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It made sense. Rick was Sly’s second, with the military training of a Marine Second Sergeant. Lucas had spent the first thirty years of his life living in Hamlet, and at least five of them with his doctor’s office on the mountainside. It didn’t matter that he’d been gone from Hamlet these last three years. Nothing really changed in the small town, and as they started down Main Street, passing local stores like Franklin’s Garage, Gloria’s Sundae Shoppe, and Jefferson’s along the way, Lucas experienced a strange twinge of nostalgia and relief that he was no longer trapped in the small town.
There were too many memories. Good ones—like his childhood with Maria, before their parents perished—and bad ones—after his marriage with Caitlin went south and Lucas longed to be free of the clingy redhead. Then there were those he treasured, like the afternoon he went for a ride with Tessa after breakfast at the coffee house, leading her up the path to the mountains where the Hamlet teenagers had their very own make-out point.
Lucas was thirty-two then. Tessa was twenty-five. Their make-out consisted of a quickie in the front seat when, running the adrenaline after Sullivan’s murder, Lucas dared a quick moment in the woods with Tessa before they had to pretend they were mere strangers thrown together by chance.
The truth was their chance meeting was six years before, though not a single soul in Hamlet knew it…
There was a reason he was so resentful of his home town. Though it took him a long time to admit it, if he’d been willing to sacrifice his ties to Hamlet as easily as he was able to divorce Caitlin first, then later murder her… if he’d left Hamlet, maybe he would’ve had Tessa all too himself long before he did.
That’s all she asked of him. Even when she couldn’t bring herself to actuallysayit, he knew that she’d never be happy in Hamlet. For a while, he thought he couldn’t leave.
She tried to end it with him then. Married Jack Sullivan after a prolonged engagement that only lasted as long as it did because she was waiting for Lucas. Deciding she needed to be the best wife she could, she tried to tell Lucas it was over…
But it would never be over. He told her that when he sped his Mustang out of Hamlet, showing up at the school where she used to teach. He repeated himself a year later when their affair was still going on, and when he offered to follow her out of Hamlet if she sacrificed her former husband… she accepted.
This used to be his home, thought Lucas, but it wasn’t any longer. And now that it couldn’t do the one thing he needed it to—namely protect Maria when he couldn’t—it made the pit in his stomach burn colder and colder as he stared wordlessly out the window, hoping for some sign that Maria was near.
They never found one.
They kept searching, pulling the cruiser and getting out if something caught their eye. Any time they passed a rare car on the road, Rick flagged them down, asking the driver if they noticed anything. At this point, Lucas was sure that everyone in Hamlet knew Maria had disappeared which, on the one hand, meant there were close to two hundred people keeping an eye out for her.
On the other? If, for some terrible reason, alocaltook her, they would know that it was only a matter of time before they were caught.
Lucas tried not to think that they were wasting their time. That Maria had been moved to another vehicle and driven out of Hamlet while the two of them questioned men and women that Lucas had known his entire life.
It was during a quiet twenty minute stretch where they hadn’t passed anything or anyone of note that Rick decided to break up the quiet with a conversational tone to his deep, rumbly voice.
“Working in a big ER must be a change of pace from treating patients out of an office,” he observed.
Lucas wasn’t one for small talk. He never had been. To fit in, he learned to master it, but right now wasn’t the time for him to follow up with any niceties.
Instead, he looked over at Rick. “How did you know I’m an emergency physician these days?”
“From the business card Sly found at Ophelia’s when he first noticed Maria was missing.”
Oh. Of course. “He told you about it?”
“Well, yeah. Why wouldn’t he? He told all of us. The HSD, I mean. After all, that car was our first clue that she was taken instead of just being gone.”
That part didn’t make any sense to Lucas. “What did my card have to do with her disappearance?” He reached up, curling his fingers around the grab bar as he shifted in the seat. This angle gave him a better look at Rick’s face as waited for the other man’s answer.
Instead of giving Lucas one, Rick had a question of his own: “He didn’t tell you?”
Lucas gritted his teeth. “That finding my card made me some kind of suspect? No. He did not.”
CHAPTEREIGHT
Rick blew a breath out through his nose. “C’mon, doc. Don’t be like that.”
Doc,thought Lucas. Even though he abandoned his practice in Hamlet and Rick wasjustasking him about being an emergency physician, he would always be ‘doc’ when he was back in the village.
“Be like what?” he asked frostily.
“You know he doesn’t think you have anything to do with Maria going missing.”
“I didn’t. I was under the impression he was telling me because I’m Maria’s only kin. But now that you say that, I’m not so sure.”
“Don’t blame Sly,” Rick tried again. “He’s barely holding it together, trying to run the search without losing his head over his wife being missing. That’s all.”
