When Snow Falls (26 page)

28

T
he Christmas feast Dylan had bought was tasty despite the fact that it wasn’t homemade. And, after running home to get cinnamon and cloves, Cheyenne had managed to bake a coffee cake and an apple pie, which everyone seemed to like. Everything would’ve been fairly idyllic—as idyllic as could be expected under the circumstances—if not for Aaron’s morose mood. His gloom overrode the excitement of the new smartphones Dylan had purchased for each of his brothers. Mack and the others showed a great deal of interest, but Aaron would barely touch his. He seemed preoccupied and upset, and that made it impossible for Cheyenne to forget the reason.

Not long after they ate, she went home. Dylan walked her to the door and promised to come over later but returned to his brothers. She was glad. She felt Aaron and Mack needed his attention. Also, she was planning to call Eve, and she figured it would be better to have some time alone for that.

But even after she and Lucky had gone in and she’d locked up it took her several minutes to work up the nerve. So much had changed since Eve left that Cheyenne had no confidence she’d be able to explain what it all meant.

She tried Presley’s number first, but was immediately transferred to voice mail, which suggested the battery was dead or the phone had been turned off.

The same thing had occurred the last hundred times she’d called. With a sigh, she forced herself to dial Eve’s cell instead.

“Don’t tell me this is my best friend calling,” Eve said without preamble.

Cheyenne cringed at her wounded tone. “I’m sorry, Eve.”

Silence.

“Did Riley tell you about this morning?”

“Yes. And I can’t believe it.”

Lucky was sniffing around her feet, trying to climb into her lap. Cheyenne reached down to help her. “I need you to trust my judgment,” she said. “I…I really need that.”

“I don’t want to see you hurt, Chey.”

“I understand. The fact that you’d give up Joe, the man
you
like, rather than see me with Dylan tells me how sincere you are. But Dylan is a good person. Even if he’s not perfect, neither am I. I believe…I believe he’s the right man for me.”

“Wow.” Eve sounded shocked. “I’ve never heard you talk like this.”

Her puppy curled up in her lap and laid its head on her thigh. “Because I’ve never felt like this.”

“I have to admit—that threatens me in a whole new way.”

Encouraged that Eve seemed to be bending, Cheyenne hurried to reassure her. “You have no reason to feel threatened.”

“I don’t? You get with Dylan and suddenly I’m not even important enough for you to answer my calls.”

“That wasn’t it at all. I…” She ran her fingers through Lucky’s fur, taking solace in the feel of it. “I couldn’t bear to hear you tell me not to see Dylan.”

“He’s
that
important to you?
Already?
”

She smiled, as she did every time she thought of him. “I’m in love.”

It took Eve a few seconds to absorb this news. “Oh, boy,” she said when she spoke again. “And we were going to stage an intervention.”

“Please don’t. Don’t even try. I need him. Especially now. My life’s a mess. I’m still getting my bearings. But I have two things going for me.”

“Those are…”

Cheyenne felt the wet rasp of Lucky’s tongue. “You—and him.”

A sniff showed that Eve was crying.

“Can’t you just…support me even if I’m wrong?”

“Of course. We’re best friends.” She sniffed again. “If it turns out to be a good decision, I’m here to celebrate with you. And if it turns out to be a bad one—”

“You can say ‘I told you so.’”

“No. Then you’ll need me even more.”

“Do you mean that?” Cheyenne asked. “There’ll be no more talk about making the biggest mistake of my life and taking unnecessary risks and…and interventions?”

“Riley said an intervention wouldn’t do any good, anyway.”

“He’s right.” She tried to lighten the moment with a laugh. “Nothing can save me now.”

Emboldened, Lucky stood to lick her face. Cheyenne raised her chin so the dog wouldn’t be able to reach the phone, which made her bark.

“What was that?” Eve asked.

Cheyenne urged Lucky to lie down again. “My Christmas present from Dylan.”

“He gave you a dog?”

“A puppy.”

Eve sighed audibly. “Okay. He wins.”

Cheyenne smiled. “You’re going to like Dylan. You’ll see. All you have to do is give him a chance.”

“He has a chance so long as he treats you right.”

“That’s fair.”

Call waiting beeped; someone else was trying to get through. She pulled the phone away from her ear to see who it was and nearly fainted. “Eve, Presley’s calling! I’ve got to go!” she said, and clicked over. “Presley? Where are you?” she asked, her heart hammering against her chest.

“This is Officer Hauck with the California Highway Patrol.”

Cheyenne’s stomach plummeted.
Please don’t tell me my sister is dead.
“What… Why do you have Presley’s phone?” she asked, her mouth suddenly dry. “She’s okay, isn’t she?”

“I’m afraid we don’t know” came the officer’s reply. “We’re trying to find someone who might be able to help us locate her.”

Nudging Lucky to one side, Cheyenne got up, trying to prepare herself for whatever news she was about to hear. “Because…”

“We found her car on Interstate 5. Her purse, her phone, everything was inside. Except her.”

* * *

“What if you could figure out where you were born and where you really came from—whether your mother was Anita or someone else? Would you want to pursue it?”

Cheyenne was half-asleep when Dylan posed this question. But he sounded wide-awake, which gave her the impression that he’d been thinking about her situation for some time.

Shifting onto her back, she covered a yawn. “Definitely.”

“Even though Anita’s gone and you’re happy with where you’re at in life?”

She was glad he hadn’t mentioned that Presley was gone, too. Surely Presley’s “gone” wasn’t as permanent as Anita’s. Since the police had recovered her car, Cheyenne was feeling a resurgence of hope. At least Presley hadn’t crashed; they hadn’t found a body. And Chief Stacy was finally making some calls. She’d contacted him after hearing from the CHP earlier. Because of where Presley’s car had been left, they thought maybe she’d hitchhiked to Los Angeles, which seemed like something she’d do. In the morning, Dylan was going to drive Cheyenne to Los Banos to pay the impound fees and pick up the Mustang.

“I could have a different mother out there. A better one. Maybe even a father or other family. Why
wouldn’t
I want to find out about that?”

“Because you’ll have to face the resentment and anger of
knowing
what Anita did to you. It won’t be just a suspicion anymore.”

As she heard rain pelting the roof, Cheyenne felt glad Dylan was here with her. Otherwise, it would be such a lonely sound. Maybe snowy days wouldn’t make her melancholy now that Dylan was in her life. “I realize that. But, either way, I need closure. I think everyone wants to be certain of where they came from, don’t you?”

Those details might be important to her children someday, she thought, but she didn’t say that. She didn’t want Dylan to think she was already considering a family. She hadn’t had her period since she’d been with him, but it wasn’t due yet, which left her hopeful that she wasn’t pregnant. She preferred not to deal with that kind of complication so early in their relationship.

“We could hire someone to look into it,” he suggested.

“We?”
Scooting closer, she kissed his whiskered cheek. “I don’t have the money, and it’s not your problem.”

“I’m happy to help.”

“I appreciate your generosity, but now that I won’t be chained to this house every minute I’m not at work—” and she wouldn’t have to contend with her mother daily “—I’m going to make a more concerted effort to do some searching on my own.”

“Where will you start?”

Leaning over him, she rubbed her nose against his. “I’ll go state by state, if I have to. Send a letter to every single county, asking for my birth certificate.”

He held back her hair. “And if Anita changed your name?”

That was a very real and depressing possibility. “I’ll know if there’s no record of a Cheyenne Rose Christensen being born on my birthday.”

“
If
it’s your birthday.”

“If it’s my birthday.”

“And then?” he prompted.

Cheyenne toyed with the hair leading down from his navel. “And then I’ll call every police department in America. I’ll start on the West Coast, since I don’t think Anita was ever out East, and I’ll ask about any cases they might have involving a missing girl.”

His hand slid up her bare back, moving in a gentle caress. “There might be a less tedious way.”

The rain was falling harder, and the wind was picking up. “How?”

“If you
were
kidnapped, there’s a good chance Presley knows about it.”

Cheyenne sat up. “No. She would’ve told me.”

He propped his hands behind his head. She couldn’t see his expression clearly in the moonlight streaming through her window, but she could make out the general shape of him. “How old were you when you were wearing that party dress?” he asked.

She knew where he was going with this and didn’t like how it made her feel. Doubting Anita was one thing. She’d always doubted Anita. But Presley was a different story. Presley had been her ally, her confidante, the one person she trusted, in certain ways even more than Eve, to have her best interests at heart. They’d made incredible sacrifices for each other over the years—going hungry so the other could eat, taking a beating to spare the other further blows, lying to avoid seeing the other punished. There were some lines they didn’t cross, and this would be one of them.

“About four,” she admitted grudgingly.

“That would make her…”

“Six.”

“That’s old enough to remember
something.
”

She could hear the frown in his voice. “Not necessarily,” she argued. “Anita could’ve told her I was her sister but had been staying with someone else. That would make it seem less remarkable when they ‘picked me up.’ Anita would’ve had to invent some excuse, right? Maybe it all happened so smoothly, Presley had no reason to be aware of anything unusual.”

“Are you serious? She didn’t have a sister and then she did? That’s not unusual?”

“You have to understand what our childhood was like, Dylan. People came and went. It wasn’t out of the ordinary for us to call men Daddy when we’d known them for less than a week. And the next man who came around? Suddenly,
he
was Daddy, and it meant nothing that the last guy was gone. We called women we’d met five minutes earlier Aunt Whatever. So I’m not sure Presley, especially at six, would find
anything
odd.”

He seemed to be choosing his next words carefully. “You’ve asked her about it, then? What she remembers?”

“Hundreds of times.”

“And she always gave the same answer?”

For some reason, Cheyenne flashed back to the night she’d brought up the Amoses after talking to Dylan in the park. At some point in the conversation, Presley had said, “You should’ve been born in a different era. Or to a Quaker family. Sometimes I wonder where the hell you came from.”

The way she’d acted right after that statement made Cheyenne even more uncomfortable now than it had then. But she wasn’t willing to admit it, wasn’t willing to doubt Presley. Not on this. Presley would know how important this was to her. “Every time.”

“So you trust her completely.”

“I do.”

He raked a hand through his hair. “Then I hate to tell you this, but…pursuing the truth might break your heart.”

“You don’t want me to start digging? You’d rather I just left things as they are?”

“I don’t want you to be hurt.” He sat up, too. Sounding reluctant but resolute, he added. “Listen, Chey. I had a long talk with Aaron this afternoon.”

“About Presley?”

“She was top of the list. I grilled him on whether or not she’d said or done
anything
out of the ordinary in the past couple of weeks. I was looking for details he might’ve forgotten or considered too inconsequential to mention.”

“And?”

“At first, he denied that she’d acted strange in any way. But then he recalled something about a private investigator.”

“Crouch.”

“That’s him. Eugene Crouch.”

Her hands clutched the bedding. “What about him?”

“Aaron said she was afraid of him, afraid of what he might do.”

“Why?”

“He wasn’t clear on that, but one night she was so agitated he was all she could talk about. And the drunker she got, the more worried she became.”

Cheyenne thought she had the answer. “Because my mother was always doing stuff that could get us in trouble. I heard Presley refer to Crouch, too. He approached her, looking for my mother, but he wouldn’t say why.”

“You don’t find that odd?”

“Not necessarily.” She explained about the hit-and-run that had haunted her and Presley ever since it had happened, and their guess that Crouch’s visit had something to do with that.

“But you don’t know. You’ve never talked to him.”

“No.”

“Maybe you should.”

Suddenly, she remembered how secretive Presley had been when Cheyenne had overheard her first talking about Crouch to Anita. She hadn’t even admitted that he was a P.I., not at first. When Cheyenne had asked who Crouch was, Presley had said he was just some guy she’d met at work.

Why hadn’t Presley guessed, from the very beginning, that it was the hit-and-run and come to her instead of Anita?

“Whatever he wanted…it couldn’t be about
me,
” she said in an attempt to shore up her crumbling confidence.

“Yes, it could,” Dylan insisted.

“She wouldn’t have told Aaron about Crouch if she was afraid it might get back to me.”

“Until very recently, you and I lived in separate worlds. The thought that it could get back to you probably never crossed her mind.”

Cheyenne’s stomach tightened into a hard knot as she considered his implication. Could she really trust Presley as much as she claimed? Or would Eugene Crouch, someone she would’ve overlooked if not for her relationship with Dylan, have the answers she craved about the little girl in the party dress and the black patent leather shoes?