“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.”