Courage Tree by Diane Chamberlain

how he’s always looking at the cottage, watching for Sophie to come out. He hardly does any work, just bosses the fellas under him around. He tries to get close to Janine to get her to trust him, and—”
    “I know you don’t like him, Mom, but let’s not get into this now, okay?” Joe was no fan of Lucas’s, either, but it seemed unlikely that he’d had anything to do with Sophie’s disappearance.
    “I’m always afraid that Janine will turn her back one day,” Donna continued, “just for a second, and Lucas Trowell will make off with Sophie. You hear about that happening all the time. It’s always the gardener or the handyman or someone who works nearby.”
    It seemed far-fetched, but maybe Donna had a point. “I’llask one of the cops to take a drive by Lucas’s house just to make sure he’s there and that there’s nothing fishy going on, okay?” he offered.
    He saw Janine step out of the police car. Although it was not yet dark out, the parking lot lights came on, and Janine stood uncertainly in the glow of one of them for a moment before walking toward the white van. There was a fragility about her that Joe had never noticed before. Not even during all those days and nights in the hospital, standing at Sophie’s bedside, wondering if she would live or die. A moment later, Sergeant Loomis got out of the car himself and waved to Joe.
    “I’ve got to go,” he said to Donna.
    “Should we come over there?” Donna asked.
    “No, you sit tight. We’ll call the second we know anything.”
    He passed Janine as he walked toward the police car.
    “You okay?” he asked her.
    She nodded, unsmiling, and he knew she was anything but okay.
    “Too hot in there,” Loomis said, as Joe approached the police car. He wiped his damp forehead with a handkerchief. “Let’s stand out here and talk.”
    Joe leaned against the closed door of the car, while Loomis asked him the predictable questions. Where had Joe been that day? What was his relationship with Sophie like? With Janine?
    “Your ex-wife says you strongly disapprove of the medical treatment your daughter is receiving.”
    “Yes, I do,” Joe said. “But I haven’t kidnapped her and taken her to the Mayo Clinic, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
    “And you didn’t want her to go to this camp, either,” Loomis continued. “How badly do you want to prove your ex-wife wrong about her decision to send your daughter there?”
    Joe’s temper was rising, and he wondered if that was Loomis’s intent. “I would never use my daughter that way,” he said, working to keep his voice calm.
    Loomis asked him a few more questions, about where he worked, about his relationship with Paula. Finally, he sighed and looked toward the clot of people a dozen yards or so away from where he was standing with Joe.
    “Do you have any gut feeling about this?” he asked, once he’d seem to run out of questions. “Any instinctive sense of what’s going on here?”
    Joe thought for a moment. “Well,” he said, “I just spoke with my in-laws. Sophie’s grandparents. They have some concerns about their gardener. Sophie and Janine live on their property, so the gardener knows them. My in-laws think he’s a little too interested in Sophie, and they’re worried he might have something to do with this. I told them I’d pass that along to you, in case you wanted to swing by his house and just make sure he’s there…and that Sophie isn’t.”
    “What do you think?”
    “I think the guy’s maybe a bit more interested in little girls than he should be, but I frankly doubt he has anything to do with this.”
    “Do you know his address?”
    “It’s on Canter Trail. Over near Wolf Trap. I’m not sure of the number, though. It’s a small ranch sort of house. A rambler. Brick. But he actually lives in the wooded lot behind the house, up in a tree house, and—”
    “Are you talking about that Trowell fellow?” Loomis looked interested.
    “You know him?”