Cry Mercy by Mariah Stewart Page B

through the mountains like the twisted webof an enormous spider. Her challenge this weekend was to travel the next few miles that Beth Magellan could have taken. There were many possibilities to choose from, many roads through, over, or around the mountains.
    Where did you go, Beth? Where did you turn off the highway? Where did your detour take you?
    Questions she'd been asking for two years. Where were Beth and Ian?
    Until she knew—until Robert knew—Susanna's life would remain trapped in the same limbo as his.
    Law enforcement from many agencies—the local and state police along with the FBI—had searched the entire width of the state, from Gibson Springs, where Beth had attended a baby shower at the home of her sister, to Conroy, without success. Search parties had scoured the mountains and valleys of western Pennsylvania for weeks following the disappearance of Robert's wife and child, Susanna reminded herself. Did she really think she, alone and unassisted, could find what they had failed to find? She wasn't sure.
    All she knew for certain was that Robert would never move on until he knew Beth wasn't coming back. And while Susanna could admire that sort of loyalty—if she were the missing wife, she'd surely cherish such devotion—the simple fact remained that she'd been in love with Robert Magellan since she met him all those years ago and he'd hired her as his administrative assistant.
    They'd worked closely together, and Susanna had come to know him well—his faults as well as his virtues. She held out the hope that someday he'd look at her in
that
way, even after he'd met the beautifulBeth Tillotson and it became apparent that he was falling in love. Somehow, even after Beth and Robert had married, Susanna hadn't been able to sever herself from him. She was one of his best friends, he'd told her one day when she'd tried to hand in her resignation. He and a partner, Colin Bressler, were starting up a new company—an Internet search engine they were calling Magellan Express—and he needed her to help set up the company. No one had better organizational skills than she did, and there was no one he'd trust more to get the new venture up and running. So she'd stayed through the years, through his marriage and the birth of his son, through the nightmare of the past two years.
    She couldn't remember the exact moment when it occurred to her that if they were ever to be together, she was going to have to take matters into her own hands. She knew that in the months following the disappearance of his family, Robert had contemplated taking his own life many times. She knew, too, that only the possibility that they might be found kept him from going through with it. She'd been the one who'd pointed out to him how furious Beth would be if she came back and found out that he'd given up.
    The only way to save him—and maybe herself as well—was to find Beth and Ian.
    Susanna had studied every topographic map she could get her hands on, and was by now familiar with the terrain. The Appalachian Mountains ran through Pennsylvania in a series of highs and lows that stretched in every direction, and the turnpike was built over, through, and around the mountains. It had been established that upon leaving her sister Pam's homelate Sunday morning, Beth had gotten on the turnpike. Right after the first exit she came to, however, a tractor-trailer had jackknifed on ice, and the state police had shut down the road. As a consequence, all traffic was diverted off the turnpike to one of the feeder roads. It was suspected that all of the detour signs had not been in place when Beth pulled off the toll road, and she might have had to depend on her own sense of direction to get around the accident site and back to the turnpike. The police had combed the hills and mountains and ravines closest to the main road for miles, but there'd been no sign of the car Beth had been driving that day.
    In one of those odd twists of fate, Beth's new car,