Northwest: Deep Freeze Part 58

"The way it's supposed to be, darlin'," he said as Jenna heard the m.u.f.fled sound of another voice vying for his attention. "Look, Jenna, I gotta go."

"Yeah." She blinked rapidly.

"See ya later."

"I'm counting on it, Sheriff," she teased, her eyes suddenly hot, tears of relief close to the surface as she clicked off, then pulled herself together. This wasn't the time to fall apart. Her girls were safe. Her life with Shane more secure and filled with more honest love than she'd ever thought possible.

Yet she couldn't help worrying about Dani Settler. Where the devil was she?

Travis felt as if something inside of him was about to explode. He jogged to the front doors of the school and swung them open. The halls were nearly deserted. No laughing children, no teachers, just a custodian wheeling a large garbage can down a hallway.

Inside the gla.s.sed-in office, a secretary was sitting behind her desk. Reading gla.s.ses were propped on the end of her nose, a phone was pressed to her ear and she was reading from a computer printout. She looked up at him as he approached. "Oh, Mr. Settler. I'm glad you're here." She offered him a forced smile. "Danielle didn't show up for physical education, the last period of the day. I was just making the call to your house. She'll need an excuse for-"

"What do you mean 'she didn't show up'?"

"Just that. Mr. Jamison had to mark her absent and..."

"Then where is she?" he demanded, his heart thudding in his ears.

"That's what I was going to ask you." Behind her reading gla.s.ses, the woman's eyes changed from taciturn to worried.

"The last time I saw her was when I dropped her off this morning," he said, a dark clawing fear sc.r.a.ping his insides. Images of Dani flashed, like ruffled cards in a deck, through his mind. Dani as a newborn, downy-haired and red-faced, Dani as a three-year-old with an impish smile and tumbling curls, Dani without her front teeth at Christmas when she was seven, Dani at her mother's funeral...Oh, G.o.d, where the h.e.l.l was she?

"I think we'd better call the princ.i.p.al," the secretary said. She disconnected her phone and clicked a speed-dial b.u.t.ton.

The princ.i.p.al, the police, the National Guard. Call whoever it took. In his peripheral vision Travis noticed Jenna and Allie walking toward the office. Both had strained expressions on their white faces and Travis Settler knew despair as deep and black as all h.e.l.l itself.

Jenna and Allie stepped through the door, Jenna's hand protectively on her daughter's shoulder. "What did they say?" she asked.

The truth of it hit him like a sucker punch. "They don't know where she is," he said, remembering Blanche Johnson's dead body, the weird bloodstained message scratched into the wall and the grease fire with its thick smoke. He swallowed hard and felt as if the very life had been squeezed out of him. All his darkest fears congealed. Life as he'd known it had stopped abruptly. "My daughter's missing," he said and knew, without a doubt, that his worst nightmare had just begun.

Dear Reader,

I hope you enjoyed Jenna and Shane's story. Boy, did I have a great time writing the book! The idea for Deep Freeze started when my editor said he wanted a book where the killer only kills in the winter. "Wow," I thought, "that's not much to go on. Why would he only kill with the snowfall? Where would the book be set? How would he do it?" But the idea for the story started to form just about the time my editor said, "And you know what? How about a companion book where the opposite is true: another serial killer, linked to the first, who kills either in or with intense heat."

I've always loved the idea of opposites or the yin and yang in life. I thought this was a fabulous idea. I ran with it.

So...the follow-up book that will be available in March 2006 is Fatal Burn. You'll meet old friends from Deep Freeze and meet some new ones as well.

Fatal Burn is Travis Settler's story. He's propelled into action as his only child, his adopted daughter, Dani, is missing, presumed abducted. He doesn't know how, where or why his daughter was stolen from him, but he intends to find her, and he'll use every method he's learned from his military/spy past to find her-with or without the cops.

Armed and dangerous, Travis follows a trail that leads straight to Shannon Carlyle's door in Northern California.

Shannon is Dani's birth mother as well as a beautiful woman with a dark past she'd hoped was put to rest forever, a woman who never thought she'd get the chance to again see the daughter she gave up as an infant.

Travis is giving her that chance and she leaps at it.

Neither trusting the other, Shannon and Travis have to work together. Time is running out. A serial arsonist has resumed his deadly fires and somehow, they fear, he's connected to Shannon.

And to Dani.

Don't forget to log on to www.lisajackson.com where you can learn more about Deep Freeze as well as my other books, play games, enter contests, take polls or partic.i.p.ate in discussions online. At www.themysterymansion.com, you can log on and visit the mansion that has interactive rooms from some of my books.

Keep reading!.

Best, Lisa Jackson.

--THE END--.