"I do understand." Ellen didn't get it. Why would Sarah tell him such a thing? Time to change the subject. "So what do you say, about the Sulamans? Gimme a chance?"

"No. Sorry."

"Okay." Ellen rose, hiding her disappointment. It wouldn't do to give him a hard time. She had to get out of the office before she got herself fired.

"Good luck with the homicide piece."

"Thanks," Ellen said, leaving to talk to Sarah.

She felt a catfight coming on.

Sarah's desk was empty, and her coat wasn't on the hook, so Ellen went to the desk nearest hers, where Meredith Snader was on her computer, her short gray hair barely visible above the monitor.

"Meredith, excuse me, have you seen Sarah?"

Meredith looked up over her tortoiseshell glasses, though her eyes remained vague, her thoughts with whatever she'd been writing. "She left."

"Where to, did she say?"

"No, sorry." Meredith focused on Ellen belatedly, her gaze sharpening like a camera lens. "So how are you, now that Courtney is no longer?"

"Sad. How about you?"

"Terrible." Meredith tsk-tsked like everybody's favorite aunt. "You know, they say war is hell, but I've been in a war and I've been in a newsroom. To me, you pick your poison."

Ellen smiled, grimly. Meredith had been a nurse in Vietnam, but she rarely mentioned it. "You have nothing to worry about. You're an institution around here."

"I hate it when people call me that. Institutions close at three o'clock." Meredith mock-shuddered.

"They'll never cut you, ever."

"Brings me no joy. I feel like you do, that cutting one of us cuts us all.

Courtney was a real sweetheart and a helluva reporter." Meredith shook her head. "I heard how upset you are."

"What do you mean?"

"Sarah said you took it hard."

Ellen could barely hide her pique, and Meredith leaned over her keyboard, lowering her voice.

"She also mentioned that you blame Arthur. By the way, so do I. It's corporate greed of the highest order."

Ellen stiffened. Arthur Jaggisoon and his family owned the newspaper, and it was career suicide to bad-mouth him. In truth, she didn't blame him for the layoffs at all. "She said that?"

"Yes." Meredith's phone rang, and she turned away. "Pardon me, I've been waiting for this call."

"Sure." Ellen went back to her desk, glancing around the newsroom. Sharon and Joey, on the phone, looked pointedly away, and she wondered if Sarah had been talking to them, too.

Ellen's face burned as she sat down in her chair. Marcelo's back was to her, so there were no more eye games, and she wasn't in the mood anyway. On top of her computer keyboard sat a messy stack of printed notes with Sarah's name at the top.

Ellen picked up the pages and thumbed through them, and they included a draft, research, and stats. She wanted to confront Sarah, but didn't know her cell phone number. She reached for her coffee and took a cold sip. Her distracted gaze met Will's on her screensaver, but his face morphed into Timothy Braverman's.

She had to get her head back in the game. She rose, grabbed her purse, and got her coat.

Ellen sat in a lovely family room that had everything but the family. Susan Sulaman sipped water from a tumbler, curled up in a matching chintz couch opposite her, in jeans, a pink crew neck, and bare feet, a remarkably down-to-earth woman who looked oddly out of place in her own home. An Oriental rug covered a floor of resawn oak, and the couches faced each other in front of a colonial-era fireplace that had authentic cast-iron hooks and a swinging iron bracket inside. A perfect circle of cherrywood table held the latest magazines, a stack of over-sized art books, and a tape recorder, running, now that the small talk was over.

"So you've heard nothing about the children at all?" Ellen asked.

"Nothing," Susan answered quietly, raking fingers through thick brown hair that curved softly to her chin. Her pretty eyes were brown, but her crow's-feet went deeper than they should for her age. Two lines had been etched in her forehead, over the bridge of a perfect nose. Susan Thoma Sulaman had been Miss Allegheny County when she became the trophy wife of her worst nightmare, multimillionaire builder Sam Sulaman.

"What have you done to find them?" Ellen asked.

"What haven't I done?" Susan smiled weakly, a fleeting glimpse of a dazzling grin. "I hound the police and the FBI. I hired three private investigators. I posted on the missing kids sites on the web."

"Like the ACM AC site?" Ellen was thinking of the white card.

"Of course, that's the main one. Nobody's turned up anything, scam artists, but no leads. I offered a fifty-thousand-dollar reward. Real money."

"Sure is." Ellen thought of the Bravermans and the million-dollar reward.

"I'll never forget the day he took them. It was October, a week before Halloween. Lynnie was going as a fish." Susan's smile reappeared. "We glued glitter to a piece of blue oak tag, and she was going to wear it like a sandwich board. It was from The Rainbow Fish."

"I know the book."

Susan's eyes lit up. "Oh, right, you have a son now. How old is he?"

"Three."

"Goodness, already?"

"I know, right?" Ellen didn't have to say, time flies, though it was her favorite mommy conversation. Some things never got old.

"I read that. I loved the articles you wrote about his sickness."

"Thank you. Anyway, you were saying."

"Yes, well, Sam Junior was going as a turtle. He had this chicken-wire shell we made", Susan stopped herself, "well, never mind about the costume. My ex picked the kids up, loaded them in the car, and I never saw them again."

"I'm so sorry." Ellen lost her bearings, momentarily. Now that she'd become a mother, it was even harder to imagine. Maybe her mind simply refused to go there. "Does it get easier with time?"

"No, it gets harder."

"How so?"

"I think about all that I'm missing with them. All that time, with each of them. Then I start to think that, even when I get them back, I'll never be able to catch up." Susan paused, a stillness coming over her. "I worry they won't remember me. That I'll be a stranger to them."

"Of course they'll remember you," Ellen rushed to say, then switched tacks. "Is it easier because at least you know they're with their father? That they're not abducted by some stranger, who could be doing them harm?" She was thinking of the Bravermans again.

"Honestly, no." Susan frowned. "Sam was a terrible father. He lost the custody battle and he didn't like the settlement, so this is the way he got me back. At the end of the day, they need me. I'm their mother."

"So you're hopeful."

"I am, I have to be. The FBI thinks like you do, that it's less of a priority because it's family. Not all victims are alike." Susan pursed her lips. "Anyway, the theory is that he took them out of the country. His money is all offshore, and they think he told the kids I died."

"Would he do that?" Ellen asked, aghast.

"Of course, he's an egomaniac, a narcissist." Susan sipped her soda, and ice rattled in the tumbler. "I don't agree with the FBI, and if I tell you what I think, it'll sound crazy."

"No, it won't, and honestly, I don't even know if this will run. It depends on my editor."

Susan frowned. "Any press at all could help find them. You never know."

"I'll try my best. Please, go on."

Susan shifted forward on the cushion. "I believe my kids are in the country, nearby even. Maybe not in Philly, but in Jersey or Delaware. Near here. I think it because I feel them, inside. I feel my children, close to me." Certainty strengthened Susan's voice. "When they were babies, if someone took them out of my sight, I felt nervous. When we were in the same room, I knew it. I feel them here, still." Susan put a hand to her heart. "I carried them, they were inside me. I think it's a mother's instinct."