Chapter 119 The Search
It was too late to get a refund for her flight, which wouldn’t leave until next evening, but Emily didn’t care if she lost the money. Instead, she booked the next available flight to Vancouver, which would leave the next morning. She had to get back to Byron, and to her company as soon as possible.
The next thing she did after re-scheduling the flight was try to call Byron. If he had seen that awful email, she would have a lot of explaining to do…
The dial tone rang once, twice, and several times, but then the voice messaging service came on. Emily tried to call him again, just in case he didn’t have time to grab the phone, but he didn’t pick up. It was pretty late, so he might have been sleeping.
Emily tried to call Sylvia next, but she wasn’t picking up either. Emily sighed, thinking this was probably what Ruby wanted, to make her panic. She decided to get a good night’s sleep to spite the evil miscreant.
In the morning, feeling fairly well-rested and optimistic, she tried to call Byron and Sylvia again, but neither of them was answering. This was a little more worrying. Did they forget about their phones, or were they in the middle of some kind of emergency?
Emily gave up trying to phone them since she had to leave for the airport. She didn’t want to leave Teddy and his family and the serene atmosphere of their farm, but she promised to be back soon.
While waiting for her flight, Emily tried to make a few more phone calls. She even called Byron’s limo driver, but he reported that his services had not been needed for a few days, so he hadn’t seen Byron for quite some time.
Now Emily was starting to get anxious. The whole flight to Vancouver seemed to last forever, and she fidgeted in her seat, unable to eat or drink anything that was on offer.
When the flight landed, Emily caught a taxi and went straight home, but just as she feared, there was no one there. She decided to call Fred. As a security agent, maybe he knew something.
“I couldn’t exactly tell you where Byron is…” Fred said. “But I can give you a rough location of his BMW.”
Emily couldn’t believe there was finally a breakthrough. “Really? That would be amazing.”
“I put a tracker on it in case it ever got stolen,” Fred said proudly. “Give me a moment… Okay, it is roughly at the intersection of Highway 16 and Range Road 102, a strangely rural location. Maybe there is something fishy going on.”
The address sounded familiar to Emily. “I think it’s okay, actually. Thanks, Fred. You’re a trooper!”
She checked the address, and just as she suspected it was very close to Susie and Angie’s Animal Shelter, the one Byron had recently set up as a gift to her. It seemed she had been worried for nothing.
Emily couldn’t wait to see him. She changed into her riding gear, got on her motorcycle, and went straight to the farm house.
When she arrived, the scene she saw was like something out of a dream, both the sexy kind… and the extremely weird kind.
The horses and goats were in the pasture, while Byron was making some sort of alteration to the farm house. Dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, he was up on a ladder using an electric drill on the wooden beam of the soffit. Sylvia stood below, holding a bird feeder. When Byron inserted a metal hook into the hole he had drilled, Sylvia passed the bird feeder up to him, and he hung it up. He was so focused on his work he didn’t see Emily approach.
For some reason, Sylvia was wearing bell-bottom sweatpants and an oversized pyjama t-shirt. This was the kind of outfit the usually fashionable lady wouldn’t be caught dead in. Her style was normally impeccable, and Emily often wondered if she had a live-in hair-stylist, but this time Sylvia’s hair was thrown into a messy bun barely held together by an elastic.
“Thank God you’re here,” Sylvia said, seeing Emily. “I’ve been co-opted into this rustic venture, which is not really my thing.”
Byron hurriedly climbed down the ladder to greet her, and she finally felt assured that he was both safe and feeling better when she clasped him in a tight hug. He had a fresh, outdoorsy smell, and Emily couldn’t get enough of it.
“I was so worried,” Emily said, “I couldn’t reach you guys by phone.” She hugged Sylvia as well, even though the woman only seemed to tolerate it.
“Reception out here is terrible,” Sylvia complained.
“I called last night too.”
“Oh, Byron finally decided to sleep, and I shut off his phone and mine so we could both get some shut-eye,” Sylvia said, “Next thing I know, he drags me out here at seven in the morning to build hummingbird feeders. I didn’t even have time to get changed.”
Well, that explained her bizarre outfit. Sylvia may have been cold-hearted and ruthless to everyone else, but she always protected her son with the fierce determination of a lioness. She even sacrificed her hair and makeup routine to come here and make sure he wasn’t alone.
Emily was so relieved to find them both here that she had almost forgotten the sad news she had to deliver.
