by Malone, Cara
“You slept with her? Is that all it was?” Logan asked.
Cal’s brow furrowed. “I didn’t have a relationship with her, if that’s what you mean.”
“Nancy Hunter didn’t describe the encounter nearly so casually,” Logan said, sitting back in his chair and folding his arms over his chest.
Christ, what was he driving at now? Did she say she and Cal had been dating or something? He was picturing her sitting in an interrogation room like this one, her husband right next to her, formulating some story about how she and Cal had a whole thing instead of a one-night stand just so her husband wouldn’t think she was a slut twenty years ago.
“Look, I don’t remember her but I don’t deny the possibility of having slept with her,” Cal said, trying to get out ahead of the conversation. “Was I a bit of a player in my twenties? Yeah, a lot of guys were. But I never knew she got knocked up. She could have tracked me down and told me but she didn’t.”
Not that he would have been particularly pleased with that news. Would he have done the right thing, married her instead of Elizabeth? Would his life be completely different now if he had, maybe even better? It was impossible to say.
Detective Logan leaned forward again, looking Cal right in the eyes as he said, “She told me that you date-raped her.”
Cal’s mouth dropped open. “What? That’s ridiculous!”
“She said you got her drunk and took her up to one of the bedrooms in the house you were partying in,” Logan went on, “and that she never contacted you about the baby because she didn’t want to see her rapist again.”
Cal was speechless. Rape! And after twenty years. When he finally managed to gather his thoughts, he said, “Everybody was drunk at that party.”
“I thought you didn’t remember when you met Nancy,” Logan countered.
“I don’t, but every party was a drunken one,” Cal said. “I never raped anyone.”
“That’s not what Nancy Hunter says,” Logan answered. “She’s been carrying that around with her for twenty years, and now her daughter is dead because she was coming here to meet her biological father. And you don’t know anything about that?”
“No!” Cal insisted.
“You don’t know why your daughter, conceived through rape, would come to your house with a gun?”
Cal was getting antsy on top of the exhaustion, a weird mix. He couldn’t think straight and he wanted to get the hell out of there before this escalated any further. “Are you accusing me of something? Or am I free to go?”
Detective Logan sat back in his chair once again. “You’re not being charged at this time, Mr. Thomas. But don’t leave town.”
Cal was out of his seat and heading for the door before the detective had even finished his sentence.
21
Simone
Despite her best efforts to pretend she was fine, Simone’s lungs burned for days after the fire at the apartment building. Every time she inhaled, she was reminded of the smoke that had invaded her cells, turning them crisp and stealing their ability to help her breathe. But two good things came out of that night.
One, she’d saved a little girl. Julie had only minor smoke inhalation and a few small burns where the heat had singed her bare skin, but she was out of the hospital now too and doing just fine.
And the second good thing? She had Amelia all to herself for a few days as she nursed Simone back to health.
They both took a couple days off work and for the first half of the week, Amelia barely left Simone’s apartment except to go out a couple of times for food and supplies. She babied Simone even though Simone would have been perfectly capable of taking care of herself if she’d been alone… and Simone exaggerated her helplessness to keep Amelia feeling useful.
They played cards on the couch and worked their way through Simone’s DVD collection. They cat-napped—which Simone suspected was as necessary for Amelia as it was for herself. They called Simone’s parents once a day for a health progress report, and both her parents were as impressed with Amelia as Simone herself was.
By Monday afternoon, Simone was feeling up to a slow, ambling walk around downtown to get some fresh air. They meandered and talked about everything from the mundane—what’s your desert island book?—to the philosophical—where do you want to be in ten years?
And by the time Simone was ready to get back to work on Tuesday, she’d realized something. She was falling in love with Amelia, and where she really wanted to be in ten years was with her.
On Tuesday morning, they went to the diner they’d meant to eat at before Simone’s hospitalization. Amelia had to work during the day, and Simone was scheduled to work second shift, so they drove separately but they were both looking for every excuse to spend time together.
“I seem to recall that when we met, you said you didn’t date, that you didn’t have time for it,” Simone teased Amelia over a plate of eggs and hash browns.
“I guess priorities change,” Amelia answered, nudging her foot beneath the table.
“Have I thanked you for taking time off work to nurse me back to health?” Simone asked.
“About ten times,” Amelia said. “And have I made you promise to be careful if you go out on another fire scene tonight?”
“I’m always careful,” Simone said.
“You’re still not a hundred percent better,” Amelia reminded her.
“Ninety percent is pretty good, though.”
Simone was teasing her, but she could see the worry in Amelia’s eyes every time they talked about the inevitability of her running into another burning building, giving up her mask for another civilian.
“On a scale of one to ten, how much do you hate my job?” Simone asked.
Amelia took her hand across the table. “I don’t hate it… I have nothing but respect for what you do and how brave you are. But I never pictured myself dating a firefighter, so it’s an adjustment, getting used to worrying about you when you’re on the job.”
Simone squeezed her hand. “I promise you I’m very good at my job—otherwise I wouldn’t have made lieutenant in only five years. I take all the precautions I can. What happened the other day was not an average day in the life of a firefighter.”
“But there’s always the potential for it to happen again,” Amelia pointed out.
“Yes,” Simone admitted. “Just like there’s the potential for you to catch some kind of crazy bio-terrorist disease during an autopsy, and either of us could get in a car with some crazy rideshare driver and get abducted.”
“We both have cars,” Amelia pointed out. “Do you even have a rideshare account?”
“Okay, fair enough,” Simone said. “Then we could both get hit by a bus as we’re leaving this diner.”
Amelia laughed. “For the record, the chance of catching any disease, let alone a biological weapon, from a corpse is very low.”
“But not zero,” Simone insisted.
“Okay, okay,” Amelia relented, still laughing. “I get it, life is risky no matter what we do.”
“And it’s precious,” Simone added. “So we have to savor the moments we get with each other.”
Their eyes locked, their breakfasts forgotten, and Simone felt the words I love you hanging on the tip of her tongue. It was way too soon to say something like that… way too impulsive, and Amelia would probably blame her recent near-death experience for the sudden bout of romanticism. But whether it was fast or not, Simone knew just from looking at Amelia that it was true—she loved this incredible, sexy, beautiful woman.
She was just opening her mouth to say so after all when Amelia’s phone started to ring.
She released Simone’s hand and broke their gaze. “Sorry, this could be work.”
“No problem,” Simone said. They had all the time in the world now that they’d found each other. She could tell Amelia how she felt later.
“Hello? …Yeah, I can be there in about fifteen minutes… Sure thing.” Simone listened to Amelia’s
half of the conversation, and when she hung up, Amelia explained, “That was Tom Logan. He’s got Elizabeth Thomas at the precinct and he’s about to question her about Megan Hunter. He thinks somebody in that house had to have known she was there and pulled the trigger on that gun.”
“Why, though?” Simone asked. “You don’t just shoot a stranger for knocking on your door in a tornado.”
“She wasn’t a stranger, though,” Amelia reminded her. “She was Cal Thomas’s daughter, and her mom was a rape victim.”
Tom had been keeping Amelia in the loop via email for the last few days,
“That gives Megan motivation to shoot Cal, if she tracked him down for that purpose,” Simone said. “But how did she end up getting shot?”
Amelia shook her head. “I don’t know, but hopefully Tom will let us know the answer to that. Anyway, I better get to the office. You sure you’re okay to go back to work today?”
Simone leaned across the table and kissed her. “Please stop worrying about me. I’m fine.”
In truth, her lungs still burned a little when she exerted herself, but it was nothing she couldn’t handle. Besides, she had the rest of the morning to relax before she had to go in for her shift.
“Promise you’ll rest?” Amelia asked as they slid out of the booth. It was like she could read Simone’s mind.
“Yes,” she said. “I am gonna swing by Balch Street on my way to work and see if I can find that damn hydrant wrench that Williams left there—I keep forgetting about it. But I’ll take it easy today and tell the universe not to start any fires tonight. Okay?”
“I hope the universe listens,” Amelia said.
22
Elizabeth
The interrogation room was just as Cal had described it—small, dingy, lonely. Elizabeth had been sitting there for what felt like at least an hour, annoyed because Detective Logan asked her to come in and she did. And then he proceeded to ignore her, probably playing mind games on her while he sat at his desk and ate a donut.
She didn’t have to come in. He wasn’t charging her with anything, and he hadn’t charged Cal when he talked to him the day before. At this point, it sure seemed like the police didn’t have any information about that girl and they were just pestering Elizabeth’s family.
Making up lies about how Cal had raped the girl’s mother.
Digging into ancient history just to threaten Elizabeth’s family with a bastard child.
Bogging down the justice system with a case that was clearly an accidental death. Three dozen people had died in Fox County on the day of the tornado—Elizabeth read that in the newspaper. It was tragic, and two of Noah’s friends had been among the dead. But why should that Megan girl be any different?
At last, the door opened and Elizabeth sat a little taller as Detective Logan came in. “Sorry to keep you waiting, Mrs. Thomas. Thanks for coming in.”
Sorry my foot, she thought.
“Do you know why I wanted to speak with you today?”
“No, and I’d appreciate it if you would just get to the point because I’ve had a very rough morning already,” she said, her voice watery with held-back tears.
“Why is that?” Logan asked, taking a seat across the table from her.
“My husband and I have been fighting a lot lately,” she admitted. “I’m sure I don’t have to tell you why.”
“Humor me,” Logan said.
She scowled at him. “Because our house was destroyed, we’re living at my sister’s place, and my husband has a bastard that you people won’t stop hassling us about.”
“Had.”
“Excuse me?”
“Your husband had a bastard. Megan Hunter is dead now.” Logan stared fixedly at her, and the affect was unnerving. “Your husband told me that you had trouble conceiving. It must have stung when you found out that he had a child with another woman.”
“My husband did not rape anyone,” Elizabeth snapped. “I don’t care what that woman says, she’s a liar.”
“Rape or not, it was an unplanned pregnancy,” Logan said. “It happened after a single encounter, when you and Cal spent years trying to conceive Noah.”
Elizabeth relaxed just a little bit. “Yes, that knowledge is painful.”
“Probably makes you pretty mad too, huh?”
Elizabeth just stared at him, unsure how to answer, her pulse drumming in her ears.
“Mad enough to shoot her?”
“What?!” Elizabeth pushed back from the table. “What are you talking about? I just found out yesterday.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” Logan said, slowly shaking his head, his voice even and calm. He leaned forward, his forearms on the steel table. “See, you said yourself that you always lock your doors, so somebody had to let Megan Hunter into your house on the morning of the tornado. If it wasn’t you, it must have been one of the boys, maybe Noah–”
“Leave Noah out of this,” she snapped. “He didn’t do anything.”
“But did you?” he pressed.
“No.”
Detective Logan just sat there, leaning backward in his chair once again, watching her, waiting for her to talk. She was starting to think she might need a lawyer when at last he said, “There’s something I didn’t tell your husband when he was here yesterday, but I want to tell you. Nancy Hunter—that’s Megan’s mom—told her daughter that she was date-raped shortly before Megan started college. She wanted her to be careful and avoid a similar fate. She said it was a cautionary tale and she never meant for Megan to figure out that it was actually the story of her conception.”
Elizabeth folded her arms, bile rising in her throat, unwilling to look at Logan. “That’s awful.”
“Yes, what happened to Nancy Hunter was awful, and so was what happened to Megan,” Logan agreed. “Without hearing that story, she might never have wound up at your door, and she’d probably still be alive today. I don’t know how she connected the dots or how she tracked your husband down, but to be perfectly honest, I don’t care. All I care about is finding out who shot her.”
He paused, and Elizabeth struggled to remain silent. He was clearly waiting for her to confess or else to swear her innocence, but she knew it was a mistake to speak at all. So she pressed her lips together and waited.
“That shot isn’t what killed Megan,” he said at last. “It was the fall down the stairs, and maybe that was an accident. Maybe the winds from the tornado pushed her in that direction. Maybe whoever let her into the house was just trying to disarm her and they didn’t mean to shoot her at all. But I gotta know what happened, and I’ll tell you, Elizabeth, there are only so many people that could have gotten into that altercation with Megan.”
She stared at the floor, wondering if she and Cal even had the money to hire her a lawyer. The insurance company would eventually reimburse them for all the expenses they’d had to take on since the tornado wrecked their lives, but right now, they were flat broke.
“Elizabeth?” Logan said her name and her eyes involuntarily flicked up to his. “Did you fight with Megan Hunter when she showed up looking for Cal and told you she was his daughter? Was it an accident?”
“No,” she said. “I never saw her… until after.”
23
Amelia
Amelia did an autopsy in the morning—her first non-tornado-related case since the disaster—and checked her email shortly after lunch. She was hoping for word from Tom because she was curious how the Megan Hunter case was going, but he hadn’t messaged her.
She figured his talk with Elizabeth Thomas was turning out to be a long one, which probably meant he was getting closer to finding out what happened. So Amelia went about her day, completing a few forms to release bodies to funeral homes. Then around one, she headed to the break room for an afternoon pick-me-up.
She was brewing a fresh pot of coffee when Elise, the office histologist, came in.
“Hey, Dr. Trace,” she said as she headed for the fridge. “How’s your girlfrien
d doing?”
Amelia’s cheeks colored. She’d called in on Monday morning and asked Reese to let everyone know she wouldn’t be in for a day or two, depending on how long it took Simone to feel better. A little part of her knew, even while she was on the phone, that it was a bad idea to give the office gossip that much ammunition. And here it was a little more than twenty-four hours later and the whole office seemed to know she had a girlfriend before she and Simone had even defined their relationship.
She just had to laugh. She knew this would happen, so had some subconscious part of herself told Reese about Simone’s smoke inhalation on purpose? Amelia had to admit, ‘girlfriend’ had a nice ring to it.
“She’s doing much better,” Amelia said, not bothering to correct Elise’s terminology. That was the direction she and Simone were headed in, wasn’t it? “I am still worried about her going to work tonight, though.”
“Understandable,” Elise said. “I wouldn’t want my girlfriend running into burning buildings… if I had one.”
“How was everything here yesterday without me?” Amelia asked. Things were returning to normal, but she still felt guilty taking time off while the mass disaster protocol was still technically in place and the workloads were still so heavy.
“We survived,” Elise said, pulling a container of yogurt out of the fridge and then fishing for a spoon in one of the drawers. “There was a little mishap with my tissue samples. Honestly, I’m surprised we haven’t goofed up before that, what with how busy we’ve been.”
“What was the goof?” Amelia asked.
“Oh, don’t worry, I caught it pretty quickly,” Elise said. “One of the autopsy assistants switched the labels for two different decedents before they delivered the tissue samples to me.”
“That could definitely be a huge problem,” Amelia said. “How did you figure it out?”
“Luckily they had different blood types,” Elise said. “And you know me—I’ve got an eye for detail. Once I noticed the blood types weren’t right, I figured out the problem and got it all sorted out.”