by K. J. Emrick
I already disliked Spectra Hamilton. I never met her, and now I never would, and still I did not like the woman.
James pointed down to the letter again. “Spectra says here that she didn’t tell me about you. That’s true, Stevie. Never heard one word about any of this till you showed up. I don’t know for sure, but I can guess at why Spectra wouldn’t tell me. It’s the same reason me and her split up. She was a free spirit, your mom. Never took anything serious. Never had a plan past tomorrow. She was lots of fun to be with, and that’s deadset, but I just couldn’t be with a woman who might decide to move to New Zealand on a whim. Or join the circus. Or open a shop selling conch shells to the tourists only to abandon the whole thing on the roadside a week later. True story, that one.”
Stevie unfolded herself, and her eyes were intense as she drank up the details of James’ story. “I never knew that much about her,” she said. “When I was a kid we moved around a lot, and then I spent a lot of time with my Aunt Eloise. Then Mom was gone, and…” She took a shaky breath. “I learned to move on. I was happy with my life. Then you… and I had to know… do you understand? I had to know.”
For the longest time James just sat there, thinking, or remembering, or maybe something deeper and darker. My heart broke for him.
I reached out to hold his hand, only to have him pull away from me.
“I need to think,” he said, standing up. He went to take the letter but then with a glance at Stevie he left it where it was. It wasn’t his to take. It belonged to an old life, the same as this girl sitting on the bed did. “I’m going back to our cabin. Stevie…”
She waited for him to finish that thought. So did I. As James stood there, I could feel a gulf forming between us and growing wider by the second.
“I don’t know what to say,” he finally told Stevie. “You’ve had years to digest this. I’m just hearing it for the first time. You haveta give me some time on this.”
Stevie nodded, and snuffled back tears that surprised me to see. If I’d had any doubts about her sincerity before, or her intentions, they were gone now. She wasn’t trying to hurt James. She just wanted the love of her father.
“I don’t know what to say,” Stevie said to him.
“Yeah,” he replied. “Me neither.”
Then he was at the door and heading outside. I thought about calling him back. Shouldn’t he stay here and work this out? It seemed to me that he should. Only, he was a guy, and guys were dumb about emotions at the best of times. Something like this might just short circuit his brain. The best I could do was to be there for him.
“Stevie, I have to go after James,” I told her. “I’m sorry, really. It’s definitely a shock. That’s all. He just needs to, you know, give it time.”
“Sure.” She shrugged. “Why should he be here for me now? Hasn’t been there for twenty-five years, why start today?”
“That’s not exactly fair, is it?” I was caught between defending James, and wishing he would open up to me about what he was feeling. The memory of him pulling his hand away from me still stung. “You didn’t approach this the right way at all. You ambushed him, is what you did. How did you think he was going to react?”
She set her jaw, and turned her face away from me, and refused to answer. Nobody was in a mood to talk, looked like.
I went to leave, catching the cabin door just as it was about to close.
“Dell?”
Halfway out the door, I turned back to Stevie. “Yes?”
“I’m sorry. For, you know, following you guys around. I see now that I went about it the wrong way.”
I could understand that. More than that, it looked like James and Alistair were right. Stevie wasn’t the kidnapper. She was just a lost little girl. “Give him some time. Don’t leave or anything, okay? We’ll come find you. Maybe not today,” I added, remembering how we were supposed to be going to investigate a series of caves to see if they were being used by a psychotic kidnapper. “Might be tomorrow would be better for everyone to talk about this. After emotions die down.”
She nodded, gratitude in her eyes. “So you and James’ll be staying, too?”
“Count on it,” I told her, even managing a little smile.
Maybe she was expecting me to yell and scream at her. I didn’t see the point. This was happening. James had a daughter he didn’t know about. He was a father, and me and him were… complicated.
Life goes on. Sometimes, in a very different direction than we expected it to.
In our cabin I found James sitting on our bed. Elbows on his knees, he was holding his head in his hands as if that was the only thing keeping him from exploding. He looked up when I came in. He opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again.
“Don’t shut me out,” I told him gently. “Tell me what you’re feeling.”
“It’s a little bit much, don’t ya think?”
“James…” What can I say to him? What would make this better? “I told Stevie that we would be back to talk to her. Maybe tomorrow.”
“Back? Dell, why in the name of God would we be going back? Were you in the same room that I was just now? Did ya hear what that girl said? It’s just so… unbelievable. Me and Spectra were only together for a few weeks. Nothing shoulda come of it. Me and her… it was a whirlwind, it was. Bit of a wild phase for me, I guess. Then me career started to take off and I realized she wasn’t the kind of woman that I could make a life with.” He gestured helplessly with one hand. “She wasn’t you, in other words.”
“Nobody’s me,” I had to agree. I wanted to get closer to him, but something was stopping me. Something was still there between us, as real as any physical wall would’ve been. “James, you have to go back and talk to Stevie. I mean, get your head around it first because I can’t imagine what you must be thinking right now, but then you have to go talk to that girl.”
His hands dropped to his sides, and I watched as they curled into fists. “No, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do. She’s your daughter.”
“She’s no daughter of mine!” The words hung there in the air for several long seconds while James took in a slow breath. “She’s my ex-girlfriend’s daughter. That’s who she is.”
“Oh, James, don’t be like that.”
“How should I be? Tell me that, Dell. How should I be?” Now he stood up, and began pacing back and forth between the beds. “I’m supposed to just be all daddy’s home? How messed up is that? No. I can’t do that. I don’t know how to be a father!”
“I am a mother, remember?” I reached out for him again. “I know what it’s like to be a parent. Why don’t you talk to me?”
“I can’t. I can’t do this.”
The impact of those words settled in hard. He looked down at my hand, held out to him, and shook his head.
“James, talk to me. Let me help you.”
“No. Dell, just… no. I don’t want this. I don’t want that woman to be my daughter.”
“I don’t think you can do anything to change it,” I pointed out to him.
“Yes, I can.” He stopped pacing, and looked out through the windows of the cabin. “Oh, look. There’s Alistair. Come on.”
“James, please,” I started to say. We needed to figure this out. We needed to stay here and figure this out, not go traipsing off with James’s new friend.
“No,” he said to me again. Then he saw the look on my face, the shock and the hurt and all of it, and he softened his tone for me. “One mystery at a time, Dell. Right now, we’ve got a missing woman to find. That trumps anything to do with me and my foolish past.”
“James, you can’t just ignore this—”
Abruptly he came to me and took me by my arms and sealed his lips against mine. The kiss had a lot of heat in it, and a lot of pent up emotions. It swept through me like the warmth from a fire.
Then it was over. His eyes were looking into mine, searching for something. Maybe he found it, and maybe he didn’t.
“Time to g
o, Dell. We’ll figure out the rest of it later.”
As he went to the door I put my fingers to my lips. I could still feel the tingle of his skin. I could see the look in his eyes. That’s when it hit me. The kiss wasn’t an expression of love.
It was his way of keeping me from talking.
Okay. Well. That could just be because the bombshell from Stevie had hit him so hard. Right? Guys are emotional in a lot of ways even though they don’t want to admit it. That must be what it was.
I held onto my unicorn necklace and let the little point of the horn bite into my skin. As much as I wanted to believe that boys will be boys and all that I just couldn’t help but worry about what I was feeling. James had his own set of emotions to deal with, sure, but so did I. Mine were forming together to make a question in my mind.
Was I losing James?
I ran out after him, just in time to see Alistair’s car pulling away down the road back towards Port Arthur. It was one of those Holden Commodores, with the long sporty front end and the dual exhaust and a rear spoiler to boot. I watched it go, sleek and black, James sitting in the front passenger seat with his eyes straight ahead.
Outside, I locked the cabin door, thinking for a moment that I would race after him and try to get him to stop so I could go with them but then I realized how ridiculous that was going to look. He’d made his choice. He didn’t want me to come with him. He didn’t want to talk right now. I was just going to have to accept that fact. For now.
I tried not to let that hurt, or read too much into it.
Guess I pushed him too far on the whole thing with Stevie. With his daughter, I mean. He was already sore with me for questioning whether he was more devoted to me or his job and now this…
Turning back to the cabins, I saw Stevie’s face in her window. Her eyes held mine for a moment.
Over her shoulder, I saw the ghost of the dead woman. Was she haunting me or Stevie, for God’s sake?
She held her finger to her mouth again, just like before.
Don’t talk. Listen.
All I could hear was the sound of Alistair’s car driving away to silence. Then Stevie pulled the curtains closed, and even the ghost was gone.
Racing for my cabin I frantically tried to remember where my mobile was. On the dresser? In the bathroom… no. It was in my pocket right where it had been this whole time. I was already inside at that point and I dropped down on the bed as I pushed my long hair aside and thumbed in the speed dial option for James.
He was in danger. That’s what the ghost had been trying to tell me. If I’d listened to James, I would have seen that. I had to find him, and warn him—
Before I could push the button to place the call the mobile rang in my hand.
I nearly dropped the phone. When I recovered on the third ring I checked the caller ID and gladly connected the call.
“Kevin?”
“Mom, you alone?”
“Er, what do you mean?”
“I’m serious. Are you by yourself?”
The short hairs at the back of my neck stood up as my skin crawled. “Kevin, you’re starting to worry me something fierce. Yes, I’m alone. Should I be alone? Should I be running for the hills or something?”
“James isn’t with you?”
I was about ready to burst. “Kevin don’t do this to me. James just left with Alistair and I need to get ahold of him like now.”
“Alistair? Alistair Grotton? The one you told me about before?”
“Well, sure. He’s helping us look into the kidnapping. He says he might know… wait. Did I tell you Alistair’s last name?”
“No, you didn’t. I found it myself when I started looking into things over there.” I could hear him flipping through some papers. “The Grotton family is big news for Port Arthur. Alistair’s great-whatever-grandfather worked at the prison before it shut down in 1877. He was fired when he killed two of the inmates. Yes, two. His father’s first two wives died under very suspicious circumstances. His third disappeared. That would be Alistair’s mother. You heard me, right? She disappeared.”
“Yes.” I heard every word. Here I was looking into a kidnapping with a man who had offered to help me and James, completely out of the blue, only to find out that the man’s own mother had disappeared suspiciously. I wasn’t a big believer in coincidence, but even if I was this was too much to call it coincidence. “What about Alistair? Did you find out anything about him?”
“Mom, you need to stay away from this man. I know he’s a doctor and all, but… Look, I’m going to send the Federal Police to talk to Alistair. They’ve got a few active investigations going where Alistair’s name shows up. They were real interested to know he was in Port Arthur the same time that this girl went missing from the prison site. They don’t have anything to arrest him for, but the term ‘person of interest’ got used more than once.”
“What about this American fellow. Hudson Snow. What’d they tell you about him?”
“Complete blank,” was his answer.
“There had to be something. When he came into the country, right? The Border Force would’ve taken down his name and where he was coming from and all that.”
“That’s what I’m saying to you,” he emphasized. “There is no record of him coming into the country. Ever. No one by the name of Hudson Snow came into Australia by any legal means at any point in time.”
I sat down. None of this made any sense. Well. Except for that part about Alistair being involved in things the police thought were dodgy. That I could believe. I’d never trusted that man. Not completely, anyway.
“Did find out one thing you’ll want to hear,” he told me. “Turns out you were right to be suspicious. This isn’t the first girl to go missing over in Port Arthur. Two years back, a woman by the name of Charlotte Tebo got taken right out of the Lady’s Room in the visitor’s center. It was in the news for like a week and then it was just one more bad story that everyone forgot.”
I sucked in a breath. The ghostly scream I’d heard… a woman, taken from the visitor’s center. Suddenly, I knew who the girl was. “Let me guess,” I said. “Young woman, long blonde hair. Pretty face. White dress, maybe?”
“Uh, yeah,” he said, confusion seeping into his voice. “How’d ya know?”
“I’ve heard some things over here, too,” I decided to tell him. Easier than saying the girl’s ghost had appeared to me at a local restaurant to ask my for help. Don’t let it happen again.
This Charlotte Tebo was the ghost I’d been seeing. The one who looked so much like Rory Hunter. She was asking me to stop a murderer who had been to Port Arthur before. Someone who liked to kill pretty girls with long blonde hair. I had to wonder, if we had the time to do a search for unsolved murders across the country, would we come up with other unsolved deaths of the same kind?
Someone here was a murderer. Hudson Snow? Alistair? Or maybe one of the university kids who came here with Rory Hunter. University kids could come and go here without anyone noticing them, I’m sure. How easy would it be for them to lure unsuspecting young women here for a holiday… no. That didn’t make sense. If one of the uni kids had been responsible for Charlotte Tebo’s murder and had also been here with Rory Hunter… the police would surely zero in on someone like that quick as spit. Not that Rory was a murder victim—yet—but the point still stood. It couldn’t be one of the university kids. That was too obvious.
Now that I knew what Stevie was about, I didn’t suspect her, either.
So it had to be Hudson, or Alistair.
Or was it someone else? Someone I hadn’t met yet?
Kevin cleared his throat, and I realized I’d been sitting in complete silence long enough to make him wonder. “Mom, are you sure you’re all right over there? I can come and get you no problem. Just stay away from this Alistair character. At least until I know more about him. Hudson Snow too, I suppose. Just sit tight in your cabin, stay away from Alistair, and I’ll come get you.”
Stay away fr
om Alistair.
Easy said, for me... but what about James? That’s when it hit me that I didn’t even know where they were going. Not specifically. I knew they were going to some caves that had to be near the shoreline somewhere. Would that be enough to find them?
“Kevin, I have to go.” I was already standing up and heading for the cabin door. “I’ll call you later.”
“Wait, Mom!” Kevin’s voice brought me up short just as I was about to disconnect our call. “Don’t go running off half-cocked, okay? I won’t be there to save your backside this time.”
It wasn’t my backside I was worried over. It was James’s.
“I’ll call you later,” I told him. “I promise.”
That was going to have to be enough for now. I know he’s worried over me, and I love him for it, but like he said. He’s not here. I am.
I have to follow him… it’s the only way I know of to try and keep him safe. I looked on the bureau but there were no car keys. James must have them in his pocket. Darn.
Now what?
An idea began to form in my mind. I raced to the cabin door and slipped through locking it behind me.
Outside, I wasted no time in running over to my neighbor’s cabin. I know Stevie might not want to see me again so soon after our brilliant conversation, but right now she had exactly what I needed.
After several loud knocks, she came to the door. “Dell? I know you said we’d talk more later but I didn’t think you meant—”
“Stevie,” I interrupted her. “I have something very important to ask you.”
“Really? Er, sure. Shoot.”
“Can I borrow your car?”
Chapter 7
She blinked at me, her eyes still red from the tears she’d been crying earlier.
“My… car?”
I knew she had to have one. She followed us from Lakeshore and it would’ve been really hard to do that on foot. “Listen, Stevie. I’ve got no right to ask you for this sort of favor. You don’t know me. I’m just the woman dating a man you recently found out is your father, and your mother is dead, and none of this is going the way any of us expected but I swear, you can trust me. I’ll keep it safe, and I’ll even fill the tank up, but this is really, really important. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t.”