The Hiding Place

by Karen Harper

  “But you still have me,” Claire told her. “At least, unless Uncle Nick takes me away.”

  “Claire, this isn’t the time for—” he started to protest, but Tara held up her hand.

  “I will always love you as a daughter,” she told Claire, “and I wanted you to know why I’m so sad.”

  “And I’ll bet you’re mad too,” Claire said, “that she died and they didn’t tell you sooner!”

  That outburst made Tara feel as if she herself had spoken. But she felt so bereft, so exhausted that she couldn’t handle that right now. “If Uncle Nick will put you to bed, I need some sleep,” she said, kissing Claire’s forehead.

  With a big bear hug, Claire kissed Tara’s cheek and scrambled out of the bed. But as Nick rose to go tuck her in, Claire asked, “What was her name, Aunt Tara?”

  “Her name was—is—Sarah Veronica Lohan-Kinsale. Sarah for one of her grandmothers and Veronica for the other. But we will call her Sarah.”

  “It’s a real pretty name, and even though I never get to meet her, she’s kind of my sister now.”

  Nick saw that Tara, fighting to hold herself together, was ready to burst into tears, so he scooped Claire up and put her in bed. A few minutes later, when he left her room, he saw that Tara’s door was still open with the light on. From his earlier night-watchman forays to check on the place, he knew she slept with it closed and her light off. He tiptoed back to close the door.

  “Nick?”

  “Yeah. Just going to close your door.”

  “Don’t, okay?” she called to him. “I can’t stand to feel closed off, closed out right now.”

  He peeked in at her. She was still huddled in her robe under the covers. Leaning one shoulder on the door frame, he said, “I understand. It doesn’t help to be alone in times of loss.”

  “You know whereof you speak. Feel like talking?”

  “Sure, but you need sleep.”

  “Feel like holding someone, then—just for a little while?”

  He covered the space to her in four quick strides, sat on the edge of the bed with his back to the headboard and reached for her. At first he cradled her as he might Claire, but then he stretched out next to her, shoes and all, outside the covers, and held her hard.

  She clung to him, her face pressed against his neck, wetting his throat with her tears. The pillow they shared was soaked.

  They didn’t move for what seemed to him like minutes but was hours. He could see her bedside clock. As he felt her eventually relax against him, he settled into a more comfortable position. Shifting his weight, he heard her sigh as she turned over, her back to him so they lay spoon fashion with his chest and thighs cradling her back and bottom.

  He wanted her. But he wanted even more than that to make the agony of her loss, mingled with guilt and anger, go away. It didn’t work to try to bury losses. You had to face them, feel them, work through them. Through Tara’s struggles, he was learning that about himself. Post-traumatic stress disorder was something they, unfortunately, shared.

  “Nick?” she said, startling him from dark dreams of mountain caves and the bright bang of an explosion. “What, sweetheart?”

  “Claire’s right. I’m sad, but I’m really mad. I want to go to the Lohan estate today and then see where they put Sarah’s ashes, but I don’t trust that man or my former husband any farther than I could throw this entire mountain.”

  “You’ve got a bodyguard with you now, Tara. All the way.”

  Holding a bouquet of white calla lilies in her lap, Tara frowned out the front window as Nick drove them through the neighborhood of Kerr Gulch where she and Laird used to live. Today she was not nervous, not distraught, just deeply hurt and angry. She kept telling herself she was under control.

  “Quite a place,” Nick observed as they passed through the Lohan monogrammed gates that had to be buzzed open from the house. “Exclusive privacy, great views and huge lots.”

  “This estate is about twelve acres and worth about three million dollars, I guess,” Tara said, her voice a monotone as if she were reciting the alphabet. “The house Laird and I had was on a five-acre lot, but it would have been better for us to be in a hut and happy. Pull up under the porte cochere.”

  A dove-gray Lincoln Town Car was parked there, but Tara had no intention of riding with Jordan to the site he’d mentioned. She actually wanted to go just with Nick, but she didn’t know where the crypt, as Jordan had called it, was. Knowing him, he’d have the place locked up.

  Before they rang the bell, Rita, Veronica’s plump, middle-aged Mexican maid, opened the door for them. With Veronica away for treatment again, Rita was probably filling in at different jobs.

  “Rita, it’s good to see you again,” Tara said, extending her hand.

  Looking surprised, then grateful, Rita took it. “So sorry for your loss, Ms. Kinsale. Mr. Lohan told the staff, and he’s going to tell Mrs. Lohan today. So very sorry for you and Mr. Laird and—”

  “This is my friend Nick MacMahon,” Tara said as Rita eyed Nick, then gestured for them to step inside the huge stone house.

  “Mr. Lohan will be right with you,” she said, and led them past windows that overlooked the covered courtyard pavilion into the hand-hewn beamed great room. The room had panoramic views of the gold and green valley and blue-gray mountains. The rain was over; it looked to be a clear day. All the furniture in the spacious room was oversize; it had always made Tara feel as if she were Alice in Wonderland and she’d eaten something that had shrunk her.

  A silver tray on a low table held a coffee carafe and a porcelain plate of pecan rolls. “May I serve you?” Rita asked.

  “We’re fine. Thanks, Rita,” Tara said, so the maid left them alone.

  Nick poured himself coffee, then went over to study the impressive array of pictures of Jordan with powerful politicians, from state senators to the governor and even the vice president. Tara knew the Lohans had always been big political contributors on both the state and national levels, but she was long past being impressed with anything they did.

  She drifted around the room, ignoring the power photos in lieu of the personal ones in carefully arranged clusters on the grand piano and the walls. Of course, there were plenty of Thane’s three children, and old family photos of Laird’s family when he and Thane were small. All of her photos had disappeared, but, Tara noted, there were none of Laird and Jen either. Perhaps Jordan and Veronica were ashamed of how quickly he’d dumped his comatose wife for another woman. Or, like Susanne, had Jordan had some removed so they wouldn’t upset her more than she already was?

  Tara looked for the yearly, three-generation Lohan photo, but found it missing. Unlike at Susanne’s house, there was no bare spot on the wall over the massive stone mantel where the current one had always hung. Instead, she saw, there was one of the family of four when Thane and Laird were about high school age. Tara noted the photos were all by the same photographer, Robert Randel, the man who had taken pictures she’d been in during the two years of her marriage. If Rita came back in, she’d ask her about that, because—

  “You are not only prompt but early,” Jordan said as he strode into the room, rubbing his hands together as if he were washing them. “Nick, I’m glad to meet you and thank you for lending support to Tara. I see Rita has offered you something,” he said with a jerky gesture at the tray. “I was just phoning to check on Veronica this morning. I’ll be heading over there to explain everything to her after our visit to the crypt. I know she’ll be greatly grieved too. How I wish I could have protected both of you from such dreadful news, Tara.”

  Tara thought he was on edge, which was unusual. He was trying to fill the air with chatter. She was tempted to ask him the location of the current family photo, which surely must include Laird and Jen, but he’d have some slick answer for her. No, she’d find out about that another way, from someone more likely to tell the truth. She hadn’t learned to be a P.I. and a skip tracer for nothing. Once she’d seen her baby’s resting pl
ace, she just might do a little research on Laird and Jen. It shouldn’t matter to her when they fell in love, when he decided to desert her, but somehow it did.

  Tara cringed every time anyone, including herself, said the word crypt. It conjured up images of haunted Halloweens or old horror movies. She expected to see a decrepit, spiderweb-covered hulk with a creaking door.

  After going twenty miles down the valley toward the west, they drove Nick’s truck onto a narrow paved lane behind Jordan’s car. He’d pretended to be surprised that they would follow in their own vehicle; Tara thought he was secretly relieved. She craned her neck to look all around. At least it was lovely here. She should have known it would be since it was Lohan land. Jordan had said his parents had once lived in a “starter house” here, but, unless it was hidden by the grove of quivering aspens just ahead, it must have been long gone. At the back of the acreage, she saw a fenced-in area with old gravestones and a single larger structure.

  “Is everything the Lohans own fenced and gated?” Nick asked.

  “It’s even the way they like to treat their women. At least this is protected. And pretty.”

  “Like Lohan women. That it is.”

  A mountain stream ran nearby; they couldn’t see it, but the sound floated to them as they got out and closed the car doors. With the whispering of falling leaves, the lilting sound was almost like a lullaby, Tara thought.

  The three of them walked toward the six-foot-high, spiked iron fence, and Jordan fitted a key in the gate. It screeched as if in protest when he opened it. Tara’s heart was thudding. The bouquet of lilies shook in her hands. She wanted to cling to Nick, but she didn’t.

  The crypt looked much too grand for this rural, isolated site, especially set among the smattering of old, rough headstones. The two-pillared edifice looked carved from imported stone—maybe marble—with its dull pinkish tint and small black flecks. It wasn’t polished but it looked sturdy, eternal. Under its peaked roof, on the flat lintel, in big, heavily incised letters was carved simply, LOHAN.

  “I had it built over their original grave sites, so there are no real vaults aboveground in it,” Jordan said. “Except, of course, for the niche for the child’s urn.”

  “Her name,” Tara told him as they went up the two steps into the crypt itself, “is Sarah Veronica.” She saw Jordan’s hand quiver as he inserted a smaller key into what appeared to be a small, bronze door, about two feet high by one foot wide.

  “All right,” he said. “If you’d like, I can have her name carved right above this little door and etched on the urn, with the dates.”

  “The date,” Tara corrected.

  As he opened the small, grated metal door, she held her breath. Morning sun slanted into the crypt through the doorway behind them, throwing stark shadows and illumining the niche. She could not believe it even now. For one moment, she imagined she’d seen a tiny face staring out at her.

  But there was only a polished, bronze urn within with the words on it, Baby Lohan, beloved child. Nothing else but dust that had sifted through the keyhole and a spider’s web, which Tara brushed away before she lay the lilies beside the fancy foot of the urn.

  “I want to hold it,” she whispered. She felt Nick step closer to her, edging Jordan away. Nick’s hand came lightly to the back of her waist.

  “Of course,” Jordan said, stepping away. “Be careful. It’s heavier than it looks.”

  But it didn’t seem heavy. It was light. And so cold to the touch. Tara stared at it, at the words, Baby and beloved, then cradled it in her arms. She stepped away to sit down on the single stone bench and held the urn in her lap. Neither man said anything. Jordan stepped farther way, though Nick hovered. The wind sighed and the stream rattled on.

  “I want this. I need to have it,” Tara told them.

  “N-need it?” Jordan blurted. “For what?”

  “For me. Just for a while.”

  “Tara, it belongs to Laird and the family, too,” Jordan protested.

  “I also have a family. And this precious part of it has been taken from me in more ways than one. She should have a birth certificate, and a death certificate, too. You’ve made it like she didn’t exist!”

  “I told you, we did all we could. We were trying to protect you—yes, and Laird—”

  “And Jen!”

  “—from having everything dragged through the media again. You being attacked by a killer and being comatose with the danger of brain injury was bad enough. We didn’t need this, too.”

  Tara had tried to keep calm, but she couldn’t help herself. She didn’t shout but raised her voice so that the interior of the crypt echoed with her words. “As usual, you didn’t need or want bad publicity. But I needed and would have loved this child! Don’t blame me or the coma for her death, because I wasn’t really there, and you and Laird and Jen and your doctors were. I might not have wanted a child until Laird and I solved our problems, but I would have cherished this child.”

  Tara stood, the urn still in her arms. It was warming to her touch. She could not let it go. Nick looked as if he was going to round on Jordan and tell him off or worse. She was learning to read the telltale throbbing at the side of his throat. It pleased her to note that her former father-in-law looked more distressed than she’d ever seen him.

  “Will you promise me,” Jordan said, “that as soon as I have the stone cut with her name and date, you will bring the urn back? All of us should be able to visit it here.”

  “Then have keys made for me, to the gate and this little door,” she countered, stepping closer to him and looking up steadily into his face. He met her gaze, but a slight tic at the corner of his left eye jumped.

  “All right,” he said, clearing his throat. “That seems fair enough. Tara, I’m doubly distressed to see you suffering so—you can only imagine how broken up Laird was—and I’m dreading telling Veronica this afternoon.”

  “Tell her I honored her as best I could with Sarah’s middle name,” she said, nodding to Nick and starting away from this place and this man.

  Nick quickly came behind her. “You were great,” he said, after a few steps, keeping close, shoulder to shoulder, but not touching her. “So strong. Do you think he will really make you the keys?”

  “If he doesn’t, I’ll never give this back,” she vowed, the urn clutched against her breasts. “Besides, I mean to find my own keys to whatever it is he’s still hiding. I’ve never seen him so shaken. He’s no more grieving with me than that marble crypt is. I think Laird and my old friend Jen probably had an affair from way back. I’ve got to find out if Daddy Dearest agreed to let them keep me comatose—which killed my baby—until Laird could be free of me to run off with Jen. Or if Jen did something to make sure my baby was stillborn, because she was afraid then Laird might have had second thoughts about running off with her. One way or the other, someone snatched my child from me. Finders Keepers has a new desperate but determined client, and it’s me.”

  16

  With the urn holding her daughter’s ashes on her lap, Tara worked like a madwoman on her own Finders Keepers case that afternoon, evening, night and the next morning.

  After all, in a way, her child had been snatched away by her ex-husband. He had taken little Sarah without telling her where the baby was—or even that she had existed. The case was the most consuming she’d ever had. Though she had no hope of getting her child back, how much more deeply she felt the desperation of women who had asked for her help.

  During Sarah’s birth, Tara had been completely at the mercy of her doctors and the Lohans. Laird had allowed a doctor near her who had every reason to want their baby to die, so that she could comfort and run off with Laird. On the Internet Tara found Laird and Jen’s marriage license in Seattle court records. It was outrageous that they were married just a few days after the divorce. And she’d traced the transfer of Jen’s license to practice medicine to the state of Washington, though she could not locate where she was practicing in the Seattle area.
Perhaps she was just enjoying the good life with Laird, hobnobbing, putting down business and social roots.

  What a gullible idiot she’d been to trust the woman she had once considered one of her two best female friends. Alex—dead. Jen—the worst sort of Judas. It was horrendous that a physician who had taken the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm might be, at least indirectly, a murderer.

  Tara also researched the various levels of coma, especially drug-induced ones. Previously, she had avoided reading anything that touched on that terrible experience; now she devoured information on the chemical means to produce a medical coma to aid in treatment and recovery.

  One fact repeated by online experts and verified by several long-distance calls she’d made this morning seemed important: Some patients seem to recall very distinct events while they are in a coma; others seem to remember as if through a mist.

  “I know I heard Veronica’s music,” she said aloud to the empty house. Claire would be at school for hours, and Nick, after hanging around all morning, had finally been convinced to take Beamer for a walk. “And I heard someone tell me I was going to have a ‘vaginal delivery’—Jen’s voice, I swear it.” She also recalled someone crying, not a newborn’s wails, but an adult’s. Yes, someone crying, crying, perhaps herself, from the pain of labor—or loss.

  Maybe she’d been so deeply incapacitated by drugs she couldn’t help deliver her child. She studied amnesiac drugs, ones that could have kept her out of it, even if her medical coma were lightened for the delivery. For some reason, one called Versed sounded familiar to her.

  Used for various procedures, Midazolam, more commonly called Versed, induced a short-term, twilight, semiconscious state in which the patient could follow basic orders, even respond, but would recall nothing of a painful experience afterward.

  But she’d gasped to read that if Versed were used during the last few days of pregnancy, it could cause drowsiness and slow the mother’s heartbeat—and cause troubled breathing and weakness in the newborn infant!