Back Where She Belongs

by Dawn Atkins

  “She’s doing fine,” Tara said, knowing that was the image her mother wanted to present, though Tara was worried about how much she’d been sleeping. “I know she appreciates everything you sent her. That was above and beyond the call of duty.”

  She watched his face. Sure enough, the red in his face deepened to magenta. Something was up with him and her mother. She prayed it was just a harmless flirtation.

  “It’s the least I could do.” He cleared his throat. “Please have a seat.” He motioned toward a chair, then sat behind his desk, sizing her up like a suspect.

  “So, this has to feel strange, huh? You being in my office and not in trouble.” He gave her a self-satisfied smile. “Glad to see you cleaned up your act. Maybe those little talks we had did you some good.”

  She had the urge to grab the World’s Best Cop mug on his desk and chuck it at his head, but she only smiled.

  “I know your mother used to worry herself sick over you.” How long had he had a thing for her mother? Now that she thought about it, he had always patted her mother’s arm and consoled her over Tara’s screw-ups. Ick. “So what can I do for you? One of my guys give you a speeding ticket you need fixed?”

  “No. No tickets.”

  “You haven’t been in town long, though, have you?” He chuckled.

  She supposed she deserved the dig, considering all the mischief she’d gotten into, but did he have to be such a patronizing jerk about it?

  “Actually, Chief Fallon, I hoped you’d tell me a little more about what happened that night...about the accident. The sequence of events...how you came to find them—” She stopped before she said at suspiciously the right moment. She didn’t dare push too hard.

  “I know what you’re after,” he said solemnly, leaning across the desk. For a second, she thought he might help her. Then he rested his elbows on the desk, hands clasped as if in prayer, a gesture that often meant, I’m holding back what you want because I know best. “You want peace of mind. But this won’t give you that.” He smiled a knowing smile. “Go home, comfort your mother, let time do its duty. That’s what you need. Believe me. I’ve seen this many, many times.”

  Stay calm. Be easy. “I appreciate your concern, but I’m prepared for whatever you can tell me.” She hoped she was. She’d been afraid to look down the embankment or peek at her sister’s clothes. If the details were gruesome...

  She braced herself. Be strong. This is for Faye and Dad.

  He stared at her, irritated, but trying to hide it.

  “If you’d prefer, I could simply read the accident report,” she threw in.

  “That’s not possible.” The way his eyes slid side to side suggested he was dodging the truth. “The report’s still in process.”

  “So you’re still investigating the accident?” Her heart skipped a beat. Maybe he was handling it, after all.

  “You know...cops and paperwork. These things take time. Hunt and peck even on the computer.” His smile invited sympathy. “We want to get the i’s dotted and the t’s all crossed. With everyone so lawsuit-happy these days, we have to be awfully careful, don’t we? In the meantime, your insurance agent took my statement, so that’s all cleared up. Your lawyer should get you a nice fat settlement, no problems.”

  She took a deep breath, fighting frustration, and took a new tack. “We owe you our thanks for responding so quickly. If Faye has any hope of recovery, it’s because she got immediate treatment.”

  “We all just hope she recovers,” he said, trying to sound humble, but clearly proud of himself for his heroic efforts.

  She had to step carefully here. “It was lucky you were passing by, since my mother said you usually play poker with my father.”

  “Wife was under the weather, so I missed the game. I was on my way into town to grab flu medicine and noticed the downed rail.” He’d put his hand to his face, scrubbing at his jaw, another sign of discomfort, possibly lying. He’d looked up and to the left, too, which typically meant the person was drawing on the right brain, the creative side, making up a tale. People remembering something looked right and down, engaging the left brain, where memories resided.

  “The timing was a miracle,” she said, leading him to say more.

  “Cop instincts. We’re always on duty. When you’ve been on the job as long as I have, you know what to look for.” He shifted in his seat. He seemed wary by nature, so the cues she was picking up could have been simply tension over being put on the spot.

  “As I said, we feel so fortunate.” She attempted a smile, but felt her lips crack. Her mouth had gone dry as dust, anticipating the tougher questions to come. “When I drove by, I noticed the caution tape near some swerving tire marks. I’m no expert, but it looked like the driver tried to avoid something. The odd thing was how far away from the crash site the marks were. Nothing near the rail. The car had to be going fast to knock it down, right?”

  He leaned back, as if to escape. “Like you said, you’re no expert. We’d need an accident reconstruction engineer to answer that question and those fellows are plenty pricey. Big police departments have them. Insurance companies hire them. Luckily we don’t need an expert to tell us they went over the rail and crashed.”

  “What about the car? I imagine its condition and position would indicate if there’d been a collision, say, with another car or a large animal.”

  “My concern was only for your injured family, not their car.”

  “But you took pictures, right? That’s required, I believe. And don’t you have to sketch out the accident, describe what happened? For example, if the car was struck from behind, you’d need to look for the hit-and-run driver, right?”

  He breathed harshly through his nose, clearly riled. “I’m not sure what you’re getting at here, but, out of respect to your family, let me lay out the facts. We don’t live in CSI land. We don’t use crash dummies to reenact wrecks. We don’t have fancy labs and if we did we wouldn’t use them on a cut-and-dried one-car accident on a dangerous curve.”

  Dammit. He wasn’t going to help her. The emotions she’d struggled with over the past two hours balled up in her chest. “Except it’s not cut-and-dried, is it? People are saying that Faye was driving drunk.”

  His hands shot up in twin stop signs. “You don’t need to worry about that. I told you we were clear with your insurance company. You’ll want to leave that alone for everyone’s sake.”

  What was he saying? “Was my sister drunk? You were there. You checked them.” Or had her pills thrown off her reflexes? What could possibly have prevented Faye from slamming on her brakes?

  “I look out for your family and I always have,” he said in a low voice, sounding eerily like her mother.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I’m saying leave it alone,” he snapped.

  “I have a right to know what happened.” Her voice broke. Dammit, she would not cry in front of this Daddy-knows-best asshole. “Tell me what you saw, please.”

  He glared at her for a long moment. “All right. I’ll spell it out. Was there a strong smell of whiskey in that car? Yes. Did I say that to the insurance adjuster? No, I did not. Will that appear in my report? No. Maybe it was gasoline fumes. Maybe I was mistaken. I could not say. And I refuse to guess. That’s how much respect I have for your family.”

  “I can’t believe Faye would drink and drive. It could have been my father, right? And that’s why she was driving. He’d been drinking.”

  He stared at her again, hatred simmering in his eyes now. When he spoke, his voice held a threat. “You never did know when to quit, did you?” He blew out a breath. “Okay. We’re not exactly sure who was driving. Don’t make me draw you a picture you won’t want to see.”

  “How could you not know who was behind the wheel?”

  He huffed out a breath. “They were together on the ground—one of them thrown from the vehicle, the other walked or crawled over to check.”

  She swallowed hard, horrified, but fighting not t
o show it.

  “Strange things happen in car accidents, freakish things. Pens sticking out of necks, arms twisted in bad ways, people in the backseat who started out in the front, you don’t want to know—”

  “So you’re saying it might have been my father driving? Was he drunk? The blood tests would show that, right?”

  He gave her a calculating look. “When they set up an IV, EMTs use an anticlotting agent that screws with any alcohol reading. Even if your insurance company lawyers subpoenaed the lab work, they’d get shit-all, if you’ll excuse my language. This is good for you, since that way they can’t refuse to cover your family’s vehicles in the future. It’s all been taken care of, as I’ve told you more than once.”

  “So, what, you lied to the insurance company? You’re falsifying your report to protect my father—or my sister—from a drunk-driving charge? Is that what you’re implying?”

  “I suggest you stop right there.”

  “I don’t think so. Not until I find out the truth. If I have to subpoena the hospital records, I will. I want to see your report, Chief Fallon, false or not. Accident reports are public record. Certainly I’d like to see the photos of the accident scene and the car, since you don’t seem to remember what it looked like. Where is the car, by the way?” Shaking, she pulled out a notepad to write down his answer.

  “It’s wherever your insurance company had it towed,” he said with a smirk.

  “You must know where it went.”

  “No idea whatsoever.” He snapped his jaw closed and folded his arms. “Better call your insurance guy. See how far you get with him with this nasty, demanding attitude you’ve got.”

  “So you refuse to help me? Even though you have all this respect for my family?” Sarcasm was a mistake, but she couldn’t stop herself.

  When he spoke, his voice was nearly a growl. “You’re in grief, I know, and half hysterical, so I’m not going to take offense at your insults to my competence and integrity.” Both hands on his desk, he pushed to his feet, leaning forward, as if to loom over her. She stood, not stepping back, not intimidated one bit. “I accept your apology,” he snapped. “Now please leave.”

  “My apology?” She’d lost her temper, she knew, but she refused to be put at the mercy of this self-righteous small-town tyrant. Before she could say more, the door opened. Dylan stepped in. “Everything okay in here?”

  “No,” Tara said. “Everything’s not okay. This man, who is a public servant, refuses to show me the accident report I’m entitled to see as a citizen and a relative of the victims.”

  “Miss Wharton seems to think there’s some conspiracy going on,” Fallon said. “She thinks I’ve got secret evidence I’m keeping from her. Could you tell her there is no mystery here, no TV drama? Could you tell her to go on home and help her poor mother and be done with it?”

  Tara was so furious, she was afraid she might slap the guy. This rinky-dink cop wasn’t going to keep the truth from her. She would contact the state police or the sheriff’s office and ask them to investigate. She would hire an attorney. She would file a suit. Whatever she needed to do she would do. “This is not over, Chief Fallon. Count on it.” She turned for the door, shaking with rage, catching Dylan’s stunned look as she left.

  CHAPTER SIX

  UNEASY ABOUT HOW Bill Fallon might respond to Tara’s questions, Dylan had headed over to the police chief’s office just to take the temperature of the room. He’d arrived in time for the mercury to spike.

  “Can you believe that?” Fallon seethed. “She rolls into town and starts throwing her weight around. Typical Wharton.”

  “I’m sure she’s trying to make sense of what happened.”

  “You don’t think I know that, boss? You forget I was doing this job when your mom was still cutting your meat for you.”

  Fallon resented having to answer to a man young enough to be his son. It hadn’t helped that Dylan had questioned the padding in Fallon’s recent budget request. “I tried to reason with her, but she had a tantrum.” He gave Dylan a wily smile. “But then I guess you know all about her tantrums.”

  Tara was right about one downside to small towns—people knew your history. Normally that didn’t faze him, but he’d always been sensitive about Tara, and Bill Fallon could be an ass. Dylan thought the lead officer in the department, Russell Gibbs, would make a great police chief. Bill was close to retirement and talked a lot about moving to Sun City when he did.

  “Why not give her the report, Bill?”

  “She doesn’t want my report. She wants someone to blame. She’s asking me what I saw, did I take pictures, was there a hit-and-run.”

  “A hit-and-run?” Where had that come from?

  “What she needs is someone to hand her tissues and say there, there, you poor, poor thing. That’s not my job. I’m the peacekeeper. I smooth the waters, keep the ship afloat. That’s what you pay me for.” He tapped his skull. “If people knew half the stuff I keep in here for their own good...”

  Dylan fought the urge to roll his eyes. Fallon bent the rules when he saw fit. He’d likely traded a screaming deal on his own pool for tipping off the contractor to the other bids for the town swimming pool. By the same token, he had patrols drive Mrs. Johnson’s neighborhood whenever her husband was out of town, ran a Scared Straight program for the high school and coached Little League, all on his own time.

  The I’ll-scratch-yours-if-you’ll-scratch-mine stuff bothered Dylan at times, but it was human nature to want favors. It happened everywhere—big city or small town. That didn’t mean he had to engage in it. Once he was working for the town full-time he’d do some housecleaning and make sure everything was aboveboard. People expected no less from him.

  “She won’t let this go, Bill. I promise you that, and this town can’t afford a lawsuit. Figure out what you can give her—your notes, photos, the report, something. In the meantime I’ll talk to her.”

  “You do that. Go hold her hand, or whatever else you want to do with her.” He smirked.

  It took everything in Dylan to keep from cold-cocking the guy, but he knew that would only fuel the man’s speculation about Dylan’s involvement with Tara. Besides that, no one—least of all Tara—would benefit from a fistfight in town hall.

  Still fuming, Dylan left and drove toward the Wharton place. As he rounded the highway curve, he noticed a white sedan parked at a sharp angle on the shoulder, as if the driver had stopped abruptly. He recognized it as Tara’s rental car, but she wasn’t inside. Where the hell was she?

  Then he noticed the orange cones and dangling caution tape. This was the accident site. She must have gone down the embankment. That would be like her. If she couldn’t get Fallon to tell her what she wanted to know, she’d find it out herself, by God.

  With a sigh, he parked and jogged across the highway to the caved-in guardrail. Looking down the slope, he caught a flash of Tara’s red shirt, so he stepped over the barrier and headed after her, passing crushed bushes, broken branches of mesquite and palo verde, and gouged trunks—damage the tow truck had likely contributed to.

  “Tara? It’s Dylan,” he called so he wouldn’t startle her. She got up from the boulder she’d been sitting on, and turned to him. She was breathing hard and chewing on her lip, trying not to cry. She looked small, beaten down and sad. Beyond her, a tree had been nearly snapped in half. Had to be where the car ended its fall.

  What a terrible thing for her to see.

  He started closer, but she stepped back, as if afraid he might hold her and she might lose control. He saw she gripped a cell phone in both hands.

  She swallowed hard. “Look at all this.” She motioned at the ground, covered with glittering pieces of safety glass, chunks of plastic, twisted strips of metal, broken bulbs, torn padding and wires. “This is all evidence. It should have been collected.”

  “This is a lot to take in, Tara,” he started, wanting to get her away from this horror.

  She held up one of the phones. “This
has to be my father’s. It’s the old flip style. He held on to things forever. Faye had an iPhone, I think, but I can’t find it. This one’s mine,” she said, lifting the phone in her other hand. “I’ve been taking pictures with it.” She swallowed hard.

  “So where is Faye’s?”

  “I’ve been looking.” She walked forward, staring at the ground.

  “Maybe you’ve seen enough for now,” he said, joining her.

  She stopped dead and sucked in a breath, staring at the ground, where there was a large rust-colored spot—blood—and a woman’s pump on its side. “Faye’s other shoe,” she said. “And all that blood.” She shot him a look of pure horror, then lurched away to throw up in the weeds.

  He went to steady her, an arm at her waist, then offered his shirttail to wipe her mouth.

  Gasping, she shook her head. “Not another of your shirts.”

  It gave him a pang that she’d joked as a way to get herself back in control. She went to sit on the boulder. Setting the two phones on the ground, she used the hem of her silk top on her face. He sat beside her, resting his hand lightly on her back.

  An old habit. It made him a little sad to remember all the tender touches they’d shared, their bodies in tune, their moods in sync. She leaned into his hand, and he was glad.

  “Fallon said they were found together on the ground,” she said shakily. “He couldn’t tell who was driving. He said he smelled alcohol. I’d bet anything he was the one who started the rumor that Faye was drunk.”

  “Faye was drunk?” This was the first he’d heard of that.

  “Faye’s assistant, Carol, said there was a rumor, but it could have been Dad, for all I know. And that was why Faye was driving. I tried to get the nurse to find out from Faye’s chart, but no luck.” She shook her head. “Fallon’s lying, but I don’t know how much. He’s just a patronizing ass.”

  “Why would he lie?”

  Tara jerked her gaze to him. “Excuse me? Are you siding with him?”