Pawsitively Secretive

by Melissa Erin Jackson

  Amber started to say something, but she saw the chief from across the room lightly raise his hand to stop her. He wanted Frank to break the silence first.

  It took almost a full minute, but he finally did. “How do you know Lilith’s name?” His attention was still focused on his hands.

  Amber met the chief’s gaze across the room and he nodded. She steeled herself, knowing Frank’s reaction could go in any number of directions. “I’m a practicing psychic.”

  Frank’s head snapped up. That white-hot rage that was always simmering below his surface caused him to shoot to his feet and whirl to face Chief Brown. “What are you playing at, Owen? This is just insulting. My daughter is missing and you’re wasting precious resources and time on … on this?” He jabbed a finger in Amber’s direction without looking at her.

  “She’s the real deal, Frank,” the chief said calmly. “She wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

  “Lilith Reed was running from something,” Amber said. Frank, still standing by the couch, turned to glare down at her. “She changed her name to Shannon Pritchard but found a way to get that change removed from her public record, along with sealing Chloe’s birth certificate.”

  He walked away from her to stand on the other side of the coffee table. He crossed his arms. “You could have found all of that out with enough digging. If you’re truly gifted, you’d know what was on that sealed certificate.”

  “I haven’t been shown all of it,” Amber said, and Frank scoffed and rolled his eyes, “but I do know her 18th birthday is tomorrow, not a month from tomorrow, as her current public paperwork shows.”

  Frank’s arms slipped from their tight grip across his chest and hung limply at his sides. “No one knows that except—” He pressed his hands to the sides of his head. “Have you seen her? Is she okay? Is she alive?”

  “Yes,” Amber said quickly, cutting off his increasingly panic-sounding questions. “She’s alive and being cared for. But she was kidnapped; she didn’t run away.”

  Frank gusted out a shaky sigh, then cautiously made his way back to Amber, perching on the end of the cushion. His pressed hands were squeezed between his knees again, but this time his knees were pointing toward her. “Someone … took her?”

  “Yes … to get back at you. Someone who knows personal details about you that most others wouldn’t,” she said. “Someone who believes they can benefit from her now being legal.”

  Frank cursed. “Montana’s law states that either the birth parents or the child, once he or she turns 18, can request to see the original birth certificate.” He shrugged, hands out, as if he was offering this confession on a platter. “Original meaning: I adopted Chloe; I’m not her biological father.”

  Amber and the chief had already suspected this was a possibility.

  “This is the kind of thing Victor Newland threatened me with,” Frank said, dropping his hands. “When my own researchers found out scandal-worthy information about his family, he swore he wouldn’t stop digging until he found the skeletons in my closet.”

  “What information did you find?” the chief asked. “There’s been wide speculation about what made Victor suddenly drop out and Lisa skip town. I didn’t realize it was something you found.”

  Frank lightly shook his head. “I never divulged what I found. It was his choice to drop out, not mine.”

  Amber scoffed. “Are you really trying to put a politician spin on that? Yes, you kept what you found a secret, but you threatened to sell the information to the Gazette if he didn’t drop out. That’s not you being altruistic. That’s blackmail.”

  Frank worked his jaw. “I didn’t want the scandal to ruin his family. I wanted to run a clean campaign.”

  “If you wanted it to be clean, you wouldn’t have gone digging into his life with your ‘researchers,’” Amber said. “You wanted to find dirt on him before he could find it on you. And, lucky for you, I guess, your skeletons are buried a lot deeper than his.”

  He glared at the chief. “You did bring her here to further throw my character into question.”

  The chief held up his hands in innocence. “Your best bet is that Victor Newland is the person most likely to benefit from Chloe turning eighteen? He gets her to request an original birth certificate and it’s revealed that you’re not really her father? You think that’s Victor’s big play?”

  Frank started to say something, then hesitated. “Yeah,” he said flatly. “That’s my best guess.”

  This reasoning didn’t sit well with Amber, and given the pinched expression on the chief’s face, he didn’t buy it either. What Amber wanted to know was why the birth certificate had been sealed. If it was merely a case of Frank adopting Chloe as his own because her biological father was out of the picture, why did that need to be kept a secret? If nothing else, it spoke to the goodness of Frank’s character that he loved Chloe and Lilith enough that he wasn’t hung up on the fact that Chloe wasn’t his.

  Then she remembered the reasons the chief said a woman might want to have a birth certificate sealed as a matter of safety. Had the potential abuse started before or after Frank came into Lilith’s life?

  “You’re lying,” Amber said flatly.

  Frank glared at her. “Excuse me?”

  “It wasn’t Victor. Are you protecting someone or are you scared of someone?”

  “Neither,” Frank ground out. “I gave you my best guess. You should be harassing Victor Newland, not me. And I don’t have to sit in my own house being insulted by a psychic.”

  When he stood up, Amber made a quick decision. Her hand clamped down on his forearm. “Who do you think kidnapped Chloe?” Her magic thrummed beneath her skin, and she uttered the spell she’d used on the chief the morning he told her about Melanie’s death. It was a spell to reveal a person’s last thought.

  Though Frank refused to answer her verbally—he squeezed his lips shut as if the words were a physical thing he could keep trapped in his mouth—his thoughts betrayed him. Sean Merrill.

  “Who is Sean Merrill?” she asked.

  Frank yanked his arm away from her and stumbled off the couch and toward the middle of the room. “How did … how did you do that?”

  “She’s the real deal,” the chief repeated from his spot in the recliner, no hint of alarm or concern in his voice.

  Amber watched as Frank paced up and down the length of the small room. His brow would crease and he’d tug at his hair and he’d mutter to himself. Finally, he stopped and faced Amber from his spot on the other side of the coffee table. “I’ve been doing my best to keep Sean Merrill away from Chloe for seventeen—now eighteen— years.”

  “Her biological father?” Amber guessed.

  “Yes,” Frank said, sighing. “The guy has been in and out of jail, though. Last I heard, he was released from prison a couple years ago after completing his sentence for a nonviolent drug offense. A friend back in Montana says she’s seen him around. He works as a gas station attendant … has a girlfriend and a dog. All I know is that the money keeps him away from Chloe.”

  “So he’s dangerous?” the chief asked.

  “Yes and no,” Frank said. “I’m almost positive he’s responsible for the accident that killed Lilith. It’s a gut feeling; I have no proof. If he’s gone through this much trouble to get Chloe now, he needs her for something. He’s not a danger to her only because she’s no good to him dead.” He pressed a fist to his mouth, as if that last word had made him nauseous.

  “Any idea what he needs her for?” Amber asked.

  “All I have are guesses,” Frank said, but he didn’t elaborate. Then he began to pace again.

  “We’re here to help,” the chief said. “We can’t help you if you don’t talk to us.”

  “But see that’s the thing,” Frank said, turning to the chief. “A big part of why I’m in this mess is because of cops. I know you’re a good guy, Owen. You being a law-abiding family man heading the department here is honestly one of the things that pushed me to run f
or mayor. But Sean Merrill was a cop too, and he nearly ruined my life.”

  Amber and the chief shot each other bewildered expressions across the room.

  “Can you tell us what happened?” Amber ventured.

  It took Frank a while to start talking. “Lilith was twenty-five when she met Sean. They both grew up in Montana, but Sean was from Missoula before moving to Lirkaldy and becoming a cop,” said Frank, who had resumed his pacing. The movement seemed to keep his wild emotions in check. “She said life was good for them for the first three years or so. She was going to vet school and he was enjoying his job as an officer. Neither was in any rush to get married or have kids. They had a full social life and lots of friends.

  “After three years, they moved into Sean’s house, but Lilith said it took a lot of convincing to get Sean to agree to it. She said at first that she thought he was just a commitment-phobe, but then she realized it was because Sean kept really strange hours. She was often up late studying, so when they lived apart, she wouldn’t bother him with late-night phone calls, assuming he was asleep. But once they were living together, she would see him leave at two or three in the morning, always claiming it was work-related.

  “A year later, Sean was involved in a drug bust gone bad, and he was shot twice in the back and once in the leg. Several bones were shattered; he nearly died. After extensive surgery and physical therapy, he was fully mobile again, though he walked with a limp because of a reconstructed femur. Lilith was by his side for all of it. They ended up drowning in debt.

  “Even though he was able to walk, he was deemed unable to work for the police department. He went on disability and developed a terrible drinking habit. Six months after all this, his two a.m. nightly outings started up again.”

  “An affair?” the chief asked. “Or was he uh … paying for companionship?”

  Frank shook his head. “Neither. He’d been stockpiling his medications from all his medical procedures and had started selling them to make extra cash. Turns out, when he was out at all hours before, he’d been caught up in drugs then too. He’d developed relationships with local dealers in large part because of the drugs he’d been stealing from the evidence locker at work, and had been in the middle of a deal when a dealer got spooked that Sean was an undercover cop, and that’s how he wound up shot.”

  The chief lightly shook his head, his lip curled as if he smelled something rotten.

  “After weeks of this, Lilith finally confronted him about it. Unfortunately, he’d been on a bender before that and went at her with his fists. She went to the police, but her reports fell on deaf ears because Sean had dirt on pretty much every cop in town, plus a gang of loyal thugs who threatened anyone who tried to work against him.

  “Lilith was trapped with him, as nearly all their money by then had been eaten up by medical bills. She had to drop out of school. And when she tried to have a say, Sean beat her.”

  “My God,” Amber said, hand to her throat. She’d always felt awful that Chloe didn’t know anything about her mother, but now she was glad Chloe had been spared these terrible details.

  “She worked several jobs for a long time, one of which paid her under the table. She squirreled away cash; it was easy to keep that from Sean since he was drunk half the time anyway. When she had enough saved up, she left. A few months after that, when she was living in her own apartment in Traver—about a hundred miles or so from Lirkaldy—she and I met at a classic film meetup group.”

  “What was playing?” Amber asked.

  A small, wistful smile graced Frank’s mouth. “Some Like it Hot.” He was lost in his thoughts for a moment, then continued. “We hit it off almost immediately. She didn’t get into details about her past for a while—it was a lot to take in—but we both fell hard. One night, she told me everything and dropped the bomb that she was pregnant. It was Sean’s; couldn’t have been mine. We kept dating after that, and six months in, I proposed. I didn’t care if Chloe wasn’t mine. I adored Lilith and wanted to make a go of a family. Lilith was terrified of Sean and what being attached to someone like her could mean for me, so she turned down my proposal.”

  “But she stayed with you?” Amber asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “She tried to leave me. It lasted three days and we were both so miserable, I begged her to come back. I didn’t care if we were married. I was too far gone to care about much of anything other than being with her.”

  The chief spoke up. “Was getting her name legally changed your idea or hers?”

  “Mine,” he said. “I’d tried law school a while back and even though I’d dropped out, I had a few old classmates I could contact about Lilith’s situation. That’s where we got the sealed birth certificate idea, too—and to use a false birthdate. Anything we could think of to make it harder for Sean to ever find either one of them. When Chloe was born, I legally adopted her, and we had a new birth certificate written up with Lilith’s new name, and mine as the father. Then we sealed it so Sean could never find it and try to claim paternity. We hoped if we made Lilith fall off the map, he’d forget about her and move on.”

  “But that didn’t happen?” Amber asked.

  “It worked for a while,” he said. “Then one day I get a phone call from a blocked number. I still don’t know how he found me, but that guy is incredibly well connected. It was clear he knew I had a tie to Lilith, but he couldn’t find her. He said he knew she had a child and assumed it was his but said that he didn’t want it. What he did want was hush money. If I sent him money monthly, he’d leave us alone. I refused. A day later, when I went out to my car at work to grab lunch, all my tires were slashed. That night, Sean called again and asked if I’d changed my mind. I know you’re not supposed to give people like him what they want, but based on what Lilith had told me about him …” Frank shook his head and shrugged. “I just wanted to keep my family safe. So I agreed to pay him.”

  “Those are the payments Francine discovered,” Amber said, the words leaving her mouth before she’d realized she was going to say them out loud.

  Frank stared at her, bewildered, for a moment, then shook this off. Perhaps he’d accepted now that she was “psychic.” “Yes, that’s what Francine found. I didn’t want to get into what they were for or have her start investigating and somehow have something get back to Sean, so I had to let her go. I reacted rashly, but it’s hard for me to keep a level head when it affects Chloe. I’ve been too embarrassed to ask her to come back.”

  “Once the payments were set up,” the chief said, getting the conversation back on track, “then he left you alone?”

  “For nearly a year,” Frank said. “Lilith hated dealing with finances, so she left most of that to me. Which was fine, since I was able to hide the payments from her. The longer it went on, and with all the expenses of a new baby, we started living paycheck to paycheck. She got suspicious one day and checked our account history and figured out pretty quick what was happening. We got into a huge fight about it and she told me to at least cut the payments in half because we were in danger of going bankrupt. We had moved since then, we’d sealed as many public records as we could, I’d changed my number—we thought we were safe.”

  Amber’s stomach churned.

  “He found us within three months,” Frank said. “Showed up on our doorstep. He was drunk or high or both … just in a really bad way. I tried to get him to leave. I gave him all the cash I had in my wallet. We were all screaming at each other. Chloe was crying in a back room. God, I was so scared he was there to do something to Chloe. The man is huge. He never got farther than the front entryway; he kept trying to barge his way in and I kept shoving him back. Lilith was yelling that she was going to call the police, that he didn’t have his cop friends in this town to save his butt this time. Next thing I know …”

  Frank grabbed the hem of his shirt and lifted it, revealing a large, jagged scar on his flat abdomen.

  “He stabbed you?” Amber asked.

  “Yep,” Frank said,
dropping his shirt. “I went down hard. He stabbed me a second time and I remember lifting my head enough to see this hunting knife’s handle sticking out of me and the shock of seeing that was almost worse than the pain. Then I saw the blood soaking into my shirt. I’ve always been squeamish about blood and even though I tried to get myself to get up and get to Lilith and Chloe, I passed out.”

  Amber had her hand pressed to her mouth, her eyes wide.

  “What happened when you came to?” the chief prodded.

  “I was in a pool of blood, Chloe—thank God—was still in the house because I heard her crying in the back, but I couldn’t hear Lilith or Sean anymore,” Frank said, his chin quivering a fraction. “While I was trying to get up, a neighbor happened to be walking by with her dog—she’d only just gotten home about ten minutes before—and saw me lying in the doorway of the house. She called an ambulance and I was rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery. Gut wounds like mine are often fatal; they said it was a small miracle I survived.

  “Lilith was gone. Sean had taken her. I …” Frank blew out a long breath. “I actually never saw her again alive.” Tears tracked down his cheeks now. “I tried for months to find her. It was like she disappeared off the face of the earth. We hadn’t kept in touch with her family because Lilith was terrified that any contact with them would put them in danger. So when she was gone, I didn’t even know how to find them. They didn’t know who I was. And then three months after she’d disappeared, her car was found at the bottom of a lake.”

  Amber and the chief diverted their gaze as Frank broke down. He excused himself for a while. When he came back, his eyes were red and his hairline was damp—she figured he had splashed water on his face. They waited patiently for him to resume his story.

  “I was a suspect for a while, since it’s usually the partner in cases like this, but my neighbor being a witness to the aftermath of the attack helped me,” he said. “I told them about Sean Merrill but there was so little evidence the police could find on him, all they could do was bring him in for questioning. The more I pushed the police to keep looking into him, the more harassment I suffered. Hang-up phone calls at all hours of the day. After days of that, I would file a report. The next day, someone would throw a rock through my window in the middle of the night. I reported that. Police kept surveillance on the house for weeks. The day the surveillance stopped, my tires were slashed again.