Exposure

by Susan Andersen

The radio in the department Suburban crackled. "We found her, Elvis! Tell Mrs. Sands her baby is at Sam and Clare Mackey's and she's fine."

  A strangled laugh erupted out of Emma's throat. Two seconds later she burst into tears. Elvis picked up the handset and held down the send button. "Thanks, Sandy," he said into the receiver. "We're heading over there now." Hanging the handset back up, he reached across to briefly grip Emma's leg just above the knee. "You okay?"

  "Um." She wrestled her emotions into submission until she had them under a measure of control and then straightened up. Twisting in her seat to face the sheriff, she scrubbed at her cheeks with the back of her wrist. "Oui, I'm fine. Ah, Dieu, Elvis, I was so scared something horrible had happened to her." Plunging both hands into her hair, she held it off her face while she stared at him with haunted eyes. "I don't think I could have handled it if she'd been hurt. Not her, too. Gracie's the only thing in my life that's worth a—" Hands dropping to her lap, she forced her eyes away. Good Lord, missy, get a grip. He doesn't want to hear your woes.

  But it was difficult. Suddenly, uncharacteristically, she wanted nothing so much as to unburden her troubles all over Elvis Donnelly's broad shoulders.

  Within moments they had emerged from a long wooded drive onto the windswept bluff that played host to the Mackey residence. Emma was out of the car almost before it came to a complete halt. She didn't notice the rich wood architecture of the house as she raced for the front door. Neither did she see, when Clare opened it, the magnificent view, which usually drew amazed comment from first-time visitors, through the expanse of sparkling glass that looked out over the Sound. "Where is she?" she demanded.

  "Upstairs in Evan's old room. But, wait Emma, before you—"

  She was interrupted by Emma's fierce hug. "Thank you! Mon Dieu, Clare, merci beaucoup from the bottom of my heart. You, more than any other person in the world, can probably appreciate how scared I was. Where did you find her?"

  "That's what I want to talk to you—"

  This time it was Sam who interrupted. "Let's all go into the living room," he suggested. "Emma, can I get you a cup of coffee?"

  "No, thank you, Sam." She gave him a blindingly white smile. "My stomach's produced so much acid this afternoon I don't dare add to it. I just need a minute to get myself together before I see Gracie."

  "How 'bout you, Elvis?"

  If Emma hadn't caught on to the underlying tension in Clare and Sam's manner, Elvis had. "No," he said shortly and grasped Emma's elbow, marching her over to one of the couches. Seating them both, he looked up at Sam. "All right, what gives, Sam? Where was Gracie found?"

  Clare's nerves jangled. No one was going to believe her. Sam didn't.

  Oh, he hadn't called her a liar to her face or anything, but his tone had been too controlled, too gentle, to be anything but an attempt to keep the crazy lady from flipping out where she stood. She took a deep breath and said. "I didn't find Gracie anywhere. She was . . . uh, delivered to me."

  Emma's frenetic gaiety dissolved. She felt very cold all of a sudden. "Delivered?" Aware of Sam staring at her, she spared him a puzzled glance before her full attention returned to Clare. "What does that mean, exactly? Delivered by whom?"

  Clare swallowed but met Emma's eyes straight on. "You."

  Emma erupted to her feet. "Are you out of your damn mind? I've been going out of my head, terrified to the depth of my soul that my bebe was hurt or maybe even dead, and you're sitting here saying . . . ?" She swallowed the rest of her words, swamped with an abrupt, sickening sense that she was brushing up against a mind gone off kilter.

  She wondered in anguish what it was about her that drew this sort of madness into her life time and time again. Did she possess some inbred magnet for trouble? She used to believe she must be sort of a ... a Typhoid Mary, or something, because it seemed everyone she'd ever cared deeply about ended up dying on her. Big Eddy had; Charlie had. Then she'd discovered that the one person she had felt it was safe to care about wasn't the man she'd thought he was at all. Now this. Had she run from everything she'd ever known, fleeing one abnormal personality only to run smack-dab into another?

  "I'm not saying I saw you personally," Clare said. "Gracie just knocked at my door. But I saw your car, Emma! There's not another one like it on the whole island. And I could see that someone with your streaky blond hair was driving it." Clare hugged herself and tried not to let her protestations of innocence slip into hysterics. Already she could see it on Emma's face: like Sam, she thought Clare was in the midst of a psychotic episode, that she'd stolen someone else's child to take the place of her dead son.

  After all the strides she had made in recent weeks, it was just so damn unfair.

  Then she remembered Gracie. "And Gracie said you wanted me to look after her. Ask her yourself." Shaking, she stared in torment at the tall woman who had begun to mean so much to her. "Emma, why are you doing this to me?"

  Moving up behind her, Sam gripped her arms in his warm hands. Clare wanted badly to lean back against him, longed more than anything else in the world to accept his comfort. She was afraid, however, that it was being offered simply to stave off a case of incipient hysterics. She stood stiffly within his embrace.

  "Why am I doing this?" Emma lunged forward, beside herself with fury and fully prepared to rip Clare Mackey's hair out by the roots. Before she could reach her objective, however, Elvis reached out and jerked her back against him, pinning her to his hard chest by the simple expedient of clamping his left arm with its prosthesis diagonally across her upper torso and his good arm around her waist.

  "Let's get Gracie down here," he said with cool authority, looking across the short distance that separated the furious woman in his arms from Sam and his wife.

  His own feelings about Clare were mixed, and had been since Evan's death. From the time his best friend had started dating her, Clare had accepted Elvis, simply and without fuss, as Sam's friend. Never once had she judged him the way almost everyone else on this island did, and for years he had flat-out loved her for that. Then, when he'd returned to the island after the explosion, she was one of the few women who hadn't all but puked to see his disfigurement. But—and he knew it wasn't his place to feel this way, wasn't even any of his business—as sorry as he'd been about the pain of her loss this past year, he'd resented her for the way she'd cut Sam out of her life when her husband had needed her following Evan's death. He'd had to stand by and watch her break his best friend's heart when Sam was already suffering unbearable heartbreak, and more than once he'd wanted to shake her silly until he made her see what she was doing to Sam.

  As for this situation, he didn't know what to make of it.

  Elvis got the two women seated while Sam went upstairs to fetch Gracie. A few moments later they all turned toward the entryway when the sound of little feet running across the tile floor broke the tense silence. Gracie burst into the room and ran straight to her mother, flinging her sturdy little body onto Emma's lap. "Hi, Maman! You miss me?"

  A choked laugh exploded deep in Emma's throat and she buiied her face in her daughter's soft curls, breathing in the familiar, comforting scent of baby shampoo. She had to concentrate hard just to prevent herself from crushing Gracie to her chest. "Yeah, um, you could say that, oui," she agreed.

  "I was stawtin' to miss you, too. But Miss-us Mackey let me play with Ebben's things. He was her little boy, but he dieded."

  "I know," Emma said gently, and she brushed Gracie's fine hair away from her forehead. "Did you take your nap today, angel pie?"

  "Uh huh. In Ebben's bed."

  Sam stared at Clare. She never talked about Evan if she could help it. Yet she'd apparently talked about him quite a bit to Gracie Sands. And as far as he knew this was the first time anyone had been invited to cross the threshold to Evan's old room since the day their son had died, let alone been invited to sleep in his bed and play with his toys. Sam sat down next to his wife and took one of her trembling hands in his.

  "Gracie
," Elvis said, and she looked away from her mother's face for the first time since she'd run into the room.

  "Hi, Shewiff," she said. "Did you come with my Mommy to pick me up?"

  "Yeah. I thought you might like a ride in the police cruiser. First, though, your momma's got a question she wants to ask you."

  "'Kay." She looked back at Emma.

  "This is kind of important, chere," Emma said, careful to keep her voice easy. "How did you get here this afternoon?"

  Gracie opened her mouth to reply, but then closed it once again. She shifted on her mother's lap, her eyes roaming the room. Finally she glanced up at Emma's face and then away again and said, "In a caw."

  "Uh huh. And who drove the car, Grace Melina?"

  Gracie peeked up at Clare, and then her gaze fell back to her hands in her lap. "Miss-us Mackey," she whispered.

  "No," Clare said in a strangled voice. "I didn't!"

  "Why are you lying, Gracie?" Sam asked sternly, and Gracie's lower lip started to quiver.

  "All right, that's quite enough." Emma rose to her feet, her daughter held protectively in her arms. "Sheriff, will you take us home, please?"

  "Dammit, I want to get to the bottom of this," Sam said before Elvis could reply.

  Emma whirled to face him in a cold rage. "Oh, I think the bottom has been reached," she snapped, drawing herself up to her full height and staring him straight in the eyes. "Mon Dieu, if you really want to do something useful, get your wife some help." Turning on her heel, she strode from the room and from there straight out of the house, slamming the heavy entry door behind her.

  Elvis joined her moments later. Unlike Emma, he wasn't satisfied that all the questions had been fully addressed. But he took one look at her closed expression and Gracie's tremulous little chin and decided they could wait for a while. It had been an extremely emotional day and discretion truly was the better part of valor sometimes. Particularly if he wanted to actually get somewhere with his inquiries. Nothing is quite so fierce and bloodthirsty as a mother mammal who perceives her young to be endangered.

  It was a short, silent ride back to town. During it, Emma began to lose some of her knee-jerk, adrenaline-fed defensiveness. Something not quite right was going on. She glanced down at Gracie who was acting so uncharacteristically clingy that Emma had ended up strapping the seat belt over both of them. Her daughter was too quiet.

  "Did you see all the stuff Elvis has in this big ol' car, angel pie?" she murmured into her daughter's ear.

  "I swear he's got more gadgets than a gourmet kitchen."

  Gracie didn't so much as glance at the interior. She kept her arms locked around her mother's neck and her head buried in the hollow of Emma's throat, and this behavior aroused Emma's suspicions. Ordinarily she could count on her daughter to chat up a storm, to ask a hundred and one questions about all the law-enforcement equipment that bristled in such abundance in the Suburban. When she considered that Gracie didn't even realize she'd been missing, Emma had to wonder why she was so subdued. Could it be that her child was guilty of some major transgression?

  "Pull around back," she requested quietly when they neared the town square. Clare's story was just too cock-and-bull, too . . . lame. Emma knew her to be an intelligent woman; so why hadn't she at least made up something that had a fighting chance of being believed? Unless perhaps she believed what she was saying.

  It was completely beyond Emma at this point to recall whether her car had been in the parking lot earlier when she'd searched for Gracie. She imagined it must have been, or its absence would have been glaringly obvious. The truth was, however, she had been so beside herself with fear for her daughter's safety, conceivably she might not have noticed a Sherman tank if one had been parked in the back lot.

  She didn't know exactly what it was she expected to see when Elvis pulled the Suburban into a space in the boarding house parking lot, but her car was exactly where she'd left it. With Gracie still clinging to her front like a barnacle to a rock, she climbed out of the police cruiser and walked up to her vehicle. Pulling off the protective cover she used to keep off the weather, she tried the doors, bent and peered in the windows, walked around to study the Chevrolet from all angles and finally stood back, consumed with fury all over again.

  "Dieu, what a chump I am," she muttered in self-disgust.

  "Yeah?" Elvis' voice, coming from directly behind her, made her jump. "Why is that?"

  "Because I began to wonder . . ." She cut herself off, shaking her head impatiently. "But, no, I have to be realistic about this. Who would go to such elaborate lengths to steal my car? And why, for pity's sake? Bon Dieu, I can't believe I'm letting myself get sucked into this! Clearly Clare's able to effect that tremulous, why-don't-you-believe-me air of... of. . ." She struggled for the right words. "... helpless victimization because she believes her own delusions. It's just . . ." Emma looked at him helplessly and shrugged.

  "You wanted to believe her."

  "Yes. Damn it anyhow."

  "And what about what Baby Beans here said?" he asked, looking at the back of Gracie's head, which was all he could see since she had not come up for air from the moment Emma had first climbed into the department Suburban with her. "Is this only about wanting to give Clare the benefit of the doubt, Emma, or are you picking up something as a mother that makes you doubt the veracity of what she told us?"

  Emma's brown eyes flared with outrage, but she struggled to tamp down her defensiveness. It was a legitimate question. "Elvis, I honest-to-God don't know what I think at this point, okay?" She hiked Gracie higher up in her hold and ran a hand wearily through her wavy hair. All her limbs felt leaden. "Please. Let me give this some thought," she requested. "And I really do need to talk to . . ." She tilted her chin at Gracie significantly. "Alone. The minute I know something concrete though, cher, I'll call you. I promise."

  He studied them both for a moment, the child who was so quiescent in her mother's arms, the woman whose characteristic passion was notably subdued as she looked back at him with tired, apathetic eyes. He nodded decisively. "Yeah, all right."

  All the starch left Emma's spine. "Thank you," she said. Then, fervently, "God, Elvis, merci beaucoup for everything" Unexpected tears welled up in her eyes, and she determinedly blinkcd them away. She reached a hand out to grip his warm forearm. "I honestly don't know how I would have gotten through this afternoon without you," she admitted tremulously.

  "Just doin' my job, ma'am." Knowing a reciprocal display of emotion would probably kick the last slat out from under her shakily shored-up poise, he kept his tone deliberately light to give her a chance to pull herself back together.

  Which she did with the pluck he'd come to expect from her. "Well, if that's true," she ultimately said, "then this town is luckier than it can possibly know to have such a dedicated professional at its service." She squeezed the arm beneath her hand and then stood on tiptoe to impulsively plant a brief, hard kiss on his mouth. "Thank you."

  She was almost through the back door when Elvis' voice halted her. "Emma."

  Stroking Gracie's back with her free hand, she turned to face him.

  "If you really want to thank me," he began, and then had to bite back the raunchy suggestion that flashed through his mind. He cleared his throat. "Please," he said aloud. "Don't talk about the particulars of this afternoon until we know exactly what's going on, okay?" He saw her open her mouth and rushed on before she could utter what he feared would be a refusal. "Listen, I know everyone's going to want to know where Gracie was found, but for now could you just say the Mackeys found her and let it go at that? Please."

  "All right." Emma nodded her head decisively. "For now."

  "That's all I'm asking. Thank you."

  She nodded again. Then she melted through the doorway and closed the door behind her.

  Chapter 8

  Elvis was back out at Sam and Clare's house fifteen minutes after he'd left Emma, knocking on the door. "We need to talk," he said as soon as Clare opene
d it.

  She stood back and held the door open, then trailed him as he strode past her into the living room. Sam walked in from the kitchen, a bottle of nonalcoholic beer in his hand. "Hey," he said neutrally. "Wanna Clausthaler?"

  Elvis looked at his friend's unsmiling face. "Yeah. That'd be good."

  Sam was back with one in only moments. Clare sat stiffly upright on the couch while he handed Elvis the condensation-dappled bottle. Then he took a seat on the cushions next to her.

  Elvis took a pull, then lowered the bottle and regarded Clare solemnly. "I'd like to hear what you have to say about today's events," he said. "Start from when Gracie showed up, and tell me everything you can remember."

  "She wasn't lying, Elvis; if that's what you're thinkin'. And she's not delusional, either." Sam's tone was flat, his expression set; and his body language suggested a preparedness to argue his wife's innocence into the night if necessary.

  Clare's head swung around and she looked at him in openmouthed surprise.

  "Did I suggest either of those things, Sam?" In contrast to his friend's rigid posture, the belligerent crossing of arms over his chest, Elvis sat forward with his forearms propped on his thighs, his beer bottle dangling between his spread legs.

  "You're here, aren'tcha? Why aren't you at the boarding house cross-examining the brat?"

  "Sam!" Clare admonished, astounded at his attack. "That's enough, now. Please. Don't call her that."

  "Jesus, Sam," Elvis said in wonderment, "she's three years old. What do you suggest I do, get out the bright lights and rubber hose?"

  "Works for me," Sam retorted. Then he turned to his wife. "Why are you defending her? You put her down in Evan's bed, let her play with his toys. You took care of her. And she turned around and stabbed you in the back for your trouble."

  "She's just a little girl, Sammy." Clare rubbed her hand up and down his rigid arm in an attempt to soothe his agitation. "You make her sound like a conniving Lolita. She was confused, that's all."

  "Or she was coached," Elvis added, and had the immediate attention of both people. "Or," he said with unsmiling equanimity, "she was telling the truth. Sit down, Sam," he ordered when his friend, fists clenched, surged to his feet. Then he turned his attention to Clare. He looked her squarely in the eyes. "To determine just what the hell did go on here today, I need all the facts. I'd like you to tell me your version of what happened."