As though she would remember; Claire had been two when she was abducted.
Rose’s crystalline blue eyes were wide and worried as Emma sat and folded her hands at the table. “Tell me.”
She had to tell her mother about Detective Miller’s phone calls. Most particularly the last one.
She’d been deliberating for a couple of days about what she was going to say.
Tonight, with Rob’s infidelity a fresh and burning sting, she couldn’t seem to find the usual decorum, the caution, with which she couched everything she told her mother.
She didn’t recognize herself in the woman who was pushing her to do something more. To be something different.
To change what Rose wouldn’t have changed.
“I’ve spent my entire life playing it safe.” They weren’t the words she’d come to say.
Rose’s frown deepened. “What do you mean?”
“I settle,” Emma said. “Or maybe I don’t, I don’t know.” This was her mother. She could only say so much.
Or stray too far from herself…
She was in no state to tell her mother about Ramsey Miller’s phone call—about the horrible mistake she and Rose had made, believing all these years that Frank Whittier, her mother’s fiancé at the time, had abducted Claire.
“I broke up with Rob today.” And that was not a mistake. No matter how badly Rose took the news.
Rose’s eyes held a spark of…something…as she watched Emma, saying nothing. But the woman wasn’t falling apart so Emma continued.
“I came home and found him with another woman in our bed. I gave him until tomorrow morning to get out.”
Rose nodded.
Her mother’s expression wasn’t crumpling. Or, worse, filling with fear. She almost had a hint of a smile on her face. And she was nodding!
Had the whole world gone mad? Or only Emma’s portion of it?
“What? You knew he was seeing someone?”
“Of course not. I’d have told you if I’d known that. I just knew he wasn’t right for you.”
That almost made her angry. As angry as she could ever get with the woman who’d suffered so horribly. And tried so hard to love Emma enough. “You thought Rob was wrong for me?”
“Yes.” Rose squeezed her hand. “But regardless of what I thought, you loved him and you most definitely didn’t deserve to be cheated on. I know it hurts and I’m so sorry about that.”
Shaking her head, Emma ignored the compassion in her mother’s voice. This was no time to open her heart and give in to the weakness there—a desperate need to be loved, in spite of everything.
She was better off if she kept her walls up.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” She concentrated on the facts that perplexed more than they caused pain.
“Because I knew you’d figure it out on your own and that you would be so much stronger for having done so. Acting on my say-so could have crippled you.”
“I’d have married him, Mom.” If Rob hadn’t kept putting off choosing a date. A location. Colors. Anything at all to do with them actually saying “I do,” rather than just “I’m going to.”
Rose shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“But if I had? You’d have let me?”
Rose studied her and then said, “I’m not sure. There was always the chance that I was wrong.”
“You liked him. From the first time we met him at that fingerprinting clinic, you liked how he took a real interest in our quest.”
“He was a big help. And had good ideas. He was a pleasant conversationalist, but that doesn’t mean I thought he’d make you happy. I did like that he kept you here in the area, close by. I liked that he was willing to spend time with us together. That we could do family things.”
A given. Rose had lost one daughter. And ever since that day, until Emma had met Rob, it had always been just the two of them.
“I’m not going to leave you, Mom, you know that,” Emma said. “Not for anything, or anyone.” But for the first time, the words didn’t flow from her heart as easily as they flowed past her throat.
For the first time, she wished, just for a second, that she could be as free as other women her age.
And then, ashamed of herself, she gave her mother a hug.
Emma missed Claire like she’d miss an arm or a leg. And she’d only been four when her little sister had been taken. Rose, a single mother who’d lost her baby, had suffered so much more.
Emma’s job, as the one left behind, was to be there for Rose. Period.
She wasn’t herself right then. Who knew, maybe she wouldn’t ever be exactly herself again. But her role in her mother’s life would not—could not—change.
“Never say never, Em. You have a life to live,” Rose said, sadness mingling with the compassion in her tone. “You have to go where it takes you.”
“My place is here. With you.”
“I hope it is. But if it’s not, you have to go.”
Her mother was talking crazy. She wasn’t going anywhere.
“You don’t mean that. You need me here.”
“Yes.” Rose’s expression was completely sober. “But my life doesn’t take precedence over yours. Or it shouldn’t. And I’ve begun to see that maybe, in spite of all of my intentions to the contrary, it has.”
Emma didn’t know what to say. Her mother was right about one thing. She did have a life to live. And she hadn’t been living it.
Any other time her mother’s words would have frightened her. Tonight, they seemed to make a confusing kind of sense.
* * *
CHRIS SKIPPED THE CHURCH meal that followed the funeral, though he did keep his head low—in deference to his mother who would be disappointed in his manners if she were still alive—as he made his way back to the new black Ford truck he’d bought the previous spring.
He wasn’t in a hurry to be anywhere. Late-afternoon sunshine usually signaled waiting his turn to meet with Manny, Comfort Cove’s lobster dealer, and exchange the day’s catch for the current pitiful rate of three dollars per pound. And then there were always things to do on board the Son Catcher to occupy his time until dusk—like keeping the aging engine running until the economy recovered enough to shoot lobster prices back up to a price lobstermen could afford to work for.
Today, for the first time in memory, the dock didn’t call to him. His first Friday off in months and, while he missed the water, the exertion, the thrill of the catch, the dock was not a happy place that day. They’d lost one of their own.
It could happen.
Wayne Ainge had been far too young to die. By all accounts he’d worshipped the ocean. And she’d been fickle to him.
He might have been driving aimlessly, but Chris’s new truck already seemed to know Chris. Without any conscious decision making, he ended up at Citadel’s, an upscale lounge and eatery in the middle of Main Street, the part of the tourist district the city council had sunk all the city’s money into.
Fishermen didn’t frequent Main Street.
Chris parked in his usual Friday-night spot—albeit a few hours earlier than normal—and, pausing to check out the thronging visitors on both sides of the street he slowly pocketed his keys, went inside and took a seat at the bar.
He was one of two people there. The other, a woman of indiscriminate age, eyed him up and down as though analyzing how much he’d bring per pound.
“Hey, Chris, what’s up?” Cody, the bartender, distracte
d him from a mental rundown of random ways to avoid hookers. “I’ve never seen you in here before dark.”
“Day off work,” Chris said, shrugging, and then remembered his attire. He looked just as he always did on Friday nights—like a white-collar business man relaxing after a long week of work. Not like a man from the docks after a long hard day. “Pour me a double,” he said.
A good bartender, Cody reached for the bottle of high-end scotch that Chris favored and poured twice the amount of Chris’s preferred drink without saying another word.
Tipping his glass to the younger man, Chris sipped, in memory of a twenty-year-old kid he’d barely known. And to men that he’d known all his life. Fellow lobstermen, fishermen, who risked their lives every day earning a living in spite of the vagaries of an ocean that was more powerful than all of them.
And halfway through the glass of amber liquid, he drank to her, too. To the mighty Atlantic. The ocean. The reason he would never have a woman in his life.
CHAPTER THREE
“I HAD A CALL, MOM.” Emma was helping her mother make a chicken Caesar salad she didn’t want. Because it was her and Rose’s favorite meal. A feel-good meal. Security food.
“From who?”
She had to start living her own life—and she wasn’t even sure what that meant. To date, her life consisted of responsibilities and “shoulds” and protecting Rose. She had to be free from some of that—free to take a chance or two. To be spontaneous in spite of dangers.
Free to want.
Rob had been naked in their bed, her bed—on sheets she’d purchased and laundered—with another woman.
Because Emma was so lacking? She’d never had an orgasm. Was that her fault? Or his?
“Emma?”
Rose’s brow was wrinkled as she glanced her way. “What?” Thank God Rose couldn’t read her thoughts.
“You said you’d had a call. I asked who from.”
Back on track. Not that the coming conversation was going to be any easier than the silent one she’d been having on and off with herself since noon that day. “From a detective. Here in Comfort Cove. His name’s Ramsey Miller.” None of which mattered. Get to the point.
Was she not woman enough to hold on to a man? Not adventurous enough? Not wild enough?
Rose wasn’t moving. Her hands, holding part of a roasted chicken breast and a knife, were suspended in midair. Midcut. “Tell me.” When she finally spoke, her tone was biting.
Emma knew she shouldn’t have started this. Not tonight. There was no reason to put her mother through more days and weeks of anguish while hope battled with reality. Reality always won. They knew that.
And yet, she really should tell Rose about Miller’s call. At some point, the detective might need to speak with her mother.
“No one knows anything about Claire,” she said quickly.
At the sink, she turned on the cold water to rinse the lettuce.
“What, then?” Fear entered Rose’s tone. Emma had known it would. That happened to a woman when her baby was stolen out of her home in broad daylight.
She thought about the box of forensic evidence that had gone missing from the police station. It was the reason for Miller’s initial call more than a month before. The last time Emma had seen the box containing her and Cal’s and Claire’s belongings, she’d been four years old.
Miller had no idea who’d taken the evidence or why.
But Rose would draw her own conclusions. And she would inevitably get her hopes up. Emma knew how it worked. Not just because she’d lived close to her mother all these years, but because she lived with the same ups and downs.
If someone had stolen the evidence from her sister’s case, could it mean that Claire was still alive? Still out there?
Or, conversely, did it mean that her baby sister was dead and buried and her abductor wanted to make certain she stayed that way?
“Emma, you’re scaring me.” Her mother still held the chicken and the knife.
Emma had moved on to mixing the oil and spices for the dressing, putting them together just the way they liked. Soft scents from the loaf of fresh Italian bread warming in the oven wafted around them.
She wasn’t up to this conversation. As a good daughter, she had to let her mother know what was going on because she couldn’t guarantee that Frank wouldn’t call. She didn’t think he would. But he knew where Rose lived. He could send her a letter.
Emma didn’t want to sit and eat. Didn’t want to do what she always did. She wanted to go somewhere. Do something.
She wanted to escape. From Rose. Claire’s memory. Frank and Cal Whittier. Rob.
She was twenty-nine. If she didn’t start living life now, it could all be over before it even began.
Taking the knife and chicken from her mother’s lifeless hands, Emma started to cut.
“Cal Whittier wrote a book.”
“What?” Rose’s brows drew together and she sank down into the chair at the head of the table—ironically, the one that had been Frank’s during the time he and his son, Cal, had lived with them.
Back when they’d been a real family.
“He published a book?” Rose asked.
“No.” Dropping the knife in the sink, Emma left the salad and went to sit next to her mother. “He gave it to Detective Miller, who works cold cases. Miller read it and noticed a piece of information that Cal had put down that wasn’t in any of the recorded testimony.”
“What information?” Rose’s tone was suspicious. Did she think Cal would lie? He’d only been seven when Claire had gone missing.
Although Emma had only been four at the time, she could still remember the anguish in her almost-brother’s eyes when he realized that, because of him, the police thought his father had done something to Claire.
“Do you remember that meat delivery truck that used to come here?” Emma asked. She’d remembered it, as she’d told Detective Miller when he’d asked her.
“Of course. They stopped three doors down, every Wednesday morning. Delivered to the Bryants. Why?”
“Cal mentioned the truck in his book. He hid behind it the morning that…that morning when he left for school. He sneaked from there to hide behind another car and then made a dash for the backyard so he didn’t have to go to school.”
“He’d thrown up in gym the day before,” Rose said, her tone softer. “He was so embarrassed he begged us to let him stay home. We hated to make him go, but we knew that if we didn’t the problem would only escalate.”
“Like falling off a horse,” Emma said, the words coming to her from long ago. “I remember Frank telling Cal about falling off a horse and getting right back on.”
“I remember that.” Emma couldn’t see Rose’s expression. Her mother’s head was bent.
“Apparently Cal didn’t tell the police that part back then,” Emma said, choosing her words carefully so her mother wouldn’t get her hopes up. “When Detective Miller read about the truck, he remembered another unsolved abduction where there’d been mention of a delivery truck, so he followed up on it.”
Rose’s head shot up, her gaze stark. “He found something? Did…is Claire…”
Shaking her head, Emma squeezed her mother’s hand. “No, Mom. I told you. There’s been no word of Claire.”
“But there might be. That’s what you’re telling me? They have a lead?”
“No,” Emma said emphatically. “It turned out that the other abduct
ion Detective Ramsey remembered reading about was unrelated. Since then he’s found two other abductions in Massachusetts that both took place more than ten years ago, on delivery routes, but they haven’t turned up any connection to us. Or her.”
Swallowing against the tightness in her throat, Emma plowed on. “Detective Miller found the driver of our truck, though. He talked to him, and—”
“He knew something? What did he say? What does he—”
“Mom, please. This is why I didn’t want to tell you.”
“Emma, for God’s sake, she was my daughter. I’m never going to stop caring, or hurting, and so I react strongly, but that’s no reason not to tell me.…”
Emma could have reminded her mother about the times Rose had shut herself away for days, the times her mother had cried for so many hours on end that Emma’d had to fend for herself, about the times she’d had to beg her mother to eat so Rose would have the energy to get out of bed.
“The driver saw Claire in the front yard, Mom. He passed Cal going up the street and he said it looked like Claire was watching him. It bothered him to see such a young child outside alone so he drove by again after making his delivery. That’s when he saw Frank come out of the house with his briefcase, which he put into the empty backseat of the car, and then he got in the car alone and drove away. That was six minutes after he’d seen Claire in the yard alone. And based on the timing, it would’ve been after Cal had seen Claire in Frank’s car.”
Rose’s eyes looked sunken and her mouth hung open as she stared at Emma, at Emma’s lips, as though trying to decipher the words that had just passed through them.
“What are you saying? That Frank didn’t do it?” The words were a whisper, more movement than sound.
Shaking her head, Emma held on to the woman who’d raised her well, in spite of her heartbreak. “The driver’s testimony matched Frank’s testimony from twenty-five years ago word for word. He’s been exonerated.”
Rose’s eyes raised to meet Emma’s gaze. “Frank didn’t do it.”
A Daughter's Story Page 2