The detective nodded, her smile filled with understanding.
“My mother would never have been able to handle my becoming a cop,” Emma continued. “Cops were on the list of men I was not to even think about dating because of the possibility someone he put away could get out and come after us.”
“Mom didn’t like the idea, at first, but when I explained to her that I’d have the best self-defense training around and would be qualified to keep us both safe from harm, she relented. I just don’t ever tell her when I’m on a case. She doesn’t even know what shifts I work.”
“Do you see her often?”
“All the time. She lives across the street from me. She has a part-time caregiver, too. A woman who looks in on her several times a week. Helps her around the house and runs errands for her. I… She drinks and doesn’t do well on her own.”
Emma felt lucky. “Have you tried to get her into treatment?”
“She’s been. Four times. And as soon as something happens that upsets her, she goes right back to the bottle.”
“That’s got to be rough.”
Lucy shrugged. “We manage. She’s not a mean drunk. Or a weepy or sloppy one, either. She drinks quietly. At home. And up until recently, she painted. Beautiful landscapes. I’ve put several of them up on eBay for her and she’s actually made pretty good money.”
“Why did she stop?”
“She was just in treatment. And she hasn’t picked up a brush since she got back.”
“Does she live alone?”
“Now she does. There was a guy, Daniel, who lived with us for a long time but he got tired of the drinking, too, and moved out to Arizona. He’s got his own construction business out there. He’s invited me to visit.”
Emma sipped her coffee, not caring that it had gone cold. “Are you going to go?”
“Maybe. I don’t take a lot of time off. Except to follow leads off the clock.” She grinned. “Too many questions to find answers for, too many cases to be able to leave the job and walk away.”
“You should, though,” Emma said. “Everyone needs a break now and then.”
“That’s what Ramsey tells me.”
“He takes vacations?”
“No, he just tells me to. Ramsey’s one of those guys who knows the rules but doesn’t think that they apply to him. Which is part of what makes him a great cop.”
“Seems like it could get him into a lot of trouble, not to mention danger.”
“He’s smart enough to know when to play by the rules even if he doesn’t think they apply.” Lucy took a long sip of her latte.
Emma was glad the man was on Claire’s case. Even if, in the end, he brought her bad news. It was time to get on with her life.
She’d been in a perpetual holding pattern since she was four years old. Waiting to find Claire. And somewhere along the way, the not knowing had become comfortable. Even though she didn’t have her sister with her, she didn’t have to mourn. Didn’t have to give up hope.
Looking for Claire gave her life meaning. But it was the only real meaning her life held.
And it wasn’t enough.
Somehow she had to find a way to let go of the past. One way or another, she needed closure. She had to move on, or she was never going to be happy.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“I DIDN’T MEAN TO GET so far offtrack.” Detective Hayes put her coffee cup down. “You’re easy to talk to.”
“So are you.”
“Thank you.” The other woman smiled. “Sometimes I think I get so wrapped up in my work that I forget how to just be a person. You know, I see everyone as a perp or a victim and not as a three-dimensional human being.” She chuckled. “Anyway, I have to put my cop hat back on. I wanted to let you know that the possible connection I was working on in Aurora—the one I told you and Cal about—came to nothing.”
“Can you tell me what it was?”
“Cal had talked about Claire being a climber. There was a case in Aurora more than twenty years ago, a little girl who’d been abducted from her home. They recovered her, healthy and unharmed, and I remembered reading that when the guy was caught he said that he never would have taken her at all if the other one hadn’t been such a climber. The detectives on the case discovered that there’d been another little girl—one the perp claimed he bought and couldn’t remember from whom. The first child had climbed up on the kitchen counter, fallen and hit her head and died. He’d disposed of her body. They’d recovered some evidence from that first girl, but hadn’t ever been able to make a match to any missing person’s report. Last year she was added to our DNA database.”
“And you know now that it wasn’t Claire?”
“That’s right.”
“Is the guy in prison now?”
“For life. Without parole. And the second girl he kidnapped is now a senior in college and doesn’t even remember the time away from her family.”
Sometimes justice was done. It was good to know.
“You said that we weren’t quite back to square one.” But it seemed as if they were.
Not that she was complaining. They’d ruled out two possible homicides this week. Twice, they’d played Russian roulette and won.
She was going to have to get something to eat soon.
To go home to her empty house.
“I believe that Claire might have been in Aurora, Emma.”
She froze.
“Not any time recently,” the detective clarified, her eyes filled with sympathy.
And suddenly Emma wasn’t feeling hungry, or lucky, at all. Was Lucy Hayes about to tell her that Claire was dead, after all?
“About eight years ago there was a big bust in Aurora—a well-to-do woman had been running a black-market adoption operation out of her home on the Ohio River for more than twenty years. She serviced the entire eastern and midwestern United States. And she dealt only with infants up to six months of age.”
Emma listened, numbing herself, in case.
“To be honest, I think the bust was part of the reason I moved up to detective so rapidly. I’d been going through my mother’s records and found the woman’s name and number. Mom told me that some time after detectives failed to turn up any evidence on Allie’s whereabouts, she got desperate and went to downtown Cincinnati, to the seamiest part of town, and posed as a desperate young, homeless pregnant woman seeking money in exchange for her unborn baby, hoping to connect with the people who might have sold Allie. Some junkies told her about this woman in Aurora. My mother contacted her, hoping that the woman might remember Allie. The woman told my mother that she’d read about her rape, but that she hadn’t had Allie.
“I wasn’t quite nineteen at the time, fresh out of the police academy. I told a detective mentor of mine what I knew. I gave her the woman’s name and ended up posing as an infertile woman with a lot of cash looking for a newborn, and helped shut the place down.”
If Emma hadn’t been so preoccupied with wondering how this was going to tie into Claire, she’d have been fascinated. “And you think that Claire was at this woman’s house? You think my sister was sold on the black market?”
“I don’t think she was sold,” the detective said. “But I know that she was at the home at some point.”
The din around them faded away. Emma heard pounding in her ears. Waves. And Lucy’s voice.
“When the place was busted, they bagged pounds of evidence—baby items, clothes, toys—in the hope that they
might be able to trace some of the kids who’d been stolen—or sold by their own parents. I made it my personal business, with the help of a DNA scientist friend of mine in Cincinnati, to catalog and file all that evidence.”
Emma’s heart was pounding so hard she could barely breathe. She needed fresh air.
“I sent a sample of Claire’s DNA to my friend. I asked her to check it against the database.”
Emma knew. “She found a match.”
“Yes.” Lucy whispered. She must have. Emma didn’t hear her. But she saw her lips form the word.
“My sister was adopted. She’s alive.”
The shake of the detective’s head sent her crashing.
“She’s not alive?” Emma asked.
Lucy Hayes frowned. “We don’t know. We might never know. The woman who owned the mansion kept impeccable records of all of her adoptions. She kept a little piece of hair from every baby—they were attached as identifiers to the records. She gave an identical record to the adoptive parents, along with footprints and the forged hospital birth records. For all intents and purposes, she ran a legitimate private-adoption agency.”
“But none of the hair samples matched Claire?”
“Uh-huh. We’d already processed all of the DNA on the hair samples to check them against cold-case missing-child cases. There was no evidence of Allie there, either, but I was able to solve a couple of other cases from what we found.”
“I can see why you don’t take vacations.”
“I know, I’m obsessed. I admit it. I’m addicted to finding children just like my mother is addicted to alcohol. I come by the addictive personality naturally. But at least I’m using it constructively.”
“Hey, I’m not criticizing!” Emma said. “You’ve done so much more than I ever have. I admire you.” Lucy Hayes had a life.
“Yeah, well, don’t forget, Emma, I didn’t know my sister. You knew and loved yours. More than that, you were the big sister, and to a four-year-old, that means Claire was your baby.”
Lucy was right. She had felt like Claire was her baby as well as Rose’s. But no one else had ever said so. Herself included.
“So what do you think it means? Claire having been there? I mean, if she wasn’t adopted out, why would she have been there at all?”
“I’m not sure. The agency handled only newborns and Claire would have been at least two. Maybe the woman tried to find a buyer for her and couldn’t.”
“What would have happened to her, then?”
Lucy Hayes gave her a look that made Emma go cold. “You think they might have killed her?”
“I’m not going there. Not unless I have to. At this point, there’s been no evidence of any murders. To the contrary, the babies in the woman’s care were well cared for. The mansion has been torn down, the land redeveloped. If there were bodies there, they’d have been found already.”
“So what happens next?”
“I keep looking,” Lucy said. “I go through all of the evidence of that case again, comparing what’s there with what I know about Claire. I talk to anyone else I can find who might know more about what went on in that house. I question the adoptive parents again. I’ll go over all of the trial transcripts, too. Once I’m fully versed in the case, I’ll head to prison to talk to the woman again.”
“That sounds like more work than one person can accomplish.”
“It’s not as onerous as it sounds. I have it down to a system. And Ramsey will be helping me.”
“I don’t know how I’ll ever repay you.”
“You won’t. I’m just doing my job, Emma. Because this has to do with the Aurora bust, my department will pay me. Not many people get paid to feed their addictions, you know?” The detective smiled, but her eyes told another story.
“I could have waited to fill you in until I knew more, but I had a feeling you’d want to be kept informed every step of the way.”
“You’re right,” Emma said, pulling her purse back up to her shoulder as Detective Hayes stood. “Thank you.”
“No need to thank me, either.” Lucy Hayes handed her a card. “Call me if you think of anything else that might help me narrow my search.”
“I will.” Emma walked with the woman to the door.
“And call me if you just want to talk, too,” the detective added, turning to look at Emma. “I mean that.”
Emma nodded. “That goes both ways,” she said, thinking that as difficult as facing up to life was, it wasn’t all bad. For the first time in twenty-five years she’d met someone who knew what she had gone through. Someone who knew what it was like to walk around with an open wound in your core. Someone who not only understood her intellectually, but who could relate to her emotionally, too.
For the first time since she’d lost Claire, she no longer felt completely and utterly alone.
CHAPTER TWENTY
EMMA MEANT TO GO straight home after her meeting with the detective. She’d like to have gone to her mother’s, to share what she’d learned about Claire, but she’d never been able to trust Rose when it came to her little sister. Her mother would insist on visiting the woman from Aurora in prison. She’d stop at nothing to find out why Claire had been in that home.
She’d want to do everything Lucy Hayes was doing for them, and she’d likely go without sleeping or eating in the process.
“You’ve reached Cal Whittier. Please leave a message.”
Sitting in her parked car outside of the Caffeine Café, Emma said, “Hey, big brother, it’s me. I just met with Detective Hayes. Walters didn’t have Claire, Cal.…” She paused as tears choked her up, and then, swallowing, said, “They did get a hit on the DNA, though. They don’t have anything solid, but they believe that at some point Claire was in a house in Aurora where black-market adoptions were conducted, but they don’t think Claire was adopted. Anyway, call me when you get a chance.”
She hung up and stared out at the bustling street, the couples holding hands, harried women with seemingly important places to be.
She brought up a virtual notepad on her cell phone. She had a journal entry to make. One that she’d copy into her book when she got home.
3. I need other women in my life—and their presence won’t make me disloyal to my mother or to Claire.
Closing the notepad function, she knew that she’d found another self-truth.
Now she had to figure out what to do with the rest of this Friday night.
There were plenty of things she could do. Places she could go. Even teacher friends she could call who would be happy to see a movie with her or catch up over dinner. She could do some quilting, or lesson planning. She had project booklets to create for the senior-class trip to Washington, D.C., in December.
What she wanted to do was drink a glass of wine and listen to piano music.
She had to call Chris before he just stopped by her house again. With another home pregnancy test.
And if he did, would she send him away?
Emma didn’t trust herself to do so. She also didn’t want him to have her number. She didn’t want to be able to hope that he’d call her.
She had to see him. On neutral ground. With other people around. So she’d keep her clothes on.
She had to make sure he didn’t show up at her door again.
But what about the wine? What if Chris was right and she was pregnant? She couldn’t drink if she was pregnant.
Oh, God. She couldn’t be pregnant. She just couldn’t handle any
more right now. Her period wasn’t even late.
Still, just in case, she’d stick with tea.
* * *
CHRIS SIPPED HIS beer slowly, watching Cody make drinks, clean glasses and carry on conversations that made his customers feel important all at the same time. Don Carmine had one hell of an employee in that young man.
“I thought you’d be playing tonight.” The statement came from behind Chris and he swung around, not liking the way that voice made him feel, as though he’d just brought in a week’s worth of lobster in a day. “Emma.”
She shouldn’t be there. Not with him there. It was why he’d called. They shouldn’t be seen together.
“Did you get my message?”
“Yeah.” She looked far too good in her proper teacher clothes. And the way her hair was tied back only made him itch to untie it, to see those dark curls fan out around her.
He had it bad.
And she had to stay away from him for another reason. He’d had a visitor at the dock earlier that evening. He’d been threatened. And he didn’t think the threat was an idle one.
Chris wasn’t afraid for himself. He was afraid for Emma. But he didn’t believe anything would happen to her in public.
“Have a seat.” He pulled out the stool next to him. She was there now. If she’d been seen with him, it was already too late. And he had to let her know why he’d called. He had to let her know what was going on.
Cody appeared with a glass of white wine, but Emma shook her head. “I’ll just have tea,” she said.
Chris’s muscles tensed up. Leaning over so that only she would hear, he asked, “Are you starting to feel pregnant?”
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