Midnight Confessions

by Karen Leabo

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Valenti,” Jenn said dejectedly, not even bothering to use a pseudonym anymore. Another plan down the tubes. “I appreciate the offer. I really do.”

  “You’ll call me if there’s anything I can do?” Mrs. Valenti asked. “Or even if I can’t do anything, just call and let me know how you’re doing.”

  “I will.”

  The older woman leaned down to give Cathy a hug. “Be good, angel. As if you know how to be any other way.”

  Joe made a sound that could have been a stifled chuckle. All right, so Cathy hadn’t been a model child as far as he was concerned. But apparently she’d been perfect in Mrs. Valenti’s book.

  “I love you,” Cathy said to her baby-sitter. “I’ll miss you.”

  “We need to get going,” Joe said, the gruffness in his voice revealing that he was not unaffected by the poignant exchange.

  “Yes,” Jenn said. “’Bye, Mrs. Valenti”

  As the older woman wandered away, Jenn leaned down and pretended to straighten the collar of Cathy’s jacket so that Joe wouldn’t see the tears of frustration burning in her eyes. She wasn’t sure she could have gone through with its anyway... yes, she could have. She would do anything to protect her child.

  Joe grabbed Jenn’s shoulders and turned her to face him. “You were going to send your daughter away? Separate yourself from her for God knows how long?”

  Tears spilled from Jenn’s eyes. “I would do anything to keep her safe. Can’t I make you understand that?”

  Their heated exchange was drawing curious looks from the people around them. Joe took Jenn’s hand and silently led her out of the market into the clear sunshine. He found a park bench and virtually pushed Jenn down onto it, set Cathy beside her, then sat on her other side.

  “Don’t be sad, Mama,” Cathy said, close to tears herself. “I didn’t want to go home with Mrs. Valenti, not by myself.”

  “I know, punkin.” Jenn stroked her daughter’s hair.

  “I’m beginning to think you really believe this story you cooked up, that your daughter is at risk from...” Joe seemed to be struggling with the words. Jenn suspected he didn’t want to be quite so forthright in front of Cathy.

  “I know my daughter is in danger.”

  “How do you know?”

  Jenn didn’t have an answer, at least, not one that would satisfy him. She knew. But she had no proof. And one did not make accusations against Judge Dennis Palmer without proof. She had no concrete evidence that Cathy had actually been molested. In fact, Jenn believed with all her heart that she’d escaped with her precious little girl just in time. If she tried to make a case based on things that had happened fifteen years ago, Dennis’s courtroom cronies would make mincemeat out of her.

  “If you were to believe me, would it make any difference?” she asked him.

  “Of course it would.”

  “And would you let us go?”

  He took a long time answering. “No. Wait, wait,” he said when she started to object. “If I let you go, I could be accused of aiding and abetting a criminal. I could lose my license—maybe go to jail myself. I don’t kid myself that your stepdaddy would forgive and forget, and he has considerable influence.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “But I wouldn’t just dump you into his hands, either. I would do whatever it takes to see that the facts are thoroughly investigated. If I believed you, I’d speak on your behalf. I’m not completely without my own influence in the law enforcement community. But frankly, Jenn, you haven’t given me a whole lot to go on, you know?”

  “Yeah, I know,” she said weakly. She could tell him more. But there was something inside her that wouldn’t allow her to reveal the unspeakable things that had happened to her as a child. Her therapist had had to drag the memories out of her, and every time she talked about it, she scared herself half into hysterics.

  Perhaps it wasn’t the abuse that frightened her as much as the fact that her own mind had tricked her all those years into believing she’d had an ideal childhood, a perfect family.

  She’d done a lot of reading about repressed memories. Sometimes they weren’t entirely reliable. She knew hers were real but that didn’t mean anyone else would believe her.

  “It’s time to go,” Joe said, almost gently. “Do you want to go back to that bakery?”

  “It’s not that important,” she said glumly. “I think we have enough food for today, anyway.”

  “Today?” He eyed the shopping bag full of goodies they’d accumulated before the ill-fated encounter with Mrs. Valenti. There were apples and bananas, cheese and crackers, lunch meats, cherry tarts, fat-free potato chips, apple juice and granola bars. “This is supposed to last all week.”

  “You might have noticed I don’t have a particularly delicate appetite,” Jenn said.

  “It doesn’t show.” Joe looked as if he’d like to take the flirtatious words back. Since he couldn’t, he made a show of standing and hoisting the shopping bag under his arm.

  “Ready?”

  Not in a million years, she thought, was she ready to deal with the likes of Joe Andresi. One minute she wanted to strangle him, the next she wanted to—no, she didn’t. She wouldn’t.

  Chapter 5

  Joe took one look at his Monte Carlo’s crumpled grill and the hood, which was wrinkled like an accordion, and got mad at Jenn Montgomery all over again. For twenty years he’d hardly gotten a dent in that car, and each tiny scratch or door ding had been hammered out, filled and/or painted with loving precision.

  “Mama, did you do that to his car?” Cathy asked with awe in her voice. She was either shocked or impressed by her mother’s criminal bent; Joe wasn’t sure which.

  “I didn’t know who was driving that car,” Jenn said, her arms folded defensively. “I thought he was some escaped felon trying to...to kidnap me or steal my purse or something. A strange man usually doesn’t follow a single, defenseless woman unless he has something bad on his mind.”

  “Defenseless?” Joe said with a snort. “Another thirty seconds and that mugger in the alley would have been dog food.”

  “What’s a mugger?” Cathy asked.

  Jenn shot Joe an accusing look. “It’s someone who grabs a lady’s purse and runs away with it,” she said.

  “And this one was a mean one,” Joe added as he fished a credit card from his wallet to pay for the repairs. “But you should have seen your mama. She hardly blinked, didn’t scream, and didn’t give him her purse, either. I thought I’d saved her life when I came along and got the knife away from him, but now that I know the real Jenn Montgomery, I think the mugger probably was the one who needed protecting.”

  “Knife?” Cathy repeated in a small voice.

  Alerted to the note of fear in the child’s voice, Joe turned around to look at her. Her eyes were huge with apprehension.

  “It’s okay, punkin,” Jean said soothingly even as she stared icicles at Joe. “The mugger didn’t hurt me. Mr. Andresi scared him away. But I’d probably have fared better with him than I have with Mr. Andresi,” she added, rather spitefully, Joe thought.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to scare the kid. She acts so adult, sometimes I forget she’s only five years old.”

  “Yeah, five,” Jenn said. “It’s a very vulnerable age.”

  “What’s vul—vunnerble?” Cathy asked.

  “It means you can’t protect yourself,” Jenn said, tousling her daughter’s blond curls. “So it’s up to the grown-ups in your life to protect you. Only not all grown-ups take that responsibility seriously.”

  Her comments, of course, were aimed at him, to subtly remind him of the peril Cathy faced in her grandparents’ custody. Or imagined peril. Joe wasn’t so sure that Jenn hadn’t manufactured some risk to justify her taking off with Cathy. Judge Palmer, a child molester? The man had tried child abuse cases in his courtroom. He’d seen the ugliness, seen what happened to the abusers and their victims. Surely he wouldn’t, couldn’t
—

  “Your stepfather has gone fishing with my dad,” Joe said impulsively. “And then with my uncle after my dad died.”

  Jenn appeared confused. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “It means I know him, personally. He’s a friend of the family. He’s been to my folks’ house. I’ve seen him playing ball with their dog. When he fishes, he throws the fish back because he can’t stand to kill them. He’s a regular guy.”

  “So, you think child mol—I mean, that kind of person looks different on the outside? Do you think they have it tattooed on their foreheads or something? Or do you think it just doesn’t happen in ‘nice’ families?”

  “What doesn’t happen?” Cathy chimed in.

  They both looked at her. Joe had very nearly forgotten her presence again, and he suspected Jenn had, too. This was another conversation they shouldn’t be having in front of a little girl.

  “We’ll talk about this later.” He handed Jenn the bag of groceries. “Let me pay the repair bill and turn over the loaner car, and we can get going.” As he handed his credit card to the mechanic—he wasn’t about to walk even ten feet away from his prisoners—Cathy peppered her mother with questions about the attempted mugging. The kid was too bright for her own good. He imagined that Jenn was exactly like her at that age—spunky, opinionated, fearless and curious.

  It occurred to him that Cathy didn’t fit the profile of an abused child. Not that he had a lot of firsthand knowledge about it, but he’d read things, heard things. Then again, Jenn had never said that anything bad had actually happened to Cathy, just that she was at risk.

  “You—” he said to Jenn when she started to climb into the back seat with Cathy. “I want you in front.”

  “I’d like to sit and visit with my daughter, since I’m not sure how much time we have left together.”

  Her words gave him a twinge in the area of his conscience, but he ruthlessly crushed it. He had to remember what a skilled manipulator Jenn could be. “Don’t break my heart. You’d both like to bolt out the door at the first stoplight I hit. I’m not that dumb.”

  “We’ve tried bolting,” Jenn reasoned. “It doesn’t work. You run faster than either of us.”

  He shrugged. When she saw that he wasn’t going to relent, she opened the passenger door and got in, then slammed it harder than was necessary. “You’re not going to handcuff me to the door, are you?” she asked when he climbed in behind the wheel.

  “I don’t know. Should I?”

  “Well, no, of course not. That’s my vote.”

  He laughed at that. “I don’t recall that this endeavor is a democracy.”

  “No, it’s a dictatorship. And you’re Mussolini.”

  “I’ve always wanted to go to Italy,” he said mildly as he started the car. The familiar roar made him feel marginally better. The engine sounded good. He could deal with the cosmetic problems later.

  Joe consulted his map of Seattle and his road atlas. Piece of cake. They could make it to Rhymer in four days if he didn’t sleep much. Hell, he might even let Jenn drive. The worst she could do would be to deliberately get them lost, and he never stayed lost for long.

  Or she could run his car into a tree. No, he wouldn’t let her drive.

  “How long will it take to get to Rhymer?” Jenn asked.

  “I was just thinking about that. Four days.”

  “Ugh.”

  “Might as well relax and enjoy it. We’ll be driving through some mighty pretty country.”

  “I know. We saw lots of it on the way to Seattle. Anyway, how can I possibly enjoy anything when I know what we’re going back to?”

  Joe glanced into the rearview mirror. Cathy had headphones on and a Barney coloring book in her lap. “The charge you’re facing isn’t that serious. A good lawyer can probably get you a suspended sentence.”

  “What a comfort that will be to me when I’m home alone and my daughter is with Dennis. You still don’t get it, do you? I don’t really care what happens to me. No one could do anything worse to me than has already been done. I do care what happens to Cathy. She’s everything to me.”

  “I don’t doubt that, Jenn. I can see the love between you—anyone could. I’m just trying to point out that when you get back home, you won’t be as powerless as you seem to believe.”

  “Do you think there’s a chance in hell I’ll get custody of my daughter? I don’t have a job, a husband or even a place to live.”

  “You won’t get her back right away. But you can get all those things—well, maybe not the husband, at least, not immediately. But you can get a job and find a place to live. In fact, why don’t you stay with your parents for a while?”

  Jenn visibly shuddered. “That is out of the question. I would have to be out of my mind to live under that man’s roof, much less willingly bring my daughter there. Anyway,” she added, “they probably wouldn’t have me, not after everything that’s happened.”

  “Your relationship is that acrimonious?”

  “It got pretty bad. When they refused to give Cathy back to me, I said some hateful things to my stepfather, all of them deserved. Then I threatened to sue for custody. I’m sure Dennis told you what an unfit mother I was.”

  The judge had told him an earful. He’d said Jenn was still emotionally distraught from losing her husband, that she was unable to hold down a job, practically living on the street. But Joe was under the impression that Jenn’s parents had wanted her to live with them and she had refused to do so, even temporarily.

  Joe chose his words carefully. “He said that you’d willingly given up custody in the first place. That you couldn’t be bothered with a child and didn’t want to be constantly reminded of the husband you lost.”

  “That,” Jenn said, nearly coming out of her seat, “is a bald-faced lie. I was in intensive care, given a ten percent chance of survival, when I signed that document giving my parents custody of Cathy. I thought I was going to die. I wanted to make things easy, prevent any sort of custody dispute. I was afraid Doug’s parents would fight my mother and Dennis for her, and I didn’t want that.”

  “So you did sign such a document.”

  “I never realized that it would take effect even if I survived. I just wanted to make sure my baby was taken care of, that someone would be legally responsible for her.”

  “And you had no qualms then about your stepfather being that someone?”

  “No. I didn’t know, then, what kind of monster he is.”

  “And when exactly did you find out this terrible thing?”

  Jenn went silent on him again. There was something she wasn’t telling him. He ran into a brick wall every time he got too close to it.

  “Did someone tell you something in confidence? Is that it?”

  “S-something like that,” Jenn stammered.

  “What was it? You don’t have to tell me who—”

  “Just drop it, okay?”

  Joe glanced over at her. The expression on her face was one of such misery, like she was fighting a band of demons, that he felt an urge to pull over to the shoulder and pull her into his arms, comfort her. But he had a hunch he was the last person she would accept comfort from.

  For the next few miles Joe tried to make sense of the partial picture Jenn had presented to him. First, she believed that Dennis Palmer was a pedophile. But if her daughter hadn’t yet been harmed, then some other child had been. Had some other little girt—a friend of Cathy’s, perhaps—told Jenn that Judge Palmer had molested her? And sworn her to secrecy?

  Another thought occurred to him. Was it Jenn herself who’d been abused as a child? But, no, that wouldn’t make sense. Jenn had said that at the time she’d signed over custody, she didn’t know of her stepfather’s aberrant behavior.

  He looked over at her again. Her eyes were closed, her face more relaxed now. He didn’t realize how long he’d stared at her until a blast from another motorist’s horn alerted him to the fact that he’d veered out of his l
ane. He quickly corrected the situation.

  Jenn’s eyes popped open. “Jeez, you trying to get us killed?”

  “Now why would I do that? I doubt I’d collect the reward money if I didn’t bring you home alive.”

  “Not funny.”

  He sobered. “No, you’re right, it isn’t. Sorry. My mind wandered for a minute.”

  “You’re not going to fall asleep at the wheel, are you?”

  “No. Conversation would be nice, though. We can talk about anything you like.”

  “I thought you wanted us to be quiet so you could ‘think.’ Anyway, what could we possibly have in common?” She stared pointedly out the window.

  “We won’t know till we talk, I guess.”

  “Hmm.” She looked back at him, challenging. “Okay. Since you apparently know my life story, let’s talk about you. How did you get into this wretched business of bounty hunting?”

  That was easy enough. “I used to be a cop in Mobile, but I decided I didn’t like it. Got tired of busting dope dealers and seeing them back on the street the next day. So I moved back to my hometown, got a private investigator’s license, and opened up shop.”

  “Just like that? People clamored for your services?”

  “Well, no. My first few years were pretty lean. I did a lot of divorce work, surveillance, boring stakeouts. But I knew my stuff, and word gets around. Now I specialize almost exclusively in skip-tracing.”

  “What’s skip-tracing?”

  “Finding people like you.”

  “And you enjoy it?”

  “Usually. It’s a challenge to match wits with someone who doesn’t want to be found.”

  “Was I a challenge?”

  He laughed. “Finding you, lady, became a personal quest. This assignment ceased to be profitable a long time ago. Even the reward money won’t put me in the black.”

  “Then why didn’t you give up? Tell Dennis I couldn’t be found?” Jenn asked, exasperated.

  “Let’s just say my curiosity got the better of me.” He’d been tempted, many times, to pack it in. Then he would pick up another clue, another piece to the puzzle, and he would press on, certain his quarry was around the next corner. Jennifer Montgomery became an obsession.