by Michele Hauf
Sam Pawloski, Comfort Cove’s coroner, nodded.
“Sorry to call you out in this weather, Detective,” Jack, the street cop who’d met Bill at the scene, muttered. Jack was a new cop. Maybe still a bit excitable. “At first glance, with the bodies in different places, it looked like we had a mess on our hands.”
Their voices were raised to be heard over the sound of wind raging outside. So far that was all there was to the storm. Dangerously high winds. No rain. No thunder or lightning.
Just a hell of a lot of debris. “You got the mess part right,” Sam said.
Pulling off his glasses, Bill wiped them and put them back on, but nothing looked better.
The parking lot was filled with branches, bark, a sail, a couple of life vests, a few shingles, pieces of metal and trash, rope, a cardboard box and an empty beer case. Candy wrappers and paper litter skated across the pavement.
“I’ve seen worse,” Manny, the weathered old marina owner and fish dealer, said from the counter behind them. “Good thing no one was out on the water.”
“I hate to think how much damage there’s going to be to the boats,” Jack said, shaking his head.
Though he’d grown up in Comfort Cove, Bill didn’t know any of the fishermen personally. He knew of one, though. Chris Talbot had been peripherally involved in one of Ramsey Miller’s missing child cold cases the previous month. Talbot was now engaged to Emma Sanderson, sister to the long-missing toddler, Claire Sanderson.
Claire had been ruled out as a victim of Ramsey’s newly arrested pedophile—but she was still missing.
“Which boat belongs to Chris Talbot?” Bill asked the curmudgeonly, leather-skinned man behind the counter.
“That one there.” The man nodded toward the right side of the dock. “The Son Catcher.”
Not the newest boat on the block by any means. “Looks like he’s got it tied down tight.” The fishing vessel was rocking fiercely.
“Chris is careful,” Manny said, almost with pride, as if Talbot was his own son. “Used to be that boat was his whole life. Till he met himself a woman he cared about more. We didn’t think that was ever going to happen.”
Emma Sanderson.
“He’s been talking to me about having a wedding down here at the docks over Thanksgiving. I told him he’d best be talking to his lady about that, but he says she wants it, too. Go figure.”
Wondering if Ramsey knew about the upcoming nuptials, Bill was about to ask where, on the smelly fishing docks, a couple would have a wedding, when Jack’s portable patrol radio sounded a call for help.
A cop had just been reported unconscious in a car outside a duplex a couple of blocks away. A woman, a social worker, was inside with two kids—one of whom was a baby. They didn’t know if anyone inside was hurt. Emergency vehicles had been dispatched.
There was no reason for a detective to be on the scene. No reason to risk his life in the storm.
Bill tore out of the marina store, a force in the wind as he ran for his car.
* * *
Funny, your life really did pass before your eyes when you faced death. Her mother’s voice floated into that little bathroom, covering the screaming baby, the howling winds, the repeated pounding of a loose board against the house. “You’re a good girl, Mary. Don’t ever forget that.”
Had she forgotten?
Her mind conjured up a picture of her father’s smile, before he got sick, before they knew insurance wouldn’t pay for the transplant that could save his life.
A huge boom brought Mary fully back to the cramped little bathtub, to the children beneath her, shielded by her body. If anything came down on them, she’d catch the brunt of it.
Something crashed in the next room.
“What was that?” Damon shouted, tears evident in his voice.
“The wind,” Mary hollered back above the roar of the storm and baby Kayla’s cries. At least the baby was no longer screaming.
She was pretty sure the roof had just fallen in on the room they’d been standing in moments before.
Chances were she wasn’t going to make it out alive.
She thought of Aunt Marianne, after whom she’d been named. Her mother’s twin sister. Before Marianne’s divorce, before her ex-husband had broken her trust, and her heart, before he’d taken all their money and run, she’d laughed a lot.
She lived with Mary’s mother Bethanne in Florida now. The twins were older, quieter. But they had a group of friends. A comfortable life. Mary, the only child, had her own room in their home, which she visited often. She’d been there the previous month. Her mother and aunt were smiling again—particularly when she was with them.
They’d never thought less of Mary. Though they had to have known what she’d done. Who she’d been.
“You’re a good girl, Mary. Don’t ever forget that.”
Her breath caught, her heart stopping, at the deafening crack that rent the ceiling above them, taking away their light—leaving them in a mostly dark, windowless room, lit only by shadows coming in through the doorway.
“Are we going to die?” Damon’s arms clutched her neck, making it harder for her arms to sustain her weight against the sides of the tub. The tough little boy’s eyes, as she glanced down at him, were wide and vulnerable and filled with terror.
“No!” she yelled, making sure he not only saw the word on her lips but heard it, too. He had to believe he was going to be fine. Belief might be the one savior Damon had left. “It just sounds bad,” she added. “We’re perfectly safe in here.”
“I’m sorry I was mean to you.”
“You weren’t mean, Damon. You were scared. You’re a good boy. A wonderful big brother...”
“You’re a good girl, Mary. Don’t ever forget that.”
Another burst of wind hit the frail structure. Plaster rained down from the ceiling onto her back.
Her life seemed to flash before her.
The stage was set. She was at work. Colorful lights filled her eyes while shame choked her throat. Or maybe it was the plaster.
She was in costume. Which meant more naked than not.
The wind blasted them.
It was her turn to go on.
Mary stepped up to the pole, holding it as she swung around, strutting her stuff for all of the eager, lascivious, staring men down below.
She looked over the sea of men, but couldn’t make out their faces as she squatted and twirled and thrust her star covered nipples forward.
And then there he was. One face in the crowd.
Bill.
Chapter Three
There was nothing he could do but stand there, in a calm that was eerier than before the storm, and watch as rescue crews dug through the rubble that had once been an abandoned duplex on a block that housed mostly indigents. Two homes on the street were in shambles, belongings mixed in with drywall, nails and glass. Several cars had been damaged by falling branches. So far, no one was dead.
The home worst hit had been vacant.
The policeman, Officer Mason, who’d been inside the squad car in front of the other home—the duplex with two walls left standing over a pile of debris—was alive and conscious, on his way to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. They weren’t sure they’d be able to save both his legs.
Or that he’d ever walk again.
People, mostly in uniforms of various kinds, swarmed what was usually a deserted street. Bill stayed out of their way. And prayed.
Officials believed there were two children buried somewhere beneath the drywall and shingles just feet away from him. They said that case manager Mary Anderson was with them.
Bill hoped that while Officer Mason, who’d been the only other person on the block when the storm took its sudden turn, had been unconscious, Mary and the children had escaped to safety. He hoped they were huddled somewhere safe, keeping warm, drinking hot tea and waiting for authorities to come get them.
He knew better. He was the authorities. If there’d been
a call reporting the appearance of these three, he’d have heard it.
Pacing, hands in the pockets of his gray dress slacks, he hunched inside the long dark unlined coat he’d pulled from his closet only hours before, and willed Mary to stay alive. He wasn’t her next of kin. He wasn’t anything official at all. He and Mary dated. Monogamously, on his part at least, for the past couple of years.
He assumed on her part, too. They’d never discussed it.
They talked about life. Laughed at the same things. Discussed as much as they could about their individual cases.
Voices rose from workers digging through the piles of rubbish. Loud. Calling out. Had they found something? Someone?
“Can I get you anything, Detective?”
A uniformed beat cop, female, stopped in front of him.
“No, thanks,” he said, shaking his head. “You all just do your jobs. Don’t mind me.”
“Holler if you need anything,” she said, continuing toward the next group of waiting professionals. Everyone was there, ready to do their prospective jobs—depending on what emerged from the rubble. Dead bodies. Or live ones.
The road was roped off at both ends. Crowds of people had gathered behind the barricades. No one was allowed at the scene. Not even reporters.
He’d met Mary at a crime scene. A drug bust he’d been working on for months. A meth lab run by a husband-and-wife team who also happened to be the parents of five-and six-year-old boys. Bill was pretty certain that the couple were pawns in a bigger game—a gang expanding from Atlantic City. He hadn’t been ready to bring them down. But social services had been called by the school, and Mary had gone in to take their kids away from them. Dad turned on her. Bill had arrived just as the paramedics were trying to talk Mary into a trip to the E.R. to be checked out.
She’d chosen to stay and talk to Bill. He’d never forget the blue eyes gazing up at him from the bruised and broken skin. There’d been no fear in them. Only resolution. She’d wanted to make sure that the man who’d backhanded her never got near his boys again.
So far, he hadn’t.
“We hear something!”
Bill had no trouble making out the words as a burly, six-foot-tall man in coveralls turned from the wreckage. Suit and dress shoes be damned, he moved forward. Not to the center of the activity. He didn’t know enough about refuse removal to be sure he wouldn’t cause greater harm to the people trapped beneath. But he couldn’t stand back, either.
Mary was somewhere in this pile of fallen building materials. She might be dead. And if she was, part of him was dead, too.
Sound dissipated. Sight blurred. Bill felt chilled to the bone as he realized how much Mary Anderson had come to mean to him.
Why hadn’t he paid attention?
Done anything about it?
Pulling off his glasses, he rubbed his eyes, but the sense of being in a twilight zone didn’t dissipate at all.
He and Mary both worked long hours. They were dedicated to their careers. He’d figured they had all the time in the world to take their relationship to a different level.
Now he might never get the chance.
Why his baby sister Jenny came to his mind as he stood there, helpless, he had no idea. Except that he hadn’t been able to save her, either.
As far as he knew Jenny was fine. Working as a blackjack dealer in Atlantic City. She called now and then, but he hadn’t seen her in years. At least she was no longer dancing.
No longer stripping.
He’d been a young officer the night his partner told him one of the other cops had seen his kid sister dancing at the new strip club in town. He’d punched his partner.
And would have been disciplined if the guy hadn’t lied to everyone about how he got the swollen jaw.
Bill had started tracking Jenny’s whereabouts that same night. Right to the club. She was eighteen. Underage. As, he suspected, were most of the girls he’d seen onstage that night. And the only other night he’d been there. The night he and several of his fellow lawmen busted the place for every conceivable non-compliance issue he could find. The girls were all hauled in, though many of them were let go with warnings—Jenny being one of them. And ultimately the place had been closed.
But Jenny hadn’t thanked him. She hadn’t settled down. She’d broken their parents’ hearts and moved to Atlantic City to make big bucks from horny jerks who didn’t give a damn about her. Until she’d found out she could make as much money dealing their cards.
“We’ve got something!”
Bill pressed forward with the surge of paramedics, officers and firemen. “It’s a purse,” he heard someone say. Followed by the voice of the female police officer who’d spoken to him earlier.
“It’s hers,” the woman called out. “The purse belongs to Mary Anderson.”
Heart pounding, Bill stood there, still frozen. Waiting. He should have asked her to marry him.
“I definitely hear something,” another male voice shouted. “Over there.” A gloved hand pointed to the back of the lot, where large pieces of fallen drywall formed an A-shape beneath shingles and black roofing paper.
“It’s a baby crying!”
She’d saved the baby. She would have wanted to save the baby.
Stomach churning, hands shaking when they’d never, ever been unsteady at a crime scene before, he tried to look at the scene as a professional. Except that there really wasn’t any call for a detective. He was witness to a disaster, not a crime.
“Hey, man, I just heard.”
The familiar male voice registered with Bill and turning to his right he saw fellow detective Ramsey Miller standing there.
“Have they found her?” Ramsey’s voice was calm. Normal. His face showed no expression.
“Not yet.”
“Then we’ll wait.”
Nothing else was said, but as the long minutes passed, Miller didn’t budge from his position beside Bill.
“We’ve got the kid! He’s in a bathtub! Alive!”
And then a few seconds later, another voice called, “The baby, too.”
And the woman? Bill asked silently, not breathing. Because suddenly he couldn’t.
“We’ve got her!” He heard the words a split second before he saw a man in yellow coveralls stand up with an obviously unconscious Mary Anderson draped over his arms. “They’ve got her,” Ramsey’s voice was grim. “Let’s go.” He moved toward the rescue worker. Bill sped past him. He had to be there with her. No matter what.
Biting the inside of his lip, he strode with purpose toward that person who mattered most in his life. Whether or not he’d told Mary and the world, that woman was his...something. And...
“Bill?”
The limp head moved, only slightly, against the yellow material. But her eyes, those beautiful blue eyes, were wide open.
“I saw you,” she said, through cracked, dry lips. And then she was out again.
“Ride with her.” Ramsey motioned toward the back of the ambulance. “I’ll see that your car’s brought in.”
Bill hadn’t even thought about his car. The only thing on his mind, other than the extent of Mary’s injuries, was asking her to be his wife.
He’d been given a second chance and he damn sure wasn’t going to blow it.
Chapter Four
Mary might or might not be a good girl, but she was a lucky one. At least that was how she saw it as she stood in her shower Thursday morning getting ready for work. Her boss had told her to take the rest of the week off. The cases piled up on her desk told her differently.
Those families needed her, and there was no reason she couldn’t tend to them. She’d been buffeted by a storm, but she’d come through it with only bruises, a concussion and one night in the hospital for observation.
A night Bill Mendholson had spent with her. He’d been the one to wake her every couple of hours that first night. To see that she had everything she wanted or needed and he’d spent Wednesday night in her bed at home.
“Breakfast is ready,” Bill’s voice called out to her just as she stepped out of the shower and Mary warned herself not to get too attached to the idea of Bill Mendholson by her side through life’s daily trials.
They dated. That was all. He’d never once hinted at anything more.
He had his place. She had hers.
His attention since the storm was simply a matter of decency. Her family was in Florida and Bill was one of her closest friends—her only friend who lived alone and didn’t have family to go home to every night.
Pulling on her thick white terry robe, she belted it at the waist, yanked the shower cap off, letting her long dark hair tumble down her shoulders, and made her way out to the breakfast nook. She’d purchased the little two bedroom Cape Cod home a couple of years earlier for far too much money because it had a view of the Atlantic Ocean. In the distance, mind you, but still the ocean...
He’d found her place mats, set the table as she’d set it for him so many times in the past. Her favorite coffee mug—the one with the heart that had been given to her by a client on the girl’s eighteenth birthday, celebrating the fact that she’d made it through the system and into adulthood—sat by her plate. He’d fixed omelets. Again, her favorite, although his version resembled scrambled eggs. There was toast, too.
She hadn’t had much of an appetite since the storm.
“Ramsey called, “ Bill said as he held out her chair and then sat perpendicular to her, in the seat she always gave him when he was over. “He’s been keeping track of Damon and Kayla as promised. The decision is made to try to keep them together. Assuming you can find a place for them. They’re in a temporary foster home until you get back to work.”
“I’m going in today.”
He frowned, his glasses touching his eyebrows as he did so. Which endeared him to her that much more. God, she loved this man.
Just as he was.
A man who walked his own walk. Who worked extremely long hours and lived alone.