The Baby Wore a Badge

by Marie Ferrarella

  Just went to show that you could never tell. That old saying about never judging a book by its cover was never more vividly true than now, he thought.

  He had a funny look on his face, Calista noted. Had she made him uncomfortable somehow? Just to be sure she hadn’t crossed some line she was unaware of, she asked, “Anything wrong?”

  The question roused him out of his thoughts. “No, everything’s fine, thanks to you,” he added. He believed in giving people their due. Reaching into his back pocket, he pulled out his wallet. He’d almost forgotten about paying her. “What do I owe you?”

  Your undying gratitude and a night out on the town, dancing.

  The thought had come out of nowhere, taking her by surprise. She shook it off, grateful that the man wasn’t a mind reader.

  Out loud she told him, “Erin already took care of that.” She’d almost felt bad about accepting the money, but she definitely could use it and practicality won out. “I’ll be going now,” she added, congratulating herself that she’d managed to leave the note of regret out of her voice. Because if given the chance, she would have liked to have hung around, talking to him. “I really enjoyed taking care of her.”

  “Even with the fussing?” he asked.

  She smiled at that. “Even with the fussing. Give me a call the next time you want to go out—to watch the baby, I mean.” That hadn’t come out quite the way she’d meant it, but she knew if she continued to correct herself, it would only get worse, so she left it at that. She didn’t want Jake getting the wrong idea.

  Jake accompanied her out of the bedroom, leaving the door opened so he could hear Marlie cry if she woke up. Mentally, he crossed his fingers that she wouldn’t.

  “I’ll be sure to do that,” he told Calista. He touched her shoulder as she turned to go. “And thanks again. I’m really grateful.”

  Calista kept replaying his words in her head all the way home.

  And, if she concentrated very hard, she could still feel his hand on her shoulder.

  Chapter Six

  Jake had always taken a certain amount of pride in knowing where he was heading, in always operating with at least a general plan in mind for his life.

  A sense of order had always helped Jake not only know who he was but also helped him stay on point whenever he was engaged in his work.

  But right now, he couldn’t help feeling like a playing card that someone had just tossed up in the air along with the rest of the deck. And like that card, he had absolutely no clue as to where or when he would finally land.

  He’d wound up taking a leave of absence from the New Orleans Police Department rather than handing in his resignation outright, the way he’d first assumed that he needed to. The leave of absence had come about because when he’d mentioned resigning, Lt. Franco had refused to accept his resignation.

  Sympathetic to his predicament—the man was a father of three—the lieutenant had advised him to “wait and see how things turn out.” This way, if he decided that he wanted to come back, he could.

  The last thing Lt. Franco had told him was that he was holding his position for him “in case things didn’t work out.” So for now, being here in Thunder Canyon was just temporary, except that the word temporary in this case had no defining limits to it. He didn’t know if he was going to wind up staying here a month, three, six, a year or forever.

  If anything more than a month was involved, he felt as if he needed to get his own place. Erin’s house was huge and both she and Corey had insisted that he and Marlie stay here with them, but he still hated to impose like this.

  Something to think about later, he told himself.

  The real problem was that he had no job to go to, no place he had to be. Erin and Corey had been adamant about having him stay with them so he didn’t even need to look into getting an apartment, at least not yet. This all left him completely at loose ends.

  He didn’t really do loose ends well.

  For the umpteenth time, Jake focused on his only present “job,” that of being Marlie’s father. God knew he was trying to do that to the best of his ability. Even though a part of him was sorely tempted to leave the basics of Marlie’s care and feeding to his sister, who clearly doted on the baby, he couldn’t allow himself to take that sort of cop-out. He hadn’t come here to have his sister take over for him; he’d come here strictly for a little help. For support really, both physical and more important, emotional.

  Wow, he couldn’t help thinking, what a difference eighteen months made.

  Eighteen months ago, he’d agreed to help his partner get pregnant in the most sterile, clinical of ways. Back then, although he clearly got along with Maggie and was attracted to her, his emotions really hadn’t been engaged.

  Now it was an entirely different story.

  A story that had begun even before Marlie had ever been born. As his partner’s time drew near, he found himself growing more and more protective of Maggie. A protectiveness that escalated after she’d given birth to Marlie.

  “Fat lot of good that did,” Jake murmured under his breath as he looked down at his daughter.

  Marlie kicked her legs, as if in response to his words. He had his daughter on the changing table, religiously adhering to Calista’s instructions about changing the little girl at the first indication that her diaper was no longer fresh.

  Despite all his protective inclinations, Maggie had been shot anyway. And he couldn’t help feeling that it was his fault. His fault in more ways than one. He hadn’t been there for her the way he should have, hadn’t been there to cover her back. And the reason he wasn’t there was because Maggie had requested to be assigned to another partner.

  And the reason for that had been because he’d allowed himself to get in too close. To let her see how protective he felt. How much he cared.

  In hindsight, maybe he’d been just the slightest bit overbearing, insisting that she wait another three months before going back to work. He should have known how Maggie would react—that she’d do the opposite of what was suggested.

  Maggie had informed him that he was stifling her, that he was invading her space and that she thought it would be best for both of them if he backed off entirely. Before he could really protest, she’d gone and requested another partner.

  Her new partner had turned out to be a rookie. And Maggie had turned out to be dead three months after she’d gone back into the field.

  “If I hadn’t wanted to be part of your life so badly, your mom would have still been here,” Jake told the little girl, emotions threatening to all but choke off his windpipe. Marlie looked up at him with her wide eyes, as if accepting every word he uttered and not judging him for it. “I’m really sorry, little girl.”

  “You shouldn’t apologize for loving her. You should never apologize for loving someone.”

  The familiar voice caught him completely by surprise. Swinging around, Jake discovered that he was right. Calista was standing in the doorway of his bedroom. Surprise quickly melted into pleasure as it occurred to him that he welcomed her company.

  And then he thought of last night. “Am I supposed to be going out again?” If so, no one had mentioned anything to him this time around.

  He looked at his watch. It was a little past noon. Corey, along with his brother Dillon, was presently in the in the process of infusing a healthy amount of cash into renovating Grant Clifford’s profitable Thunder Canyon ski resort. The hotel had long rivaled the allure of Aspen.

  He looked at Calista quizzically, silently underlining his question. She looked too well dressed to be babysitting, but then, she hadn’t exactly looked like someone’s poor relation yesterday evening.

  “No.” Calista laughed. On her way out, Erin had opened the door just as she was about to knock. The latter had let her in, then left for a quick errand. “I just stopped by on my lunch break to see how Marlie was doing with her rash.” Because the baby was in the midst of having her diaper changed, Calista looked for herself. She was pleased
at what she saw. “Looks like I stopped by just at the right time.”

  Jake was impressed with her sense of responsibility. In his experience, people her age were almost exclusively into themselves and didn’t take the time or made the effort to think about anyone else.

  “Miraculously, Marlie’s rash is almost all cleared up,” he told her. “Thanks to you.”

  “No,” she corrected, wanting to give credit where it was due. “Thanks to my grandmother’s wonder salve. Here,” Calista said as she began digging through her purse, “I made up a bigger batch for you when I got home. This should tide you over in case she gets another rash. No reason for the little lady to suffer. Ah, here it is,” she announced triumphantly.

  With that she produced a small plastic jar and handed it to Jake.

  Turning it around, he read the side of the mediumsize jar. “Moisturizing cream?” he asked, raising his eyes to hers skeptically.

  “That was the largest jar I had—other than the mayo jar and that was a little too big. If I put the salve in that, you’d have to scrape the bottom of the jar to get anything.”

  “Thanks,” he said, closing his hand around the jar. He looked at her again. He thought of her comment about this being the largest jar she had. Were the others for skin care as well? What did she need with any of those? From what he could see, Calista Clifton looked like a natural beauty to him. “I don’t think you need any kind of ‘beauty aids,’” he told her. “You look good just the way you are.”

  She hadn’t expected to feel such an intense inner glow in response to such a simple compliment. After all, he hadn’t said that she was drop-dead gorgeous or anything like that. Stripped down, his comment meant that the moisturizer was doing what it was supposed to be doing: keeping her skin moist. Keeping her looking her age. For the first time, she wondered if that was such a good thing.

  Another woman might have laughed and said something about preferring to remain the way nature had initially intended her to be, but lying, even the smallest, whitest and most harmless of lies, was not something she was in the habit of doing. So she felt honor-bound to deflect the much-appreciated compliment by telling him, “I look this way because of beauty aids.”

  Jake remained firm in his assessment, not because he was flirting with her—she was a girl and he was a man, for God’s sake—but because he liked to think of himself as having a good eye for details.

  “All the so-called beauty aids in the world can’t make you look beautiful if you’re not.”

  Obviously this man had no experience with a beauty salon, she thought with a grin. And then it hit her. He’d used the word beautiful. Did he just mean that in a general, casual way, or was he actually applying it to her, saying that he thought she was beautiful? She wasn’t sure, but she certainly wasn’t about to ask. What she was going to do was savor the word and pretend he really meant it.

  Which meant quitting while she was ahead.

  “I’d better be getting back before Mr. Fowler files a missing persons report,” she told him.

  “Mr. Fowler?” Sealing the tabs on Marlie’s diaper, he lifted the little girl up into his arms, then crossed to Calista. The very least he could do was walk her to the front door. “I thought Erin said you were working as an intern for the mayor.”

  “I am,” she confirmed, turning and walking out into the hallway. “But right now, there’s only part-time work available for me.”

  That didn’t answer the question entirely. “And Mr. Fowler is—?”

  “The owner of that antique shop in the middle of town. You must have seen it, the Tattered Saddle,” she supplied the name.

  But Jake shook his head as they came to the stairs. “I’m not familiar with it.” He hadn’t even been aware that there was an antique store in town. He never understood the lure of buying something that was old and falling apart. To him, things like that belonged in the garbage.

  “Neither is anyone else, it seems,” Calista told him. “I’ve hardly seen anyone come into the store since I started working there. I really don’t know how Mr. Fowler stays open,” she confided. “My guess is that he must be independently wealthy, or at least not hurting for money. But then again, he treats every delivery as if it was vital for national security.”

  Jake stopped walking just short of the upper landing. “I’m afraid you lost me.”

  “It’s like Mr. Fowler has this radar that goes on high alert every time the UPS truck drives up the street by the shop. He gets antsy and starts to act even more peculiar than he normally does. And half the time the truck doesn’t even stop at the store. When it doesn’t, he acts surly and disappointed. When it does stop, he practically vibrates like a tuning fork.

  “Another thing,” she confided. “I was at the front of the store for the last delivery and I offered to sign for it for him so he wouldn’t have to go outside. He practically shoved me into the store, telling me to keep dusting. He snapped that it wasn’t my ‘job’ to sign for deliveries. Then he had the delivery man come around to the back of the building and drop the delivery off at the back entrance to the storeroom, otherwise known as his lair.”

  “His lair?” Jake repeated, amused.

  She nodded. The man acted as if it was his private little domain. “He holes up there half the time I’m at the store. Heaven only knows what he’s doing in there.” She drew upon something she’d been forced to read in English class in her junior year. “Two hundred years ago, I would have said he was Silas Marner, counting his gold,” Calista quipped.

  It was probably nothing, just an eccentric old man very set in his ways, but nonetheless, Jake could feel the inner policeman in him coming to the fore. It just reinforced his feeling that he didn’t do nothing well or for long. What if the old man was up to something? What if the shipments didn’t contain antiques but something else?

  He was letting his imagination run away with him, Jake thought as he followed Calista down the stairs. This Fowler guy was undoubtedly exactly what he seemed, an offbeat guy with a bunch of quirky habits.

  The region seemed to have a crop of eccentric people, he thought.

  “Colorful locals” Corey had called them.

  Jake addressed the back of Calista’s head. “Doesn’t sound as if he’s a nice boss.”

  She shrugged. “Not as nice as some,” she allowed, glancing back at him over her shoulder, her meaning very clear. “But I can put up with it until Bo wants me working full-time. When he does, I’ll leave the Tattered Saddle in a heartbeat.”

  “Is that what you want?” he asked as they came to the first floor. “A career in politics?”

  “In some capacity, yes,” she replied. “It doesn’t have to be in the front lines, like a congresswoman or a senator,” she clarified quickly. Even though she wasn’t shy, she didn’t have a craving to be in the limelight. “I just want to be involved in doing something that really matters. Something worthwhile. Something that winds up helping people.”

  He believed her. There was something very honest and sincere about Calista. It was hard for him to believe she was only twenty-two, as Erin had mentioned. “Well, I’d say that you’ve already gotten a good start doing that kind of thing already, what with the way you’ve gone out of your way to help Marlie.”

  Calista stopped just short of the front door and turned around to look at the infant in Jake’s arms. As well as to steal a glance at Jake.

  “Well, that was my pleasure entirely, wasn’t it, Marlie?” she said, lightly stroking the baby’s soft, downy red hair.

  In response, Marlie cooed.

  Jake laughed, marveling, “I swear she understands everything that’s said to her.”

  Calista smiled. “No reason to believe that she doesn’t.”

  Surprised, Jake raised his eyes to hers. “You believe that?”

  The question had just slipped out.

  Although he believed to a great extent that babies did understand what was said to them, it was ordinarily an opinion he kept to himself b
ecause when he voiced it, he was either humored, or just laughed at and asked if he was joking.

  “I sure do,” Calista replied with genuine feeling. “And I think more and more people do, too. Why else would they tell women to play soft, soothing music for their babies before they’re even born?” she challenged. “Seems kind of silly otherwise.”

  When he came right down to it, Jake had no rebuttal for that. He found himself liking the way Calista agreed with him.

  Found himself liking a great deal about this young woman.

  And he shouldn’t, he reminded himself. She was much too young for him—if he was in the market for some female companionship, which he wasn’t. Right now, Marlie was all the female he could handle.

  “Thanks for stopping by,” he told Calista as she opened the front door. Belatedly, he realized that along with his daughter, he was still holding the jar she’d given him. “And for the extra salve.”

  Calista waved a dismissive hand. There was no need to thank her, but she did like hearing the words from him. “Don’t mention it.”

  “Oh, and about that Fowler guy?” he said just as she crossed the threshold.

  Calista stopped and looked at him, wondering what he could say about the old man. Did he know him? Was he going to tell her to ease up on the shop owner?

  “Yes?”

  “If he does anything else that seems a little off to you and you want someone to talk to about it, give me a call.”

  Did that sound as stilted to her as it did to him? he wondered. It wasn’t a line even if it sounded like one in hindsight. She’d aroused his curiosity and mercifully given him something to think about other than his daughter’s disappearing diaper rash.

  The invitation pleased her, but the last thing she wanted was to sound too eager. “I don’t want to bother you.”

  Jake laughed. He would more than welcome the distraction, although, as he’d already told himself, there was probably nothing to the owner’s strange behavior beyond a quirkiness.

  “It’s not exactly as if I’m very busy these days. I’m not doing anything except learning the ropes of being a father.”