He smiled, opened his fist and—with no hint of being patronizing—replied, “Good girl. Now go. Don’t want me to keel over before I get rid of this dang thing, do you?”
She shook her head, offered him a final look of gratitude, then turned to make her way toward the barn. Once inside, she didn’t waste time with nostalgia. As the flood of emotional memories from that one summer rushed in, Elle shook them off in favor of the more concrete ones. Through those, she located the ring where the key hung, and the shelf that housed a protective jacket. She stuffed the former into the dusty pocket of the latter, then shook the debris off the leather as best she could, and slid her arms into the fabric. Unfortunately, the spot where the extra jeans were kept was empty, and so was the cubby that used to house the boots. But the most important piece of equipment—the helmet—was hanging from the bike itself, as always. It was also polished clean. Like it’d been waiting for her. Elle directed another, thankful thought toward the old man as she slid the cool plastic over her head and buckled up the strap at her chin.
Satisfied that she was as ready as she could be, she rolled the bike out to the gravel patch beside the barn. Both the stolen car and Mr. Quincy were gone, and Elle had to forcefully push aside a renewed stab of guilt-tinged worry. The old man was a war vet, a retired reform school teacher, and he had some high-level martial arts training, too. He’d told her all of that the first time she’d tried to refuse his help. And while he was well past his prime, Elle knew that if anyone was capable of knowing his own limits, it was him. She swung a leg over the bike, eyed the empty space where he’d been a final time, then refocused her attention.
As she turned the key in the ignition, she fully expected some kind of protest from the machine. But she was pleasantly wrong. The engine came to life with a purr, the custom-made muffler keeping the decibels to a very tolerable level. The seat rumbled a little under her body, and she recalled the sheer terror she’d felt the first time she’d climbed on all those years ago. Would she fall off? Break her neck? Embarrass herself? But surprisingly, none of that had happened. And the way that had bolstered her confidence had been nothing short of remarkable. What she’d told Mr. Quincy was true; it had been her first taste of freedom since the moment she’d been forced to move in with Trey. Now that came rushing back, too. The speed. The power. It was soothing. And when Elle pushed to a slightly wobbly start, her hope buoyed once more.
CHAPTER 19
As the taillights of Dr. McMillan’s high-priced sedan winked out of sight, Noah wondered if he was doing the right thing. He could’ve chosen to go with the doctor. The other man had offered to take him along, even at risk to himself. On top of that, Noah was ninety-nine point nine percent sure that the house call would lead him straight to Trey Charger. Possibly directly to Elle and her daughter as well. And there was a large part of Noah that simply wanted to take the chance. In fact, over the course of the three-hour-long drive from Vancouver to Wavers Hollow, a fantasy about it had managed to take hold. He’d envisioned himself simply storming the metaphorical castle. Rushing in with sword brandished—or a pistol, as the case would have it—and with furious commands pouring from his mouth. In the white-knight version of himself, Noah reigned supreme. Trey Charger dropped to his knees. He handed over both Elle and Katie. And together, the three of them rode off into the sunset. On a randomly found horse. Obviously.
In reality, though, Noah knew that wasn’t how things worked. The retrievals that worked best were the ones that were thought out. Carefully measured steps. Fail-safes. Option B, option C, and option D, too, just in case everything else went awry.
Action over emotion.
He hadn’t used the mantra very much over the last day, but he knew he needed it now. As much as he itched to be back in contact with Elle—and yeah, to become her triumphant savior—he couldn’t just go in with a reckless, unlikely-to-succeed move. He wanted confirmation of Elle’s presence, but he sure as hell didn’t trust himself to be able to hold back if she was on Trey’s property. Which was why he’d solicited a promise from Dr. McMillan instead. The very second the other man knew for certain if Elle and Katie—or even either one of them—was present at Trey’s summer house, he’d send a text. Then Noah could decide what to do. In the meantime, he would wait. He’d take a slightly slower, safer approach. One that would come closer to guaranteeing results. Except now that he was on the cusp, standing on the front walkway of a minuscule house on the edge of Wavers Hollow, he was second-guessing the choice.
He shifted from foot to foot and studied the cutesy blue shutters and the kitschy flower boxes under the windows. He examined the latticework that hung from the eaves and listened to the light melody of the chimes that were strung over the railing. There was no pretending that he’d come to the wrong place. Even if the cashier at the gas station hadn’t given perfect, precise directions, there was no mistaking it.
The Gingerbread Cabin.
That was what Norah had said it was called, and the name was apt.
Noah sighed and scrubbed a hand over the back of his neck. He knew he needed to go up and knock. Enlisting some help from the best in the business made sense. The fact that the best just happened to be his sister was nothing but an added bonus. So why did it feel a little like the imaginary horse and the white knight scenario would’ve been a safer choice?
It wasn’t that Norah wouldn’t take him in or offer to help him. She would. In all likelihood, she’d be more than happy to do it. For bragging rights. But also because she loved him as much as he loved her. The problem was more complex than that. Despite their lighthearted banter on the phone, the years had been hard on their relationship. What he’d told Elle about it was true. The closeness he and Norah experienced as teens had suffered a deep break with the loss of their baby sister. The slowly rebuilt bond had been tenuous, and their parents’ divorce had knocked it right over. Since then, most of what they shared was excuses. Reasons not to come to Easter dinner. Apologies and jokes about missing the birthday they shared. That wasn’t to say they didn’t keep in touch. They did. By phone. Text. Emails of funny cat videos. The lightness was comfortable. It was easy. Once he looked her in the eyes—a darker hazel than his own—it would be impossible to maintain that distance.
And you have so much time to think about this?
His conscience was right. He had to hurry. Lives depended on it.
He swiped his hand over his chin, then dragged his phone from his pocket and prepared to dial his sister’s number again, this time to issue a far too belated warning. Before he could even get his passcode typed in, though, Norah’s familiar voice carried to him from the tiny porch.
“Don’t bother,” she called. “I already tried calling the police, and they told me that my brother needing a haircut is not an emergency.”
For a long moment, he just stared at her. Her hair was a shade deeper than his, just like her eyes were that little bit darker. She was shorter, or course, than his six-foot-four-inch self. Her head still topped close to five-eleven, though—a reasonably impressive height for a woman. Looking at her wasn’t like looking in a mirror. It was something else entirely. Something that stripped away the years of separation and falsely casual conversation and left Noah raw. Maybe because over the last day, Elle had reminded him that there were more emotions than fierce anger and heart-searing sadness. Maybe because he felt like for the first time in forever, he could have another chance at life. He couldn’t say with certainty what the reason was, but without thinking about it any more, he stepped forward and slammed Norah into the biggest, best brother-style hug he had to offer. And though she exhaled a squeak, she didn’t fight him off like she always had when they were kids. Instead, her arms tightened, too, and she spoke into his shoulder.
“I never blamed you,” she said, her voice breaking.
Noah gave her one more squeeze before he let her go.
“I know,” he replied, and he meant
it.
It was strange. The way the all-over pressure on his body eased up. He’d told himself the same thing over the years. It wasn’t his fault. His sister didn’t hold him accountable. No one did. He’d been a kid. They’d both been kids. Yet the underlying doubt had always been there.
But now…
It seemed to have dissolved completely.
Norah smiled, and she swept her hand toward the house. “Come on in, little brother. I’ve got some stuff you’re going to want to see.”
He didn’t bother to ask what it was, or to wonder how she knew he’d turn up on her doorstep. He didn’t even notice the oddity of it. It was just the way things were with them. Which was why it didn’t surprise him, either, when his sister led him inside, then straight to the couch and coffee table, where her laptop sat waiting.
“Sorry,” she said as she sat down and indicated for him to do the same. “No room for a home office in this place.”
“Roughing it, huh?” teased Noah.
“A girl’s gotta do what she’s gotta do to get some peace,” his sister told him.
Concern flooded in. “Is everything okay with you?”
“Working too hard. Not sleeping too well. You know how it—” She cut herself off with a headshake. “You’re not here to listen to me whine.”
“I don’t mind, Norah. You know that.”
She sighed. “I do. I do know that. But I want to help you right now, Noah. We’ll worry about me once you and your dream girl have settled down and made some babies, okay?”
He should’ve brushed off the idea as ridiculous. Even if he did believe that the hours he and Elle had shared were the beginnings of something that could last a lifetime, it was unreasonable to be thinking about whether or not their children would have her eyes. Yet the vision was there all the same. Maybe twins, like him and his sister. A boy and a girl. Noah couldn’t deny that he liked the thought. And Norah was right about the other part, too. He had come for her help—urgently—so he’d take what was offered, and if she was burnt out and didn’t want to talk about it then, he could respect that at the same time.
“All right,” he said. “Show me what you’ve got.”
She nodded, then swiped a finger over the laptop’s mouse. The screen lit up, and Noah saw that she had multiple windows open, each one shrunk down so that the contents could be viewed side by side. He saw, also, that she’d started her search the same way he had—by typing in the question, “Who is Elle Charger?” Her results were similar to his, too. The digital breadcrumbs had led her to Sassy Sammi—aka Tawney O’Malley—and that particular wormhole had yielded his sister a flashing “safe search” warning. It might’ve made him chuckle if a photo under the warning hadn’t distracted him from his own amusement. It looked so much like Elle that his heart stuttered.
“What’s this?” he asked, tapping the window.
Norah swiftly enlarged it. “What do you think it is?”
“It looks like Elle. But it’s not her.” His eyes flicked over the image.
The woman had the same full lips. The same lush blond hair. Her demeanor, though, was nothing like Elle’s at all. Her smile was coy—like she knew a secret—and her pose was deliberately provocative.
His sister’s reply was gentle. “It looks like her because she’s your dream girl’s mother.”
Startled, Noah jerked his attention up from the picture. “What?”
“Don’t freak out. Just read the article.”
With an abruptly dry mouth, Noah did as he was told.
“A Brief Biography of Sassy Sammi.”
Below the self-explanatory heading was an easy-to-follow outline of Tawney’s life. Her birthdate and place. Her three marriages and three divorces. Her sudden death at age twenty-four. And her only child. Mirabella O’Malley. The moment he saw the entry, Noah knew his sister was right. Elle. How could it be anyone but her? And if he had any doubt at all—if he thought for even a moment that the resemblance was an insane coincidence—the second photograph at the bottom of the page washed it away. It was the woman who looked like Elle again. Only in this shot, she held hands with a little blond girl. The same little blond girl from the digital newspaper clipping that Noah had found about Tawney O’Malley’s funeral. It was troubling, even if he didn’t fully grasp the implication of the puzzle piece.
He brought his gaze to his sister once more. “What else?”
She reached across to tap on the keyboard, then swung it in Noah’s direction. “This.”
A new window was on display, this one showcasing a website called VanCity Secondary High School: Online Reunions.
“Scroll through the list of names,” Norah suggested.
With a graduating class of only thirty-six in the year in question, it was easy to immediately spot what it was that his sister wanted him to see. Tawney O’Malley, James Stanley and Trey Charger had been classmates. As Noah clicked through some of the candid shots, it was easy to see that the trio had been close. It answered the question of connection, but it also raised even more questions.
Seeming to read his mind, Norah spoke up again. “I went a step farther, and I pulled some digital strings to see if there was any old dirt on the three of them. There was the usual stuff that troubled teens get into. A drunk-and-disorderly and intoxication-of-a-minor charges for Tawney. A vandalism thing for James. And Trey stole a few hundred bucks from the student council.”
“The records weren’t expunged because they were minors?” Noah asked.
His sister shook her head. “Not automatically. And I don’t think Trey or Tawney cared. They did a few dumb things later on, too. James tried to have his record erased, but when he applied to become a cop, it became public again. I didn’t look into how. But either way, the small stuff isn’t what matters. What counts is this…”
She clicked again, and a police report popped up. Noah raised an eyebrow, and the corner of his sister’s mouth tipped up.
“Don’t ask,” she said. “Just look.”
With a little headshake, he turned his attention to the report, which he read over quickly. The officer who’d taken the notes described an incident that happened on the side of a mountain. A camping trip gone wrong. Trey, Tawney and James had headed out right after their grad party on a Friday night, then been found the following Monday. A single photo accompanied the write-up, and it spoke volumes. The three teenagers stood a few feet from each other, with a red-clad rescue crew all around them. Tawney’s face was pointed down, her shoulders hunched up under an emergency blanket. James had his arms crossed over his chest. His expression was just shy of furious. Trey, on the other hand, was smug. He was the only one looking at the camera, and a ghost of a smile covered his face in a way that made Noah’s fist ball up.
What had happened up there, over those three days? he wondered.
“I think it was the turning point for all three of them,” Norah said, answering his unasked question. “And whatever it was…they went their separate ways after it was over. Go back to the grad page and have a look at the ‘Then and Now’ tab.”
Noah clicked from one window to the other, and he saw that his sister was right. It was impossible to say for sure that the nights in question had been their last ones together, but the three friends had clearly gone in different directions. James Stanley shifted to the right side of the law, joining the police academy when he was twenty. Trey attended business school straight after graduation, and he finished a four-year program almost eighteen months early. Tawney slipped off the radar for about a year, then reappeared under her pseudonym, gaining a little bit of notoriety from a small scandal involving a local politician. Their careers and lives were completely distinct, and Noah suspected that further research wouldn’t bring in any more overlap. Not until Tawney’s death and the photograph at her funeral, anyway.
Feeling unsettled, Noah started to close the t
ab. Before he could click, though, yet another picture snapped up his attention—mostly because it was such a sharp contrast to the one attached to the police report. This one was a yearbook candid, and it took only a moment for the truth to hit him. To smack him in the face, really. He stared down at the shot of the three of them, realization rolling over him like a boulder. In the picture, James stood to the side, middle finger raised, but blurred out. Trey was looking straight ahead, that same, cocky smile on his face, and somehow—even though he was just a kid and even though his lips were turned up—his calculating nature was written all over him. It was Tawney, though, who gave it all away. Her eyes weren’t on the camera; they were on Trey.
To say her expression was one of adoration would’ve been an understatement. Tawney O’Malley had clearly been desperately in love with Charger. Whether or not it was reciprocated was practically irrelevant, because there was also one more, little factor that changed everything. That answered everything. The way Tawney’s hand rested on her abdomen. The way her fingers splayed out protectively. The tiny bump that no one would’ve thought to look for unless they had baby on the brain. For Noah, though, the conclusion popped up right way.
Tawney was pregnant with Trey’s baby twenty-five years ago. And that baby became Mirabella. It—she—became Elle.
For a long second, all he could do was gawk at the picture, absorbing the reality it offered. Trey Charger wasn’t Elle’s abusive ex. He was her abusive father. She was the little girl who’d been locked in the closet in that illustrative story. That fact meant something else, too. A hugely important detail. Katie wasn’t Elle’s daughter. She was her sister. And Elle had been trying to save her from whatever horror she’d had to endure herself.
“Damn,” Noah whispered. “Damn, damn, damn.”
He needed to get to her. To them. He looked up at Norah, mentally cursing himself for not letting the white knight fantasy take over. He had to rush in. He had to save her. Save them both. Waiting for the doctor’s word be damned. Except as he started to push to his feet, his phone chimed with an incoming message. When he yanked the device from his pocket, his blood turned to ice. The message from Dr. McMillan was the one they’d prearranged.
Harlequin Romantic Suspense January 2021 Page 89