by JoAnn Ross
It was only much later that Gabe realized how fortunate he’d been. The other two kids’ parents had simply written the checks to pay their share of the damage. Which his parents were too financially strapped to do, even if they’d been inclined to get him off the hook. Which they hadn’t been.
But his life, which had been on the road to some serious trouble, took a 180-degree turn.
Seems I had a knack for it. And I liked being able to freeze time in that single frame. I went through six rolls of thirty-six exposures on that first Friday night game.
“Maybe the guy thought I had talent, or maybe he just wanted to save film, but he started teaching me how to bracket my shots, and how to choose how to tell the story, and how to select the image that would make the most impact.”
“Like you were telling us today. About how if your picture wasn’t good enough, you aren’t close enough.”
“Yeah. Which I got from Robert Capa, who covered five wars and really knew what he was talking about. Anyway, this editor who introduced me to photography worked for a weekly that was part of a syndicate of small-town papers scattered throughout the South. So, pretty soon I was picking up some extra cash taking other shots for them.” He’d used some of the money he’d earned to buy a police scanner, which had paid for itself the first month.
“I went to college and spent two years majoring in photography, but by then I’d already been getting paid for my work for three years and didn’t want to waste time. I’d already decided I wanted to be a war photographer because it sounded dangerous. Since I was young, green, and wanted adventure, and figured the uniform would impress girls, I joined the Marines.”
“So, did it? Impress the girls?”
Ha. He’d finally hit on something the kid was really interested in. Gabe grinned. “Yeah.” Wanting to focus on the positive, he didn’t see any reason to mention that hadn’t always turned out to be a good thing.
“Were you afraid? Being in war?”
“Sure. But fear’s not important. It’s how you manage it that matters.”
Johnny Harper thought about that for a long, silent time.
Then, damn, just when Gabe thought he might be going to share something personal, or ask something important, his sister came running up to him, waving a blue ribbon over her wet blond curls and calling out, “Did you see me floating, Johnny? On my back?”
“I sure did.” As the teen bent down to scoop her up, soaking the front of his shirt and jeans, the moment was lost.
For now.
51
Jack Craig had practiced what he was going to say over and over again on the drive here from his two-million-dollar Seven Hills golf course home. But now the words stuck like a stone in his throat.
Where the hell to begin?
“I got married last year.”
“Yeah. I don’t read the social columns, but I saw something about that on the business page. So, did your ex really take you to the cleaners in that divorce?”
“I believe she left me enough to pay your fee.” Jack glanced around the office, as if pointing out that the guy hadn’t exactly set up shop in the Bellagio.
He was seriously considering walking out the door, but knew that he wouldn’t have a moment’s peace unless he “cowboyed up,” as his Texas-born oil-heiress wife put it, and did what needed to be done.
“There’ve been other women in my life, of course,” he stated. “Before my wife.”
Three wives now, but who was counting? Their lawyers, who’d soaked him for alimony every time. If Jack thought about how many cars he had to sell every day before he began to make a profit, he’d never get out of bed.
“Why don’t you tell me something that would surprise me?” O’Keefe suggested dryly.
“One in particular. Several years ago.”
“And she’s surfaced to cause you a problem.”
“No. Well, not directly.” Time to just spit it out. “We had a close relationship.”
Close meaning you fucked her.”
“Yes.”
“And now she’s threatening to make trouble with your wife?”
“No. I doubt she even knows I’m married.” Christ, he was making a mess of this. “But my wife knows about her.”
“So? You’re, what, fifty years old?”
“Fifty-eight.” A year-round tan, racquetball three times a week, and a personal trainer kept him looking younger than his years.
“So, it’s not like she expected you not to have a life before you married her.”
“Of course not.” Jack’s fingers clenched so tightly his knuckles ached. “She recently discovered she can’t have children. It’s some kind of female problem,” he said, briskly brushing aside any unpleasant medical details he hadn’t wanted to know himself. And which weren’t pertinent to the situation.
“That’s tough. I guess she wants a kid?”
“Yes. She’s somewhat younger than me.” Twenty-eight years younger, which might have been a mistake, since he’d thought he was done raising kids. “We were talking about adoption, but she’s big on blood ties. Which is when I screwed up.”
It was her fault. If she hadn’t been nagging him to death about wanting a family, he wouldn’t have been drinking too much, and his damn secret never would have come out.
“I told her that perhaps I had a child.”
“With this other woman.” The detective did not sound surprised. Then again, in his line of work, he’d probably seen just about everything.
“Yes.” Jack’s hands were sweating. He rubbed them on his thighs. “I don’t know. . . . Crystal Harper was a secretary in the parts department of one of my dealerships. I had to let her go after a few weeks because she proved unreliable.”
“Which didn’t stop you from fucking her.”
He felt his cheeks burn beneath his tan. He was a pillar of the community, dammit. No one talked to him this way.
“My point is that she could have been lying.”
“Or not.”
“Which is why I’m hiring you. I need to find out if she was telling the truth. And if she was . . .” He took a deep breath and finally found the strength to spit it out. “I need you to find my child.”
52
It rained for the next three days, keeping the campers indoors much of the time. Which wasn’t the worst thing that could happen, Charity decided as she and Gabe worked together helping the kids put the photos into a scrapbook.
Since many of the campers hadn’t grasped the concept of editorial choice, she and Gabe had stayed in the workroom while the kids went off to paint scenery and work on the songs and skits they’d be performing with the counselors on the closing night.
“Have you heard from the judge yet?” he asked as they sat in the lodge office, culling through at least a hundred photos of ducks.
“Unfortunately not. But he did check in with his office. The court clerk assured Mom that he hadn’t been attacked by pirates or anything dire.”
“Your mother seems to be doing okay.”
“She’s hurting.” After the ducks came several dozen of Gabe’s dog, who in one was wearing one of the glittery cardboard tiaras Amanda had picked up at a local party store. “I think it’s unusual for her because typically I hear a litany of complaints when a marriage goes south. This time she’s being strangely closemouthed.”
“Maybe because she wants things to work out. And if they do stay together, family get-togethers would probably be more uncomfortable if she dumped a lot of personal stuff about her marriage on you.”
“That’s very perceptive for a guy who doesn’t have any family.”
“I may not have one now.”
Just when Charity had thought Angel Harper only knew how to take photos of animals, Gabe paused on a shot of the girl’s brother swinging over the lake on a rope Fred had hung from a tree limb.
“But I did,” he said. He zoomed in on the photograph. “Who knew that kid could laugh?”
“Not me. He’s no
t nearly as sullen as he was last year, but except for the photography, which he really seems to be into, thanks to you, he hasn’t exactly been the poster boy of a happy camper.”
“Something’s weighing heavily on his mind.”
“Not surprising, given his circumstances.”
“True. But one of the reasons I’m still alive is that I’ve learned to trust my spidey sense. Which is telling me that this is something different. Something more recent.”
“Something that’s happened since he arrived here?”
“Yeah. He might have arrived with the cloud of doom hanging over his head, but whatever’s on his mind has him a lot edgier. He keeps looking around like he expects Bigfoot to leap out of the woods and take his sister away.”
“Do you think he’s having a problem with some of the other campers?”
“It doesn’t feel like that.” Gabe rubbed his chin as he considered her question. “But I suppose it could be, although Fred and Ethel seem to have everyone pretty well supervised, so it’s unlikely, if he was dealing with a bully or anything like that, that no one would have noticed. I thought he might tell me the other day—”
“When you were both standing by the lake. During the swimming lessons.”
“You saw that?”
“I was in the kitchen and glanced out the window.” She didn’t want to reveal that she spent way too much time watching him. Or that she, Kara, and Sedona had been discussing him.
Although they’d spent the past two nights together—after Amanda had insisted she’d really prefer to be alone to read a book about women and blue-water cruising she’d bought at Tidal Wave Books—she and Gabe had remained determinedly casual during the day.
Which didn’t mean that she didn’t think about him during the times they were apart. Because she did. All the time. And couldn’t help hoping that he was thinking of her, too.
“Your conversation looked serious.”
“I was sharing a bit of my checkered past.”
None of which he’d shared with her.
It was just sex.
She could tell herself that until doomsday, but dammit, the one thing they’d overlooked when they’d made that deal was that sex, by its very nature, was personal. At least for her.
“That was a good idea,” she said. “By not coming off like Mr. Perfect Marine, he might be more encouraged to open up about whatever it is that’s bothering him.”
“That’s what I thought,” he said absently. “Damn. Look at this.” He zoomed in even closer, going to a pixel view of Johnny Harper’s chest.
“It’s your tattoo,” she said.
“Yeah,” he muttered. “He was standing in the line the first day, when I was putting those stick-on ones on the kids, but he said he didn’t want one.”
“Well, he has one now.”
“Seems to.” He tucked his tongue in his cheek. He’d done it again. Gone to that walled-off place inside himself.
“Do you think he’s been smoking?”
“I wouldn’t be all that surprised, but it’s not as if he’s got a lot of time to himself around this place. Why do you ask?”
“I thought I caught a whiff of smoke in his hair.”
“They roasted marshmallows last night. It was probably from the campfire.”
“Probably.”
They worked in silence a bit longer. Charity printed out a photo Gabe had taken of Johnny and Angel Harper onto a square piece of fabric that was going to be the front of a pillow. She’d come up with the idea so the campers could feel their siblings’ presence in their beds after the camp had ended and they’d returned to their separate homes.
“I told him my parents were drunks.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So was I. I might not have landed in the system, the way these kids did. But I pretty much raised myself.”
“Well, you certainly did a pretty fine job of it, from what I can tell,” she said mildly, not quite sure where he was going with this.
“They died my freshman year of college.”
“That must have been difficult.” At the same time? In an accident? Or worse? she wondered as the murder-suicides that showed up on the nightly news from time to time flashed through her mind.
“Actually, I was relieved. The two of them were textbook enablers. I spent a lot of time while I was growing up worrying that one of them might die and I’d be left to take care of the survivor.”
“That’s sad. That a boy would think of his parents that way.”
Charity might not have had that much stability— okay, hardly any—growing up herself, but at least she’d always known that her mother, father, and Lucas had honestly loved her.
He lifted his shoulders. “As it happened, they died together. Which was undoubtedly just the way they would’ve wanted it. In an accident.”
Myriad possibilities flashed through her mind. None of them pretty.
“The bitch was that they’d gone on the wagon a few weeks before. I doubt it would’ve lasted, but my mother called to tell me that they’d ‘found Jesus’ and were going off with a mission group to spread the gospel in Central America. They were in a bus that went off a cliff.”
“That is tragic. Did you share this with Johnny?”
“No. There didn’t seem any point. Especially since I have no idea what his parental situation is, so I didn’t want to risk bringing up bad memories.”
“He’s been eligible for adoption for several years. So has his sister.”
He angled his head, studying her even as he hit the print button. “That’s not in his camp records,” he guessed.
“No.” She straightened her shoulders, refusing to let him make her feel defensive. “I called his social worker.”
“Why would you do that?” She watched as comprehension dawned. He shook his head. “Hell. You’re thinking about taking in two more strays, aren’t you?”
“That’s a terrible way to put it.” She set her teeth when she wanted to grind them.
“How would you put it?”
“Anyone can see those children belong together,” she said. “I wasn’t fortunate enough to have any siblings, except for Lucas, my stepbrother, but I can still imagine how horrible it must be to be separated from your sister or brother. To only see each other for a few days a year. And as lovely as this camp is, it’s still an artificial environment. It’s not the same as if they actually lived together all the time.”
“What they’ve undoubtedly gone through is a bitch. And unfair. But even you can’t save the entire planet. And you can’t treat those Harper kids like you do that polar bear of a dog you rescued.”
“That’s not what I’m suggesting doing.” She was on her feet now. And, dammit, trembling.
“Isn’t it?” He kept his eyes on hers as he stood up, as well. They were toe to toe and he didn’t look happy. “Look, I know you want a family—”
“And I know you don’t. You’ve made your point loud and clear, but I don’t see how my feelings, or what choices I might make in my own life, have anything to do with you.”
She wrapped her arms around herself, wondering where this conversation had taken a wrong turn. All she’d wanted was to know some personal thing about Gabe. And suddenly she was having to defend her behavior, which wasn’t any of his damn business, since he’d made it clear that he wasn’t into complications. Or baggage, which a woman and two kids would definitely involve.
“I have a big house,” she repeated what she’d been telling herself the past two days. “I’m financially stable. I work from home, so I’d be around all the time. And everyone knows dogs are good for children. It seems applying to be a foster parent makes sense.”
“Look, I’m not sure how the system works, but I’m pretty sure being a foster parent is usually a temporary situation. Again, sort of like what you do with the strays that wander through your shelter.”
“That’s usually the case, but—”
“Shit.” He dragged a hand throu
gh his hair, and for a man who claimed to be into this relationship just for the sex, he seemed awfully frustrated by her life choices. “Tell me you’re not thinking about adoption.”
She could have told him that once she’d started following her intuition, instead of planning everything to the nth degree, her life had improved exponentially. She’d moved out west, into a house she’d fallen in love with the first moment she’d seen it on the Internet.
Her clinic was thriving; she had more friends than in Chicago, where the few friends she’d made were mostly Ethan’s. She was ready—financially and emotionally—for a family. Having grown up jumping rope to the old jingle “First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Charity with the baby carriage,” she’d always just assumed that she’d follow the traditional route.
But that hadn’t happened. At least not yet. So, what would be wrong with mixing up the order?
She lifted her chin. “Excuse me, but again, I fail to see how any plans I may or may not have for my future are any of your business. It’s not as if my life will have an effect on yours, since you’re going to be in Washington. Or Alaska. Hawaii. And God knows where after that.”
She was surprised by the razor sharpness of her voice, which definitely wasn’t her usual tone. Even when she’d informed Ethan she was calling off the wedding, she’d stayed calm and collected. At least on the outside. Inside she’d been shaking like a leaf. But her weasel of a former fiancé hadn’t realized that.
Apparently Gabe was equally surprised by her flash of temper. He scrubbed both hands down his face.
Charity knew he was frustrated by her possible plan, but couldn’t understand why. Granted, she hadn’t known him all that long, but from what she’d witnessed, he didn’t seem to be the type of controlling male who felt the need to dominate a woman’s life. In fact, if she was to be perfectly honest, she hadn’t had to work all that hard to push the dog on him, despite his earlier protest that he didn’t want it.