by Joanne Rock
“What the hell are you wearing?” Zach’s eyes narrowed as he took in the baby carrier.
“I believe it’s called a pouch sling.” He glanced down at the carrier, where Aiden was starting to stir, his face scrunching up in that pre-cry, wrinkle-puss expression that meant food would be required soon. Sam rocked from foot to foot, trying to soothe his son while lowering his voice to a low hiss. “And it works like nobody’s business to keep the baby asleep unless you have clueless friends who ring the doorbell.”
“It’s purple, dude.” Zach squinted at the strap over one of Sam’s shoulders. “And plaid.”
“Right. And when you have kids you’ll be begging me to let you borrow it.” He stalked toward the kitchen to get a bottle started. “But I’ll just come over and ring your doorbell while your firstborn is sleeping instead.”
“Sorry.” Zach kept pace behind him, his leather shoes echoing on the hardwood. The guy still dressed more like a corporate raider than a small-town mayor. “I’m just not used to seeing you sporting anything from the lavender family.”
“Keep it up and I’ll pass you the bottle and the boy to see how you do.”
He shook the formula-and-water combination, glad he’d taken the time to do dishes earlier so everything was clean and ready.
It made for the fifth night in a row he hadn’t slept more than a handful of hours, but on the upside, at least he’d caught up on work.
“You’re going to wish we could go back to talking about purple baby carriers when you find out why I’m here.” Zach flung himself on a bar stool at the counter and turned his attention to Sam’s coffeemaker.
“Bad news?” Lifting Aiden out of the carrier, Sam cradled him in one arm and offered the boy the bottle. The kid latched on to it like he hadn’t eaten in days instead of hours. Would he ever sleep through the night at this rate?
“J. D. Covington walked out of juvie three days ago.” Zach concentrated on making the coffee as he turned on the water and filled the pot.
Sam managed to stop himself from uttering most of the curses that passed through his brain, not wanting to upset Aiden’s digestion.
“Why? And how come we’re only just finding out about it?” A message should have come to his department ASAP, damn it.
Did no one follow protocol anymore?
“You know the juvenile system. They write their own rules. Apparently, they had a detention hearing and decided he could be supervised at home until the pretrial screening, but someone must have forgotten to inform the arresting officer.” Zach dumped in some grounds and hit the start button. “I only found out when I went to the quarry to see what kind of Wi-Fi connection I could pick up—long story.” He waved away that thread of the conversation. “Anyway, I ran into the kid and his mother, and she told me the good news.”
“Meaning J.D. could have sent me that message on my phone.”
“Or his mother.” Zach shrugged, reaching for a mug. “She reminds me of the way my mom was when Dad went to jail—faithful to the end.”
Sam remembered all too well. Mrs. Chance had fallen apart when her husband had gone to prison for white-collar crime. But somehow he could understand her reaction. He had no idea how Jeremy Covington’s wife could forgive him for assault and sex offenses against teens.
“No luck pinpointing where that message came from?” He took a seat on a bar stool two down the counter from Zach, leaning an elbow on the granite to make it easier to feed Aiden.
“None.” Zach slid the phone across the breakfast bar. “If you get any more, don’t touch anything after it happens and bring it to me as fast as you can.”
“Right.” He ground his teeth together, anger building. “And how do you suggest I document threats that disappear seconds after they’re delivered?”
“You’re the cop,” Zach reminded him. “But I’d write down times and dates.”
“You say that like I’m going to have more than one.”
He stared down at the innocent face in the crook of his arm, hardly believing the boy was his. His ex-girlfriend might have found the baby overwhelming, but for Sam, the boy was already a part of him. The best part. “But I’m telling you now, there’d better not be another threat against my son.”
“We’ll find out where it came from.” Zach said it with a certainty that eased some of the defensive fury building in Sam’s chest.
Sam knew he meant it. And he trusted him. If there was any way to prove a digital crime or find a cybertrail, Zach’s company would do it.
“Good. I’ll assign someone to watch J.D. now that I know he’s circulating again.” He set aside Aiden’s bottle and patted the baby’s back even though the boy was already falling asleep. In the middle of the morning of course. Rarely at night. “You didn’t need to come all the way out here to bring me my phone. I’ve got to stop by the office later to set up some interviews with victims who reported trouble out in the quarry in the last few years.”
He hadn’t forgotten about the spike in incident reports during the week of the teaching conference.
“I drove Heather to her sister’s house before I came in here.” Zach craned his neck to look out the kitchen window, maybe trying to glimpse the cabin from here. “I figured I’d talk to you until she was done over there.”
“If I know Amy, that’ll be any minute,” he said drily, grateful to see Aiden was now fully asleep again. “She’s not one for idle conversation.”
Zach chuckled softly, leaning in to center the coffeepot perfectly under the drip of the steaming-hot java.
“What’s so amusing?” Sam moved toward the infant swing in the center of the dining room, where he’d never bothered to set up a table. Gently, he lowered Aiden in it. To his surprise, the boy stayed asleep, settling his heavy head against one side of the cushioned seat, his baby Buddha belly stretching the snaps of his onesie.
“Just trying to picture the two of you talking if she’s the quiet one.”
In spite of himself, Sam grinned back at him.
“Compared to her, dude, I’m chatty.”
“Is that right?” Zach pulled two stoneware mugs off the wrought iron stand near the coffeemaker. “Heather did say that her sister’s invitation to come over consisted of about five words. And those were delivered via a call at two in the morning.”
He split the brew between the two mugs before searching Sam’s fridge for creamer.
Sam sipped his black, wondering why Amy had been awake at that hour. Was that unusual? Or had she been thinking about their conversation this afternoon?
He sure as hell had thought about it a lot last night.
But Amy hadn’t called him at 2:00 a.m. She’d called her sister—the one who was testifying against Jeremy and J. D. Covington at the end of the month. Had she been thinking about that?
“When is your sister flying in for the trial?” Sam hadn’t spoken to Gabriella in weeks.
It occurred to him now that if Amy had secrets about that last summer, maybe Gabby could shake something loose. Spark a memory.
“I don’t know how much time she can take off from work, but I imagine she’ll be here at least a week before the trial begins in order to prepare.” His coffee fixed, Zach returned to the counter stool. “Why?”
“Maybe we ought to get together everyone we can from that summer.” The idea took shape, feeling right as he said it. “The friends you hung around with. The other foster kids living in the Hastings’ house. Anyone who worked at the pizza shop.”
“Haven’t we already talked to a lot of them?” Zach opened his phone and flipped through the digital files that Sam had been sending him.
“The local ones. But how many people left town, the same way we did?” He wondered how he could hunt down those people. “Lorelei probably has contact information for everyone who’s gone through her h
ouse.”
Zach nodded. “It could be a great time for a Hasting fosters’ reunion.”
Why not?
“I’ll get on it.” He’d ask his foster mother to help him. But first he needed to speak with Amy.
“Good.” Zach’s phone chimed before he’d sucked down half his drink. “I’ll see if I can get Gabriella out here sooner rather than later.” Standing, he shoved his phone in his pocket. “Looks like Heather’s ready to go. It was a fast visit after all.”
No surprise there.
Sam walked his friend to the door. “I know you don’t want J.D. anywhere near your fiancée,” Sam observed just as Zach reached the door.
“I’ll kill the kid personally if he breaks that restraining order.”
Sam believed him. Zach wasn’t a fighter, but he’d held his own that day they’d found the Covingtons trying to kidnap Heather Finley and Megan Bryer.
“You’ll have my help, of course. But maybe so it doesn’t come to that, you could dip into that impressive Chance financial reserve and put a PI on the kid.”
Zach frowned, scratching the back of his neck. “I don’t want to do anything that could harm the case. Aren’t there conflict-of-interest laws at work there? Me being the mayor and all?”
“Heather will be your wife soon. How could any court deny you the right to protect her however you see fit?” That area of the law was far too gray for his liking. But sometimes, common sense counted in the legal system.
“But any information a PI gathers is going to be tough to use as evidence when I’m footing the bill.”
Sam shrugged, rubbing the kink out of his neck. “Not necessarily. All I know is that Heartache doesn’t have a dedicated police force, per se. I don’t have enough manpower to keep constant watch on everyone in town. We can’t even try the case in Heartache.” Criminal matters were heard in a court at the county seat. “You have a right to use your resources to make sure your family is safe.”
“I like the way you think.” He clapped Sam on the shoulder. “I’ll look into it this afternoon. But I know you’ve got another angle here that you’re not sharing with me.”
Oh yeah. The angle where Amy Finley was keeping something from him. But he couldn’t connect the dots enough to share with Zach yet. And he had a lot of angles to work before the pretrial screening in less than two weeks.
“Don’t look at me.” Sam held the door open, letting the cold fall breeze clear his head. “I’ve got a foster family reunion to plan.”
“Not in a million years would I have guessed you’d beat me to the land of family reunions and baby carriers.” Zach didn’t bother to hide a grin.
“Bite me.” Sam closed the door and padded back into the house in his socks, ignoring his friend’s laughter.
He was more interested in how soon he would see the woman who had never been far from his thoughts this week.
CHAPTER SIX
“I DON’T KNOW how you and Erin got all this construction talent while I struggle to tell my wrenches apart.” Heather stared up at the new support beam Amy had added to the cabin after demolishing a wall. “Seriously. I don’t even remember setting foot in the family lumberyard until I was at least a teenager.”
Their first meeting in ten years hadn’t been as awkward as Amy had feared, but that had everything to do with her bighearted sister and very little to do with Amy herself. Heather had breezed in with a quick hug that had ended just before Amy could start to feel smothered, then proceeded to fill the dead air with chatter about Heartache and questions about the remodeling of the hunting cabin.
So far, they’d avoided anything too personal, including talk of the trial and the family.
Or at least, they’d only talked of the Finleys as it related to their construction business.
“That’s because we were forever sticking you with Mom.” Amy unplugged the cord for the reciprocating saw, not wanting her sister to trip since Heather wore heeled boots with her pink paisley shirt dress, a bold choice with her long red curls. “Erin and I were always the first to raise our hands when Dad gave any of us a chance to tag along on a job or help in the warehouse.”
She hadn’t thought about that in a long time. She and Erin would race shopping carts down the wide aisles, sometimes using them like go-carts and vaulting into the baskets at the last second.
Their oldest brother, Scott, had hated it when they did things like that, always trying hard to make the family more upstanding and respectable. Less...wild. But their father didn’t seem to mind. Or maybe he hadn’t really noticed.
“That’s funny.” The long fringe on Heather’s sleeveless maroon sweater swept through the sawdust on a pile of planks as she peered into the open floor joists. “I remember being relieved when the house was quieter. I think Mom was easier to manage one-on-one.”
The fact that Heather seemed to be examining the remodeling project more than quizzing her about their mother made it easier to talk about Diana Finley. A topic Amy normally shut down faster than any other.
“Five kids would probably make anyone a little twitchy.” She’d gained that much perspective at least. “Don’t ask me why Mom, of all people, would have that many children to care for when she’d barely been able to care for herself more often than not.”
After miscarrying her only pregnancy, Amy would have traded anything for just one healthy baby. The ache of that loss still hit her at unexpected times.
“In the early days of their marriage, I doubt she had any idea how bad the bipolar disorder would get.” Backing away from the gaping hole in the cabin floor, Heather turned her attention to the small kitchen. “I can’t believe this place doesn’t even have a cooktop. I think Mack has a propane camp stove that you could set up on the counter. Want me to bring that next time?”
“That would be great.” A wave of gratitude rolled over her at the realization that her sister was trying to make this visit easy on her. Because, hell yes, she’d rather talk about cook stoves than Mom. And yet it was nice to hear Heather acknowledge that their mother’s condition had worsened over the years. Sometimes, as a teen, Amy felt like she was the only one who could see that. “Can I ask you a question?”
“I’ve waited a long time to have a conversation with you, Amy. Ask me anything.” Heather leaned up against the kitchen counter and waited.
“When the Covingtons tried to kidnap you, they didn’t try...to touch you?” Amy couldn’t reconcile the man who grabbed Heather with the one who had made her life a living hell ten years ago. She was trying to connect the dots and would feel better if she could say for sure that Covington had been the one who’d grabbed her, too. But she just hadn’t seen him well enough. “I mean, how can Zach and Sam think that Jeremy is the same guy who tried to sexually assault Gabriella when the MO with you and Megan Bryer was so different? Gabby was an underage girl lured out by an internet predator to a remote location, and she would have been raped if not for Sam. Why do Zach and Sam believe that perpetrator is the same man who grabbed an adult woman in a public place and threw you in a van?”
Heather paused and seemed to consider the question. She tucked her hair behind one ear before answering.
“I haven’t heard all the evidence myself, so I can’t say for sure. But there have been other victims. And it sounds like Jeremy operated by himself ten years ago, whereas now they believe his son is working with him, so that could change how he preys on women. Plus, Megan is underage, and she was targeted online through a video-game chat message, so there are similarities there.”
“Are you nervous about testifying?” Amy folded her arms across her chest, feeling the chill in the morning air. She should have gotten a fire going before her sister arrived.
“No.” Heather’s answer came immediately. “I’m so furious about what he did—to Megan especially—that I can’t wait for my d
ay in court to reveal him as a bastard to the world.”
“Good for you.” Admiring her attitude, Amy traced a pattern in the sawdust along a plywood plank. “Has Mom said much about the trial?”
Heather frowned, no doubt thinking it a strange question.
Amy had her reasons for asking. She wondered how much her mother remembered about their last argument. The one where Amy had told her about The Incident, looking for guidance or maybe just a little empathy. Instead finding only irrational anger directed at Amy and not at the guilty party. Her mother had not been well that summer; Amy understood that. But had she been medicated enough to have forgotten what Amy had confided?
“Not really. Mom insists that she saw Jeremy Covington giving me sidelong glances during Erin’s wedding reception, and somehow that was enough to mark him as a villain in her mind.” Heather shrugged. “Some days she seems really solid on her new medicine, but other days...” She shook her head, not finishing the thought. “She’s always been eccentric, though, right?”
Understatement of the year.
“She did set my daily chore list to the tune of ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ when I was in preschool.” It was a memory of mixed emotions. Sad because their mother couldn’t find any energy to do any household chores herself. But happy because she really had tried to make it fun.
“Exactly.” Heather came closer, tilting her head to see what Amy had drawn in the dust on the plywood.
Only then did it occur to her she’d sketched a tree at the edge of the forest, with a window in the distance.
Fighting the urge to erase it, she told herself that it wasn’t all that legible anyhow. Sawdust wasn’t exactly her medium. Besides, that image didn’t hold meaning for anyone but her...
“Sam’s coming over today,” she blurted, moving away from the site of her impromptu artwork. “He thinks talking about that summer before he left town with the Chances will somehow uncover new evidence.”
“Really?” Her sister leaned over the sawdust drawing and added a few flourishes that Amy couldn’t quite see. “Do you mind being around him? I always got the impression that your breakup was part of the reason you left.”