When they climbed into her mother’s Escalade a half hour later, Beth felt wrecked, wrung out, and her mother still looked perfect. Her mom put the car in gear, pulled out of the lot, and said, “I think that went very well. The rest, of course, is up to you.”
Beth said, “Mom. You’re . . .” Her voice was shaking, and she didn’t care. “You’re amazing. You could have been a lawyer. You could have been a judge.”
Her mother shot her one quick look, then turned onto Cedar and headed toward Evan’s house. “Of course I could have. But I’m not. I’m a wife and mother. And I’m very good.”
It was like the world was moving past Evan, and he wasn’t able to grab hold. However hard he tried to focus, things kept slipping by him. Joan had gone home, and so had Beth’s dad, once Beth and her mom had taken off. First, though, Don had given him a squeeze on his shoulder and a promise to “do whatever I can. Whatever Michelle finds out, if I can make something happen faster, I’ll do it. Meanwhile, you hang in there.” Which didn’t do much for Evan right now. Henry was lying by his side as he had been all afternoon, when he wasn’t pacing to the front door and back again, looking for Gracie. And the pink medicine was in the fridge. Waiting.
Evan had called the doctor’s office, but he’d got the answering service. Of course, he’d realized after a moment. It was Sunday. How had he forgotten that? Beth and her mother had already left when his phone rang, which made him jump and grab for it.
It wasn’t April, it wasn’t her parents, it wasn’t the police saying they’d made a mistake, and it wasn’t even Beth. It was the doctor.
Evan explained the situation as fast as he could, knowing he sounded like a robot.
“Not the best,” Dr. Gehrig said, “but of course, this does happen when kids are going back and forth between parents. How many doses has she had?”
“Three.”
She made a “Hmm” noise, the kind they must teach doctors, and said, “How was Gracie responding?”
“By last night, she was better. So the medicine knocked it out, right? The infection?”
Another “Hmm,” then, “It would be best for her mother to take her in and get that re-prescribed, certainly.”
“What if she doesn’t? What if she won’t?” He tried to breathe.
“Then Gracie will either get better, or she won’t. If she does, you’re fine. If the fever and pain start up again, I expect her mother will take her in to get checked before any complications have a chance to set in. A sick baby tends to get her point across. I wouldn’t worry too much.”
The cold lump in Evan’s stomach was sending a different message. He wanted to say, “How about if the mother doesn’t know what she’s seeing? How about if she doesn’t care?” But he didn’t. He knew what it would sound like. Another set of parents fighting over the kids, the accusations flying. He hung up, turned his head like he was moving through water, and asked his mom, “Would you call April’s mom again? Tell her about the medicine. Give her the name.” He got up from the table and went to the fridge to get it, banging his knee along the way and not feeling it. “Tell her Gracie needs it,” he said, handing the bottle over. “Tell her she could get sicker fast without it. A lot sicker.”
He wanted to keep moving, but he didn’t. He was afraid he wouldn’t be able to stop, and he didn’t know what he’d do. He sat down, picked up the cup in front of him, took a sip of cold, bitter black coffee, and set it down. Dakota was moving around the kitchen, making sandwiches. Blake was in the living room, on the phone. For his business, probably, but at least he was here. And Evan’s mom was calling April’s mom, whose name, suddenly, Evan couldn’t remember. Getting voicemail. Leaving the message, somehow sounding calm. Hanging up and saying, “That’s the best I can do. Remember, honey, Gracie’s her granddaughter too.”
Evan wanted to say, “Then why hasn’t she seen her since the beginning?” But he didn’t. He just breathed in and breathed out. He sat. He tried not to think that if only Beth hadn’t convinced him to file. If only . . . He sat.
When he heard the front door open, though, he was there, and his mom and Dakota were right behind him. Beth came in with a look on her face like excitement. Like something. She put her hands on his forearms and said, “We’ve got a first name. Chris. At least if it’s the same guy, because it’s been a month or more. But if it is—we know he’s somewhere near Spokane, but ‘out in the boonies.’ Probably Spokane County, though, because of that Washington plate. Somebody was driving that truck, if it wasn’t one of April’s parents.”
“It wasn’t her dad’s rig,” Evan managed to say. “Unless he got a new one. But yeah. We should check her folks. We should . . . stake their house out or something. Break in the back when they leave. Something.”
“Can’t do it,” Blake said. “You heard it from your lawyer, and I talked to mine and heard the same thing. The minute you do something like that, your ex gets a restraining order slapped on you, and that’s the last thing you need when you’ve got a little girl to hang on to. But don’t worry,” he said when Evan would have spoken. Exploded, more like. “I already got a few guys on that. Just set it up. They’re headed out there now. They’ll watch her parents’ place, and they’ll check for that truck.”
“Get them to run the plate,” Evan said. “We’ve got a first name. Probably a county. Make and model. Two digits on the plate. Narrow it down.”
“I asked,” Blake said. “You bet I did. Only law enforcement’s going to be able to do that.”
“You’re not telling me that they can’t do it,” Evan said. “You know they could do it. You know they’d have somebody on the inside who could get that for them.”
“Sorry, man,” Blake said. “They say not. If we had a full plate, they’d probably skate on it, call in a favor. But when you only have two digits, and you’d get all those names and addresses? And with Gracie’s mom not breaking any laws? They aren’t doing it. But they’re watching the house, and they’ll keep watching it. Sooner or later, she’ll go to her parents’, because she’s probably close by. She’ll go there, and my guys will follow her. We’ll find out where she is.”
“And then what?” Dakota asked.
“Then we serve papers,” Beth said. “The petition for custody. Faster than by publication. We’ll have the address, and then we’ll go for an emergency hearing. Dad can help make that happen.”
“Are you sure?” Dakota asked. “That he can, and that he will?”
“Maybe Beth’s not sure,” Michelle said, “but I am. Babies aren’t chess pieces. That precious girl belongs with the person who loves her best, and that’s not the person who ran away and stayed gone, and then snatched her when she was sick. Anybody’s going to see that. I know both our magistrates. They might not always be popular, but they’re not stupid. It’s going to happen, Evan. You’re going to get her back.”
Evan didn’t sleep much that night. He tried, because there was nothing else to do. He got that he was where he needed to be. If April came back, because surely she wouldn’t want to deal with a sick baby. She hadn’t been able to handle crying before. Why would she even have taken Gracie in the first place? It made no sense. It was crazy.
Around and around his thoughts went, getting nowhere. He lay rigid on his back and stared into the dark. And Beth didn’t take her hand off him all night long.
He didn’t want her to touch him. And he did.
Beth waited until Monday morning. And then she called.
Eight o’clock, and she was in Evan’s back yard dialing the number. And after a few minutes, she was dialing another one. Felicia Diaz, who’d already be at her desk, because she’d only just made partner.
Felicia didn’t say hello. She said, “Thank God. This old lady Simon stuck me with is crazy, and I don’t think she likes brown people. No men, no non-Anglos, and nobody who hates dogs. I’m 1 for 3, and that’s OK, because I hate her too. I want to kick her wrinkly old ass right on out of here, but you know I can’t. I’ve got he
r scheduled for Friday, and we’re going to do it in your office. One of her yappy little asshole dogs peed on my carpet. I hate my job.”
Beth said, “Stop. Wait. Listen.”
“Uh-oh,” Felicia said. “Don’t tell me.”
“It’s not that. It’s a friend here. His ex took his little girl . . .” She explained as briefly as she could, knowing that it sounded like every other custody dispute. “And I need your help,” she said at the end. “We need to find out where this guy is.”
“I’m not who you need to talk to,” Felicia said. “Call Hogan and get him to do it. Investigation’s his job.”
“I tried,” Beth admitted. “Just now.” She rubbed two fingers over her forehead, wishing she’d had more sleep. “It’s not firm business, I’m not a partner, and it’s way too sketchy. I need somebody else to request it. Somebody who can make Hogan close his eyes.”
“I want to help you,” Felicia said. “But that’s not going to be me. I’d get myself up a creek, and I can’t do it. You know your friend can get a hearing. If she really left the kid for that long, then grabbed her like that? He’ll probably get sole legal. All he has to do is wait.”
“I know,” Beth said, “but he doesn’t feel like he can wait. He needs to know now.”
“And then what?”
“That’s the tricky part, sure. But I have a plan for that.”
“What? There’s no good plan. Or there is. The one—oh, yeah—that we tend to advocate here. Wait for the judge. You’re too close to it. This is why you don’t represent your friends and relatives. Well, it’s why you don’t. I don’t because my relatives are crazy.”
“All right,” Beth said. “Thanks anyway.” She hung up, walked around the back yard in her bare feet, noticed absently that the lavender near the back fence had started to bloom, and thought about things. And then she made another call.
They didn’t go in the helicopter after all.
“It’d take longer to arrange for the car on the other end than it would to drive,” Blake said. He sounded reluctant to Evan, like he’d been looking forward to the ride, to some action, and Evan knew why. He could think of a few movie scenes he wouldn’t mind reenacting himself. Where you hovered a few yards over the house, maybe, and drove the bad guys out. Or where you put the helicopter down right smack in front of that pickup. After that? He had more ideas. It was Monday afternoon, Gracie had been gone for twenty-eight hours, and he wanted to hit somebody. He wanted to kill somebody. He wanted his daughter.
Instead, he and Beth were going to be driving, she’d informed him. In her car, because, she’d said, “I have a plan. And we need my car, not yours, for it, because April won’t know it. And my car’s so respectable, too. So appropriate. Put the car seat in the back. And Mom’s coming with us, by the way.”
“That’s right,” Michelle said. She’d come over first thing this morning and had made coffee, and she and Beth had walked around the yard and talked. Evan had assumed there was some kind of consoling going on, some mother/daughter thing. Apparently, though, he’d been wrong.
“How come she gets to go and I don’t?” Dakota complained. She’d been pacing all morning, the way Evan had wanted to do, until she’d grabbed his clippers and finished trimming his bushes, which had made Blake sigh and go help her. Big-time millionaires probably didn’t do a lot of their own trimming. When Beth had called them to the house again a little after two-thirty, though, they’d both hustled right back in.
“You don’t get to come because you’d probably hit April,” Beth told Dakota. “And that’s not going to work.”
“It would work for me,” Dakota said. “It would work great. I wouldn’t just hit her, either. I’d kick her while she was down.”
“Beth’s got a plan, baby,” Blake said. “I know you’d like to jump right in, but every so often, the careful people get a turn. And when it comes to the legal stuff, the careful people are usually right.”
“Yes, we are,” Beth said. “I’ve given it a lot of thought.” She looked at Evan. “If you trust me to try it my way.”
He didn’t want to. He wanted the helicopter option. Preferably with guns mounted. “I get it,” he said instead. “I have to take the longer view, because I need Gracie to be given to me, so we’ve got to do it right. Let’s go.”
The drive would take less than an hour, but it was probably good that Beth was driving, because he’d have been getting a ticket for sure. The closer they got to Liberty Lake, the town in eastern Washington where one Chris Wilson had registered a blue Dodge Dakota, the more Evan’s body stiffened. By now, he was rigid, and he was trying not to look at the empty car seat beside him with the bunny rabbit rattle sitting in it, one ear floppy and chewed.
“How did you get the guy’s address, anyway?” he asked, then realized he’d talked right over something Beth had said to her mom, beside her in the front seat. “You never said.”
“I called Simon,” Beth said. He could see the white on her knuckles as she gripped the steering wheel, but her voice sounded calm. Like a lawyer’s. He’d never understood how Beth could be so different from her mom, but maybe he was realizing today that there were some similarities there. Beth was tougher than she seemed. “A senior partner can ask for pretty much anything. I didn’t want to tell you until I knew we could get results. I wasn’t sure at all.”
“I’m guessing he wasn’t happy about it,” Evan said.
“Nope. I promised I’d come back on Thursday and give him a hundred and ten percent from here on out. I said it was the only favor I’d ever ask him.”
“And that worked?” He couldn’t think about the “Thursday” part now. His mind couldn’t take in one more thing.
“No. It didn’t. It worked when I told him about Gracie’s big blue eyes and the way she hangs onto her daddy. When I told him how sick she was, and how her mother took her without her medicine when she had that terrible fever. He has three grandchildren, and the youngest one’s a baby girl. He has their pictures on his desk. They’re in little bitty frames, and he hides them behind his stack of files, but they’re there.”
“Oh.” Fifteen miles out. “Good. So what’s the plan? If we can’t snatch her back?” Everybody had been completely clear on that, and on bribing April, too. Neither thing, both Beth and Joan had told him, would help him one bit in a court case. And he couldn’t think of any other possible way to get Gracie.
He still needed to know where she was. He needed to see her. And somehow, he’d keep from grabbing her and running. Somehow.
“Pretty simple, really,” Beth said. “My mom rings the doorbell and talks her way in. April’s friends are worried about her, because the police have been asking questions and saying that the baby’s in danger and they’re going to press charges, so they got in touch with this group my mom belongs to today. My mom’s from a women’s rights organization that helps moms who’ve lost their kids unfairly, and she’s come to help.”
“Why would your mom help?”
Beth didn’t sigh. She said, “Well, she’s not my mom, obviously. The group isn’t real, either. She’s a middle-aged volunteer lady.”
“Which I am,” Michelle said, “except that I don’t care for the term ‘middle-aged.’ I’m a community organizer. I dressed down.”
She had, Evan guessed. If cream slacks and a navy top that looked like silk were “dressed down.” Simple, anyway.
“I left off my rings,” Michelle said, “other than my wedding band. And I didn’t accessorize.”
“And then what happens?” Evan asked. “You get Gracie and run? I thought we couldn’t do that.” This plan made no sense to him.
“No,” Michelle said. “I get April to come with me to take the baby to the doctor, if she hasn’t done it. I take her to buy diapers and clothes and the right kind of formula, because you know they won’t have thought of that. Probably feeding her regular milk. Who knows what they’re doing. I pay for everything with the ‘organization’s’ funds. I take o
ver and make everything easy, and we do lots and lots of errands, until April’s worn out and Gracie’s cranky and tired and it all seems too hard. Beth’s my driver. I give April the papers someplace in there, when the time is right, like I’m doing her a favor, and I tell her we’ll help with an attorney, because the WHW assists women in their legal struggles. Which I will,” she added. “I’ll get her an attorney so she can’t come back later and say she was pressured. This is the beauty of it. I’m not even lying.”
“What’s the . . . the WHW?” Evan felt like he was in some alternate reality. Some bizarre role-playing game that only a woman could dream up.
“Women Helping Women,” of course,” Michelle said. “I figured it should be simple. This girl doesn’t sound very bright to me. Let’s hope Gracie got your brains.”
“I thought Evan didn’t have brains,” Beth said.
“I was mistaken,” Michelle answered. “I asked his mother yesterday. He went to college. His grade-point average was perfectly respectable.”
“Isn’t it going to be a problem,” Evan said, “when she gets in the car with Gracie and I’m here?”
No Kind of Hero (Portland Devils Book 2) Page 29