A Son's Tale

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  “What’s with you?” his father asked on Tuesday night, a week after Morgan’s first custody hearing—a week after they’d spent the half hour in her kitchen that had changed his life.

  “What do you mean?” Cal was chopping onions.

  Frank had come in after playing basketball with Sammie and taken hamburger out of the freezer. The two men were making homemade spaghetti sauce—something they hadn’t done together in years—to go on the pasta they were having for dinner.

  “You’re whistling. Staying home every night. And you’re going to bed earlier rather than locking yourself in that office of yours for half the night.”

  His group of young artists didn’t start meeting again until the fall. He’d had his junior arts league meeting already this month. He’d arranged appointments for potential funding during his lunch hours—not on purpose, they’d just happened that way. The various university functions he attended didn’t begin again until September.

  And he couldn’t very well go out. Not now that he was going to have a woman in his life in a few weeks.

  “I didn’t stay up half the night. And how would you know? You were in your room most nights before I started writing.”

  “Writing?” Frank’s spoon stilled in the pot of freshly cut tomatoes and garlic as he looked over at Cal. “Writing what? You never told me you were writing. You said you were researching. For class.”

  “I never said it was for class. You assumed it was.”

  Frank stirred. A minute passed. “I might have assumed it was for class,” he said, his tone less accusing. “What were you writing?”

  “Nothing, Dad,” he said. What on earth had loosened his tongue so much lately? Whatever it was, it had to stop. Safety lay in privacy. “Just typing up notes from the research I was doing.”

  “So you were researching.” Adding a couple of tablespoons of white wine, some bay leaf and oregano to his sauce, Frank sounded appeased.

  “Of course. I don’t lie to you.”

  Another couple of minutes passed quietly while Frank stirred and tasted and adjusted and Cal browned his onions in a small touch of olive oil and added a pound of hamburger.

  “But there’s only one thing I know of that we don’t talk about, and if your research wasn’t for class, I’m fairly certain it had to do with Comfort Cove.” Frank’s voice was barren.

  He’d just said he didn’t lie to his father. “It doesn’t matter, Dad.”

  “You’re writing about what happened?” The sauce was put on a back burner.

  “It’s just notes.”

  “Do you think that’s wise, Cal? To put things down on paper? What if someone gets ahold of your notes?”

  What if? Cal lost his appetite. And his compulsion to whistle.

  “Don’t borrow trouble, Dad, please. I’ve been working on this for years and nothing has happened. Don’t let that call to the nursing home bother you. Life is trying to look up for us. Let it.”

  Adding his ground beef to his father’s sauce, Cal set the mixture to simmer and filled a pot with water to cook the spaghetti.

  * * *

  THE NEXT MORNING, before class, Cal remembered his words to his father about borrowing trouble when he listened to the voice mail in his office. Ramsey Miller needed him to call.

  Guilt was a like a chronic disease in his gut, an albatross, an unwanted but very familiar companion. If it hadn’t been for his testimony, his father would not have been a suspect twenty-five years before.

  But Miller already had that testimony in his files. Cal’s book dealt more with their lives after they’d left Comfort Cove, his own thoughts and memories and anger, and chronicled his research methods and findings, right down to dates and times of discovery. And not one piece of information had led to Claire Sanderson.

  So there was nothing to worry about.

  With his father’s fearful reaction the night before fresh in his mind, Cal dialed Miller’s number.

  “I found something,” Miller said.

  No. Life did not work this way—all neatly tied up. “What do you mean?”

  “Your book. Chapter two. You talk about a delivery truck on your street the morning that Claire Sanderson went missing.”

  “The truck I hid behind to sneak back to our place.”

  “You didn’t mention the truck in your testimony to the police.”

  So that made him suspect? Or somehow cast further suspicions on his father?

  Was it too much to hope that the two of them be happy? For at least a few days?

  “I didn’t deliberately withhold the information from them, if that’s what you’re implying,” Cal said, hand in his pocket as he took the handset from his office phone over to the window to look out at the campus. “It’s not like the truck means anything except that the guy delivered meat,” he said now, remembering the truck, the writing on the side, as if he’d seen it the week before. He gave Miller the details. “It was at the neighbor’s house every single Wednesday morning. Three doors down from us. They didn’t buy their meat at the store like we did, and Emma and I asked our parents why. It was there every week, and it wasn’t anything that had ever been a danger to us. The guy was known in the neighborhood. Believe me, there’s nothing suspect about that truck. The police asked me if I’d seen anything unusual, but seeing that particular delivery truck in our neighborhood was normal.”

  “I understand. I read the book. You mention it only because you hid behind the truck as a means to sneak back to your house and into your backyard because you didn’t want to go to school that day.”

  “I’d thrown up there the day before.” A humiliation a guy didn’t forget.

  “I understand that the truck doesn’t seem like evidence to you, but reading about it struck a chord,” Miller said. “I remembered another abduction where a delivery truck had been seen in the area. That one didn’t pan out in terms of a connection to Claire’s disappearance—the child was found asleep in a tent in the neighbor’s backyard. But I pulled records for other meat delivery routes. I ran that against reported abductions and had two hits.”

  What was Miller saying? “Does this mean my father is in the clear?”

  “No. But it means there’s a possibility of a break in the case. You say that meat delivery truck delivered to a neighbor three houses down?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did your father have any association with them?”

  “No. My… Rose Sanderson, Claire’s mother, knew them, but not well, as I remember.”

  “Has your father ever had meats delivered?”

  Here we go again. “No.” Cal didn’t bother to hide his frustration.

  “I’m going to run cross-checks between the other two cases and the evidence we do have. I’ll also be checking the records from the delivery company to see if your father’s name comes up. If it does, I’m going to need to talk to him. Either way, I’ll get back to you.”

  “Please keep me informed,” he said. Miller hadn’t had to call him. He could have called the nursing home first, looking for his father to ask about his meat truck associations. “And I’d like you to call me before you contact my father. At least give me a heads-up.”

  “I appreciate your position, Professor. I’ll do what I can.”

  Which meant nothing at all.

  “And all of this is because you want to find out what happened to the missing box of evidence.”

  “It’s part of an ongoing investigation so I can’t disc
uss details.”

  Cal frowned. “Do you have a body, Detective? Have you found Claire?”

  “Look, Professor, I appreciate your help. I can’t really say more, but I will tell you that this has to do with more than just Claire Sanderson. I was working on another case when I discovered the box missing.”

  “So it really isn’t about my father?”

  “I don’t know that.”

  Frustrated, but appreciative that the detective was telling him as much as he could, Cal got off the phone with Miller and grabbed his briefcase. He had a class to teach.

  And a woman to see there who, though they weren’t seeing each other yet romantically, still made his world look a hell of a lot better than it ever had before.

  * * *

  “OKAY, FRANK’S GOING to pick you up at school and drop you off at tryouts. I’ll pick you up there,” Morgan told Sammie as she dropped him off at school Wednesday morning. “You have everything you need?”

  The boy, wearing his new sneakers and a University of Tennessee T-shirt and basketball shorts, all compliments of the Whittiers, smirked at her. “I’m ready, Mom. Frank said so. Quit worrying.”

  She was a mother. It was her job to worry. Which he’d realize when he got older.

  “Just remember, the other boys are all older than you. This is only your first time trying out.”

  Looking at her with those expressive brown eyes, Sammie said, “Jeez, Mom, don’t you think I’m going to make it?”

  “I think you’ve got a good chance, Sammie. I just don’t want you to give up if you don’t.”

  “I’m not a quitter. That’s what you’ve always said. We Lowens don’t quit.”

  “That’s right. We don’t.” She smiled at him. He was her son. For a while she’d almost forgotten what that meant. After years of fighting against her father’s manipulation, she’d almost given in to it. And lost her son in the process.

  Thank God for Cal. He’d been put in her life for a reason. A very good one.

  And it wasn’t just Cal. With Frank in Sammie’s life, her son had been almost a perfect child at home, and since she had no social life, she now had time in the evenings to spend on Mark Twain.

  Wishing her son luck and giving him an extra long hug filled with all of the love she had stored up inside, she sent him off into his world and turned her car toward her own class.

  * * *

  WITH FINGERS THAT FUMBLED in his haste to not get ahead of himself, Ramsey Miller dialed a number he now knew by heart from the phone on his desk in the eighth precinct of the Comfort Cove Police Department.

  Lucy had been on a case for a couple of days. She’d sent a text the night before that she’d wrapped it up—the body of the dead woman had led to the arrest of the woman’s husband—and was taking a couple of days off.

  “Yeah? What’s up?” She sounded sleepy.

  “Sorry to wake you.”

  “No, that’s okay. I should be up, anyway. I have to get Mom’s breakfast this morning.” Lucy lived alone, but across the street from her mother who was not well. The woman who cared for her mother was good to Lucy, working unusual hours as they fit Lucy’s schedule, so Lucy generally gave the woman time off on her own days off.

  “She in bed again?” Ramsey asked. Did Lucy ever notice that her mother always took to her bed on Lucy’s days off?

  “Yeah. She had a spell last evening, apparently. Marie called just before she left.”

  Sandy Hayes could get around well enough if she stayed off the alcohol. And took her depression medication. She seemed to prefer having Lucy there to take care of her.

  “Is she drinking?”

  “No. I asked.”

  He was glad to hear it, not that it was any of his business. He’d never even met the woman. He’d only met Lucy once.

  “I got a lead.”

  “What?” He heard the covers rustle and figured Lucy had just sat up in bed. “Where?” And then, more quietly, “Oh, Ramsey, did you find another one? Was it Claire Sanderson?”

  She was referring to Ramsey’s obsession with the Peter Walters case. He’d busted the fifty-five-year-old bastard on a child abduction case a year back. He’d been in time to save the kid, a three-year-old girl, from more than just a scare, but Walters had a big mouth and an even bigger need to brag, letting Ramsey know that he hadn’t been able to save them all. Not one to have patience with cold cases, Ramsey had nonetheless found himself immersed in boxes of evidence that night—all local missing-children cases. His search had continued for most of that next week and he’d ended up finding information that tied Walters to another case from the Comfort Cove area. It didn’t take him ten minutes of convincing to get Walters to tell him what he’d done with the body.

  What he’d found made him puke. And Walters had a last laugh as he told Ramsey that, hypothetically, there could be more victims.

  Ramsey had been a madman ever since, using every spare moment to try to prove that there had been no other victims. He’d searched the bachelor’s house himself, enraged enough, when he found nothing, to tear up floorboards with his bare hands. Underneath them he’d found miscellaneous objects— children’s clothing, a stuffed animal, a pink hairbrush. All in all, he’d come out with a box full of items that had potentially belonged to victims.

  Going through old cases in a six-hundred-mile radius, he’d already matched four cases to Walters. In Massachusetts and out of state, too.

  Walters was in prison awaiting trial on the most recent kidnapping, but since his victim was returned safely, he wasn’t looking at the life sentence without parole that he deserved. And then he’d face trial on the kidnapping and murder of Kylie Jacobs. And on the kidnapping and murder of the other four victims Ramsey had tied him to. One of which had taken place in Massachusetts and would carry the death penalty. Ramsey wasn’t going to rest until the man was dead.

  It was during his investigations into cold abduction cases that he’d met Detective Lucy Hayes from Aurora, Indiana. He’d submitted a request for a box of evidence on an Aurora, Michigan, abduction that wasn’t where it belonged; Lucy had checked out the box for a cold case she was following.

  He’d called her. They’d exchanged case information and had been working together ever since.

  “No,” he said now. “I didn’t find Claire. And I’m no closer to finding out what happened to her box of evidence. How does a box get up and walk out of a vault in the basement of a police facility? How did someone get in the door without a badge, get past security, carry out a box and not get picked up by cameras?”

  Lucy didn’t say anything. Probably knew he was venting. They’d been over it all before.

  “But I did stumble on to something,” he continued. Over the past months he’d grown accustomed to running things by her. He filled her in on the delivery truck.

  “Here’s what I’m thinking,” he continued, speaking in low tones due to the bustle of police business going on around him. “This Frank Whittier had the girl in his car. Probably to keep her out of sight for the few minutes he waited on the truck. Then he hands her over and takes the payoff when the guy sells the baby. Either that, or the two of them are as sick as Walters and then I don’t want to think about what they did with her.” He told her about the two other abductions on meat delivery routes. “I’m checking now to see if there’s any connection to Whittier and the other two kids. We figured Frank didn’t do this alone. So maybe we’ve found his partner.”r />
  “Do you have the driver’s name?”

  “Yeah, but I haven’t found the guy yet. I’m still tracking him down.”

  “This would mean that Claire wasn’t one of Walters’s victims.”

  “That’s right.” Which had become his goal in life—to rule out which children had been Walters’s victims. Each time a case didn’t match up, he was relieved. At the same time, he was driven to find every one of his victims and hang Walters for each and every one of them. He wanted closure for the families. He wanted Walters to pay. And he grieved every single time he hit pay dirt.

  “But whoever took Claire and these other children did something with them,” Lucy said, her voice echoing the sadness that haunted him.

  “Yeah.”

  “Life sucks, doesn’t it?”

  “Seems to.”

  “Keep me posted.”

  “Yeah.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  MORGAN WAS WAITING for Cal’s call at ten o’clock Wednesday night. He hadn’t said he’d call. They weren’t in a relationship—yet—and didn’t talk on the phone as if they were. But in the past, whenever he’d had reason to call, he’d done so at ten. The time seemed to work for both of them.

  And today, he had reason to call.

  At 9:57 p.m. her phone lit up, signaling his call. He was early. She liked that he hadn’t been able to wait, either.

  “Hi.” She hadn’t been able to talk to him after class. She’d had no valid reason to. And this close to the end of the quarter with papers being due, he’d had a lot of students hovering around him, needing his attention.

  “How’d it go?”

  “He made the first cut!” She’d been bursting with the news. “Can you believe it? He’s not even five feet tall and he’s that much closer to playing on the junior high team!”