Someone else from the department offered food. Morgan declined. Her parents ordered and her father added something for Morgan, as well.
She wasn’t going to eat the salad he’d requested.
Cal and Frank had given the police a lead. What did that mean? What could it mean other than that her father’s investigator had been correct in the conclusions he’d drawn from his findings? Frank Whittier had been a danger to Sammie. And Cal had not only lied to her, but he’d also knowingly exposed her son to the potential danger his father represented.
So why did she ache for him still?
Was she that messed up?
Maybe there just hadn’t been time for her heart to assimilate the news that Cal wasn’t a good man.
At the moment, the whys didn’t seem to matter. Sammie was missing. She’d just given up custody of her son. And she needed Cal.
* * *
TENSE AND EXPECTING an interminable wait, Cal was shocked when less than five minutes later, his father and Martin, along with the officers who had driven them and those from a couple of squad cars who’d blocked off the area, came walking back out of the school, en masse.
He reached for the door handle. Sanchez stopped him. Not unkindly, but not gently, either. “Wait,” he said as his arm shot out across Cal’s body.
Straining to see what was going on, to see more than one of his father’s shoulders, he wanted to take down the man beside him. Martin, who was in front of his father now, made a motion.
“Let’s go.” Sanchez opened the door, slid out and held the door open for Cal.
“What’s going on?”
No one was saying much; the officers’ focus was trained on the middle of their entourage. Once he was standing, Cal could see what they saw.
A little boy with tearstained cheeks—Sammie— was being held by his father, his small arms wrapped around Frank’s neck. Frank’s head was bent toward the boy, as though he was speaking to him. As Cal approached, the crowd parted and allowed him to walk right up to the pair.
And that was when it dawned on him that Frank was no longer in handcuffs.
* * *
“SOMETHING’S GOING ON.” Grace, seated on the couch opposite from Morgan, straightened, staring through the window that led out into the hallway of the third floor of the police station.
Morgan didn’t care about bustle in the hallway.
She’d cared even less about the dinner that had been delivered ten minutes before. Or the tea her mother had offered her.
She just needed Sammie safe. That was all. She asked nothing else of fate or God or any powers that be. Just that Sammie be safe.
The door behind her opened. Just as it had when Michael had come in. When the tea arrived. And dinner. And an officer asking them if they needed anything. And Detective Warner.
“Morgan?”
Detective Martin. She swung around.
And there was Sammie. In the arms of the man who’d abducted him?
“What…?”
“Hold on, Mr. Lowen.” Detective Martin held her hand up in front of her and put it against George’s chest as he approached with a menacing look on his face. Holding George back, she motioned Frank into the room.
“I think all of you need to listen to what this young man has to say,” she said, pointing at Sammie. “And then, I hope, this will be the last time we see any of you. At least in this capacity.”
“Sammie?”
Morgan didn’t care what anyone had to say. She needed to feel her son, to know he was real.
Frank put the boy down and Sammie ran to her, his arms wrapping so tightly around her it hurt. Pain had never felt so good. “Oh, my God, Sammie,” she said, and started to sob. She hadn’t shed a tear in hours and now they were flowing as if a dam had broken.
Sammie was crying, too, and his tears put a stop to hers. Sammie hadn’t cried the last time he’d come home to her.
Something was different. Something was wrong.
Avoiding the two men who’d entered the room with the detective and her son, Morgan looked at Elaine Martin. “Where was he? What happened?”
“Ask him.”
“Sammie?”
Vaguely aware that her parents were standing at the couch across from them, Morgan held her son at arm’s length, only so she could look into his sweet, earnest face. And accept whatever news he had to give her.
Sammie glanced back in the direction of the men behind Detective Martin.
“Tell her, son.” Frank Whittier’s voice.
And then, “Trust her.” Cal. Her eyes filled with tears again.
“Talk to me, Sammie.”
“I wasn’t going to run again, Mom, I swear.”
“You ran away?”
“Not really.” His head dropped, his shoulders slumped. “I promised you I wouldn’t and I guess I broke my promise, but it wasn’t like before.” He looked back up at her. “I don’t want to leave you,” he said, starting to cry again, though she could see he was trying as hard as he could to be the man he wanted to be. “I promised I wouldn’t run away from you again and I didn’t.”
Sammie’s back was to her parents so he didn’t see when George sat down. But Morgan saw. And the knot in her stomach started to tighten again.
“Grandpa called me when I was at practice this afternoon,” he said, his brown eyes wide, begging her to believe him.
Morgan looked, not at her father, or her mother, who would always support George, but at Elaine Martin.
The detective nodded. “The phone records were waiting for us when we got back.”
“He told me that you’d agreed to give me up. That you thought it was best.”
That was when Morgan looked at her father. “You promised…”
“You were going to see Cal,” he told her. “You’re so easily swayed. Your judgment betrays you. I wasn’t going to let you change your mind. One way or the other, the boy belongs with me.”
“What I wanted,” she said, loud and clear, “was for you to let me talk to my son about my decisions. You promised.”
“And I would have kept that promise if you hadn’t gone to see Whittier. He was going to try to change your mind. And you’d just admitted that you were in love with him.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to.”
Conscious of the other people in the room, Morgan shook her head and focused again on the son whom she loved with every fiber of her being. “Grandpa called you and then what?”
“I just didn’t know what to do,” he said, the words ending on a high whine.
“I understand, sweetie, just tell me.”
Morgan sat down, pulling Sammie into her arms. With his head cradled against her chest, in a way it hadn’t been since before he’d started kindergarten, he said, “I figured that if, when I ran away from you, that made a court case for them to take me away from you, then if I ran away from Grandpa, that would make another court case for them to take me away from him.”
Out of the mouths of babes. She’d heard the cliché many times. Now it seemed relevant.
Grace stood, crossed over to sit beside Sammie.
He glanced at her, then huddled back against Morgan, his back to his grandmother.
“I knew about this place in the boys’ locker room off the gym. It had rubber mats over it, you know, for walking on when you get out of the shower, but one time last summer when I went in to pee, there was a guy working o
n the showers and he had the mat up and there was this big hole that went down underground. I thought I could hide there.”
In the sewer? Morgan shuddered.
“After Grandpa called, I got scared and I thought of that place and I knew they’d never find me there and so I said I had to pee and I pulled back the rug only enough to get to the cover so it would fall back in place and I used a weight bar to open the metal cover and slid down inside and then closed the cover. But then—” Sammie’s voice broke “—then I knew I’d been really stupid because I didn’t have any food and I’d had to drop down in there and there was no way I could get back up to the lid. It was pitch-black. And…and then I remembered that I’d told Frank where I’d go and I knew that when he heard I was missing, he’d come bring me food. He came, but he didn’t bring food. He brought the police.”
Sammie could have died down in that sewer. If not for…
Morgan looked at Frank Whittier. “You found him?”
The older man bowed his head and then raised it again. “Sammie told me about the hideaway the day of your court hearing. We had our practice before he knew the result of the hearing and he mentioned that he had a place to hide if they took him away from you.”
Even then her son had known where he belonged.
“You saved his life.”
She didn’t dare look at Cal. He’d lied to her. But she’d had no faith in him, either. She’d listened to her father, the man who’d betrayed her, instead of to the man who’d actually cared for her.
“I just…” Frank was interrupted by the peal of Detective Martin’s cell phone.
“Martin… .Yes, Detective Miller… .Yes, I did… .Yes, I did… .Yes… .Well…” There was a long pause and total silence in the room as the detective listened. “Oh!”
Everyone in the room, with the exception of Sammie, who was still resting against Morgan, stared at the detective. And waited for her to speak after she hung up.
“That was Detective Ramsey Miller, from Comfort Cove, Massachusetts,” she told the room at large. “He’s currently looking into the Claire Sanderson abduction in connection with a current case.”
She turned then, and faced Frank Whittier. “That book your son wrote about the abduction that he sent to Miller last week…”
Cal Whittier wrote a book? And sent it to a detective?
He was helping the police when she’d basically accused him of harboring a criminal?
“He mentioned a meat delivery truck in the book. It wasn’t in any of the police reports. It was as normal to your son as the houses and trees, and he didn’t mention it any more than he mentioned the houses and trees he hid behind as he made his way back to your house instead of going to school that morning.”
“I remember the truck,” Frank said. “It stopped three doors down, every Wednesday morning. I don’t remember seeing it that morning.”
“It was there. Detective Miller has been working to track down the driver and they just brought him in this afternoon. He was interviewing the man when I called him earlier. The driver remembers seeing you, Frank,” Detective Martin said, more emotion in her voice than usual. She stopped, looked at the Lowens. “Would you like to do this in private?”
“Under the circumstances—” Frank nodded toward Sammie “—no, I would like everyone to hear what you have to say.”
Morgan glanced only at Frank. The man’s expression was stoic. She couldn’t read him. Did he want Sammie to hear firsthand that he’d done something wrong? Or was he that sure he was about to be exonerated?
“He said he saw Claire in your front yard when he first drove past on his way to make a delivery. He saw Cal, too. He was farther up the street. The little girl caught his attention because the front door was standing open and there didn’t appear to be anyone else around. He was so bothered by a little kid like that, outside all alone, that after he drove around the block to make another delivery he went back by the Sanderson home before continuing with his route. That was when you came out, put your briefcase on the front seat, opened the back door to drop your suit coat on the seat, which is what allowed him to see that the backseat was empty, and you drove off. Which is exactly what you told the police you did. There was no sign of the child, so he assumed you’d taken her back in the house and all was well. He was running late at that point and continued on his way.
“He didn’t know about the child going missing until a couple of days later. He was young then, and partied a lot, and was afraid that if he came forward they’d hold him as a suspect. He knew about the other delivery truck abductions. He said he couldn’t lose his whole life for a crime he didn’t commit just because he’d been trying to do a good thing. He figured they’d clear you when they didn’t find more evidence. Unfortunately our world is full of people who turn a blind eye rather than risk the consequences of getting involved. Apparently this guy at least had enough of a conscience to follow the case and know that you’d never been charged.”
“Frank didn’t do it,” Sammie whispered. Morgan heard her son. She saw Frank Whittier drop down to his knees, his hands on his head.
The older man shuddered and then, from his knees, glanced up at Detective Martin. “I’m exonerated?”
“Yes, sir, you are.” Martin’s eyes glistened with emotion.
And that was when Morgan saw Cal because he fell beside his father, hugging the older man.
Cal turned his head once. His wet eyes met Morgan’s.
And that was when she remembered that she’d signed away her rights to the boy she held.
She glanced toward her mother.
Her mother looked at her. And then at George. When Grace stood, Morgan knew that her mother was going over to her father’s side again. Some things in life she could count on.
But she had Sammie to think about. Sammie to fight for. If her father could sue her for custody, she could sue him back. Sort of like Sammie had said.
“George, Michael didn’t leave here until five,” Grace said, her tone soft. Calm. But firm, too. “Too late to file papers tonight. If you don’t call him, I will.”
Hardly daring to believe what was happening, Morgan looked from one parent to the other. Her mother was not backing down. At all.
Her father still showed no emotion. Not even as he fell from his throne. “I’ll call him,” was all he said as he left the room. Grace went after him, and Morgan didn’t think she would ever forget the words her mother said.
“I’m going to call him, too, just to be sure that George does the right thing.”
As her parents walked out one after the other, Morgan noticed that Cal and Frank had already gone.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
MORGAN MISSED THE LAST day of class. She was allowed to miss one class, so it didn’t matter as far as her grade went. But it mattered to Cal. He’d put a lot of stock in that class, in that meeting.
He’d spent some time on the internet the night before when he and his father, after sharing a couple of beers and a pizza at one of the busiest places in town—just because they could—had returned home. He’d seen a couple of university job postings in Texas and Louisiana that appealed to him. Depending on the outcome of his meeting with Morgan that morning, he intended to apply for them.
Frank wanted to take some continuing education classes, recertify and see if he could put in a few more years of teaching, and possibly coaching, before he retired. He could do that anywhere.
For that matter, he could do it in Tyl
er, if he didn’t want to move with Cal.
It was odd, knowing that Frank didn’t need Cal anymore. His father could live on his own. Get a driver’s license. Have an address. Hell, he could even buy a house, once he got a job so he could qualify for the loan.
When Morgan didn’t show for class, Cal knew he had his answer. He applied for both positions.
A week later, he’d been offered both.
* * *
HER PHONE WAS RINGING. Sitting in the junior high parking lot the second week in August, reading a book while Sammie was inside at practice, Morgan grabbed her cell phone from her purse. Her son wouldn’t be calling unless he was hurt.
She didn’t recognize the number.
“Hello?”
“Morgan? This is Frank Whittier.”
Her heart began to pound. “Hi, Frank, how are you?”
“Good. I’d like to speak with you. Is there a time we can meet?”
She told him where she was, where she’d be for the next hour, and he said he’d be there in ten.
Nine minutes later, Cal’s Durango pulled into the lot next to her and Frank got out. Unlocking her Taurus, she motioned for Frank to get in.
And when he did, she couldn’t stop looking at him. Not just because even in jeans and a polo shirt the man looked distinguished instead of old, but because he was Cal’s father. “You look good.”
“I’ve got a semester of classes ahead of me and then recertification,” he said. “Life is good.”
This from a man who’d been robbed of twenty-five years.
“Good.” She smiled, glad to be with him. “What did you want to talk about?”
“First, Sammie.”
Frowning, she tensed. What about Sammie? If her son had thought her overprotective before, it was nothing compared to the watchful eye she kept now that she fully accepted the responsibility that came with his being the grandson of a very rich man. But so far, there had been no complaints from the little man.
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