She’d let her mother down. And she’d let herself down. She wasn’t going to bring Allie back. She wasn’t going to be able to save Sandy, as she’d always told herself she would do. She couldn’t give her mother a happy ending. She wasn’t ever going to know who Sandy had been before the rape. Before she’d lost Allie.
“You’re at a crossroads, Lucy. One that most female cops come to at some point or other. You either shut down and eventually lose what made you a good cop to begin with, or you learn how to be a cop and a woman at the same time.”
It wasn’t Amber’s words so much as the honest and warm look in the woman’s eyes that reached Lucy.
“What was your crossroads?” she asked.
“I answered a call for a baby who wasn’t breathing. The mom called it in. I listened to the 9-1-1 recording—she was frantic. I got there. The baby was blue, but worse, she had these marks around her neck. I was sick to my stomach and needed to console the mother, and then I realized she didn’t even see that her baby had been hurt. It didn’t take an hour to build the case. The mother, probably in a postpartum depression, tried to quiet her own newborn daughter by grabbing her around the throat. She held the baby, rocking her, crying, begging her to be okay, and I had to collar her.”
“Did the baby live?”
“Yeah. And miraculously without brain damage. She’s in second grade now and excelling in every way.”
Another happy ending. “That’s great!” Lucy said, truly happy for the little girl, and for the mother, who’d acted out of illness but whose daughter meant everything to her in the world.
“Yeah. She’s living with her aunt and uncle. They’re her legal guardians since her mother’s in prison for assault and battery on a minor.”
“But you said she was suffering from postpartum depression… .”
“The jury returned a guilty verdict and the judge gave her fifteen to life. And the night after sentencing, when I left the courtroom, was my crossroads. I am a woman. I don’t have children of my own, but I hope to someday. As that poor mother was taken from the courtroom, sobbing for her baby, I wanted to die knowing that it was partially because of my testimony that she was going away. I’d done my job well enough to get a conviction.”
“What did you do then?” Lucy asked.
“I went to a bar, got drunk, met a man who was more than willing to hold me, went to a hotel with him intending to have mind-numbing sex and ended up spending the night sobbing in his arms. I’m a good cop. I’m capable of getting the job done. And when the case is heartbreaking, I cry.”
She would never have guessed it.
Amber Locken cried.
Cal Whittier, dressed in jeans and a button-down shirt under a long-sleeved blue sweater, hardly resembled the man who’d been with Emma Sanderson that day she’d brought in hair ribbons containing her sister’s DNA providing the means to prove, one way or the other, if Claire Sanderson had been one of Peter Walters’s victims.
The man who stood before him, holding a brown paper sack rolled down from the top, was relaxed. At ease. His eyes met Ramsey’s with a peace that was noticeable. His hair was longer, too.
Ramsey looked for a wedding ring on the other man’s left hand and noted there was none. Had his fiancée, who was the single mother of a ten-year-old boy, wised up? Did she know that Cal was covering for his criminal father?
“I brought you something, Detective,” Whittier said, holding out the bag. “I was going to give it to Emma, but Morgan insisted that you might be able to use it. And this morning, when I asked Emma, she said the same. I don’t think it’ll help, but if it does, then I am with them one hundred percent in wanting you to have it.”
Leary, Ramsey took the bag.
“You and Morgan set a date yet?” Ramsey asked.
“January 18,” the professor replied with a smile. “Society weddings require a bit of time to plan and prepare for.”
“I wouldn’t have figured you for a society wedding.” Whittier was the most private man Ramsey had ever met.
“I’m not. And neither, incidentally, is Morgan. But if that’s what it takes to keep the family intact, and to get her old man to walk her up the aisle and give her over to me, then I’m game.”
So they were still engaged. And had her family’s blessing.
Would the Lowens still be as willing to put on the big public bash when the fiancé’s father was called out for abducting a little girl?
And why didn’t Ramsey feel any better about knowing that the wedding would soon be off?
“What’s in the bag?” he asked, holding up the brown paper.
“Claire’s teddy bear.”
What? Ramsey peeled open the bag and looked inside. He’d have pulled out the brown bear—something Claire had, reportedly, refused to have out of her sight—if he’d had gloves on.
“How did you get this?”
The bear had been found in Frank Whittier’s car after Claire had gone missing. Everyone in the family had reported that Claire had been trying to feed the bear breakfast the morning of her disappearance. And then the bear had turned up underneath the seat in Frank’s car.
It had been logged in as evidence, but it’d been missing from the box of forensic evidence that was stolen and later recovered from Emma’s ex-fiancé. The evidence that was, at that moment, at the DNA office in Boston waiting for further testing.
“I guess you could say I stole it,” Cal said, his face serious. “When Claire disappeared, they brought us all down here to the police station.”
Cal had been here, in Ramsey’s building, while Ramsey had been a child running around on the farm in Vienna, Kentucky.
“They put me in a room,” Cal said. “They gave me French fries and anything else I wanted to eat. They brought in a counselor. And they asked me questions about Claire and my dad.”
Ramsey had read about the meeting in the writings he’d confiscated from Cal in August. And in police reports.
“The container of evidence they were collecting was on the counter,” he said. “I saw Claire’s bear there. And when I was left alone for a couple of minutes, I took it. I was scared to death, for her and for me and Emma, too. I thought about how Claire wasn’t afraid as long as she had that bear. And I guess I thought that if I kept the bear safe for her, she’d come to get it. And in the meantime, Emma and I would be safe, too.”
The elevator binged and the doors opened. Kim got off. She gave Cal a curious look, smiled at Ramsey and went on into the squad room.
“I hid the bear in my jacket, brought it home with me and have kept it hidden ever since.”
Ramsey frowned. “Your father never knew you had it?”
“Nope. No one did until I showed it to Morgan. And then, this morning, to Emma.”
“Has Frank seen it?”
“No.”
“Is he here with you?”
“No. I came early because Emma and Chris have asked me to officiate their wedding and I had to get a single-use certification to do so. My father and Morgan are due in on Friday.”
“You said you showed the bear to Emma. Have you seen Rose, as well?”
The professor hadn’t visited his one-time almost-stepmother during his last visit to town. From what Emma had told Lucy, Cal hadn’t yet forgiven Rose for turning on his father.
“Not yet. We’re having dinner tonight.” Cal didn’t seem all that eager.
Because Rose had done him a great disservice? Or because, even now, he knew that his father had done the worst disservice to Rose?
“Will Sammie be coming with Frank and Morgan to the wedding?” Morgan’s ten-year-old son reportedly adored both Frank and Cal.
“No. He’s spending the weekend with his grandparents. With Frank and Rose seeing each other for the first time since we…left Comfort Cove…we just figured Frank deserved a bit of time to deal with things without having to keep up appearances for Sammie’s sake.”
Maybe Cal Whittier knew that there was a chance his fat
her would be arrested upon his return to Comfort Cove and he hadn’t wanted Sammie to witness that.
But Ramsey was beginning to believe that Cal really was what he seemed. A good man who only wanted to do what was right.
A man who’d been a seven-year-old child the day Claire Sanderson had been abducted. One who truly did not know if his father had anything to do with the little girl’s disappearance.
Had the older man played his son, just as he was playing the rest of them?
Thanking Cal for the package and telling him he looked forward to seeing him on a much happier occasion that weekend, Ramsey returned to the squad room with one thought in mind.
To get the bear to the lab for testing against the sample of water taken from the storm sewer near Claire Sanderson’s home. And to have it checked for prints, too. By most accounts, the bear had been in Claire’s possession when the kidnapper had grabbed her.
Ramsey could almost promise whose prints they’d find.
Of course, Frank Whittier would claim that his prints were on the bear because he’d lived with the little girl, had picked it up to tuck it into bed with her. Or some similar, logical explanation.
But Frank’s days of skating the law due to too little evidence were almost through.
Cal Whittier had delivered his father to the police twentyfive years before. And he might have just unwittingly done so again.
And this time, the police weren’t stopping short of a conviction.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
L ucy traced her finger over chubby rosy cheeks. Those big blue eyes…they held nothing but joy. Allison Elizabeth Hayes. That image had always been her strength, her drive. She felt that her sister had been calling out to her to take care of their mother and never to stop looking until she’d found Allie.
At home in her bedroom, she sat cross-legged on the floor with a small wooden box open in front of her. Inside were the only photos they had of Allie. Sandy had been poor and single, without close family, when she’d had Allie. Back in the day when people had to not only own a camera but pay to have film developed.
After the rape, Sandy had rid herself of everything that reminded her of the daughter she’d lost. She couldn’t cope with the reminders. Her doctor had suggested that she pack them away until the grief and anger passed. Sandy had given them away instead. Only these few photos had survived. They’d been in Lucy’s possession since she was four. She’d seen her mother going through the box and crying, with a fifth of liquor in her other hand. That night, after Sandy had passed out, she’d taken the box into her room and hidden it.
Sandy had never asked her about the box.
Lucy had never fessed up to what she’d done.
Ironically, here she was, twenty-some years later, sitting
on her own bedroom floor, just as Sandy had been that night, looking at the same pictures, with the same agony eating away at her.
The only difference between then and now, between mother and daughter, was the bottle of booze. And the truth.
Tears dripped down Lucy’s cheeks, wetting her new scar, before dripping off her chin. Her stitches were gone. The swelling was gone.
Had it only been four days since she’d found that bone?
Allie’s bone. She’d held her sister in her hand.
She’d promised herself she wouldn’t cry. She wasn’t going to lose control again. She wasn’t going to end up like Sandy.
And looking at that picture, the sweet little face, the companion she’d carried in her heart her whole life, she sobbed a bit more. Allison Elizabeth Hayes had been an innocent baby who’d brought joy into the world. How could anyone extinguish that joy?
Why?
Maybe, if she knew what had happened…if she could understand—
Her phone rang, startling her, bringing her back from that long-ago day in the woods. She was home early. It could be Sandy having noticed her car… .
She couldn’t talk to her mother in this state.
It was Ramsey.
“Hello?” She tried her best to sound normal.
“You called. Are you crying?”
Lying seemed pointless. “Yeah. They identified the body. It was Allie.”
She wasn’t fighting the news. Wasn’t even shocked.
She didn’t know what she was.
“Oh, Luce, I’m sorry.” And then, “Lord, I wish I was closer.”
The emotion she heard in his normally even tone wrapped around her, and she cried a little harder.
“I didn’t know her,” she said. “How can I love someone I never even met?”
“She was your sister, Lucy. You loved her memory, if nothing else.”
With her favorite picture of baby Allie in her lap, Lucy traced the cheeks again. “All my life I’ve felt as though Allie was out there someplace, speaking to me, giving me the strength to take care of Mama and get to her so that we could all be together again. It’s like both of them were counting on me, and when I’d look at Allie’s picture, I’d feel the joy emanating from her, and I’d know I could come through for them.”
She wasn’t sobbing anymore, but the tears hadn’t completely stopped falling. She wiped her nose, looking down at the box.
“It’s why I kept looking, never letting up, because I could hear her calling to me. Where other girls had best friends and confidantes, I had Allie. When I was younger I’d talk to her sometimes, like she was really there. Yet in truth, Allie was never out there. She was never more than a six-month-old baby who died way too soon. I didn’t have a big sister calling to me all these years, giving me the strength to go on.”
“Your own strength kept you going.”
“Then why do I feel so bereft? Like I just lost my best friend? My lifelong companion?”
“You know I don’t believe in much I can’t see, or eventually prove, but I don’t discredit the chance that you’ve had that companion all these years, just as you say. They say that aside from flesh and bones we all have spirits—something that lives on after our bones return to the earth. Maybe it’s not Allie’s body that’s been calling to you, Luce. Maybe it’s her spirit. And maybe she led you to her bones the other night so that you could stop looking for her. Maybe it’s her way of telling you its time to get on with your life.”
She hadn’t thought it possible for anyone to ease the agony in her heart. She’d been wrong.
“You really think so?”
“I know that there’s more to life than bones and death.” “God, I hope you’re right.”
“I don’t believe you imagined what you felt.”
She didn’t, either, not deep down. But to think she had to let go…
“If what you say is true, then I haven’t lost anything, really, have I?” she asked. “I mean, if Allie’s spirit has been talking to me all these years, it’s not like she’s going to suddenly abandon me. Because she’s no worse off today than she was twenty-five years ago. And I don’t need her any less, either.”
“The only thing you’ve lost is the hope of seeing her in the flesh in this lifetime.”
“I really had counted on that,” she said, pulling the box of photos onto her lap, cradling it. “Crazy, huh? I’m a cop. I work cold cases. I know more than most that I had little chance of seeing Allie alive. But I still believed I would. I really thought we were one of those miracle statistics and that that was what she was telling me.”
Sniffling, she studied the baby’s photo.
What happened to you, little one? What do you need me to know?
“How’s your mother?”
“Drinking, but not heavily yet. She’ll be drunk tomorrow.” She’d spoken to Sandy on the way home, telling her that she’d been to the grocery store and would be over first thing in the morning to help with Thanksgiving dinner preparations.
She had a pie to make later that night. Her mother, largely, did the rest.
“I figured, with Allie—”
“Oh, I’m not telling her. At least, not yet,” she
said, putting the pictures back in the box, closing the lid and tucking it into the bottom drawer of her nightstand so that Allie could watch over her at night. And calm the bad dreams. Just like Lucy had always done for Sandy.
“The holidays are always hard enough. It would do her in to have a double whammy. And there’s no reason that she has to know right away. Why take away another week or two of hoping for her? Todd is going to need to interview her at some point regarding the place where we found Allie. I’ll need to take her out there, see if she remembers anything. But not today.
“Wakerby is already out on bail and until they have enough to bring him in on—”
“It’s okay, Luce. I understand. You don’t have to justify anything to me. I’d have made the same decision. Especially with tomorrow being a holiday.”
Lucy stopped at her living-room window and looked over at her mother’s house. The television was on. She could see the screen through the sheers. Marie drew the heavy drapes at night, but she always opened them during the day, insisting that daylight was a balm to Sandy.
She was probably right.
“I’m being selfish,” she announced, watching that window. She wanted to be as devoted as Marie. She’d tried. She just couldn’t cope with Sandy 24/7. “I’m not telling her right now because if I do she’ll have a relapse and I’ll have to cancel my trip to Comfort Cove.”
She wasn’t going to miss Emma’s wedding.
Nor a chance to see Ramsey.
“I think you should come early.”
“I’d love to, but…” she answered automatically, without forethought.
“You’ve had a rough few days. You need some time to grieve, to process, without worrying about your effect on your mother. You shouldn’t be dealing with this all alone. Especially after today.”
After she’d found out that Allie was really dead, he meant. Because she was. She was never going to get to meet the big sister that she’d been loving all of her life. Tears came to her eyes again and, leaving the window, she blinked them away.
“I don’t know if I can get my flight changed.” Spend more than one night with Ramsey? In her weakened state?
The Truth About Comfort Cove Page 21