by Tami Hoag
“Growing up,” Amy mumbled, staring down at the nails her cousin had painted hot pink for her over the weekend. She would have given just about anything to avoid this conversation. She hadn’t spoken more than a dozen sentences to her father since their blow-up over the dating issue. She had held her silent vigil, bolstered by the sure knowledge that he had wronged her. But now not only was she going to have to talk to him, she was going to have start out by telling him something he wasn’t going to want to hear, something that made her feel more like the guilty one instead of one unjustly oppressed.
Dane took Elizabeth’s place on the desk, sitting back against the smooth oak, hands braced on either side of him. “What’s this all about?”
“Trace was with me.” She blurted out the words, heart thundering, eyes trained on her fingernails, hoping that her father would be calm and rational and understanding.
There was a long beat of silence, during which a dozen different scenarios flashed through her head. Then came his voice—low, tight, deceptively soft, like the first distant rumble of thunder before a storm. “What?”
She lifted her chin and faced him, thinking that now she knew what it must have been like for French underground spies to be interrogated by the SS. He stared at her, his face taut, anger simmering in the depths of his eyes. “Trace couldn’t have killed that person because he was with me when it happened.”
Dane held himself perfectly, utterly still, tension tightening every muscle, every sinew, skimming across his nerve endings like a razor. “How could he have been with you? You were home in bed.” Mrs. Cranston had told him that when he had come in. He had even gone up to check on her, only to find her door locked for the second night in a row.
Amy took a deep breath and told the story from beginning to end. How she and Trace had met. How she had been at the VFW baseball game, waiting for him to come, when news of the fight at the Rooster had hit the stands. How she had found Trace at their spot in the woods and invited him to the house to talk. How she had talked him into climbing the oak tree outside her bedroom window.
“We were only talking,” she said, knotting her hands in her lap. “Trace is so sweet and I really care about him. I hated to see him hurting—”
Dane cut her off with a motion of his hand. “After I expressly forbade you to date—”
She bounced ahead on her chair, her face earnest. “It wasn’t a date. We were just—”
“Dammit, Amy, don’t try to argue technicalities with me!” he thundered, pushing himself off the desk. “You knew what I meant.”
“Yes,” she shouted back. “You meant you thought I was a child. Well, I’m not, Daddy!” She came up out of her chair, trembling with anger and fear, her long hair swinging around her shoulders like a rumpled veil. “I’m fifteen. I’m a young woman. Mom understands that, Mike understands, why can’t you—”
Dane saw red at the mention of the man who had usurped his place in his daughter’s life. “I don’t give a damn what Mike Manetti understands,” he snarled. “I’m your father—”
“My father, not my keeper,” Amy said, refusing to back down now that the fight was on. “You can’t force me to stay a child. That’s one thing you can’t manipulate and control, Daddy. I’m going to grow up whether you like it or not.”
“You call asking a boy to sneak into your bedroom growing up?” Dane asked, arching a brow. “I call it childish.”
“I call it trying to have a life when my father doesn’t want to allow it.”
“Oh, and I suppose Saint Mike would allow it?” he sneered, old resentments seeping up through old wounds to burn and sting like acid. “What the hell else does he allow my daughter to do? Throw orgies in the pool house?”
Amy rolled her eyes. “God, now who’s being childish?” she said, shaking her head. She planted her hands on her slim hips, in unconscious imitation of her father’s stance, and took a deep breath to try to calm the emotions roiling inside her, to try to ease the lump of tears in her throat. “Mike sees me for who I am and he trusts me,” she said. “You don’t know who I am. You see only what you want to see. You want me to be your little pal, your little ‘peanut,’ for the rest of my life, because that’s the niche I fit into in your life and God forbid you should have to change or compromise or not get your own way.”
Dane narrowed his eyes. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you didn’t want to live in L.A., so you left. Never mind what Mom wanted or might have compromised on. Never mind that I got left out—”
“Amy, you were a baby!” he exclaimed, wondering how they had veered onto this topic. Wondering how to get off it before all the memories and emotions he had kept penned up inside him all these years found their way out. “You don’t know anything about what went on between your mother and me.”
She stared up at him through a sheen of tears and hurt. “I know you left.”
“Your mother could have come with me. I wanted you with me. Hell, I fought to get you!”
“You fought over me,” Amy declared, feeling that same helplessness, the same worthless frustration and pain she had felt during the divorce. She remembered realizing that Mommy and Daddy had stopped loving each other, and wondering if they would stop loving her too. Tears rolled off her lashes and down her cheeks. She wiped them with the back of her hand. “Like I was a toy or something,” she muttered bitterly. “A prize. Well, I’m not a prize, I’m a person, and I’m growing and changing and having relationships with other people, and if you’re not willing to accept that, Daddy, maybe I should just go home!”
Choking back a sob, she grabbed her purse from the back of the chair and stormed out of the office, slamming the door behind her.
Dane stood there like a statue, feeling old and weak as the anger ebbed away. He heaved a sigh and slicked his hands back over his hair. Why did life have to be so damned complicated, every issue tangling with the next, clouding the big picture, confusing, confounding? One of the things he missed most about football was the simplicity of it, the orderliness. The field was clearly defined, the boundaries absolute, the rules unbending, the enemy instantly recognizable. Goals were set and gone after with logical precision. Why couldn’t life be more like that?
He didn’t think it was an unreasonable request. None of the things he asked for in life seemed out of line—peace, order, his farm, his job, his daughter.
God forbid you should have to change or compromise or not get your own way.
He lifted the picture frame off his desk and stared at his little girl, frozen at eleven, happy, smiling, holding up her hand-lettered sign. I LOVE YOU, DADDY.
His fingers tightened on the frame. That was what he wanted most—for his daughter to love him. He didn’t like to think he had emotional needs, but he couldn’t deny that one. He had been robbed of Amy’s childhood, her presence had been stolen from his daily life. All he got to have of her were photographs and snatches of time. It didn’t seem unreasonable to want to prolong that time in any way he could.
Growing up couldn’t happen fast enough as far as Amy was concerned. She was eager to experience, to sample life, to become an adult. But for Dane that time would go by so quickly. A handful of visits. A series of days. Then she would be gone, with a life of her own, a family of her own. And he would be left with his little cache of memories . . . peace, order, his farm, his job . . .
His job. His mind seized on the words, frantic to escape the emotional mine field. He had a job to do. Drawing in a breath that wasn’t quite steady, he blinked to clear his vision, set the picture frame down, and left the office.
“YOU WERE TOGETHER,” DANE SAID TIGHTLY. “TILL WHEN?”
He watched Trace shift uneasily on his chair and swallow hard, his Adam’s apple bouncing in his throat. “Till about two-thirty.”
Trace watched the muscles work in Sheriff Jantzen’s jaw. He was a dead man now. Messing with the sheriff’s daughter. Jantzen looked mad enough to pull out a big ol’ .44 Magnum,
like Dirty Harry, and plug him right between the eyes. He had told Amy they would get in trouble, but she had begged him to stay, just a little while, and he couldn’t see how any man could look into those big blue eyes of hers and refuse her anything. He couldn’t. He didn’t want to. He was up to his ears in love with her. It was wonderful and terrifying, and now he was going to get his butt kicked because of it.
“We didn’t do anything, Sheriff,” he said, scrambling to allay a father’s worst fears. “Honest, we didn’t. I mean—well, I kissed her—” Jantzen’s nostrils flared. Trace gulped down another knot of fear. “But that was all. My hand to God,” he swore, raising his right hand like a pledge. “We mostly just talked.”
He was telling the truth. That was one thing about Trace, Dane thought as he sat back and rubbed a hand against the band of tension tightening across his forehead. He wouldn’t have had any trouble catching the kid in a lie. Trace was positively beaming with honesty, his eyes wide and imploring Dane to believe him. Dane drummed his fingers against the tabletop and glanced at Elizabeth, who stood off to the side with her arms crossed. She hadn’t had much of anything to say throughout the interview. Hadn’t had a single word for him. She offered nothing now, not anger, not sympathy, nothing.
“Why didn’t you tell me this before, Trace?”
Trace rocked ahead on his chair, pushing his broken glasses up on his nose. “I didn’t want to get Amy in trouble. She said you were being a real hard-ass—” He bit off the word and cursed himself for being dumber than dirt. His face flushed scarlet and he tried again. “I mean, that you thought she was too young and all.”
“Trace, you could have been charged with murder—”
“But I didn’t do it!” he said emphatically. “I figured you’d catch who did and then that would be the end of it. I’d go free and Amy wouldn’t get in trouble with you. All we did was talk . . . mostly—”
Dane lifted a hand to hold off any more revelations. On the scale of bad days, this had to rank up there with the 1979 game against Seattle that could have won the Raiders a wild card berth in the playoffs. He had dropped a sure thing on the twenty-yard line and blown his knee in the ensuing collision with the Seahawks free safety. They lost the game 29 to 24 and he spent the next six months in rehab.
“Please don’t be too mad at Amy, Sheriff,” Trace said earnestly, his young heart aching at the idea of his sweet little Amy weathering the kind of storm her father could undoubtedly unleash. “I take full responsibility. I mean, I’m older than her, and I should have known better, but I . . .”
He shrugged and looked down at his fingernails, not quite able to put into words what he felt when he was with Amy. She was so sunny and sweet, and she got him talking about things he didn’t ever talk about with anybody. Like how he wanted to go to college to become an aerospace engineer, and how much it had hurt to have Brock Stuart reject him. In the few days he’d known her, Amy had become the best friend he’d ever had—besides his mom, and moms fit into a category of their own, so that didn’t count. He wanted to make Jantzen understand, but he had a feeling that wasn’t going to happen, him being Amy’s dad and all.
“I just wanted to be with her,” he mumbled, tamping down all the grand and frightening feelings of first love and compressing them into that one statement. He glanced up at Jantzen through his eyelashes. “I’ll understand if you don’t want me to work for you anymore.”
Dane heaved a sigh. How could he come down hard on a kid who had been willing to go to jail to protect his daughter’s honor? It wasn’t Trace he was disappointed in, but Amy. And maybe not so much Amy as fate, the fate that had separated him from his daughter, the factors that had driven Tricia to want things he couldn’t give her. All of it weighed down on him like a millstone, making him feel too vulnerable, too mortal. None of that was Trace Stuart’s fault.
“I don’t want you climbing in my upstairs windows,” he growled. “But you’re not fired. Amy, however, is likely to be grounded for the rest of her natural life.”
“But Sheriff—”
Dane cut him off with a look. “Don’t push it, Trace.”
“Yessir. Thank you, sir.”
Dane pushed his chair back and rose, feeling old and tired, responsibility hanging on him like a wet woolen robe. He had two murders to solve and a private life that was tumbling around him like a house of cards in a stiff wind. “You’re free to go.”
He looked at Elizabeth, who was still watching him with that even, emotionless expression. “I’d like to talk to your mom for a minute in private.”
Elizabeth pushed herself away from the wall and stepped ahead, nodding to her son. “Wait for me in the car, Trace.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Trace slid out of his chair and followed Deputy Kaufman out of the interrogation room. The door closed and for a moment silence hung like humidity in the air, thick and oppressive. Finally Dane shrugged.
“I’m sorry.”
Elizabeth gave him a smile and shook her head. “It’s not your fault your daughter is growing up to be sweet and beautiful. In fact, I can’t see that you had much of anything to do with that—especially the sweet part.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know what you meant.” She slung her purse strap over her shoulder and started for the door, the last scene they had played out in this room too fresh in her mind. She had all but told him she was in love with him. It didn’t seem smart to stick around and further endanger her dignity. “I’ve got to go,” she said, looking past him. “I’ve got a paper to get out.”
He should have let her go. A smart man would have. “I’m sorry about this mess with Trace. I wouldn’t have put you through it if I could have helped it.”
“You were just doing your job.”
Somehow, when she said it, it didn’t sound like a very good excuse, Dane thought. The separate strands of his life had crossed and tangled—job, fatherhood, friendship, sex. This was just the kind of mess he had diligently avoided for most of his adult life, the kind of mess he would avoid again as soon as he got the lines uncrossed and straightened out.
“I’m sorry if you got the wrong idea—about our relationship.”
Elizabeth bit down on her pain and managed another brave smile. “We don’t have a relationship. We have sex. See there?” she asked, meeting his gaze for one brief, painful second. “Now you’ve got me doing it. Cutting up my life into neat little chunks. Next thing you know, I won’t be able to let any of my foods touch on my plate.”
She sauntered to the door, throwing him a sultry look over her shoulder as she went. “See ya ’round, cowboy. Catch yourself a bad guy. Maybe you’ll get your name in the paper.”
She walked out of the station with her head up and her eyes forward, ignoring the male heads she turned and ignoring the pernicious glare of the ever-diligent Mrs. Worth. She cut through the mob of reporters waiting outside the door, blocking out the noise of the questions they hurled at her, blocking out the feral looks in their eyes with her Ray-Bans.
Trace waited for her in the Eldorado. He had raised the top on the car, shut the windows, and locked the doors to keep the press at bay. Elizabeth slid in behind the wheel, started the engine and the air-conditioning. Without a word she put the car in gear and piloted it away from the courthouse. Neither of them said anything until they were out of town. Then Elizabeth pulled off on a side road and stopped the car.
Trace looked at her, bracing himself for the worst. “I guess you’re pretty pissed at me, huh?”
“I’m not proud that you lied,” Elizabeth said, pulling off her sunglasses and setting them on the dash. She turned toward him with love in her eyes. “But I’m kind of proud of the reason you did it. It wasn’t smart, but your heart was in the right place.”
His brows shot up above the rims of his glasses. “You’re not mad?”
“I don’t want to be mad right now,” she whispered, reaching out to brush his short dark hair. “Right now I jus
t want to be glad to have you sitting here with me instead of in some cell. I want to tell you that in spite of all the mistakes we’ve both made, I’m glad you’re my son.”
Tears brimmed in her eyes and in her throat, thickening her voice. She caught his hand with hers and squeezed it hard, as if she might be able to pass her feelings to him through touch. “Don’t ever think you messed up my life, Trace. Don’t ever think I didn’t want you,” she whispered. “God knows I haven’t had the greatest life to date, but you are the one bright spot. You’re the best thing that ever happened to me, honey. I wouldn’t trade you for anyone or anything in the world.”
A big ball of tears wadded up at the back of Trace’s throat and he knew he had to say something stupid or start crying like a baby. One corner of his mouth hooked upward in a lopsided smile. “Not even for a million dollars and a new Ferrari?”
Elizabeth shook her head, laughing and spilling tears to be quickly wiped away with her free hand. “Not even.”