“Hell,” Maggie muttered, covering her face with her hands.
“Things going that well?” Kyle entered the small office off her master bedroom, carrying a tray with a pot of tea and a plate of pastries that smelled delicious. She'd not only bought herself a teakettle, but a teapot, too, ordering them online. She even paid for overnight shipping.
“Earl Grey and walnut scones,” he announced. Without asking, he poured her a cup and served her two flaky triangles of pastry on a turn-of-the-century flowered plate.
“Pull up a chair.” She reached for the tea. She’d been living on Kyle’s tea and breads since the accident. It was the only thing she could keep down.
“Don’t mind if I do.” He slid a leather armchair across the hardwood floor to the front of the desk and made himself a cup of tea.
“You don’t have to keep coming over here and making me food,” she said, relieved that he did.
“It’s not for you, dear. You’re just an excuse to use that fancy oven of yours.” He licked the crumbs from his fingers. “So how goes the baby search?”
“It goes not,” she said glumly. “No one will tell me anything. It’s as if I imagined the whole thing. I can’t even get the hospital to admit I was there.”
He eyed her over the brim of his teacup. “Thought about asking your mother if she could remember anything? You said she took care of the paperwork.”
“Cold day in hell,” she snapped.
He sat back quietly in his chair and sipped his tea.
She waited for her blind fury to pass before she spoke. “I’m sorry,” she said softly, genuinely so. “I’m not angry with you. I’m angry with her, with myself.”
“You were a baby yourself.” He didn’t make the statement as an excuse, only as truth.
“You’re right. I was.” She traced the gold filigree paint that rimmed her teacup and sighed heavily. “Anyway, I don’t think I can discuss it with my mother. I know it doesn’t make sense, but I just can’t do it. It hurts too much. We’ve never spoken of the matter. Not one word has ever passed between us. I don’t know that it ever will.”
“Not even if you find your daughter?”
“I don’t know,” she answered.
He cradled his teacup thoughtfully. “Maggie, are you sure you really want this information?”
She glanced up in surprise. “Of course I do.”
“It hasn’t just been a way to keep your mind off Stanley and Jordan?”
She swallowed a mouthful of warm tea, giving his suggestion careful consideration before she answered him. “It has, but it isn’t. I told you, I should have done this years ago. I threw myself into my studies and then into my career to get away from the whole mess. But I was kidding myself to think I could go the rest of my life pretending it never happened.”
There was a long, quiet pause, giving them both time to think, before he spoke again. “Tell me something. If we ...you do locate your daughter, what are you going to do then? Have you thought about that?”
She had. “I intend to contact her parents, tell them who I am and where they can reach me. Kyle”—she leaned across the desk—“she’s fourteen years old now, almost fifteen. She’s got to be asking questions about me, wondering who I am, why I gave her away.”
“If her parents have told her she’s adopted.”
She set her cup down hard on the blotter and tea spilled into the saucer. “You’re certainly being Mr. Supportive.”
“I’m playing devil’s advocate.” He reached for another scone. “It’s my job.”
A few notes of a Jimmy Buffett tune played in her head and she had to smile. Kyle was right. It was his job to keep her in line, to keep her thinking reasonably.
She met his gaze. “I have to try. Can you understand that? Even if they turn me away cold. At least then, if she ever tries to find me later, I’ll be able to tell her I attempted to contact her. She’ll know I cared about her.” She nibbled on the scone. “It happens all the time, you know. Women adopted as babies grow up, have children of their own, and feel a part of their life is missing. They track down their mothers and are reunited.”
“With mothers who are doing ten to twenty in the state pen.”
She grimaced. “Very funny. I’m not in the state pen, at least not yet. And I’m not the kind of mother a teenage girl would be ashamed of.”
“But you’re not her mother, Maggie dear,” he said softly. “Not anymore.”
She stared into the amber liquid of her teacup. His words cut her to the quick. But he was right, damn him. He was right. She stood, pressing her hands on her desk. “Want to go for a walk on the beach?” All of a sudden the room felt stuffy. She felt hemmed in.
“Sure.”
They started down the beach, walking north. Though it was a Tuesday morning, the beach was already beginning to fill with vacationers hoping to catch a few extra hours of the sun’s rays.
They walked side by side for two blocks before Maggie spoke again. “I understand what you’re saying about me not being her mother. I really do. I didn’t change her diapers, nurse her through the chickenpox, or watch her in the school Christmas play.” She struggled to keep the emotion out of her voice. “But she came from my body, Kyle. You can’t imagine what that’s like.”
“No, I can’t imagine, and I won’t pretend I do.” He took her hand and squeezed it. “I just don’t want you to set yourself up for a fall. I don’t want you hurt any more than you already are.”
She nodded, appreciating the feel of another’s touch. She missed the feel of Jordan’s little hand in hers. She even missed the feel of Stanley’s arm draped casually over her shoulder. She felt so alone.
“I’m not saying it won’t hurt. I just feel as if this is a part of life I need to settle before I can go on.”
Maggie halted along the outgoing shoreline to watch a teenage girl with reddish-blond hair kneeling in the sand. She was building a sandcastle on the edge of the surf, a whole bucket full of serious sandcastle tools at her side. A pair of sunglasses worn like a headband held her hair out of her face. She had to be a local.
“Think she’s fourteen?” Maggie asked softly, not really looking for answer. “Probably not.” She chuckled. “No fluorescent blue eye shadow or headphone attached to her head.”
“Come on.” Kyle tugged on her hand, turning her back the way they’d come. “Got time to meet someone?”
She turned away from the girl. “Who?”
“An old friend. He runs a pottery shop on the avenue.”
“I don’t need any pottery right now.”
“He sells pottery for a living, but he’s a real computer geek. A superior hacker, I’m told.”
She halted. Cold water ran over her bare feet. “A computer hacker? What do I want with a computer hacker?”
He lifted one shoulder and his neatly ironed yellow polo shirt rippled. “Surely there are hospital records. You just need access to them.”
Maggie’s eyes widened. “Kyle Dickerson! That’s illegal.”
“So you’re not interested?”
“Of course I am.” She released his hand and took off down the beach, calling over her shoulder. “Race you to the car!”
~~~
“Taylor!” Jarrett McKay leaned on the rail of the living room deck of his parent’s beach house and studied the beach. He cupped his hands around his mouth and hollered again. “Taylor!”
“I’m coming. I’m coming!” He heard his daughter’s voice rise from somewhere below the deck.
The outside shower came on, and then turned off. A minute later his daughter appeared, in denim shorts and a T-shirt, hair tousled, her bare feet wet. Perched on her freckled nose was a pair of very chic black cat’s-eye sunglasses. “You should come down and see the castle I made, Dad.” She pushed the glasses up on the bridge of her nose. “It’s got turrets and everything.”
He glanced out over the dunes toward the ocean. “Tide coming in?”
She frowned, lookin
g up at him. “Going out. You don’t think I’d spend an hour on a castle if the tide was coming in, do you?”
He grinned. Miss Logical. That was his Taylor. “How about you come help me unpack for a while? Then we’ll go down and see it together. Deal?”
“We couldn’t do it now?”
“No whining. You know how I feel about whiny female voices.” He hooked a thumb in the direction of the living room that was in utter chaos, even for his living room. “First work, then play.”
Taylor groaned. “Work, work, work, that’s all I do is work.” She tossed her shoulder-length strawberry-blond hair in an exaggerated gesture. “I’m nothing but a Cinderella to you.”
“Grab a box from the truck on your way up, Cindy.”
Jarrett returned to the living room, not wanting to hear his daughter’s reply. His parents had warned him it wouldn’t be easy raising a girl once she was a teenager, but they didn’t know the half of it.
With a sigh, Jarrett paused in the middle of the living room that overlooked the ocean. The previous year he'd purchased the house from his parents, who had moved to Florida. Then, after much soul-searching, he had decided to move from Philadelphia to the Delaware beach town and get settled before the school year began.
In the fall, Taylor would be starting her sophomore year of high school, and a public school in Delaware was more suited to his daughter’s needs and personality than the private high school she was attending in Philadelphia. Besides, both of them were happier at the beach than in the city. It was quieter, at least through the school year, and the lifestyle was less hectic. Jarrett and Taylor had always spent summers here, even when she was a baby, but it had been both their dreams to take up residence permanently in the little town of Talbany Beach.
Jarrett knew he was fortunate to have a job that allowed him to work anywhere. It was one of the advantages of being a small business owner. He’d have to make monthly trips to his main office in Philadelphia, but most of the work could be handled from here by means of his computer, a fax, and the extra phone line he’d already had installed.
“Where do you want this?” Taylor appeared at the top of the stairs, her face blocked by a huge cardboard moving box.
“What does it say?”
“Kitchen.”
“Then my guess would be—”
“Umm . . . the kitchen.” She laughed.
He chuckled over her silliness with her. He and Taylor had their battles. She was stubborn, still immature at times, and had a flair for dramatics. But she was a good kid, bright, articulate. She didn’t smoke or drink and she came home on time. She was a straight A student with a love of history, especially anything medieval. He was proud of her and loved her fiercely. Being a single parent wasn’t easy, but he had never regretted his decision, not once in all these years.
“This thing is heavy, Dad.” She dropped the box onto the counter. “What have you got in it?”
He grabbed one end of a bookcase standing in the center of the room and began to drag it across the carpet to a wall. Halfway across the room, one end came off, but he shoved it back on—another one of his projects that hadn’t quite gone together as it should have. “I don’t know. Open it. Check inside.” He pushed the shaky bookcase against the wall and located a box marked “books.” “Put it away, while you’re at it.”
She picked up a utility knife from the counter and cut open the box. “Hey, Dad.”
He sat on the floor. “Hey, Taylor.”
“Dad, what was she like?”
He didn’t have to ask who she was. He knew whom she meant. It seemed as if ever since Taylor had turned into a teen she’d been obsessed with her mother. “I’ve told you. She was pretty. She was smart. She was fun. She was just like you.”
“Pretty!” she scoffed. “That doesn’t tell me anything. Pretty like cute? Pretty like a Greek goddess? Or was she more a classic beauty like Audrey Hepburn? I don’t understand why you don’t have any pictures of her. That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard of, not having pictures of your wife. When I grow up and get married, I’m going to make my husband take pictures of me. That way if I die, my kids will know what I looked like.”
He let her rattle on because it was the easiest thing to do. By trial and error, he’d discovered that allowing her to ramble until she ran out of steam was the quickest to way to move on, leaving the subject behind.
Jarrett didn’t like talking about Maggie. He didn’t even like thinking about her, but for Taylor’s sake he knew he had to keep his feelings hidden from her. There was no need for Taylor to know any of the sordid truth about her mother. She had been pretty and smart and fun, and that was the memory he wanted Taylor to carry with her always.
“Of course, when I get married,” Taylor continued as she placed glasses in the cupboard beside the sink, “I’m not going to have one child. I think it’s terrible to have only one child.” She placed her hand dramatically on her breast. “A burden too heavy for some children to bear.”
He hid a smile of amusement as he shoved books into the bookshelf. His laughter would only encourage her.
“One box down,” she said as she tossed the empty box into a pile in the corner of the living room. She placed her hands on her narrow hips and rolled her eyes as she surveyed the room. “And only a hundred zillion or so to go.”
“So, what are you waiting for?” He reached for another armful of books. “Grab another box, Cindy.”
Chapter 7
Maggie drove down the avenue where Kyle’s men’s clothing store was located, searching frantically for a parking space. Someone pulled out in front of her, and she hit her horn.
“Come on, come on,” she murmured. “There’s got to be one space. One lousy parking space.”
She’d already passed his shop twice, riding up the avenue to the ocean boardwalk and looping back around again. Every parking space was taken by vacationers trying to cram in a little shopping while still getting time on the beach. Maggie never came down the avenue during peak season unless it was to see Kyle. It was just too stressful.
She spotted backup lights on a vehicle three parking spaces ahead of her. Was someone leaving, or was the driver just resting his foot on the brake while he waited for passengers to unload? “Please, please,” she whispered. “Please be going home.”
She had to get to Kyle’s shop. In less than a week, his hacker friend had found information on the adoption of her daughter. But Kyle wanted to tell her what had been discovered in person, not on the phone. He had wanted to wait until tonight over dinner, but she would be working. She had to know now.
The line of cars eased slowly ahead of her. She flipped on her right blinker. What luck, she thought optimistically, still not knowing for sure she would get the space. Only a block from Kyle’s shop.
The driver of the car in front of her, a woody station wagon with Pennsylvania plates and beach chairs tied to the luggage rack, braked suddenly and came to a stop.
“What now?” she murmured. “You can’t just stop here.” She lifted her hands off the wheel. “You can’t stop in the middle of the street.”
A chubby teen walked between two parked cars, carrying drinks and a bucket of fries. The car was apparently waiting for him and lunch.
She tapped on the leather steering wheel of her car. “Come on, come on.” She glanced at her Timex. Stanley had bought her a beautiful Rolex, but it didn’t have a second hand. What physician could work without a second hand, for Pete’s sake?
The rear door of the station wagon popped open and a Coke can tumbled out.
The driver behind Maggie laid on his car horn.
She gripped the wheel, glancing into her rearview mirror. “What do you want me to do? Drive over him?”
The teen passed the fries and drinks to someone inside the car. He went down on one knee to pick up the soda can.
Maggie turned the fan up on the air-conditioning and a blast of cold air hit her in the face. If someone else took the
parking space before she got into it, she didn’t know what she’d do. Double park? Pull up on the sidewalk? She was beyond reason now.
She watched the teen hitch up his sagging knee-length surf shorts and stand, can in hand. “Good boy,” she congratulated. “Littering is bad. Awful. Now get in the flippin’ car!”
She stared at the still empty parking space just beyond her grasp. The brass ring.
The boy jumped into the back seat. The wagon rolled forward and Maggie eased her green Jag into the parking space.
She leapt out of the car, taking a handful of quarters with her. She dropped two into the meter. Slinging her purse over her shoulder, she took off down the sidewalk, dodging strollers and sunburned couples walking hand in hand, window shopping.
This is it, she thought. He has something; Kyle knows where I can find my daughter. This is it!
She was so scared she was afraid she was going to pee her pants.
“Kyle!” Maggie burst into Black Tie White Polo and rushed past a mannequin wearing a white tennis sweater and tasteful navy shorts and holding a tennis racket.
She spotted Kyle near a display of dress socks. He held up one finger. He was with a customer.
She took a deep breath and walked to the counter. An elderly gentleman, one of Kyle’s employees, Mr. Rolfson, was ringing up a tie with sand buckets on it for another customer.
“Afternoon, Mr. Rolfson.”
Her heart pounded in her chest. Despite the chill in the store, her palms and the back of her neck were sweaty.
“Dr. Turner. So sorry for your loss,” the gray-haired gentleman said kindly.
She smiled hesitantly. The condolences were still hard, but they were getting easier. At least she wasn’t bursting into tears in public now. “Thank you. I appreciate it.”
Kyle approached the counter, carrying two pairs of socks, two shirts, and a tie. “Tony, would you ring this up for me?” He glanced at Maggie. “Maggie and I will be in the back.”
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