As it was, he was on full alert. He had two goals. First and foremost, get Ethan and Miranda into his car and disappear with them. The second, do it without anyone getting hurt.
He’d take down the older man if he had to. His gun was loaded and in the back of his jeans.
He didn’t want Ethan to witness any violence. Miranda had sacrificed her entire life so her son could grow up free of violence.
As he turned off the car in Park, he felt a second’s hesitation. He was risking everything.
The chief could be telling the truth. His story had been convincing enough that Miranda had given up. Or maybe she’d given up because he’d been telling the truth.
He’d seen the psychiatrist’s letter. And the rest of the paperwork her father had left behind in his file.
Miranda had had a psychotic break when she was eleven. And again at sixteen. She’d grieved beyond her ability to cope.
Maybe because her father had been beating her?
There’d been a report of a broken arm. She’d fallen off the monkey bars at school. At the age of twelve.
And the same arm had been broken a second time, in a different place, when she’d missed a step in the dark at sixteen. She’d been going outside to take out the trash and missed the last step. That kind of thing happened.
“Come on, Tad, let’s go in! I wanna tell Mom about the cell I got to walk in.”
He wasn’t so sure Miranda would be pleased to hear her son’s excitement at being in an actual jail cell. As a guy, he got it. The boy wasn’t imagining himself ever being locked in one. It was just cool to see stuff that was on television. To see where they kept the bad guys after they caught them all.
With one last check to make sure his gun was in place, he followed Ethan into the house.
* * *
When Miranda saw Tad and Ethan get out of the car, she zipped up the bag she’d been filling—the backpack from under her bed, which now held more money and her and Ethan’s favorite things, in addition to one change of clothes for each of them. The pajamas had to go. As did most of the food. She’d kept the jerky, some applesauce and a package of sandwich meat.
That should all make it through security. If it got that far.
Her father had allowed her privacy to pack, and was waiting for her in the living room.
“You want him to like you?” she asked him as Tad and her son came up the front walk.
“He will.”
“You want him to like you, call him Ethan. And let him get to know you a bit before you tell him who you are.”
She’d purposely waited to make that suggestion. He’d listen, or not. Without giving him time to assess, she had a better chance that he’d take her advice.
He wasn’t a stupid man.
“Mom! Guess what?” Ethan came barreling in the front door with Tad right behind him. And then, seeing Brian O’Connor, stopped.
“Who are you?”
“He’s someone I knew before you were born,” Miranda said, coming forward to draw her son closer to the man she wanted him farthest away from.
Play the game, she reminded herself. It was the only way to free her son.
“This is Chief O’Connor. He’s a fire chief. So now, today, you saw a police station and you get to meet a fireman.”
“Cool!” Ethan looked his grandfather up and down. “You’re kinda old to slide down poles.”
Her father knelt down, reaching out to draw a light hand across Ethan’s jaw. “I can teach you how to do it if you want,” he said, grinning.
Because she couldn’t bear to see the awe on her son’s face, Miranda looked at Tad, expecting to see his beaming approval. If that was the case, she couldn’t really blame him. He’d been under her father’s influence long before he’d ever met her. And Chief O’Connor told a convincing story with credible “proof.”
The truth would come out in the end. She had no doubt of that. If she didn’t get away, he’d hit her again. Maybe even kill her.
But then it would be too late to protect Ethan from the residual effect of living with violence. She wanted her son to grow up with the ability to trust others. The cycle of violence stopped with her. She’d promised herself.
Tad wasn’t looking at Ethan and her father. He was watching her. Intently.
“Well, if we’re ready to go...” the chief began.
“Go?” Ethan asked, frowning at her.
“Remember that vacation I talked to you about?” She said the first thing that came to mind. “You wanted to go to Disneyland or Yellowstone, remember?”
“Yeeaahh.”
“Well, how about we go to North Carolina instead?”
“Why?” Ethan frowned again. “And you said a weekend trip. What about school?”
It wasn’t that the boy loved going to school. But his life was routine. He expected that.
“I’m going to head to the little boys’ room, and then we’ll go.” Her father took that chance to bug out of the awkward conversation, leaving her to be the bad guy.
As he left the room, he sent a look to Tad, as if to say, they’re in your care.
Telling Tad to watch them, she was sure.
Miranda had no doubt he’d had someone in California draw up appropriate paperwork to at least get her into some kind of mental health facility for a check. After all, he would’ve argued, what woman just up and ran, changing her identity, for no reason?
He’d used her earlier trauma, incident-induced and long gone, to lay doubt with others about her current mental state. It was cruel in the extreme.
And he’d already let her know, the night she’d run all those years ago, that in North Carolina, as in most states, grandparents could go to court to be granted visitation rights.
“Mom? What’s happening?” For the first time Ethan looked scared.
As soon as the bathroom door shut, Tad grabbed the pack she’d dropped to the floor. “Run this out to my car, Ethan,” he said with enough authority that Ethan did as he asked. “Let’s go.” He didn’t touch her. But the look in his eye... He was giving her a choice.
He’d get her out of here if she wanted to go.
She didn’t trust him. Didn’t even feel she knew him anymore.
But for whatever reason, he’d offered her the chance she’d been waiting for.
Chapter 29
“Marry me.”
They’d been driving north and mostly east for a couple of hours. Before they’d even left town, Tad had her take the SIM cards out of their phones. And in some obscure little burb half an hour into the country, he’d traded his SUV for a newer model, complete with a DVD system and drop-down screen for the back seat. He’d told Ethan they were going on an adventure.
“To Yellowstone?” Ethan had asked.
Tad had never confirmed or denied the question, he’d just talked about various natural forests, ones he’d been to, ones he’d liked.
And for the past ten minutes or so, her son, with headphones on and a movie they’d purchased for him at a gas station, had been asleep.
“Marry you,” she said, keeping her voice low, but letting her incredulousness seep through.
What she kept to herself was the warm delight that shot through her at the very idea.
“We’ll be in Vegas by eleven. We could be married before midnight.”
And the world thought she’d lost her mind.
“Why would I marry you?” she asked him. “You used me. Set me up. Because of you, I’m having to leave everything I care about and expose my child to a life on the run.”
“For one thing, if we’re married, he can’t force you to go with him for emotional or mental evaluation. Not even for your own good. I’m guessing those papers are signed by a doctor who trusts and believes him and signed based on things your father has reported not on meetings with you,
which could put him in danger of losing his license, not to mention jail time, but it’s not like you have time to prove all that. If we’re married I’d be the only one who could request evaluation.”
She hadn’t thought of that. If she was married, some of her father’s power over her would naturally disappear. Psychiatric papers or not.
She had to think. The future. Ethan.
“We could get married, and then head back to town,” he told her. “Take a day to give Ethan his adventure and he could be back in school by the end of the week.”
It sounded so easy.
And crazy.
Anything that seemed too good to be true usually was.
“He’s not just going to go away, Tad. If it was that easy, I’d never have had to run in the first place.”
“You were younger. A lot more vulnerable. Completely alone. You had no training yet, no counseling, to help you stand up to his manipulation. And Lord knows, in North Carolina, you’d had no way to compete with the power he wields. It would’ve been your word against his.”
She stared at him. “You believe me.”
“I thought that was established the second you left with me,” he said. “The second I asked you to go. Either I was going to trust that you were telling the truth and not delusional, or I wasn’t. And either you were going to trust me or you weren’t. There weren’t a lot of options, and no time to find any more.”
She’d had similar thoughts rushing through her mind as they’d driven, but Ethan was right there. She hadn’t been free to speak...
“I’ve never been so thankful to hear a man say he had to pee,” Tad said, smiling over at her. “I’d have figured out a way to get you out of there, even if I had to hold the man at gunpoint, but this way Ethan is none the wiser...”
She nodded. Staring out the front windshield. “I left with you because I believed I’d have a better chance of escaping from you than from him.”
He’d shared her most vulnerable confidences with her father. Brian O’Connor had made sure that arrow landed on her heart during their conversation at the police station that day. He’d let her know he’d had the power to get Tad to “tell” on her.
“You’re free to go anytime,” Tad said, totally serious as he looked over at her. “I swore to myself that I’d get you away from him. That I’d undo what I could of the damage I’d done, but you owe me nothing.”
She had money. Her emergency pack.
“You want some jerky?” she asked him, reaching into the back seat to retrieve the pack on the floor behind her.
She removed the jerky. He took a piece. She chewed one.
“It could be that all that time you were working for my father, you genuinely thought you were saving me.” She told him what she’d realized at some point during that very long day.
“Or that I did what it takes to do a good job. That I was on the payroll and, being off work, needed the paycheck. That, after letting down my peers on that last case, I wasn’t going to be disloyal to another man in uniform. Particularly not the state’s fire chief.”
“On the other hand, it could be that you care more about the end in mind than the means,” she told him.
“Or it could be that I went to California to do a job and fell in love, instead.”
Her heart jumped. Her stomach jumped. She wanted to be happy. She could feel happiness out there, right in front of her.
“He has the power to see that you won’t work as a detective again. Especially now. Taking me away like this...”
“You haven’t been declared incompetent. His paperwork only gave him permission to have you examined. You’d have passed with flying colors.”
“I never intended to let it get that far.”
“I know.”
She turned to look at him. “You did? You do?” She needed the honest-to-God truth, whatever that might be.
“Your knuckles, they were white on the chair. You weren’t giving in to him. You were pandering to him. Patronizing him.”
“I was taking it,” she said. “To do anything different at that point would have been stupid.”
“You had to get home to get Ethan’s things.” He said, nodding toward the bag still on her lap.
She’d needed things for Ethan, either way.
“You told him he was going on the vacation you talked about. You’d prepared him. In your quiet, careful, intelligent and completely sane way, you were taking care of your son.”
Irritated by the tears that sprang to her eyes, she looked ahead and said, “It’s what I do.”
“It’s what I’d like to do, too.”
He reached for her hand. She hesitated.
And then she took it.
* * *
“Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today in the Crystal Heights Casino and Chapel to witness the union of this man and this woman in holy matrimony.”
The Elvis impersonator even talked like the legend.
“And me, too,” Ethan interrupted. “This man and this woman and don’t forget me...”
Standing there in his jeans and T-shirt, with Miranda still in her scrubs and Tad in the jeans and shirt he’d pulled on that morning, the boy didn’t seem the least bit fazed about the strange turns his life had taken that day.
Pushing his glasses up his nose, he glanced at his mother. “Are you sure Tad really knows what he’s doing?”
Grinning, Tad looked at the boy. “I think it’s the mom and dad who have to get married first, and then the kids,” he said.
“Wait a minute.” Ethan took a step back. “Dad? I’m going to have a dad?”
“Is that okay with you?” Miranda asked. She’d been handed a cheesy bouquet of flowers when they’d walked in the door. It was shaking in her hands.
“Yeah!” The upward lilt in Ethan’s voice left no doubt that Tad had a place in this family if he wanted it.
What Tad wanted was to give her a proper wedding, as soon as their lives settled down. She deserved so much better than this.
What he wanted just as much was to take away Brian O’Connor’s power over them.
“I don’t mean to be rude, but can we get on with this?” Elvis whispered. “We got people waiting and time is money, if you know what I mean.”
A minute later, with two quick I dos and no chance even to kiss the bride, they were pronounced husband and wife.
* * *
Though Ethan was all about seeing the lights, getting ice cream and visiting a hotel swimming pool, he was asleep five minutes after they were back in their newer SUV.
Pulling off to the side of the road, Tad grabbed a phone she didn’t recognize out of the glove box. “It’s the burner phone I’ve been using to communicate with your father so that no one could trace me to you,” he said. “Now that the deed is done and we’re married, we need to call Chantel. You want to do it or do you want me to?”
“She knew your plan to kidnap us?”
“She knew I planned to marry you if you’d have me.”
Oh.
She took the phone. Looked at him in the darkness. “What are we doing now?”
Getting out of town safely, getting a car, getting Ethan something to eat when he woke up, getting married...one thing led to another.
And now, here they were, parked on the side of a desert road outside Vegas with no bed to sleep in.
“I say we find a place to stop for the night. And then head back to town in the morning.”
“You were serious? We’re just going back?”
“Either your father will see the wisdom in admitting defeat on this one, with the hope of one day seeing his grandson, or he’s going to lose his temper, in which case, I’ll be there when he breaks the law and we’ll have something to charge him with.”
She frowned, shaking her head.
“Wh
at?”
“I hate what he did. How scared I am of him. I really believe he’d have killed me and somehow justified it. But...he’s done so much good, too. He really is a hero to the rest of the world. It’s just such a shame that it all has to come tumbling down.”
“It doesn’t have to. He can go home. Leave you and Ethan alone to live your lives.”
“I don’t think he’s capable of that.”
She thought about that last night in Asheville, when he’d come to her apartment. His eyes had been glazed. He’d been like a madman. No one was going to keep him from his wife’s grandson.
Not his grandson. His wife’s.
“When I look back on the three of us as a family... I think my father always struggled with his shadow side. Whether it was the adrenaline rush from work, the need to be strong and forceful to do what he did, or events from his past... I don’t know, but after my mom died, I was always afraid to be alone with him.”
“You said he never hit you, or your mother, while she was alive.”
“He never did. When my mom was around, he was different. I liked being with him then. It was like she tamed something in him, quieted whatever lion roars inside him. After she died, it all fell apart.”
He touched her face and she turned to look at him in the moonlight. “As I went through puberty, matured, he drank more, lost his temper more, got meaner and meaner. He said it was because of my belligerence, my inability to do what was right. But I think it was because I resembled her so much. I’d cringe when people mentioned how much I looked like her in front of him. I was a constant reminder, a stab of pain every time he looked at me.”
“Then as far as I’m concerned, he’s lost the right to look at you,” Tad said softly, leaning over to give her a kiss. It wasn’t sensual. Or passionate.
But it made her cry.
* * *
In the end, Miranda opted for Tad to call Chantel. There’d likely be plans to make and she figured the two detectives were better suited to do that than she was.
Her Detective's Secret Intent Page 23
