Assault and Batting

by Rothery, Tess

  “It takes a lot longer to come up with a list of fifty than it sounds like it will, so we’ll need to let Belle back in shortly. Before we do, would you allow her to try this?”

  Taylor lifted her head, opened her eyes, and took a deep breath. She didn’t have any better ideas. “Only if I get to be a part of it too.”

  “We can make that work.” A flicker of humor danced in Maddie’s eyes. The old friend from childhood showing through. “After all, we’ve done this before.” She let herself dimple into a smile, then smoothed her face back into a look of care and gentle interest.

  They had done this before, but it had hardly been the same.

  Belle had managed to list thirty-two things to love about her mom and was struggling for a thirty-third when they let her back in. She declined the offer to share her list.

  Her assignment from Maddie was to work on the list whenever she felt despair.

  Their assignment—for the three of them—was to head out to South Yamhill River to visit the B&B where Laura Quinn and her friends had been staying when she drowned.

  Her job, that Taylor had given herself, was to call Colleen Kirby and give her a piece of her mind. No way was Colleen stealing Belle.

  * * *

  “What does despair feel like?”

  Belle and Taylor were in Flour Sax the next day after school. Grandpa was snoring softly in his chair. Their mom’s voice was murmuring from her little corner of the shop, where her YouTube videos played on a loop. Taylor knew she was gone, but there was a bittersweet comfort hearing her from the other side of the shop, as though she could turn a corner and find her mom telling a friend how intimate knowledge of the color wheel would elevate her quilting.

  Taylor hadn’t sat and watched it yet herself. She just couldn’t. But the voice in the distance was lovely.

  Belle sat on a stool at the cutting table while Taylor dusted shelves. Rain poured outside like someone had turned on the shower of the gods. It was a dark, bleak spring day and no sales would come of it.

  “It feels like a sadness that shouldn’t go away,” Taylor offered.

  “Sure,” Belle said. “But physically…what does it physically feel like?”

  “Oh…um….” Creative writing had not been her favorite subject. Unless you count ad copy. “Maybe like…um…like a pressure? On your chest?” Taylor stopped and considered how she felt at this exact moment. “More like pressure sort of all over…hard to move.”

  “Yeah. And maybe like a rush of fear in your heart? With lots of shaking?” Belle asked.

  Taylor hooked the stepstool with the toe of her foot and dragged it over to the next row of shelves. She remembered that feeling, curled up in her bed, heart racing, head pounding… “Yeah,” she said. “Like that. And a headache too.”

  Belle was doodling on the edges of the legal pad that Maddie had given her. “How can I make a list when I feel like that?”

  Taylor ran the faux feather duster over the thin edge of the laminate wood shelf that showed in front of the bolts of polka dotted quilting cotton. “I don’t know. We go to see Maddie again in two days. Let’s ask her.”

  “Do you think it’s okay if I work on the list now? I don’t feel great, but I don’t think I’d call it despair.”

  “I say you should do it.” Taylor stood on her tip toes to reach the top of the shelves where the dust of thousands of yards of cotton fiber gathered continuously. Her eyes could use a wiping right now. She hadn’t thought about the nights of panic after dad died in years. Her mom had gone somewhere, and Taylor was staying with Grandma and Grandpa Quinn. They hadn’t had the funeral yet. Taylor had been very well-behaved when everyone was around, but every night she felt like she’d never make it till the next morning.

  The door jingled. “Good afternoon!” Taylor turned on the stool, to offer her customer a very forced smile.

  A well-bundled woman slipped off her plastic rain jacket, trying not to drip on their carpets, then hung it on a rack next to the door.

  She turned, fluffing her head of brilliant and unnatural red hair. “I’m so glad I find you both here.”

  Colleen Kirby. In the flesh.

  Taylor gripped the shelf so as not to fall. Or maybe to keep from throwing herself at Colleen in a rage.

  Belle stared at her, color draining from her face.

  “Does the shop still close at six on weeknights?” Colleen asked.

  It was 5:45.

  “Yes,” Taylor croaked.

  “Good. I’d like to take you both out for dinner tonight so we can talk.”

  Her bright smile faded to a look of fear as she watched Belle. Her eyebrows drew together as though begging.

  Belle sat up and composed her features, though her face remained colorless and her words were soft. “What about Gramps?”

  “We can bring him something back. I’d…I’d like us ladies to have some time alone.”

  “We’re practically alone now. Gramps is napping.” The grip Belle had on her pencil made Taylor fear she’d snap it.

  “That’s okay too…” Colleen moved toward the display where Laura’s videos were playing. “Oh…” She paused in front of it, engrossed.

  “You and I can have dinner.” Taylor stepped down to the solid floor. “Belle can stay with Grandpa.”

  “I’d really rather…”

  “I think it’s better this time.” Taylor gave Colleen her warmest professional smile, though she didn’t plan on giving her a second dinner.

  Colleen hadn’t looked away from the video. “Okay.” She settled into one of the slipper chairs they had strewn across the store, the one with random French-like words in turquoise script across a creamy linen background. She watched Laura’s show while they closed up shop. Belle and Grandpa went out back, through the rain, to their little house two blocks down the road.

  Colleen and Taylor swathed themselves in rain jackets and hurried to Rueben’s Café.

  They ordered quickly. The home style food was nothing to write home about, but the soup was hot and the bread was soft.

  “Has Belle talked to you about our situation?” Colleen’s voice was low, as though she didn’t want to be overheard, but the only other customers were a booth full of students from the college.

  “She showed me your letter.” This was a boldfaced lie, but Taylor felt like she was hardly the boldest of the two.

  Colleen sipped a spoonful of minestrone. “Your mom and I had talked about it—about telling Belle about me. Did you and your mom discuss it at all?”

  “No.” Taylor spun her spoon in her bowl of cheesy broccoli. Adrenaline held her gut in a steel grip.

  Colleen licked her lips and inhaled slowly as though centering herself. “I had wanted, hoped, for an open adoption where I could be involved in Belle’s life once I was on my feet again. Somehow it always seemed too disruptive, so we didn’t try. But your mom sent pictures…”

  “She sent them to all of her friends, at back to school, Christmas and Easter.”

  “Oh.” Colleen’s eyes dropped to her soup.

  “Belle only has one year left of high school. It would be terrible to make her leave her friends right after she lost her mother.” Taylor sounded like Cooper’s mom, but in this case, she was right. You just don’t disrupt the life of a grieving child.

  Colleen bit her lip. “We can afford so many opportunities for her.”

  Taylor straightened up, jutting her chin out, a caricature of an enraged child.

  “Just, I mean, opportunities that could help her get into a good college…”

  “By all means, help her financially.” Taylor reached for her water cup but just held it, the icy, damp glass clenched in her tight fingers.

  “It’s not money, she can have that whether she lives with me or not, but we have opportunities that don’t exist here.” Colleen turned to look out the window at the long block of buildings full of antiques.

  “I’m her legal guardian till she turns eighteen, in a year and a half.�
� Taylor slid her thumb up and down the glass hoping it would somehow calm her, put out the fire in her heart. It didn’t.

  “You’ll have so much to do…with the shop, and taking care of your grandfather, and…your life back in the city.”

  “I’ll have the same things to do that Mom had.”

  “I know…”

  “You have your other kids. You’ll be too busy with them.”

  “No! Not at all!” Colleen brightened up. “It will be good for Belle to be part of a family, to have siblings. I’m a stay at home mom.” She blushed, clearly proud of how her life had turned out since the adoption.

  “I’m her family.”

  “Oh! Yes, I know, but…she didn’t grow up with you around.”

  “She’s sixteen. She didn’t grow up with you around.” Her words were bitter, and Taylor said them to cause pain.

  “Taylor, surely we can come to some kind of arrangement. Maybe Belle could stay with you during the summer.”

  Taylor let go of the glass. “This is Belle’s home. She’s not going anywhere. You don’t have a legal or moral claim to her. I wish you’d just leave us alone.”

  Colleen sighed heavily, her eyes big, sympathetic…but then they shifted. There was steel behind those large blue eyes.

  “I know that Laura recommended Belle stay with you in her will, but it doesn’t really matter. We had a handshake agreement, not a legal adoption.”

  Taylor stared at her.

  “I’m sorry your mother never explained this to you. I was her best friend, Taylor. She would do anything for me and did. When I was at my worst, at the very bottom of who I could be as a person, sick with addiction, I got pregnant with Belle, and your mom took her for me to keep her safe while I got better. And I’m better now. Much, much better.”

  She didn’t sound better to Taylor. She sounded like a psychopath. Like the kind of woman who would kill her best friend to steal a baby.

  The room started to spin, and Taylor realized she had been holding her breath. As she exhaled, things came back into focus. Colleen didn’t look insane. She looked sad.

  Collen reached across the table. “I’ve been better for a very long time, but Belle had such a lovely home with your mom. I didn’t want to hurt either of them. But now my baby is hurting, and I want to make her better. You’ve got to understand.”

  “Please, please don’t take my sister from me.” The voice that escaped Taylor sounded like a child. Like the kid who had lost her daddy. And her heart was exploding like it had those nights at her grandparent’s house.

  This was what despair felt like.

  Colleen paid for the meal and then walked her home, her arm hooked through Taylor’s, keeping her upright.

  Taylor honestly didn’t know if she could have made it on her own.

  Jess Rueben would have had to call an ambulance and Serge, their volunteer paramedic, would have had to come for her in his converted Honda Odyssey, the one that looked like a hearse.

  They didn’t talk while they walked except for Collen to say, “You were right. It’s too soon to talk about this with Belle. Let’s not mention anything to her yet.”

  Chapter Four

  Taylor didn’t know how Colleen got home that night, or where she was staying. She collapsed on the couch, while Belle hid in her room, and Grandpa watched Mayberry on cable.

  She longed for her mother to solve this problem for her, the way she’d been able to do when she was little, but her mother not being here anymore was the problem.

  She was gone.

  But…. Taylor fiddled with her phone. Her mother had left a little bit of herself behind. If she was brave, she could watch her now, see her, hear her…

  Slowly, as though she was giving herself plenty of time to change her mind, Taylor opened her YouTube app, searched for Flour Sax, and picked a video at random.

  The volume was low, Grandpa would never hear it over his show, but her mom’s laughter seemed to ring out. Why was she laughing? Was it at her own jokes? Taylor didn’t remember that being a thing she did.

  She pulled the well-worn, log cabin quilt off the back of the sofa and tucked it around her knees. In the video, her mom was demonstrating how to fold fabric so you could cut one long strip from it to create bias tape. She did it so quickly, the folding and the cutting was so smooth. It was a matter of seconds and then she was ironing it with a fun little iron they sold in the shop. “Heat and pressure. Heat and pressure. Gentle, but firm. Like parenting a teenager.” She looked down at the slim little iron in her hand. “Not that I’d use a hot iron on my daughter, but sometimes…” Her laughter seemed to bubble up from deep within, the joy of parenting being too much for her.

  Taylor paused the video on a particularly pretty shot of her mom smiling down at the fabric she was bending to her will, that she was improving with her knowledge. Heat and pressure. That’s what it took to turn that thin strip of fabric into the piece that held the whole quilt together. Taylor seemed to have plenty of both right now, but she was barely holding herself together, much less the whole quilt.

  * * *

  The next morning Taylor called the school to let them know she was keeping Belle home for two weeks. She explained that she’d need Belle’s work so she could keep up, and that Belle was under the care of Dr. Maddie Carpenter. The school secretary was very understanding.

  Then Taylor called Maddie and asked her to meet them at the shop at nine a.m. They had to make a plan and make it fast.

  Maybe Colleen had killed her mother to get Belle back. If so, she wasn’t going to get away with it.

  Maddie, Belle, and Taylor gathered around the cutting table with cups of tea Taylor made in Grandpa’s little sitting area. He sat in his chair, watching the morning news on a small black and white TV. The ladies spoke quietly, though Taylor wasn’t sure Grandpa’s hearing was good enough for that to matter.

  It took them about twenty minutes to catch Maddie up on all the details.

  “Let’s not assume murder.” Maddie’s calm professional voice matched the creamy linen suit she wore. Cool, almost casual, but buttoned up. “Let’s go into this investigation with the idea that we want to know exactly what happened, whatever that is.”

  “But doesn’t it help to have a premise to start with?” Belle was practically bouncing in her seat.

  Maddie had been right. A project would be good for Belle.

  “We don’t need a premise. After all, we know where, when, and have a pretty good idea of how. We just need to be able to understand why.”

  “Our starting premise is that Colleen had been putting pressure on Mom to give me back.” Belle dropped her voice a few notes and increased the vocal fray. This was serious talk. “So, Mom invited the girls for a getaway to come up with a plan to prevent it. Or maybe so the three of them could pressure Colleen not to do it.”

  Taylor was still shaken that the adoption had never been legalized. She was impressed that Belle hadn’t flipped out on hearing that news.

  “But didn’t you say Mom didn’t want Colleen to come?” Taylor reminded Belle of the fight she had intervened in.

  Belle thought for a moment. “Yes, but maybe that’s because she wanted alone time with Melinda and Amara to explain everything and get them on board. Maybe she didn’t want Colleen there messing it up.”

  “Do you think your mom’s friends knew about the situation?” Maddie’s question was for Taylor.

  “If so, they never let on to me. For years, when dad was around, Mom spent time with Amara and Melinda. They didn’t start spending time with Colleen again till I was in college.”

  “So that was about ten years ago?”

  “Around that. Colleen wasn’t a part of their social circle till Belle was at least six. That must have been around the time Colleen got sober.”

  “That’s easy to find out.” Maddie scribbled a note on a steno pad.

  “If no one was in touch with Colleen, they had no reason to think she was the birth mom.” Taylor ch
oked on the ‘mom’ part of that sentence.

  “Did your mom take these kinds of girls trips often?” This time the question was for Belle. Taylor should have been able to answer it, but she didn’t know, or wouldn’t have if Belle hadn’t told her already.

  “No. This was the first one in ages.” Belle tapped the toe of her Van’s clad foot on the rung of the stool.

  “How did she seem?”

  “She was really excited. She had gone shopping for cute clothes and had a cooler full of fancy food and drinks. She loved margaritas, but never had them.” Belle sounded wistful.

  Taylor felt the same. Nothing would have been more healing than a day in town, with her mom, shopping till dark. Maybe it was because she was from a small community, maybe it was something else, but when hard times hit, nothing could be counted on to restore inner balance like a serious shopping spree.

  “Not much of a drinker?” Maddie asked.

  “Just wine tastings, mostly.” Taylor pulled herself back to the moment. Now was not the time to try and figure out where she could get her own linen suit, no matter how ragged her jeans and Flour Sax sweatshirt made her feel.

  “Yeah, no places for a good margarita around here. It was like a treat.” Belle offered.

  “They were staying off the Belleview-Hopewell road, right? They hadn’t gone far.” Maddie asked. Taylor was impressed by her memory.

  “That’s right. She was worried about Gramps and didn’t want to be too far in case of emergency. I told her that Cooper’s parents were close and had promised to keep an eye on us, but she still worried.”

  “It’s natural. Leaving you with an aging grandparent would be hard on her. She was used to being the one who took care of everyone.” Maddie nodded, acknowledging Belle and giving her positive support. “What would you girls like to do first?”

  “We should go to the B&B,” Belle said

  Taylor shivered. Like Belle, a part of her needed to step onto that dock her mom had fallen from, to see the last things her mom had seen.

  “And we need to talk to the other ladies, don’t you think?” Belle asked Taylor.