A Child's Wish

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  People were streaming along the hallway behind Mark, staring at her. “Is the meeting over?”

  “Yes,” her mother said. “Just ended.”

  “What’s up?” Mark asked again, loosening his tie. She could feel him staring at her. And in spite of the past week, in spite of his anger and disbelief, she needed his strength if she was going to get through this.

  Kelsey needed his cooperation.

  She looked him straight in the eye. “Kelsey’s in danger.”

  “What?” he said, glancing away from her to take in her mother and Susan. “You’re upset about the vote, I understand that, but you can appeal. We will appeal. You have ten days to file a petition for a trial in Washington County District Court. This isn’t over.”

  “Mark,” Meredith said, bending over against the pain in her stomach. “Kelsey’s in danger!”

  She could feel heads turn in her direction and they didn’t matter at all. Nothing mattered but the little girl calling out to her.

  Mark’s gaze met hers, and she calmed. “Kelsey’s at home with a sitter,” he said. “She’s fine.”

  Shaking her head, Meredith tersely said, “Call.” And held her stomach while Mark pulled out his cell phone and did so.

  Her mother was flying back to Florida first thing the next morning. She had an appointment with her primary care physician to confirm the liver results. Meredith wanted to go home with her. To be cradled in her mother’s arms.

  She could hear Mark on the phone, composed at first, asking the sitter to double-check Kelsey’s room and make sure she was asleep. And then more caustically demanding that she check the bathroom, if the little girl wasn’t in her bed.

  Two minutes later he hung up the phone, his face ashen.

  “She’s gone.”

  MARK NEEDED TO GET out of there fast. To beat up everyone in his path. He needed to scream. And to cry. Feeling more helpless than he’d ever felt in his entire life, he stood in the hallway of the city building and looked at Meredith Foster.

  “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean you don’t know?”

  He wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her senseless. And he wanted to hold on to her until his sanity returned. His daughter, his life’s blood, was missing.

  Meredith had warned him.

  She was his salvation. It made no sense.

  Almost doubled over, leaning against the wall, Meredith grabbed his hand.

  “Help me.” His plea was all he had left.

  “We have to find Josie,” she said. “Do you know where she lives?”

  “Yes, of course.” Mark rattled off the address.

  “Come on, I’ll drive you,” Evelyn said.

  “And I’ll go to Mark’s house, in case there’s any word there,” Susan added. “I’ll also phone the police.”

  “Have them meet us at Josie’s house,” Meredith called as she ran with Mark and her mother out the door.

  “We’ll be there in no time, Mark,” Meredith said as they climbed into the back of her car. Her mother already had the keys in the ignition.

  “Does she know where she’s going?”

  “I lived here for thirty years, young man,” Evelyn said. “I know these roads better than you do.”

  “Who is she?” Mark asked Meredith, not letting go of her hand even when she had to use it to put on her seat belt.

  “My mother.”

  At another time, Mark might have felt uncomfortable knowing that, ashamed even. At the moment he just felt grateful to have two Foster women in his camp.

  “Nice to meet you, ma’am,” he said.

  “You, too, son,” Evelyn replied. “Now just relax. That girl of mine was put on this earth for situations like this. She’ll find your little girl in time. You just wait and see.”

  Mark would give half his life to have that kind of faith. But for now he was going to get by on the coattails of a woman who should hate him for not believing in her daughter, but who was too busy helping him to do so.

  Meredith groaned as her mother took another sharp corner. She wasn’t sure if she was going to be ill or pass out. At the moment, she’d settle for either if it would relieve some of the pain in her stomach.

  “She’s sick, Mark,” she said, her throat raw.

  “Sick how?”

  “I don’t know.” She hated the blank places, the missing pieces. She could feel the urgency, but couldn’t get them there. “It feels like alcohol, drugs maybe. Her head is spinning. And she’s scared.” Meredith started to cry. “She’s so scared I can barely stand it.”

  “Hold on, baby,” Evelyn said from the front seat. “Mark, put your arms around her, hold her, give her what comfort you can.”

  Mark did. And Meredith’s nerves settled again. The man reached her like no one else ever had. For now, she was grateful.

  “WHY JOSIE?” Mark asked when Meredith’s breathing slowed to a more normal pace.

  “She seems to be thinking about her,” she said. Even to herself, she sounded insane.

  Mark didn’t say a word. Just continued to hold her close, breathing with her, two hearts beating side by side.

  JOSIE WAS ALREADY in bed when they arrived.

  “It’s a school night,” her mother said, fear in her eyes as she looked at the school principal in her doorway.

  The police arrived just as Josie’s father came to the door wanting to know what was going on. And within two minutes Josie was standing before them in her yellow flowered nightgown, wide-eyed and obviously scared out of her wits.

  “I d-d-don’t kn-kn-know anything,” she said, rubbing her eyes.

  “Josephine Marie, if you do not start telling these people everything you know within the next five seconds you will be grounded for the rest of your life,” Josie’s father said, obviously overwrought.

  Meredith knelt down in front of the child.

  “Josie, loyalty is one of the most important things in life, but sometimes, to be loyal, you have to look like you’re being disloyal,” she said, her voice even. She didn’t even question her sudden tranquility. “Kelsey’s trying her best, Josie, but she’s in over her head right now and she could be dying. She needs your help.”

  Josie wanted to believe her. Meredith could see it in the little girl’s eyes. “She knows you’re the only one who can help us find her,” Meredith said. “Please don’t let her down now.”

  “I…”

  “Please, honey, she’s not going to get into trouble. She is in trouble.”

  “She’s with her mother.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  MARK’S KNEES WEAKENED and it took everything he had to remain standing.

  “What did she say?” he asked Evelyn.

  “She’s with her mother. Your wife?”

  “Ex-wife.”

  “Where does your wife live, sir?” one of the two police officers asked.

  “I have no idea. I haven’t seen or heard from her since the divorce was final three years ago. I thought she’d left town long ago.”

  “She came to school right after Christmas,” Josie said with a sniffle. “Me and Kelse were walking home from school and this woman hissed at us from the bushes. I wanted to run and so did Kelsey, but then she stopped and got all funny and started to cry. Her mom had come to find her.”

  “Since January?” Mark yelped. He was waiting to wake up from this nightmare, already vowing never to sleep again.

  Josie nodded, looking only at Meredith as she spoke. “She said she’s been trying to get back to Kelsey ever since she left. That she’s missed her as much as Kelsey missed her mom. She’s got a lawyer and everything and told Kelsey that she’s going to have joint custody soon.”

  Mark absolutely could not believe anything he was hearing.

  “So you think her mother kidnapped her?” the second police officer asked.

  “No,” Josie said, her gaze locked on Meredith. “Her mom came to school today and told
Kelsey she had to come over tonight so she could take something special to Kenny. There’s drugs,” she whispered.

  Mark couldn’t just stand there anymore. Kneeling down next to Meredith, he touched his shoulder to hers, looking for strength. Joining with her.

  “What kind of drugs?” he asked, working with the child, something he did instinctively. This wasn’t about him. It was about the children. He wasn’t going to let Kelsey down.

  “I dunno,” Josie said. “But they made it there in the garage and Kelsey had to take it to a boy at the junior high. His name’s Kenny.”

  Mark almost vomited on the spot. His sweet baby girl delivering drugs? If he ever found Barbie he was going to kill her with his bare hands.

  “My ex-wife had a drug problem,” he said to the cops behind him. “She was addicted to methamphetamine.”

  “Do you know where Kelsey’s mother lives?” Cop number one asked.

  Josie looked at Mark. “I don’t know the exact house, Mr. Shepherd, but it’s on that street out by the old milk farm, you know with the gas station on the corner that has all the green lights in the window? Kelsey went to the bathroom there once when she had to go really bad. She wouldn’t ever go at that house. She doesn’t like Don, the guy who lives there with her mother.”

  Mark’s head swam. He was seeing stars. And Meredith’s hand as she touched his face.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  “I know the neighborhood,” he heard cop number two say. “There are only eight houses on the block.” And then to Evelyn, “Follow us, ma’am, we’ll lead you in. But once we get there—” he turned to Mark and Meredith “—you’ll need to wait outside in the car. We have no idea what we’re in for.”

  “Kelsey will want her father,” Meredith said.

  “It’s okay.” Mark put an arm around her, leaning on her as much as guiding her. “I’m not leaving my daughter’s life to amateurs. There’s no telling what Barbie would do if she saw me. Or Kelsey, either for that matter.”

  He’d wait in the car. But it would be the hardest thing he’d ever done.

  MEREDITH CRIED most of the way across town, and then had to fight unconsciousness. “She’s getting worse,” she moaned, putting her head on Mark’s shoulder. “She needs to lie down.”

  “Goddammit, hurry,” Mark bit out beneath his breath.

  Meredith wished she could help him. She put a hand on his leg, but that was all she could do.

  “Hold on,” Evelyn said from the front seat, and Meredith started to cry again. She loved her mother so much.

  The car stopped and Meredith could hardly breathe. She wasn’t sure she was going to make it. Wondered what would happen if she died right then in the back seat of her own car with her mother at the wheel.

  “They’re at the second house,” Evelyn said quietly.

  “They’re running to the third,” Mark added, his voice urgent. “Do you think they found something out?”

  Meredith’s heart started to beat faster, pumping blood and air through her body.

  “Most likely.”

  She had to hold on.

  “They’re going in.”

  Please, God, Meredith begged, find me fast. And then she passed out.

  SUSAN MET THEM at the hospital and stood by while the team of emergency doctors worked on Kelsey. Mark, pacing with Evelyn and Meredith, kept an eye on the hallway where they’d disappeared with his daughter and waited for Susan to come out and report to them.

  “How you doing?” he heard Evelyn ask Meredith and he turned to take inventory of her color. Her cheeks were rosy again—instead of the alarming white they’d been when he’d helped her in, conscious but sick to her stomach and lethargic.

  “Good,” she said, and Mark’s heart jumped when she smiled. “Feeling more and more like myself.”

  He squeezed her hand. “You scared the hell out of me.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Has that ever happened before?”

  “Never.”

  Even now that she was more herself, she held his hand.

  “She’s been sick before, needed to lie down to calm herself, but it’s never taken control that strongly.” Evelyn, as Mark had just discovered, was a scientist. She’d held an impressive position with the oil company that was Bartlesville’s claim to fame.

  Pulling the knot in his tie down to midchest, he looked from one to the other of the strongest women he’d ever known, and knew the past two hours, past two months, had changed him. Irrevocably.

  “Is she going to be all right?” he asked Meredith.

  She peered up at him, her eyes widening. “You want to know what I feel or what I think?”

  “I want to know what you know.”

  “She’s going to be fine. Physically, at least. We have some work ahead of us in the emotional department.”

  “How sure are you on that?” Evelyn asked.

  “Ninety.”

  Mark frowned, feeling like a novice. “What does that mean?”

  “Anything over sixty on Meredith’s confidence scale has at least some truth to it,” Evelyn said. “Fifty or less, she thinks it, but she doesn’t feel anything at all one way or the other.”

  “So ninety’s good.”

  Meredith was staring at him, tears brimming in her eyes. “Yes, very good,” she said. Mark knew that she wasn’t just speaking about his daughter, but any other conversation would have to wait for another time.

  Which was fine by him.

  Right now he just wanted to be. He was sitting in a hospital emergency room, waiting while his daughter’s stomach was pumped and hoping that her blood levels and vital signs would return to normal, and felt peaceful in a way he never had before.

  MEREDITH CALLED for a substitute teacher on Wednesday morning before taking her mother to airport and heading over to the hospital to sit with Kelsey. When they’d admitted the little girl, semiconscious and disoriented, Mark had insisted on staying with her. Now Meredith was going to relieve him so he could go home and shower.

  He was standing in the hallway, his trousers and long-sleeved white shirt wrinkled. He’d removed his jacket and tie sometime since she’d last seen him.

  “They’re in with her,” he said, coming to meet her. “She might get to come home this morning. They found iodine, pseudo—which comes from cold medicine—phosphorus, lantern fuel and lye in her stomach.” His eyes, when he looked at her, brimmed with a pain she could only begin to understand.

  “The makings of meth.”

  “Apparently in the final stages, the mixture is placed in a two-liter pop bottle. Barbie told Kelsey to help herself to what was in the fridge. She’d said she made lemonade, but Kelsey couldn’t find anything yellow except in the bottle. She thought her mom had stored the lemonade there because she’s poor and didn’t have a proper pitcher. Thank God the stuff tasted so bad she didn’t drink more of it.”

  “How’s she been?”

  “Quiet. Answering questions, but that’s all. She slept all night and has been in and out this morning. She’s alert right now.”

  “And they don’t foresee any residual damage?”

  He shook his head, sighed, looking exhausted beyond endurance. “Like you said, she’s going to need counseling, a lot of love and time, but physically they expect a complete recovery almost immediately.”

  An orderly passed with a gurney. Meredith leaned back against the wall out of the way, watching the door to Kelsey’s room. “So why was the place cleaned out when we got there except for Kelsey unconscious on the floor?” Meredith shivered, feeling it all again.

  “I talked to Detective Armes this morning. He thinks that when Barbie realized what had happened, she got scared and split.”

  “And left her daughter there to die?”

  “Armes thinks Barbie thought there was no way to save Kelsey. So she saved herself.” The bitterness in his voice was to be expected. Meredith figured he had a long road of emotional healing ahead of him, too.

&n
bsp; “Do they have any leads on her?”

  He shook his head. “They found an old car that matches the description of the one she was driving in a junkyard fifty miles out of town. The license plate was gone, but they’re sure it was hers. She’s probably across the state line, possibly on her way to Mexico. They figure they’re going west.”

  “But they’ll keep looking.”

  “For a time, at least. It was a small-time operation. The big dealers in this part of the country use what’s been termed the Nazi method of producing meth since pseudo is so closely regulated. This guy used cold medicine, which is usually just seen out west.”

  “Which is why they think they’re heading that way?”

  Mark shrugged. “Apparently. They think he’s from there, or at least has close ties in the area.”

  Adjusting the denim bag on her shoulder, Meredith crossed her arms. She’d worn her beaded jeans this morning because they were Kelsey’s favorite. She wished now she’d also worn a sweater.

  “What about his rig out back?”

  “He was in the process of buying it. Got behind on his payments and owed more on it than it’s worth. Ames thinks he’s hoping the bank will repossess the truck and cut their losses.”

  “Charming folks.” And Kelsey had been over there, with them, every Friday for the past four months. She should have known, done more sooner.

  “Kenny’s father, James, is nowhere to be found. The boy’s with his mother, who was devastated to learn that Kenny’s father had been seeing him again. They’re both being scheduled for counseling. Ames believes Kenny was as much a pawn in all this as Kelsey was.”

  “It’s a shame it doesn’t take some kind of certification to become a parent,” Meredith said. “To their kids they’re God.”

  “Kelsey’s going to be fine, and that’s the most important thing,” Mark said, almost as if he could read her mind. His chin was stiff and she knew it was taking all he had to maintain control.

  Bending forward, closer to his ear, she said, “Beat your pillow to a pulp when you go home to shower.”

  “What on earth for?”

  “They’re easy to replace. And you don’t go to jail for it.”