by Karen Harper
She meant it and was happy for him and her precious little Claire. Family at last, for both of them. But another loss loomed for her, unless she could convince him to at least stay in the area. The house was his, Claire was his, even Tara’s best wishes were his, but in a way he was her enemy.
Ashamed of that thought—or blushing from the closeness of the man himself—Tara turned away. She hurried to the house and unlocked the door while Claire chattered to Nick about her two best friends at school, about how she and “Aunt Tara” were going to go to the Denver Zoo and to a concert at Red Rocks and would he go, too. Thank heavens the seven-year-old had no hang-ups about her uncle, whom she hadn’t seen for over two years except for e-mailed photos and one face-to-face online interview. The child was so happy she flaunted the gap-toothed grin she’d been shy about ever since she’d begun to lose her baby teeth. Her brown eyes danced in her narrow, freckled face while, in her excitement, she stood on first one sneakered foot and then the other.
Tara stood frozen for a moment, gazing at them, her mind racing. She had to try to convince Nick not to take Claire away—at least, not far away. In that split second of mingled frustration and fear, she sensed what her clients must feel in that moment they realized their husbands or exes or boyfriends had taken their beloved kids and disappeared.
With a sniff, she turned away to open the front door. Instead of his usual single bark and gentle greeting, Beamer tore past her in a blur of movement and strength. Nick saw him coming and put Claire behind him while the golden Lab nearly leaped into his arms. Another moment to remember, Tara told herself, then realized she felt left out—almost jealous. Today of all days, when she’d needed her closeness to Claire and some peace and quiet to deal with her own problems, this!
Nick hugged Beamer and knelt to bury his face in the dog’s hair. The three of them looked like a matched set, all golden haired, perhaps with golden futures. Tara leaned in the doorway with tears in her eyes, then realized she was resting both hands protectively on her belly.
What Dr. Holbrook had told her today hit hard again. He was mistaken, of course. If the birth of her own child were a fact, the only possibility was that it had occurred while she was comatose. But that was impossible. Insane. Yet, just to ease her mind, she was going to use her online skills to check it out, phone Jen in L.A., too, and perhaps even get a second opinion beyond Jen’s. But even comatose women didn’t have babies they never knew about, especially not while they were on birth control, for heaven’s sake. The man was wrong, and she’d told him so.
Now, she just had to prove it to herself.
However strange things seemed without his mother here, the old house seemed to welcome Nick. He’d held the door for Tara, and his words—After you—echoed in his head. Yeah, he could really see himself going after a woman like this. Yet she seemed more than wary, as if she had an invisible fence around her that she—or he—dare not cross. Hell, he couldn’t blame her, since she probably figured he could take Claire away from her. Maybe she was scarred from her sudden divorce, too, even if that was a while ago.
After his excited niece dragged him from room to room, as if he’d never seen the place he’d grown up in, he sat at the kitchen table with a Coors beer, taco chips and Claire while Tara fixed a salad and spaghetti. He filled them in on his flights home, then told them how he’d left the ten dogs he’d helped train with their new partners in the mountains of Afghanistan and how they wanted him to train even more here in the States. Beamer, tight to his leg under the table, seemed to listen to each word, too.
“Aunt Tara showed me where you were on the map and I can spell Afghanistan, too,” Claire piped up. “And I think that’s where afghans like that one on the sofa Grandma knitted first came from. Beamer missed you. Aunt Tara, too. We all did, ’specially after Mommy went to heaven and Daddy went to prison.”
That incredible last sentence, delivered in the child’s light voice, reminded Nick of some sappy Western music lyrics. Hard to believe it was all true and had happened to his family. Tears filled his eyes. Crying in his beer already. Man, he must be exhausted as well as jetlagged. Everything was getting to him today. His eyes met Tara’s green gaze again over the steam from the boiling pasta. What was this woman really like? Was she that lovely inside, too? She had tried to save Alex at the risk of her own life and had taken such good care of Claire. In the coma Clay’s attack had caused, she’d lost almost a year of her life and had lost her husband, the life she’d known. He knew she ran a P.I. firm that searched for lost kids. She must have a heart of gold.
He could tell she forced a smile before she looked away from him. She was tall but shapely. Any moron who’d been living with men and looking only at the occasional woman swathed in black burkas for the past two years would appreciate that. Her grace and femininity made him weak in the knees, yet she seemed to have an edge to her. Her sunny looks often crashed to frowns or near tears. Damn, they had a lot to say to each other. He could only hope she’d understand his dilemma about taking Claire and leaving.
Tara intended to let Nick read Claire her bedtime story and tuck her in tonight, but both Claire and Nick had insisted she come into the child’s bedroom, too. Ironically, Claire had chosen Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day—she liked any book title with a resemblance to her mother’s name in it. Nick shot Tara a what’s-with-this-book look, since the child seemed so happy. He’d soon learn, Tara thought, that Claire had lots of problems that came out in lots of ways. As Nick read the familiar book to his niece, Tara’s mind drifted. She could have written Tara’s Horrendous, Impossible, Ridiculous, Gut-wrenching Day. She felt both emotionally exhausted and keyed up; for once, the glass of red wine she and Nick had drunk with dinner was not making her sleepy. She was as revved up as if she’d downed a whole pot of coffee and she was dying to get online to search comatose woman + childbirth and to phone Jen. But she needed to talk to Nick in private first.
After they tucked Claire in bed, they sat out on the deck overlooking the darkening mountains. For the first time in the thirteen months since she’d moved in with Claire, Tara felt like a guest. It was an amazingly peaceful scene and yet she felt so uptight.
“You’re probably very tired,” she said, feeling she should give him a way out of further conversation if he wanted to be alone—with man’s best friend, that is. Beamer trailed him everywhere and now lay two feet from the rungs of Nick’s rocker.
“I’m kind of jazzed, tell you the truth.”
They shared small talk, things about Claire’s daily schedule. He with another beer, she with herbal tea, they rocked and watched the setting sun stain the western sky bloodred. To the northeast, down the mountain and over the darkening silhouettes of spiky pines and leaf-rattling aspens, they could see the distant lights of Denver coming on in twinkling pinpoints. Behind them, up the mountain, the thick, black tree line loomed.
“Lots of memories here,” he said softly, then cleared his throat. “I guess it’s pretty tough to have lost some memories, when you were…hurt.”
“Besides losing Alex, I lost my husband. That was just as well though. No woman wants someone who isn’t in for the hard times as well as the good. We had a lot of differences.” She switched to a news-reporter-style voice: “Independent, self-supporting, middle-class woman weds big money and becomes property of the lord of the manor, along with the loyal-only-unto-themselves Lohan family.” She dropped the elevated tone and went on. “Laird Lohan gave me a shock when he left me—and left town—but also saved me some heartache. I’m slowly getting my real self back, becoming just working girl Tara Kinsale again. And Claire’s been such a big part of my life and recovery.”
“Alex had a tough marriage, too. Things were bad with Clay, obviously, even before he took Claire from her.” He shook his head. “I guess I was in my own little freewheeling-bachelor and dog-training world during most of that. Thank God, the cops found Clay, and he’s locked up for life.”
“Yes, b
ut you should know that his family, especially his younger brother Rick, really took Clay’s conviction personally, as if it was Alex’s, or even my fault. She wasn’t around to blame, so Rick berated me. Told me off in person and later sent me a threatening letter, which I saved.”
He frowned and shifted in his chair so hard it creaked. “Yeah, that sounds like Rick. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he’s more of a blowhard than someone with the guts to do something. He doesn’t have a family and never quite made a go of things professionally—keeps changing jobs, even careers. He hasn’t bothered you since his initial eruption, has he?”
“Haven’t seen hide nor hair of him.”
“Beamer would growl if he came around here.”
“You’ll have to have a chat with Beamer,” she said, glad to change the subject. “He doesn’t growl, but he barks anytime a fox or elk or bear is around.”
“He just needs a bit of reeducation on manners. So…” He drew the word out as if he hesitated to embark on whatever he was going to say. “I take it that happy, smiling Claire still has her dark moments—that book she chose tonight, stuff like that.”
“Yes. I think hearing about another kid’s difficult day comforts her. It teaches her she’s not the only one with problems and losses, although few suffer what she’d been through. The two of us are open about her losses, and she knows about mine—”
Her voice caught. But did she have a loss Claire didn’t know about—one that she herself didn’t know about? No, she could not have had a child of her own, a baby who would now be—let’s see, probably around two and a half years old. If, by the wildest stretch of imagination, that were true, where was the proof? Where was the child?
“Go on,” Nick prompted, making her realize she’d stopped in the middle of a sentence. It took her a moment to get back on her mental track.
“Claire and I have leaned on each other,” she said. “But don’t be startled if you hear her shrieking in the middle of the night.”
“Bad dreams?”
She nodded. “Very.” She didn’t tell him that ever since her recovery from the coma—or perhaps even during the coma—she also had been stalked by the monsters of warped, horrendous nightmares. She’d received counseling for the dreams at the Lohan Clinic when she was trying to make plans and put her life back together.
“Nick,” she said, speaking faster now as she turned in her rocker to face him, “if you don’t mind my asking, what are your plans?”
“Undecided. I’ve got a too-good-to-turn-down offer to train dogs for the armed forces, but it would mean a move to North Carolina. With all my experience, I feel it’s my duty, in peace or wartime. These dogs would not be bomb sniffers but trackers who hunt the enemy—specific people, when we can give the dogs a scent, like what I’ve been doing these last two years. But Claire’s my duty now, too.”
“Your mother told me once that when you got the funding, you wanted to open a dog academy around here, to train dogs and their humans to search for lost people.”
“True. I love this area. In a way, we’re both in the finders business, aren’t we? Tara, I can’t thank you enough for all you’ve done for Claire. I know you didn’t do it for me, but speaking for my entire family, gone though they are…” His voice trailed off again. He cleared his throat. “Anything I can do to help you—to repay—I don’t mean with money. Guess you’ve been there, done that.”
“I appreciate your support,” she told him. Damn, she was resting her free hand on her belly again, almost as if she had a stomachache. Here she was discussing what was most important to her and Claire and she kept coming back to the fact she could not have had a baby. No! No way in all creation was that remotely possible!
“You’re upset,” he said, leaning toward her with his elbow on the arm of his chair, so they mirrored each other’s body language. They had both stopped rocking; earlier she’d noticed how they had rocked in unison. “Even if Claire and I move across the country,” he told her, “you’re always welcome to visit, and we’ll come see you. I doubt if the move would be permanent. Maybe just a few years. I don’t mean to hurt you after all you’ve been through.”
“Don’t worry about that,” she said, rising to go inside before she blurted out everything to him about today, not to mention the fact that she would just hate it—hate him—if he took Claire away. “Sometimes there’s nowhere to go but up. I know whereof I speak.”
“But all that’s behind you now,” he said as she started inside.
She turned back to face him. Wouldn’t he be shocked if she dumped her doctor’s claim about a belly line and cervical dimples on a man she barely knew on his first day home? The darn doctor was right about the subtle changes to her breasts and belly, but surely all that could have resulted from her coma, too. At least, that’s what she told herself before today.
“By the way,” she said, “I get Claire up for school at seven, but we’ll be quiet if you want to sleep in. It will be nice to have a man on the premises, since it feels a bit isolated up here, even with Beamer on patrol. I’ll start looking for a new place soon, maybe in town.”
“No!” Nick said, thumping his empty bottle onto the wooden deck and standing to take her arm to turn her toward him. “You do anything like that on my account, and Claire will never forgive me. Beamer will track you for us. Before you make any move like that, I’ll find someplace else until everything is decided on and settled.”
Settled, she thought. As she thanked him and wished him a good night’s sleep, she realized she wasn’t ever going to feel settled again until she proved she’d never been pregnant.
3
In her office, Tara turned on the lights and hurried to the PC she used to track down other people’s kids. Finally, some time to herself. She needed answers, and she needed them now. After all, she was a researcher, a finder, a tracker of people. It was nearly midnight, but she’d never sleep if she didn’t look into Dr. Holbrook’s crazy claims.
Her Finders Keepers office was in the large, extra bedroom. In addition to her desk and one armchair, the office had two PCs, one of them always online, a fax/copier/scanner, and four file cabinets—fireproof ones with locks. Since Alex had taken the report on Clay from Tara’s files, she was paranoid about keeping things under lock and key.
One file held her case-data sheets and time logs for payment. Also, this was where she kept her precious list of IBs—information brokers—who were always her last resort. They were expensive, obsessive, underground kinds of people she’d never want to meet in person. One of them, Marv Seymour, had been trying to hit on her via e-mail and fax, as if she’d consulted some lookin’-for-love source instead of purchasing locate info from him. Unfortunately, he did not live far away, in Centennial, south of Denver. She’d told him not to contact her for personal reasons again, after he’d claimed he “knew more than the TV and newspapers had covered about her lonely life.” That was the pot calling the kettle black, since he sounded like a real loner. However much she needed a good local IB, Seymour came across like a weirdo who lived in the shadows. Colorado was one of few states that had no statewide licensing or oversight of private detective agencies, and IBs were never called to account for their actions either.
On the wall above Tara’s big pine desk hung two large corkboards with a splattering of random notes, maps and reminders pinned to them. To her left was a large, white erasable marker board next to a huge calendar on which she kept track of what reports were due when. Because she juggled several cases at once, she had learned to multitask and prioritize. Once she found she could do that again, she’d known she had no lasting mental concerns from her coma. Hard rehab work had brought her through her physical weaknesses. Rather, she thought, the residual damage was all emotional.
Tara’s office telephone system had three lines, one dedicated to the fax. Only one had a listed number. Tape recorders were attached to two of the three phones, because she often recorded witness interviews. Taping was legal becau
se she always stated and then repeated that the conversation was being recorded. Her clients received a copy of the tape along with the final report—a report she would have given to Alex after Clay was in custody and Claire was on her way back to her mother.
Now, in Tara’s zeal to learn if a comatose woman could deliver a child—maybe even a living child—she caught a glimpse of why Alex had rushed after Claire the moment she had learned her location. Like Tara tonight with Nick and Claire, Alex had chatted normally on that fateful day. She had controlled her desperation in order to hide the fact she intended to find Claire at any cost, even if it meant stealing the progress report from her friend and lying to her about where she was going.
Though Tara had told no one but her psychiatrist at the Lohan Clinic, deep down she blamed Alex for putting herself in a position to be murdered. Tara also blamed Alex for indirectly placing her in a dangerous situation that led to Clay robbing her of a year of her life. It was a miracle that Alex’s rash actions hadn’t pushed Clay into harming Claire, as well. Tara hated feeling so conflicted about her best friend, but she couldn’t help feeling anger as well as anguish over her loss.
Tara sat down in her desk chair and double-clicked her mouse. The big, flat screen woke up, displaying the latest wallpaper on her home page. She had taken a photo of the mountains and valley from the highest safe access point above the house, an outcrop called Big Rock. But over the breathtaking view she had superimposed the headline from the Denver Post reporting her recovery from her coma: Comatose Conifer Woman Gets Back Life But Not Her Past. Was it possible her coma had taken something else from her?
The article had told about her memory loss, starting the day Clay had slammed her over the head with the butt of the same gun he’d used to kill Alex. It had also revealed that her husband, well-known locally through his wealthy, influential family, had left her and moved to the West Coast during her long coma. That had surely made Laird look cold and selfish, Tara thought, and the Lohans hated bad PR. They always wanted to be seen as altruistic and generous. Laird must have wanted to get away from her badly. Veronica, his mother, was the only Lohan who had seemed to sympathize with Tara in the dissolution of the marriage, but of course, Lohan blue blood didn’t flow through Veronica’s veins. She’d married into the clan, just like Tara.
