The Detective's Secret Daughter

by Rachelle Mccalla

  Owen didn’t leave, but quietly watched as she placed the rolled pastry crust smoothly over the waiting pans and flattened the next mound of soft dough.

  She glanced up at him, then went back to rolling her dough, reminding herself that it didn’t matter one bit what her feelings might be for Owen. He would be a part of her life from now on—because they would share responsibility for raising Paige.

  But as Paige came downstairs with a board game and asked Owen to play, and the two of them trotted out to the dining room together, Victoria realized it did matter. She had feelings for the detective, feelings she needed to get under control before she did something crazy—like kiss him again.

  Owen blinked at the red numbers on his bedside clock: 12:52.

  Normally he was exhausted after his evening shift ended, and had no trouble falling asleep. Tonight he had too many things on his mind.

  The guilt he felt about the circumstances surrounding Victoria continued to grow, gnawing at him, preventing him from closing his eyes.

  Had it been a mistake to kiss her?

  He couldn’t decide. The kiss itself was the kind of thing any man might search his whole life to find. Kissing Victoria was better than eating anything she’d ever baked, and that was saying something. But kissing Victoria only left him wanting to kiss her more, and that was craziness.

  She’d called him a complication. She’d waved her rolling pin at him as if she might clobber him with it if he got any closer.

  But she hadn’t clobbered him with it. She’d kissed him back.

  She had feelings for him, he was nearly certain of it, but she didn’t trust him because he’d asked for joint custody of Paige. She was nervous about what that meant, what it could mean.

  He’d thought about calling Cooper and telling him to cancel the case, but how could he give up such hard-fought territory?

  What if she didn’t feel the same way about him that he felt about her? What if giving up his demands at this point didn’t restore her trust? What if he gave up his rights to Paige, and then Victoria ran off with his daughter, and he never saw her again?

  Owen pounded his pillow flat, wishing he could so easily smooth out all the wrinkles of the past. The biggest problem, of course, was the past ten years. They’d been blissfully in love back in high school. He could imagine himself being in love with her once again, except for the betrayals that had passed between them.

  Her father had killed his cousin. Though the Fitzgeralds were polite to Victoria, he knew from comments such as those Ryan had made in the office the week before that they still associated Victoria with their cousin’s death.

  So, even if he could convince Victoria that he didn’t blame her, that his love for her was bigger than the hurt of the past ten years, that didn’t erase the looming specter of his family’s condemnation. Whenever she looked at him, she had to see the angry eyes of the whole Fitzgerald clan glaring at her over his shoulders, blaming her for Patrick’s death. Guilty by association.

  Even if he loved Victoria, that didn’t change the way his family felt about her.

  Throwing back the covers with a disgusted grunt, he wrestled running shoes onto his feet and grabbed a jacket. Pounding his pillow hadn’t helped. Maybe pounding the pavement would.

  The bluffs of Fitzgerald Bay provided a vigorous workout, and the empty streets made for a clear track. He ran up and down each block in turn, sprinting on the downhill stretches, plodding back up and sprinting down again.

  Finally he stood, breathless, outside the Sugar Plum Café, and looked up at the historical landmark with its dark windows unblinking against the night, and wondered what secrets lay within. Was the Sugar Plum being targeted because of some secret linked to Olivia’s death? Or did the peculiar song Paige had overheard the robber singing actually point somehow to a link to the Fitzgerald family?

  He circled slowly around the building, pondering. Had he missed a clue somewhere? Was there something more he could do to catch the culprit? Pausing to restack a few of the logs he’d split, he arranged them in a stable-looking pile and wished everything in his world could be so easily fixed.

  Then he ambled back around the backside of the house, pausing to stomp the dirt from his shoes when he reached the sidewalk.

  A sound caught his attention. In the split second it took him to lift his head and look up, a dark figure jumped out of the night, landing on him and knocking him to the ground.

  TEN

  Victoria ran out the back door with a bright flashlight and shone it on the spot where the police officer had tackled the man to the ground.

  Finally, they’d caught the shadowy figure she’d seen from the Sugar Plum windows.

  The officer wrestled the man upright. She immediately recognized the uniformed officer who’d captured the criminal. Hank Monroe. Normally she didn’t like the man, but if he’d caught her assailant and finally brought peace to her household, she’d forgive him for every harsh thing he’d ever said.

  Hank wrestled the fighting figure around until he faced her, and the bright beam of her flashlight shone on his face.

  “Owen?”

  He looked furious but had stopped fighting Hank.

  “Owen Fitzgerald.” Hank yanked him around and pulled out a set of handcuffs. “Aah, the pieces are starting to fall into place now. Why didn’t I realize it sooner?”

  Owen blinked against the light of Victoria’s flashlight. “Let me guess. You saw someone hanging around and called the police?”

  Victoria took a step closer as Hank slapped the cuffs on Owen’s wrists. “You’re the one who told me to call right away if I saw anyone.”

  As the metal cuffs locked tightly around his wrists, Owen hung his head. His mouth fell open as though he couldn’t quite believe what was happening, but he couldn’t think of what to say in his defense.

  Hank gave him a hard jerk in the direction of the police station.

  “Wait.” Victoria stepped closer. “Owen can’t be the perpetrator. He was on duty all the times I’ve had trouble before. He was the officer who responded to my calls.”

  “I’m not the perpetrator,” Owen stated bluntly, glaring at Hank.

  “Oh, no?” Hank chuckled icily. “It all makes too much sense. Of course you were the first officer on the scene. You were already there because you committed the crime. That’s why the perp always got away. It’s like Clark Kent and Superman. You never see them in the same room at the same time, because they’re the same guy.” He continued to shove Owen in the direction of the police station.

  Victoria placed a hand on Hank’s shoulder. “Owen isn’t the perpetrator, Hank.”

  Hank’s brown eyes settled on hers. “How do you know?”

  Victoria looked back and forth between Owen and Hank.

  Two men with so much in common. She’d gone to school with both of them, dated both of them, though Hank just once, and returned to town to find both of them still single. They both came from prominent, well-respected families. Why did she trust Owen over Hank?

  Had she misjudged them both?

  How did she know?

  “I just don’t think Owen would do that.”

  Hank’s eyes glinted in the darkness. “That doesn’t make him innocent. I’ll be back in a minute to take your statement. You might want to go inside and make sure he didn’t do any damage.”

  As Hank hauled Owen off in the direction of the police station, Victoria hurried inside, Hank’s words a reminder that she’d left her daughter sleeping quietly in bed.

  Paige slumbered silently on, and Victoria leaned against her door frame, listening to the even sound of her daughter’s breathing. How many hundreds of times when Paige was a baby had Victoria watched her sleeping, listening for those peaceful breaths that sometimes came
so silently?

  Owen had never had that experience.

  Her heart pinched. Owen couldn’t possibly be guilty. Hank had made a valid point, though, and Victoria couldn’t think how to refute it. And Owen hadn’t really fought Hank. Was it because, as an officer of the law, he knew he’d only get himself into trouble by resisting arrest, and that the best thing to do was go quietly and let his innocence be proved later?

  Or was it because he did have something to hide?

  Faintly, she heard a knock at the door and hurried down to see Hank standing in the doorway. He was smiling broadly. The sight was a tad unnerving.

  “I need to get a statement from you about what you saw, and confirm that you want to press charges.”

  “I don’t know. I’m not convinced Owen—”

  But Hank didn’t let her finish. “Don’t you see, Victoria? This is your shot to end all your troubles. If Owen goes to prison—”

  “Prison?”

  Hank’s expression softened. “He stole three thousand dollars from you. He busted your window. He’s been stalking you at night. Yeah, I’d say he’s going to go to prison.” Hank smiled with a little too much confidence. A little too much happiness.

  Why in the world was Hank so pleased with the idea of his fellow officer going to prison? She shook her head. “I’m not going to press charges. I don’t believe he’s guilty of anything.”

  “But you’ve got to,” Hank snarled.

  “No—” Victoria took a step back across her threshold, her mind made up “—I don’t.” She closed the door quickly and snapped the lock shot, praying it would keep Hank out.

  Something wasn’t right about Hank’s reaction. In fact, the more she thought about it, the more she realized that there were a lot of things about Hank that didn’t sit well with her. She needed to talk to Owen.

  Business was slow the next morning when Owen walked in, the blue of his eyes overshadowed by the dark circles around them. His T-shirt looked rumpled and his jeans had a hole in the knee. He ordered coffee and a Cape Cod egg scramble, one of her signature specialties made with local crab meat, asparagus, avocado and plenty of asiago cheese.

  She brought him the plate as he nursed his coffee in a booth in the corner.

  Since no more customers had arrived, she set the plate in front of him and sat down in the opposite seat.

  “I didn’t do it.” His expression was completely flat, save for the weariness in his heavy eyes.

  “How did you get out of jail?”

  “Ryan paid my bail. Then he gave me a lecture I won’t soon forget.”

  Victoria winced. The eldest Fitzgerald brother was an imposing figure, and she’d always been a bit intimidated by him.

  As Owen settled in eating his breakfast in silence, Victoria studied his face.

  When he finished, Owen patted his lips with a napkin and settled it over his plate with a sigh. “It’s up to you to decide if you want to press charges.”

  “I’ll press charges,” Victoria said evenly, “when I believe the right man has been caught.”

  Hope sparkled in Owen’s eyes.

  “I realized when I saw Hank’s badge last night what a stupid mistake I’d made, and how obviously guilty I looked. If I could figure out a clear reason why you should believe I’m innocent, I’d give it to you.” He leaned back and made a pained face. “It’s like the situation with Charles, with people thinking he killed Olivia. I don’t want to believe my brother would do that. I’d defend him to the death, but at the same time, I’ve taken a vow to see justice served, and my feelings for my brother don’t make him innocent. Until we have clear evidence one way or the other, we just don’t know.”

  She mulled his words, still puzzling through the mess. “I’ve been thinking about why Hank was gloating last night. What I still don’t understand about Hank is why he’s never said anything to clear up the rumor that I ran away with him.”

  Owen’s head snapped up and he met her eyes.

  “He’s got to have heard the rumors about Paige being his daughter,” Victoria continued, “but I’ve never heard him deny them.”

  “You didn’t deny them.” Owen let the words fall slowly, thoughtfully.

  “Because I didn’t think people would believe me. But Hank’s a police officer, and his father was a judge. If he denied the rumors, that would be the end of it.” She shrugged. “Unless he has denied them, and they just refuse to die down.”

  “No.” Owen shook his head. “I’ve never heard of Hank denying any of it. In fact—” he rose and picked up his plate “—as I recall, Hank stood by the rumors. That’s part of what convinced me to believe them in the first place.”

  Victoria stood, as well, shaking her head. “But he knows the truth. He knows that Paige couldn’t possibly be his. I never let him touch me. And I hadn’t seen him since graduation, until Paige and I moved back to town six months ago.”

  Anger flashed in Owen’s eyes. “Hank knows Paige can’t possibly be his, but he still perpetuates the rumors that the two of you ran away together years ago. Why?”

  Victoria took Owen’s plate from him and hurried off toward the kitchen.

  Unsure whether he was welcome to follow, Owen took his time leaving the dining room, still puzzling over all the unresolved questions in his life of late. He paused to look at the walls, the pictures a bit sparse since Victoria had rehung them, minus the ones that had been damaged. The picture of him with Patrick now hung at eye level. Owen studied their chocolate milk-topped smiles, wishing he could go back in time to those simple days when he and his cousin had talked about any and everything that was on their minds. He wished he could talk to Patrick again.

  “Patrick,” he whispered to the empty room. “Why did you have to die?” In the distance he could hear the clatter of Victoria busy in the kitchen, and knew the answer. Her father had hit Patrick head-on.

  The memory burned his throat. Victoria had made her father promise he wouldn’t drink and drive. She’d begged him to stop drinking entirely, or at the very least, not to drive when he’d been drinking. She’d told him her dad had promised.

  Someone had lied.

  Owen headed out the door and across the street to the police station. He wasn’t scheduled to work for the next two days—wasn’t even sure they’d have him back after that, depending on what kind of fuss Hank might make. But if Victoria wasn’t pressing charges, there was no reason anyone had to believe he’d done anything wrong.

  Instead of heading for his desk, he made a beeline for the file room where the records on old cases were kept. His fingers found the file on the wreck that had killed Patrick.

  He laid it out on the table, pictures spilling forth from their ten-year-old tomb as though they’d been there only a day. The memories were just as fresh, though Owen had never looked at the file before. His gut clenched at the sight of Patrick’s blue T-Bird, in which he’d ridden with Patrick many times, reduced to a mangled ball of metal, crunched almost beyond recognition.

  And Victoria’s father’s truck, a two-ton rust bucket of solid steel, its front end crumpled like a red paper ball, the back three-quarters utterly unscathed. Owen blinked and shuffled through the pictures.

  Was the back end of Stanley Evans’s pickup truck really unscathed? A white streak, which looked almost like glare from the camera flash, stretched most of the length of the vehicle.

  Owen squinted at a couple of closer images. It wasn’t glare at all, but paint, with corresponding scratches and a stretch of indentation indicating Stanley Evans’s vehicle had scraped alongside something white. Thinking back through ten years of fog, Owen tried to recall if he’d ever seen the scrape on the truck before. He’d been over to Victoria’s plenty of times in the days and weeks leading up to the accident. Stanley Evans’s truck had almost al
ways been parked outside.

  And hadn’t he and Victoria washed her car on a sunny day not long before the accident? And then, because he wanted an excuse to spend more time with her, Owen had suggested they wash her father’s vehicle.

  The white scrape hadn’t been there then.

  Owen carried the file into his father’s office. Though he wasn’t looking forward to facing his dad after the events of the night before, he needed answers. The pounding in his heart told him so.

  He balanced the pictures on the open file and knocked on the chief’s door with his other hand.

  Aiden Fitzgerald looked up, and a guarded smile spread across his face as he recognized his son. “Didn’t expect to see you today. Come in.”

  Owen sat opposite his dad’s desk and placed the pictures in front of him. As he might have expected, before Aiden asked him the reason for his visit, his father had a few things to say to him first.

  “You got yourself in quite a fix last night. Hank Monroe is convinced you’re behind all the trouble at the Sugar Plum.”

  “That’s preposterous.” Owen gave his dad a challenging look. Leave it to the old man to sort out right from wrong. He’d been doing it for most of his life.

  “You have an alibi for the other incidents?”

  “I was on duty during most of them.”

  “You were the first man on the scene. Hank thinks that’s more than a coincidence.”

  Owen sighed. He was never going to get a chance to ask his father about the pictures in Patrick’s file at this rate. “I wouldn’t do anything to hurt Victoria.” He stared his father down, daring him to suggest otherwise.

  “Is that a fact?” Fitzgerald blue eyes bored into his. “Never?”

  “Never.”

  Aiden glanced at the pictures Owen had placed on his desk. “Even though her father killed your cousin?”

  “Did Monroe bring up that detail?”

  “He didn’t need to. I see it’s on your mind, as well.” Aiden’s eyes darted from the pictures and back to his son. “So what’s this intrusion about? Looking for peace? Try going to church.”