Jay had no idea whatsoever how to be a part of a family and that couldn’t be all by his choice alone. Was there something genetic that precluded the ability to have close relationships?
One thing was for certain, he wasn’t about to contact Cole until he was convinced his presence in the boy’s life would mark an improvement.
A call rescued him from the archives—in the library and in his mind—shortly after noon. Stepping outside to answer, Jay quickly agreed to Shawna’s request he take an afternoon appointment in Shelter Valley. He returned the car, collected his bike and hightailed it out of town.
All in all, the first half of his day had been a total waste. Good thing he wasn’t being paid for his private investigative work.
SHE SHOULDN’T HAVE AGREED to this. At the Shelter Valley Medical Center for the second time that day, Ellen studied the pamphlets on the bulletin board to the right of the reception desk in the lobby, waiting for her appointment with Black Leather—Jay Billingsley.
She would much rather be at Big Spirits, the retirement center and adult day care where she worked as a social worker and activities director. They were a relatively small operation—only fifty beds—and some days it seemed as though Ellen was a jack-of-all-trades, between the counseling and the planning and implementing activities to keep the seniors busy, challenged, healthy and happy. Still, she loved her job. Loved the people she cared for. They had so much wisdom. And many of them possessed an inner peace and acceptance that she would give much to obtain.
Even more than wanting to be at work, she would rather be with her son, who would have been playing happily at Little Spirits, the day care that was attached to the facility where Ellen worked. Had he been in town, that is.
“Ellen?”
Heart pounding, she spun around. Black Leather. He’d snuck up on her.
Not a good sign.
“Come on back.”
No. She didn’t think so. At all.
He smiled. Not a guy smile. Or a doctor smile. A…smile smile. Like what a stranger would give to another stranger passing in the hall. No threat. No invasion of her space.
Taking control of herself, Ellen stepped through the door with him, intending to tell him in private that Shawna had made a mistake, that this treatment wasn’t a good idea. Maybe Ellen would soften the blow by agreeing to reschedule.
Probably not. She had no intention of coming back. And she wasn’t duplicitous.
“Shawna says you work at Big Spirits.”
“That’s right.” She stayed a step behind him as they passed mostly closed doors that housed Shawna’s office, a weight-loss clinic and an eye doctor.
“I’ve got an appointment with a client there in the morning.”
Why didn’t Ellen know about that? Those were her people. Every one of them.
Not that she had a thing to do with their medical needs. She was their social-emotional captain.
No one needed her permission to call a massage therapist. Nor did anyone have to inform her when someone was having a medically prescribed procedure unless it related to something Ellen had planned. Or limited a resident’s participation in activities.
But they usually did let her know.
The man in front of her slowed.
A vision of Josh’s face as he’d turned around to wave goodbye to her at the airport flashed before her eyes. In the last minutes she’d been with her son, she’d pulled his arms away from her.
She had to get well.
For him, if nothing else.
Black Leather opened the door second from the end. The one Shawna had taken her to earlier that day.
Ellen knew exactly what waited inside. A padded table with a headrest extending from one end. There was a small table, too, with a box of tissues and an MP3 docking station. Next to that was a cloth-draped cart with drawers and a couple of shelves filled with white sheets and towels. The top of the cart was covered with various bottles filled with liquids.
She couldn’t go in there. Not even for Josh. Well, to save his life, she would. She’d die for him.
But Josh’s life wasn’t in danger.
Black Leather, who wore black denim jeans and a white lab coat with black leather boots that made no noise when he walked, turned in the doorway to see her standing several feet away.
“Wait here,” he said, when she’d already formed her lips to blurt out her unequivocal refusal to go any farther down the hall toward that door—or with any treatment he might have in mind.
Ellen stood there, the refusal to enter any room with him still hovering. She felt caged, staring at the ponytail hanging down his back as he strode away from her.
This was her chance to leave. She could have Shawna make her apologies. Shawna was the one who had put her in this spot so she could be the one to get Ellen out of it.
Not entirely fair. Ellen had asked Shawna for help. And Shawna thought Black Leather could help. He had training. History. Previous successes.
He liked old people.
So did Ellen.
He exited Shawna’s office carrying a chair. Was he intending to use it? Or to have Ellen use it? Didn’t much matter to her. She was not going in that little room alone with this man.
Not today anyway.
Not while she was in the middle of a panic attack.
She recognized the symptoms. The tightness in her chest. Butterflies in her stomach. Foggy thoughts that wouldn’t land.
“Try this.” Black Leather set the chair at the end of the hall and pointed.
“You want me to sit there?”
“Sure.”
“Out here?”
“Yes.”
Okay. Well, her knees were a little shaky. Maybe her symptoms were more obvious than she’d thought. And it wasn’t as though he could do anything in the middle of the hall.
Granted the area was in a corner of the medical center. And not one soul had come or gone in the minutes she’d been there. But still, someone could. At any moment one of the other doors could open and someone could walk out.
Ellen sat.
“Shawna tells me you’re suffering from PTSD.”
Ellen had negotiated with Shawna and they had finally settled on her releasing only that information to him. It was all he needed to know to be able to treat her.
Stiff and ready to bolt, Ellen stared at him—as if he were a train wreck. She had to survey the damage. To see the suffering.
“You look too young to have been in the service.”
“I’m twenty-six.” Not young at all.
“Were you in the service?”
“No.”
His gaze made her uncomfortable. Could the man see the quaking inside her? Better that than having him see the dark shadows in her mind.
“The idea here is to teach your body that physical touch is nonthreatening. And to teach your mind that physical touch will bring you pleasure. To get you to the point where your automatic reaction is to welcome touch because you associate it with pleasure. To retrain you to expect it. Does that make sense?”
She wasn’t a moron.
And he wasn’t going to get her in that room.
“I’m going to start out with one hand. I’ll place it lightly where your right shoulder and neck meet. You naturally hold tension there and we want to relieve that tension.”
He was not getting her in that room.
“You ready?”
Ellen glared up at him. “What? Out here?”
“Yes.” He met her gaze head-on.
And the honesty, the understanding she saw there reached through her haze of panic.
“Just one hand?”
“Yes.”
“You promise?”
“Yes.”
“Only in the one spot?”
“Yes.”
He didn’t move.
She tried to prepare. To imagine his hand on her neck. To brace herself for how that would feel.
“Are you just going to lay your hand there, or what?�
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“I’m going to start with three fingers. I’ll take them away then touch again. I’ll repeat that until your body accepts the contact.”
“How will you know that?”
“You’ll let me know.”
She had to do something? The butterflies were swarming fiercely.
“What if I don’t?” Did that mean he’d keep touching her? And claim that she hadn’t told him not to? Because she’d—
“You will. Your muscles will tense up—their way of responding to unwanted contact.”
Oh. Right. As a massage therapist, he knew all about muscles. Was probably trained to “listen” to them in ways Ellen didn’t even know about.
What else would he be able to understand about her if he touched her?
“That’s it then? You touch with three fingers—lightly—and that’s all?”
“Once your body accepts it, if we get to that point, I’ll apply light pressure—something meant to feel really good. I’ll give you plenty of warning before I change a process. That’s how this works. No surprises. And nothing without your explicit agreement. Okay?”
She wanted to date.
She didn’t want to sleep alone for the rest of her life.
She was not going to spend her life—even one aspect of it—hostage to what that bastard had done to her.
Josh needed her to be healthy.
Ellen nodded.
“Look at me please.”
She did.
“Okay?”
She nodded again.
“I need to hear you say it. This is totally your call.”
“Okay.” She tensed.
Black Leather waited then moved slowly to her side.
“Three fingers,” he said, holding them about a foot in front of her so she could see them. “I’m going to touch. On top of your hair. Ready?”
“Yes.”
She sensed more than heard his movement. “Touching now…”
Emotion exploded inside of Ellen, a volcano that rose from her stomach and took her breath away. Sight blinded by tears, she turned the corner of the hall before she even realized she was out of the chair.
And she didn’t stop. Not when people called her name. Not until she was in her car with the door locked. Not until she was driving down the road, heading toward…she had no idea where.
That hadn’t gone well.
CHAPTER FOUR
JAY HAD NEVER BEEN ONE to leave well enough alone. He had this cursed inability to turn his back and walk away. Even after the trait had landed him eighteen months in prison, he continued to let it drive his actions. And now he couldn’t leave Ellen Moore to handle the fallout of their afternoon session alone.
But she’d disappeared—had been out of the parking lot before he’d been able to grab the keys out of the locked drawer in his table. Although he’d driven around the entire town, he hadn’t spotted her.
Jay knew better than to ask people if they’d seen her. Or to hope they would direct him to her. She was a daughter of Shelter Valley. He was the outsider.
He called Shawna, knowing the counselor would have a hell of lot more luck at locating Ellen than he would, but reached her voice mail and left a message for her to phone him as soon as possible.
He had nothing to do this afternoon except wait for that call and tend to the one aspect of his life that he’d left completely alone.
His father had deserted him and his mother. The man was weak and irresponsible. He’d loved his mother enough to marry her, but not enough to stick around after she’d had Jay. And Jay had seen nothing worth pursuing in that situation.
Then Kelsey Johnson, now Kelsey MacDonald, had contacted him a month ago. They had known each other in college. He’d had sex with her. She’d married one of Jay’s ex-frat brothers. And twelve years later, she confessed he had a son.
A delinquent son. One her husband was tired of dealing with. Apparently, MacDonald had known all along that the boy wasn’t his. So out of the blue, Kelsey wanted Jay to take responsibility for Cole.
A man couldn’t very well expect to father a troubled teenager when he had his own father issues. Jay didn’t trust fathers. Or families.
He had no idea how to be the first. Or to be a part of the second.
To make matters worse, Jay, who knew what it was to be abandoned, had unwittingly put his own son in the very same position.
Damn Kelsey for putting him in this position.
The idea that he had a son was not sitting well with him. Despite having had four weeks to come to terms with the news, to make the plans that uprooted his entire footloose and fancy-free, lay-on-the-beach-whenever-he-wanted-to lifestyle, the existence of a boy with Jay’s blood in his veins still seemed completely unrealistic.
He sat at his computer, intent on searching various databases he had access to for any mention of Jay Billingsley, Sr.
He had a copy of his mother’s birth certificate and death certificate, which had been listed in her maiden name—his aunt’s doing. She’d wanted to eradicate any mention of the man who’d deserted her baby sister.
Jay had his own birth certificate, too. But he couldn’t connect Tammy Renee Walton to Billingsley. He couldn’t find any record of his father at all. Not even on his own birth certificate. Even though they had been married, his mother had chosen to list her maiden name and leave the father blank.
He knew the man’s name was Jay Billingsley. He knew he’d worked at a car dealership in Tucson—as a salesman his aunt had said—that had long since gone out of business.
With those three pieces of information, it should be easy enough to trace the guy. Jay had always thought he could find his father in a matter of hours if he’d really wanted to do so.
Apparently not.
This morning, when he’d attempted to access his mother’s marriage license, he’d been told there wasn’t one. The records clerk who had been helping him suggested that his parents might have been married in another state.
Just damned fine.
Like the majority of U.S. states, Arizona was a closed record state, which meant that without the man’s name on his birth certificate, Jay had no legal way of accessing his father’s records—other than those that were public such as birth date, marriage or death. He couldn’t find any public records for the man in Arizona.
For all he knew, Jay Billingsley, Sr. could have been born in another state, as well.
Maybe he’d died at some point, too.
Jay had other avenues to check. He hadn’t developed the reputation he had for ferreting out the most hard to find facts in order to solve cold cases without learning a few hundred tricks.
But he hadn’t expected to need them this time. He’d figured he’d make a few simple inquiries, do a stake-out—similar to the one he’d done that morning—then, depending on what he found, plan his next move.
Typing usernames and passwords on various internet public document reporting agencies Jay searched U.S. marriage, birth and death records.
Surprised as hell, Jay came up with another dead end. Jay Billingsley, Sr. had obviously lied to Tammy about his real name. That could explain why the man had taken off without a backward glance.
Had he been in trouble?
A member of the underworld?
Living a double life with a wife and family elsewhere?
Or simply a scumbag con man?
Trying a different tactic, Jay gathered the articles he’d located this morning. He opened a can of soda and sat back to spend the time before preparing his poolside dinner of grilled shrimp with news stories from the Tucson Citizen and the Arizona Daily Star dating back thirty-two years ago.
Maybe a birth announcement would shed some light on the latest irritation in his life. Or maybe a piece of school sports trivia would. He already had the few brief pieces that had been printed about his mother’s death before the records had been sealed from the press.
There was no mention of his father having been on the scene at any ti
me. During his years-long investigation to find his mother’s killer, he’d looked for any mention of his father. The only family listed had been his mother’s sister—the aunt who had raised Jay. The same woman who had told him that his father had abandoned Jay and his mother before she’d been murdered.
It was conceivable the man might not even know about the heinous crime that had robbed Jay of any semblance of a normal life.
He’d known about Jay, though. That much was quite clear. Billingsley, Sr. had put it in writing, giving sole custody of his son to Tammy Walton Billingsley. Jay’s aunt had kept the letter in a lockbox. Jay had it now.
But just because his father wasn’t mentioned at the time of his mother’s death, didn’t mean that the man hadn’t made the news in some other fashion. Jay had done the obvious—searched for any mention of Jay Billingsley—so now he was going to do the more tedious part of an investigator’s job. Read through layers and layers of unrelated detail attempting to find that one piece of information that would click with something he already knew but didn’t yet know was pertinent.
The man had lived in Tucson. That much was certain. His aunt had also mentioned—let slip was more like it—that his father had had some later ties to Shelter Valley.
The sooner Jay found his father, the sooner he could contact Cole’s mother and determine exactly how the next phase of his own life would unfold. It wouldn’t be a white picket fence in a small town—or anywhere. He knew that much. But if Cole’s mother had her way, the kid could end up living with Jay.
He picked up a sheet of paper with a shrunken news paper page copied to it. He took in the details of reported life in Tucson, Arizona. On January 13 some thirty years ago, Dr. Paul Fugate, a botanist and park ranger, left his office to check out a nature trail and never returned. Thumbing through pages, Jay found many references to the search for the bearded National Park Service employee, but couldn’t find any reference to the man being found.
Could the man’s disappearance have anything to do with his father? Could the man be his father? Sure…except for the name, and the age.
But what if his aunt had been mistaken about his father? What if Tammy Walton had been involved with, married to, an older man?
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