“Jay Billingsley, same as me. I was raised by my aunt—she was older than my mother by a decade—who, understandably, detested my father. One of the few pieces of information she shared with me was that I was named after him—at my mother’s insistence. According to my aunt, my mother was besotted with the man to the point of losing all common sense. My aunt rarely spoke of my father. Rightly or wrongly, she blamed him for my mother’s death.”
Ellen reached for the next folder. “May I?”
Jay nodded, and she started to examine the evidence he’d compiled until he held up his phone.
“You need to call your folks or we’re going to have visitors.”
Hard to believe almost an hour had passed. Grabbing her cell phone, Ellen called her mother, told her that she was fine, and that she’d call her when she arrived home.
“And, Mom, it might be a little while,” she added as warning for her mother not to panic.
“You’ve got a lot of dead ends here,” she said to Jay.
“He worked at a car dealership in Tucson—Dolby Dodge.” He’d rolled his sleeves up and undid the top couple of buttons of his shirt. “I found a used Mustang there when I was sixteen, wanted to buy it. My aunt wouldn’t sign for the car and forbade me from ever going back. When I pushed, she told me why.”
Ellen tried to picture a sixteen-year-old Jay and failed.
“I’ve never heard of Dolby Dodge.” Not that she was all that familiar with Tucson.
“It went out of business eleven years ago,” Jay said with a sigh. “There’s no record I can find of a Jay Billingsley, other than myself, ever having lived in Tucson during that period. I can’t find a marriage license for my mother in Arizona, or any other state, either.”
“You have her social security records.” Ellen had glanced through them.
“I’m next of kin. And as you see, there’s no record of a name change. The IRS reports no joint filings, either.”
“So maybe they weren’t married.”
“My aunt sure thought they were—and I have my mother’s wedding ring. At this point I have to consider that they might not have been. At least not legally.”
“Is your aunt still alive?”
“No. She died from kidney failure fourteen years ago—during my first year of college.”
Ellen couldn’t imagine being so young and without family. Hell, she couldn’t imagine being without family at any age.
“I’ve been alone in the world ever since.”
So he’d never married. She’d wondered.
He picked up the photo he’d first shown her. “I have to find this man,” he said, pointing to the guy who’d been standing next to Tammy. “Based on when the picture was taken, that has to be my father. She wouldn’t have had time to end one relationship, start another and have a baby.”
“Did you show the picture around Big Spirits?”
“I asked Hugh. He mentioned Dolby Dodge one day when he was talking about all of the cars he’d owned over the years. And yes, I showed him the photo.”
“But he didn’t remember anything about your father.”
“No.”
Sitting back, Ellen pondered his situation. “If your folks lived in Tucson, why are you looking for him in Shelter Valley?”
“When I was looking at colleges I wanted to apply to Montford. My aunt had heard that my father had moved to the Shelter Valley area and she refused to help pay for college if I applied here. That photo was taken at Montford. There’s a connection here. I simply haven’t found it yet.”
“Why was your aunt so against you running into him?”
“I think she was afraid he’d do to me what he did to my mom—reel me in with promises to be a real father to me then abandon me. That would not have stopped me if I’d wanted to see the man. I didn’t. Wherever he was, I wanted to stay as far away from that place as I could.”
That, Ellen understood. She had no desire to be around her father ever again, either. A parent who couldn’t be one was like a stomach that couldn’t process food—unnatural, debilitating and terminally painful.
“So when you find him, what then? You move on?”
The expression on his face was odd. “I don’t know.” He flipped the edge of one of the folders. “I go where investigative cases take me, picking up massage work anytime I’m in one place for a period of time. And when I’m not investigating, I gravitate toward the beach. Mostly in the Miami area.”
“How many cases do you do a year?” Not that it was any of her business. At all.
“Depends. One year I did six. Usually one or two.”
“And you never looked for your father?”
“Nope.”
“So why now?”
His glance was pointed as he assessed her, as though trying to make up his mind about something. “I got a call last month from a woman I slept with in college.”
“That’s an odd way of putting it.”
“I’d say a woman I dated, but we didn’t really date. We hung out in the same crowd. And we had sex.”
“Did she have something to do with your father?”
“No, she told me I am one.”
“What?” Ellen sat forward, her mind spinning over what she knew about him. His aunt had died fourteen years ago during his first year of college so that would make his child at least eleven. “You didn’t know she’d had your child until a month ago?”
“That’s right.”
“How could that be?”
“I…left…college after my junior year, which was when Kelsey and I slept together. After that she married another guy in our crowd and passed off the kid as his.”
“She didn’t tell him that the child was yours?”
“I don’t know if she did or not. He knows now. And I assume that he’s known for some time based on what Kelsey has said.”
“Is she still married to him?”
“Oh, yeah. The marriage isn’t at risk. The kid is.”
“At risk, how?”
“He’s twelve years old and has already been arrested twice. For drug use and petty theft. That’s why Kelsey called. She says Cole’s problems are my fault and it’s time I deal with them.”
“How can they be your fault if you didn’t raise the kid? And how are you supposed to deal with him?”
“I guess that’s up to me.”
“Where is he now?”
“Living with his mother and stepfather in Scottsdale.”
So he was close. Scottsdale was an upscale town on the northeast side of Phoenix, less than an hour from Shelter Valley.
“Does he know you’re his dad?” The social worker in her kicked into gear. “Not yet.”
“I’m assuming you’ve met him?”
“Not yet.”
He’d known that he had a son for an entire month and he hadn’t met him yet? Ellen would have caught the first flight to the boy’s doorstep.
“Aren’t you anxious to meet him? Even a little bit?”
“Sure, I want to meet him. Who wouldn’t? But not until I’m prepared to take on an at-risk kid. He’s already in trouble—and that’s with the supervision of two parents. How am I, a single person, going to keep a better eye on him than they could? How can I trust myself to be able to be there for him long-term? Thus, my search for my father. I need to know why he left. And find out if I’m like him. Find out if he had wanderlust, too. If he discovered he couldn’t coexist with family life. My lifestyle suits me. Maybe there’s a reason for that.
“I have no family to offer a kid. Have no idea how to be a member of a family. There’s no one to fall back on if we run into a problem. Until I have some kind of solid plan, it can’t possibly be good to uproot the kid.”
As a certified family counselor, she agreed with him there.
“You’ve obviously thought this through.”
“I’ve thought of little else since Kelsey dropped her bomb on me.”
It occurred to her he hadn’t answered her other qu
estion. “So why does Kelsey think Cole’s problems are your fault?”
“I’m surprised Greg hasn’t already told you.”
“What does the sheriff have to do with it?” Still trying to assimilate everything he’d shared, Ellen couldn’t see how Greg fit.
“I spent eighteen months in prison for drug possession.”
HE WAS WHAT HE WAS. And if the sheriff had told his wife about Jay’s private investigating, it was only a matter of time before the drug bust came out, too.
To be fair, Greg seemed like an ethical man. And it was Jay’s responsibility to tell Ellen the truth if he wanted her to trust him.
“I got in with a crowd of rich kids at the University of Arizona.” Merely thinking about those days and the choices he’d made had him slouching in his chair. “We had all the drugs and alcohol we wanted and we partied hard. My aunt had just died, and I couldn’t resist being welcomed into the group. These kids had families. Not just parents and siblings, but aunts and uncles and cousins. I could join in and forget for a while that I didn’t have anyone. They invited me on a Christmas cruise to the Mediterranean, a ski trip to the Swiss Alps, weekend jaunts to Vail, a summer in the Bahamas.
“It was great until the night a couple of the guys thought they were entitled to drug a girl and rape her because she’d told one of them that she wouldn’t sleep with him if he were the last guy alive. I called the cops.
“Problem was, we were all high on cocaine—had plenty of it in the house. Fortunately for them, they had their daddies to bail them out of jail and hire them top-notch attorneys. Me? I wasn’t so fortunate and spent eighteen months behind bars as a result.”
“And the girl? Did she know what you did for her?”
“I have no idea. I hadn’t seen her before and haven’t heard of her since. She wasn’t raped that night. That’s all I know.”
“That’s when you left college.”
“Right.”
“Kelsey was pregnant with Cole when you went to jail.”
“That’s what she says.”
“Are you sure Cole’s your son?”
“I have no reason to believe he isn’t. It’s easy enough to check these days, and Kelsey knows that. She knows I’m a private investigator. She’s not going to lie to me about it.”
“But you’re going to have a blood test done, to be sure?”
“Of course. At some point. When the boy is ready.”
When Jay was ready, was more like it. Whatever course of action he decided upon, he knew there would be no turning back. Yet he had no idea how to move forward.
It wasn’t as though he would be able to ease into parenting, learning the easy stuff such as how to change a diaper and stick a bottle in the kid’s mouth.
“I’d like to help.” They were the last words he’d expected Ellen to say.
“Help how?”
“Let me ask around to see if anyone has heard of your father. Maybe show that picture. People trust me so they might tell me something they wouldn’t share with a stranger. I mean, did you talk to Becca or Will Parsons? He’s the president of Montford and she’s the mayor.”
In another town he might have gone to the college president or the mayor. In a metropolis used to accepting all kinds of people. In Shelter Valley he hadn’t pushed that far yet—hadn’t figured he’d get much cooperation. But if Ellen did the asking…
“I’ll agree on one condition,” he said.
“What?”
“That you come back to the clinic and try therapy again. We can go slowly. Light touch only. Fully clothed. When you need to stop, we stop.”
“I liked the motorcycle riding better.”
“We can do that, too. It might help to keep things from seeming too threatening to you.”
She stared at his folders, but he had a feeling she didn’t really see them.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll try, but I’m making no promises.”
“Understood.”
“When should I come in?”
“Tomorrow morning too soon? You start work at nine, right? I can meet you at the clinic at eight.”
“Fine.” She was frowning, and stood to leave. She asked for a copy of the photo she’d be showing around town. He agreed to have it for her in the morning.
Then she left.
All in all, they’d done a good day’s work.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
EVERY MUSCLE IN ELLEN’S body tightened the moment she entered Jay’s clinic room. The space was too small, the walls too close. The table was too skinny and the mechanism for the headrest seemed vaguely sadistic. The lighting was too dim.
The entire space was open. Nowhere to hide.
She hated everything but the soft music playing.
“Here’s the photo.” Jay grabbed a manila folder from the counter to hand it to her.
Taking it, Ellen calmed herself. Right. She was in control here. Helping him. And allowing him to try to help her, too. He was Black Leather. Motorcycle Man.
He’d met her mother and given her nothing to complain about. Except the ponytail, of course.
What’s he trying to say with that ponytail, El?
Strangely enough, rather than bringing her to her senses as her mother had hoped, the comment had only made Ellen smile.
“You ready to get started?” he asked.
Her mental smile faded. Along with the calm.
“Not really.”
“You want to talk about it?”
“No.” She wanted to be normal and able to get a massage. The heroines of Shelter Valley treated themselves to spa days in Phoenix. They went as a group.
She wanted to be normal and have a healthy spousal relationship.
But she didn’t want to be touched.
“I’m going to leave the room for a couple of minutes. Take your time. Listen to the music. When you’re ready, get up on the table, lie down on your stomach, with your forehead against this pad, and cover yourself with this sheet.”
“I’m keeping my clothes on.”
“Just as we discussed,” he agreed. “And you’ll be covered with a sheet.”
She wouldn’t be exposed. She’d be a shadow under a sheet.
Nodding, Ellen watched him go. And prayed that he wouldn’t go too far. She didn’t know how long she could hold out against the urge to run.
Afraid to be caught uncovered, she pushed her purse under a table in the corner and climbed onto the massage table, then arranged herself as he’d instructed. Through an opening in the headrest she could see the floor, but her features were protected from view.
She could cry and no one would know.
Reaching back to grab the sheet, she pulled it around herself and settled into position. She’d made it. Was fully covered. Not exposed.
The low lights were nice. Kept her hidden. And the music…if she concentrated on it, went where it wanted to take her, she could almost leave the room. She followed it to a field. The grass was long and soft and green. A slight breeze cooled the warmth emanating from the sun shining in the blue sky above. The music took her to a flower garden filled with deep red tulips, brightly colored marigolds and lilacs. They were in full bloom, and the air was filled with heady sweet scents….
The door opened and Ellen tensed.
Jay didn’t speak as he entered. If not for the soft rustle of his steps against the linoleum, she wouldn’t have known he was there.
The same as on the motorcycle. He was the driver and yet, remained…unobtrusive. He let her take her own journey on that bike. Let her touch or not touch as she saw fit. He followed every directive she’d given him.
He was there for her. To help her. She wanted help.
The sheet moved and she felt immediate panic.
He pulled the sheet up, covering her neck.
Okay. She was safe. She tried to focus on the music. Violins played. Flowers were there, in the periphery of her mind, but she couldn’t access them.
What was going to happen next?
Would she bolt? Would he tell her what he was going to do?
She was a freak—lying here on the verge of explosion.
The touch on her shoulder was light, a stroke. One, then another. One side, then the other. So soft that it seemed a flower caressed her. Not a human being. Not a man. Just a flower. Lightly brushing her shoulder.
She heard music. Not breathing. Saw a floor so dimly lit she couldn’t make out the design in the tile. She saw shapes. Like clouds. Maybe soft white clouds in the blue sky above her flower garden.
She could almost smell the lavender. Or was it lilac? The roses were distinct. She could have orchids, too. It was her garden. Anything could grow there.
Strokes along her shoulders led naturally to strokes at her neck. And along her back. Ellen accepted them. Became one with them. Gentle touches delivered peacefully in a perfect garden of peace.
The sound of footsteps was disturbing, but not upsetting. Abrasive to her lethargic state, but not alarming.
“I’m going to step outside.” A low voice pulled her from her garden. “Take as long as you need. I’ll meet you in the hallway.”
They were done? That was it? She’d made it?
She waited a full minute after she heard the door close before she moved. Sliding off the table was easy. Focusing, finding the energy to walk, to pick up her purse was more difficult.
When she opened the door, the light in the hallway was almost blinding.
Jay stood there, his brown eyes focused solely on her, a crease in his brow. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” She sort of smiled. “I think I am.”
“Good.” He walked with her. “If you have any residual effects, feel free to call.”
“Residual effects?”
“If you get scared, start to feel uncomfortable thinking about the session. That sort of thing.”
She hadn’t considered that. “Okay.”
“I’d like you to come back tomorrow,” he said as they rounded the corner into the waiting room.
Several people filled the chairs lining two walls. Allison Everson—a girl Ellen had graduated from high school with who had married a boy from their class—was there with her two toddlers, both whining. Ellen also recognized an older guy who worked in the janitorial department at the university. She’d seen him there many times, although had never actually met him. A woman she’d worked with once was engrossed in a magazine. And an older couple she knew from church were hunched over a clipboard apparently filling out a form. The anxiety she expected to feel at having so many familiar faces witness her conversation with her therapist never appeared.
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