A Father's Quest

by Debra Salonen

  “I can’t believe that whore is your mother, Rem. I’m sorry. That’s a crappy word, but it’s the truth. Everybody knows she sleeps around. And to get pregnant by her friend’s husband when her friend was also pregnant…that’s too much, man. Too much.” Then he’d left.

  And, now, he was back, asking her to be the very person she didn’t want to be.

  “That happened a long time ago, Jonas. I was a child.”

  “The same age my daughter is,” Jonas said, meaningfully. “She’s lost, like I was. Afraid. If someone like me—an ordinary dad—can sense this, so can you, because you’re special. You are, Rem. You always have been. Please, please say you’ll help.”

  She pressed her fingertips to her temples. No one had ever begged her to find a missing child. Her mother’s friends had always asked for signs, some sort of super natural permission to make choices they probably would have made anyway. This was different. Dangerous. The risk of failure was far too great.

  “Jonas, you don’t understand. Sometimes I have dreams that I can remember when I wake up. And some times the images in my dreams make sense to people who want them to mean something. I’ve never, ever claimed otherwise. And if I told you I saw something in a dream that you thought pertained to your daughter and it turned out to be wrong or it led you on a wild goose chase in the opposite direction, you’d blame me. You’d hate me more than you already do.”

  He stepped closer, ignoring Jessie completely. “I never hated you, Rem. I couldn’t if I wanted to. Your mother? Yes. I’m not sorry Marlene is dead. My only regret is I never told her exactly what I thought of her. But none of what happened between us was your fault.”

  “He’s right, you know,” Jessie said. “And, not to detract from the seriousness of Jonas’s situation, but you two do realize that technology has made certain advances, right? A DNA test would prove once and for all whether Mom was telling the truth that night.”

  Jonas’s eyebrows came together. “Is there some reason you think Marlene lied?”

  Jessie threw Remy a look. Funny, this was yet another subject they’d talked about earlier.

  “Jessie and I have come to the conclusion that Mama had—how do the politicians put it?—a questionable association with the truth.”

  Jonas continued to frown but after a few seconds he shrugged. “Whatever. I don’t care about the past. I know I probably should, but my only focus at the moment is finding my daughter. If you can’t help me, then…I’ll keep looking.”

  He started to leave but paused to pull something from his pocket. “I know this is a long shot, but…well…this is Birdie,” he said, holding out a photograph.

  Remy’s hand started to shake even before she touched it. Nerves, anticipation, empathy…she didn’t know. But the moment she saw the picture, her vision blurred and her heart jolted.

  Red hair. She had red hair.

  Remy pressed her lips together as hard as she could to keep from crying out.

  She very rarely recalled color in her dreams. Images, yes. Movement. Structures. Voices. Dialogue. But never hair color.

  Until recently.

  “Uh-oh,” Jessie put an arm around Remy’s shoulders in support.

  “What?” Jonas asked, his gaze never leaving Remy.

  Jessie let her chin drop so her head touched Remy’s.

  “I don’t know for sure,” she told Jonas, “but I’m guessing Remy has seen this little girl in her dreams. Right, Rem?”

  Remy kept her gaze on the photo. “Two nights ago.”

  Jessie patted her back. “I’m sorry, Remy. I know you wanted to put this dream thing behind you, but, well, you know what they say about the best-laid plans.”

  JONAS HAD NO IDEA WHAT Jessie was talking about and he didn’t care. A jolt of electricity passed through him, jump-starting the tiny bit of remaining hope he’d been nursing. “You’ve seen her? You saw Birdie in one of your dreams?” Jonas reached for Remy’s arm. “When? What happened? Was she okay?”

  Despite her bad ankle, Jessie managed to shove her sister behind her and deflect Jonas’s hand. “No way. No touching her. Step back and take a deep breath. She’s not a circus sideshow act. If you can’t control yourself, my cowboy fiancé has a rope and he’s not afraid to use it.”

  Jonas didn’t appreciate being bossed around by Jessie Bouchard, but he wasn’t a fool. He needed Remy’s help, and if that meant going through her twin, so be it. He’d dealt with Jessie in the past and he could do it again.

  “So? What now? How do we do this?”

  Jessie looked at her sister. “Rem?”

  “I need to sit down.”

  She dashed inside as though she might be sick. Did thinking about her dreams make her sick? Or had she seen something too horrible to recall? He was terrified to ask. He wished he could remember more from high school, but Remy always had downplayed her supposed gift. “It’s a scam,” she once told him. “A parlor trick that Mama dreamed up to increase her business. You don’t believe any of this, do you?”

  He hadn’t then, but here he was, fifteen years later, asking for help from the one person who had every right to hate him. He’d treated her badly because of something that wasn’t her fault. Too bad he’d been so damn confused and hurt he’d lashed out at the wrong person. Unfortunately, the one person he should have lashed out at—his father—was dead and buried.

  “Are you going in?” Jessie asked.

  Did he have any choice? He wished like hell he could walk away. He didn’t know if seeing Remy was causing his head to ache or the fact he hadn’t a good night’s sleep in weeks. It probably didn’t help that he’d been living on coffee and fast food. He was a mess, and that meant he wasn’t going to be on top of his game when Birdie needed him most.

  “She has your picture,” Jessie prompted.

  “What’s your agenda? One minute you’re accusing me of incestuous intentions, the next you’re encouraging me to follow your sister into the house.”

  She looked chagrined. “Honestly? I don’t know what to think. But I’m sick of not knowing the truth about anything. And, despite what Remy says, I do think you broke her heart and she’s never completely gotten over you. So maybe helping you reunite with your daughter—and, presumably, your wife—she’ll be able to close that door for good.”

  His wife. Cheryl was his ex-wife, and he didn’t give a damn what happened to her once he had Birdie back.

  “Jessie,” a girl in her early teens called out from the corner of the house near the garage, “are we taking your bike? Or is this Remy’s?”

  “That one is Rem’s, Shiloh. But mine is somewhere in the garage. Hold on. I’ll be right there.” She turned and looked at him. “The next move is up to you, Jonas. A part of me wants to tell you to take a hike and leave my sister alone, but you probably won’t do that, so…” She glanced toward the open door. “Tell her not to do anything I wouldn’t do—at least until the DNA results are in.”

  She grinned and hopped down the steps, the same way she’d come up.

  Jonas knew he didn’t have a choice. He’d come here for a reason, and a good insurance investigator followed every lead—not just the convenient ones.

  He stepped into the foyer of the home he’d last visited fifteen years earlier and looked around. The place had a completely different feel to it. Bigger. More open. Normal, he decided. The last time he’d been there, the rooms had been dwarfed by an abundance of furniture. Huge dark pieces that didn’t match each other.

  He turned toward the parlor. The spot where Marlene Bouchard had changed his life forever.

  Remy was standing beside the simple, white brick fireplace, her gaze still focused on the picture in her hand.

  “Okay, Remy, tell me what’s going on. First you say you don’t have dreams and I’d be risking my daughter’s life to believe you if you did tell me anything. Then you turn white as a sheet and look like you’re going to faint the minute you see Birdie’s picture. So, yes or no? Have you seen my daughter in yo
ur dreams?”

  “I don’t know.”

  His headache spiked and he gave in to fatigue and dropped into the room’s lone chair, an overstuffed leather armchair. “That’s not exactly the answer I was looking for.”

  “I can’t help it. I’ve been actively trying not to remember my dreams, Jonas. After Mama passed away, I decided she was the only person who actually believed all that dream-girl nonsense and I needed to move on, find out who I really am.”

  He bit back a swearword that seemed appropriate.

  She held up the photo, waving it slightly. “But a few nights ago, I had a tiny, fleeting glimpse of a little girl with bright red hair. Nothing of any significance happened. She sort of popped in and popped out in the background, like a…spirit,” she said, obviously choosing the word with care. “I didn’t even remember seeing her until you showed me this picture.”

  He believed her. “Then, you can’t say for sure it was Birdie?”

  “No. I can’t.”

  Damn. He shouldn’t have come here, wasted his time. All because a Christmas card somehow got mixed in with the file he was compiling about Cheryl and her stupid church. The shiny photo greeting featured a dozen or so doctors, nurses and staff members at Shadybrook, the assisted-living center where his mother resided. A familiar face with a sweet smile and long blond hair had stirred up memories and, unfortunately, a worthless hunch.

  “Are you still working at Shadybrook?” he asked.

  She looked surprised by the question. “No. I’m going to start job hunting on Monday. Why do you ask?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe that explains why you saw a kid with red hair in your dream. Mom has a bunch of pictures of Birdie around her room.”

  She seemed to contemplate that possibility. “That makes sense. Except for the fact I haven’t spoken with your mother since they moved her to the full-care wing last fall. You came back for that, didn’t you?”

  He nodded. A quick, cheerless trip that involved more time on an airplane than on the ground, a flurry of paperwork and an all-too-brief, tearful reunion with Birdie.

  “But,” she said, obviously forcing a smile, “I suppose it’s possible. The subconscious is full of trivia that can pop to the surface for no apparent reason.”

  He had the distinct impression she didn’t believe a word she was saying. He knew it was time to leave, but he couldn’t make himself move. He felt mired in a web of dread. Similar to how he felt the entire time he was in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  He was responsible for every man in his unit. He didn’t always know where they were or if they were in trouble, caught in a firefight, trusting the wrong person, ambushed or wounded. The knot in his gut never lessened, and now it was back.

  He pressed on a tender spot just above his belt line to ease the discomfort as he looked around, searching for any sort of distraction. “What happened to all the furniture that used to be in here? Were you robbed? I hope you put in a claim with your insurance company.”

  She smiled. “The chair you’re sitting on is the only one I kept.”

  Was it the same one her mother sat in that night? No, he didn’t think so. He could picture Remy sitting beside him on the red velvet, tufted settee. And he’d nearly broken his neck stumbling over an ugly, lumpy footstool with frayed gold tassels around the bottom in his haste to get away after Marlene made that announcement. He’d kicked it violently, sending it flying into a big wooden hutch of some sort.

  Despite the depth of his negative feelings later on, when he’d been dating Remy, he’d secretly admired Marlene’s style. He’d found the eclectic and slightly bohemian tone a welcome change from the stifling formality of his mother’s rigidly proper decor.

  Remy walked into the adjoining dining room and returned a moment later with a simple, straight-back chair—more Ikea than estate sale—and placed it a few feet to his left. “When Mama passed, she left Jessie and me this house with all its contents. I decided to let my sisters take whatever they wanted.”

  “The Bullies? Do you still call them that?”

  She seemed surprised that he remembered the nickname she and Jessie had for their three older sisters. Since he was an only child, he’d had a hard time understanding how her siblings could be so mean and spiteful to the much younger twins. But apparently both Jessie and Remy had felt uniformly picked on—hence the descriptive appellation.

  “Actually, they call themselves that now. I think they consider it a badge of honor or something. Their children think that’s the funniest thing ever.”

  He smiled. Birdie would have laughed, too. “Do they live around here?”

  “Close enough to be a nuisance,” she said, but since this was Remy, he was pretty sure she didn’t mean it.

  Or maybe she’d changed. How the hell would he know? He’d made a rational, logical decision to never see Remy again—for both their sakes, he’d told himself at the time. Young kids thought they had all the answers, right?

  “May I ask you a question?” Remy asked.

  Jonas nodded.

  “How missing is she?”

  That question.

  “Missing enough to make me qualify for the Worst Father of the Year award,” he said, softly. He’d spent his whole life swearing he wouldn’t be like his dad, and he wasn’t. He was worse.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  REMY MADE AN IMPATIENT gesture Jonas remembered from before. “I don’t believe that for a minute. What I’m asking is how did she go missing? Did she wander away from her mother while you were gone? Was she kidnapped? Does her mother have her somewhere?”

  “The last. Her mom took her. And that’s one of the reasons I’m so frantic. As unfair as it sounds, Cheryl—my ex—hasn’t officially broken the law. Nobody is willing to call this a kidnapping, even though Cheryl took Birdie out of the state without my permission.”

  “Is she the custodial parent?”

  “Temporarily. When we divorced, I agreed to joint custody because I thought that was in Birdie’s best interest. But Cheryl has some health issues and I wound up with Birdie ninety percent of the time. Which,” he quickly added, “was great. Everything was good until my National Guard unit was called up.”

  He decided not to tell her the whole, convoluted tale of his failed marriage, instead, sticking to the current facts. “I transferred custody solely to Cheryl while I was out of the country.”

  “Where did you say you were?”

  “Iraq and Afghanistan. We got home six weeks ago. And from what I’ve been able to piece together, Cheryl got involved with a religious cult shortly before the holidays. The group calls themselves The GoodFriends of Christ, or GoodFriends, for short. They remained in the Memphis area for a month or so. Then right before school was set to resume, Cheryl hocked what she could, abandoned everything else in the apartment I paid a year’s rent in advance for and basically disappeared.”

  “How did you find out?”

  Her questions came like a practiced investigator’s.

  “I’d made arrangements with friends to check on Birdie every few weeks. They’d stop by with food, toys, books—little things I’d left with them before I was deployed. When they realized Cheryl and Birdie were gone, they called the police.”

  “When did you last hear from her?”

  This was the part his buddy at the Memphis P.D. found the hardest to get his head around. “Cheryl has been emailing me, off and on. Twice she agreed to meet me and bring Birdie but never showed up. Three weeks ago, she let me talk to Birdie using Skype.”

  “And Birdie was okay?”

  He knew his daughter, and even though he hadn’t seen Birdie for several months, he recognized the signs of stress—and fear. “She seemed healthy enough but quiet. Reserved. Like she was afraid to say anything. She’s smart and very sensitive to her mother’s problems. She’s always tried to take care of her mom, which is nice, but a kid should be a kid, right?”

  She didn’t answer. He didn’t expect her to.

 
; “Wasn’t your wife supposed to clear any move with you before she took your child to another state?”

  “Yes, but, you know what government agencies are like right now—overworked and understaffed. I have a family lawyer who has filed all the proper papers, but who’s going to invest the time and money to track down a mom when the kid isn’t in imminent danger?”

  “What about school? It’s against the law to keep a child out of school, isn’t it?”

  “Not if you fill out the paperwork to do homeschooling. But that’s actually the scariest part for me, because Cheryl was homeschooled. She hated it and blamed her parents for depriving her of what she felt was a normal upbringing. ‘Crazy hippies,’ she called them. I really question her state of mind if she’s putting Birdie through something she hated.”

  “Do you have any idea where your daughter is?”

  He hunched forward, weaving his fingers together.

  He didn’t know why he was telling her all of this if she wasn’t prepared to help, although it actually felt good to have someone to talk to. “No. The homeschool form Cheryl filled out was filed with the State of Florida, but the address she gave was bogus. My friend who works with the Memphis P.D. ran a check on the GoodFriends. He said they haven’t held an official revival meeting for nearly two months.”

  “They’ve disappeared?” Her eyes looked alarmed.

  “Apparently. Do you see now why I need your help? Any lead would help point me in the right direction.”

  She swallowed. “Or send you off to Timbuktu when they were actually camped right down the street.”

  “Yeah, I heard you on the porch. You’re afraid of some kind of backlash. But the fact is I don’t have a lot of options at the moment. I’m not a sit-around-and-wait kind of guy. My dad used to say, ‘Do something, even if it’s wrong.’” He let out a harsh snort. “Ironic, huh? Given what he did with your mom.”

  She crossed her legs and sat forward, her foot bouncing in a nervous habit. She used to call it sedentary pacing—a way to free up her subconscious thought process by distracting the rational, thinking part of her brain.