Pawsitively Secretive

by Melissa Erin Jackson

“Is it safe?” she asked.

  “One second. Car coming in the other direction. Okay … now.”

  When she emerged, finger-combing her hair as she did, the chief gave her a quick once-over. “Welcome back.”

  The tension in his shoulders seemed to ease once her face was back to normal. Amber’s leg jiggled as she cycled through the possibilities of what Chloe had stuffed away in that envelope. Maybe she too had known about her father’s strange monthly payments and had found out who they’d been made to.

  The police station was quiet. Dolores was in her wooden box desk, and Amber was sure there was at least one officer holding down the fort while the others were at the Deidrick house.

  “Dolores,” the chief said in greeting as they walked by.

  “Chief,” she said, her voice croaky, like a frog who had a bad smoking habit. Then her flat eyes focused on Amber, watching her as she went by.

  As usual, once they were out of view, Dolores’s keyboard clacking resumed. Amber had decided that she hoped Dolores wasn’t actually doing paperwork, but was penning a particularly racy romance novel.

  The moment the chief had closed his office door behind them, Amber said, “Hurry and open this thing before I die of anticipation!”

  The chief laughed—a sound that surprised him, given the way he froze, his eyes suddenly widening. “You’ll have to learn to check your enthusiasm,” he said once he sobered, rounding his desk so he could place the laptop and manila envelope on top. He shrugged out of his jacket and draped it over the back of his chair. He unbuttoned the cuffs of his shirt and rolled them up a few inches on either side. “I can’t tell you how many times I was sure I’d stumbled on something that would break a case wide open and it ended up being nothing. It’s possible that the only thing in here is really angsty lovesick teenage poetry.”

  Amber winced, not once considering that the contents of the envelope could be anything other than evidence so shocking it would lead to solving Chloe’s disappearance. Then her posture deflated. “Enthusiasm has officially been checked.”

  The chief laughed again, handing her another pair of gloves that he produced from a drawer in his desk. As she pulled them on, the chief donned his own—much faster than she had—and bent up the two metal arms of the clasp on the envelope’s back flap.

  Check your enthusiasm, she instructed herself when an excited trill flitted in her stomach. Please don’t be angsty poetry. Please don’t be angsty poetry.

  The chief reached into the envelope and pulled out a stack of papers. Amber walked around to stand next to the chief, up on her tiptoes as she tried to look over his shoulder. “Well, it’s not poetry.” But he still only stared at the top sheet, not offering her any hint of what they’d found.

  “Chief, I swear if you don’t tell me what’s in there, I really will turn you into a hamster!”

  He laughed again, and when he looked at her, the corner of his mouth was pulled up.

  “Oh my God,” she said. “You’re dragging this out on purpose.”

  “Maybe.” He cleared a space on his desk and placed the papers on the surface. “You’re worse than Sammy when I tell him he has to hold still for a full minute after dinner if he wants a cookie. He’s so excited, he practically vibrates.”

  Amber wanted to call him a creatively offensive name, but her gaze snagged on the top sheet of the pile. “All results for Chloe Deidrick,” she read out loud. Then she saw phrases like “census and voter lists,” “birth, marriage, and death certificates,” and “family trees.”

  It took a second for it to click.

  “She had a DNA test done,” Amber said, looking up at the chief then.

  “Grab a chair,” he said as he sat down, never taking his attention off the stack of paper on his desk.

  Amber hurried around his desk to grab one of the chairs, then hustled back over to deposit hers beside his. The chief divided the stack and handed her half, his wide hands looking strained in the latex gloves. When she tugged on the stack he held out to her, he tightened his grip.

  “Don’t think I’m going to make a habit of this,” he said. “Think of this as a thank-you for your help.”

  “Maybe you’re sowing the seed for me to become a witch PI.”

  “Oh God,” he groaned.

  “We could have our own buddy cop show! You, the no-nonsense police chief, me, the spunky private investigator who uses her magical talents to get results the police can’t find through ordinary means.”

  He stared at her, expression blank. “You’re very weird, Amber Blackwood.”

  “Thank you,” she said, finally able to pull the papers from his grasp.

  The printout at the top of Amber’s stack was the obituary for Shannon Pritchard. “Shannon Pritchard, 29, passed away January 19 in Lirkaldy, Montana. She is survived by her daughter Chloe and her husband Frank. She will be missed.” That was it; nothing about a funeral or a wake. Just an acknowledgement that she’d passed away. The photo of her was small, but even though it was grainy and in black-and-white, the similarity to Chloe was unmistakable.

  The next was a form that stated that Chloe’s birth certificate wasn’t available, as it had been sealed.

  What followed was what looked like a screen capture, with a column of names and pictures running down the left side of the page. From what Amber could gather, the site she’d submitted her DNA sample to had then sent her a list of people—who were also in the system—who might be a “relationship match” for her. At the top was a box with a star above it that was labeled “Aunt,” and said she was a maternal match. The woman’s name was Karen Reed.

  After that were a couple of pages about Karen, listing her parents, birthday, and her place of birth as Lirkaldy, Montana. Karen had only one sibling: Lilith Reed, who was listed as deceased on January 19th. The date was circled. Amber flipped back to the front of her stack. Shannon Pritchard had also died on January 19th.

  “Hey, chief,” she said. “You know how you said it was like Shannon Pritchard didn’t exist? I think I might have found her real name.” She then explained what she’d found.

  “Interesting …” The chief dropped his papers and swiveled toward his computer. After the screen came to life, he clicked through a few programs and keyed “Lilith Reed” and “Lirkaldy” into a search engine that definitely wasn’t Google.

  As he did that, Amber kept flipping through her own stack, and then landed on a birth certificate of Lilith Reed. A note in Chloe’s looping scrawl was written at the bottom of the printout. Is Lilith my mother? When did she become Shannon Pritchard? Why?

  Amber didn’t know much about genealogy sites, but she knew enough to know that one could only get matches if someone else from their family—even if it was a distant cousin—was in the system, too. Lilith/Shannon had died before these sites became popular, but even still, weren’t there public records detailing the big events in a person’s life? “If Lilith had legally changed her name to Shannon,” Amber said, “shouldn’t there be a report showing the name change? Why was Chloe’s birth certificate sealed?”

  The chief was still scrolling through things on his computer and answered her without looking away from his screen. “Birth certificates are often sealed when there’s a closed adoption. It’s possible that Frank isn’t Chloe’s biological father, but legally adopted her. If the parents want to keep the biological parent or parents from contacting the child or the child’s family post-adoption, they’ll request that it’s closed. The original birth certificate is altered to list the adoptive parents, and then the original is destroyed.”

  “Permanently destroyed?” Amber asked.

  “Depends on the state,” the chief said. “In some cases, yes. In others, the original exists, but can only be revealed by way of a court order, and not until the child in question is 18.”

  “Are birth certificates only sealed in closed adoptions?” Amber asked.

  “I’ve seen them sealed when the paternity of the father is wished to be kept
a secret,” the chief said. “For instance, if the mother and the father have a contentious relationship—especially if they aren’t married—and the mother feels threatened by him, the birth certificate can be sealed to prevent the father from knowing about his child. A father can always file for a paternity test if he needs legal proof that a child is his, but once that happens, the location of the mother could potentially be revealed during the process. Keeping the birth certificate sealed could be used as a safety measure to protect mother and child from a dangerous man.”

  Amber swallowed, an image of the mayor’s angry face, standing nose to nose with her, replaying in her head. Francine Robins had called the mayor a “monster.” What had he done to earn such a label? What had he said to Chloe the night she disappeared that would have made her feel safer out in a storm than in the house with him?

  “I’m not finding much of anything about Lilith Reed,” the chief said, breaking through Amber’s thoughts. “It’s as if she didn’t exist either. But it’s possible that she paid a lawyer to seal more than Chloe’s birth certificate.”

  “You can do that?” Amber asked.

  “Depending on the nature of her situation—maybe,” the chief said. “There are also plenty of ways to obtain another identity illegally and then fly under the radar. She could only take jobs that paid under the table, opt not to have a bank account—things like that.”

  “What would make a person do that?” she asked, though some part of her already knew.

  “Given the marks that were found on her body—ones that hadn’t killed her but had looked as if they’d been sustained over a long period of time—it’s very possible Lilith Reed was in a very bad situation. Perhaps she crafted a new identity out of desperation and self-preservation.”

  Amber chewed on her bottom lip, staring at the small smile on Shannon’s Pritchard’s face in the photo beside her very sparse obituary. “She will be missed,” the obituary said.

  Missed by who, Amber wanted to know. By Frank? Had his simmering rage been what caused those marks on Lilith’s body? Had she changed her name from Lilith to Shannon to escape him? Had he found her after she’d fled, done something to facilitate her death, and then taken Chloe with him? A man who Lilith, very possibly, had gone through so much trouble to keep Chloe safe from?

  Did Frank have her again now?

  Amber remembered her vision from the promotion tincture—the scene that would play out tomorrow, on the day that marked seven days since Chloe’s disappearance—where Chloe had touched the picture of her father standing on a table outside the Sippin’ Siamese, a megaphone to his mouth. A tear had hit the newspaper. Had Chloe been crying because she missed her father and was touched to see that he was doing all he could to find her, or was she crying because the person spearheading her search was the same man who had stolen her—perhaps for the second time?

  That evening, Amber paced her studio apartment. The chief told her that she needed to lie low until he had a better idea of what to do with this new information. Amber felt restless. It was hard to know this much and this little at once and be unable to tell anyone about it.

  She plopped down on her couch and stared at the sea of miniature cat toys littering her coffee table. She needed at least one hundred and fifty, and had only completed ninety so far. She had a little over a week to get them all done, but she couldn’t for the life of her concentrate on anything.

  Then she spotted the corner of a small white piece of paper. She unearthed the business card from beneath a small pile of tiny balls of yarn. Alan Peterson’s name stared up at her.

  All she knew about Alan’s client was that it was a woman who knew of Chloe, but wasn’t local. Could her aunt, Karen Reed, have found Chloe’s whereabouts when they had been matched on the ancestry site? If the mayor had been keeping Chloe on a short leash for most of her life, who else could possibly have any idea how or where to find her?

  The chief’s voice sounded in her head whenever she thought about trying to contact Karen. Who knew what can of worms that could open up?

  She slapped the business card against her open palm. The chief didn’t want her to harass witnesses, but he couldn’t get upset with her over watching someone, could he?

  She pulled open the right-hand drawer on her coffee table and fished out her map of Edgehill, spreading it out as best she could on what space was available. Though the spell would work best if she had a picture to work from, she knew there was no point searching for Alan Peterson online. Even if he had a website using his apparently false name, Amber had no idea where the guy had originally come from. Plus, what PI would put his picture online? He needed to be as anonymous as possible.

  There wasn’t any of Alan’s energy left in the business card after Amber had conducted the memory spell, but the mere fact that it had once been his would likely be enough. Amber also, thanks to her handful of interactions with the man, had his face burned into her memory.

  With the business card in one hand, and her amethyst crystal in the other, Amber recited the increasingly familiar scrying spell. It took five separate attempts over the course of an hour for the dot representing Alan Peterson to finally pop up on her map. Amber knew this was likely in large part due to Alan not wanting to be found. He was staying not in a hotel, but in a small duplex not far from the Sippin’ Siamese. It was an out-of-the-way location, as far as the center of Edgehill went, but she figured Alan wanted it that way. The less he was noticed in town, the less he’d be remembered.

  For the rest of the evening, Amber scoured her grimoire for anything that might help her stay out of sight of the crafty PI tomorrow. She was desperate to open her parents’ grimoires, but until she and Edgar found a safe place for them, Amber couldn’t risk breaking the cloaking spell on either one.

  When she could scarcely keep her eyes open any longer, she stuffed her folded sheets of newly crafted spells into her purse, got ready for bed, and prepared her glass of water and premonition tincture. The cats curled up on the bed with her, Tom lying flush with her side, and Alley curled up on a pillow.

  Since this was her second dose of the tincture, Aunt Gretchen had said she could take a full tablespoon instead of a teaspoon. Amber almost couldn’t guzzle the drink down fast enough, the tincture pulling her into sleep almost immediately.

  Her glass hit the floor and the whomp whomp whomp of it rolling away across the hardwood floor sounded in her head as loud as a gong as she slipped into a vision of Chloe.

  Chloe lay on her mattress, picking at her already badly chipped red nail polish.

  Four knocks sounded on the door. Chloe slapped her reply, then flipped the bird to the camera in the corner for good measure, but she didn’t bother to get up.

  A tray of breakfast and a glass of water were slid into the room, just as before. And, just as before, a paper followed. This time, however, it was an article that looked like it had been scanned and then printed on standard white printer paper. When the door closed, followed by four knocks, Chloe kicked off her blanket and scrambled across the cement floor to snatch up the sheet.

  It was a newspaper clipping from almost eighteen years ago. “Local Man Suspected in Death of Woman Found in Lake.” It was a short article, but it detailed the mysterious death of a woman who had plunged into Lake Lirkaldy in the dead of winter. At the time of the accident, she didn’t have any kind of ID on her, so the article referred to her as Jane Doe. The woman had bruises on her arms, legs, and neck, causing police to speculate that she’d been in an altercation of some kind prior to the accident. She wore only a nightshirt and no shoes. By the time the car had been discovered, it had snowed heavily, covering any sign of what might have happened to cause her to plunge into the freezing-cold lake. It was suspected that she could have been under the influence and hit a patch of black ice. Witnesses were urged to come forward with news.

  Chloe flipped the paper over and gasped. Written in thick black letters were the words, “Who killed your mother? Your father isn’t who
he says he is.”

  Amber woke with a start, her apartment lit with the first rays of morning.

  Whoever took Chloe wasn’t her father … but it was someone who wanted to pit Chloe against him.

  Chapter 14

  Thursday marked the one-week anniversary of Chloe’s disappearance. Amber and the chief at least had the knowledge that the girl was okay. The mayor and everyone else in Edgehill were on high alert. Thanks to movies and TV, most everyone knew how vital the first 48 hours were in cases like Chloe’s. They were well beyond that window now, and Amber wondered how many were fearing the worst—how many were simply waiting for the news confirming that Chloe Deidrick was never coming home.

  At 8 a.m. sharp, Amber flipped the sign to open, welcomed her first customer, and then slipped out the door to let the Bowens take over.

  A cab pulled up outside the Quirky Whisker a few minutes later. A trip to the car rental place resulted in Amber signing several forms, informing the cashier on three separate occasions that she really didn’t want the extra insurance because she was already insured, and finally having a car again. One didn’t need a car in a town like Edgehill, necessarily, but it helped. And one certainly couldn’t conduct covert surveillance while on a bicycle.

  After adjusting the seat and mirrors in the rental, she pulled her Edgehill map out of her purse. When she’d checked it before leaving, the Alan Peterson dot was still at his duplex. Now, it appeared to be at Catty Melt. Perhaps Alan was as obsessed with Catty Cakes as Edgar was.

  Depositing her purse and map on the passenger seat of the nearly spotless rental car, she made the half hour drive back to Edgehill. By the time she was within the town limits, the Alan dot was on the move again. She checked it at every red light and stop sign, wondering if there was a locator app meant for witches. She was surely going to get in an accident tracking this guy on paper.

  The good thing was, she could keep a reasonable distance from him at any given time and still know where he was even if she couldn’t actually see him. It would prevent her from being spotted. When the Alan dot stopped in a residential neighborhood not more than two blocks from Balinese Park, she didn’t have any guesses as to who Alan might be keeping an eye on.