Mother by Fate

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  By “we” he better have meant the two of them. Not him and whatever stripper he had living with him.

  “I’m coaching full-time this year, so she’ll have to go to an after-school program of some kind, but I can send her to the free one if you’d rather...”

  “I didn’t get my July pictures.”

  “I know. I...well...I thought someone had mailed them.”

  “And this...someone... She can’t mail pictures but you trust her to take care of a five-year-old child?” She couldn’t say “our” daughter. Because technically, Bessie wasn’t Sara’s. She’d raised her as her own from the second she was born. Her ex-husband had said he’d do the necessary paperwork for Sara to be able to adopt his biological child so they could be a fully legal family, so Sara would have the same parental rights he did.

  The adoption was just another thing he’d lied about.

  “She’s...not with Bessie and me anymore.” He always spoke faster when he was saying something he knew made him look bad in her eyes. It was how she knew when he was lying to her.

  Pathetic, really.

  “I’m sending over scans and pics of some of her projects. And July’s photos, too, right now, as we speak,” he said. “She’s got real spatial aptitude. And you know I wouldn’t ask if I had the money to pay for this myself. But being a single father...”

  He was a good father. It was the only reason Sara had spent the past three years biting her tongue and sending her money. The alimony she had no choice but to pay. She came from a wealthy family. And had made a poor marriage choice.

  Bessie wasn’t at fault for that. And for the first two years of the little girl’s life, Sara had been the little girl’s only mother. She’d thought she would be her forever mother.

  “I know the ropes, Jason. You don’t have to repeat your victim’s tale every time we speak.” Yes, she’d left him, drastically downsizing his lifestyle.

  But only after she’d caught him cheating on her. More than once.

  “It’s wrong that you don’t let me see her.”

  “You’re the one who chose to leave us. I don’t want her to get confused with various mothers coming in and out of her life. Or having to choose loyalties...”

  He was afraid that if Sara was in Bessie’s life the day would come when Bessie would choose to come to live with Sara.

  “When she’s eighteen, she’ll be able to make her own choice,” Sara reminded him.

  “She was two when you left. I hardly think she’ll remember you.” The man was stupid, hurting her while asking her for money.

  Stupid and smart enough to win, too. He had her over a barrel and he knew it. Her love for Bessie was as unconditional as any mother’s love. She’d give the little girl whatever she needed.

  “Just don’t be late with my pictures again,” she said. They were the only way she could watch her little girl grow up.

  “I won’t. I am sorry about that,” he said. And she knew he meant it. Just as she knew that every dime she sent for Bessie’s care was spent exactly as she meant it to be spent.

  Jason wasn’t going to screw up a good thing. Not for himself, and not for Bessie, either. He truly doted on the little girl.

  He didn’t call Sara for the basics. The general child-care things he handled on his own. Just as, while he’d fought for alimony, he’d never asked for child support during their divorce settlement. He was savvy, the jerk she’d married. If he’d made an agreement to accept child support from Sara, she’d have had grounds to argue her right to see the girl.

  “I’ll transfer the money by Monday,” she said. They banked at the same institution—Jason’s doing—so that she could make online transfers. She couldn’t take money out of his account. And he couldn’t see hers at all. But she was able to transfer funds to his account at any time.

  Her alimony payments went through the court. And unless he married, they would continue to do so for another seven years.

  “Thanks, Sara.” Jason’s tone was congenial now. As if they were old friends. All the tension had left his voice. As it always did. No matter how much of a scum he’d just been. Asking for money. Or having sex behind his wife’s back. He was Jason. He was entitled.

  “How is she?” Sara asked. He was going to hang up.

  “Good. Real good.”

  “How did she do with the swimming lessons?”

  “It was rough at first. You know how she hates having her head underwater...”

  She had at two. That could have changed.

  “But in the end, she was swimming like a fish.”

  “Underwater?”

  “Not as easily, but yeah.”

  Sara smiled. Bessie was one determined little girl. She was proud of her.

  “So, yeah, I hate to cut you off, but I gotta go, Sara, I have to...”

  Sara might have forced him to talk to her a little longer—after all, she hadn’t transferred the money yet—but her phone buzzed with an incoming call.

  “I do, too. Bye,” she said to her ex, and clicked over to take the other call.

  “Lila, what’s up?” The managing director of the Lemonade Stand, the unique, privately funded women’s shelter where Sara worked, didn’t ever call her at home just to chat. “It’s Nicole. She’s gone.”

  “What do you mean gone? She left?” Dropping her towel, Sara reached for the closest pair of cotton pants she had. With the phone propped between her shoulder and her ear, she slipped into underwear and then her pants. “It doesn’t make sense,” she said, buttoning the pants with fingers that fumbled in her haste. “Why would she go? She’s not safe and... She called someone and got word that her son was being moved, didn’t she?”

  It was the sole reason the woman would leave the only place where she was safe. Where her secrets were safe.

  “She made a call,” Lila confirmed. “But no, she told one of the girls that Toby hadn’t been moved yet.”

  There was a neighbor in LA across the street from where Nicole had lived with her husband and son, an older woman Nicole’s ex didn’t even notice, who’d been keeping an eye on things for Nicole. Specifically on her son. Because Trevor, Toby’s father, a white-supremacist higher-up in a national neo-Nazi organization was going to run with him. Nicole knew it. Now the police knew it. And if he did run, the woman would never see her son again. Worse, the boy would have little chance but to be indoctrinated by the man who’d spawned him for one purpose only. To populate the world with white men who hated anyone who wasn’t a white man.

  White men who believed that ridding the earth of nonwhites was their God-given purpose.

  If Nicole didn’t get Toby away, the boy would most likely grow up to be just like his dad. As Trevor had done before him.

  Sara had a bra on and was in the process of pulling a short-sleeved cotton top over her head. “She wouldn’t leave,” she said. “Not without Toby.”

  Late the night before, the Santa Raquel police had promised Nicole they’d get her son out of Trevor’s house and into safe custody, after the LA Police Department had withdrawn the warrant that had been issued for her arrest. A child-welfare representative, a member of the High Risk Team, had already been briefed and was waiting for Toby to arrive in Santa Raquel.

  “She left,” Lila said, her voice unusually agitated. “She was at the thrift shop, looking for some jeans...” All they’d had in the on-campus store were women’s sizes. Nicole, who was twenty-seven years old and five foot two, barely weighed a hundred pounds. “And then she was gone. Out the side door where we empty the trash...”

  The thrift shop, one of the many businesses operated by the Lemonade Stand that were open to the public and provided the shelter’s primary means of support, fronted an open city street. Residents accessed it through a back exit, and from there the only admittance to the locked
grounds of the Stand was via fingerprint recognition.

  A new safety measure that had been instigated over the summer as part of the work the High Risk Team was doing.

  “She got spooked,” Sara said, slipping into a pair of light blue flats, then slinging her bag over her shoulder before heading out the door. “Dammit, someone was there. Someone scared her into running.”

  “From what we heard last night, if Trevor gets hold of her she’s as good as dead.”

  “And then he has Toby all to himself,” Sara said. “You’ve already alerted everyone...”

  “Of course.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  “Good.”

  Sara and Lila, in these jobs they worked together, had seen more ugliness than most people ever would. Lila always appeared to handle it all calmly.

  With only the briefest shrug of disappointment about the fact that she wouldn’t have been able to have her dinner date with Hot Pool Guy that night, Sara drove carefully, but over the speed limit to the Lemonade Stand. There wasn’t much she could do at this point, but maybe there would be. Once she talked with some of the women. They might relax and open up to her more easily than they would with a member of law enforcement. Maybe one of them saw something that would give them a clue as to where Nicole had gone.

  A direction even.

  Regardless, Sara needed to be at the Stand.

  Because just as Lila leaned on her, she leaned on Lila, too.

  They were two strong women, caring for victims to the best of their ability.

  And though they never spoke of their personal lives with each other, they both seemed to understand, without having to say as much, that they were two women with secrets of their own.

  CHAPTER THREE

  MICHAEL WAS GOOD at what he did. In just a few short years he’d become one of the top ten bounty hunters in the country. And while Michael had bills to pay, he didn’t hunt criminals to make a living. He hunted them strictly to save innocent lives.

  He’d brought in the head of a Mexican drug cartel for a sum that would have kept him and Mari clothed and fed for more than a year if he’d chosen to stop working.

  A tiny bitch of a woman wasn’t going to get away from him.

  She was good, though. Her ex-husband, when he’d gone to the guy to find out what he could about the woman listed on the warrant he’d been given, told him she’d been hunted before.

  Trevor Kramer had been only too happy to speak with him—relieved to know that the woman who’d posed a threat to his son’s life was soon going to be behind bars for good.

  Michael had been hanging out on the street where he’d spotted her the evening before, after tracing her to a bus stop in Santa Raquel. She’d been with Sara Havens and the two had disappeared before traffic had cleared enough for him to get across the street. He was certain now that someplace close by, but not easily discernible to him, was a women’s shelter that was unknowingly harboring a criminal.

  He still didn’t know where the shelter was, but less than an hour after leaving Sara Haven’s condo complex that afternoon, he’d seen Nicole, and their cat-and-mouse game had begun. She’d been inside the thrift shop he’d visited the evening before looking for information on her or Sara. From where he’d been standing out on the street, he’d seen her by a rack of pants. Moving slowly, casually, he’d drawn closer. He’d counted two doors with access to the shop—one on the side, the other in the front. Heading toward the corner of the building, he’d had both covered.

  But by some divine timing for her, the woman had shot out the side door at the exact time a delivery truck had pulled into the alley. It had been turning around and she’d been standing on the far side of the bumper, clutching a ring attached to the side of the truck, catching a ride away from him before he’d had a chance to approach her.

  He’d lost a precious few minutes getting back to his SUV, but he’d kept the truck in sight. Apparently he’d had a little divine intervention, as well—the big truck was having trouble maneuvering through the crowded city streets. Just as he got close, the truck stopped and the woman on the back jumped off.

  He’d swerved into a parking spot and had taken off after her on foot.

  They’d been running for more than an hour now. In and out of neighborhoods. Over fences. He’d lose her, and then find her again. Anytime he’d thought she was too tired to go on, she’d disappear on him again.

  It didn’t take him long to figure out that she ducked under and behind thick shrubbery to rest.

  The third time she tried that trick he had her. She was in a front yard in a quiet neighborhood. It didn’t look like anyone was home. Michael had her cornered.

  His paperwork had her listed as armed and dangerous. She’d already taken one shot at a man. Her ex-husband. She’d broken into two homes. And had attempted to steal a baby out of his crib on two different occasions, both times while bearing a loaded gun.

  She had a record that was pages long and included aiding and abetting a bombing. According to her ex she was a meth addict—which explained how skinny she was.

  Drawing closer to the shrub he was almost close enough to grab the woman. Trevor Kramer had told him that unless she was in need of a fix, she was pretty good about following orders.

  He’d found the comment strange, but gathered Trevor was talking about his ex-wife’s work ethic as Michael had been asking about her employment—anything that could give him a clue to where she might go to hide. So Nicole Kramer followed orders at work, did her job well, when she wasn’t jonesing.

  After spending a night in a women’s shelter, where she most certainly wouldn’t have had access to illegal drugs, she was probably desperate for a fix. It was probably what had driven her out of the shelter that afternoon to begin with.

  He pulled his gun. He was going to get this woman, no matter what it took.

  “I have you cornered, Nicole. I’m only here to help you, to keep you safe. I know Sara.”

  No response. He’d seen the shrubs move. He knew she was in there.

  Too far in for him to grab her. And he couldn’t just start shooting. Not unless she shot at him first.

  She had to come out at some point.

  “I’ll wait as long as I have to,” he said, leaning against the corner of the house closest to the end of the line of shrubs. She’d chosen well. The bushes were so dense he still couldn’t see her.

  He could hear her, though. Hear the swishing sound as she moved in the dirt. She was crawling through the line of bushes. Intending to come out on the other end around the corner of the house and get away from him while he stood there talking to the shrubs. “It won’t work, Nicole,” he said, moving with the sound of the swishing as the tops of the bushes quivered as she made her way along the house.

  The sun was setting behind the house, leaving the front in shadow. Keeping his gaze honed on every little movement, he almost missed the swaying back near the original entrance to the shrubs at the front of the house. She wanted him to think that she was going around back to escape so she could slip out the front.

  No, he heard rustling in the back.

  But saw movement up front.

  She was playing with him. Trevor had said the woman was an escape artist. She’d managed to elude not just the LAPD, but the San Diego Police Department, as well.

  She wasn’t going to elude him.

  Another sound from the back.

  Movement in the front.

  She was in one area, and using something to either create noise or movement in the other. At the corner of the house now, he watched both shrub exits. If she was as smart as Trevor had said she was, she’d go out the back. She could hop the five-foot fence into the woods. Maybe even make it to the beach.

  Another swoosh, like a body sliding along in the dirt, or a s
hirt rubbing up against a foundation. He moved toward the sound. If he went in after her, cornered her in the dark, she’d likely shoot him.

  He had to be ready to grab her the second she showed herself.

  The sound came again. Ignoring the movements up front now, he prepared to jump the woman as soon as she emerged.

  He heard the rustle before his brain had a chance to process what it meant. It was in front of him and she was out of the bush and across the driveway by the time he could react. As she fled, he saw the long branch she’d been using to make the sounds. She’d pulled it out with her, dropping it as she ran.

  She only had a thirty-second head start. Back the way they’d come. And he knew, as she probably did, that that side of the house wasn’t fenced. She was off in the woods, heading toward the beach, and their little game continued.

  Michael chased her until dark. Until after dark. The night was more friend to her than to him. But he was good at what he did.

  It wasn’t until she hopped on a bus just as it was pulling away that she finally lost him.

  His SUV was at least a couple of miles from where he was. He had no way to follow her.

  But he took the bus number.

  He had contacts. As long as he had a bus number he could find the driver and question him. Canvass the entire route if he had to. One way or another he was going to find out where she got off.

  And he’d continue the hunt.

  * * *

  STOPPING SHORT OF wringing her hands, Sara paced her small office at the Lemonade Stand. The sound of her heels on the hard plastic chair runner jarred her as she crossed around the back of the armchair she most usually sat in, to the desk, over to the front of her chair, around the walnut coffee table to the floral-pattern couch and back.

  She adjusted the box of lotion-filled tissues on the table. And listened for the sound of footsteps outside.

  Lynn Duncan Bishop, the Stand’s full-time nurse practitioner and chief medical officer, had said they’d only be a minute.

  But with Maddie, Lynn’s live-in sister-in-law and a former victim of domestic abuse, one could never quite predict how things would go. In her thirties, Maddie had the emotional and mental capacity of a child.