Mother by Fate

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  A scrap of paper.

  Is he your friend?

  Hands trembling, she read the note over and over again.

  Nicole had seen them. She knew Sara was with the man who’d been chasing her. And knew they were at the beach? Checking restrooms?

  Okay. So she didn’t trust her enough to come to her. But enough to leave a note.

  Now she knew why Nicole hadn’t called.

  But the other woman was still hanging around.

  She’d attempted to make contact.

  That was all that mattered.

  Nicole had to know whether or not she could trust her.

  Sara understood what the woman was really asking. Could she trust Michael?

  Sara didn’t trust him. How could she direct Nicole to do so? She sure didn’t want the other woman alone with Michael. Didn’t trust him not to deliver her right into the hands of Detective Miller of the LAPD if Sara wasn’t there to enforce their agreement to turn her over to the Santa Raquel police.

  But if she didn’t assure Nicole that she was safe with Sara, the woman might also then surmise that the promise to bring Toby to Santa Raquel had been a lie. She might do something crazy. Like head back to LA and take on her murdering husband a third time in an attempt to rescue her son from a fate worse than death.

  She opened her pouch and took out a pen.

  Coached herself through several deep breaths. Closed her eyes and tried again.

  Was Michael her friend?

  Of course not. But she wanted him to be.

  She needed Nicole to trust her. You didn’t build trust with lies.

  Around and around she went.

  And finally, mostly because she was afraid Michael would come looking for her and see the note, she scribbled a response.

  Putting the note back in the pants and returning them as she’d found them, she walked out into the cooling dusk air.

  She was tempted to stay right there. To wait Nicole out.

  But knew the other woman wouldn’t show herself if they were anywhere around.

  She was on to them.

  Watching them.

  And in Nicole, she had a feeling Michael had met his match.

  He hunted people down for a living and caught them. Every time, apparently.

  He was good. The best. And he’d chased Nicole down. But Sara was starting to understand that Nicole Kramer wasn’t going to be caught unless she wanted to be.

  Sara hoped to God she had what it took to help the other woman know she was safe.

  Michael was sitting up when she got back in the car.

  “Everything okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You were in there a long time.”

  “Thanks for noticing,” she said. “And for drawing attention to the fact.”

  His raised eyebrow told her he didn’t trust her any more than she trusted him. “A body has to do what a body has to do,” she said, praying he’d leave it at that.

  With another long look at her, he did.

  And before she could raise more suspicions by making up an excuse for them to have to get out of there, he started up the car.

  “I’d like to find an inconspicuous spot to park, within sight of the pier, before it gets dark enough for Nicole to show up.”

  She nodded.

  “And then you should get some rest. Because when she shows up we go to work.”

  Sara nodded again.

  The words she’d left on that paper in the bathroom reverberated louder and louder in her mind.

  Had she said the right thing? Would Nicole understand?

  Would the woman be back for the note?

  Had she seen Sara with her bloody shirt? Was that what had given her the idea to leave the note in the jeans?

  Had she been close enough to see her going in and out of restrooms all afternoon?

  Sara wasn’t a tracker. Or a hunter.

  Nicole sensed that she was different.

  She was a finder of hurts. A soother of emotional pain.

  She’d touched Nicole’s pain. The other woman wanted to trust her.

  Sara was a facilitator in the building of inner strength.

  She needed Nicole to approach her when she was alone. It was the only way she could guarantee the woman’s safety.

  The words she’d written came back to her again. And again.

  He knows Trevor.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  HE COULDN’T BELIEVE IT, but he’d actually fallen asleep. Had a good solid twenty minutes of rest. He’d get more as soon as they were parked.

  Now that he knew he could.

  As much as Sara’s presence had driven him nuts all day, he also liked having her around. Liked having another set of eyes on the horizon while his slept.

  Liked having someone else care as much as he did, was as invested as he was in finding his jumper.

  If for very different reasons.

  He found an alcove with no security lights at the edge of a large wooded area that covered the entire cliff that led straight down to the right of the pier. When he pulled the SUV off the road and into the fallen leaves and twigs in the shadows at the edge of the woods, he’d have a full view of the pier and would guess that anyone more than four feet away wouldn’t know he was there.

  But there they were.

  * * *

  WHEN MICHAEL WOKE up an hour later, Sara was sitting just as she’d been when he’d fallen asleep. Upright. Phone in hand. Watching the beach.

  He watched her for a second before she noticed that he was awake. And wondered what it would have been like if he’d met her through other means. Say, at the kennel. Maybe she’d come to adopt one of their rescues.

  It would be a Sara thing to do.

  Except that she’d say she worked too much. It wouldn’t be fair to leave a pet alone for so long...

  “How long have you been awake?”

  “Just woke up.” The lies continued to roll glibly off his tongue.

  They’d never bothered him as much as they did right then. Lying on the job was a necessary part of the work he did. Justified by the end result.

  He’d never expected to be so good at it.

  He’d never expected to be as poleaxed by another woman as he’d been by Shelley. He’d known the first night he’d met Shelley that he was going to marry her.

  Within a month they’d been living together.

  A once-in-a-lifetime miracle, they used to say about finding each other. A perfect storm.

  Until the storm had overpowered them. Struck them down.

  And then there’d been nothing perfect left at all.

  * * *

  SARA SLEPT FOR a while. With binoculars in hand, Michael took a walk, keeping to the shadows. At one point he felt the familiar prickles on the back of his neck. They told him that someone was watching him. That he was getting close.

  Adrenaline spread through him with the force of a storm. But not a perfect one.

  If he wasn’t careful, someone was going to get hurt.

  He couldn’t let that happen. The whole purpose of this, of the job, of leaving Mari alone with his sisters for long lengths of time, was to prevent anyone else from getting hurt.

  He covered the area stealthily. Quickly. Like an invisible lynx.

  But his instincts had led him astray.

  There was no one there.

  * * *

  DARKNESS FELL WITH a vengeance. Michael told Sara she could no longer text or use her phone as the reflection would show in the window glass.

  She wondered if Nicole had gotten her note.

  If the woman was watching them. Waiting for Sara to be alone.

 
Or if she’d been sleeping in preparation for the night ahead when she and Michael had driven off. Had she awakened to find them gone?

  Nicole had to rest sometime. If Michael’s hunch was right, and so far he’d been right more than not, Nicole had slept that afternoon.

  Before or after leaving the note in the jeans?

  Maybe the maintenance staff had thrown them away before Nicole had gotten back to them. She didn’t know how often the public restrooms at the beach were cleaned. Maybe they didn’t even work on Sundays.

  Sara didn’t spend a lot of time at the beach.

  She’d been there once since moving to Santa Raquel.

  A fire started down by the water under the pier. Santa Raquel’s beaches were nothing like the beaches of Florida, which came to life at night with partiers and tourists. The town attracted tourists of a different kind. Seniors. Families. The restaurants closed at ten. There were only a few bars in town, and all but the one out by the highway closed at midnight.

  The street people were starting to gather. To come home.

  “You ever hear from your ex?”

  The question was random, in a night that had grown ominously quiet and far too loud at the same time.

  Duplicity went against everything she stood for. And she was, at that moment, involved in a life-or-death lie. Maybe that was why she told him the truth.

  “Yes.”

  That, and maybe she just needed to talk about something that didn’t involve Nicole. Or subterfuge. Something that wouldn’t hurt anyone in the telling.

  “Often?”

  “Sometimes.” They could have been discussing paint choices for a room neither of them would ever enter.

  “Recently?”

  “Last evening.”

  Perhaps now would be a good time to remind herself why any softness she was feeling toward Michael Edison was out of place.

  “You’re in touch regularly, then?”

  “Every month.” And she had to get money transferred before three o’clock the next day—the first banking day since Jason had called—so that he wouldn’t panic. A panicky single father wasn’t good for his child.

  Michael was looking through his binoculars again.

  Laying her head back against the seat, Sara watched the tip of the flame in the distance and tried to relax. They were going to give it another hour and then approach the pier through the woods until they were close enough to identify Nicole if she happened to be present. If Sara didn’t find some other way to separate herself from Michael at that time, she’d excuse herself to the bathroom.

  Again. Another bathroom.

  Stomach issues would be believable after the twenty-four hours they’d just spent.

  “You’re still close with him, then?”

  “What’s with all the questions?” Turning her head without lifting it from the seat, she saw the whites of his eyes as he did the same.

  The connection didn’t last long. They were both too focused on the scene unfolding in the distance before them. Focused on the bodies that were slowly making their way up the beach, seemingly coming out of nowhere.

  “I don’t honestly know.” Michael’s voice fell softly in the darkness when they were facing forward again. “I just keep thinking about the you I’ve come to know, being married to an ass like him, and it doesn’t add up.”

  The truth wasn’t going to hurt Nicole. Or anyone else.

  And it might make him trust her more.

  If there came a time when he started to figure out that she’d betrayed him that night.

  So she told him about meeting Jason at USC a little more than five years before. She’d been finishing up her master’s degree in clinical counseling. He’d been taking a continuing education course, a requisite to keep his license to teach current.

  “What does he teach?”

  “Junior-high history. He coaches basketball, too.” Which made Jason’s propensity for seedy woman a huge problem as far as she was concerned, considering the fact that he was a role model for boys.

  When they’d first met, she’d been a witness to his very real distress as he faced the fact that his wife, an ex-stripper who’d made good, wanted to abort her pregnancy because she’d suddenly decided she wanted to be neither a wife nor a mother. Sara had been moved by Jason’s heartbreaking desire to have his child born. To love and raise that child. She’d believed him when he’d told her that she was different, that she captivated him, that he couldn’t imagine life without her in it, by his side, making decisions with him.

  And when his wife agreed to bear the child if he’d give her a quick divorce, he’d woken Sara in the middle of the night to tell her so.

  “He asked me to marry him that night,” she said. Wondering how she’d ever been so naive. So stupid.

  “Were you married before the baby was born?”

  “Yes. And we were both at the hospital, right there in the room when she came into the world.”

  It was unconventional. Odd and weird. And had seemed right.

  “His ex-wife didn’t even care,” she said, remembering back. “She saw herself as a surrogate, buying her freedom. If she’d ever had any real feelings for Jason, she’d long since forgotten.” The woman had told the doctor and anyone else who came into the birthing room that she was Sara and Jason’s surrogate.

  They’d played along. There’d been no reason not to. Sara, as Jason’s wife, was Bessie’s mother. And that was exactly as she’d seen herself since the first breath that child had taken.

  “I named her. I was the first one to hold her,” she said, smiling. She’d always liked children, but had never known it was possible to love one so much.

  “But...” She heard confusion in Michael’s voice. “You live in an adult-only complex...”

  “When I caught Jason cheating for the third time...” When she’d seen herself becoming a paranoid, mistrusting shrew, checking his emails, his internet activity, and even...

  “He called one night to say that he and the assistant coach were taking the team out for pizza after the game. I didn’t believe him.”

  She stared forward. Watching dark, featureless figures moving in the distance.

  “Because they’d never done that before?”

  “No, they had. And he’d had a game that night. I don’t know why I didn’t believe him. I’d love to say that I’d heard from one of the player’s mothers or something, but I hadn’t. I guess I was just at the point where I didn’t believe anything he said anymore. I don’t know. Something just told me that he was lying.”

  Of course, there’d been umpteen times before then, when that same something had told her the same thing and she’d found Jason doing exactly what he’d told her he would be doing. How many times had she spent hours searching his computer only to find that there was no evidence of pornographic material there? Or in his internet search history?

  “I got Bessie out of bed...”

  “How old was she then?”

  “Two.”

  He nodded. As if he knew what getting a two-year-old out of bed entailed.

  Because he did. “You got Bessie up...”

  Sara focused on the bodies gathering around the fire. Thought about them roasting hot dogs. Or making s’mores. And knew that, in reality, they were probably doing something much more mundane. Staying warm against the ocean’s cool night breeze. Drying off after a bath. Letting their clothes dry. Keeping mosquitoes at bay.

  Someone might be eating bounty from the trash. Maybe even sharing a little with a friend.

  She’d bet there were liquor bottles being passed around. Maybe some needles for those “lucky” enough to afford them.

  Michael didn’t prompt her again.

  “I sat in a parking lot of a strip club at two in the morning,
with my daughter asleep in her car seat, and watched as my husband had sex with a dancer on the trunk of a car outside the backstage door.”

  She’d thought it was the lowest moment of her life. Until the day she’d received Jason’s response to her divorce filing and realized that he was going to take Bessie away from her.

  “You didn’t have legal rights to her?” Michael sat forward, his head turned in her direction.

  With tears in her eyes, Sara was glad he couldn’t see her. But then, he probably couldn’t see when she shook her head, either.

  “I thought he’d put my name on her birth certificate. I was his wife when she was born, and the mother put herself down as my surrogate,” she finally said when she could do so without a trembling voice. “When I finally saw the certificate and saw that I wasn’t listed, he blamed it on his ex. On a clerical error. He said he’d sign a petition so I could adopt her. I did the necessary legwork. Left the paperwork for him to sign. He kept saying he would. And never did. I think he was trying to ensure that I’d never leave him, but I didn’t really believe that he’d take Bessie away from me. She needed me. And he needed someone to care for her when he went on his stripper sprees.”

  “And you still have contact with this guy?”

  “I get a Bessie report, with pictures, once a month.”

  “I can’t believe, after what you’ve described, he’d be that decent.”

  “I... He’s supporting a child on a teacher’s salary. I want Bessie to have every opportunity she’d have had if she was in my life.”

  “You send him money.” For alimony, and for Bessie. But she didn’t tell him that.

  “I have plenty.”

  Tapping his thumb on the steering wheel he said, “I had a report run on you.”

  “I figured as much. You know about my family.”

  “I know who they are. And that you could own the damn complex you live in if you wanted to.”

  Had that attracted him to her? Funny, the idea hadn’t even occurred to her before that moment. Very funny, considering that her entire life her family’s money had always come between her and any real relationship.

  Even Jason. Though she hadn’t found out that he’d sought her out because of her family money that first day on campus until one of their worst fights. The first time she’d found out he’d been cheating on her.