Mother by Fate

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  “Let me guess, you don’t want me mentioning that you’re a bounty hunter.”

  “Do you want to find Nicole as fast as possible?”

  “I don’t like lying to people. Especially innocent people who will already be hurting just knowing that their daughter is missing.”

  He hadn’t expected her to love the idea.

  “You won’t be lying to them,” he told her. “You just aren’t going to identify me. After you introduce yourself, I’ll tell them my name.”

  “And let them draw their own conclusions.”

  “You got a better idea?”

  “Nicole told me her parents have been dead for four years. They were killed in a car accident shortly after her marriage to Trevor.”

  “From what I understand, they’ve been estranged that long.”

  The restraining order was four years old. And had been renewed each year since its inception.

  “Because of Trevor.”

  He’d hoped she’d draw the conclusion.

  And bowed his head in acknowledgment.

  “They tried to save her from him.”

  “I can’t say.” But wanted her to think so.

  She studied the house for another couple of minutes while Michael reminded himself that patience was a virtue.

  “Okay, let’s do this.”

  He didn’t even have a chance to respond, to tell her to be careful, wish her luck, anything, before her door was thrust open and she was out of the vehicle.

  * * *

  ROBERT AND NADINE Buchannan welcomed them into their home immediately. In their mid to late fifties, the couple were both dressed in jeans and short-sleeved shirts, with cups of coffee and half-eaten plates of toast and jam in front of them.

  Nadine offered them coffee and toast. Sara declined. Michael accepted a cup of coffee.

  Introductions had gone just as he’d said they would. She was a friend of Nicole’s, and her counselor, and he was Michael Edison. Neither Robert nor Nadine asked why they were there. Or mentioned their daughter.

  Until the four of them were seated and Michael had his coffee in hand.

  “Something’s happened to Nicole, hasn’t it?” Nadine’s gaze was shadowed, her brow creased as she quietly asked the question.

  And Sara thought she understood. When the Buchannans had been unsuccessful in getting their only child away from Trevor Kramer, they’d known it was only a matter of time until he hurt her.

  Nicole hadn’t described her parents at all like Sara was seeing them.

  She’d described Robert as a man with a fierce temper who could rip a family apart without an ounce of remorse. A man who would twist his daughter’s arm until it came out of the socket if she dared to disobey him.

  Statistically, women who were abused as children were more at risk of choosing a man for a husband who had abusive tendencies. She’d guessed that to be the case where Nicole was concerned when the woman had been in her care. Now she wasn’t so sure.

  “Your daughter is missing,” she told them. “We have reason to believe that Trevor is after her. That if we don’t find her first, he’ll hurt her. And possibly her son.”

  Robert Buchannan pushed his plate of half-eaten toast away. There was moisture in his eyes. He seemed to be taking the news worse than his wife. “My grandson. I’ve never seen him, you know.” In his baggy jeans, gray hair and plaid shirt, the man looked all grandpa. If you overlooked the rather disconcerting tattoo on his neck.

  “She didn’t even tell us when he was born,” Nadine added. Nicole’s mother had a couple of tattoos, as well. Peeking out from the sleeves of her shirt. Body art was pleasing to a lot of people these days. Perfectly common on the coast of California.

  “Trevor sent a birth announcement. I think he was rubbing our noses in the fact that he’d won.” Nadine seemed more resigned to the truth. Or was good at covering up what she really felt.

  People dealt with things in different ways.

  Sara was drawn to the way Nadine ate her toast. Very systematically. Taking equal bites out of each side. She kept her plate centered in front of her. Her napkin was placed very deliberately and evenly in her nap. She’d washed her hands after shaking theirs.

  A neat-and-clean freak. Like Nicole.

  Nicole had been charmed by the golden-hued room they’d put her in. She’d loved the soft yellows. The bold colors on the floral comforter and matching pillows.

  Her mother’s house was white. Stark white. Everywhere. White cupboards. White walls. White tiled floors. White furniture. The hand towel hanging from the stove was white. And so were the dishes.

  There were crumbs on the table in front of Robert, on the floor at his feet and in his lap. His napkin was wadded in his fist.

  “Is there anything you can tell us about Nicole?” Sara asked softly, in deference for the pain they had to be feeling. “Anything that might help us find her?”

  “That girl just never did know her place,” Nadine said, clearly saddened, as she shook her head.

  “Know her place?”

  “Her father and I did everything we could to set a good example for her. Robert was more patient than most when she mouthed off to him, disobeyed him. A daughter needs to know her place to stay safe, to have the protection she needs and deserves, but Nicole just didn’t ever quite understand that.”

  Robert shook his head, looking from his coffee cup to Sara, and then to Michael. “Tell them and they forget, teach them and they remember, involve them and they learn,” he said, citing a version of the well-known Benjamin Franklin quote. “That’s the way we raised that girl. Involving her in everything from the first. The decisions we made we made as a family. We listened to her opinion and then helped her see other ways when she was blind to them...”

  It all sounded good.

  Sort of.

  Listening to understand and listening to change an opinion were two very different things. One was healthy. The other, in its worst form, was brainwashing.

  And the part about knowing her place and needing protection... Sara got a bad taste in her mouth from that. The family’s beliefs seemed chauvinistic at best. But her job wasn’t about imposing her own views on others. It was about helping people be healthy in their own minds and hearts so they would be able to function as contributing members of society.

  She was uncomfortable sitting there. All that whiteness. She couldn’t see what was beneath it.

  “Do you have any idea where Nicole is?” Michael took over the questioning, turning so that his shoulders effectively cut her out of the conversation when he’d said he was going to be the silent partner on this one. He was looking only at Robert. As though they’d made some kind of connection. Over a Benjamin Franklin quote? What had changed in the past sixty seconds that she’d missed?

  Or had this been Michael’s plan all along? Had he lied to her about letting her take the lead on this one?

  The thought hurt. It shouldn’t have. She was lying to him, too.

  Robert hesitated. Looked at his wife, who picked up both their plates and carried them to the sink. He glanced at Sara then.

  And Michael said, “You look like you could use some air. You want to step outside?” He didn’t even glance at Sara.

  But his hand touched her thigh under the table.

  “A little air would be good,” Robert said.

  That touch, after both of them had spent the past twenty-four hours doing their best to make certain there was no physical contact between them, changed everything. A silent communication. Binding them as one force.

  She figured out what he was doing. He wanted to separate Nicole’s parents. Maybe Nadine would be more apt to talk if Robert wasn’t in the room. Sara didn’t like the plan. Didn’t want Michael alone with Nicole’s father. Not when sh
e didn’t trust his motives.

  Didn’t want him to leave her alone in this house.

  But she didn’t argue, either. If there was a chance she could get Nadine to talk...

  The sliding glass door off the kitchen opened and closed. Outside, the men walked to the edge of the deck and stood at the railing facing a small backyard with perfectly manicured grass.

  Finishing with the plates, having washed and dried them and put them away, Nadine proceeded to clean up the crumbs around her husband’s place at the table.

  Sara tried to hear what the men were saying but couldn’t make out a single word. Only the occasional low rumble.

  “How long has it been since you’ve heard from your daughter?”

  “Four years.”

  The exact time Nicole had said they’d been dead. Because they were dead to her?

  A clock on the wall told her forty-five minutes had passed since she’d texted Nicole. She’d sent the number to Lila.

  Was Nicole at the Lemonade Stand? Had she taken the opportunity to get herself to safety while Sara kept Michael occupied?

  The conversation outside continued. Based on their posture and the rapidity of their communication, Sara figured it was about as serious as it could get. Definitely not an exchange of sport scores going on out there.

  “Were you close when Nicole was growing up?” She gave Nadine her full focus. She was asking the other woman to spill intimate details of her life. Just in case they needed them. In case Nicole didn’t make it to safety.

  At the moment, the woman whose life she was invading deserved her full attention.

  “She was my very best friend.” Nadine looked as though she might cry. “From the moment she was born.”

  “So what changed? What happened?”

  The other woman’s chin came up. Her eyes seemed to die a little inside. “I’ll tell you what happened. That husband of hers happened. She got pregnant. Lost the baby. And lost her heart, too, if you ask me. She used to understand. To be so positive and sure and confident in the difference between right and wrong. She’d do anything to right a wrong, that girl of mine. And then...nothing.”

  Sara relaxed a little bit. The Nicole that Nadine described sounded a lot like the woman Sara had met. She was doing anything and everything—she was even willing to lose her life—to right a wrong. To save her son from losing his soul.

  “What do you know about how she lost that baby?”

  The details weren’t hers to tell, but if she could help Nadine understand the horrors Nicole had suffered alone...

  Could she help heal the breach between Nicole and her mother? Nicole was going to need all the support she could get when this was all over and she was faced with being a single, out-of-work mother with no child support. And the finances were only a small part of the challenges Nicole would face as she tried to heal, to recover emotionally from the years of abuse.

  If Nadine knew what Trevor had done to her daughter—and why—then she’d understand. Nicole could use a mama bear on her side. And it looked as if Nadine desperately needed the chance to be one again.

  Nadine rocked in her chair a bit. Looking toward her husband on the deck. But said nothing.

  “If you knew...”

  The woman sat upright. “I know that it doesn’t really matter the hows.” Nadine’s tone of voice changed the entire atmosphere of the room. “What matters is the why. And that’s what Nicole didn’t understand. That girl has brought all of this on herself by her refusal to listen to her father.”

  Nadine’s house slippers were white. And looking at them, Sara began to understand something. Nicole wasn’t the one who’d lost her heart. Or at least, she hadn’t done so on her own. She’d been raised by this woman.

  A mother who’d obviously, at some point, been hurt beyond her own ability to cope.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “YOU GUYS SEEMED to be having a serious conversation.” Sara’s voice pierced through Michael. Like Shelley’s had the one time he’d lied to her—he’d said he was at the library when he’d stopped to have a beer with a lab partner at a campus pub while she’d been home caring for their newborn—and she’d found out. He’d had no idea a lie could wound so deeply.

  And he never lied to her again. He’d made mistakes. He’d done things that had pissed her off on occasion. But he’d never lied about them.

  Sara pulled her phone out of her pouch and looked at it. But didn’t type.

  “We’ve been driving for five minutes,” she said, sounding more agitated than he’d heard her to date. “I have no idea what’s going on. I know this part of the job is yours. I’m not trying to direct, and hesitated to speak because I don’t want to interrupt your thought process, but I need to prepare myself.”

  Her understanding bothered him. She was making it damned difficult for him to keep his distance from her.

  “I’m not driving anyplace in particular at the moment,” he told her. “I’m looking, trying to get a sense of what Nicole’s day looks like to her right now. But mostly, I’ve been sitting here trying to decide what to tell you.”

  Her gaze shot in his direction. He tried to ignore the emotional pull attached to it.

  “Nicole told you that Trevor was the head of the California coalition of the Ivory Nation.”

  He didn’t have to tell her what he’d found out. It didn’t matter what she thought of him—or so he assured himself—but she had to understand the danger she was going to be in once they found Nicole.

  “Yes. And I know she’s right. I had the information confirmed.”

  By the Santa Raquel police, supposedly. That was what she wanted him to believe. But there was something squirrely about that, too. She’d said the warrant for Nicole’s arrest had been dismissed, so he’d made another call while the shower had been running that morning. He confirmed that he was working under a current warrant.

  To do otherwise could get him thrown in prison for kidnapping.

  There was no doubt about it—Sara was misinformed. And trusted whomever was feeding her the misinformation. Getting her to trust him instead was highly unlikely.

  He wasn’t trustworthy where she was concerned.

  And he needed her help. Nicole wasn’t going to let him get close to her. She’d die before giving herself up to him willingly. There was still a chance—a very good chance—that Sara could talk her into custody.

  “Why did you ask about Trevor?” She looked at her phone again as she asked the question. And he wondered if she knew something he didn’t.

  He could get Nicole without her. The capture might take a little longer. It would undoubtedly be uglier. Someone besides Nicole could get hurt.

  All good reasons not to tell Sara the whole truth.

  She wasn’t going to believe him anyway.

  “Trevor was Ivory Nation,” he said, turning down a side street that would lead him to the convenience store that, according to Robert, had the mix of syrup and fountain soda that his daughter loved the most. They also offered any size drink for one low price. And had chunked ice instead of crushed. Crushed ice was a pet peeve of Nicole’s. It melted too quickly and changed the syrup-soda water consistency.

  One thing he’d ascertained during his few minutes with the older man—Robert Buchannan knew his daughter well. He’d paid attention to the smallest details of her life. And tended to them, too. There’d been a convenience store in LA that carried Nicole’s favorite drink, too. Robert had found it for her. And when she was a teenager, he’d taken her there every single morning to get her soda.

  Sara had turned to watch out the side window. Just as she’d been doing all morning so far. But he knew that she’d turned away from what he was telling her, too.

  He wanted to be disappointed that she wasn’t going to believe him.


  He really wanted her to get scared and get out while she still could.

  For her sake.

  But what if Nicole approached Sara before Michael could stop her? As long as Sara was with him, he could keep her safe.

  As long as she understood the dangers and trusted him.

  He had to help her see them somehow...

  “Robert Buchannan is a founding member of the California coalition of the Ivory Nation brotherhood. Nadine was raised in an Ivory Nation household in Arizona, raised to believe that her purpose in life was to help keep America pure. She was sixteen when her father introduced her to Robert. The Ivory Nation brotherhood had chosen the match. They married within a month of their meeting so that Nadine could move with him to California and help start up the California coalition.”

  Sara stared out her side window. Her hands were completely still in her lap. It was a small thing, but he took heart from the fact that she wasn’t fiddling with her phone in that moment. He had her completely with him.

  The trick was to convince her to stay there.

  “Unknown to the brotherhood, Robert had some prostrate problems. His gland had been inverted when he’d been born. He hadn’t known if he’d ever be able to father children. It took him and Nadine a long time to conceive. It was a huge disappointment to both of them when they found out they were having a girl. But they both knew that the likelihood of them having another child was small.” He had a lot of ground to cover, to paint a picture she could understand and then get to the point.

  “They determined that just as Nadine had grown up to be a valued contributor to the cause, Nicole could be, too.”

  “You’re telling me she was raised Ivory Nation?”

  The disbelief in her voice wasn’t encouraging.

  “Yes.”

  “And you expect me to believe that Nadine and Robert are, too?”

  “Did you notice the tattoo on his neck?”

  “Yes.”

  “Trevor has one, too. Exactly like it. It’s Ivory Nation branding.”

  “So Trevor is Ivory Nation. Just like Nicole said. Like I’ve been trying to tell you.”