Once a Father

by Marie Ferrarella

  “And I can’t say I’m not relieved,” she told him. When he looked at her quizzically, Tracy added with a bright smile, “You damn near talked my ear off.”

  The absurd comment coaxed what passed for a smile from Adam’s lips. After all, she had done him a favor, even if he hadn’t asked her to. “I’m not usually very talkative.”

  She widened her eyes in feigned surprise. “You’re kidding.”

  He snorted, getting out of the car. “Didn’t seem to bother you any, I noticed. You talk enough for three people.”

  Not three, she thought, but maybe two. “I don’t much care for silence,” she admitted.

  He preferred silence himself. “You should try it sometime,” he told her pointedly.

  Tracy took no offense. “Deal. If you try talking sometime.” Not about to leave herself open for a smart rejoinder, she shifted gears and began backing out of the driveway. “See you around, Collins,” she called out.

  Vince McGuire, a firefighter who had joined the staff at the fire station shortly after Adam had arrived, approached him, an appreciative look on his face as he watched Tracy pull away.

  “We’d wondered where you’d gotten to.” He nodded at the departing vehicle and its driver. “Bring back a souvenir from the fire?”

  Turning on his heel, Adam began walking into the fire station. He didn’t even bother looking at the other man. “Stick it in your ear, McGuire.”

  “That wasn’t exactly where I had in mind,” McGuire said with a laugh as he hurried to catch up.

  Chapter 3

  Adam sighed in frustration as he let the receiver drop into the cradle. It was raining outside the window of his first-floor apartment, one of those dark and gloomy January days that made people long for spring and feel it was never going to arrive.

  The mood within his apartment was just as dark and gloomy.

  He couldn’t get Jake Anderson off his mind.

  The boy was about the same age as his own son had been when he’d lost him. At first glance, Jake had even looked like Bobby, the same silky blond hair, the same slight, delicate build. And the eyes, there was just something about the look in Jake’s blue eyes that had worked its way under his skin, refusing to leave him alone.

  Walking out of the living room, Adam crossed to the kitchen more on automatic pilot than by conscious thought. Ordinarily, he made a point to shed the events of the day along with his uniform when he left the station house. It was the only way he’d found he could survive.

  But not this time.

  This time, he could see Jake’s face, could see his burned and bruised little body, could even smell the smoke that had surrounded the boy like a malevolent envelope every time his mind began to stray.

  In an attempt to free himself and put the whole incident behind him, Adam decided to see what he could find out about Jake having any next of kin who would take him in.

  A cursory effort had yielded nothing. Getting off duty, he’d stopped by the country club and asked a still very much shaken Bonnie Brannigan if she could give him the Andersons’ address, since it had to be on file in the membership listing. Once he had the address, he’d gone to the Andersons’ neighborhood and knocked on the doors of several of their neighbors. No one knew anything. The Andersons had been gregarious people, but neither had ever mentioned any extended family. A woman who lived across the street from them had told him that Meg had once mentioned that she and her husband were both only children. And apparently nobody had ever seen any grandparents pulling up into the Andersons’ driveway to pay a visit during any of the holidays.

  Facing a dead end, he’d dug a little deeper.

  Adam had just gotten off the telephone with a friend of his whose sister worked in the social services department that would have jurisdiction over Mission Creek. He hated calling in favors, but for reasons he didn’t want to examine, this had become important to him.

  He encountered the same dead end he’d found by going to the Andersons’ neighborhood. There was no next of kin. No doting grandparent, no busy long-lost uncle or vivacious aunt to come to Jake’s aid and take him in.

  According to Rick Foster’s sister, Jenny, the preliminary investigation indicated that the Andersons seemed to have no family whatsoever except for some distant second cousin.

  Adam had no reason to doubt Jenny Foster’s findings. She’d been at her job over ten years and knew the system inside and out.

  The system.

  That’s the way that lady doctor had referred to it. The system. He didn’t want the boy to be eaten up by the system, with no one to care for him, no one to make the night terrors go away, the way he had for Bobby when his son had woken up in the middle of the night, screaming and shaking.

  Adam sat down at his small kitchen table, picking up the roast beef sandwich he’d haphazardly thrown together for lunch just before his phone had rung. He bit into it, his mind reviewing the meager facts. The only relative Jenny had come up with was a distant cousin on Meg Anderson’s side. A forty-three-year-old twice-divorced anthropologist who was currently on a dig somewhere in Africa, nobody knew exactly where.

  Maybe he could be persuaded to take the boy, but Adam doubted it. It was a long shot at best and besides, Jake needed someone now. Mayonnaise leeched out of Adam’s sandwich on one side, taking a piece of lettuce with it. It fell on his paper plate with a glop, but he didn’t notice. He was too busy thinking.

  He didn’t like the idea of the boy facing all this alone.

  This was Adam’s downtime. Like any firefighter, he worked two days on, two days off. What he normally did during this time was unwind, put his professional life as far out of his mind as possible. But Jake’s eyes wouldn’t let him. Try though he might, Adam couldn’t seem to separate his thoughts, couldn’t shove them into the neat little cubicles where he always pushed them in. Despite his best efforts, it had happened.

  His professional life had seeped into his private life.

  There was no denying it. The boy he had rescued from the Lone Star Country Club fire had gotten to him.

  He needed to do something to work this out of his system. With no set plan for the day, Adam decided it might be a good idea to pay a visit to the hospital to see how Jake was coming along.

  Maybe if the boy was mending well, he could stop thinking about him so much.

  Stone paced around his office. He was beyond angry. It had been a simple, simple plan. Nothing was supposed to have gone wrong. And yet, everything had. And it threatened to continue to go wrong, bringing down everything around him. It was like when you pull an apple out of the bottom row of neatly arranged fruit—an avalanche resulted.

  He couldn’t have that. Wouldn’t have that.

  Swinging around, he looked at the man who was the latest recipient of his foul mood. Ed Bancroft. The man responsible for leaving the security room door ajar while they were transferring the sacks of money. The sacks were normally retained in the back closet of the security room after the money arrived from Central America, but before the purchase of non-traceable money orders.

  Simple. Yet in jeopardy now.

  He’d had his doubts about bringing Bancroft on. The man was weak enough to be malleable, but he had the one thing that had made many a scheme run afoul: the remnants of a conscience.

  He just had to see to it that he kept Bancroft too intimidated to even think of allowing that conscience to dictate any of his actions.

  “I want to know what that kid saw, understand?”

  Bancroft had been the one to look up and see the boy peeking into the security office just as the green canvas bags were being loaded onto the truck.

  “The bags were closed, Chief. There’s no way anyone could have known what was in them. Besides, I saw the kid before the ambulance took him away. He was in pretty bad shape. He might not make it. And even if he does, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to see him.”

  It was the wrong thing to say. Anything beyond “Yes, Chief” would have been. Stone’s
eyes reduced to small, malevolent slits.

  “What are you, a complete cretin? We’re talking about some six-year-old kid—”

  “Five,” Bancroft corrected automatically, then instantly regretted it. The chief didn’t like being corrected.

  “Five,” Stone spat out. “You’ve got a badge. That gives you access to anybody. We’re supposed to be investigating the bombing, remember? I’m heading up the task force.” Which was the ultimate joke, seeing as how he’d been the one to set the wheels in motion. But that was what made his position so sweet. Since he had control over everything that went on in and around Mission Creek, he could squash anyone who might interfere with his operation.

  Like he should have been able to squash that damned aging commando, he thought darkly.

  Gathering his thoughts together, he tried to remember which of the men in the Lion’s Den were currently available. He didn’t trust Bancroft going out alone.

  “I want you to take Malloy with you and go question the kid.” He nailed the tall, narrow-chested man with a look. “And don’t scare him, just get him to tell you exactly what he saw. Maybe things aren’t as black as they seem.” But Stone doubted it. He’d been born a pessimist and hadn’t been disappointed yet. “And next time, make sure the goddamn inner door is closed before you start moving the bags out.”

  Bancroft made a fruitless attempt to absolve himself. “It wasn’t my fault, Chief. I wasn’t anywhere near it and I wasn’t the last man in—”

  “Doesn’t matter whose fault it was.” Other than the fact that he was going to make the miserable bastard pay, whoever it was, Stone thought. Taking a step, he got directly into the other policeman’s face. “Know this. If one of us goes down, we all could go down. Do I make myself clear?”

  Like a newly recruited marine trying not to buckle before his drill sergeant in boot camp, Bancroft squared his thin shoulders. “Yes, sir.”

  “Good, now get going.” Stone pushed the other man toward the door. “The sooner I know where we stand, the better.”

  In the doorway, struck by a bolt of either duty or momentary insanity, Bancroft hesitated, then said, “Chief, Westin’s gone.”

  The dark look Stone gave him told Bancroft the chief was already aware of this salient piece of information. Bancroft quickly darted out the door before the second wave of fallout began.

  The boy had been on Tracy’s mind all night. She didn’t think of him as another burn victim, or even think of him by his name. She thought of Jake as the boy with the sad eyes.

  She didn’t think she’d ever seen eyes that sad before.

  All things considered, it was a routine enough procedure for her. She’d sedated Jake yesterday before treating his wounds. He’d been bathed in cool water and moist bandages had been applied to the burned skin. Pumped full of antibiotics to prevent any infections from setting in, there was every reason in the world to believe Jake Anderson would make a full and complete recovery, given time.

  Still, she’d sat by his bed after she’d returned from feeding Petunia, waiting for Jake to wake up. She didn’t want to have him open his eyes to an empty room. When he’d finally woken up, hours later, she’d gently talked to him, but there had been no response. He’d just lain there, staring at the ceiling.

  At first, she’d thought he was disoriented, or frightened, but after a while she realized that he had gone off somewhere, into his own little world. A world where no one and nothing could enter. That included emotional pain. As gently as she could, though it hadn’t been easy for her, she’d told him about his parents. There’d been no response, no reaction.

  She was certain that on some level, Jake already knew his parents were dead. He hadn’t cried out for them, hadn’t made a sound at all. As long as he stayed within the confines of the silence he’d created, he didn’t have to admit that he was alone.

  Concerned, she’d called down Lydia Sanchez, the head of the child psychology department at the hospital, for a consultation.

  Lydia had spent a half hour with the boy, reviewing his files and talking to him. There had been no response for her, either.

  “It’s self-preservation,” Lydia had told her outside the boy’s room. “His mind can’t deal with the tragedy, can’t deal with the words, so for him all words are dead. He’s mute.”

  “Is he traumatically deaf, too?” Tracy knew there was no physical reason for it. She’d had several tests performed that showed there was no trauma to his brain, no injuries to his auditory nerves and none to his throat or vocal chords.

  “No,” Lydia had told her, looking at Jake through the glass that separated the boy from them. “He can hear you. Whether he’s processing the words is another matter. I think he is, but—” she shrugged, uncertain whether she was right or not.

  “How long will he stay this way?” Tracy had wanted to know.

  “Hard to tell. He might start talking again by this evening. Then again, this might go on for some time.”

  “Months?” Tracy guessed.

  “Possibly. But doubtful,” Lydia had said in the next breath. “He’s young. They heal faster when they’re young.”

  At least she could hope, Tracy thought.

  She looked at Jake now, newly changed bandages covering parts of his arms and legs, as well as his torso. His face, because it had been buried beneath his arm, had mercifully been spared. He lay on his back on the egg-crate mattress meant to alleviate some of his discomfort by redistributing his weight. Staring at the ceiling, he seemed completely oblivious to the fact that she was there. She talked anyway, keeping her voice as bright and cheery as possible.

  “We’re going to let you slide for a little while, Jake. But tomorrow, we’re going to get you up and moving. Don’t want those limbs of yours to get soft now, do we?” She looked at him, but there was no indication on his face that he even heard a single word. “You have to exercise your muscles, you know. Use them or lose them. We’ve got a neat physical therapist. Her name’s Randi. Kind of a funny name for a girl, huh?”

  There was no response, only the soft sounds of the monitors that surrounded him, keeping tabs on his vital signs.

  Tracy pushed on. “But she’s very nice. She’s got a little boy a bit younger than you are, so she knows all about—”

  She stopped as the door abruptly opened and two uniformed policemen, grim-faced and very official looking, entered the room.

  Tracy’s voice changed to one of authority. “May I help you, Officers?”

  Kyle Malloy took the lead. Shorter, stockier, he had no patience with excuses or anything that got in his way. His eyes washed over her quickly, missing nothing and lingering on the soft silhouette evident within the opened lab coat that draped the woman.

  “We’re Officers Malloy and Bancroft.” He gestured vaguely to indicate who was who. “We’d like to ask the boy a few questions about what happened at the Lone Star Country Club yesterday.”

  She was surprised to see Jake’s eyes shift toward the men, his gaze intent. He wasn’t as unaware of things as he was trying to pretend. It was a hopeful sign, Tracy thought.

  She moved protectively to the foot of Jake’s bed, blocking the policeman’s direct access to him. “I’m afraid that’s not possible.”

  Bancroft began to say something, but Malloy cut him off. His smile disappeared. “And just who are you?”

  “Dr. Tracy Walker.” She saw his eyes go to the ID tag she and the rest of the staff wore on a navy blue string around their necks. She didn’t care for the time delay before he raised them again to her face. “I’m his doctor—”

  The smug smile returned to his lips. “We won’t be too long,” Malloy promised her. “But the chief wants us to talk to everyone who was anywhere in the area, and from preliminary indications by the crime scene investigators, this boy had a ringside table with his mama and papa. Can’t have a bomber running around, now can we?”

  Tracy resented the slight condescending tone she heard in the policeman’s voice. A lot of
people had trouble taking her seriously. She knew that part of it was because, even at thirty, she looked younger than her age. That had always gotten in her way.

  But part of the reason for the tone, she surmised, was because of some male superiority thing that was going on inside of Officer Malloy’s head.

  Either way, she wasn’t about to allow them to badger Jake.

  “No,” she smiled tightly, momentarily playing along with the role she’d been assigned, “we can’t. But Jake still can’t tell you anything.”

  “That’s for us to decide, little lady,” Malloy informed her. “You never know when the slightest clue might just break open a case.”

  Tired of the game, Tracy dropped her tone. It was time to get these policemen to leave. Though he hadn’t given any outward indication, something told Tracy that their presence here was agitating Jake. If nothing else, she wasn’t about to have them continue talking about the bombing. He was upset enough as it was.

  “Please, Officer, I’ve seen Columbo. Spare me the hype. Jake can’t tell you anything because Jake can’t talk.”

  Malloy exchanged glances with Bancroft. This was news to them.

  After a beat, Malloy decided he wasn’t buying it. The woman was stonewalling him. He wasn’t about to return to the chief to tell him that he’d failed. It was a hell of a lot easier taking on this woman.

  “What do you mean he can’t talk? No one said anything about the boy being deaf and dumb.”

  Now she knew the man was an idiot. Tracy’s anger took in his all but silent partner as she looked at both of them.

  “The correct term,” she informed Malloy tersely, “is hearing-and-speech impaired, and Jake Anderson wasn’t—until the accident.” She looked back at the still, bandaged body in the bed, giving Jake a reassuring smile he didn’t seem to notice or acknowledge. She looked back at the two policemen. “He can hear you, but he doesn’t speak.”