A Daughter's Story

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  She was not making another big mistake.

  Cal was a brother to her. She hadn’t asked to have him move in with them all those years ago. She hadn’t asked to love him.

  Cal had done no wrong to her or her mother. Neither had Frank, for that matter. Just the opposite.

  The passageway cleared. Emma paced, all but oblivious to the others waiting to collect loved ones. There was a young man with flowers, watching the hall down from the gates.

  More people flooded the passage, held up by an older, heavyset woman who probably should have asked for a wheelchair.

  And then she saw him. In the middle of a mass of people pulling carry-on bags, wearing backpacks and talking into their cell phones, was Cal. He was taller than she’d expected. His hair was darker and his face shadowed with whiskers, but his eyes were all Cal. And they were trained on her.

  He smiled.

  Her grin stretched all the way across her face. She could feel it. And then he was through his fellow passengers, in front of her, and she was in his arms.

  Holding on as if she’d never let go.

  Because she never was going to let go of him again. This time, no matter what, her big brother was in her life to stay.

  * * *

  THE WOMAN WASN’T home. In black jeans and a clean gray T-shirt, Chris stood at her front door in flip-flops, having knocked three times, and accepted the fact that this wasn’t going to be over as soon as he’d determined it would be. He wanted to see her, then get the hell out of the middle-class, suburban part of town.

  It had to be clear to everyone who passed that he didn’t belong there.

  * * *

  “MS. SANDERSON? I’M Detective Miller, come on in.” At just under six feet, the man was shorter than she’d pictured. He made eye contact so briefly she wasn’t sure it had happened, and then she was staring at his suited shoulders as he motioned toward a hallway with several doorways leading into rooms with large windows.

  With the California rolls she and Cal had shared rumbling around in her stomach, she turned to look at the man who’d flown all the way from Tennessee to be with her. He nodded and, with a reassuring hand at her back, accompanied her down the hallway.

  Miller led them to the last door on the left. Inside, a young, blonde woman sat on the far side of a conference table. She stood as they entered.

  “Ms. Sanderson, this is Detective Lucy Hayes. I hope you don’t mind if she sits in with us.”

  The other detective Cal had told her about.

  Shaking her head, Emma smiled at Detective Hayes, taking the hand she offered. Detective Hayes might be a small woman, a couple of inches shorter than Emma’s five and a half feet, but there was nothing weak about her grip.

  “Detective Hayes has been working with me on this case,” Miller said. “She’s helping me on her own time, not as an official member of my team. I just need to make that clear.”

  “The detective from Aurora,” Cal said, his eyes narrowing in a way Emma already recognized as his quietly assessing look.

  Miller eyed Emma’s brother. “Sorry,” she said, so focused on breathing that she’d forgotten her manners. “Detective Miller, this is Caleb Whittier. I understand you two have met by phone several times.”

  “Mr. Whittier.” Miller stepped forward and shook Cal’s hand. “Good to meet you in person.”

  “Good to meet you, too,” Cal said. Then he peered over at the female detective. “Since you’re so far from home, are we to assume that you found something to do with our case?”

  Fear gripped Emma as the two detectives exchanged a glance. After twenty-five years of needing to know, she wasn’t ready.

  “What?” Emma asked when the silence became unbearable. Miller nodded at Hayes.

  “It’s probably nothing.” Lucy Hayes looked Emma right in the eye. “I’m actually working on a different case, also a baby abduction, that took place around the same time your sister went missing. I signed out the evidence kit for my case and it turned out to contain some evidence that fit Peter Walters’s M.O.”

  “The pervert you told me about,” Emma said, looking at Detective Miller. His suit was green. Hunter green. A suit. Not slacks and a jacket. The tie had thin, dark green stripes set amid beige and brown.

  Her baby sister had not been molested at two years of age. The knowledge would kill Rose.

  Her throat closed up. Her lips started to tremble. She bit them from the inside.

  “That’s right,” Miller said.

  “Did you tie that case to him?” Cal asked what Emma could not.

  “Fortunately, no,” Lucy Hayes replied evenly. “But there’s a minor similarity between the case I’m working on in Aurora and a piece of information from Cal’s book that Detective Miller told me about. We’re checking on it but haven’t turned up anything substantial yet.” Her smile, given mostly to Emma, was soft. Warm. “I had vacation coming so I took this week off to be here and follow up with Ramsey. Ramsey told me about meeting with you and I wanted to meet you both. I also wanted to ask your permission to take a sample of Claire’s DNA back to Indiana with me. I have a private lab in Cincinnati that is doing some work for me on the cold-case abductions I’m looking at there.”

  Nodding, Emma relaxed a notch. She didn’t have to accept anything just yet. “Okay. If it will help.”

  The detectives exchanged another glance and Lucy gave a short nod.

  “Lucy has been working on her original case a long time,” Miller told Cal and Emma. “She has a lot of information at her disposal. Some pretty impressive databases she’s set up on her own dime. It’s not just a job to her. If there’s something to find she’ll find it.”

  Cal’s hand settled in the middle of Emma’s back.

  It was time. Emma slid her hand inside her bag. She didn’t have to look to find what she was after. She knew right where it was. Pulling out the box, she extended her arm toward the detectives.

  The detectives asked Emma and Cal to talk about the day Claire went missing.

  Lucy Hayes wrapped her hand around Emma’s. “We’ll take care of it for you.” Her softly spoken words referred to the box. Emma was turning over so much more.

  She clung to it, finally giving in to the gentle tug of the female detective’s hand.

  “If you’re up to it, we have some questions for you,” Ramsey Miller said.

  Emma glanced at the little wooden box of ribbons in Lucy’s hands, then at Cal. “Okay,” she said, and the two of them took seats opposite the detectives.

  The detectives asked Emma and Cal to talk about the day Claire went missing.

  Together, they recounted the story of that day. Their memories sometimes gelled and sometimes collided as the detectives recorded the conversation.

  Emma and Cal both remembered their regular babysitter being sick that day. And Rose, on the phone making arrangements and then telling them that she’d have to pick them up after school.

  They both remembered Claire’s bear at the breakfast table. Cal thought she’d been in her high chair. Emma remembered her sister kneeling in a big-people chair.

  Cal remembered that Claire climbed like a monkey and that was why she was still in a high chair and not a booster seat.

  Emma remembered the climbing, too, but couldn’t remember why her sister didn’t have a booster seat.

  They both remembered the detective later finding Claire’s teddy bear in Cal’s father’s car.

 
Emma thought Cal’s father had been in the house for a long time after breakfast. Cal had been the first to leave.

  They both remembered the truck that delivered meat in the neighborhood, but only Cal remembered seeing it that day.

  Neither of them saw anyone else.

  The whole time they talked, Emma watched the detectives, wondering what Detective Hayes had found in Cal’s book. She assumed the detectives couldn’t say because it had to do with another case, as well, and she wasn’t as upset about that as she might have been.

  She just wasn’t ready.

  “And who, in your current lives, knows any of these details?” Miller asked when, more than an hour later, they’d run out of things to say.

  “My fiancée, Morgan Lowen, knows most of them,” Cal said.

  “Her knowledge is recent, right?” Miller asked, his gaze intense. “Since the box of evidence disappeared.”

  “Right.”

  “And how about you?” Detective Hayes appeared equally serious as she questioned Emma.

  “I rarely talk about the past,” Emma said. “I mean, everyone knows about Claire—my mother and I do a lot of local campaigning for child-safety awareness—but we don’t discuss details.”

  “How about other family members?”

  “My family is just my mother and me and my grandfather in Florida. Mom, by the way, knows nothing about this meeting. Or about…Peter Walters…or any investigation. My mother’s…fragile…where Claire is concerned.”

  Both detectives nodded. “Detective Miller told me you’d asked to leave your mother out of this for now,” Hayes said, and then asked, “have you ever been married?”

  “No.”

  “What about love interests? Is there anyone in your life that you might have confided in?”

  Her face hot, Emma experienced a flash of humiliation as she thought of Chris. Were they watching her? Could they know?

  But she hadn’t confided in Chris. So he was a moot point.

  “I…was engaged,” she said, refocusing her thoughts. “To Rob Evert.” Another humiliating episode she’d rather not talk about, but preferable to the lobsterman debacle. “He knows about Claire, of course. He knows about this meeting, too, actually.” She glanced at Cal. She’d told him of her broken engagement. “Rob’s been very supportive, helping my mother and me with various fund-raisers, and so on. He knows all about our efforts to find Claire. But he never asked about the day she went missing. He understood that it’s a painful memory. And…like I said, I don’t talk about it. It’s not like I remember all that much from before the abduction, anyway. Or—” she paused, shared a look with Cal “—I didn’t realize how much I remembered until Cal and I started talking about it. I was only four. And until Claire was…gone…it was just an ordinary day.”

  She remembered that night, though. The long hours when no one went to bed and she was afraid to go to sleep. To leave her mother’s side at all. And she remembered the horrible, nightmarish days that followed, too. Her mother never smiled or laughed in those days. She was never in a good mood after that.

  And Emma was never unafraid.

  She’d lost her baby sister—and her childhood, too.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  FOR ALL CHRIS KNEW Emma Sanderson worked second shift. Or nights. Or didn’t work at all. Her name and address were all his called-in favor had netted.

  Sitting in his shiny black pickup across the street from her house Monday night, he wondered if ten o’clock was too late to pay her a visit.

  He’d just pulled up and a light was still on behind the big front window. One she left on when she was away? Did she even live alone?

  He’d been by three times. The light had been on two of those three times. He didn’t relish the idea of making the half-hour trip back over here anytime soon. And he didn’t want a repeat of the previous sleepless night, either. Better just to get it over with.

  While he was sitting there, debating what to do, a blue car pulled into Emma’s drive. The garage door opened and the car pulled in, the door closing behind it even before the engine had stopped.

  Chris had failed to notice if she’d been alone.

  Still, there was no decision to make here.

  * * *

  THE KNOCK ON her door startled Emma, stimulating a rush of adrenaline, followed by dread.

  Rob.

  He knew how she felt about answering the door at night.

  Rob was intimately acquainted with the fears she battled every day of her life. Fears that her mother had implanted in her at a very young age, telling her that those fears would keep her safe.

  His antics were escalating if he was trying to scare her into believing she needed him.

  Going to the door, Emma grabbed the handle with one hand, the dead bolt with the other, ready to undo the latter and pull on the former. At the last second, she put one eye to the peephole that had been installed at exactly her height.

  And fear of a new breed took root inside her. It wasn’t Rob at the door.

  But it was a man she had to deal with once and for all.

  “Chris?” she said as she opened the heavy wooden door just enough to speak to him, leaving the screen door firmly closed.

  “Yeah. I’d have called but I don’t know your number.”

  “How did you know my address?” Was he more of a creep than she had thought? Had he been following her?

  It was a ridiculous thought. She’d spent the night with the man in the most intimate way possible. She knew he wasn’t a creep.

  Just a fisherman who lived a lifestyle so far removed from hers that she couldn’t understand it at all.

  How could a man put his job above his family? Above a wife and children? It wasn’t as if the ocean would take care of him in his old age.

  “I know some cops,” Chris said. “Saved me from having to hire a private detective.”

  His words didn’t help the tension holding her rigid. “You had me investigated?”

  But if he knew cops, he couldn’t be all bad. Unless they were…

  “Nope. They ran a check on your license plate and gave me your last name and address. If you sue them for it, you’ll win. They trusted that you’d want to see me.”

  He’d made an effort to find her. He’d have called if she’d left her phone number for him.

  Emma’s heart fluttered. And her lower region started to dance.

  “What did you want to talk about?” Emma leaned against the door, clinging to it, exhausted from a day spent dealing with myriad emotions. And she found herself liking Chris anew.

  Because he’d tried to contact her, after all.

  “I’d…kind of like to come in to discuss it, if I may.”

  If he was going to kill her, he’d had plenty of opportunity a few weeks ago when he’d had her alone and naked in his hotel room.

  “I had a rough day,” she blurted. To explain whatever she might do next? Put him off? Send him away?

  “This won’t take long.”

  Nodding, Emma unlocked the screen door, and stood back, letting him into her foyer. She led the way into the living room. The couches were brown leather—chosen with Rob in mind. So was the recliner.

  Her hand-carved rocking chair was adorned with a brightly colored quilt she’d made during her senior year of high school. With her mother’s blessing she’d used fabric from some of Claire’s old clothes.

  Tonight, she headed straight for security, settling into the
chair and pulling the quilt onto her lap.

  Chris, a very different-looking Chris than the one she’d made love with, settled back onto the couch with the ease of a man who planned to stay awhile. Or who had the ability to make himself comfortable wherever he happened to be. She’d always admired that trait.

  “What did you want to talk about?” Had he seen her at the dock? Was that when he’d seen her license plate?

  Cody had probably told him she’d been to Citadel’s, too.

  How embarrassing. The man probably thought she was stalking him.

  With a sick feeling, she realized he probably hadn’t been looking for her because the night they’d shared had meant as much to him as it had to her. He’d come to let her down gently. To ask that she quit following him.

  “What was so rough about your day?” His voice was quiet and deep, laced with indiscernible emotion.

  Not trusting her composure, she shook her head.

  “Were you at work?”

  “No. I was at the police station.” The words sounded factual. Unemotional.

  “The police station? Are you in some kind of trouble?”

  He could have sounded put off. Horrified. He didn’t. Which was comforting.

  But, then, he came from a rough part of town.

  “Do you need help?”

  How could she still be affected by that voice, those eyes, after what she knew of him? After he’d left her alone in that hotel room with no way to connect again?

  Emma’s lips started to tremble. She thought of her students. Her classroom. She took a deep breath—assuming the authority figure—and proceeded to give him an abbreviated version of her day.

  “Your sister was abducted and no one ever found her?”

  “Mmm-hmm.” She never got used to the shocked reaction.

  “I’d go nuts.”

  Momentarily disarmed by his matter-of-fact tone, she paused, and then said, “Yeah, I do.” He’d nailed it completely. When the pain became more than she could bear, she went nuts. Drove herself nuts. Drove anyone around her nuts.