A Daughter's Story

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  Looking up from the tests she was grading after school on Friday, Emma put down her pen. “Tammy? Come on in.”

  The dark-haired sophomore came slowly forward. “There’s a phone message for you in the office. I told Mrs. Olsen that I’d let you know.”

  Barbara Olsen, the high school’s office administrator, had agreed to let Tammy spend the last period of the day volunteering in the office in place of attending a study hall the gifted student didn’t need.

  “Thanks, I’ll stop in on my way out,” she said, smiling, putting the rest of the papers in her leather briefcase and pulling on the black cardigan she’d worn with her black slacks and white blouse. “You aced your test.”

  “Oh, good!” The straight-A student seemed surprised every time she did well.

  “How’s your mother doing?”

  Tammy stood just inside the doorway. “Okay. She goes in for more treatments today. She really wants to be well and I know she’ll make it.”

  Tammy’s mother, a drug baby, had been fighting addiction problems since the day she was born. Usually she won the fight, but not always.

  “You’re staying with your aunt in the interim?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is your uncle in town?” The man scared Tammy, but he hadn’t done anything overt enough to warrant contacting the authorities. And staying with her aunt kept Tammy out of the child-welfare system and foster care.

  “Not right now. He gets back next week.”

  “How long is your mother going to be away for this time?”

  “Six weeks.”

  Most of the fall semester.

  “You’ve got my number programmed into your cell phone, right?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Do not hesitate to use it, Tammy. For any reason. If you just miss your mom and want to talk, you call me.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I mean it, Tammy,” Emma spoke firmly. “I promised your mother I would be here for you when she couldn’t be. That’s how the world works. She got dealt some hard cards, and because of that, so did you. But you were also dealt a lot of good cards. I’m one of your aces, okay?”

  With tears in her eyes, the girl nodded. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me. Just call me.”

  “I will.”

  Emma believed her.

  * * *

  THE PHONE MESSAGE was from Chris. She’d had sex with him twice now, but still had not exchanged phone numbers with him. He knew where she lived, where she worked—she’d told him the name of the school the night she’d told him what she did for a living. She knew where he worked. He thought they might be having a baby together…but they hadn’t exchanged numbers. Or email addresses, either. He hadn’t asked for hers. And she’d thought it for the best.

  They had no future. There was no point in opening the means for convenient, immediate contact.

  According to the note Barbara had left in her box, he’d not only asked her to call him, he’d said it was important. He’d left his number.

  Walking out to her car, she punched the digits into her list of contacts. She wasn’t ready to speak to him yet. Perhaps it was the coward’s way out, but she couldn’t follow in her mother’s footsteps and make the biggest mistake of her life. She couldn’t let herself fall for a fisherman.

  She had to let him know that her doctor was out of town until Monday of the following week and probably wouldn’t be able to see her until Tuesday at the earliest, and that she wanted to wait to see her own physician.

  He might not like that choice. But her body was hers and she was comfortable with her own doctor.

  In spite of what Chris thought, there was no rush. Her doctor didn’t even recommend a first prenatal exam until six weeks. And she couldn’t let herself consider the what ifs of being pregnant. Not right now. She had so much coming at her and couldn’t afford to let Chris’s panic affect her. Anyway, they’d know soon enough.

  Emma might be strong, but she was also smart enough to know that she couldn’t afford another heartbreak. Not any time soon.

  She’d just dropped her phone in her purse when the ring tone sounded. She didn’t recognize the number, or even the area code.

  Sitting in her car in the teachers’ parking lot, she took the call.

  “Hello?”

  “Emma? This is Detective Lucy Hayes, you got a minute?”

  She gulped. She wasn’t ready. Not while facing a drive through town at dinnertime. Comfort Cove wasn’t a metropolis, but it had more than doubled in size since she was a kid.

  “I’m just leaving work.…” The woman was a cop. Cops didn’t encourage cell-phone distraction while operating a motor vehicle.

  “I was wondering if we could meet,” the detective said, her voice reassuringly calm.

  “You have news.”

  “I have a couple of things to talk to you about. We can meet at the station,” she said. “Miller’s out on another case, but we can use his office. Or we can meet someplace less formal if you’d like. There’s a coffeehouse not far from the station.”

  “The Caffeine Café,” Emma said. “I go right by there on my way home.”

  “Do you have time to stop?”

  She had all weekend. And she wasn’t ready. “Of course. If I didn’t have time, I would make time.”

  Claire came first. Always.

  * * *

  CHRIS STOPPED IN at Marta and Jim’s after he left the docks Friday night.

  “Well, it’s about time you showed up for Friday-night dinner.” Marta greeted him at the door, wiping her hands on her apron. “I’ve got fried tilapia and homemade chips nearly ready.”

  “I can’t stay.” He gave his automatic response to pretty much any invitation, and then said, “I just stopped by to let Jim know that Trick’s going to be back on the water tomorrow. It would be good if he could keep an eye out for him.”

  “Come on in and tell him, then.” Marta stood back, holding open the door leading into the kitchen, which looked the same as it had when he was a kid. “He’s already at the table.”

  The room smelled just like he remembered Friday-night dinners smelling every week of his growing up.

  “Sit down, boy,” Jim said, nodding at the chair across from Marta’s empty place.

  Chris hesitated.

  “He says he can’t stay,” Marta said, pulling a plate from the cupboard, silverware from the drawer, and shoving the drawer closed with her hip.

  “Of course he can stay.” The look he gave Chris had Chris in his seat, a napkin spread across his lap, before Marta had the food on the table. There were some lessons a guy learned young and didn’t have to learn twice.

  Going against that look—the one his father and Jim had perfected—was one of those things.

  Not getting a girl pregnant out of wedlock was another.

  “You ever hear of a guy named Dale Sanderson?” Chris asked Jim a few minutes later, spearing a piece of fish with his fork.

  Jim glanced up at him and away, frowning while he chewed. “Name rings a bell. Who’s asking?”

  “An old acquaintance of his was down at the docks a Sunday or two ago.”

  He wouldn’t lie. But neither would he give them even a hint that he’d had a conversation with an unmarried female.

  Heck, the first time he’d talked to Sara in school someone had told someone who told someone, and the next thing he knew his parents had heard about it. Then h
is mom told Marta, who told Jim, and the following Friday-night dinner the four of them had practically had him and Sara married.

  The weeks after Sara had broken off their engagement, the four of them had walked around looking as if someone had died.

  But he wasn’t just keeping quiet for himself. He was protecting Emma from any connection to the man she’d written off long ago.

  Which didn’t stop Chris from being curious.

  He’d eaten several bites of tilapia before he realized that Jim hadn’t said a word. Marta was frowning.

  “So did you know him?” he asked, looking from one to the other.

  “Heard of him,” Jim said. “Seen him from afar. Never had occasion to speak with him.”

  “Sounds like you remember him well.”

  “He was a punk,” Jim muttered. “Gave the docks, and those of us who worked hard for an honest living, a bad name.”

  “He was just a kid,” Marta said.

  “A punk kid.” Jim, who was always kind, almost snorted on the last word.

  “They said he stole from the boats,” Marta put in.

  “He hired on with Kennedy,” Jim added, naming a man Chris could hardly remember, but one he’d heard a lot of stories about growing up. The man had been in his sixties when Chris was born, which would have made him close to seventy when Dale Sanderson worked for him.

  Kennedy had never married. But he took at-risk boys from around town under his wing, taught them hard work and manners and honesty.

  He’d died on his boat, out at sea. His traps had all been empty, his lobsters banded and ready to sell. It had appeared as if he’d just gone to sleep after a good day’s work.

  His will had stipulated that his boat, and everything else he owned, be sold and the money put into a scholarship fund at the local high school.

  “Rumor was that Sanderson might have had something to do with Kennedy dying,” Jim said, setting down his fork. “He’d married in between his first and second summers on the docks. Had a kid. Kennedy liked the girl—and took a shine to the baby, too. Then he found out that Sanderson had been stealing from him—taking the catch in to Manny every day and siphoning off the payout. He also found things missing from his house and the boat, too. When he confronted Sanderson, the guy laughed at him. Told him he was just an old dodder who should have quit years before. Said that Kennedy wouldn’t be bringing in any fish at all if it weren’t for Dale. Claimed that the money was rightfully his since he did all the work…”

  Chris was almost sorry he’d asked.

  “Right about that time Dale found out that his wife was pregnant again,” Marta said.

  Chris took a bite of salad, glancing at her. “Did you know her? Sanderson’s wife?”

  “No.” Marta shook her head. “She used to hang around down at the docks, that first summer, but she was just like any of the other high-school girls that think the fishing life is romantic, or the fisherman rugged because they’re forbidden.”

  Marta had grown up down at the docks, the daughter of a fisherman. She’d known better.

  “Once they were married, she never came down to the docks again.”

  “Sanderson wasn’t the only one who behaved poorly,” Jim said. “There’s enough guys down at the dock who do exactly as outsiders claim they do—the drinking and fornicating and taking off from responsibility.”

  Chris knew all about them. To some men, fishing, being out on the ocean, was a way to escape from life’s duties. The docks would always attract some of their kind.

  “The young SOB got drunk and loud one night and told everyone down at the bar that Kennedy wasn’t up to fishing anymore, that he was a waste of weight on his own boat.”

  Oh, God, no. Chris felt the blow almost personally, figuring he knew exactly how that had to have felt to a man who’d given his entire life to the ocean.

  “Next day, Kennedy took the boat out alone. Brought in his entire catch. Prepared ’em for sale. And died.

  “By the time the dust settled after Kennedy’s funeral, Sanderson had run off. I heard he divorced his wife while she was pregnant with their second baby.

  “No one knows what happened to him, for sure,” Jim said, picking up his fork again. “We were just glad to be rid of him.”

  Chris could have told the older man about Dale Sanderson’s unfortunate fate. But it wasn’t his story to tell.

  And he didn’t think he was going to tell Emma about the legacy she’d escaped, either. There was no point in her learning about a man she’d never known.

  * * *

  “THANKS FOR MEETING with me on such short notice.” Detective Hayes, dressed in a fashionable tweed pant suit, met Emma at the door of the Caffeine Café.

  “Of course.” Emma pulled open the door and held it for the detective. The woman walked into the place as if she owned it, in spite of being a few inches shorter than Emma. Her short blond hair bobbed as she moved.

  Pulling her brown curls out from under the shoulder strap of her purse, Emma followed her inside.

  They ordered coffee—black decaf for Emma, a caramel latte for Lucy—and found a small round table at the back of the room, across from a young man engrossed in his computer and wearing earbuds.

  Lucy started in right away. “We got Claire’s DNA results back today.”

  Holding her coffee cup between her hands, Emma soaked up the warmth. “So soon? I thought it would be a couple of weeks.”

  “So did Ramsey, but Shawn, at the lab, worked on the Walters case and he pushed it through. Ramsey was called out on a homicide just after Shawn called him, so I told him I’d meet with you. If that’s all right with you?”

  Emma nodded, just as happy to be dealing with Detective Hayes.

  Staring down into the black liquid she’d yet to taste, Emma steeled herself. They’d been on this roller coaster for twenty-five years. It was time to get off.

  She saw Lucy Hayes’s fingers slide across the table just before the detective wrapped them around the top of Emma’s hand where it still clutched her cup.

  “There was no match between Claire’s DNA and the Walters case.”

  Every muscle in her body gave way, leaving her weak. Limp. Relief was a physical ache as the tension she’d been holding in began to give up its grip.

  When she could, she glanced up. “She wasn’t one of his victims?”

  Her blue eyes warm, Lucy shook her head. “None of the items found in Walters’s basement link him to Claire.”

  “Thank God.” Thank you, Lord. A thousand times, thank you. Emma’s eyes welled with tears and she blinked them away, nodding. Trying to smile. “Of course that means we’re back to square one,” she said. It was frustrating, but she was more than willing to go back to not knowing if it meant that Claire hadn’t suffered at the hands of that sick bastard.

  “We aren’t quite back to square one,” Lucy said slowly, her gaze intent. Giving Emma’s hand one last squeeze, she sat back. “We have nothing concrete yet. Not even enough to warrant informing you…”

  “But you’re going to tell me.”

  “I need to explain something, first.”

  “Of course.”

  Lucy took a sip of her drink, and turned up the corners of her napkin with her free hand.

  “Ramsey told you about the case that introduced us—he needed evidence to rule out a female infant abduction as one of Walters’s victims and I’d signed out the evidence.”

  Walters was not C
laire’s abductor. Still weak with relief, Emma made herself focus on the words Detective Hayes was saying, and nodded.

  Claire had not been one of Walters’s victims.

  She had to call Cal.

  “That infant female was my older sister.”

  Emma’s heart lurched as she became fully present. She stared at the detective.

  “I don’t know exactly what you’re going through,” Lucy Hayes said. “I never knew my sister. She was abducted before I was born. But I do know how hard it is to live with the aftermath. The way it changes a family. I understand how the not knowing can make you crazy. And give you perpetual hope at the same time.”

  “Did you find your sister?”

  “Not yet. She’s the reason I became a cop. So that I could have access to every means possible to find her. My mother…she’s never been stable, or even always coherent, since I’ve known her. She was with Allison at the time she was taken. She was taken, too. The guy beat her up, raped her and left her for dead. But he kept Allison. They never found him. Or my sister.”

  Holding back the emotion swarming inside her as best she could, Emma asked, “How long was this before you were born?”

  “A little over a year.”

  “So you weren’t… The rape didn’t make her pregnant.”

  “No. My father died when I was a baby, though. He was much older than my mother. A cop. She turned to him after Allie was taken. Allie’s father, a boyfriend who left her when she found out she was pregnant, was nowhere to be found.”

  “Was your father on the case?”

  “Not full-time. He was from across the state line and followed up on a camera sighting that they thought was my mother and Allie. Turned out not to be, but he checked in on my mom afterward and one thing led to another. He died in an unrelated shoot-out.”

  “And Allie…your sister…she’s not one of Walters’s victims either, right? Since you say you haven’t found her.”

  “Right. We don’t have Allie’s DNA, but a sample from my mother ruled out even a close match.”

  “My mom’s stable,” Emma said. “She went back to work a year after Claire went missing. She was a teacher. She’s an elementary-school principal now and spends all of her free time advocating for child-safety education. But I’ve spent my entire life protecting her from the fear and depression that could easily kill her.”