Adding Up to Family

by Marie Ferrarella

  “You and about a dozen others. If you’re here because my sister owes somebody money, you’re out of luck. You won’t get it from me.”

  “This isn’t about money.”

  “I don’t care what it’s about.” He tried closing the door again, only to glare at her even harder when he couldn’t because she’d quickly planted her heavy boot in the doorway.

  “So you don’t care about her abandoned baby?” Ordinarily, she would have cringed a little at her own bluntness, but these weren’t ordinary circumstances.

  This time she didn’t have to look closely to see the shock that crossed his handsome face. He closed his aqua eyes for a second. Then he frowned and moved away from the doorway. But he didn’t try shutting the door.

  It was invitation enough for her and she stepped inside.

  The interior of the house was only slightly less derelict than it had been when she’d confronted the teenagers. Then, the kids had been sprawled around on sleeping bags and tattered beach chairs. Now, only one piece of furniture remained in the main room—a couch that was presumably new, considering the thick plastic wrapped around it. It was pushed to one side of the square room and sat beneath a foggy-glassed wall mirror. A couple of packing boxes were stacked next to it, along with what appeared to be new, unfinished kitchen cabinets. On the other side of the room were gallon cans of paint along with paint rollers stacked atop a tarp. Clearly he was preparing to paint over the graffiti-covered walls.

  The problems she and her sister were having with the Victorian they’d been restoring were owed strictly to the age and decline of the house. He had to deal with an old house plus neglect and outright vandalism.

  He disappeared through a door near the paint cans and she followed, setting the thick book on top of one of the boxes as she passed the stack.

  He was standing in the middle of the kitchen, seeming to stare at nothing at all.

  He made no sign that he even recognized her presence. Chewing the inside of her cheek, she stepped around him to reach the sink against the cabinetless wall. When she’d been here before, the kitchen had had vile yellow cabinets and she wondered if he’d pulled them out in preparation for the new ones, or if it had been vandals.

  The white enamel sink was still chipped, but it was no longer filled with cigarette ashes and discarded beer cans. In fact, it looked scrupulously clean. There was a dish drainer sitting on the bottom of the sink and she pulled one of the glasses from it. It was still damp from being recently washed, and she filled it with water.

  He hadn’t moved a muscle.

  “Mr. Cooper, why don’t you sit down?” She gestured to the round table wedged in the space between an avocado-green refrigerator and a tin-doored pantry cupboard.

  He still didn’t move.

  His chambray shirtsleeves were rolled up his sinewy forearms and she cautiously touched his elbow through the cloth.

  He jerked as if she’d prodded him with an electric rod and glared down at her.

  She pushed the water glass toward him until he had no choice but to take it. “Maybe this will help,” she said calmly despite the distraction of his intensely colored eyes. “Would you mind if I sat?”

  His eyebrows lowered as she pulled out one of the padded metal chairs without waiting for his answer. She sat on the edge of the yellow vinyl cushion, hoping he would follow suit.

  She needed his cooperation. It would be easier to get that if she could get beyond his annoyance and his shock. In her experience, sitting together at someone’s kitchen table was a step in the right direction.

  After a brief hesitation, he pulled out a second chair. The metal legs scraped against the black-and-white checkered linoleum floor. He sat, and finally drank down half the water.

  Then he set the glass in the middle of the table and sighed. He rested his forearms on the Formica and pressed his fingers together until the tips turned white around his short, neatly clipped fingernails. “I didn’t know she’d had a baby,” he said after a moment. His voice was low. Gruff. “Or that she was in Braden. We—” He broke off and cleared his throat, curling his fingers into fists. “We haven’t spoken in a while.”

  Ali very nearly reached out to cover his hands with her own. Instead, she clasped them together in her lap just to be sure she kept them under control. She wanted to ask what his and his sister’s connection was to Braden that they’d both ended up here during entirely different time frames. Braden was simply too small for it to be coincidental. But she held back that particular question for now. “How long is a while?”

  His jaw shifted. “A while.” He focused those unsettling eyes on her face. “How do you know this baby you’re talking about is Karen’s?”

  She couldn’t fudge the facts about that. “I don’t know for certain that she is,” she admitted. “Only that a child has been abandoned, and the evidence seems to point to her being Karen’s.”

  “What evidence?”

  An old-fashioned electric clock hung on the wall opposite them, above the stove. It was shaped like a black cat, with a long tail that swung right and left in time with the ticking hands of the clock face on the cat’s belly. “There was an unsigned note left along with the infant. We believe your sister wrote it. Her wording was distinct.”

  His eyebrows rose slightly.

  “‘Jaxie, please take care of Layla for me.’” Ali recited the brief missive from memory.

  Grant sat back in his chair. His expression turned annoyed again. “How does that tell you anything? Except the kid’s name is Layla. You don’t even know for sure that the author of the note is Layla’s mother. You’re just assuming.”

  “In the absence of any other information, it’s the only assumption we have to make. Maybe Daisy isn’t—”

  “Karen.”

  “Karen. Maybe she isn’t the baby’s mother, but she clearly had some involvement with the child or she wouldn’t have written the note.”

  “If she wrote the note. Do you even have proof of that? And who the hell is Jaxie?”

  She glanced at the clock again. Gowler would take lateness even worse than he would her personal use of a department vehicle. God only knew what he would assign her to next. Janitorial, maybe. It was about the one thing he hadn’t done. Yet. “Maybe I should start at the beginning.”

  He gave her a long look that seemed to say “you think?” “Maybe you should.”

  She suddenly felt too warm and unzipped her jacket. “An infant was left on the doorstep of a home owned by two brothers in Braden last month. The only identifying item left with the baby was the note. Unsigned, as I said. On common, white paper. No clear fingerprints. But the reference to Jaxie presumably meant Jaxon Swift, who is one of the occupants of the home. Mr. Swift owns a business in Braden and he had an employee for a short while named—” she inclined her head slightly “—Daisy Miranda, who was the only one who ever used that nickname for him. But she left Mr. Swift’s employment more than a year ago and he hasn’t heard from her since.”

  “So? The kid is his. Why else leave her for him? What’s the problem?” His eyes looked cynical. “Jaxie doesn’t want to take responsibility?”

  “That was our assumption, too, at first. That he was the father, I mean. But DNA tests have already disproved his paternity. He’s not Layla’s father. The business Mr. Swift owns is a bar. Magic Jax. Karen was a cocktail waitress. Their uniforms are, um—”

  “Skimpy?”

  She hesitated. She’d been known to work as a cocktail waitress at Magic Jax a time or two for extra money. She was taking a few shifts right now to help get her car out of auto-shop jail. “Let’s just say the outfits are closely fitted. Given the timing, it’s unlikely that your sister was even pregnant when she quit working there. There are no records locally about Layla’s birth, but we estimate she’s now about three months old.”

  “So where is the baby
?”

  Ali kept herself from shifting. “The judge in charge of her case has placed her temporarily with a local family while we investigate.”

  His lips twisted. “He’s put her in foster care, you mean.”

  The term was accurate, but implied a formality and distance that wasn’t the case at all, since it was Ali’s own sister Maddie and her new husband, Lincoln Swift, who were providing the care. “Yes. A very good foster family. Can you give me any information about Karen’s friends? If she was involved with a particular man?”

  “No. I didn’t even know she’d been here in Wyoming.”

  Ali waited a moment for him to explain further, but he didn’t. And even though she tried to give him her best demanding stare, his gaze didn’t shy away.

  She was afraid that she was the one who came away feeling unsteady. She wasn’t used to feeling unnerved by a man. Even an unreasonably handsome one.

  Determined to get back on track, she reached into the inner pocket of her jacket and pulled out one of her business cards. They were generic cards for the police department, but she kept a small supply on which she’d added her badge number, email and phone number. “If there’s anything that comes to you, anything at all, please consider calling me.”

  He didn’t take the card. “So you can arrest her for abandoning her child?”

  She thought about the sweet baby that she herself had rocked and played with and fallen for just like everyone else who’d come into Layla’s orbit. It didn’t really matter what had drawn this man and his nomadic sister to the same place at entirely different times.

  What mattered was Layla.

  She placed the card on the center of the table as she stood. “So I can find a child’s mother,” she amended quietly.

  He didn’t respond. Didn’t reach for the card.

  She squelched a sigh. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Cooper.” She turned to leave the kitchen.

  “I haven’t talked to Karen in nearly three years,” he said abruptly.

  She stopped and looked at him. She couldn’t imagine not speaking with any one of her siblings for three days, much less three years. “That’s a long time.”

  “You don’t know Karen.” He stood from the table and escorted her from the barren kitchen back through the nonlivable living room. “She’s flighty. Irresponsible. Manipulative. But she wouldn’t have done this.” He opened the front door and a rush of bitterly cold wind swept inside. “She wouldn’t have dumped off her baby.”

  “Not even if she was desperate?”

  His lips tightened. “If she was that desperate, she would have let me know.”

  “Well...” Ali zipped up her jacket. Fortunately, her departmental SUV had good heating. She stuck out her hand, hoping to show him that she wasn’t his adversary. “If you think of anything at all that might help us find her, please consider calling me.”

  He looked vaguely resigned. He briefly clasped her hand, then shoved his fingers in the front pockets of his jeans. “I won’t think of anything.”

  She fought the urge to tuck away her own hand, because her palm was most definitely singing. “But if you do—”

  “But if I do, I’ll contact you.”

  It was the best she could do at the moment. Bringing up the subject of testing his DNA to help identify whether or not Karen, aka Daisy Miranda, was actually Layla’s mother wouldn’t get her anywhere. Not just yet. She didn’t have to possess the kind of brilliant mind that had been bestowed on her siblings to recognize that particular fact. “Thank you.” She barely took two steps out the front door when it closed solidly behind her.

  She didn’t look back, but let out a long, silent exhale that clouded visibly around her head as she went down the steps and headed to the SUV. At least she’d learned Daisy’s real name.

  Daisy Miranda might have seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth.

  But maybe Karen Cooper hadn’t.

  She pulled open the truck door and climbed inside, quickly turning on the ignition and the heat.

  Only when she drove away did she finally rub her palm against the side of her pants until the tingling went away.

  * * *

  Grant Cooper watched the SUV until it was out of sight.

  Then he turned on his heel and strode through the disaster zone that was the living room, heading back to the kitchen.

  The sight of the book sitting on top of his packing crates stopped him.

  He picked up the thick novel. Stared for a moment at the slick black cover featuring an embossed outline of a soldier. The author’s name, T. C. Grant, was spelled out in gold and was as prominent as the title—CCT Final Rules.

  He turned and threw the book—hard—across the room.

  It bounced against the plaster wall, knocked a can of white paint onto its side and fell with a thud to the floor.

  He still felt like punching something.

  If not for Karen, he never would have written the damn book he’d just thrown. But what was a little signature forgery, which had locked him into writing a fourth CCT Rules book, compared to abandoning her own child?

  He raked his fingers through his hair.

  “She wouldn’t do that,” he muttered.

  But his eyes caught in the old mirror hanging on the wall. And there was uncertainty in his reflection.

  Karen would have had to have been desperate to do it. If he hadn’t barred her from his life three years ago, she’d have come to him.

  Just like she’d always come to him, expecting him to clean up the latest mess that she’d landed herself in.

  Until that last, unforgiveable act, when she’d signed his name on the publishing contract he’d decided against accepting, he’d always been there for her.

  She’d been crashing on his couch at the time, pitching the advantages of the contract as heavily as his publisher had been. It was his fault for leaving the unsigned contract right out on his desk where she’d had easy access to it. His fault for not even realizing the contract had disappeared, until he’d received it back, fully executed and with a handwritten note of “glad to see you came to your senses” attached. That’s what he got for having an ex-wife for his publisher. He’d known immediately what Karen had done, then. Signed his name on the dotted line. Same as she’d used to sign their parents’ names on school report cards.

  It was easier to write the book than admit what she’d done. Courtesy of his ex-wife, Karen had walked away with a shopping spree for her part in “convincing” him to take the deal he’d admittedly been waffling over. She’d never known that writing the book had taken everything he had left out of him. Because he’d drawn the line with her by then. No more cleaning up. No more paying off. He didn’t want to hear from her. Didn’t want her phone calls. Her text messages. Her emails. Not even the postcards she always mailed from the places she ended up on her never-ending quest to find her “perfect” life.

  Didn’t matter how many times Grant told her there was no such thing. His troubled sister was always on the hunt for it.

  She’d even come to Wyoming, where she didn’t have any connections at all except for the one that he had.

  And now there was a baby. Supposedly hers.

  He looked in the mirror.

  It wasn’t his reflection he saw, though. It was his sister’s face when he’d told her to stay out of his life for good.

  He looked away from the mirror. Sighed deeply.

  “Hell, Karen. What have you done?”

  Copyright © 2018 by Marie Rydzynski-Ferrarella

  ISBN-13: 9781488093760

  Adding Up to Family

  Copyright © 2018 by Marie Rydzynski-Ferrarella

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