From Here to Paternity

by Christine Rimmer

  “Why do you need to be there?” she demanded when he came on the line.

  “I’m helping, remember? Also, I’m buying dinner.”

  “We have not reached the point where we’re deciding who’s paying yet. We’re not even to dinner. We’re still back with why you even have to be there.”

  “Okay, okay. I don’t need to be there. I want to be there. Tanner’s my brother—and you could use a break from taking care of Mia.” He kept after her. “Look. Take the baby to Ma’s. Be at the Nugget at six. It’ll be you, me and my long-lost half brother. We’ll have a drink and some steaks. Then you and Tanner can go on over to your place and he’ll talk to you about Sissy, get whatever leads you’ve got for him, ask you whatever questions he has for you. You can trust him absolutely. Tell him stuff you’re uncomfortable talking about with me, that’s fine. He won’t repeat anything you say—not even to me.”

  “Wait. The three of us have dinner, then Tanner comes to my house. And you don’t?”

  “I want you to feel free to tell him everything you know. And I have a feeling there are some things you’re not going to want to say in front of me.”

  “I don’t see any reason to go out to dinner first.”

  He gave a grunt of impatience. “Tanner’s coming up from the valley. It’s a two-and-a-half-hour drive—if traffic is light, which it never is anymore. He deserves a decent dinner.”

  “Fine. You guys can have dinner. Then he can come to my place.”

  “Charlene,” he said. That was all, just her name. And something about the way he said it made her feel kind of petty. Like she was making a big deal out of something really minor.

  She gave in. “Oh, all right. The Nugget at six. He and I talk at my house, after. Without you.”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “And I’m paying.”

  “Well, all right, Charlene. Have it your way.”

  Chapter Seven

  Have it your way, he’d said. Right.

  It was only as she hung up that she realized she’d just agreed to have dinner with him in a public place on a Friday night. By tomorrow morning it would be all over town that she and Brand were speaking again after ten years of stony silence.

  And okay. More than speaking. They were going out together. Sort of. In the most general sense of the term.

  “Goo-dah,” said Mia from her bouncy chair in the middle of the big metal desk.

  Charlene caught her sweet little foot in its mint-green romper and rubbed the sole gently. “Yeah, well. I guess if I’m letting him ‘help,’ everyone’s bound to find out eventually. And I’m working on that whole forgiveness issue, you know? I think it’s a big step in my personal growth, for me to agree to be seen in public with the guy.”

  In response to that, Mia burped.

  Charlene called Chastity, just to confirm that Brand’s mother really was expecting to watch Mia that evening.

  “I’m lookin’ forward to it,” she said.

  So Charlene dropped the baby off at five after five, went home and changed into a dress she’d bought months ago and never worn. She also primped a whole lot longer than was necessary—not that anyone ever needed to know that.

  She headed back across town at five minutes of six.

  Brand and a dark-haired guy, presumably Tanner, were sitting in one of the knotty-pine booths when she entered the Nugget. Brand, who faced the door, sent her a smile of greeting. The guy across from him looked around. Charlene could see a faint family resemblance. The dark-haired man was handsome in a brooding, intense kind of way. And he had that Bravo cleft in his chin.

  Nadine Stout, headwaitress and co-owner of the Nugget, grabbed a menu from the stand by the door and led Charlene to the booth. Brand slid out and stood waiting as she approached, so she ended up sitting on the inside, beside him.

  Both men already had drinks. She asked Nadine for a glass of white wine. The waitress trotted off to get it and Brand introduced her to his brother.

  She shook Tanner’s hand across the table. His grip was warm, dry and firm. She got an immediate sense of a man she could count on—though not of someone who would be all that easy to get to know.

  Brand leaned close and said softly, “Nice dress.”

  Now, see.

  That was really kind of over the line, like something a guy would say on a real date. Which this was not, no matter what Nadine Stout—who was constantly hiding a knowing smile every time Charlene glanced her way—happened to think.

  “Thank you,” she replied, because it seemed the polite thing to say and this was certainly not the time or place to give the guy a hard time for paying her a compliment.

  And all right. It did please her—that he’d noticed she was a little more dressed up than usual, that he looked at her with that admiring gleam in his eye.

  Was she a sucker for this guy or what? Ten years after he turned his back on her when she needed him most—and here she was again, preening and feeling all giddy inside just because he admired her dress.

  Nadine brought her wine and came back fifteen minutes later to take their order. Brand talked about how his practice was doing, and Tanner mentioned his mother and sister. He said he’d been born and raised in Sacramento, that he remembered very little about his father, who was rarely there. His mother’d had a hard time of it. She’d ended up putting both Tanner and his sister in foster care.

  Brand caught her eye. “Sounds familiar, huh?” It had been the same for him and his brothers. The youngest, Bowie, had not so much as seen his father. Blake had gotten Chastity pregnant for the fourth time—and never returned to New Bethlehem Flat. But at least she’d managed to keep her boys at home.

  Neither of the men mentioned Sissy. Or Mia. Charlene was relieved about that. Talk of her niece and her sister could wait until she and Brand’s brother, the detective, were behind closed doors.

  It was a little after seven when Nadine asked if they wanted dessert. Nobody did.

  “I’ll take the check,” Charlene told the waitress, maybe a little more aggressively than necessary. Nadine whipped it off her pad and handed it over. Charlene paid up.

  They’d arrived in separate vehicles, so Tanner said he’d follow her to her house.

  Brand said, “Thanks for dinner,” when they got out onto Main Street. He headed for his big, fancy Jeep in the lot by the post office.

  Charlene watched him walk away and felt a little curl of wistfulness down inside—for what?

  That the dinner they’d just shared might have been a real date? That tomorrow, when tongues were wagging about how she and Brand were clearly getting back together, it would actually be true?

  Never mind. Those were questions she just didn’t need to ask herself. She turned for her own car, which waited in the lot by the town hall.

  Tanner Bravo took a seat at her kitchen table and turned down her offer of coffee. Charlene went and got the printout of the list she’d made for him.

  He took it and looked it over. Slowly. Charlene sat across from him, tension crawling along the muscles between her shoulder blades as she pressed her lips together—hard—to keep from babbling something nonsensical while the detective was trying to concentrate.

  By the time he finally glanced up from the paper, she was practically vibrating in her chair.

  He looked at her sideways. “You okay?”

  She cleared her throat. “Um. Not really. I really want to find my sister.”

  “I’ll do what I can.” What? Did it seem that impossible, even to him—a guy who found missing people for a living? He felt in his pockets. “Got a pen?” She took one from the mug by the phone and handed it over. He scribbled himself a note on the list she’d given him. “A time frame question…”

  “Sure. Anything…”

  “How long was it between your aunt kicking your sister out and when she showed up here?”

  “Well, I don’t know. As long as it takes to get here from San Diego, I guess. It seemed to me like she came st
raight here. I don’t know why I think that, but I do…”

  “Does she have a car?”

  “No—well, maybe she has one now. I wouldn’t know about that. But last year she didn’t. She’d had one, until about six months before she came to stay with me.”

  Tanner said nothing. He simply waited for her to explain.

  She said, “Sissy got speeding tickets. And she got in three minor wrecks. Finally she had her license suspended. Our aunt took the keys away from her. The car ended up impounded. It was all a big mess.”

  “How did she get here, then, without a car?”

  Charlene blew out a hard breath. “She hitchhiked. I hated that she did that. It’s dangerous. But she always claimed that she could protect herself and that nobody had better mess with her.”

  “Why did your aunt kick her out?”

  “Um. Sissy said it was for cutting school….”

  Brand’s brother looked at her as if he knew there was more to it.

  So she told him what she hadn’t been willing to admit to Brand. “And because Aunt Irma found, um, marijuana in her room.” She watched as he scribbled himself another note and had to ask, “Why does it matter, how she got here, how long it took her, why my aunt kicked her out?”

  He shrugged. “Possible clues to her whereabouts now. She might return to anywhere she’s been before. And as for the issues between her and your aunt, well, that’s background, and the more I know about her background, the more effective I’ll be at looking for her.”

  What he said made total sense. And Charlene felt guilty for challenging him. “I’m sorry. I guess I’m not very helpful. I just don’t know enough—” No matter how many times she admitted it, it still hurt like hell to have to say it.

  “You’re doing fine,” Tanner said. He asked, “During the weeks she stayed with you, any friends of hers come to visit her?”

  “No.”

  “What about phone calls from friends—or to them, to anyone from out of town?”

  Charlene sat up straighter as hope dawned. “You’re right. There were calls I never made. On my phone bill, after Sissy ran away. To and from San Francisco. And San Diego—and some other area code I didn’t recognize. I called the numbers when I first got the bill, thinking maybe I’d find out where Sissy was. I got a couple of answering machines and left messages, but no one called me back. Two actually picked up. One was a guy. He told me I had a wrong number and hung up before I could say anything else. And one was a woman who swore she didn’t know anybody named Sissy.”

  “You still have that bill?”

  “I do, I think. It’ll take me a few minutes to find it.” She started to rise.

  “Hold on,” he said, and took a business card—same as the one Brand had given her the night before—from an inside pocket of his jacket. He wrote on the back of it. “Here’s my fax number. Send me a copy of that bill tomorrow, if possible.”

  “Yes. I will.”

  “And can you tell me the dates your sister was here in town?”

  Those dates just happened to be burned into her brain. “Five weeks. From Sunday, the twenty-second of May until sometime Sunday night the twenty-seventh of June, or possibly very early Monday morning, the twenty-eighth. She…ran off in the middle of the night. I woke up the next morning and she was gone and so were all her things.”

  He did more scribbling. She waited. Finally he said, “When did your sister become pregnant?”

  “I can’t say for sure. But most likely, it was last year, during the time she stayed here in town—I mean, unless Mia was born early, or Sissy lied about the baby’s birthday.”

  “Brand told me you found a letter pinned to the baby’s blanket.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’d like to see it.”

  “It’s…it’s kind of falling apart. I’ve read it so much.”

  “I understand. I don’t need the original. Just a fax is fine. You can send it to me tomorrow, but I wonder if maybe I could see the original now.”

  “Of course.”

  He didn’t say anything more, only watched her, waiting. So she got up and got the note from the secret compartment at the bottom of her jewelry box. She carried it back to the kitchen and spread it out on the table.

  “There,” she said, “See? She writes that Mia was born on March fifteenth…”

  “That’s believable to you? Does the baby seem the right age?” When she nodded, he added, “And nine months before that would be mid-June, when Sissy was living here.”

  “Yes. And, um, as you can see, she claims that Brand is the father.”

  “I see that. Do you believe her?”

  It was the first time she’d been asked the question by a more-or-less neutral party. She told the truth. “The more I think it over, no. I don’t. I just don’t.”

  Tanner nodded. “And are you certain the baby is actually your sister’s child?”

  The question shocked her to her core. So much so that she had to stifle a gasp. “Well, I never thought…I mean, it never occurred to me that Mia might not be Sissy’s. Who else’s could she be?”

  “I wouldn’t know. But it’s possible, right? You never saw your sister pregnant. You seem to think your aunt doesn’t even know that there is a baby. You had no idea your sister had even been pregnant, not until the baby appeared on your couch…”

  “True. But…”

  “But what?”

  “No.” She said it firmly. “I see where you’re going, but you’re wrong. I know—I’m absolutely certain—that that baby is my niece.”

  “I’m only trying to consider all the possibilities, you understand? To come at the information from every angle.”

  “I do understand. And I’m telling you I’m certain that baby is my sister’s child.”

  “How do you know, Charlene?” He said it kindly—in the way that you talk to deluded people, to people who refuse to face the truth.

  Charlene closed her eyes. And a sense of certainty settled over her. She knew Mia was Sissy’s. And she told Tanner why.

  “Because I was nine when my sister was born. I can still see her baby face. Except for that little dimple Mia’s got in her chin, that face could be Mia’s face. There’s just no way she’s not my sister’s baby.”

  Tanner said nothing. The kitchen was silent. She could hear the antique clock ticking in the other room.

  After a moment Charlene opened her eyes and found him writing more notes on the paper she’d given him. “So. What else?”

  “A current picture of your sister would help a lot.”

  Of course. She should have thought of that. “I have a couple of snapshots I took when she was here last year.” She rose again and got him the pictures.

  He took the best one—of Sissy sitting outside on the deck with her morning coffee, her spiked hair purple at the tips, lips painted black, the safety pins in her nose and ears and left eyebrow glinting in the sunlight. “I’ll make a copy. You’ll get it back.”

  “I’d appreciate that. I don’t have a lot of pictures of her in the past few years.”

  He picked up the paper and stood. “I’ll start with those phone numbers you’ll fax me tomorrow, those and what you’ve given me here.”

  “When you talk to my aunt…” She didn’t quite know how to ask the question.

  But he already knew what she wanted—probably because Brand had warned him. “You’re my client. If you don’t want your aunt to know about Mia, she won’t hear about her from me.”

  “Thank you.”

  He actually smiled then, a wry twist of his lips. “Don’t thank me yet. I’ll see what I can do.”

  She followed Tanner out into the gathering twilight. After he drove off down her driveway, she got in the wagon and went over to the Sierra Star to get Mia. That midnight-blue Grand Cherokee of Brand’s was parked in front, gleaming under the streetlamp.

  Should she have known?

  And why did her idiot heart feel suddenly light as a moonbe
am in her chest?

  Dumb.

  Dumb, dumb, dumb.

  She was not, she reminded herself as she marched up the slate walk—not under any circumstances—going to allow him to talk her into letting him come on over to her place. That is, if he had something like that in mind.

  Chastity answered her knock. “Come on in the kitchen.”

  Charlene opened her mouth to tell Brand’s mom that she just couldn’t stay. But Chastity had already turned to lead the way to the back of the house. It only seemed polite to fall in step behind her.

  In the cozy, warm kitchen that smelled of something delicious and lemony, Alyosha, Chastity’s boyfriend, sat at the table with Brand. A widower who’d retired to the Flat a few years back and kept busy as the local handyman, Alyosha beamed and nodded at Charlene and she nodded back.

  Brand said, “Hey.”

  She looked at him and he smiled at her. Her already absurdly weightless heart lifted up and floated right out of her body.

  Dumb, dumb, double-dumb.

  Chastity gestured at the chair next to Brand’s. “Mia’s sound asleep in my room. Sit down. Have a cup of coffee and a slice of lemon bread before you take off.”

  She was going to say how she really had to go. But somehow, she found herself pulling out that chair and sitting down. “Lemon bread, huh? It smells amazing.”

  “Smells great, tastes even better,” said Alyosha.

  So she had a cup of coffee and a slice of the delicious warm-from-the-oven bread.

  “How did your meeting go?” Chastity asked, and Charlene was instantly worried about how much Brand had told her.

  She sent him a sideways glance, and he gave her an almost imperceptible shake of his head, which she took to mean he’d revealed nothing he shouldn’t have. “Just fine,” she told Chastity, “My meeting went just fine.”

  “Well, good,” said Brand’s mother with a nod.

  Alyosha frowned as if he might be wondering what meeting they were talking about. But he didn’t ask. Chastity offered him more lemon bread, and the handyman eagerly accepted.