A Daughter's Story (5 page)

CHAPTER EIGHT

E
MMA
GAVE
R
OB
a couple of extra hours
to vacate her house on Saturday. She blamed her inability to get out of bed and
leave the hotel room on her late night. It certainly wasn’t a man keeping her
there.

Her companion in crime was no more than a vivid memory.
Sometime before dawn he’d kissed her one last time, told her to sleep, then,
when she was more unconscious than not, he’d dressed and left. She hadn’t even
known his intent until she’d heard the latch on the door click behind him.

She’d risen then. In the restroom she’d found the note he’d
left for her on the marble sink, telling her to stay as long as she liked. He’d
arranged a late check-out. He told her to order breakfast on him.

“I hope that our night together is a
memory that will last you a lifetime,”
he’d written.
“
I
know that I will never forget
you. Chris.”

That was it. Just Chris. No last name. No phone number. No way
for her to contact him. No request for a way to contact her.

After reading the note half a dozen times Emma had told herself
to dress, find her car and get the hell home.

And then she’d remembered Rob’s deadline, which wasn’t yet
past, and had crawled back into bed. What the heck. Chris had presumably paid
for the room. She might as well get some rest.

With the help of the wine she’d consumed the night before,
she’d slept for several more hours—waking around noon to glasses half filled
with stale wine and whiskey, the scent of lovemaking and her clothes in a neat
pile on the table in front of the couch.

The note Chris had written was still there, too, crumpled on
the bedside table. Right where she’d left it.

* * *

W
ITH
HIS
FADED
orange coveralls
stripped down to his waist, Chris dropped the wrench and swore. He was stranded
on his boat about ten miles out. And saw a flash of long legs in his mind’s
eye.

At his father’s insistence, he’d learned how to repair a boat
engine before he’d pulled up his first trap. But there was only so much a guy
could do to an engine with pistons that were done being overhauled. New rings
weren’t going to do it this time. He’d had no black smoke warning this time.
Only a rough idle when he’d taken the boat out.

Maybe he’d have taken the engine coughs more seriously if he’d
had any sleep. If he’d been able to wipe out the image of dark curls spread
across his white pillowcase. He couldn’t afford to miss another day’s catch. And
engine coughing could be healed after he’d brought in the haul. Usually.

At least he’d brought in a better than average catch. More than
seven hundred pounds. At only three dollars a pound—less than half of what he
used to sell for—he was going to gross twenty-one hundred. He could get the
catch in to Manny. With the cost of running a lobstering operation coupled with
his living expenses, he was going to be lucky to make this month’s bills.

Which was another reason he didn’t date. He couldn’t afford to
wine and dine a woman. He couldn’t afford the time.

Forgoing the radio—and the coast guard—Chris pulled out his
cell phone and dialed.

He couldn’t afford a new engine, either. Or a day off work. He
damn well couldn’t afford to be distracted by thoughts of a woman—no matter how
good the night before had been.

“Jim, it’s Chris. I need a tow.”

He gave his father’s best friend his coordinates. Jim wasn’t
fishing anymore. He’d bought a new boat just before the economy failed and had
lost it to bankruptcy a couple of years later. Now the sixty-seven-year-old
fisherman drove a towboat for Manny.

If Chris couldn’t find a way to fish and fix his boat at the
same time, he could end up just like Jim.

“Be there in twenty,” Jim told him, and hung up.

No questions asked.

* * *

E
MMA
PUSHED
THE
button on her car
visor, activating the automatic garage-door opener at four o’clock Saturday
afternoon and paused in the driveway. Rob’s silver Ranger was still parked
inside.

The tall, lanky, boyishly good-looking man came out of the
kitchen and into the garage before the outer door was fully raised.

She had a choice. Back up and speed away. Or stay.

Emma pulled into her garage.

“You didn’t change the locks.” Rob was there, opening her door
for her. “I spent the night praying that you’d give me another chance, Em. This
was the first time since we got engaged,” he said, his tone pleading. “I swear
to you, it won’t happen again. Ever.”

She got out of the car, pulling her purse out with her.

“The look on your face, when you came in the bedroom
yesterday…”

Emma made her way to the door and into the house.

“I will never forget that look, Em. Or forgive myself for
putting it there.”

He hadn’t moved out. Everything was just as she’d left it the
day before. Rob’s shot glasses were on the second shelf of the window alcove
over the sink. His espresso machine still sat on the counter. And his shoes were
underneath the dining-room table—right where he always left them.

Most everything in the townhome—the furniture, the dishes, the
mortgage—belonged to her. He’d sold his stuff when he’d moved in because they
hadn’t needed two of everything.

“You’re in the same clothes you took with you yesterday.”

She put her purse on the closet shelf. Not far from Rob’s golf
clubs. He was that sure of her.

She was that predictable.

“You have clothes at your mother’s house.”

She’d called her mother on her way home, letting Rose know that
she’d stayed downtown and had a long rest. She’d assured Rose that she was fine
and that she’d call her later. She’d opted out of joining her for dinner and a
movie.

Now she wondered if maybe that hadn’t been such a good idea. If
she had someplace to be, something she had to do, she could leave without
running away.

Chris had had all morning to contact her at his hotel room, but
he hadn’t. And he hadn’t returned.

Unlike Rob, she knew when someone was giving her ample time to
get out.

“You’ve been out all night.”

Rob’s tone turned accusing as he followed her into the living
room, down the hallway and into their shared home office. She had no idea what
she was going to do there, but it was a better choice than the bedroom, where
she really wanted to be.

Or the shower, where she needed to be.

“Where were you?”

He was standing right behind her. Hounding her. Emma turned and
stared him right in the eye. “That is none of your business.”

“You’ve got a hickey on your neck.”

Emma raised a hand to cover the mark. She’d forgotten. Chris
had been inside her—for a second time—when she’d admitted that she’d never had a
hickey in her life. What had been a hazy recollection crystallized as though a
high-powered beam had been pointed at the memory.

“You were with another man!” The astonishment in Rob’s voice
riled her. He didn’t have to sound so shocked. Like the idea of another man
wanting her was impossible to imagine.

“You’re no better than I am!”

He had that wrong. She’d waited until she was free before she
had sex with someone else.

Rob reached out, taking hold of her shoulders, pulling her to
him. “I’m sorry, Em. I understand. And I forgive you. I’m actually relieved.” He
looked down at her, a sympathetic smile on his lips. “You don’t know how hard
it’s been living with someone as perfect as you are. There’s no way I could ever
measure up. But now…”

“What do you mean, as perfect as I am?”

“You know!” He gave her shoulders a squeeze. “You live
completely on the white side of black and white. You don’t ever mess up. Or do
anything unless you know you won’t make a mistake. You have such high standards
you make it impossible for a guy to live up to you.”

Emma stepped back forcefully enough to make him let go of her.
She’d been crushed that Rob had been unfaithful. He appeared glad that she had
been.

“Who was he, Em? Anyone I know?”

More nauseated than ever, Emma walked out of the office. “Get
out, Rob. Now. Take your things and get out. The locksmith is on his way.”

“You don’t mean that.” He placed a hand on her arm. Gently.
“Please. Let’s talk. We can get through this. I know we can. I know
you,
Em.”

He did know her. Better than anyone ever had. There was a lot
of value in that. A lot of worth.

Chris didn’t know her at all. And didn’t want to.

If she let Rob leave, she’d be alone. Really alone. Did she
want that?

“Get out.” The words came from deep within. “The Lock Exchange
guy is going to be here soon. Whatever’s still here by the time the locks are
changed, you lose.”

“You don’t know what you’re doing.”

“Yes, actually, I do.” Emma shook inside, scared to death but
determined.

She’d done the unimaginable the night before. She’d left a bar
with a man she didn’t know. She’d shed her clothes for him, spread her legs for
him. And then she’d been left to wake up alone.

Somehow she had to make something good come from that. She had
to make the night count. She had to become a changed woman.

“I’m warning you, Em. If you do this, if you really force me
out of here, I won’t be back.”

She stood still and tried not to cry.

“I mean it.”

He took a step toward her.

“I know you mean it.” Emma could hardly believe the firmness of
her tone. “I am changing the locks and anything that’s left behind, you lose.
You’ve had twenty-four hours.”

“Fine, then. But mark my words, you’re going to regret
this.”

She faced him one last time, aware of how she must look in
yesterday’s clothes with last night’s rumpled hair, smeared makeup and unbrushed
teeth. “That’s a chance I’m willing to take.”

Emma didn’t take chances.

But apparently the woman she’d unleashed the night before had
caught a ride home with her.

CHAPTER NINE

C
HRIS
TOSSED
BACK
a few drinks with Jim at his house on Saturday
night. The older man had taken a look at his boat and had verified what Chris
already knew. He’d shot at least one piston. The
Son
Catcher
wasn’t going anywhere until Chris came up with a thousand
bucks and the time to fix her.

And if he kept dipping into his savings, he wasn’t going to
have anything left for his retirement.

Not that he had any plans to quit working.

If he couldn’t fish, there wouldn’t be anything left to live
for, anyway.

“You don’t come around enough, Chris.” Jim’s wife, Marta, put a
plate of fresh crab sandwiches on the table in the enclosed patio and pulled up
a stool.

“I don’t want to impose,” Chris said.

“Your folks have been gone almost ten years, and you’ve been
here, what, five times since then?”

It sounded so bad when she put it like that.

“I miss our Friday-night dinners.”

Jim had been friends with Chris’s father in high school. When
they’d married, their wives had also become close friends. The two couples had
shared dinner together every Friday night. And after Chris had been born, the
only child among them, he’d become a part of the tradition. One that had
continued until his parents’ deaths.

After that, Chris found it easier to be alone.

* * *

E
MMA
SLEPT
ON
the couch Saturday
night. With the television on.

She wasn’t afraid of burglars. Or of the dark.

She was afraid of herself, that—alone in the queen-size bed, in
the room that she’d shared for two years—she’d toss and turn and feel
desperate.

She was afraid she’d do something crazy. Like call Rob. He’d be
expecting a call. And, in spite of what he said, he’d come back.

She knew him well, too.

Another possibility, a worse one, was that she’d leave the
house and go down to Citadel’s. If Chris made his living there, he’d have to be
there more than one night a week. Weekends were the biggest draw.

And if he was booked someplace else, Cody would probably know
about that, too.

As badly as Emma wanted to see him again, she knew she
shouldn’t. So she didn’t sleep much.

But she caught up on
I Love Lucy
reruns. And when dawn still took too long to arrive, she put in
Pillow Talk,
one of her favorite movies from her Doris
Day collection. Emma owned every single movie Doris Day had ever made.

She loved them all.

Doris always got her guy. But she never lost sight of who she
was in the process. Always remained true to herself.

She was an icon in her day, a woman before her time. The
characters Doris depicted were strong women. Women who didn’t need men to
complete them, who were successful in their own right and found men to
complement them.

Men who were so in love with her characters, that love changed
them from playboys into faithful partners for life.

At seven in the morning, as the end credits of
Pillow Talk
played, Emma reached into the side-table
drawer, pulled out a journal—an unused gift from one of her students—and opened
it to the first page.

She wrote her name in large black print:
EMMA SANDERSON.

And then she started a list.

1. I want to be loved by a man who loves me
so much that that love changes him.

She waited for more to come to her, and when nothing presented
itself, she closed the journal and put it back in the drawer. Then she went to
take a shower and begin the rest of her life.

* * *

A
T
NINE
O
’
CLOCK
Sunday morning, Emma picked up the phone.

Ramsey Miller had given her Cal’s number, after obtaining Cal’s
permission to do so. She’d programmed it into the contact list on her cell
phone.

She’d let it sit there.

With the push of a button, she made another major life
decision.

Her heart was pounding as she waited for Cal to pick up.

“Hello?”

His voice was deep. Distinguished.

“Hello?”

She almost hung up. She had no idea what she was getting into.
What kind of Pandora’s box she could be opening. What if the Whittiers tried to
sue them?

“Hello?” Cal sounded more perplexed than irritated by the
silence on the other end. The young boy she remembered had always been so
patient with her and Claire. So willing to listen.

“Cal?”

“Yes?”

“It’s Emma. Emma Sanderson. Detective Ramsey Miller told me
that you said it was all right to call and…”
I’m a new
woman now. Or at least I’m trying to be.

“Emma. I wondered if that was you when I saw the area code and
didn’t recognize the number.” There was hesitation in his voice. Not that she
could blame him.

“I just… I called to apologize, Cal. I know that nothing I can
say will ever make up for what happened to you—and to your father.…”

When she’d been little she’d called Frank “Papa.”

“You have nothing to apologize for, Emma. You were four.”

“Over the years…I’ve thought of you. I could have called, but I
didn’t.”

“You wouldn’t have found a number.”

“I might have. And if not, I should have spoken up. Gone to the
authorities. Told them that I didn’t think your father did it. I should have
been a friend to you, Cal. You were the best friend to me.”

Her throat was dry. Each word was successively more
difficult.

“No one was going to believe what you thought, Em. Not without
some kind of proof to substantiate your belief. You were a kid. Frank was the
only father you’d known. Of course you weren’t going to believe the worst of
him.”

“I should have tried harder to convince Mom, instead of always
supporting her.”

“I can’t speak to that,” Cal said. “I’ve spent the past
twenty-five years hating your mother.”

“I don’t blame you.” What a bizarre conversation. There had
been a time she’d never have believed she would ever talk to Cal again. And yet,
sitting at the breakfast bar in her kitchen with tears in her eyes, she smiled.
Feeling more at home than she’d felt in a very long time.

“I missed you so much. Not just at first, but over the years. I
never stopped missing you.”

“I missed you, too.”

“You did?”

“Yeah, although it took me a while to admit it.”

“What changed?”

“I’ve mellowed out a bit since I got engaged.”

Emma’s grin grew. “Who’s the lucky woman?”

That started a conversation that lasted more than two hours. He
told her about his fiancée, Morgan, and her ten-year-old son, Sammie. He also
shared with her how much he enjoyed teaching American Literature and Creative
Writing to college students. And then he brought the conversation back to Ramsey
Miller. “He needs a DNA sample from Claire,” Cal said. “That’s why he originally
went looking for the evidence box.”

“I know.” Emma hadn’t told her mother about the DNA request,
the reason for it. She hadn’t told her about the missing evidence, either.

“Did Ramsey explain what was going on?” he asked quietly. “Do
you know about Peter Walters?”

A feeling of dread settled in her stomach. “Yeah.”

Detective Ramsey Miller had been on a case, tracking down a
missing little girl. He’d followed a lead and found Peter Walters, the
fifty-five-year-old kidnapper, and the toddler he’d abducted. Found them before
Walters had been able to harm the girl. But, in Ramsey’s words to Emma, she
said, “It was clear that it hadn’t been the bastard’s first time at bat.”

“Miller found things hidden beneath the floorboards in
Walters’s basement—items belonging to little girls. He’s looking at all
cold-case abductions on the East Coast and in the Midwest, testing DNA from the
missing children, looking for a match. So far, he’s positively identified four
victims,” Cal said softly.

“He told me that he found the stuff in the basement after a
confession from Walters regarding what he’d done with one of the victims before
and after he’d killed her.”

A confession that, according to the detective, had made him
puke.

“He thinks Claire might be the fifth.” Emma’s voice broke on
the words. For so long now she’d prayed. On good days, she was able to picture
Claire alive and well and happy—unaware that she’d been abducted.

“He’s not sure, Em. From what I’ve gathered, Miller is trying
to rule out victims as much as anything. When Claire was taken, DNA testing
wasn’t available. Now they can get samples of DNA from a twenty-five-year-old
strand of hair. He just needs something of Claire’s, something she touched or
wore, to see if he can pull a sample. He wants to either rule Claire out as one
of Walters’s victims, or identify her and close her case.”

That scared the hell out of Emma. What would she and Rose do if
Claire’s case was closed and their hope was unequivocally destroyed?

How did one go on without hope?

“He’s not working alone on this,” Cal continued. “There’s a
Detective Lucy Hayes, from Aurora, Indiana, who’s helping him on the side,
without pay. Miller gave me as many details as he could. According to him, he
got in touch with Detective Hayes when he tried to check out a box of evidence
pertaining to a cold-case abduction in Indiana and found it was already checked
out. By her. He told me this only to reaffirm that he hadn’t just been hounding
my father. He wanted me to know that he’s looking closely at every single case.
It’s like a quest for him. And apparently with this Hayes woman, too. They want
to find Walters’s victims, identify and track down Claire’s abductor, to solve
as many of these cases as they can.”

She understood quests. It made her nervous as hell that someone
else was exerting as much energy into her sister’s case. Which made no sense.
She needed to know what happened to Claire.

“There’s something else, too,” Cal continued softly, on the
other end of the line. “Miller also wants to know why the evidence from Claire’s
case is missing. Walters couldn’t have taken it. He’s in prison. But did he have
an accomplice? Or is there someone else out there involved in Claire’s
disappearance who wants to make certain there’s never a chance of getting
caught? When Miller called me, it was pretty clear he thought my father or I
might have had something to do with the missing evidence.”

The words dug at the hole in Emma’s heart. “Oh, Cal, I’m so
sorry. Even after all this time, to be hunted like a suspect…”

She and Rose had a lot to answer for. Too much to answer
for.

“There’s no way to make it better,” she said aloud. “If I could
change what we did—”

“I’ve made mistakes, too, Em. We all did. We did what we had to
do to survive in the only ways we could see fit.”

“You must hate us.”

“I don’t hate you.”

But he’d said he hated her mother. And while she loved Rose
fiercely, would protect her fiercely, she couldn’t blame Cal for hating her.

“I need to know who took that evidence, Em. Claire’s DNA could
lead us to answers separate and apart from the Walters case. Someone didn’t want
her evidence looked at for a reason.”

“I know.” She understood that he was asking her to give Miller
what he wanted.

He was asking Emma to face the idea that her baby sister might
have died at the hands of a fiend. That she might have suffered horrible
atrocities.

“I’ve got the hair ribbons my mom used to put in our hair every
day,” Emma said. They were still in the wooden box they’d always been kept in.
It was tucked away in the back of the closet in her office. “She never put
ribbons in my hair again after that day.”

Her mother had done everything she could to make certain that
Emma was the plainest girl around. Not so unattractive to attract pity, just
invisible, so that no one would notice her.

“If he can’t lift any of Claire’s DNA, he could get a sample of
yours. It wouldn’t be an exact match, but there’d be enough to identify one of
the victims as a close relative of yours. Or not.”

She didn’t really have a choice to make. They all needed
answers. Frank deserved answers. After being hounded for twenty-five years, just
having his name cleared probably wasn’t enough. The older man was probably not
going to rest until he knew that the real culprit was caught and charged with
the crime he himself didn’t commit.

“I’ll give the ribbons to Detective Miller. And a sample of my
DNA if he needs it. I just need a little time. As badly as I need to know… I’m
dreading… I mean, what if I find out my baby sister was—”

“Would you like me to go with you? I can fly up.”

She wanted to accept Cal’s offer.

“I’d like to, Emma. I know we won’t get the results right away,
but I don’t want you doing that alone. Especially since I’m asking you to do it.
It seems right that we go together.”

She hadn’t seen Cal in twenty-five years. Had never met him as
a man. And yet, this was the big brother she’d lost at the same time her world
had been blown apart. Right when she’d needed him most.

“I can’t believe I’m saying this—I’m usually so capable—but
would you?”

“Of course.”

She wrapped her finger around a napkin. And watched it
shake.

“Okay, good. When?”

In less than a minute, she had plans to see Cal in just over
two weeks. He was in the middle of teaching an intercession class—a break in the
college semester that allowed for special two-week classes—until then and wanted
to be able to take a couple of days with her.

Just in case. He didn’t say that. But she knew.

“You’ll call me with your flight information?”

“I’ll do better than that,” he said. “Give me your email and
I’ll send you a copy of the itinerary.”