Grab & Go (Mayfield Cozy Mystery Book 2) (9 page)

CHAPTER 11

I’d just bought a child. A scrawny, languid little thing with dark hair and nearly translucent skin. I could hardly keep my eyes off her in the rearview mirror.

How many little kids in the world have eyes the color of butter rum Life Savers? More than Skip was able to produce all by himself, I was pretty sure. But had he helped create this one? I didn’t consider Susanna a reliable anything, let alone a reliable source about Skip’s romantic trysts. But the eyes — they were exactly like Skip’s.

How many illegal things had I done in the past forty-eight hours? Bring it on. I was on a roll. A weird exhilaration flooded over me. Then I realized I was shaking. And I really wanted to cry.

I glanced at the girl again. No matter what, it wasn’t her fault.

“How old are you?” I asked, trying to sound friendly.

A brief moment of meeting my glance in the mirror but no answer.

Susanna had mentioned schooling, but the girl didn’t look more than five or six years old. Although, given her life until now, it’d be fair to expect she’d be small for her age.

I tried another question, this one usually easier to answer by the younger set. “What’s your name?”

Her eyes were just barely level with the bottom of the window in the back seat, and she kept them fixed on the never-ending gray clouds as though she was bored with the interrogation. The seatbelt crossed her thin shoulder and chest, pinning her flat like a prisoner. Her hands rested limply in her lap. She probably didn’t weigh enough to be out of a child’s protective car seat, and I hoped we didn’t attract the attention of a state patrol trooper.

“Well, my name’s Nora,” I chattered cheerfully. “I live on a farm, sort of. We have a couple pigs and a goat. A bunch of boys live on the property too. But they’re nice boys,” I added hastily, remembering the preliminary war of the sexes common in the elementary school ages when the other side was considered to have cooties. “Right now we have another little girl visiting too. Her name’s CeCe.”

No reaction.

She hadn’t come with a suitcase, identification, anything. I doubted she had tags sewn into her clothes with her name, social security number and birth date on them. Like during the Depression when extra children were shipped off to relatives, arriving at strange train stations with only the clothes on their backs and delivery labels pinned to their shirts as though they were pieces of luggage. Free labor for the cost of room and board, as it were.

I chewed on my lip and tried to decide how to explain the girl’s presence to Clarice. One thing I was sure of though — Walt’s reaction. Never, ever leave a child in a situation where harm may come to them if you’re given the opportunity to help. That’s why Mayfield was a home for strays of all types.

The miles seemed to fly by, mainly because my mind was working overtime. I kept to the speed limit and drove sedately in the slow lane even though my brain was doing anything but, to no avail.

She was just starting to nod off when I pulled up in front of the Gonzales’s house. We had maybe another hour of solid, if gray-tinted, daylight left, and I was going to need all of it for the trek ahead.

I slung my tote across one shoulder and hefted the little girl out of the back seat. “You okay?” I murmured.

She burrowed into my other shoulder and wrapped her arms around my neck. I took that as a yes and set off.

Her legs dangled from around my hip, her feet bumping against my thighs as I hiked. She’d looked small, but her extra forty-plus pounds made me breathless in a hurry.

My arms burned from clasping her, and I was panting raggedly into her hair. But she clenched me so tightly, I didn’t dare set her down for a rest. This little girl, whoever she was, needed something reliable in her life, and I was going to be it.

With my center of balance off-kilter, I had to study every step, avoiding rocks and roots, finding the smoothest path. Every once in a while, with shorter intervals the farther we went, I stopped and leaned against a tree, easing the strain off my back, catching my breath, psyching myself up for the next incline. The little girl snuggled in against me like a papoose, an ungainly extension of my own body.

Clarice and CeCe were sitting at the kitchen table coloring in a Disney princess coloring book when I burst through the door. The shock, fear, worry and irritation that flitted across Clarice’s face in that moment was almost worth the price of admission.

“I’ll explain later,” I wheezed, gently setting the little girl down in an empty chair.

CeCe, wasting no time, popped out of her chair to stand by the newcomer. “What’s your name?” she asked in that bright, uninhibited tone children have.

I laid a hand on the little girl’s head. “She’s tired, and so am I. How about we have dinner first?”

I pitched my eyebrows at Clarice who was scowling mightily, a purple crayon poised in her large-knuckled hand. But she pushed to standing without a word and started banging pots and pans around in a rather effective manner.

oOo

It was a night for early bedtimes all around. I rustled up my biggest t-shirt for the little girl to wear as a nightie. I sat on the edge of the newly made-up bed in the room that was quickly becoming our girls’ dormitory and brushed her hair after her bath. CeCe was still splashing during her turn in the tub down the hall, so I had a few minutes alone with the child.

I placed my hands on her arms and held her loosely as she stood in front of me. “I understand you don’t want to talk, and that’s okay.”

Her eyes tracked with me, face expressionless.

“But we need to call you something, so you’ll know we’re talking to you. Would it be all right if I gave you a name, and later you can pick which one you like best — the name you have now or the one I give you?”

She nodded slightly, but I thought I saw the tiniest flicker of eagerness — or maybe curiosity — in her eyes.

“How about Emmie?” I asked. “Emmie Grace?” I’d traded an emerald for her in a moment of grace. Why not. She’d learn what it meant when she was ready.

She traced the scar on my upper lip with a fingertip and nodded gravely. Then she climbed onto the bed and slid under the covers.

“Good night, Emmie,” I whispered.

Fifteen minutes later, Clarice and I sat across the kitchen table from each other. I felt as though I had to swim through a huge void, to merge her understanding with mine — what little there was — before I could let myself relax. She took it well.

“So you traded Skip’s ring for Skip’s child,” she finally grunted. “Seems appropriate. Frankly, he never struck me as the type to fool around.” Her face puckered in distaste.

“She looks like—”

“Only the eye color.” Clarice cut me off. “Nothing else.”

“She’s too little to know for sure,” I said.

“You’ll never know for sure, unless you do a DNA test.” Clarice glared me, squinting through the cat’s eye glasses. “But you’re not going to do that, are you?”

I sighed. “It wouldn’t change what Emmie needs.”

“What about this Juliet woman, a courier? What’s that mean?” Clarice asked.

“It means research. Because I haven’t a clue. The diagram from Josh. What we copied at the freight terminal. It’s here — somewhere in all these details.”

I slept hard — dreamless and all the way through the night — for the first time in a very long time. I shouldn’t have, but I did.

oOo

First thing in the morning, while the girls slurped Cheerios and milk from their bowls and Clarice cracked her eyes open with a gallon of coffee, I scanned the kitchen with the bug detector doohickey Josh had given me. I’d blown it last night — probably from exhaustion — by discussing the wild events of my day with Clarice out loud, in the open, for any listening device to pick up.

At first I worried that the little gadget didn’t work since nothing happened — no lights flashed, no buzzing or vibration. CeCe was chattering away, obviously excited about having a new playmate, and more than making up for the silence of the rest of us, so any voice-activated bugs should have been very busy transmitting her eager plans for building a fort in one of the mansion’s many rooms that were essentially furniture graveyards.

Then I went outside and climbed into the Subaru. I started the engine and let the station wagon roll in neutral for several feet. Yep — motion activated. The tracking device lit up like I’d hit the jackpot.

I found the GPS unit up underneath the left rear bumper, embedded in the caked-on mud that coated most of the car. A powerful magnet held the small, rectangular box to a metal bracket. But I left it in place — for now.

“What’re you doing?” Clarice growled when I returned to the kitchen. The coffee had finally lubricated her voice.

I dropped the bug tracker back into my purse and grinned. “Trying out an early Christmas present from Josh. We’re clear in here.”

“I took the paperwork up to your office yesterday,” she said. “About a million trips up three flights of stairs, I’ll have you know. You do what you need to do up there. I’ll take care of things down here—” she peered at the two girls in turn, “and start preparations for the big bash.”

I laid a hand on Emmie’s head and smiled at her when she glanced up. I believe in smiling with my eyes — I have to since the lower half of my face isn’t as flexible as it could be due to all the surgeries, and smiles don’t always register there the way I’d like them to. She smiled back at me — but still no words.

I was an only child, probably because I was an expensive child, so I grew up having to entertain myself. Emmie was an isolated child, whether or not she had any half-siblings. I sincerely doubted she had any full siblings. It would do her good to be in CeCe’s company for a while and play like a carefree kid, maybe for the first time in her life. I planted a kiss in her hair and headed upstairs.

My office, as Clarice referred to it, was a low-ceilinged, wide room at the top of the mansion, with dormer windows that provided the best view of the property, including Mt. Adams, Mt. St. Helens and Mt. Rainier in the distance — on clear days, which today was not.

Clarice is a marvel. Her ability to finagle, dictate and bulldog resources into marching order was amazing. She’d laid out a workstation for me with the copied contents of the file drawer on the left, my laptop and Skip’s laptop side by side in the middle, and Josh’s diagrammed pages on the right.

The only other thing I needed was about ten brains working simultaneously on my problem because the one I had at my disposal felt particularly sluggish this morning. I dropped into the chair and faced the overwhelming wealth of information.

Then I decided the floor was better. I skimmed through the copied files and started making piles, grouping them into categories based on my uneasy understanding of shipping industry jargon. The more I learned, the more I rearranged, creating sweeping streaks through the thick dust on the floorboards as I shuffled files.

Rain pounded on the roof over my head. I could even hear water trickling in rivulets down the edges of the slate tiles on the steep descent. The mansion’s attic had very little, if any, insulation. At least it was dry inside.

Drizzle, mist, buckets, downpour, sprinkle, steady, soaking, spitting — my rain-related vocabulary had definitely expanded over the past few weeks. The prevailing winter forecast was gray, damp and muddy.

The files appeared to be business as usual. Records of what was going where on whose behalf. Most of the files were old, and I assumed that the current records were now computerized, eliminating the need for hard copies.

It looked like Hank had been cleaning out the files, tossing what was no longer needed, and hit the tip of an iceberg with the property records and his concern about incorrectly or insufficiently documented freight. But I came to the conclusion that Lee Gomes was the iceberg, or at least he was the link I needed to get into the inner workings of the iceberg because his contact list had sure lit up Josh Freeney’s suspicions. It was starting to appear as though that list alone had been worth exploiting Thomas’s criminal skills, much as I hated the thought.

Skip did indeed own the building and the land it was on — all 11.5 acres zoned for light industrial use, with a conditional use permit for the operation of the freight terminal. He’d bought it three years before we’d met and I’d started running his charitable foundation. I needed to check with Walt about how that might align with when the boys’ camp started.

The property was leased to Comet Consolidated, Ltd., a lovely, ambiguous corporate name that didn’t clearly explain the true nature of the business. Sounded like a holding company or a front to me, but I had become cynical about the nature of the enterprises my husband was involved with. I needed to get my hands on the lease contract.

A few of the documents had the name of another man who signed on the freight terminal’s behalf — a Roger Harrod. All I knew about him was that he’d quit shortly after hiring Hank. Maybe he’d stuck around just long enough to make sure Hank was properly trained, or something else had come up.