The Hiding Place (22 page)

After going twenty miles down the valley toward the west, they drove Nick’s truck onto a narrow paved lane behind Jordan’s car. He’d pretended to be surprised that they would follow in their own vehicle; Tara thought he was secretly relieved. She craned her neck to look all around. At least it was lovely here. She should have known it would be since it was Lohan land. Jordan had said his parents had once lived in a “starter house” here, but, unless it was hidden by the grove of quivering aspens just ahead, it must have been long gone. At the back of the acreage, she saw a fenced-in area with old gravestones and a single larger structure.

“Is everything the Lohans own fenced and gated?” Nick asked.

“It’s even the way they like to treat their women. At least this is protected. And pretty.”

“Like Lohan women. That it is.”

A mountain stream ran nearby; they couldn’t see it, but the sound floated to them as they got out and closed the car doors. With the whispering of falling leaves, the lilting sound was almost like a lullaby, Tara thought.

The three of them walked toward the six-foot-high, spiked iron fence, and Jordan fitted a key in the gate. It screeched as if in protest when he opened it. Tara’s heart was thudding. The bouquet of lilies shook in her hands. She wanted to cling to Nick, but she didn’t.

The crypt looked much too grand for this rural, isolated site, especially set among the smattering of old, rough headstones. The two-pillared edifice looked carved from imported stone—maybe marble—with its dull pinkish tint and small black flecks. It wasn’t polished but it looked sturdy, eternal. Under its peaked roof, on the flat lintel, in big, heavily incised letters was carved simply,
LOHAN.

“I had it built over their original grave sites, so there are no real vaults aboveground in it,” Jordan said. “Except, of course, for the niche for the child’s urn.”

“Her name,” Tara told him as they went up the two steps into the crypt itself, “is Sarah Veronica.” She saw Jordan’s hand quiver as he inserted a smaller key into what appeared to be a small, bronze door, about two feet high by one foot wide.

“All right,” he said. “If you’d like, I can have her name carved right above this little door and etched on the urn, with the dates.”

“The date,” Tara corrected.

As he opened the small, grated metal door, she held her breath. Morning sun slanted into the crypt through the doorway behind them, throwing stark shadows and illumining the niche. She could not believe it even now. For one moment, she imagined she’d seen a tiny face staring out at her.

But there was only a polished, bronze urn within with the words on it,
Baby Lohan, beloved child.
Nothing else but dust that had sifted through the keyhole and a spider’s web, which Tara brushed away before she lay the lilies beside the fancy foot of the urn.

“I want to hold it,” she whispered. She felt Nick step closer to her, edging Jordan away. Nick’s hand came lightly to the back of her waist.

“Of course,” Jordan said, stepping away. “Be careful. It’s heavier than it looks.”

But it didn’t seem heavy. It was light. And so cold to the touch. Tara stared at it, at the words,
Baby
and
beloved,
then cradled it in her arms. She stepped away to sit down on the single stone bench and held the urn in her lap. Neither man said anything. Jordan stepped farther way, though Nick hovered. The wind sighed and the stream rattled on.

“I want this. I need to have it,” Tara told them.

“N-need it?” Jordan blurted. “For what?”

“For me. Just for a while.”

“Tara, it belongs to Laird and the family, too,” Jordan protested.

“I also have a family. And this precious part of it has been taken from me in more ways than one. She should have a birth certificate, and a death certificate, too. You’ve made it like she didn’t exist!”

“I told you, we did all we could. We were trying to protect you—yes, and Laird—”

“And Jen!”

“—from having everything dragged through the media again. You being attacked by a killer and being comatose with the danger of brain injury was bad enough. We didn’t need this, too.”

Tara had tried to keep calm, but she couldn’t help herself. She didn’t shout but raised her voice so that the interior of the crypt echoed with her words. “As usual, you didn’t need or want bad publicity. But I needed and would have loved this child! Don’t blame me or the coma for her death, because I wasn’t really there, and you and Laird and Jen and your doctors were. I might not have wanted a child until Laird and I solved our problems, but I would have cherished this child.”

Tara stood, the urn still in her arms. It was warming to her touch. She could not let it go. Nick looked as if he was going to round on Jordan and tell him off or worse. She was learning to read the telltale throbbing at the side of his throat. It pleased her to note that her former father-in-law looked more distressed than she’d ever seen him.

“Will you promise me,” Jordan said, “that as soon as I have the stone cut with her name and date, you will bring the urn back? All of us should be able to visit it here.”

“Then have keys made for me, to the gate and this little door,” she countered, stepping closer to him and looking up steadily into his face. He met her gaze, but a slight tic at the corner of his left eye jumped.

“All right,” he said, clearing his throat. “That seems fair enough. Tara, I’m doubly distressed to see you suffering so—you can only imagine how broken up Laird was—and I’m dreading telling Veronica this afternoon.”

“Tell her I honored her as best I could with Sarah’s middle name,” she said, nodding to Nick and starting away from this place and this man.

Nick quickly came behind her. “You were great,” he said, after a few steps, keeping close, shoulder to shoulder, but not touching her. “So strong. Do you think he will really make you the keys?”

“If he doesn’t, I’ll never give this back,” she vowed, the urn clutched against her breasts. “Besides, I mean to find my own keys to whatever it is he’s still hiding. I’ve never seen him so shaken. He’s no more grieving with me than that marble crypt is. I think Laird and my old friend Jen probably had an affair from way back. I’ve got to find out if Daddy Dearest agreed to let them keep me comatose—which killed my baby—until Laird could be free of me to run off with Jen. Or if Jen did something to make sure my baby was stillborn, because she was afraid then Laird might have had second thoughts about running off with her. One way or the other, someone snatched my child from me. Finders Keepers has a new desperate but determined client, and it’s me.”

W
ith the urn holding her daughter’s ashes on her lap, Tara worked like a madwoman on her own Finders Keepers case that afternoon, evening, night and the next morning.

After all, in a way, her child had been snatched away by her ex-husband. He had taken little Sarah without telling her where the baby was—or even that she had existed. The case was the most consuming she’d ever had. Though she had no hope of getting her child back, how much more deeply she felt the desperation of women who had asked for her help.

During Sarah’s birth, Tara had been completely at the mercy of her doctors and the Lohans. Laird had allowed a doctor near her who had every reason to want their baby to die, so that she could comfort and run off with Laird. On the Internet Tara found Laird and Jen’s marriage license in Seattle court records. It was outrageous that they were married just a few days after the divorce. And she’d traced the transfer of Jen’s license to practice medicine to the state of Washington, though she could not locate where she was practicing in the Seattle area. Perhaps she was just enjoying the good life with Laird, hobnobbing, putting down business and social roots.

What a gullible idiot she’d been to trust the woman she had once considered one of her two best female friends. Alex—dead. Jen—the worst sort of Judas. It was horrendous that a physician who had taken the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm might be, at least indirectly, a murderer.

Tara also researched the various levels of coma, especially drug-induced ones. Previously, she had avoided reading anything that touched on that terrible experience; now she devoured information on the chemical means to produce a medical coma to aid in treatment and recovery.

One fact repeated by online experts and verified by several long-distance calls she’d made this morning seemed important:
Some patients seem to recall very distinct events while they are in a coma; others seem to remember as if through a mist.

“I know I heard Veronica’s music,” she said aloud to the empty house. Claire would be at school for hours, and Nick, after hanging around all morning, had finally been convinced to take Beamer for a walk. “And I heard someone tell me I was going to have a ‘vaginal delivery’—Jen’s voice, I swear it.” She also recalled someone crying, not a newborn’s wails, but an adult’s. Yes, someone crying, crying, perhaps herself, from the pain of labor—or loss.

Maybe she’d been so deeply incapacitated by drugs she couldn’t help deliver her child. She studied amnesiac drugs, ones that could have kept her out of it, even if her medical coma were lightened for the delivery. For some reason, one called Versed sounded familiar to her.

Used for various procedures, Midazolam, more commonly called Versed, induced a short-term, twilight, semiconscious state in which the patient could follow basic orders, even respond, but would recall nothing of a painful experience afterward.

But she’d gasped to read that if Versed were used during the last few days of pregnancy, it could cause drowsiness and slow the mother’s heartbeat—and
cause troubled breathing and weakness in the newborn infant!

If Tara could prove malpractice or malfeasance—or worse, intent, at least on Jen’s part—that resulted in her child’s death, she’d get a lawyer and go after Jordan, Laird and Jen. She’d get Jen’s license revoked at the least, see her go to prison at best. Whether Tara won or not against Lohan power and money, at least she’d make them pay with their precious reputations. How dare Jordan claim that
she
had lost her child? Not she and Laird. Not a doctor. Not all of us. He’d intimated it was all her fault. No, her miracle baby’s death was not her fault! And she was going to uncover something better than misty memories to prove that.

She carefully placed the urn back on her desk and began to pace, raking her hands through her hair. Of all that she’d read, one thing haunted her as if some specter whispered over and over in her head, “Locked in syndrome. Locked in. Locked…in.”

She had memorized the words from a Web site about the Glasgow Coma Scale:
Some coma patients suffer from “locked in” syndrome in which they are awake but unable to react or act upon their environment…

Locked in syndrome…locked in…She was locked in until she could prove the Lohan doctors had used drugs to control her while she was pregnant and then botched her baby’s birth. She spent hours reading about other drugs that could induce deep comas for someone with head trauma: lorazepam, or Ativan, were the drugs of choice for patients requiring long-term sedation. Pentobarbital induced comas for patients with head bleeds…On it went in a maze of possibilities.

She jumped when a knock sounded on her office door. The familiar surroundings came back to her from whatever dimension she’d been in. “Nick?” she called.

“Can I come in?” he asked and cracked the door open. “You skipped breakfast. I made us some good old peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.” He carried a tray with milk, sandwiches, potato chips and apples.

“Thanks, but I couldn’t eat.”

“You have to keep your strength up. Doctor’s orders—mine.”

“I’ve been researching doctors, some I trust—and then, on the other hand, Jennifer DeMar Lohan, ob-gyn.”

He set the tray down on the end of the desk. Beamer padded in with a bone in his mouth and flopped on the floor to gnaw at it. “Tara, where would be a good place for that?” Nick asked with a nod not at the tray but at the urn.

“A nice way of telling me I can’t carry her ashes around with me day and night? I know that. But Sarah’s my client, too—both of us.”

“You need to take a break.”

“I know. All right.”

“I thought I’d show you the other aspect of tracking with Beamer—the human aspect. The dog can only do so much of the work.”

“Is that a ploy to get me outside, get some exercise, Dr. Nick?”

“It is, but a tracker like you should know some of the tricks of a tracker like me. After Claire’s gone to bed tonight will be time enough to get back to all your research.”

“I have to admit, my eyes are ready to cross. Even when I close them, I still see lines of print from the screen—and her face. Sarah’s. You know, what she might have looked like. I’ve read that some parents who lose newborns take photos of them to keep the child’s memory alive. I don’t think that’s morbid. She would have been two and a half. Since I never saw her, I keep picturing her as looking like my old baby pictures.”

He reached out and cupped her cheek with his big, warm hand. “Could be. That’s logical. Beautiful, red-haired with forest-green eyes, just like her mother.”

She turned her head and kissed his palm. She heard his sharp intake of breath. His eyes narrowed, his nostrils flared, but she could tell he held himself back from seizing her. “You’ve been so wonderful to me,” she whispered. They stood there, frozen in time, staring into each other’s eyes as if mesmerized.

Then he frowned and broke the spell. “Tara, the army’s pushing me for a quick answer about training dogs at Fort Bragg. I got a phone call this morning, and they’ve sweetened the pot again. I’d love for you to come with Claire and me. You could work your case and others from there, maybe with more objectivity and security than here.”

“I can’t,” she told him as she stepped away and looked down at the urn again. “I need to actually question some people in person, and that’s too far away.”

“Laird?”

“Not yet, at least. When I do, it will probably be with legal help. Besides, he’d only lie or blame me. He and Jen would obviously both spout the Lohan line. I’ve got to have some ammo when I finally face them. Don’t worry—I’m starting with a family photographer when he gets back in town. No danger there.”