Fortunate Harbor (36 page)

“I don’t think so,” Dana said. This, at least, wasn’t a lie. “It’s a stretch to think any of the Stricklands would go as far afield as North Dakota to find an investigator, isn’t it?”

“But we don’t know he stayed in North Dakota after he retired. Maybe he always wanted to live in California, so afterward he went there.”

“I guess it’s possible, though unlikely,” Dana said, trying to sound skeptical. “But he’s been here in Florida since May, and it’s nearly August. If he believed I was Carol Kelly, then he would have found all the proof he needed by now and gone on to another job.”

“How? By looking through your mail?” Wanda asked.

“I may have asked him to get it that day. I just don’t remember.” Dana steeled herself to lie. “I’d trust Pete with my life. He’s not trying to hurt me or Lizzie. He’s a good guy, and I’m sure I would have picked up something, some vibe, some clue, by now if he was investigating me. I know you’re all worried, but I think Pete just suspected I’m not that fond of cops, so he didn’t make a point that he’d been one. That’s all.”

Wanda didn’t look convinced. “I’m going to ask Ken to find out if Pete did go to California after he retired. Maybe he got a P.I. license and Ken can find out. The laws are different in different places, but we could check.”

“Please don’t,” Dana said. “Really. Please don’t. Ken’s going to wonder what this is all about, if he doesn’t wonder already. Then he’ll be asking questions about
me.
You’re going to chase me away, Wanda. And I know you don’t want to do that. I’ll be careful. I’ll pay attention and watch Pete closer for a while. I will, I promise. You’re all good friends.”

Tears sprang to her eyes because they
were
good friends, and after today she would never see them again.

“You’re sure?” Wanda asked.

“Please, just leave this alone now. I’ve been warned. I’ll handle it from here.”

The women glanced at each other. Dana saw Wanda give the slightest shrug. Dana hoped that meant she had a little time. She needed just enough to pack up the few indispensable things she and Lizzie owned, and drive across the bridge to drag her protesting daughter away from her new friends. All before Pete arrived for the evening.

Pete, who had probably been on her trail for years.

Dana got to her feet in dismissal. “Thank you for caring. Lizzie and I are lucky.”

“You’ll be careful?” Tracy looked concerned.

“I’m the most careful person you’ve ever met.” Except, of course, this once, when caution had failed her completely.

The others stood, and Dana walked them down the driveway. All dreams of a better life for Lizzie had evaporated. If she and her daughter were lucky enough to get away, they would continue their hand-to-mouth existence. Before his death, Fargo had tried to set her life and Lizzie’s on a better path. Dana hoped it gained him points in whatever afterlife had awaited him.

Then again, her brother had never believed in an afterlife. From earliest childhood he had lived exclusively for the moment. Only at the end, in prison, when he knew his moments were numbered, had he thought to contact her and tell her to go back to Happiness Haven and search for her own happy ending.

“You will be okay?” Janya asked.

“I make a habit of it,” Dana said.

“You let me know if you change your mind,” Wanda said.

“I still think Ken could do a little research and put your mind to rest…or not.”

Dana managed the trace of a smile. “I’ll do that. You have a good evening.”

She watched them walk down the road. Time was passing. Pete hadn’t been clear about when he would arrive this evening, so she didn’t know how much time she had. She just knew that she had to time her departure carefully. She didn’t want the women to see her leave, but she couldn’t wait until it was dark or Pete might show up.

She thought of other times here, times when she and Fargo had still been young enough to believe that life was easy and happiness was guaranteed. His life had ended in a prison hospital.

She hoped that hers didn’t end in prison, too.

“So, did you believe her?” Wanda asked, as the three women started back toward their houses.

While they were still in earshot of Dana’s place, Tracy had asked herself the same question and been unable to answer. Now that they weren’t, she still didn’t have a clue.

She tried to put thoughts into words. “Like I said when you first told us about Pete, he and Dana have had more than a few opportunities for serious pillow talk. And if you watched her expression when you told her Pete used to be a cop, you know she was stunned. She looked like somebody who just found out her best friend was murdered.”

“But would it not be bad enough news just to learn the man you were intimate with hadn’t told you something so important?” Janya asked. “That could explain the reaction.”

“No, it was more like she thought she was in danger.”

“I need a drink and a chance to mull this over,” Wanda said. “You two have time?”

As usual, Tracy had no plans for the evening. Every night since her breakfast with Henrietta, she had considered calling CJ to apologize. Every evening she had stopped short of picking up the telephone.

Maybe she was simply not a person who forgave easily, although she’d never thought of herself that way. But she couldn’t seem to overcome her suspicions. She was unconvinced that CJ’s arrival in Florida had been motivated by a desire for a reunion with his ex, yet she couldn’t find any other reason for his presence here or his interest in making Happiness Key a going concern. He had gone over the property with a fine-tooth comb, just to help her.

Maybe prison had changed him after all.

“I’ve got a great bottle of Zinfandel,” she told Wanda, thinking of the one Marsh had arrived with on the night she’d ruined their plan for mutual seduction. “I’ve been saving it, but I don’t know for what.”

“You keep saving it,” Wanda said. “I’m making margaritas.”

They followed Wanda to her house. Janya rarely drank, but she made an exception for Wanda’s margaritas. The women didn’t have much to say as Wanda assembled ingredients and the blender whirred. They took the finished product into her eye-popping living room, with its neon colors and tropical prints. George, a lime-green stuffed monkey puppet, peered down from a shelf adorned with photos of Elvis at his sexiest, and Wanda’s kids and grandkids.

“So help me, I’m losing my mind, but I’m beginning to see why you painted these walls orchid,” Tracy said. “It’s a lift just to walk in here.”

“You need a lift?”

“I need to understand why my life has fallen apart again.”

“Take more than some paint on my walls to do that.”

Tracy wanted to get back to the reason they were here. “What are the chances Pete Knight was hired to look for Carol Kelly?”

Wanda looked annoyed. “I can’t believe she doesn’t want me to check with Kenny.”

“What do we know for sure about Dana?” Tracy asked, to circumvent the oncoming diatribe.

Janya was the first to speak. “We know we like her. We know she is an exemplary mother.”

“She’s a good worker,” Wanda said. “She pitches in no matter how dirty or hard a job is. She’s creative. She doesn’t sit around and wish business was better. She makes it better.”

“She is…” Janya looked as if she was searching for the right word, as Alice often had to do. “Wary,” she said. “Careful with what she says. Perhaps suspicious is not too strong a word.”

“That could be explained by that Roy Strickland and his brothers,” Wanda said. “It only makes sense.”

“Ray,” Tracy corrected automatically. “Ray Strickland.”

“No, it’s not,” Wanda said. “Roy.”

“I’m the one who got Marsh to look this up, remember? I’m the one who got the printouts. I can guarantee you, it’s Ray Strickland.
Ray
.”

Wanda didn’t respond, and Tracy thought she was just preparing an argument.

Then Wanda’s eyes widened. “
She
said Roy.”

“She who?”

“Dana! This afternoon at the shop. That’s where I got it from. I was trying to get her to open up, which is like trying to pry open an oyster shell with your fingernails. I told her Kenny would be staying home for a while, and she looked unhappy. So I said she ought to be happy he was around, too,
just in case. Then she said she didn’t trust the police and…” Wanda stopped.

“What did she say?” Tracy demanded.

“She said
Roy
had paid off a lot of cops, or something like that.”

“I think you just heard it wrong,” Tracy said. “Ray, Roy, easy mistake.”

“No, I didn’t! You can bet your ever-loving tushy I was concentrating on that insult to cops in general, but I heard the name right. Dana said
Roy
. The only reason it didn’t hit me then was because I was so busy trying to defend Kenny.”

Janya interceded. “If this man is stalking her, why did she use the wrong name? Is that not something she would remember only too well?”

The women looked at each other.

“Not if she’d never heard it until the night we confronted her,” Tracy said, brain in overdrive. “Not if Dana
isn’t
Carol Kelly, and she’d never heard of anybody named Kelly or Strickland until that night. We hit her with a lot at the same time, remember?
We
told
her
who she was. We didn’t ask her to tell us. Could she have mixed up the names? Because neither Roy nor Ray meant a thing to her?”

“Then who is she?” Wanda looked angry now. “If she’s not Carol Kelly,
who is she?
”

Tracy continued thinking out loud. “And if she’s not Carol Kelly, and she’s not from Stockton, California, she could be from anywhere.”

“She could be from North Dakota,” Janya said. “Perhaps she and Pete knew each other before this, and she was unhappy we learned more about him.”

Tracy continued guessing. “Or maybe Pete really is on her trail for something else, something we don’t know yet. It’s
pretty clear she’s running. And it’s just as clear she wanted to throw us off the scent, so she played along with our bad amateur detective work.”

“I’m confused,” Wanda said. “And I’m angry. Here we’ve all been so worried about her, trying to watch out for those Strickland goons, giving her all the sympathy we can, and she’s been lying to us.”

“If she is lying,” Janya said, “I think the reason must be a good one. I would not assume she is just trying to, what is it you say, pull the cotton over our heads?”

“Pull the wool over our eyes,” Tracy said. “And we did that ourselves. Dana never came to us,
we
went to
her
. But don’t forget, we discovered for real that she borrowed another woman’s and child’s names and birth certificates. That’s indisputable. What would you do in her situation if somebody confronted you with that, then supplied a perfectly sympathetic, logical reason before you had time to invent one yourself? Would you say, no, wait a minute, let me think of a better explanation?”

“She could have told us the truth!” Wanda said.

“Not if it’s a truth we’re better off not knowing.”

“I think she will leave now,” Janya said softly. “I think Pete must be part of this in some way, and now that she knows he was a police officer from North Dakota, that will scare her into her car and over the bridge forever.”

“Maybe that’ll be better,” Wanda said, clearly upset at the lies.

Tracy could understand. Of all of them, Wanda was closest to Dana. She was the one who had told Dana about the house, the one who had offered the woman a job. She was the one who had introduced Dana to the other women and vouched for her.

“Think of Lizzie,” Tracy said quietly. “If we can help, we should.”

“We don’t know who we’re helping do we?” Janya asked. “If Pete came here to find her, we must ask why.”

“We need to go back and talk to her,” Tracy said. “We need to see if there’s anything we can do.”

“You’re not exactly the best judge of character,” Wanda said. “Seeing as you married CJ and went juking with Lee Symington whenever you could. You’re a psychopath magnet.”

Tracy noticed Wanda didn’t mention Marsh. “Are you coming or not?”

“Don’t go and think you can leave me out of this.” Wanda put down her margarita and strode to the door. “
You
coming?”

Dana had already packed her own suitcase and started on Lizzie’s. She hated choosing what mattered most to her daughter, but there was no time for a consultation. Her hands were trembling, and she was trying to think ahead as she threw in underwear and jeans and pajamas. She had cash hidden in her closet, not much, and tomorrow was payday, but she would have to say goodbye to her paycheck. She couldn’t wait another day to leave, and after she moved on, she couldn’t send for it.

She didn’t know how far the cash would take her. She had an emergency fund in a bank account in Texas, money left from the sale of her parents’ farm fifteen years ago, but not much. The account was the only cushion she’d ever had, and it had dwindled from five figures to four. Now it was on the downward slide to three. But she would have to take what was left and close it. This was the emergency that had always haunted her.

“Damn it, Fargo. Why did you send us here on a wild-goose chase?”

She threw in the stuffed seal Lizzie always dragged with her from town to town. She threw in books and CDs and, of
course, the beloved coin collection. The suitcase was bulging, but she managed to zip it. She was wheeling it toward the back door when someone knocked on the front.

She stood, terrified, and hoped whoever it was would go away.

That was not to be. She heard the sound of a key in the lock and the door swung open. Her neighbors were inside before she could protest.

“You’re not Carol Kelly,” Tracy said without a greeting. “We’ve figured that much out. Help us figure out the rest of it.”

“I’d like you to leave,” Dana said, drawing herself up to her full height. “This is my house, and you’re intruding.”

“It doesn’t look like it’s going to be your house long,” Wanda said with a sniff. “Seems to me you’re heading somewhere, and I’ll bet you don’t intend to come back.”

With the evidence right there, Dana couldn’t object. “There’s no law against moving on.”

“There might be if you
broke
the law.”

She slumped a little. “Please. You’ve been my friends. Just let this go. Let
me
go. I can’t stay—”

“Because of Pete, right?” Tracy said. “Because of what we told you about him?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Wanda moved closer. “Sure it does. If he’s a threat, we can help. Kenny can—”

“No! Please, don’t tell your husband!”

Wanda fell silent. Finally she shook her head. “I’m going to have to tell him, Dana. It was one thing to stay quiet about somebody stalking you. But what if you’re the guilty party? You’ve already involved us in your lies. How can we let that go on?”

Dana began to cry. She had been running so long, and she never got far enough away, no matter where she went.

Janya moved closer, then put her arm around Dana’s shoulders. “Please, nobody wants to hurt you.”

Dana couldn’t seem to stop the tears. “This is about Lizzie,” she said through them. “That’s all you need to know. Whatever you do, whoever you tell, she’ll be the one who suffers.”

“Why?” Tracy asked, moving to Dana’s other side. “Is this a custody issue? Are you running from Lizzie’s father?”

Dana knew she couldn’t lie again. The women wouldn’t rest until they knew, and now they would track her. They would involve the police. She was sure of it. She put her face in her hands. “No, Lizzie’s father is dead.”

“Did you kill him?” Tracy asked softly.

Dana’s head shot up. “No! I haven’t killed anybody! I never even knew him.”

“How can that be?”

“Lizzie is not my child!”

The room went still. Even the clock on the wall seemed to stop ticking.

“You kidnapped her?” Wanda asked. “My God.”

“It’s not what you think. It’s not what it sounds like. Please. Just let it go.”

“What are the chances?” Tracy asked.

Dana knew that was just an expression, but in this case, a sensible one. What
were
the chances? Dana realized the women would never rest until they knew everything now.

“I have to sit.” Dana made her way to a chair. She lifted her T-shirt and wiped her eyes on the hem.

“You need to tell us what’s going on,” Wanda said. “The truth.”

Dana hadn’t told the truth in so long, she wasn’t sure she remembered how. But despite the possible consequences, the
truth was a glimmer of light. The truth, and nothing but. A gift taken from her. And now her gift to give.

“I don’t want to talk to Kenny, but I will,” Wanda said.

Dana didn’t know what to do except trust them. “My real name is Isabel Carlsen. Eleven years ago I was a social worker in Grand Forks, North Dakota. I worked in Children’s Services.”

Janya had gone into the kitchen for a glass of water, and now she handed it to Dana, who took a grateful sip.

The story was long, but there was no time for the nuances. Dana outlined the facts. “My caseload was long, too long. I worked night and day trying to do my job. My husband left me. He wasn’t a man with much patience. We’d…” She took another sip, because this part was hard. “We’d lost a baby at birth. I worked harder to forget both things, I guess.”

She was a little calmer now, but her voice had lost all traces of animation. “I was careful not to let my clients work their way into my heart. If you’ve ever done that kind of work, you know how hard that is. But I did okay, except for one little girl. A baby, Ivy Greenwald. Greta, the mother, had never married. The father on record died in some accident, and his parents refused to believe the child was his. The government thought she was, and after his death made Social Security payments for the baby. Greta was a chronic liar and a drug addict, and Ivy was tiny and had problems from birth. We didn’t want her to go home with Greta once she was well enough to leave the hospital, but the judge assigned to the case thought she’d be fine, and of course, Greta wanted the Social Security. That judge was a sticking point for all of us, a man who believed children are the property of their parents and the state must respect that. In my three years with the agency, he never agreed to terminate any parent’s rights.”