Grounds to Believe (17 page)

Ross moved closer, and knelt by the chair. Somebody moved, and the light fell across the woman’s face.

With a shock, he recognized her.

This woman had answered the door the last time he’d ever seen his daughter. Every detail of that meeting was burned into his mind’s eye, including the suspicious gaze the woman turned on him now. Maybe she’d gained weight and now used a wheelchair, but that expression hadn’t changed one bit.

He knelt by the chair, gripping the base of the arm rest. “Do you remember me?”

She frowned. “Nope. Sorry.”

“I remember you. You knew Annie DeLuca.”

“So?”

“So I’m looking for Annie’s daughter, Kailey. She’s supposed to be with a woman named Miriam, who was trying to find me. I’m Kailey’s father, Ross Malcolm.”

“And I’m the prophet Deborah. Prove it.”

He wasn’t sure if she was introducing herself or being sarcastic. “I don’t have the papers with me, but I have her baby picture.” He pulled it out of his wallet and showed it to her.

The woman sniffed. “That don’t prove anything. Could be any kid.”

“Do you know where Miriam is?”

“Nope.”

“Do you know someone who would know?”

“Nope.”

Ross resisted the surge of frustration that commanded him either to shake the woman or bang his head on the arm of her chair.

Behind him, Moses wound up with a thundering exhortation, and the crowd, including the woman in the wheelchair, applauded enthusiastically. Then she got to her feet, folded the chair up, and handed it to someone, who moved off into the crowd with it under his arm.

Ross regretted the handful of change he’d given her. Nothing like being taken in by the Sealers a second time.

“Can you tell me anything at all that would help me find my daughter?” he said desperately, tagging at her elbow, Julia in tow.

“Maybe she’s gone to Seattle,” the woman said over her shoulder. “Maybe she’s here. Maybe she’s at the shelter where all the homeless people go. Who knows?”

Homeless people?

What shelter? The only one he knew about was in Seattle. But—

And then he knew. He’d been talking to Miriam all along.

By the time he’d recovered his senses, she’d melted into the crowd and he and Julia were left standing alone on the grass, where nothing moved but the Sealers’ trash blowing in the breeze past their feet.

“W
here are we going?” Julia took the helmet he handed her. Though she no longer fumbled with it, in the time it took her to buckle the chin strap, Ross already had the motorcycle started and his helmet on.

“The sheriff’s office.”

He must be going to report the woman. Julia hung on to his waist as he took a corner about ten miles an hour too fast. Miriam could be arrested for half a dozen different crimes, in Julia’s opinion, child endangerment being the greatest one.

They pulled up outside a brick building similar to the one that the police department shared with the mayor’s office in Hamilton Falls. But instead of marching in there to report Miriam, Ross took her hand and led her to a bench next to a planter box full of flowers.

He pulled her down next to him. “Julia, I don’t see how to get around this. There are things you have to know before we go in.”

She’d seen him outside the police department in Hamilton Falls earlier in the week. He’d said it was for a speeding ticket, but was it?

“You’re not on parole or something, are you? Where you have to check in?” The words came out hesitantly, and he lifted his head with a huff of laughter.

“Parole? No.”

Well, that was a start. “What, then?”

“There is something else I told you that wasn’t quite true.”

Oh, no. He was married, after all. Or not married, but in a relationship. Or in a relationship and getting married.

“Don’t look like that,” he said. “I’m not a criminal, I promise. I’m a cop.”

“Are you married?”

“No. Single father. Julia, did you hear what I said?”

He wasn’t married. It didn’t matter, anyway. She was the one who was in a relationship and getting married, wasn’t she? She lowered her head in her hands. “I think I’m losing my mind.”

“I know I let you believe I was a mechanic, but that was just a story I tell sometimes when I’m off duty. I needed to get away from police work, find solace, like I said. A vacation that’s part travel and part spiritual break. Just me and the highway and God. If people know I’m a cop, sometimes they act strangely around me. It’s easier to use the—the cover story.”

Compared to what she’d been expecting, the news that he was a policeman seemed wildly unimportant. Nice to know, but not really relevant.

“So why tell me now and not in the park?” she asked. “When were you going to get around to telling me who you really are?”

“I was working up to it,” he said with a smile. “But in order to claim Kailey I need to have the law enforcement establishment behind me. And I need to use the computer in there.” He jerked a thumb at the building behind them. “Are you okay with this?”

She shook her head, feeling as though there were bees buzzing in her skull instead of happily functioning brain cells. “It doesn’t matter if I’m okay with it. You are what you are. Is there anything else you’d like to tell me? Otherwise we have a child to find, right?”

He bent his gaze to look into her eyes. “I’m a cop, a single dad who really wants to find his daughter and a guy who thinks you’re the most remarkable woman he’s ever met.”

In spite of herself, she smiled. That didn’t sound like a man who was committed elsewhere, did it?

They went into the sheriff’s office at six forty-five, and by seven-thirty Ross had everything he needed, including the information that there was indeed a county shelter at the other end of town. Ross wasn’t able to get the woman who answered the phone to confirm that Kailey was actually there, but he was determined to go down in person anyway.

Julia had to admit that having the law enforcement establishment behind you certainly got the job done. Ross had paged his “old friend,” who turned out to be his partner in Seattle, and prevailed on him to go down to his apartment
and transmit the original petition for custody and Kailey’s birth certificate out to the sheriff’s office. While he was waiting for the fax, she stood behind his chair as he downloaded an image of Kailey’s baby fingerprints from the missing children’s archive in what he explained was the National Crime Information Center. That kind of attention to detail told her Ross wasn’t about to allow anything to come between himself and his daughter, not at this late date. Julia couldn’t blame him. But she was less worried about the legalities of reuniting father and daughter than about the emotional effect it might have on the little girl.

When they parked in the miniscule parking lot belonging to the county shelter at the far end of town, she discovered she wasn’t the only one worried about it.

“She doesn’t know me,” Ross said as he tilted the motorcycle on its kickstand. “The last time I saw her, she was sixteen months old. She took one look at me and screamed.”

“I think we should go back and find Miriam,” Julia said uneasily. “Think how you would feel if you were Kailey and these strange people appeared with no warning to take you away.”

“That woman made it plain she wasn’t going to help. More than that—if she left Kailey here unsupervised and uncared for I’m going to track her down myself and arrest her for endangerment.”

Julia waited while Ross pushed open the door of the shelter for her. “Maybe I should try to talk to her first,” she persisted. “Prepare her for you. A woman might be more reassuring to a little girl who’s lost her mom.”

Ross nodded, and stalked across the bare hallway to face the woman sitting behind a battered metal reception desk. “I’m Kailey Malcolm’s father,” he said, laying his black-leather identification folder and the fax on the desk in front of her. “Investigator Ross Malcolm, Organized Crime Task Force. I’m here to take my daughter home.”

The woman’s brows wrinkled. “Where is her mother, Investigator?”

“Her mother is dead.” Ross’s mouth flattened to a grim line, as though the words hurt. “The woman who brought her here isn’t her mother. She’s been trying to bring Kailey to me, and I just now tracked her down.” That was putting it very mildly and charitably, but Julia saw he was trying to phrase it in a way that wouldn’t make the specter of Child Protective Services suddenly appear.

If it hadn’t already. The thought chilled her. Kailey could be on her way to a foster home right now, snatched out of his grasp at the last moment.

The woman gazed at him over the rims of her glasses. “Kailey DeLuca was assigned a social worker when she arrived. Let me see if Renee Iverly is still here. Most of the day staff have gone home.”

For a moment Julia thought Ross was going to push past the woman and do a forced search of the shelter. He gripped the edge of the desk and controlled himself while the woman spoke to someone on the phone. A door opened down the hall and a tall, rangy woman dressed in a black tunic and tights walked into the reception area.

“Investigator Malcolm?” she asked, extending a hand to him and then to Julia. “I’m Renee Iverly. Come with me, please.”

With every delay, Julia’s tension rose another notch. She could only imagine what Ross’s feelings were. He made them very plain once they were ushered into a cluttered office rather than into a room where there were kids.

“I’ve been looking for my daughter her whole life, ma’am. Annie took Kailey when she was a baby and ran off with a religious cult. I just got the information that she was in Pitchford this afternoon.”

He put the papers on her desk, and she read through them rapidly. She seemed to find what she was looking for, and laid them down, clasping her hands on the crumpled pile.

“I understand your feelings, Investigator. You’ve been very proactive in providing the birth certificate and your original petition for custody. And you say the child’s mother is dead? The woman who left her here wasn’t her mother?”

“No. She’s been trying to find me, I assume to deliver Kailey to me.”

“What is she, a misdirected package? The poor child is being treated as abandoned. We were about to contact CPS on her behalf.”

Ross’s hands clenched. “I’m here now. I’m prepared to give her the home she deserves.” Julia caught her breath at the years of frustrated longing in his voice.

“Let me tell you how the system works.”

“Ma’am, could I just see my little girl?”

“In a moment. I want to set your expectations. You can’t just walk out with the child. There are steps to this. To protect her.” She gave him a kind but unyielding look, and Ross reluctantly sat back in his chair.

“What steps?”

“The case of abandonment seems pretty clear, so this should be straightforward. As her social worker, I can authorize supervised visits—”

Ross bolted up in protest, and she held up a placating hand.

“As I said, there are steps that must be followed, Investigator. We’ll need to do a criminal check on you, which obviously won’t take long. There will need to be a home study, a look at your employment, and so on, and then you and I will go before a judge and get her officially released from the county’s custody. Did her mother have parents who might contest your right to the child?”

“No,” Ross said through clenched teeth. “They’re dead.”

Ms. Iverly nodded. “Then it shouldn’t take long to close the case. I’ll get the background check initiated first thing in the morning, and get on Judge Olafsen’s docket. Where can we reach you?”

Ross gave her his card, and indicated the pager number. “Now,” he said in a voice so gentle it made Julia shiver, “about that supervised visit?”

Julia knew all too well what it was like to be skewered by that steely gaze, and hoped the woman could see beyond the badge to the father’s heart.

Ms. Iverly was evidently used to dealing with desperate parents. “She’s still in the playroom. We get the smaller ones ready for bed first. Follow me.”

Outside the door, in the dimly lit hallway, the do-it-my-way-or-else cop dissolved and an uncertain father took his place. When Ms. Iverly paused at a door covered in finger paintings, he took a shaky breath.

“What if she hates me?” he whispered. “I don’t know what Annie’s told her about me. Or about the world outside the cult, for that matter. I couldn’t stand it if she—if—”

“Just wait here,” Ms. Iverly said. “By the door, where she can see you. I’ll tell her who you are.”

Inside, half a dozen children played, cutting up construction paper and coloring pictures on the floor.

A dark-haired little girl with Ross’s eyes sat alone on a cushion at the table, carefully cutting pictures out of a magazine with orange-handled blunt scissors, her lower lip caught between her teeth.

The social worker walked quietly across the room and knelt by the table, and the child glanced up, startled.

“Hi, Kailey.” Kailey clutched the pair of scissors, as if she were afraid they would be taken away. “Are you cutting out pictures?”

Kailey nodded. “See?”

Standing beside Ross just inside the door, Julia had an awful vision of the pictures slashed, the child acting out her hatred and disappointment on paper in the absence of her father.

“Goodness. Did you cut out all these? May I see one?”

“Here.” The child fanned through a little pile of cutout people on the table. Carefully, she laid a picture of a man and a woman pushing a child on a swing in Ms. Iverly’s palm. “This is the best one.”

The social worker held it up for the two of them to see. No slashes. No cuts. It was a little uneven, and the scissors had slipped once across somebody’s knee, but other than that it was a very careful piece of work.

“That’s my daddy,” Kailey said, as if explaining something the older woman couldn’t possibly know.

“I see that.”

“He loves his little girl, even though he’s mad at her mommy.”

“How do you know that, sweetie?”

“He told the mommy to stand over there while he pushed the swing.”

The woman glanced at Ross. “Do you miss your mommy?”

She nodded. “Not Miriam, though. She’s always mad at me, even when I get people to bring her money.”

Julia’s heart broke at a small child learning such survival skills.

“Do you think about your daddy a lot?”

Kailey turned back to the magazine and began to cut another picture out with precise little snips of the scissors. “He’s going to come and get me someday. We stopped moving with the church so now he can.”

“He can find you now?”

“Mm-hm.”

“Did Mommy tell you that?”

Disdain wrinkled the child’s small nose. “Uh-uh. I just know.”

“Did you like it with the church?”

She shook her head vigorously. Gently, Ms. Iverly brushed a strand of the shaggy hair out of the child’s mouth.

“I have to weed the garden, and pray a zillion times a day. And ask people for money, even crabby people. I wish daddy would hurry up.” Kailey’s voice trembled a little on the last words. The doubt underlying her stubborn hope caught at Julia’s heart.

“Kailey, would you like to meet your daddy? He loves you so much. He’s been looking for you for a long time.”

The child stopped cutting. “When?”

“How about now? See that man over there?”

Her uncertain gray gaze locked on Ross, then returned to the social worker, begging her not to be playing a trick, to be making a promise that would never materialize. “That man?” The scissors were motionless in her hand, poised for a piece of paper that had fluttered to the floor.

Ross clutched Julia’s arm, and she felt the tremors coursing through it. Julia touched his hand gently and gave him a little push, blinking back tears.

Ross walked slowly to the table, and Ms. Iverly stepped back to lean against the wall.

“Kailey?” His whisper cracked, and a lump rose into Julia’s throat at the raw emotion in it. The little girl still did not move, but watched him carefully as he approached,
as though she were a wild creature who might break and run at the least alarm. “Sweetie?”

He knelt beside her chair, tears swimming in his eyes. “Hi, baby. I’ve been looking for you for a long time.” Her solemn eyes took him in, detail by detail. “You stopped moving, didn’t you? So I could find you. What a smart girl.”

The scissors dropped on the floor. Neither father nor child paid any attention.

“Daddy?”

Julia could see the effort Ross made to give her time, to stop himself from hugging her right away, so she could adjust her mental picture from the idealized perfection of the people in her pictures to this wet-eyed man in the scuffed leather jacket.