Only Ever You (15 page)

As she came around a bend near the turnoff for Fernwood Road, flashing lights suddenly appeared. Bea slammed on the brake as she saw a police cruiser blocking the road. Behind it, in the glare of headlights, she could see several large trucks and a cluster of men in yellow hard hats. The whine of an arc saw; sparks shot up in the air.

It was too late for Bea to turn around; a police officer waving a flashlight strode toward her car.

“Go back, turn around,” she willed under her breath, but he kept coming. She tilted the rearview mirror to see the bag in the backseat. The zipper was partially open. Bea reached back to zip it fully closed, but the metal slipped in her fingers, then stuck. “Damn it!”

The cop approached the driver’s-side door, squinting against the glare of her headlights, and made a circular motion with his hand, instructing her to put down her window.

She lowered it a crack. “Yes, officer?”

The flashlight blinded her for a moment as he ran it over her face before lowering it. “Ma’am, this road is temporarily blocked for the next few nights for road work. Where are you heading?”

“Fernwood Road.”

He nodded, his face bisected by shadows. Young and overly muscular, biceps straining his uniform jacket. “We can let you through in a minute, just sit tight.” He ran the flashlight lazily over the interior of the car and Bea fought to keep her face relaxed and hands on the wheel. Her gaze flicked to the rearview mirror and back up to the cop’s inquiring eyes. The bag was twitching; could he see it?

“You’re out late,” the cop said and she knew he was fishing.

“Yep.” She tried to smile, pulled her lips back from her teeth, imagined that her pale face must be gleaming when everything else was so black. Black! She’d forgotten that she wore all black—the pageboy wig, the hoodie, the pants, even her socks and shoes. Damn, it looked odd. Had he noticed?

“You work a late shift?”

Like it was any of his business. A bead of sweat trickled down the side of Bea’s face despite the cold. She looked up at what she could see of the young man’s face. “Yep.”

If he asked where she worked, she wouldn’t know what to say. “Will it be much longer?” She spoke quickly to distract him.

“Shouldn’t be; let me check.” He turned toward the construction just as the sound of the arc welding stopped. In the sudden quiet an audible moan. The cop turned back. “What was that?”

“I didn’t hear anything.” Her voice sounded high and false; did he notice? The cop’s flashlight shot back to her face and she thought he must see the sweat soaking her temples, pooling in the hollow at her collarbone. It was only thirty degrees, but she felt soaked in sweat. Her chest hurt, the familiar pain of angina radiating from the center out. She wanted to massage it, but her hands stayed glued to the steering wheel.

The officer hitched up his belt with the flashlight still in his hand, its beam bouncing erratically over the car. A startling glimpse of something white in the rearview mirror. A tiny hand.

“Wait a minute.” The man’s voice rose as the beam of light stilled on the backseat. “What’s that?”

chapter eighteen

DAY ONE

Detective Ottilo’s calm slipped; he looked genuinely surprised. “Adopted? So her birth mother might have taken her?”

“No,” David said. “There’s no way. It was a closed adoption.”

“Maybe she found us,” Jill said. “Haven’t you always wondered if she might?”

“No,” he said, flatly. “Never.”

But Ottilo ignored him, asking, “Has she ever tried to contact you?”

Jill shook her head, sinking farther into the couch. “But maybe somehow she got our address—”

“That’s ridiculous,” David said sharply. “It would be illegal. It was a closed adoption—closed as in we knew almost nothing about the birth mother—we didn’t even know her name—and she knew the same about us.”

Detective Finley said, “Still, it’s possible. We need the agency’s name and number.”

“We didn’t use an agency,” David said. “It was a private adoption.”

“Then you used a lawyer?” Ottilo said, adding, “Was it someone from your firm?”

“No, a colleague set us up with an adoption attorney. John Antkowiak.”

“We’ll need his phone number and all of the information you have from the adoption.”

David grimaced, but stood up. “It’s in the study.” Detective Ottilo followed him after exchanging a quick look with Detective Finley. Before Jill could interpret it, a young police officer rushed to Ottilo’s side, speaking rapidly, but too low to overhear.

“What? What is it?” Jill asked, but they ignored her, the uniformed officer heading back down the hall toward the kitchen with Ottilo striding after him.

Finley called, “Mike?”

Ottilo glanced back at her, face grim. “We’ve got something out back.”

Jill ran after the detectives, down the hall. A cluster of police officers and a few crime-scene technicians crowded the kitchen and the back door. Detective Ottilo pushed through them with the officer who’d fetched him, but when Jill tried to follow, Detective Finley stopped her with an outstretched arm. “Let’s wait here a minute.”

“Is it Sophia?” Jill stood on tiptoe trying to see over the crowd. “Have they found Sophia?”

“What’s going on?” David rushed into the room. “Have they found her?”

“Sophia isn’t out there.” Detective Finley didn’t budge.

“Then who is?” David demanded. He sounded angry, but Jill could hear the fear underneath it. “This is ridiculous—you can’t stop us from moving around our own house.” He started to push past the detective, who was several inches shorter and at least fifty pounds lighter, and the woman’s hand shot out and circled David’s wrist. She had his arm up and behind his back before Jill could react. He cried out in either surprise or pain, and Jill cried, “Let him go!”

A male police officer stepped in from the other room and two other officers turned from the back door. Commotion came from outside, the crowd dispersing, and Detective Ottilo turned back to them.

“It’s all right,” he said and Finley abruptly released David.

“What the hell is going on!” he said. His shirt had come untucked; he was red in the face.

Jill’s searched Ottilo’s face. “What is it? What did you find?”

“There are traces of blood on the patio,” Ottilo said.

Jill couldn’t move, she was frozen in place. “Oh my God.”

“Blood? What the hell—is it Sophia’s? I want to see it.” David made another move forward and this time it was Ottilo who caught him, holding the other man firmly by both arms.

“You cannot go out there, Mr. Lassiter. We need to preserve the evidence; the fewer the people the better chance we have.” He let him go and turned to Jill. “You said you cut your hand yesterday?”

“Yes, I bled on the kitchen floor, maybe some of it got tracked outside.”

“But you didn’t go outside when you cut it?”

Jill shook her head. A momentary hope that it was just her blood, not Sophia’s, evaporated. “How much blood was on the patio? It’s Sophia’s blood, right? Oh my God.” She didn’t realize she was shaking until Detective Finley put a steadying hand on her arm.

“Don’t jump ahead, Mrs. Lassiter,” she said. “We don’t know anything yet.”

Detective Ottilo moved one arm around David’s shoulders and both of them were escorted out of the kitchen. Jill couldn’t stop trembling. How could she and David have missed seeing the blood outside?

There was a sudden commotion at the front door, and Elaine Lassiter pushed past an officer trying to restrain her.

“She insisted on coming inside,” a young patrolman said to Detective Ottilo.

“Of course I insisted! I’m the grandmother!” Elaine turned her back on the man as if he were an annoying waiter. She scanned the room, spotting Jill first, but going straight to her son. “David!”

“Hi, Mom.” He went to her open arms, and after she’d held him, Elaine reached out an arm to Jill, who got pulled into the older woman’s small but iron-tight embrace. As always, a pungent aroma of Shalimar wafted in with her. Jill pulled back first, raising her eyebrows at David to demand why he’d called his mother. He avoided her gaze.

“We could barely get on the street,” Elaine said with wonder and indignation. “There are police cars a mile deep outside. Your father dropped me off; he’s going to have to park clear down at the end of the road.”

Detective Finley moved to a front window with her cell phone, apparently directing some cops outside to deal with through traffic. Elaine looked her up and down before turning her attention to Detective Ottilo. “What’s happening? Have you searched the neighborhood?”

“Everything possible is being done, Mrs.…?”

“Lassiter. Elaine Lassiter. I’m David’s mother. Do you have any suspects?”

“I’m really not at liberty to discuss the case with you, Mrs. Lassiter.”

“I just want to be sure that everything is being considered. Have you located the birth mother?”

Jill recoiled and David said, “Mom!”

Elaine said to Ottilo, “They don’t like to talk about it, but really—isn’t the birth mother the first person you should look at?”

“We’ve already talked about this,” David said. “Not that it matters. We got Sophia when she was a day old. It’s almost as if Jill gave birth to her.”

“But she didn’t,” Elaine said in her usual blunt manner, looking straight at Jill. “And the birth mother could be anybody.” She turned back to the detectives. “You hear these things all the time, women taking back their children after they give them up. That’s why I argued against adopting—”

“Stop it, Mom!” David cut her off, red in the face. Jill got up from the couch and crossed to the window, holding her arms protectively across her chest.

“Well, I’m just trying to help.” Elaine managed to sound both indignant and wounded at the same time. Her voice grated on Jill. In the silence that followed, the ticking of the mantel clock seemed suddenly louder, an indictment of her as a mother, the biological clock that had ticked away inside her but hadn’t been enough to produce a healthy, living child.

Ottilo’s cell phone rang and he carried it with him into the hallway, talking so quietly that even when she strained Jill couldn’t hear what was being said.

“Mr. and Mrs. Lassiter, we’d like to take your fingerprints,” Detective Finley said. Jill turned from the window, wondering why they needed to do it again, but Finley was talking to her in-laws. Bill Lassiter had slipped into the house without his wife’s fanfare. Tall and slightly stoop-shouldered, he stood there in his usual quiet manner letting his wife take the lead.

“We’re not suspects, are we?” Elaine said.

“It’s routine—we need to identify all the prints found in the house.”

Elaine and Bill followed Finley into the dining room. It was at that same table, over a dinner orchestrated for that very purpose, that Jill and David had announced to his parents that they were adopting. Elaine had given them plenty of reasons why they shouldn’t do it—it was too soon after what happened, the child wouldn’t be their own flesh and blood, who knew what bad genes the child could carry—while Bill sat nodding his head in apparent agreement, a concerned look on his face. It was at such moments that Jill saw clearly why Bill was an accountant, not a litigator, and why David was such an effective one. He’d inherited his mother’s quick wit and verbal repartee, and he’d answered every argument thrown at them.

From the dining room, Jill heard Bill say, “David and Jill know that we would never do anything to hurt Sophia.”

On that point, at least, they were in total agreement. Despite their reservations about adoption, once Sophia was actually born David’s parents came on board as doting grandparents, eager to spend as much time with her as possible and showering her with attention and gifts. Jill thought that they’d forgotten about the adoption, given that Elaine was prone to making comments like “She looks so much like David,” or “Isn’t that exactly what Diane did at that age?”

Apparently they’d never forgotten. It had festered below the surface, perhaps a secret fear for Elaine that she’d lose her granddaughter. That Jill shared the same fear should have been a bond between them, but it couldn’t be, not after what had happened. Jill turned back to the window, pressing her hands against her temples as if she could push away bad memories. She stared out at the cul-de-sac crammed with vehicles; alien to see it this crowded. A news van had joined the patrol cars, reporters sniffing around like stray dogs.

David said, “What the hell are they doing?” She turned away from the window as he flung himself back down on the couch, gesturing at all the strangers passing through their house. “I see lots of police, but what are they actually doing to bring her home? Have all of the neighbors been questioned yet?”

The officer standing at the front door shifted, staring at him before looking away, and Jill could tell that he and the other cops were judging David—the arrogance of this high-priced attorney expecting that they could just snap their fingers and make everything okay. It didn’t help that he sounded peevish, the voice of a man expecting things to work for him as if the universe had decreed him exempt from all pain and suffering.

Ottilo came back into the room. “There’s been a development.” His eyes were alight.

David leapt up. “What is it? Have you found her?”

Clenching her hands, Jill recited a silent prayer: Let it be Sophia, please let them have found her, please let it be.

“A neighbor reported seeing a strange car parked near the entrance to your street last night—”

“Was Sophia in the car?” Jill interrupted.

“We’re waiting for confirmation, Mrs. Lassiter. The only other thing I can tell you is that a car matching that description was stopped by police sometime early this morning. There was a child in
that
car.”

“It’s her,” Jill said. “It’s got to be Sophia.”

“It could be her, Mrs. Lassiter.
Could
be. We don’t know anything yet—they’re checking on it as we speak.”

The home phone’s shrill ring made everyone jump. David said, “I’ll go,” and headed into the dining room. Every time it rang they had to take it in there, waiting for an okay from the technician working on recording the calls. In case the kidnapper called. Kidnapper. The very word sounded ludicrous, like something out of a nineteenth-century novel. Jill watched as the technician gave the go-ahead and David picked up the phone. “Hello? Oh, hi. No, nothing yet.” He shook his head at the technician who switched off the recording, stifling a yawn as David told whoever was calling that he’d call back on his cell phone. He strode down the hall to his study and Jill returned to the window, but not before noticing that Detective Ottilo had followed after David, his expression inscrutable. She looked outside again. A second news truck had pulled up alongside the first. They would have to talk to the media at some point—they needed help to find Sophia—but the very thought made her shudder.