Swift Justice (16 page)

(Sunday)

I spent Sunday morning hiking part of the Barr Trail up Pikes Peak before coming home, showering, and putting on clean jeans and an orange camp shirt to meet with Patricia Sprouse. The Subaru motored out to Black Forest as if it knew the way, and I pulled up outside the Sprouse home at two twenty. I’d wanted to give Pastor Zach plenty of time to get caught up in his meeting. The tan Chevy that had been under the carport before was missing, so I assumed he was out of the way. As I climbed out of the car, checking to make sure my recorder was in my purse, I spotted another car parked farther down the road in front of a blue-painted home with a horse weather vane on the chimney. I knew that car; in fact, I had its license plate number in my notebook, waiting for Monday to arrive so I could call my DMV contact and get the name of the Lexus’s owner. Maybe the car’s owner was a friend of the Sprouses after all, and she’d come to pay a condolence call.

The sounds of an argument coming from the backyard as I headed for the front door put paid to that idea.

“I don’t know!” Patricia Sprouse sounded close to tears.

“I think you do know. You’re hiding her from me.” The other woman’s voice trembled with rage. “She’s mine! If I have to I’ll get my lawyers involved. Your husband’s church will never survive the scandal—”

“Calm down, Jacquie,” a man’s voice said as I pushed through the back gate, scattering the six or seven hens pecking at corn nearby. They squawked and half-flew, half-scuttled closer to a weathered chicken coop that was once red but had faded to a rusty pink.

“Hi, Patricia,” I said brightly, my eyes on the auburn-haired woman and her male companion. Her husband? She wore black slacks with a cream silk blouse and turquoise earrings, bracelet, and belt buckle. A large diamond sparkled on her hand as she hitched her purse higher on her shoulder. The man was equally well turned out, but in a less showy way, the subtle plaid pattern on his sport coat meeting flawlessly at the seams and his neat beard well barbered. He stood half a head taller than his wife and looked to be ten or fifteen years older, putting him in his midfifties, I’d guess. A large hand rested on his wife’s shoulder. Comfort or restraint?

Completely ignoring me, he told Patricia, “Two days, Mrs. Sprouse. That’s all I’m prepared to wait. That baby is ours.” Without waiting to see Patricia’s reaction, he strode toward the gate, sizing me up with a glance as he exited.

His wife paused to say, “Please,” with a pleading look at Patricia before following him. Fastidiously picking her way
around the clots of chicken poop, she brushed past me without a word and stalked out the gate. I pushed it closed as a fat white chicken tried to escape.

“Are you okay?” I asked Patricia, who stood unmoving in the middle of the yard, a pail of chicken feed forgotten in her left hand. “Who was that?”

My words broke Patricia’s trance, and she stared at me with troubled eyes. “The Falstows, Jacqueline and Stefan.”

When she didn’t continue, I said, “I saw her at the funeral. Was she a friend of Elizabeth’s?”

“Oh, no.” She hesitated, as if unsure how much to tell me. Then the words burst from her. “She says Elizabeth’s baby is hers! She says Elizabeth signed a contract with her and her husband to let them adopt the baby. They paid her. If we don’t give them the baby within two days, they’ll sue us.”

Her words knocked me back a step. Pieces of the puzzle clicked into place in my mind, and I knew I’d found the source of the money Elizabeth planned to use to escape her home. I didn’t know how much a teen could make on such a deal—wasn’t selling babies illegal?—but I suspected there were some under-the-table ways to profit, like college athletes accepting cars and bogus jobs and such from team boosters. It might add up to a lot of money, at least by a teenager’s standards.

A black chicken pecked at the feed pail, recalling Patricia to her task. She scooped up seed with one hand and scattered it across the yard, inciting a mad flutter of wings and some vicious pecking as the chickens converged on the food.

“Are you going to give the baby to her?” I asked. “The DHS—”

“I know you don’t work for the Department of Human Services,” she said, her voice stronger. Her faded blue eyes
met mine as she upended the pail, dribbling the last seeds onto the ground. “Aurora Newcastle told me who you were.”

So much for my cover. “Is she doing okay?”

“She’s dying,” Patricia said flatly. “She was too ill to travel down for the funeral. I’m going to drive up to Denver this week, have lunch with her. I want to see her one more time before . . . I don’t care what Zachary says. She was—is—my best friend.” Her eyes stabbed defiantly at me, as if I were the husband who had detached her from the friendship.

“Why did you call me, Mrs. Sprouse?”

“Come in.” She led the way across the yard, away from the scratching chickens, to the back door of the small brick house. Inside the kitchen with its white appliances it was cooler. “Would you like some iced tea?”

“Sure.” I settled into one of four wooden chairs around a Formica-topped table.

A gust of cold air filtered across the room as she opened the fridge to retrieve a pitcher of tea. I wondered if Elizabeth had sewn the pleated curtains veiling the window over the sink with a cheerful pattern of farmyard animals on a pale blue background. They looked freshly laundered; the whole kitchen was sparkling clean, despite such signs of age as a gouge in the porcelain sink and linoleum curling back from where it met the cabinets.

“Thanks,” I said as Patricia handed me a glass and sat across from me. It wasn’t Pepsi, but it was cold and caffeinated, and I realized I was thirsty. I took two long swallows as Patricia gathered her thoughts.

“Aurora told me you were looking for Elizabeth on behalf of a client. Who is your client?”

“I can’t tell you that, Mrs. Sprouse.” I could tell by her quiet acceptance of my answer that she hadn’t expected me to divulge the name.

“Is it Elizabeth’s birth mother? Elizabeth started searching for her not long after I married Zachary and we moved down here from Denver. Did she find her, make contact? Is that who has the baby?” She sat in her chair, as if anticipating a blow, and I knew it must hurt her unbearably to think her daughter, the girl she’d raised from infancy, had entrusted her own baby to another woman. Worse, to the woman who had given her up.

“Who is the baby’s father?” I countered.

“I don’t know,” Patricia said. “When she told me she was pregnant, she wouldn’t say anything about who the boy was, not even when Zachary took the strap to her to make her tell us the truth.”

“He whipped a pregnant teenager?”
And you let him?
I left the second question unsaid.

“Zachary believes in strong discipline to rebuke the sinful,” she said, not meeting my eyes. “It’s God’s way. Look at how he punished David and Bathsheba for their sin—he killed their child. And Jonah, and Lot’s wife.” She reached desperately for examples I was sure her husband had paraded in front of her and Elizabeth time and again.

“I heard that your husband had arranged a marriage for her. Could that man have fathered the baby?”

She stared at me in dismay. “How did you know— No, Elizabeth was resistant to that betrothal, much to Seth’s disappointment. I’m sure they hadn’t . . . that he didn’t . . .”

“What’s Seth’s full name?”

“Johnson. Seth Johnson. He’s a godly man, a pillar of the church, one of our elders.”

“How old is he?”

“Maybe forty-three. The poor man’s been a widower for three years now.” She twisted the plain gold band of her wedding ring.

Call me cynical, but when a man in his forties tries to marry a sixteen-year-old, I know just what “pillar” is driving him.

“What happened after your husband beat Elizabeth?”

“She left the next day,” Patricia said, despair darkening her eyes. “I never spoke to her again.”

I let the unutterable sadness of that lie between us for a moment.

“So why are you interested in finding the baby?”

“She’s all I have left of Elizabeth,” Patricia said. “I owe it to her. I want to do better this time.”

“You don’t get do-overs with raising children,” I said. Not if you dump them with relatives so you can travel the world saving sinners, not if you run off to Costa Rica with your personal trainer, not if you marry perverts who molest them. I drained my glass and set it on the table, leaning forward to catch Patricia’s eyes. “When you say you owe it to ‘her,’ do you mean Elizabeth or Olivia? Because, frankly, even though I’m not really with the DHS, I’m not sure this house is the best place for Olivia. Look what happened to Elizabeth.”

“That wasn’t my fault!” she cried, tears springing to her eyes. “Zachary—” She stopped.

“Zachary what? Would he be willing to submit to a DNA test to check paternity?”

It took her a full thirty seconds to grasp my meaning, and
when she did, bright circles of red stained her cheeks. She used both hands to fan herself. “He would never . . . Zachary didn’t . . . you have a filthy mind!”

I probably did, the result of too much time as an OSI agent and too many cases like this one. In fact, it was a molestation case that had finally driven me out of the Air Force. Didn’t mean Zachary hadn’t raped his stepdaughter. “The simplest way for your husband to prove his innocence would be to offer to donate a DNA sample, Mrs. Sprouse,” I said more mildly. “I’m sure DHS would look more favorably on your request for custody, too, if he were to do that.” I had no idea if that was true or not, or even if DHS would be involved in deciding who got custody, but it sounded good.

“Can I just see the baby?” she pleaded. “Does she look like Elizabeth?”

Hell if I knew. I hadn’t studied her that closely. I was sure Patricia would see a resemblance to her daughter, however. I felt sorry for this woman, mourning her daughter, maybe blaming herself for marrying the man who beat her or worse, yearning to see her granddaughter. Yet I couldn’t imagine how she could stand by and let her husband drive her daughter away.

“I’ve been hired to find the baby’s father—nothing more,” I said, rising from the table. “I can’t tell you who my client is, but I’ll pass along your desire to see the baby.”

“Thank you,” Patricia said, clearly used to making do with half a loaf.

“How did the Falstows expect you to contact them?” I asked.

Patricia looked confused by the change of subject, then
pulled a business card out of her pocket. It read
RUSSELL ZIEGLER, ATTORNEY-AT-LAW
and offered several phone numbers. I wrote them all down.

Conscious of passing time and of the possibility of Pastor Zach returning with all his Old Testament bombast, I crossed to the door. Patricia Sprouse remained seated, her head in her hands, the picture of defeat.

“Look,” I said, pity for her overriding my usual policy of noninvolvement, “I’ve got a lawyer friend who specializes in custody cases. Maybe if you gave her a call she could help you.”

She looked up, a shadow of hope in her eyes, and I recited Valerie’s number. Patricia repeated it several times, committing it to memory, and I wondered if she was afraid of Pastor Zach’s reaction if he found the number written somewhere.

“God’s peace be with you,” she said as the screen door banged shut behind me.

Back at you
, I thought. If there was a God and he had extra peace to pass around, these people needed it more than I did.