Swift Justice (26 page)

(Wednesday)

Melissa Lloyd hovered outside my office when I drove up the next morning. Dressed for work in a peach skirt and coordinating blouse, she was babyless this time and shifted from foot to foot as I got out of my car. I scanned the parking lot but didn’t see Gigi’s Hummer. Maybe she’d slept in.

“Good morning,” I greeted Melissa.

“Hi. Look, Ian said you stopped by. Then the cops came. Olivia’s on antibiotics for an ear infection, I’ve got a huge design order pending, and I’m at my wit’s end.”

One look at her had told me that. Her skirt hung from her hipbones as if she’d lost weight, and her skin had a sallow cast that spoke of too many sleepless nights and not enough exercise. Or maybe peach just wasn’t her color.

“Are you any closer to finding her father? Ian says I should just give her to Child Protective Services, but I can’t bring myself to do that because . . .”

“You haven’t told him about your relationship with the baby?” I unlocked the door and actually missed the smell of the coffee Gigi usually had perking by now. I offered my client a Pepsi and helped myself to one when she refused.

She wandered to the window and looked out into the parking lot. “I just can’t. When he came home unexpectedly because he thought I sounded stressed—so sweet of him!—I was going to, but then Olivia got sick, and he’s so fed up with the time I spend with her that I just . . . I
did
tell him the baby was Lizzy’s and that since Lizzy had died unexpectedly I felt responsible for her.”

I handed her a note with Patricia Sprouse’s and Jacqueline Falstow’s phone numbers. “Both these women would kill”—unfortunate turn of phrase—“to get hold of that baby. If you can’t cope with her, give one of them a call. Or do like your husband suggested and turn her over to the authorities. I’ll keep looking for the father, and the legal outcome will likely be the same no matter whose custody the baby is in.”

“Maybe I’ll do that,” she said, turning to accept the slip of paper. She massaged her temple with two fingers wearily. “Caring for a baby is so hard,” she said. “I don’t know how single parents do it, especially teen mothers. This—having Olivia—confirms for me that I made the right decision in giving Lizzy up. It’s been good that way.” She nodded decisively, but her eyes slid to the window again, and her fingers plucked at the fabric of her skirt.

I wondered if she continued caring for Olivia as a kind of
punishment for the guilt she still felt about giving up Elizabeth. I’m no psychologist, but she seemed to wear the burden of the baby like a hair shirt, accepting the itch of sleepless nights and the irritation of having no time for herself and her husband as a retribution she deserved. It seemed kind of hard on Ian since he had to share in the punishment without understanding why.

As if she’d heard my thoughts, Melissa said, “Ian’s headed back to Arizona today—he’s got to get back to his customer. He said the baby has to be out of the house by the time he gets back for good.”

“When—”

“This weekend.”

I couldn’t tell if the look she sent me was a plea or an ultimatum. I told her the case was my top priority and saw her to the door just as Gigi descended from her Hummer, wearing a floral wrap dress that displayed a lot of pillowy bosom and matched her cast.

“Good morning,” she trilled.

I introduced her and Melissa, and Gigi’s eyes filled with sympathetic tears. “I am so sorry for your loss,” she consoled Melissa with a pat on her hand. “Your daughter’s passing—”

Melissa jerked her hand back. “I don’t have a— She wasn’t my— Please.”

She directed the last word at me, and I knew it was a plea to find the baby’s father quickly. I watched her rigid back as she returned to her car, ignored Gigi’s “I didn’t mean to upset her,” and dialed Jack Van Hoose’s number. He was booked up all day but agreed to meet me at Albertine’s for a drink after work. I held out small hope that a beer would help my questions
go down any easier. When I hedged about telling him what I wanted to talk about, his rich voice carried a grin through the phone line as he said, “Just couldn’t wait until Friday to see me, huh?”

“Something like that,” I replied and hung up. I so hoped he wasn’t the father of Elizabeth’s baby and that my questioning him about it wouldn’t doom our fledgling relationship from the start.

I needed to track down the Emmerling kid. It made more sense to think of Elizabeth getting it on with a fellow student than with the counselor, right? Flipping open the Yellow Pages, I zeroed in on Landscapers, quickly locating Emmerling Landscape Installation and Maintenance. A phone call netted me the address of the house where Wes was installing a sprinkler system. No time like the present. Telling Gigi I’d be back in an hour or so, I headed east on Woodmen, out past Powers, aiming for the Meridian area, where Wes was supposed to be working. I couldn’t believe how many buildings had sprung up since I last drove out this way. What used to be pronghorn terrain was now a mélange of housing and shopping areas. I shook my head as I drove, lamenting the loss of the open prairie. My mind turned to work, however, when I rounded a corner and saw a pickup truck with
EMMERLING
stenciled in green on the doors and an open trailer filled with yard equipment hitched to the rear. Several men were digging trenches and unloading sod in front of a nondescript two-story house.

“Wes Emmerling?” I asked the first person I came to after exiting my car, a barrel-chested Hispanic man with a thick mustache.

“ ’Round back.” Without a hint of curiosity, he returned to digging a hole for the young spruce sprawled on the sidewalk, its roots bound in a ball.

I hadn’t realized I had a preconceived notion of what Wes Emmerling would be like until I pushed through the gate and saw him laying PVC pipe in the trenches crisscrossing the backyard. Based on Linnea’s comments and his job as a landscaper, I’d imagined he’d be bare-chested, rippling with muscles, bronzed by the sun. I saw him with a strut and the cocky attitude that kissed and told. As he turned to face me, brushing mud off his hands, I saw a slender kid of medium height, not quite filled out yet, with soft brown hair that fell into his eyes. He wore an emerald Emmerling Landscape T-shirt and jeans, both crusted with dirt and grass.

“We’ll be another couple of hours, Mrs. Denton,” he said with a shy smile, “but it’s going great.”

“Huh?” I looked behind me. No one.

His brows drew together in confusion. “Don’t you live here?” He nodded toward the house. “Aren’t you Mrs. Denton?”

“No. I’m a private investigator, Charlotte Swift. Call me Charlie.” I passed him one of my cards. “I’d like to talk to you if you’re Wes Emmerling.”

“That’s me.” He shook my hand, his grip firm, a puzzled look on his face. “Why—”

“It’s about Elizabeth Sprouse.”

To his credit, his eyes didn’t drop from mine. He heaved a sigh that seemed combined of resignation and sadness. “What about her? She died.”

“Look, is there someplace more comfortable we could talk? I’d be happy to buy you a coffee or a soda.”

He looked around the empty backyard, at the rutted earth and the pile of sprinkler piping and heads. “I don’t know. I’ve got a lot of work . . .”

“Twenty minutes,” I promised. “We’ll zip up to that Mickey D’s on the corner.”

“All right.” He tramped to a hose coiled near the deck and rinsed off his hands and boots before following me out of the yard. “I’ll be back in twenty, Manny,” he told the man out front.

He was silent as he climbed into my Subaru, and I didn’t try to get him to open up until we were seated at a sticky table at the McDonald’s with our sodas.

“So, tell me about Elizabeth,” I suggested.

“She was okay.” He pleated the paper casing from his straw.

“Okay? I heard you guys were pretty close.” That wasn’t exactly what Linnea had said, but it sounded less confrontational than “I heard you screwed her a couple times.”

“I was sad to hear she’d died,” he offered, swiping his bangs out of his eyes. They were a warm brown, and I could see how a troubled girl like Elizabeth might find his sensitivity appealing. “I wanted to go to her funeral, but . . . My dad’s pretty strict, and he didn’t know . . . I had to work.”

Wes looked defensive, but an underlying sadness made me like him. He pulled the straw from his soda and began to bend it into a triangle.

“You were really into her, weren’t you?” I asked gently.

“She was smart and beautiful,” he said.

I liked that he put “smart” first.

“But she . . . she had issues, I guess you’d say.”

“Like?”

“Like she was really hung up on finding her birth mom, but in a weird sort of way.”

“How so?”

He shrugged, seeming more like fifteen than eighteen. “I dunno. It was like she was mad at her or something. But she’d never met her, so that doesn’t make sense, does it? And she hated her stepdad.”

“Did he abuse her?” My pulse quickened, but I kept my voice even.

“She didn’t say so, not in so many words. But I wondered. After we . . .”

Sensing his embarrassment, I stepped in. “Had sex?”

He nodded. “Yeah. She talked about him. Said he played mind games with everyone, said he’d brainwashed her mother—Mrs. Sprouse, you know—so she wasn’t even the same person. It made me sad to listen to her.”

“Did you use protection?”

He caught my meaning immediately and blushed under his tan. “She was on the pill.”

Hmm. I was tempted to give him the “condoms are your friends” lecture, but decided it wasn’t my place. “Did you know she was pregnant when she ran away? That she had a baby?”

“Really? No, I . . .” His eyes widened, and I saw all the possibilities flash through his mind. “Was it—”

“Yours? You tell me.”

“We only did it three times. She was on the pill,” he reiterated. “She said.”

“You could take a DNA test,” I suggested. “That would—”

“My dad!” He blanched.

Clearly Papa Emmerling was a forceful figure. I wondered what he knew about his son’s dallyings with Elizabeth.

“Are you eighteen?”

“Next month,” he said. “The twelfth.”

“Then your dad wouldn’t have to know. Think about it.”

“I’m leaving for college next week. In Virginia. I got a scholarship to UVA.” A trace of pride sounded in his voice. As if suddenly becoming aware of the straw he was mangling, he dropped it on the table.

“They have labs in Virginia,” I pointed out drily. “Think about it.”

“I will,” he promised. He hesitated, and I saw his throat work. “Miss Smith—”

“Charlie.”

“Is it a boy or a girl?”

“A girl. Olivia.”

He bit down on his lower lip. “I don’t know what my dad would—”

“Did your dad—your folks—ever meet Elizabeth?” I asked when he didn’t continue.

“Once.” His tone said the meeting was not a success.

I didn’t press it. “Did you hear from Elizabeth after she left school? When was the last time you saw her?”

“February. But we didn’t date after November. She broke up with me around Thanksgiving, and I only saw her around school after that.”

“Did she say why?”

“Not really. She didn’t have time, she said. She’d gotten a part-time job. It took up a lot of her time, she said. Look, I gotta get back to work.” Wes pushed back from the table.

“Did you get the feeling she was seeing someone else?” I persisted.

“Maybe. Probably. Elizabeth was the kind of girl who needed to always be with a guy. I think it was her way of proving she was pretty and . . .”

“Lovable?” How sad.

“Yeah. She even flirted with—” He pressed his lips closed and headed for the door, chucking his empty cup into the trash with unnecessary force.

Why did I get the feeling he was going to say “my dad”?

After dropping a subdued Wes back at work, I drove to the office, thinking about what he’d said. I knew women like Elizabeth, women who got their sense of self-worth from attracting men. Each new conquest bolstered their self-esteem, made them feel worthwhile or likable. The feeling never lasted, though, and they’d move on to another man, needing to prove and re-prove their desirability. I didn’t get it, but I’d noticed those women frequently had strained relationships with their fathers. Elizabeth certainly qualified on that front, with her birth father unknown, her adopted father dead, and her stepfather screwier than a hardware convention. From my point of view, it made finding Olivia’s father that much more difficult since Elizabeth might have had a series of casual partners.