Tara Quinn - The Good Girl

After her briefing on the case that morning, she’d opted to come in alone to get the boy. She’d thought keeping the police out of the picture was in Damon’s best interests. That was before the storm hit.

“We been doin’ just fine.” The boy’s look was hard with only the merest hint of uncertainty in those vivid blue eyes. Mary wondered how long he’d been virtually alone with the baby girl who appeared to be healthy—in spite of having been born to a user.

Wind hurled and glass broke. The window in the bedroom? Was the one in this room next? She had to get the kids to safety.

“Is there a basement in this place?”

“Just in the buildin’ next door.”

“Then we have to go there. Now.”

“Uh-uh.”

Damon had softened earlier when she’d asked him about Kayla. He liked to talk about his baby sister. While her gaze searched for any safe harbor at all, her mind scrambled for conversation that might lure the boy into a sense of cooperation.

“Your mom said Kayla’s had her checkups. Is that right?” If they didn’t leave immediately, the baby’s health didn’t matter. And neither did Damon’s. Or hers.

“‘Course. At the free clinic. I took her myself.”

And the county clinic hadn’t notified child Protective Services that a newborn was in the care of a young boy?

Damon said something else, but she couldn’t hear him as the storm’s intensity increased.

“Damon, we have to get out of here!” Fighting the instincts that told her to run, Mary listened to her training—to her heart—and knew that she would not desert these children. No matter what.

Which meant she might only have a few minutes to get through to the boy. Or die with them.

A burst of wind slammed the building so hard, she felt it shake. Diving for the boy, shielding the baby with her body, Mary wrapped her arms around Damon and shoved them toward the tiny bathroom in the center of the apartment. Pushing them into the tub, she climbed in with them, lay down and cradled the children against her. Kayla was crying. She couldn’t worry about that at the moment.

“I lied to the doctor,” Damon yelled, but she could hardly hear him.

“It’s okay,” Mary yelled back, praying silently for their protection. For the children, at least, to be saved.

“I told him Mom was sick with the flu. And when he said he had to see her, I called a girl I know next door to come and pretend to be her. She’s been going with me to all Kayla’s checkups.”

The storm raged. The baby cried. The boy yelled. And Mary thought about Bill Mendholson. She’d never told him she loved him.

She wished she had.

“It’s clearly a storm-related accident.” Bill, standing with the coroner inside the marina store, stared out at the potential crime scene down by the docks, hoping that the older couple whose RV had rolled over had never known what hit them. So far, they were the only reported casualties.

Sam Pawloski, Comfort Cove’s coroner, nodded.

“Sorry to call you out in this weather, Detective,” Jack, the street cop who’d met Bill at the scene, muttered. Jack was a new cop. Maybe still a bit excitable. “At first glance, with the bodies in different places, it looked like we had a mess on our hands.”

Their voices were raised to be heard over the sound of wind raging outside. So far that was all there was to the storm. Dangerously high winds. No rain. No thunder or lightning.

Just a hell of a lot of debris. “You got the mess part right,” Sam said.

Pulling off his glasses, Bill wiped them and put them back on, but nothing looked better.

The parking lot was filled with branches, bark, a sail, a couple of life vests, a few shingles, pieces of metal and trash, rope, a cardboard box and an empty beer case. Candy wrappers and paper litter skated across the pavement.

“I’ve seen worse,” Manny, the weathered old marina owner and fish dealer, said from the counter behind them. “Good thing no one was out on the water.”

“I hate to think how much damage there’s going to be to the boats,” Jack said, shaking his head.

Though he’d grown up in Comfort Cove, Bill didn’t know any of the fishermen personally. He knew of one, though. Chris Talbot had been peripherally involved in one of Ramsey Miller’s missing child cold cases the previous month. Talbot was now engaged to Emma Sanderson, sister to the long-missing toddler, Claire Sanderson.

Claire had been ruled out as a victim of Ramsey’s newly arrested pedophile—but she was still missing.

“Which boat belongs to Chris Talbot?” Bill asked the curmudgeonly, leather-skinned man behind the counter.

“That one there.” The man nodded toward the right side of the dock. “The Son Catcher .”

Not the newest boat on the block by any means. “Looks like he’s got it tied down tight.” The fishing vessel was rocking fiercely.

“Chris is careful,” Manny said, almost with pride, as if Talbot was his own son. “Used to be that boat was his whole life. Till he met himself a woman he cared about more. We didn’t think that was ever going to happen.”

Emma Sanderson.

“He’s been talking to me about having a wedding down here at the docks over Thanksgiving. I told him he’d best be talking to his lady about that, but he says she wants it, too. Go figure.”

Wondering if Ramsey knew about the upcoming nuptials, Bill was about to ask where, on the smelly fishing docks, a couple would have a wedding, when Jack’s portable patrol radio sounded a call for help.

A cop had just been reported unconscious in a car outside a duplex a couple of blocks away. A woman, a social worker, was inside with two kids—one of whom was a baby. They didn’t know if anyone inside was hurt. Emergency vehicles had been dispatched.

There was no reason for a detective to be on the scene. No reason to risk his life in the storm.

Bill tore out of the marina store, a force in the wind as he ran for his car.

Funny, your life really did pass before your eyes when you faced death. Her mother’s voice floated into that little bathroom, covering the screaming baby, the howling winds, the repeated pounding of a loose board against the house. “You’re a good girl, Mary. Don’t ever forget that.”

Had she forgotten?

Her mind conjured up a picture of her father’s smile, before he got sick, before they knew insurance wouldn’t pay for the transplant that could save his life.

A huge boom brought Mary fully back to the cramped little bathtub, to the children beneath her, shielded by her body. If anything came down on them, she’d catch the brunt of it.

Something crashed in the next room.

“What was that?” Damon shouted, tears evident in his voice.

“The wind,” Mary hollered back above the roar of the storm and baby Kayla’s cries. At least the baby was no longer screaming.

She was pretty sure the roof had just fallen in on the room they’d been standing in moments before.

Chances were she wasn’t going to make it out alive.

She thought of Aunt Marianne, after whom she’d been named. Her mother’s twin sister. Before Marianne’s divorce, before her ex-husband had broken her trust, and her heart, before he’d taken all their money and run, she’d laughed a lot.

She lived with Mary’s mother Bethanne in Florida now. The twins were older, quieter. But they had a group of friends. A comfortable life. Mary, the only child, had her own room in their home, which she visited often. She’d been there the previous month. Her mother and aunt were smiling again—particularly when she was with them.

They’d never thought less of Mary. Though they had to have known what she’d done. Who she’d been.