Maggie Shayne - Thicker Than Water

Oh, God, the police. She imagined them—the two officers, and that bitch Detective Jackson—were gathering up the papers and documents and videotapes one by one, even now. They would probably sit in a roomful of cops and go over all of them. If they found out the truth, her life would be destroyed. They would take Dawn away from her. Track down her birth mother’s relatives—the very same people Lizzie had been compelled to run away from all those years ago—and hand her over to them.

Dawn.

Shivering all over, Julie kept steering the Jeep with one hand, dipping into her jacket pocket with the other. She pulled out the two photographs she had found on the floor, both of them taken in a place so jarringly familiar that the sight of them had almost floored her. They’d been taken at Young Believers’ compound.

She looked at them now, tried to make out the faces in the group shots. And finally she realized why one of those faces seemed so familiar. The young man with the three-piece suit and the automatic rifle was Harry Blackwood.

“He was there,” she whispered. Not as one of the inmates, though. Those who lived at the place didn’t wear suits but plain, functional clothes more suited to working in the greenhouses and gardens. No, Harry must have been one of Mordecai’s visiting dignitaries. The men who brought large sums of money in exchange for some of Mordecai’s crops.

Julie lowered the photos toward her pocket, glanced up at the road and saw the glowing orange eyes and red-brown coat in her headlights’ beam. Startled, the deer froze in the middle of the road. Equally startled, Julie jerked the wheel hard to the left and jammed her foot on the brake. The Jeep’s rear end skidded right, so she jerked the wheel right, overcorrected, and sent it skidding the other way. Her body jerked hard against the car’s motions, but the seat belt kept her from being whipped across the seat. She thought she was going into the brush at the side of the road for sure, but somehow she pulled out of the skid, and the back end’s fishtailing slowed and finally stopped. She forgot about the clutch, and the car bucked and then stalled.

She sat there, the car at a cockeyed angle on the shoulder, watching the deer bound merrily away into the woods, and she thought how right her daughter was about her driving skills. Damn deer anyway. Thank God she hadn’t wrecked Dawnie’s sixteenth-birthday present or she would never have heard the end of it, even though her insurance would have covered the damage.

She told herself it didn’t matter. She hadn’t wrecked the Jeep, or hit the deer or anything else. She hadn’t been hurt, and she supposed that might have turned out differently if Sean hadn’t reminded her to buckle up. Though she would be damned before she admitted that to him.

Pulling herself together, she pushed down the clutch, restarted the engine, pulled back onto the pavement and drove slowly the rest of the way home, her full attention on the road the entire time. She pulled the Jeep into the garage, closed the door and crept into the house as quietly as she could. She checked all the locks, shut off all the lights. God, it was 3:30 a.m. She had to get up again in a little more than three hours.

She tiptoed up the stairs and paused outside her daughter’s bedroom door to peek inside. Dawn was lying in the bed, exactly the way she had been before. She hadn’t so much as moved in her sleep.

What had at first seemed reassuring changed in an instant as Julie stared in at the bed and realized what she was seeing.

She pushed the door open further and stepped inside. “Dawn?”

Dawn said nothing. Julie moved closer to the bed, reached down to touch Dawn’s shoulder. “Dawnie?”

Still nothing. She pulled the covers back.

Pillows lay beneath them, lined up to resemble the form of a sleeping sixteen-year-old covered in blankets. Lifting her head, Julie saw the curtains floating on a breeze coming in through the open window.

“Oh my God,” Julie whispered. “Dawn!”

Dawn crouched in the bushes on the front lawn as the Jeep’s headlights shone on the slowly rising garage door. The Jeep rolled inside. Dawn’s mother got out of the car in a pair of old jeans and a sweatshirt, half her hair hanging loose from what looked like a haphazard pony tail. The garage door lowered slowly.

“Was that your mom?” Kayla asked in an overly loud whisper.

“Yeah.”

“Why’s she driving your Jeep?”

Dawn shrugged. “Left her car keys someplace today and had to catch a ride home with, uh…a friend, I guess.”

“Good thing we left the party early.”

“Not early enough.” Dawn rubbed her arms, the possibility of getting caught adding to the chill of the crisp October night air. Wondering where her mom had been in the wee hours of the morning gave her an even deeper chill. She’d overheard part of a phone call earlier tonight, before her mom had left for her first late-night meeting or whatever. Dawn had picked up the upstairs extension and heard her mother say, “You won’t quit until you destroy me utterly, will you, Harry?” and a man reply, “Not utterly, Jewel. I don’t want to kill the golden goose, you know.” Her mother’s reply to that had been, “Fine, eleven, then.” And then she’d hung up the phone.

Dawn knew her mother had secrets. She’d always had secrets, things that Dawn knew were best not asked about. She didn’t ask about her father, for instance. Julie would only say they’d both been teens, and that he’d been killed in a car accident before Julie had even realized she was pregnant. His family were devoutly religious, and telling them of Dawn’s existence would only have added to their pain. To push for more information only wound up with one or both of them getting angry, the same result that came of asking too many questions about Julie’s side of the family.

Dawn often thought she was probably adopted. It would explain her mom’s secrets, and it would explain how Julie could be so dark that she must have Latin blood, while Dawn herself was as pale as a daisy. She was going to ask about it someday, but privately she thought it wasn’t half as important as Julie seemed to think it was. It wouldn’t change anything.

Dawn loved her mother, secrets and all. But this was the first time she’d had this sickening feeling that one of her mom’s secrets might be dangerous, or that she might be in trouble because of them.

“Where do you suppose she went?” Kayla asked softly.

Dawn shook herself out of her thoughts, focused on the present situation and shrugged. “There was probably breaking news somewhere,” she lied. She knew better, though. Her mom didn’t go out to cover breaking news in jeans and a sweatshirt. It was a running joke how fast she could make herself ready to go on the air. Five minutes with a makeup mirror and a compact would be plenty, in a pinch.

“You’d better get back in there, Dawnie, before she realizes you’re gone.”

Dawn saw her bedroom light come on and swallowed hard. “Too late,” she said, her heart falling to somewhere in the region of her stomach. “You might as well go home. There’s no sense in both of us getting caught. Your dad would kill you.”

Kayla nodded. “My dad’s a cop, and he’s not as good a snoop as your mother is.” She sighed. “Call me in the morning,” she said, then she ran off into the darkness.

Dawn squared her shoulders and walked toward the house. She thought about going around to the back and climbing in through her bedroom window but decided against it. It would only make her mother angrier. Instead she went to the front door and used her spare key to let herself in.

Before she’d even closed and locked the door behind her, her mother’s steps came rapidly down the stairs. “Dawnie?”