The Secret Father

“One blow…” She leaned forward, jamming her stomach into the glass desk’s blunt edge. “What are you talking about?”

“Now you’re on board.” Brian slid her a photograph. “You and I want to know what’s behind Andy-Zach’s story. So will our readers. They’re going to see the facts in brief paragraphs about stupid criminals in their Kendall newspapers, but they’ll want to know more, and we can give them a bigger picture in Kendall’s premiere news magazine. Is the sheriff an android or a man? He says he just reacted. A guy doesn’t react like that without training.” Brian leaned back. “Or I would have had a better time in high school.”

She put her glasses back on and turned the picture around. The man’s face made her breath catch.

Not again.

Her heart boomeranged painfully. He was older, his blond hair longer than a military cut, his eyes more cynical and his body leaner.

But once again, the man in the picture, the kick-ass sheriff, was Lieutenant Zach Calvert, looking pretty damn healthy for a man who’d died six years ago.

She scanned the brief column beneath the picture. After she’d told her dad everything, he’d gone to the Navy. He was perfect for the job; he could get to the truth about the Loch Ness monster.

He’d spoken to a Commander Gould, who’d explained that Zach’s crash had been bad luck in a routine training flight. Today’s article didn’t mention the flight or the Navy or the crash that had supposedly killed Zach.

Olivia stared at his face in the grainy photo. She wasn’t wrong. This was Evan’s father. “Your daddy’s in heaven” had become her mantra. She’d hoped a daddy somewhere would make Evan feel like the children he’d envied for having fathers at home.

Numb with shock, she didn’t know whether to be furious or relieved. At least this time she didn’t seem to be falling apart at the sight of a lousy photo. She’d grieved and recovered. For six years, Lieutenant Zach Calvert had been dead.

Did that make being a sheriff in Bardill’s Ridge, Tennessee heaven? Or hell?

TWO DAYS AFTER Brian showed her Zach’s photo, Olivia’s plane drifted out of the clouds on approach to McGhee-Tyson Airport in Knoxville.

Her shock had dissipated and been replaced by pragmatism. Whatever Zach was playing at, he had a son. And her son deserved a chance to know and be loved by his father. She had to believe he could be kinder to his son than he’d been to her.

He’d gone to a lot of trouble to leave her. How had he persuaded his commanding officer to lie to her father? She’d barely stopped her dad from getting to the bottom of that question.

With any luck, looking after Evan would keep him too busy to hunt down Captain Kerwin Gould and pry the truth out of him. She wanted a word with Zach first.

After she’d called his office three times without being able to force a word out of her mouth, she’d asked Brian to set up the interview. She needed to see Zach’s face the first time he heard her voice. She’d believed him to be an honorable and loving man. She had to know who he really was before she invited him into her son’s life.

And she wondered why he’d agreed to let her interview him if he’d been so desperate to get away from her six years ago? Maybe he’d forgotten her.

Fine. He only had to remember enough to believe he might be Evan’s father.

As the plane drifted on descent, she opened Zach’s dossier. After his accident, he’d spent three months in a hospital outside San Diego. Four months after that, he’d married one of his nurses. Within eight months of their marriage, their daughter, Lily, had been born.

Which explained his silence. Had he been sleeping with Helene and her at the same time? Even six years later she felt like an idiot for trusting him.

Zach had been her first love. Tall and tough, unstoppable in his pursuit, he’d made her think she was all that mattered to him in the whole world. Combine that with his status as her father’s last choice, and she’d hardly known how to resist.

Looking back through newly opened eyes, she no longer believed in his passion or her own. She’d taken a stupid risk the night she’d forgotten her birth control. And after his supposed death, she’d made up a loving father for her son. The part where Zach had abandoned her never came into her stories.

Finally she’d tried not to remember Zach at all. But then a day would start when Evan woke with sleepy, is-it-morning eyes that reminded her of his father, or he startled her with the long capable fingers that looked too uncomfortably much like Zach’s.

She closed the folder and peered through the small window at the deep green forest flowing beneath the airplane. Dark and verdant, as mysterious as Zach’s true intentions. What had he wanted with her? Not that she’d expected forever, but a phone call to tell her she was no longer in the picture would have been nice.

Looking at mountains that seemed to have no border with flat land, she felt like an intruder. She’d once prayed Zach would ask her to meet his family. Now, possibly in front of them, she had to find out who he really was so she could decide whether to tell Evan he hadn’t died.

Olivia slipped the folder back into her soft briefcase and then fished out another clean, almost untouched file Brian had put together for her. She hadn’t told Evan or Brian the truth, so she had to go home with some kind of story.

The bank photo lay on top. Beneath were clippings from all the other stories Brian had gathered on the attempted robbery.

After the plane landed, Olivia collected her bags and packed them into her rental car. As soon as she left the airport, the road began to rise. The interstate, narrowing into two lanes, had been cut into red clay and granite hills spiked with evergreens, smoothed by icy-looking streams.

Like a bad omen, clouds covered the sun, dulling the red and gold leaves of the hardwoods. Rest stops and traffic came few and far between, and her ears began to pop at the higher elevation.

She fumbled in her purse and briefcase for gum, but Evan must have found her stash. Her boy was a fiend for gum. She gave up and yawned to clear the pressure.

As she passed the first mileage sign for Bardill’s Ridge, she breathed a sigh of relief. She ought to be able to find Sheriff Calvert’s office just in time for her appointment.

At her turnoff, she followed the long ramp away from the interstate. No sign of life stirred within the trees. Such a heavy dose of nature could make a city woman a little anxious.

At the end of the ramp a sign pointing to the left offered her the chance to turn back. To the right Bardill’s Ridge waited. Olivia opened her window and breathed in pine-laden air.

She could go home, continue the life she’d made with Evan and tell Brian the story on Zach hadn’t panned out. Her heart pounded in jackhammer fashion.

A right turn would change her life, but it might also bring her son a father who could love him. What choice did she have?

She turned right and the road inclined again. Soon a white church spire peeked out of the leaves. Just beyond the spire a redbrick cupola topped a black-shingled roof. Extremely Norman Rockwell. Olivia’s heart rate returned to normal. She could handle a Norman Rockwell town.

In front of her, a tractor turned off a dirt road onto the shoulder. The driver lifted his ball cap as she slowed to pass him.

That never happened in Chicago.

On the outskirts of Bardill’s Ridge, she passed a large blue clapboard feed store. The sign that clung to the roof of a wide veranda-cum-loading dock shouted Henderson’s in capital letters. Sticks of straw blew into the road from the bales on the porch. The men hoisting feed onto their trucks and into the backs of their SUVs looked up from their chores as she slowed to the speed limit.

Zach had been right when he’d warned the bank robber that people here noticed strangers. She passed a library, two small churches and too many curious faces.

Farther down the street, a sign painted with cartoon bears and rabbits and a bouncing typeface proclaimed the building behind it the ABC Daycare. Olivia missed Evan with a keen ache as the boys and girls spilled across the play yard.

Closer to the center of town, there were more office buildings. As she passed them the women and men who strode the surprisingly busy sidewalks watched her. No matter what he decided to do about Evan, Zach would have to explain about her after she left town.

Olivia glanced at her watch. Five past two.

At the next stop sign she glanced right and found the big white church. She turned, but had to stop again on the edge of a small square encircled by wrought iron. On one side stood the church. Beside her, a curlicued, Victorian theater promised the latest releases. Opposite, a high school looked buttoned up and busy, with papers on the windows and a teacher holding class outside as his students inspected a maple’s bright shedding leaves. The redbrick building across the square was the courthouse, Bardill’s county seat, according to a tall, black sign posted out front.

Olivia glanced at her briefcase, containing both folders and a photo vital to her plan. Zach had told Brian she’d find him in his office in the jail at the back of the courthouse.

She parked and grabbed her things. Fighting wind, she slipped into the square, via an iron gate. Her heels slid on the cobblestone path that crisscrossed the grass. At the other side of the park she exited through another gate and crossed the wide street. Breathing hard, she climbed the courthouse steps and scoured the map at the front door.

The jail was a left off the long, tall lower hall. Just beyond, a glass door led to a closer parking lot. Olivia swore and tried to tame her wild hair as her shoes clicked loudly on the marble.

Reaching Zach’s office door exactly on time, she twitched her skirt into place, tugged at her sweater’s neckline and then watched her right hand tremble on the doorknob.

If she’d known she was pregnant before Zach left, she would have told him. She was simply doing what she would have done then. If Zach didn’t want Evan, she could still say she’d done her best for her son.

She opened the door, anticipating a dispatcher. Instead, Zach looked up from paperwork spread on a wide, scarred oak desk.