The Runaway Daughter

Most of the time, anyway.

Had his brother and his chief deputy lost their minds?

“DRUGS?” MAGGIE RIVERS asked Claire Morton.

They’d moved their whispered conversation into the girls’ bathroom at the Oakwood Youth Center. Anything to avoid the posse of teenage boys, Garret Henderson included, who wouldn’t stop talking about Travis Reynolds overdosing. The mayor’s son always thrived on sharing every gory detail he overheard from his dad.

Claire’s baby was in dire need of a diaper change, so she and Maggie had jumped at the excuse to get lost.

“Are you sure Sam’s dealing?” Maggie asked her friend.

“He’s doing more than that. I think he’s supplying the stuff to half the county. Where else would he be getting the money for the new car, and the apartment and all the electronic junk he’s got lying around everywhere?” Claire shoved her frizzy red hair away from her face and yanked at the plastic tape holding the diaper on a wiggling baby Max. The plastic unfolded from the baby’s bottom, revealing more mess than a seven-month-old should be capable of making.

Maggie couldn’t keep from covering her nose.

“Oh, that’s not right!” She tried breathing through her mouth. It didn’t help.

“Peaches.” Claire went to work with a wad of baby wipes. She looked like she wanted to race Maggie for the door. “I’m trying solid foods, and this happens every time he eats strained peaches.”

“Then stop giving them to him.” Desperate to do something to help, Maggie fished for a fresh diaper in her friend’s oversize bag.

She lifted out an Elmo-emblazoned plastic panty. A small baggie came with it, slipping off the diaper onto the cracked, fake-marble surface of the vanity. The white powder inside could have been formula. But the speed at which her friend snatched the baggie off the counter put a swift end to that theory.

“You see?” Claire waved it fiercely in the air between them. She left Maggie to hold the baby as she stomped to the nearest stall and flushed the bag, contents and all, down the toilet. “Sam thinks he’s hiding it from me. There’s never anything like this in the apartment. But I found more between the seats of his car the other day. He wouldn’t tell me what it was— just that it was none of my business. Now it’s in Max’s things. I think…I think Sam might have even been selling the stuff that killed Travis. I saw them talking together the other day, all secret-like. And Travis called Sam’s cell phone yesterday morning.”

Maggie stared as her friend returned her attention to the baby she’d made with Sam Walker, one of the shadiest characters in Oakwood. She had to keep her cool for her friend’s sake. Claire had never thought she was a goody-goody, like some of the other kids, just because her dad was the sheriff and her uncle a deputy. Now wasn’t the time to prove her friend wrong and start nagging about the law.

Besides, she’d heard worse back home in New York, where she’d lived with her mom until a year ago. It hadn’t been hard to pick out the druggies and the dealers in her high school in Manhattan. Even though she’d gone to a specialized math and science school with some of the smartest kids in the country, the drug culture had been accepted as a way of life. Moving to picturesque Georgia to live with her newly discovered father, Maggie had expected things to be different. Simpler somehow, more homespun.

But it hadn’t taken long to recognize the familiar patterns. The half lives being lived by people, many of them teens her age or younger, who fed their habits in secret, or so they thought. But the secrets were getting harder to hide. Her dad’s deputies kept raiding places all over town, trying to bust things up. But nothing was working.

And now Claire’s boyfriend was the ring leader?

“There were all these people at the apartment when Max and I got home last night.” Her friend hefted the now clean smelling baby onto her shoulder and pushed at the hair falling into her worried blue eyes. “I didn’t know many of them. I never do. It seems like it’s a new bunch every time, except for one or two of the local guys Sam keeps telling me to forget about seeing there. And there are the endless cell-phone calls. The beepers going off all the time. Then Sam or one of his goons disappears, and it’s hours before I see them again. They keep talking about some kind of shack over on his mom’s property near Pineview. They’re storing who knows what there. And one of the guys last night had a gun. I swear, Maggie, I’ve never been so scared in my life.”

“If Sam’s running the local drug scene, you can’t stay with him, Claire. It’s not safe, for you or for Max. You’ve got to get out of there.”

And you’ve got to tell somebody, but Maggie didn’t dare say the words out loud. Claire was so freaked, no way would she talk to Maggie’s dad or any grown-up. Not until she was free of Sam.

“Get out where? Like I can find some place to stay without going to Sam’s family. And those people are bad as he is. I think he’s bankrolling most of them with the money he’s making. No way would they take my side against him. They wouldn’t let me walk away with Max, either.”

“You’re always complaining that Sam never spends any time with the baby.” Maggie smoothed a hand over the downy fluff on Max’s head. She and her dad would never get back the years when neither of them had known the other existed. Every new day was a scramble to make up for what they’d missed. How could Sam not care about his own kid? “I hate to say it, but I doubt Sam’s going to stop you two from leaving.”

“Maybe not, but his family would. The Walkers are like some kind of backwoods clan—nobody takes what’s theirs. And they’re all over the place,” Claire added with a touch of envy.

She’d hit town as a runaway, leaving behind parents she said had wanted to control her life and tell her what to do. She’d been on her way to somewhere bigger like Atlanta. Someplace you could start over and make a new beginning with nothing, not even a high-school diploma. But then she’d hooked up with Sam Walker, and the guy’s anything-goes, get-the-most-from-today line had made Oakwood look really good.

Now, a year and a half later, she and Max were trapped in a no-win situation worse than what she’d left behind in Virginia.

“Sam’s mama’s not going to let this baby out of her sight,” Claire added.

“What does Betty Walker have to do with it? Max is yours.”

“And Sam is hers. My job is to make her son happy, and take care of her grandson. If she got wind I was even thinking of leaving, the family would take Max from me and worry about making it look legal later.”

“Then you’d go to the police. My dad—”

“The Walkers could make Max disappear before your dad got to them. I have no one here, Maggie. My parents don’t even know I had a baby. And I’m not sure they’d help, even if they did. I’ve got to forget all the stuff going on in the apartment and make the best of it. At least until Max is older. Maybe then if I take him away, I can leave him with someone while I work.”

And that was the argument Maggie kept banging her head against, every time she tried to talk her friend into walking away from her baby’s father. Claire believed she was completely helpless. Completely dependent. Sam and his family made sure of it.

“Can… Can you talk with Sam about it?” Maggie fought not to tell her friend she was nuts for even thinking of sleeping one more night in that apartment. “Maybe he’ll agree to do whatever he’s doing somewhere else. There has to be some other place he can…you know, do business with people.”

What was she saying! Sam Walker had to be stopped.

But Claire was already shaking her head, her eyes clouding with tears. “I hardly say anything to him anymore. The baby’s crying all night, and he’s tired of Max’s stuff being all over the apartment when he has people over. I don’t even think he wants us there, except his mama’d hit the roof if he turned us out. And I think…I think I heard him and those guys talking about that drive-by shooting that happened last month. I…I think Sam was involved somehow. Maybe that guy who died even worked for him. I’m scared, Maggie. I…” A tear trickled down. “I don’t know what to do.”

“The drive-by’s all my dad and my uncle talk about. Nothing like that’s ever happened here before. It’s got everyone in town messed up worrying. Claire—” She grasped her friend’s elbow. “You’ve got to get away from Sam.”

“I can’t. Where would I go?”

“Let me talk to my dad. He’ll know what to do.”

Her dad. Maggie’s chest grew tight, same as every time she thought how lucky she was to have her mom, and now her dad and Uncle Tony in her life. Even crusty old LeJeune was growing on her. Her Oakwood family took care of each other like nobody’s business, the part of her newfound southern heritage she liked best. To people down here, family meant fighting to the death for the people you loved.

But Claire had no one to fight for her but scummy Sam.

And me. She has me.

“Don’t you dare tell Sheriff Rivers,” her friend warned. “No cops. They’d want to question Sam and his family. They’d take Max away from me, ’cause I have no way to take care of him without Sam’s money, then the Walkers—”

“My dad wouldn’t do that—”

“I swear, Maggie. If you tell anyone about this—”

“Okay! I won’t.”

“If you do, I’ll never speak to you ag—”

The bathroom door swung open.

Claire sucked in the rest of her threat.

“Hey girls.” Angie Carter’s smile lost some of its customary gusto as she absorbed their stunned silence. “Everything okay?”

“Everything’s fine.” Claire grabbed the diaper bag and all but trampled Oakwood’s chief deputy rushing out the door.

Maggie picked up the packet of baby wipes her friend had left, and tried to slip away, too. The hand on her arm wasn’t exactly a command to halt, but Maggie skidded to a stop inside the door all the same.