To Catch A Wife

“Living and breathing.”

“Where is she?”

“We got a ping off her driver’s license. She was pulled over for speeding near some hole-in-the-wall in Wisconsin.”

Huh. He’d figured if the girl was still among the living, she was running from something, more likely someone, but he hadn’t expected her to make it that far out of Chicago. “Does this place have a name?”

He could hear the sound of his colleague tapping on a keyboard. “Riverton. That ring any bells?”

A whole cathedral full of them. “That’s my hometown, so, yeah, it sure does.”

“Huh. You don’t say. Want me to give the Riverton PD a call, have them ask her some questions?”

Jack opened the top drawer of his desk and plucked a business card out of the pencil tray. He’d put it there almost two months ago, the day he’d returned to Chicago from a rare visit to his hometown to attend his friend Eric Larsen’s funeral.

He’d looked at the card every day since.

Emily Finnegan, Reporter.

The Riverton Gazette.

Beneath that, her phone number and an email address.

He thought about her every day, too, even when he wasn’t looking at her card. He hadn’t wanted to. Simply hadn’t been able to stop himself. He’d thought about calling her but had decided against it. What would he say?

Thanks for a good time? Too tasteless.

See you next time I’m in town? Too vague.

Better to let it be. With some regret, he was now wishing he had given her a call.

Years ago, they had been paired up as maid of honor and best man at Eric and Annie’s wedding. Tall and reedy, a glossy-haired brunette with a brown-eyed gaze that didn’t miss a beat, Emily had returned home for the big event from Minneapolis, where she’d been studying journalism. Quiet, though not so much shy as watchful and reserved. It would have been a cliché for the best man to hook up with the maid of honor, so he hadn’t tried. But he’d wanted to. The next time he’d seen her was at Eric and Annie’s son’s christening. He and Emily were godparents, and a post-baptismal hookup would have been even tackier. Again, he’d let it go.

Eric’s funeral had been a game-changer. A change driven by grief, the raw emotion of the day, the sharp reminder that life could be unexpectedly short. As a homicide detective, Jack knew about death, had seen it up close and personal in a way few did. He possessed intimate knowledge of all the gruesome ways people could die. What he didn’t know, he’d realized the day of Eric’s funeral, was how they lived. He had no idea how he needed to live, and he’d discovered just how clueless he was as he’d helped carry his friend’s casket to the waiting hearse and later stood on the sidelines, watching a young widow with her family, each of them grieving the loss of a man they had loved. They should have been angry with the world, with the unfairness of losing someone so young. They were mourning their loss, of course, but they were also honoring their loved one by moving on with their lives and caring for one another. By living.

After the funeral, Jack had spent a polite amount of time exchanging platitudes with people he barely knew, drinking bitter coffee and eating several crustless triangle sandwiches that were a church-hall staple. He had spoken briefly with Annie and then left. He had encountered Emily dashing out of the coatroom with her jacket slung over her arm. He had done the gentlemanly thing and helped her put it on. They had walked out of the church and into a deluge, so he’d offered her a lift and suggested they go for coffee. That had segued into dinner. He had assumed they’d have nothing in common. The energy of city life pulsed through his veins, and she was a small-town girl through and through. So when he’d taken her home, he shouldn’t have stayed. But he had.

“Evans? You still there?” Brett’s voice dragged his attention back to the business at hand and the card between his fingers.

“Yeah. Sorry. What were you saying?”

“Should we have the Riverton PD interview the Daniels woman for us?”

“No.” Jack set the card next to the stack of reports on his desk. “I’d like to talk to her myself. If I leave now, I can be there in five hours. Could you ask them to—”

“She’s not going anywhere. They’ve given her a twenty-four-hour suspension, and her car’s been impounded. She’s been drinking.”

Jack checked his watch. Seven-thirty. An early start by anyone’s standard. He knew Rose had been raised by a drug addict and spent a lot of years in and out of foster homes. The Chicago PD wanted to know more about her relationship with the suspect they had in custody, and to what level, if any, she was involved in the homicides. Also, were they the reason she was on the run?

“Could you give them a call, let them know I’m on my way? I’ll talk to her when I get there.” By then, she should be sober enough to answer his questions.

“You got it.”

Jack closed the files on his desk and shoved them into a drawer, scrolled through the list of contacts on his phone and hit the one called Home.

“Mom, Dad,” he said after their voice mail beeped, glad he hadn’t woken them. “I need to be in Riverton for a few days. See you tonight.”

He picked up Emily’s card, debated whether or not to call her, too, let her know he was coming to town. No. He’d surprise her. Smiling at that, he slid the card into the pocket of his leather jacket.

“I might be late,” he added to the message he was leaving for his parents. “Don’t wait up.”

* * *

HER SISTERS HAD insisted that Emily take the pregnancy test immediately, so she had reluctantly barricaded herself in the second-floor bathroom, alone. The result was positive, as her gut instinct had been telling her for the past week.

Now what? The only thing she knew for sure was she wasn’t ready to venture back into the world, and she wasn’t ready to face her sisters.

Why had she lied? Telling them she was having Fred’s baby was the dumbest thing she’d ever done. What must they think? What had she been thinking? Fred had been her best friend since first grade, the closest thing to a brother she’d ever had, and just about the last person in the world she could imagine making a baby with. Fred? The very idea made her cheeks burn. Now she wouldn’t be able to face him, either.

Then there was Jack Evans, the real father of this tiny human who had taken up residence inside her. No need to worry about how to face him. After one night with her, he had hightailed it back to Chicago, never to be seen or heard from again.

She would have to get in touch with him, tell him about the baby. She wasn’t ready to go there, though. Not yet. This news was too new, too unsettling, too overwhelming. Jack was not part of her life, never had been, not in any real or meaningful way. And he never would be. Don’t think about him, she told herself. Not now.

Besides, she had more pressing concerns. Her sisters were waiting downstairs. They would pepper her with questions, most of which she wasn’t ready to answer. She needed to figure out something to tell them, though. Aside from Fred and her father, of course, they were the two people in the world who always had her back, and now she was going to need their support more than ever.

CJ would be this new little person’s irrepressible, fun-loving aunt, the one who took him or her kite flying and horseback riding. She’d teach him or her how to blow bubble-gum bubbles. The farm was as much a part of CJ as her free spirit. According to her, she had a perfect life—teaching riding lessons, taking B & B guests on trail rides, boarding horses for several families in town, and operating a successful therapeutic riding program. CJ would welcome this baby with arms as wide as the world.

Annie, the world’s best mom, knew all about raising a child on her own, but at least she’d done things in the proper order. Marriage first, baby second. The recent and unexpected death of her husband had been beyond her control, but she was coping as only a natural-born supermom could. She carpooled to softball games, helped with homework, baked the most awesome bake-sale cookies on the planet, all while single-handedly keeping house, running a business and making it look easy. Annie’s huge heart was brimming with all the care and attention this newcomer would ever need.

Fred, too, would be great with the baby. He’d be a sort of surrogate dad, as soon as he got over the shock—no, make that horror—that she had told her sisters he was the father. Once he was over that, he would always be there for her and—Emily ran her hands over the almost indiscernible curve of her belly—whoever this was.

But for now, it’s just you and me, kid.

Her heart rate amped up, and she realized she had been standing at the bathroom window, staring unseeingly through the white lace drapery. She pushed aside her panic along with the delicate fabric and focused her attention on the familiar scene below. The grassy backyard gave way to the soon-to-be-planted vegetable garden with its deer-proof fence and the chicken coop with its fox-proof enclosure. Beyond those, a stand of poplars, their branches studded with new buds. The stables, still visible through the trees, would soon be obscured by a trembling, leafy-green curtain. Emily had committed every square inch of this place to memory, could picture it clearly in any season. She loved the farm as it was now, sun-warmed and fresh from the late-spring rains. Summer would arrive any minute, and she would always associate it with the long, lazy days of school holidays. Then the sudden burst of autumn color would gradually fade to the monochrome that was a Wisconsin winter, then it would be Christmas, and after...

The baby would be here, and she’d be a mom. A fresh wave of panic rolled over her. Truthfully, she didn’t know the first thing about being a mother, never having had one, or at least, scarcely able to remember a time when she had.

Emily swung away from the window and faced herself in the bathroom mirror. She had been only four years old when her mother left them, and she had been waiting for her to come back ever since, a silly childhood fantasy she had never outgrown. She stared hard at her reflection. No matter how the future unfolded, she would figure this out, and she would always be there for this little one. Always, always, always.

“And, please, be a girl,” she whispered. She didn’t know anything about boys, and at that moment, she didn’t like them much, either. At least not the ones who stayed the night and never called.

She looked down at the plastic pregnancy stick and wondered for the umpteenth time how she could have let herself get so caught up in the moment. Because it had been the moment, she reminded herself, the one she had fantasized about since she’d started high school and her hormones had kicked in. She had been an underdeveloped fourteen-year-old. Jack Evans had been sixteen and in lust with Belinda Bellows, the knockout who had been crowned queen of Riverton’s Riverboat Festival, with the requisite physical assets needed to pull it off. Emily had been invisible back then, and she had stayed invisible, as far as Jack Evans was concerned, until her brother-in-law’s shocking death had put her on a collision course with the heart-searingly handsome Chicago PD detective.

During a cozy dinner conversation about pasts and futures—his and hers and Riverton’s—she had been surprised to learn they had things in common. A lot of things, actually. They both preferred dogs to cats, marinara to alfredo, red wine to white. Regrettably, they had shared a bottle of wine over dinner. Red, of course. And then he had walked her back to her little apartment above the newspaper office...and that was how she’d ended up here, two months later and too many weeks late, holding this stupid stick with its two colored lines. She hadn’t heard from him since. No phone calls, no emails. Not even a lousy text message. Calling him would have made her seem desperate, so she hadn’t.

The shuffle of footsteps in the hallway was followed by a light knock on the bathroom door.

“Emily?” Annie asked. “Are you still in there?”