The Devaney Brothers: Daniel

“You didn’t, did you?” Kendra prodded. “So why should I have to? Just because I’m a kid?”

“You have a point,” Molly admitted, impressed by the girl’s quick grasp of things. “But letting you stick around here and giving you a job could get me into a whole lot of trouble. You’re a minor in the eyes of the law, even if you think you’re old enough to be on your own.”

Kendra gave her another one of those too-grown-up looks. “What’s the alternative? You don’t give me a job and I keep running,” she said simply. “Do you honestly want that on your conscience? The next place I stop, the people might not be so nice.”

Well, hell, Molly thought. She definitely did not want that on her conscience. “One week, max,” she said very firmly. “And you open up to me. I’ll try to help you figure out the best thing to do.”

“If that means calling my parents, it’s not going to happen,” Kendra said stubbornly.

Molly was equally determined to see that it did, but she merely said, “We’ll see.”

Now that her immediate fate was settled, Kendra gave her a hopeful look. “I don’t suppose you have any of that apple pie left, do you? I could smell it when you brought it to those guys in the booth next to me. It smelled awesome.”

“Yes, there’s pie left.” Her cook always baked enough for at least two days, because it was a customer favorite.

“And ice cream? I’m pretty sure there was ice cream on their pie.”

Molly chuckled. “Yes, there’s ice cream. When was the last time you ate?” she asked as she cut a slice of pie and set it in front of Kendra, then added a large scoop of vanilla ice cream.

“A trucker bought me a couple of doughnuts this morning,” Kendra said as she dug into the dessert.

“Please tell me you were not hitching rides,” Molly said.

Once again, Kendra regarded her indignantly. “What? Do I look stupid? I know better than to get in a car or a truck with a stranger, especially some guy.”

“Well, thank heavens for that.”

“This was a lady trucker, and she was in this place where my bus stopped. She must have felt sorry for me or something, ’cause she offered to buy the doughnuts. I could have bought them for myself, but I figured I should hang on to all the money I could, since I wasn’t sure how long it would be before I could get a job.” She gave Molly a thoughtful look. “So, how much are you paying me?”

“We’ll work it out in the morning.”

“Meals are part of the deal, right?”

Molly bit back a grin. “Yes.”

“And I can sleep here, too?”

“Yes. Were you by any chance a negotiator in a previous life?”

Kendra shrugged. “Just looking out for myself. If I don’t, who will?”

Indeed, Molly thought. Wasn’t that a lesson she’d had to learn the hard way?

* * *

The saddest eyes Daniel Devaney had ever seen stared back at him from the latest missing-child poster to cross his desk. Kendra Grace Morrow had huge, dark, haunted eyes. Only thirteen, according to the information on the fax, she looked older and far too wise.

Believed to be somewhere in Maine, she had run away from her home in Portland two weeks earlier, no doubt leaving behind frantic parents and baffled police. Daniel’s heart broke for all of them, just as it did every single time he looked over one of these posters. At least this time there seemed to be no question that the girl had taken off on her own. She hadn’t been kidnapped. She’d left a note that hadn’t said much and packed a bag. There had been a few sightings reported to the police, and in each the girl had been spotted alone.

Still, runaways never seemed to understand the dangers that awaited them, or else the situation they were leaving behind was so desperate, so awful, that anything seemed to be an improvement. He didn’t know the facts of this particular case, but they all had one thing in common—a kid who needed help. And each time he saw one, he wondered if there had ever been posters like this for his three older brothers, the ones he hadn’t remembered until he’d accidently found the old photos in the attic, the brothers his parents had abandoned years ago.

Sometimes when he thought of what had happened, of the choice that Connor and Kathleen Devaney had made to keep Daniel and his twin, Patrick, Daniel’s heart ached. What had Ryan, Sean and Michael thought when they’d discovered that they’d been left behind? How long had they cried? How long had it been before they’d stopped watching and waiting for their mom and dad to come back for them? Had foster care been kind to them? Or had the system failed them, just as their own parents had?

He’d met them all recently, but they’d danced around the tough issues. One of these days they were going to have to face the past together and deal with the mess their parents had made of all their lives. It wasn’t as if he and Patrick had emerged unscathed, not once they’d discovered the truth.

Patrick had taken it even harder than Daniel had. He’d left home and hadn’t spoken to their parents since. Nor had he been in touch with Daniel until recently, when he’d set up that first meeting with Ryan, Sean and Michael. He’d expected Daniel to have explanations by now for what had happened all those years ago, but Daniel was still as much in the dark as everyone else.

Oh, he’d tried his best to make sense of what had happened, but beyond revealing the existence of the three older boys, his parents had said precious little to try to justify what they had done. Even though Daniel had maintained contact with his parents, that didn’t mean he’d worked through his own anger and guilt over having been one of the two chosen to be kept.

He supposed he owed his folks in one respect. Had it not been for the discovery of their betrayal, he might not have found the kind of work that he was doing now—saving kids in trouble, fighting for their rights, mending fences between them and their parents or finding them loving homes. The caseloads were heavy, the hours long, but it was important, meaningful work. And it could break a man’s heart on a daily basis.

He coped by adhering strictly to the rules, by reducing messy emotions to black-and-white regulations. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t. Gazing into Kendra Morrow’s haunted eyes, he instinctively knew that this was one of those times it wouldn’t work. The girl was a heartbreaker. He hoped to heaven she was in someone else’s jurisdiction, where she’d be found safe.

He sighed when his phone rang, relieved by the intrusion into his dark thoughts about a world in which kids ran away when they were little more than babies, too young to understand the risks.

“Devaney,” he said when he’d picked up the phone.

“Daniel, it’s Joe Sutton at police headquarters. Have you seen that poster for Kendra Morrow?”

“It’s on my desk now.”

“I was just having lunch over in Widow’s Cove,” the detective told him.

The mere mention of Widow’s Cove was enough to make Daniel’s palms sweat. And there was only one place in town worth going to for lunch...Molly’s. “Oh?” he said as if his heart wasn’t thumping unsteadily.

“I think Kendra Morrow’s hanging out at Molly Creighton’s place on the waterfront,” Joe reported. “You know the one I mean? Best chowder on the coast?”

“Yeah, Jess’s. Are you sure it was Kendra?”

“If it wasn’t her, it was her double. I’d just seen the poster before I went over there.”

“Then why didn’t you pick her up?” Daniel asked, surprised by the lapse from a cop who was usually quick to nab runaways for their own protection. He and Joe had handled more than their share of these cases together, and he respected the older man’s instincts.

“Because I looked through the file earlier, and something’s not quite right. I thought you might want to have a chat with the girl while I do some checking into why she ran away in the first place. You know as well as I do that sometimes these things aren’t as cut-and-dried as they seem at first glance. If I’d thought she was at risk, I’d have brought her in, but she’s not going anywhere. Molly will see to that. I didn’t see any point in uprooting her until I have all the facts.”

This time Daniel’s sigh was even heavier. He and Molly got along like a couple of tomcats fighting for turf. Their relationship had been passionate and volatile for years, even before he’d let her down so damn badly. After what had happened the night she’d told him she was pregnant, the relationship had cooled to a degree that a glance between them could freeze meat. He regretted that, but he’d accepted it. He’d been a stubborn fool, and he didn’t deserve her forgiveness.

Out of respect for her feelings, it had been a few years now since he’d set foot in that bar she’d inherited from her grandfather. He stayed away in part because Patrick tended to hang out at Jess’s, but mostly because he couldn’t bear the look of justifiable contempt in Molly’s eyes.

“Can you take a run over there?” Joe pressed.

Daniel hesitated for just an instant, but when it came to work, he always did what he had to do, no matter how delicate the situation or how uncomfortable it made him.

“I’m on my way,” he promised, folding the fax into quarters and stuffing it into the pocket of his jacket. “I’ll check in with you later. You sure you don’t want me to bring her over, if it is Kendra? If she figures out we’re onto her, she could run again.”

“Just alert Molly, in case she doesn’t know anyone’s looking for the girl. She’ll keep her safe enough.”

“She has a thirteen-year-old working in a bar,” Daniel reminded him, an edge of sarcasm in his voice. It was just like Molly and her soft heart to take in a runaway kid and to hell with the consequences. Had she even once considered how desperate the parents might be or how many laws she might be breaking?