The Good Girl

Officer Mason might still be alive. And if he was, he surely needed medical assistance.

The street had been strangely empty. Where were the emergency personnel? Neighbors? She couldn’t leave the kids. And she couldn’t pick up Damon and the baby and carry them out.

Besides, where would they go? To the street? The officer in the car hadn’t been safe there.

“I’ll be right back,” she said to the boy, even though it was completely clear that he didn’t intend to go anywhere. Slipping out into the eerie grayness, she pushed forward against the wind and made her way down to the car. The tree lay diagonally across it. She hauled open the front passenger door. Mason, slumped against the steering wheel, was unresponsive. His legs were pinned by the tree. But he was breathing. Grabbing the microphone from the police radio, she gave the dispatcher a hurried update as to their location and his condition and then, knowing there was no more she could do, took one last look at the mercifully unconscious Officer Mason. She hollered at him to hang on and pushed her way back up to the front door.

Did folks uptown know how badly they were being hit? No one had expected the storm to reach shore.

Another burst of wind struck the side of the termite-infested wooden building as she leaned against the front door, forcing it to close, hoping the rickety latch would hold. Heart pounding, she found enough calm to say, “You can’t stay here, Damon. It’s not safe.” She tried to reason with the small-boned, tough-skinned boy whose drug-addict mother had been arrested that morning at the end of a three-day binge in a seedy motel. The place was in a neighboring village, and she’d been with a dock worker who was new to town. “You have no money. No way to buy food and diapers for Kayla.”

After her briefing on the case that morning, she’d opted to come in alone to get the boy. She’d thought keeping the police out of the picture was in Damon’s best interests. That was before the storm hit.

“We been doin’ just fine.” The boy’s look was hard with only the merest hint of uncertainty in those vivid blue eyes. Mary wondered how long he’d been virtually alone with the baby girl who appeared to be healthy—in spite of having been born to a user.

Wind hurled and glass broke. The window in the bedroom? Was the one in this room next? She had to get the kids to safety.

“Is there a basement in this place?”

“Just in the buildin’ next door.”

“Then we have to go there. Now.”

“Uh-uh.”

Damon had softened earlier when she’d asked him about Kayla. He liked to talk about his baby sister. While her gaze searched for any safe harbor at all, her mind scrambled for conversation that might lure the boy into a sense of cooperation.

“Your mom said Kayla’s had her checkups. Is that right?” If they didn’t leave immediately, the baby’s health didn’t matter. And neither did Damon’s. Or hers.

“‘Course. At the free clinic. I took her myself.”

And the county clinic hadn’t notified child Protective Services that a newborn was in the care of a young boy?

Damon said something else, but she couldn’t hear him as the storm’s intensity increased.

“Damon, we have to get out of here!” Fighting the instincts that told her to run, Mary listened to her training—to her heart—and knew that she would not desert these children. No matter what.

Which meant she might only have a few minutes to get through to the boy. Or die with them.

A burst of wind slammed the building so hard, she felt it shake. Diving for the boy, shielding the baby with her body, Mary wrapped her arms around Damon and shoved them toward the tiny bathroom in the center of the apartment. Pushing them into the tub, she climbed in with them, lay down and cradled the children against her. Kayla was crying. She couldn’t worry about that at the moment.

“I lied to the doctor,” Damon yelled, but she could hardly hear him.

“It’s okay,” Mary yelled back, praying silently for their protection. For the children, at least, to be saved.

“I told him Mom was sick with the flu. And when he said he had to see her, I called a girl I know next door to come and pretend to be her. She’s been going with me to all Kayla’s checkups.”

The storm raged. The baby cried. The boy yelled. And Mary thought about Bill Mendholson. She’d never told him she loved him.

She wished she had.

Chapter Two (#ulink_08334e64-3e36-50de-a133-24f78caa518c)

“It’s clearly a storm-related accident.” Bill, standing with the coroner inside the marina store, stared out at the potential crime scene down by the docks, hoping that the older couple whose RV had rolled over had never known what hit them. So far, they were the only reported casualties.

Sam Pawloski, Comfort Cove’s coroner, nodded.

“Sorry to call you out in this weather, Detective,” Jack, the street cop who’d met Bill at the scene, muttered. Jack was a new cop. Maybe still a bit excitable. “At first glance, with the bodies in different places, it looked like we had a mess on our hands.”

Their voices were raised to be heard over the sound of wind raging outside. So far that was all there was to the storm. Dangerously high winds. No rain. No thunder or lightning.

Just a hell of a lot of debris. “You got the mess part right,” Sam said.

Pulling off his glasses, Bill wiped them and put them back on, but nothing looked better.

The parking lot was filled with branches, bark, a sail, a couple of life vests, a few shingles, pieces of metal and trash, rope, a cardboard box and an empty beer case. Candy wrappers and paper litter skated across the pavement.

“I’ve seen worse,” Manny, the weathered old marina owner and fish dealer, said from the counter behind them. “Good thing no one was out on the water.”

“I hate to think how much damage there’s going to be to the boats,” Jack said, shaking his head.

Though he’d grown up in Comfort Cove, Bill didn’t know any of the fishermen personally. He knew of one, though. Chris Talbot had been peripherally involved in one of Ramsey Miller’s missing child cold cases the previous month. Talbot was now engaged to Emma Sanderson, sister to the long-missing toddler, Claire Sanderson.

Claire had been ruled out as a victim of Ramsey’s newly arrested pedophile—but she was still missing.

“Which boat belongs to Chris Talbot?” Bill asked the curmudgeonly, leather-skinned man behind the counter.

“That one there.” The man nodded toward the right side of the dock. “The Son Catcher.”

Not the newest boat on the block by any means. “Looks like he’s got it tied down tight.” The fishing vessel was rocking fiercely.

“Chris is careful,” Manny said, almost with pride, as if Talbot was his own son. “Used to be that boat was his whole life. Till he met himself a woman he cared about more. We didn’t think that was ever going to happen.”

Emma Sanderson.

“He’s been talking to me about having a wedding down here at the docks over Thanksgiving. I told him he’d best be talking to his lady about that, but he says she wants it, too. Go figure.”

Wondering if Ramsey knew about the upcoming nuptials, Bill was about to ask where, on the smelly fishing docks, a couple would have a wedding, when Jack’s portable patrol radio sounded a call for help.

A cop had just been reported unconscious in a car outside a duplex a couple of blocks away. A woman, a social worker, was inside with two kids—one of whom was a baby. They didn’t know if anyone inside was hurt. Emergency vehicles had been dispatched.

There was no reason for a detective to be on the scene. No reason to risk his life in the storm.

Bill tore out of the marina store, a force in the wind as he ran for his car.

Funny, your life really did pass before your eyes when you faced death. Her mother’s voice floated into that little bathroom, covering the screaming baby, the howling winds, the repeated pounding of a loose board against the house. “You’re a good girl, Mary. Don’t ever forget that.”

Had she forgotten?