Child by Chance Page 5

  All in all, without studying his collage or knowing that he’d been expelled from class, she’d say that his parents had done about the best job parents could hope to do raising a child.

  Or a mother would hope that someone else would do when raising her child.

  “What do you think?” Her son held up the top edges of his poster.

  His work with her was done.

  She had to blink. Pretended to need to scratch her nose.

  “I think you’ve got the makings of a talented artist.” They weren’t any of the words raging through her. They were the ones she could say.

  And they were the truth.

  Her son might not have her hair. Or her nose. But he had her artistic ability, and then some.

  He nodded. “I like it.”

  “Good.”

  Oh, my God. This was it.

  “How soon can I have it back?” He was looking at her. She couldn’t just sit there and stare at him. Or cry.

  “Within the week,” she told him.

  “Cool.”

  Talia stood. There was no other choice. She collected her things just as she’d done the other four days she’d been there. Packed them into her bag.

  Kent helped her cover the poster board, his smaller fingers brushing her hand, and she almost lost it. And then a look of horror crossed his face.

  Because he somehow knew that he’d touched a fraud? A woman who was far too dirty to even breathe the same air he breathed?

  Boys his age had to stay as far away as possible from the type of woman she’d been.

  But she wasn’t that woman anymore. By choice. It had been her actions that got her away from that life.

  “You aren’t going to show anyone else, are you?”

  His question finally registered.

  “I can’t promise that, Kent,” she told him. She gave him one thing she’d always promised herself she’d give to everyone. Her honesty. For the most part she’d kept that promise. “I can promise you that I won’t show any other students, though. And it’s not going to be hung on display.”

  His features relaxed. “Okay, then. No kids.”

  Why didn’t he want anyone else to see his collage?

  The questions attacked her, as they’d been doing all week, and she wondered if she was up to this task. This time. Could she even hope to give Kent’s collage a fair read?

  Not that it really mattered in the end. He was being cared for by professionals. Mrs. Barbour had told her that Kent saw a counselor on a regular basis. And his teachers and father were watching out for him, too.

  Her little collage experiment was just a school art exercise at this point.

  Her bag was on her shoulder. His poster under her arm. And Kent had his math book open. “Okay, then,” she said, turning toward the door. “See ya.”

  “Yeah, see ya.”

  Talia let herself out. She made it to her car.

  And then she fell apart.

  CHAPTER SIX

  SHERMAN DIDN’T MAKE Kent go to bed early. He’d told his son on his tenth birthday that he could stay up until ten from then on if he wanted to. But the boy still held to his nine o’clock bedtime anytime that they were home.

  He got himself up at six in the morning, too. Brooke used to wake him every day. Sherman had taken over for her right after the accident, but every morning Kent had already been on his way to the bathroom to brush his teeth and comb his hair before getting dressed for school. But he still presented himself at his son’s bedroom door every day. To say good-morning.

  On Saturday at 6:05, Kent was still asleep. With his heart in his throat, Sherman stood frozen until he saw the soft rise and fall of his son’s chest. And realized that he was falling back into the debilitating habit that had practically suffocated him—and his son, too—after Brooke’s death. He’d attended a grief counseling group, but it had been Dr. Jordon, Kent’s counselor, who helped him see that he was in a state of almost-constant panic—fearing that he was going to lose Kent, too.

  Kent was healthy. Robust. Perfectly fine. He wasn’t going to lose him. What he was going to do was take advantage of his boy’s sleeping in and get some work done on the computer.

  Noncampaign work.

  For two years he’d been surfing the internet for any mention of anyone who’d gone missing around the time of Brooke’s death. Or of anyone spotted around the neighborhood where the car her killer had been driving had been stolen. He was active on social networks. Trolled Facebook pages of anyone who said they were from that area. Same for Twitter. YouTube and Tumblr, too, in case someone posted a video or photo he might recognize from the crash scene.

  The police had done what they could. They’d retrieved the surveillance cameras from a convenience store in the stolen car’s neighborhood. They’d talked to folks who lived within a half-mile radius of the crime scene. The guy had been driving the wrong way down the freeway on a very deserted stretch of California highway.

  Law enforcement was convinced that the crash had been the result of drunk driving, period.

  Sherman wasn’t so sure. More paranoia? Maybe. But the stretch of road Brooke had been on had been long and straight—the crash happening in the middle of the stretch where someone could have seen cars for a long distance in both directions. Even if he’d been drunk surely she’d have seen him in enough time to at least swerve. But she hadn’t done so.

  The man she’d been meeting in the city that night—Alan Klasky—had said Brooke had only had one glass of wine and had ordered coffee to go for the ride home. Investigators had determined that she’d been holding the half-empty cup when she’d been hit head-on. Something about the splatter of the coffee on the air bag—her right wrist and her face had been a clear indication that the cup had been upright. She hadn’t fallen asleep. Couldn’t have or the cup would have fallen out of her grasp. Or tipped, at the very least.

  He ran over the details in his mind. Arranging and rearranging had become a habit for him, too. Always looking for another angle, for anything they missed. He wasn’t sure why he couldn’t let it go.

  Brooke had been killed in a car accident by a drunk driver who’d stolen a car. His wife was gone. Kent’s mother was gone. The only thing left was making whoever had done this pay for what they’d done.

  Important, yes. But enough to hang the rest of his life on? Or to occupy so much of his time and brain power?

  He’d probably be better served using that energy to figure out his son. But then, he struggled with everything he knew about Kent, and about grief and kids going through grief, and kids who lost their mothers, and boys’ relationships with their mothers, and ten-year-olds in fourth grade on an almost hourly basis, too.

  Wonder was that he got anything else done.

  Must be like Brooke had always said— laughingly in the beginning and then, later, not—he was the master of multitasking. He worked on a campaign and his mind also germinated other issues at the same time.

  He slept and seemed to work out solutions to problems, she’d once said to him. She’d begun to take offense at the way he always seemed to have plans for them, to know what they should do in any given situation. She’d begun to feel as if she was losing herself little by little to him.

  Shaking his head, Sherman moved from one social networking site to another and swore when his computer froze up on him.

  His time on the case was limited by the fact that he didn’t ever work on it when Kent was awake. Brooke’s death had changed their son. Clearly, he wasn’t recovering as well as they’d all hoped. Wasn’t adjusting at all as Dr. Jordon had first predicted he would. Sherman wasn’t going to make matters worse by bringing up evidence in the case for his precocious son to grind in that busy mind of his.

  While the cursor turned over and over on his screen
as the web page loaded, he moved to the computer on the next wall in the office he and Brooke used to share and he and Kent now shared. Using his mom’s computer had been important to the boy.

  Signing on, he opened the internet browser, typed what he wanted and, while he waited for the screen to open, perused the list of recently accessed folders that had flashed on the screen when he’d put his cursor in the search bar. He’d pulled off all of Brooke’s files, storing them on an external hard drive in his room, before he’d turned the computer over to Kent.

  Mostly it was school stuff. Kent regularly showed Sherman his computer work. Making everything accessible to his dad had been one of the prerequisites of his son’s having his own computer. There were dangers out there that Kent might not be aware of. And he’d readily agreed to Sherman’s rules.

  Sherman didn’t exercise his right to search very often. It wasn’t as if Kent had a lot of time at the computer without Sherman present in the room. But when he saw a folder he didn’t recognize— triq3tra—he investigated. The folder was three-deep in last year’s math folder. He’d never have found it if it hadn’t been in the recently used list. Heart beating uncomfortably, he clicked on it, hoping to God he and Kent didn’t have worse problems than he thought.

  The file was password protected.

  No matter what he tried, Sherman couldn’t open it.

  * * *

  TALIA WAS IN the shower Saturday morning, trying not to worry about the fact that she hadn’t even started her homework for the coming week and was working eight-hour shifts at the mall in Beverly Hills both Saturday and Sunday. She’d always been a night owl, even before her previous profession. And she had no social life—completely her choice. She knew she’d get the work done.

  She just preferred to keep to her schedule.

  “Tal?”

  At first she thought she’d imagined the voice. Her inner self calling her to task, no doubt.

  “Talia?”

  “Oh!” Through the glass door of the master bathroom shower, Talia saw Tatum round the corner. She turned her back and instinctively covered herself, then realized what an idiotic thing that was to do.

  “Sorry,” Tatum said, sitting on the stool in the separate room across from the shower. “But it’s not like I haven’t seen it all before,” she said.

  When Tatum was small, more often than not she’d showered with Talia. Someone had to help the little girl bathe, make sure that she got the soap out of her hair.

  “I’m not used to have someone walking around my house while I’m showering,” Talia said.

  She didn’t want her sister to see the body that had rocked the stage more nights than she could count. She knew she’d get over it in time—time took care of everything, didn’t it?—but right now, her naked body shamed her. Illogical though that was.

  “Sorry,” Tatum said again. “You’re usually heading out the door by eight. It’s five to, and when I saw your car but you didn’t answer my knock, I got worried.”

  And Tatum, like Sedona and Tanner, had a key to the place. At Talia’s insistence, not theirs. She wanted her little sister to have a place to hang out, or hide out, at any time for any reason. “I was up late last night,” she said, finishing her shower and reaching for a towel at the same time she shut off the water.

  “Doing homework?” Her sister’s voice came through the open door. Talia could see her denim-clad knees bobbing up and down.

  Tatum knew her schedule.

  “No.”

  “You spent the night with his collage, didn’t you?”

  An adult might have been too polite to ask. Tanner would have been too cautious around her to push.

  “Yep.”

  As Talia wrapped a towel around her body and another one around her head, Tatum left her perch on the stool and followed her to the bedroom. “And?”

  All of Talia’s underwear was still pretty much the unmentionable kind. She just couldn’t afford to replace them and had no intention of anyone seeing them.

  “Pick me out something to wear, would you?” she asked, pointing to the walk-in closet opposite the regular closet on the far side of the room. Her stuff would have fit easily in her regular closet, but she’d never had a walk-in before. She liked getting dressed in it. It was like a private dressing room.

  At the moment, it gave her the privacy to grab a thong and a scrap of lace with underwire and get them on before pulling on a robe and heading back into the bathroom to semidry her hair. Just enough to get it up in a twist. Any more than that would dry it out.

  “How often do you wash your hair?” Tatum asked, coming in to sit on the counter and watch as Talia expertly flipped the long blond strands up and around her hand. Hooker’s hair, she thought, knowing full well that it had made her a lot of money over the years. She should cut it. Dye it.

  But she’d always loved her hair. Even as a little kid.

  “Three times a week,” she said.

  “I only do two.” Tatum picked up her can of hairspray, read the label. “Otherwise, it gets too dry.”

  “Have you been using the hydrating conditioner I gave you?”

  “Yeah. And the detangler, too.”

  “It’s only been a couple of months. Give it time. Your hair will be soft as a baby’s by summer.”

  She liked to dress before applying her makeup—so as not to smear anything on her clothes. But Tatum was sitting there. Watching her.

  “I wish I could do that as quickly as you,” she said, watching at Talia applied a coat of face cream to her skin, topped it with foundation and then began applying three shades of eye shadow, liner and mascara to her eyes. All to have the end result look as if she wasn’t wearing much makeup at all.

  And she didn’t want Tatum to ever be as quick as she was at the artifice. Going from lap dance back to the stage in five minutes hadn’t left her with much time for touching up her makeup. Leaving a bedroom where she’d just been slapped in the face by her husband, to go out and meet his guests, hadn’t left much time for covering up, either.

  But she’d managed.

  “How about getting me some coffee?” she asked as she added a bit of blush to finish.

  “Sure, mocha or dark roast?” She and Tatum had shopped together for the little cups of coffee that went with Sedona’s one-cup machine. She’d said she didn’t need it at Tanner’s house as they’d never just drink one cup of coffee there.

  “Dark roast.”

  As soon as Tatum slid off the counter, Talia threw on the light purple blouse and beige silk-lined pants her sister had chosen for her. Before she was in the wedged sandals Tatum had also chosen, her sister was back, placing a cup of coffee on the bathroom counter.

  “Wear this,” she said, pulling her favorite pendant out of Talia’s jewelry box. It was an inch-long hand, decorated with colorful little stones, and on a fairly short gold chain. Tatum found the matching earrings and laid them out, as well.

  The sisters had ordered the ensemble off a home shopping television network to commemorate the first time Tatum spent the night with her in the beach house. Tatum had picked a piece, too. Talia was still paying them both off.

  “You never told me why you’re here,” Talia said as she gave herself one last glance in the mirror.

  “I just wanted to see you,” Tatum said. Then added, “I’m on my way to the Stand for a session and...I’d hoped you’d stop by last night...”

  Oh, God, she was failing her little sister again. “You should have called,” she said, not bothering to hide the sorrow on her face as she faced the beautiful young woman Tatum had become. “I’d have been there in a heartbeat if I’d known you needed me.”

  “Chill, big sis,” Tatum said, touching Talia’s wrist lightly. “It wasn’t me I was concerned about. It’s you. And I didn’t call because I d
idn’t want to bother you, but I worried about you all night. Yesterday was your last day with Kent.”

  “Yeah, but you don’t need to worry. I’m fine.”

  “That’s why you spent the night with his collage?”

  Talia meant to brush past her sister, down the hall and out the door. She was going to be late for work if she didn’t get a move on. Instead, she stood there helplessly, her eyes filling with tears.

  “He’s...” She shook her head. “No, never mind. I’m fine.”

  “You can see him again, Tal,” Tatum said, following her through the house and out the door, double-checking that Talia had locked it.

  “No.”

  “It was in your adoption agreement. You can contact his father and at least ask if—”

  “No.” Talia was okay now, her purse in hand on her way to work. Where expensive clothes and good jewelry were the only things she’d have to worry about. That and trying to help women whose bodies weren’t perfect look good.

  “Just...think about it, okay?” Tatum asked, standing in between Talia and the driver’s-side car door.

  “It would be a selfish thing to do.” She said out loud what she’d been telling herself all night long.

  She had to contact someone, though. The more she’d studied Kent’s finished product, without the boy there to distract her, the more things she’d seen that concerned her.

  He hadn’t been overt, of course. He was too smart for that. But somehow those bad words had made it from the trash to his poster. Not the exact letters, of course. These were much smaller. And partially hidden. He’d used letters as borders on a number of pictures and she’d thought him creative. Until she’d seen the ones she’d prohibited earlier in the week. He must have pieced them together from magazines at home and slipped them onto the collage without her noticing.

  “Not if you’re doing it for me,” Tatum said. “And him. Did you ever think that maybe he’d like to know he has an aunt? Or maybe I could be a friend to him now that his mom’s gone? Kind of like a big sister.”