Sure enough, he hadn’t even cracked the book open when Mad’s eyelids dropped and stayed that way. Jake read one of the soft-touch books they both liked before he put his son in his crib.
The one pushed up to the side of Jake’s bed.
He might have finally been able to give up holding his son close at night but there was no way he’d cope with putting Mad in a different room yet.
That would have to change when Jake bought their own house. But until then, he’d keep his boy close enough to touch without getting out of bed.
4
Mallory pulled into the parking lot beside the Sunnyville police department building half an hour before her appointment time. Her early arrival could be directly attributed to nerves.
Nervousness had kept her up most of the night and it had nothing to do with the reason she was here.
No. She had no qualms about what she’d come here to do. It was beinghere, the place itself that gave her the jitters.
In her twenty-seven years, she’d only been to a police station once and that had been years ago when Renee had been arrested for shoplifting not long after Mallory’s father and Donna had married.
Her dad had been out of town on business and Donna had had no choice but to take ten-year-old Mallory with her to bail out her troubled daughter.
The one thing she remembered from that visit was how nice the police officers were. Even when they were being yelled at by someone in handcuffs, they’d appeared calm and, to Mallory’s ten-year-old mind, extremely polite.
Of course she’d learned over the years that her view of the police had been slightly skewed by that one event and it might have had something to do with the cans of soda and handfuls of candy the nice officers kept bringing her while she waited for Donna to finish whatever she’d had to do to get Renee released.
There had only been two other times in her life when she’d dealt with the police directly and both times had happened in her family home.
The first had been the night they’d come knocking to tell Donna Mallory’s father had been killed in a car accident.
All she remembered of that night was Donna crying hysterically in the living room until the family doctor had been called and administered a sedative to calm her stepmother down, and a nice policewoman taking Mallory to the kitchen and making her a cup of tea.
At twenty-one she’d been old enough to remain with Donna except Mallory had found it impossible to console her stepmother when her own grief had been overwhelming, leaving her numb.
The other time was a few years after those horrible months following her father’s death when two plain-clothed detectives had come looking for Renee.
They hadn’t revealed why they wanted to talk to her stepsister and to this day Mallory didn’t know what they wanted but Renee had been long gone by then and neither she nor Donna were able to help the officers with her stepsister’s whereabouts. The men hadn’t been inclined to give them any information on why they needed to speak to Renee, just asked that they be contacted if she came around.
Her stepsister hadn’t really been around much before or after her father and Donna married. Even when she had come home for Mallory’s father’s funeral she’d only stuck around long enough for the will to be read, his estate to be finalized.
After Renee had gotten her hands on the inheritance Jeffery Dawson left her—as well as the money in her mother’s checking account—she had disappeared for a couple of years.
Not that Mallory saw Renee the times she did visit. Her stepsister usually managed to catch Donna without Mallory around and it was only after she’d gone again that Mallory had been made aware of her reappearance.
It was a pattern. One Renee had gotten into long before Mallory’s father had died. And Mallory knew Donna gave her daughter money every time she turned up on their doorstep. She’d argued with her stepmother a number of times about the handouts in the years since her dad’s death.
As much as Donna thought she was helping her daughter she wasn’t, and Mallory had to wonder if her mother’s willingness to give her whatever she asked for contributed to Renee’s horrible behavior.
She remembered numerous arguments between her father and Donna too. Although she’d been too young to understand the significance of those heated discussions. Her dad had been against giving Renee cash whenever she asked. It was probably why he’d tied up their inheritances in a variety of trust funds that they could only get their hands on at certain ages and after life events such as marriage and the birth of—
“Oh.”
Mallory lunged for her bag. She needed the file from the PI. She’d brought a copy with her because she wanted to leave it with Detective Malone in the hope it would help keep her stepsister behind bars.
Mallory was very much afraid Renee would get out on her appeal. She hadn’t told Donna that she’d been in contact with Renee’s lawyer. He was a smarmy man out of LA who made Mallory’s skin crawl and her stomach turn and had a reputation for getting the guilty set free. He believed he could get Renee’s sentence not only reduced but get the whole conviction quashed.
If what the PI had found out was correct—and really, she had no doubt the information laid out exactly what happened—Mallory didn’t want Renee getting out any time soon, never mind getting out of the charges completely.
She’d do what she could to make sure her stepsister didn’t get off with what would amount to barely a slap on the wrist for what she’d done to that little boy.
Flicking through the folder, she found what she was looking for and quickly scanned the document.
