AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I just told you.”
“You don’t see her?”
He shook his head and then said, “When I got out of the army, I found out she lied. My dad was never in prison. He just didn’t want to be saddled with a wife and kid at eighteen. I met him. He sells insurance in Boise. Has a wife, three grown kids, one still in college, and a granddaughter.”
“You have a relationship with him now?”
“That’s overstating it . . . we know of each other. That’s about as far as we’ve gotten. I confronted Cora Sue about her lies, and she said she thought it was best if I thought he’d been rotting away in prison, but I think it was easier for her.” He shrugged. “I talk to Mom once a month, and the guy I’m supposed to think of as my dad every so often. He’s a stranger. His kids—my half siblings? Strangers. I guess if I ever got around to sending Christmas cards, we could do that. But we won’t. At least not in the foreseeable future.”
“If I could see my mom again, I’d want to.”
“After what she did to you? To your brother and sister?”
“Yes. Absolutely. Because I want to know what happened, why she left me, and where the twins are.”
“And then—?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I never get that far, I guess. I’d like to think we could start over.”
Noah scratched his chin thoughtfully, his fingers scraping on the stubble of a day or two’s growth of beard. “Sometimes it just doesn’t work out, wasn’t meant to be.”
The silence stretched between them for a few seconds before she let that subject die. “So, what about you, Noah? What do you do? You know, for a living.”
“I’m a P.I. now, got my license as soon as I said good-bye to the military.”
She stopped petting the cat. “Really?”
“Yep.”
“Where do you live?”
“L.A. But I’m between cases, so I thought I’d do some investigating on my own. Just for me.” He held her gaze and got to the point. “And maybe for you, too. I figured you’d like to find out what happened to your mother. I would, too. Whatever she was caught up in that night in the desert nearly cost me my life.”
One of her eyebrows arched. “I was there, too.”
“You?”
“In Didi’s Cadillac. Special cargo space. I was going to sneak out and meet you, remember?” she charged. He’d seen mention of the fact in the news about Didi’s daughter making claims about a baby exchange and that both she and her mother had been in the desert that night. He’d known about Didi, had remembered seeing the huge white Cadillac, but Remmi’s story had been sketchy, from a distraught minor, and there had been no proof, that he’d seen, of any baby being a part of the explosion and tragedy in the Mojave.
There had been a murder, he knew, a man shot and killed, burned in the conflagration of the Mustang. And someone had definitely tried to kill him. Absently, he rubbed the scar on his neck.
Remmi went on. “That night, Didi came home earlier than I’d expected, and I had to hide. I crawled into the space in the Caddy’s trunk, not knowing what she was planning. I hoped to get out as soon as I could, but she unwittingly took me with her, and I watched through a peephole in the back seat as she drove the twins into the desert. You know about all that, right? Her giving one of the babies to a guy who was supposed to be their father? For money?” She turned a little pale at the memory, and her features had hardened.
“Yeah, I read about it in the papers.” The truth was he’d devoured every bit of information he could find about Didi Storm, the explosion in the desert, and the hunt for a murderer. He’d run away back then, yes, but now it had become his mission to find the bastard who was behind it all and haul his sorry ass to justice.
She asked, “So why were you out there that night?”
“Rebelling against Ike and Cora Sue and the whole damned world, I guess. Ike had laid down the law, so I took his bike behind his back. I was mad. You didn’t meet me, and I was disappointed and pissed. Ended up being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Like me.” She eyed him. “I suppose you read the book?”
“About Didi? Yeah.”
“I think the author’s a fake. I haven’t been able to reach her. The agent sure is, just a P.O. box and an answering service. I checked.”
Now, it was his mouth that smiled. “Well, that’s where I come in.”
“What do you mean?”
