License to Shop (25 page)

But no, I couldn’t go. It
was much too late to run away. Kecia had run away, but she had
taken her daughter. Mine was still lost, I couldn’t go anywhere
until I’d found her.

My feet were leaden on the
soft soil of the playground. My daughter was missing and I wanted
to search everywhere for her, but I could not move. It’s too late.
I thought. Anna is gone and I cannot move.

As my gaze prowled the
playground restlessly, ceaselessly, I caught a glimpse of blue. My
eyes focused on the blue. It was the same blue as Anna’s favorite
sweater. I started walking toward it. Hoping. Wishing.
Praying.

I dropped to my knees and
crawled under the plastic skirting that surrounded the climbing
platform.

There was a child there. A
girl, I was sure. Anna? She was curled up. Still. Asleep? Yes, her
chest rose and fell steadily. I pulled her to me with a cry of
profound relief.

After six hours of being sure that my daughter had been
kidnapped by the admin I had trusted and admired, I had to
relinquish her to paramedics who checked her for bruises,
scratches, harm. They found nothing.

I wanted to take her back
into my arms, but instead I stood back and watched her be enfolded
in her father’s arms, along with our new puppy, and answer his
never-ending questions, while she petted the dog and patiently
explained that Kecia had brought her back to school to attend the
watercolor workshop. When no one had come to pick her up after
school, she had grown afraid, and curled up in a safe place, where
the bad guys couldn’t get her. She hadn’t meant to fall asleep, but
she had.

I could smile at her
ingeniousness in hiding from the bad guys, but only because I had
her back, safe and sound, again.

James Connery kept
questioning her, patiently. I suppose he hoped she’d have hints of
where Kecia might have gone.

But all she knew was that
she had wanted to attend the watercolor workshop. And that no one
had come to pick her up after school. “So you hid so no one would
see you until your Daddy or Mommy came for you, but you fell
asleep?”

“
Yes, but I didn’t let my
hair touch the ground, so I’m sure I don’t have lice. She put her
head trustingly under my shaking hands and I ran my fingers through
the strands carefully, feeling the bumps and curves of her eggshell
skull. My hands were steady when I pushed gently at her shoulders.
“Nope, no lice.”

“
I’m sorry I worried you,
Mom. Kecia told me you might be late, because of your job. She said
to stay out of sight until you got here. I didn’t realize I’d fall
asleep.”

“
It’s okay sweetie. You
did just fine.” She turned her hand so that I saw it — a butterfly
tattoo on her wrist, just like Kecia’s.

“
It’s okay, I’m glad you
were thinking ahead.” I touched the tattoo. “This is pretty. Where
did you get it?”

“
Kecia gave it to me when
she she left me here to wait for you.”

She saw my face and
misunderstood. “It isn’t real, it’s just a temporary
tattoo.”

“
I know.”
Temporary.

“
Next time I promise I
won’t fall asleep, I’ll keep pinching myself.”

“
Next time, I promise I
won’t let you out of my sight.” I knew it wasn’t possible to keep
her under my wing forever, but for a little while longer, I would
try.

Seth stared at us,
thankfully saying nothing, though I could feel him seethe. He
waited to boil over until we got home, and put Anna safely to bed.
We didn’t tell Ryan what had happened. Tomorrow. He had to know
from us, not from the kids at school, but we just couldn’t face
telling him tonight.

“
If you hadn’t agreed to
this spying job, Anna would never have been in danger.”

We both knew that wasn’t
true. Kids are always in danger, from the most random, natural
hazards like baseball bats, to inattentive drivers, to…well, to go
on would be pointless. Suffice to say the list is longer than any
one parent’s sanity can handle.

“
I’ll get the hammer and
nails and you find the boards long enough to cover her doorway.
We’ll lock her in her room and keep her safe forever.” I wasn’t
feeling guilty, or penitent, or anything but very angry. I blamed
myself enough for everyone, I didn’t need Seth piling
on.

“
Don’t be absurd.” He
backed down, obviously seeing that I was not entirely
rational.

“
I’m not. If she goes out
of the house, we can’t keep her perfectly safe. So she shouldn’t go
out of the house. Let’s board her safely in her room.”

He subsided, maybe because
he didn’t want to go down to the basement and rummage around in the
dangerous leftover debris from past house projects. Maybe because
he didn’t want to rummage around in my psyche and see exactly how
crazy I might be at that moment.

But he was Mount Vesuvius
of anger, and all that hot lava had to go somewhere, so a new and
different eruption came on the heels of abandoning the idea of
punishing a little girl for being resourceful and scaring her
parents to death.

“
You may have ruined your
chances at the admissions job. Do you know that? Dr. Stubbs is not
likely to forgive you for alerting the FBI to take her into
custody, never mind when she finds out you were spying under her
very nose.”

I felt myself get very
calm. I wanted to say, “I don’t want the job.” But I didn’t. I
could say it tomorrow, when we were starting to head back to
normal, or as close to normal as we could get, knowing what we now
knew. Instead, I said, “I helped stop an identity-theft ring. I
helped find Robert Quartermaine’s murderer.”

“
Kecia didn’t kill him,
remember that small bit of good news when we found out our
daughter’s kidnapper was not also a murderer?”

“
I found the thumb drive
that had the information Robert Quartermaine had stolen from the
university — which is what got him killed.” I said baldly. “I did.
I’m good at this spy business.”

He looked at me in horror.
“Are you going to go to work for the FBI?”

There were so many answers
to that question. “No.”

The relief that softened
the tense lines of his body was immediate. “Good. It’s one thing
for you to be an admissions counselor, but I couldn’t stand
worrying about you if you were doing something
dangerous.”

I started to
laugh.

He looked at
me.

I said, “I worked in the
Admissions office for all of three days and….” I laughed
harder.

Being Seth, the man I
married, he got it. He laughed, too. “Okay. You win. Maybe you
shouldn’t get a real job. It would probably lead you to get
involved with a Columbian drug cartel.”

“
Fair enough,” I agreed,
letting him pull me into an embrace.

“
Who are you, Molly?” he
whispered into my hair. “I don’t think I know you
anymore.”

I was so tempted to reply
with the trite, “You never knew me.” And derail this conversation
into more familiar territory.

But I thought of Anna,
upstairs. I think of how lucky we were. This is a time for healing,
not hurt. “Who ever knows anyone, Seth?” I would never have
expected to be so blown away by the capability of my six year old.
“What about Anna? Did you have a clue she thought like a
commando?”

A girl after the tradition
of Harriet the Spy herself. Or maybe Nancy Drew, always thinking
ahead, not just sneaking around and watching people do their
thing.

Unlike her mother, who
spied on unsuspecting people going about their daily jobs, but
couldn’t find her own daughter sleeping under the jungle gym. “I
think we should recognize that our daughter could grow up to rule
the world, if we raise her right.”

I wanted him to laugh, to
turn that raging volcano of fear and anger off with a drenching
dose of reality about who his little girl was. It worked. The anger
sank back inside, and he laughed. Unfortunately, his laughter
loosened something deep within me and I turned into a waterfall,
sobbing so loudly that the kids came pounding down the stairs,
asking what was wrong.

Seth tried to shield me
from their eyes, “It’s okay kids, Mom is just really glad Anna is
home and she’s crying because she’s so happy.”

I pushed him away and
cried louder at the sight of the panic and dismay on my children’s
faces. Moms shouldn’t fall apart. It meant the end of the
world.

Seth tried to pull me back
into his arms once again and this time when I went into his
embrace, I held out my hands to the kids. “I need hugs from
everyone.”

Hugs are usually short
awkward things in our house, so I had three pairs of arms around me
tentatively at first. But as my sobs got quieter, the arms
tightened and soon we were all pulled close together, unsure of who
was hugging who.

It was clearly up to me to
break up the love fest, but I waited until I was afraid I’d pass
out from lack of oxygen. It didn’t take much to dislodge them all,
just a sigh and a shake of my head and miraculously we each had our
personal comfort zone back again.

“
I love you guys.” It was
corny and predictable, but I had to say it. They were all looking
at me.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO

Life After Enlightenment

In the middle of the night, I got a text from a
blocked number. It said: Don’t take the job. Stay free. I knew who
it was. Kecia. But I didn’t tell Deb or Connery. What we’d learned
about the hardworking single mother, student, and temporary admin
was that she had an IQ off the charts. Not only did she have a head
for business, but she had taken enough programming classes for a
minor in computer science, if she’d wanted.

I couldn’t help but
remember how she’d said one of her goals was a good education. She
hadn’t said degree. I wonder if she’d realized she would soon be
turning her back on the degree, on the graduation ceremony, and the
diploma that was the symbolic reward for all her hard
work?

When Robert Quartermaine
had been killed, her operation had been put into jeopardy —
ironically not from anything she’d done.

The FBI geeks had
decrypted the drive, arrested and interrogated all the operators
who had sold the skimmed credit cards and stolen identities Kecia
had supplied them. Not one of them had met her face-to-face. She’d
been meticulously discreet.

James Connery said the
geeks were certain that she had been winding down operations. They
suspected that she had intended to graduate, end her criminal
enterprise at the university, and move on to a new
location.

I didn’t agree. I
remembered her comment about early retirement. I was fairly certain
she had retired somewhere to raise her daughter and live off the
millions she’d stashed away. But I didn’t want to find out for
sure. That would mean the FBI had caught her. That her daughter
would be left without a dad, or a mom. And she was, for a criminal
mastermind, a very good mom.

The question about taking
the Admissions Counselor job had not been up to me, after all. Dr.
Stubbs hired Penny, and one of the other applicants, after telling
me I did not need to return to the office to finish out my
temporary employment with the Admission Office.

She was never going to
forgive me for finding that hard drive and using it to implicate
her in the identity-theft ring.

I was, like a coward,
relieved not to have to turn the job down. But I would have, even
without the anonymous text advising me to do so.

I should not have felt so
free, knowing that my working with the FBI had made me a pariah to
the university’s HR department. Even Deirdre couldn’t fix what I
had broken. She had already postponed a coffee date with me once. I
hoped I’d be able to explain things well enough to gain her
forgiveness.

I’d let Sue know I was
back in the mystery shopping rotation, and she’d promised me that
massage spa shop soon. I wasn’t going to hold my breath.

I’d also volunteered to
work in Anna’s classroom once a week. I just wanted to keep a
little closer eye on her, for a while.

When I arrived, the kids
were running around the classroom like they’d had their sugar fix
already and for a moment I worried that I’d gotten my day wrong.
Until Mrs. Glenn approached me with the air of a drowning woman
ready to cling on to her safety net. “So glad you could
come.”

I was shocked to see the
normally sanguine teacher so harried. “Late spring
fever?”

“
No. Zachary Taylor was
expelled this morning in front of everyone and after an hour of
numb silence, they’ve gone wild.”

“
Oh.” I didn’t approve of
all the expellings that were going on. And I knew Mrs. Glenn had to
be very rattled to have told me the name of the child who’d gotten
the axe this time. I knew Zachary. I didn’t ask Mrs. Glenn what
happened, though, because she was very likely to realize she
shouldn’t have said anything to me. I just said, “Tell me how I can
help.”