Paper Bullets (3 page)

Samantha giggled. “She has the best timing.”

I gestured toward the guest bathroom. “Go get busy, and I’ll feed our starving cat.” I gave Samantha a sideways look. Sure, I was getting tired of the constant complaining, but I still liked spending time with my daughter. Even if it did involve vacuuming and cleaning the toilet bowl. “Maybe we can squeeze in part of a movie before I go out tonight,” I said.

“Before
we
go out.”

Samantha was going to her friend Maddie’s house for an end-of-the-summer party that Maddie’s mother had assured me would be chaperoned. Not that I worried about Samantha—as far as she was concerned, Jonathan was her boyfriend and that was that—but Maddie had developed something of a wild streak over the summer. My reputation as a “cool mom” had tarnished a bit when I’d told Samantha that Maddie couldn’t come over to the house unless I was there.

“So, movie?” I asked.

Kyle and I weren’t going to a movie. He didn’t like to go to the movies on a Saturday night. Too many teenagers on dates. He said it made him feel old.

Whenever we did go out on a Saturday, he always took me to dinner at some restaurant I’d never heard of. Tonight we were going out for Mexican food at a family-owned place where the dad did all the cooking and his son did everything else, from bartending to waiting tables to washing the dishes. Kyle said the food was excellent, and I’d learned to trust his judgment.

Samantha wrinkled her nose. “If you shower first.”

I raised my eyebrows, pretending to be offended, but I couldn’t pull it off. I did need a shower. “Okay. You pick the movie while I’m in the shower.”

Samantha headed off toward the guest bathroom with a plastic tote full of cleaning supplies and rubber gloves. Most kids probably hated cleaning the bathroom, but the guest bathroom didn’t get a lot of traffic. It’s easier to clean than the kitchen, which was next on my hit list before the shower. Samantha had taken her shower while I met with Ryan, and I was pretty sure she wouldn’t be working up a sweat anytime in the near future.

The cat yelped again.

I took a look at the cat’s dish. Almost full, but apparently enough was missing that the cat was worried she’d never eat again.

I filled up the little hole she’d made in her food. She sniffed at it, ate maybe one bite, and headed off toward the living room couch, content with the knowledge she wouldn’t starve tonight.

“And my daughter’s worried I’m going senile,” I muttered.

While I wiped down the kitchen counter, I contemplated life as a spoiled housecat. Food on demand, a nice sunny spot to snooze in, and a soft lap to curl up on. Not such a bad existence.

Of course, there’d be no Samantha and no movies, and no Kyle and Mexican food and Saturday night kisses goodnight.

I still had a smile on my face when I got done with the kitchen. On my way to take a shower, I detoured through the living room and gave my confused cat a scritch beneath her chin.

“I still think I’ve got the better deal, cat,” I told her.

CHAPTER 3

JONATHAN BRADDOCK was still tall and shy and gangly, but in the eight months since Samantha and I had first met him in person, he’d filled out a little and the blemishes that had plagued his complexion were almost gone.

He would never be a heartthrob, but he had a pleasant face and warm brown eyes, and the few times he’d actually smiled without looking down at the ground, embarrassed to be noticed, he looked like the kind of kid any high school girl would be happy to go to prom with.

I’d only gotten him to smile like that a couple of times. Samantha could do it just by saying hello.

Jonathan and his mother arrived a little late, but given that the drive from Nevada City to our house in Sparks wasn’t exactly a trip to the grocery store, I didn’t mind. It gave me the opportunity for one last futile attempt to remove cat fur from my couch.

June Braddock, Jonathan’s mother, tried to get her son to sit down in the living room and talk with the adults, but it was a lost cause. It was pretty clear the kids wanted to be off by themselves. The closest they were going to get to that was Samantha’s bedroom, and only if they kept the door open. Jonathan might be shy, but he was a senior this year, and that meant he was a bundle of overactive hormones. I wasn’t born yesterday. The door was going to stay open, or I’d go down to her room and open it myself.

When I made the offer, they practically bolted down the hall.

“I don’t think I was ever that young,” I said staring after them.

June chuckled. She’d already fished her latest knitting project out of her tote bag and was busy doing things with needles and yarn I couldn’t hope to replicate.

“I’m sad to say I remember when I was,” she said. “Young, and foolish, too. Isn’t that what teenagers are supposed to be?”

I’d learned a few things about June Braddock, some from her, and some from the research I’d done before I’d allowed Samantha to meet Jonathan in person. I knew she was speaking from experience.

June Tolliver had met Harry Braddock her junior year in high school. She’d had to drop out of school before graduation because she was pregnant with Jonathan’s older brother.

She’d married Harry right before the baby was born, and she’d had Jonathan the year after.

Harry hadn’t been prepared for life as the father of two young boys. He’d found work in a local garage repairing tires and changing oil, but the family couldn’t make ends meet. They’d moved in with Harry’s parents in Nevada City, a situation June had called “cramped.” I could imagine.

Then Jonathan’s older brother got sick. June and her husband had no insurance.

Six months after Jonathan’s older brother passed away, they’d filed for bankruptcy to get out from under the medical bills.

Things had looked up for a while after that. They’d moved into a small apartment. Harry’s parents watched Jonathan during the day, and June was able to get a part-time job at a local craft store.

Then Harry left June, nearly a year to the day after their bankruptcy had been discharged.

“He just never came home one night,” she’d told me. “I did all the normal things. Called the police. Called the hospitals. Called his parents and his friends.”

She’d been knitting when she told me this story the last time Samantha and I had traveled to Nevada City. The needles never lost their rhythm even though June’s voice had grown strained and quiet.

“One of his friends finally told me that Harry had been talking about moving to Las Vegas. Striking it rich at the tables. He thought he could be a professional gambler, you see. He used to watch all the poker shows on cable. Practiced his ‘poker face’ when he thought no one else was watching. It got so that Jonathan could imitate that poker face and Harry never even knew it.”

She didn’t have the money to hire someone like me to find him, she’d said, so she figured he would come home when he was good and ready.

Instead, she was served with divorce papers from a lawyer in Las Vegas, and two months later, she was a single mother.

It explained a lot about why she was so protective of Jonathan, and why she’d been nervous about letting him meet someone he’d talked to over the Internet. Someone from Nevada, no less.

I’d had my own reservations. People could pretend to be whoever they wanted to be on the Internet. The news was full of stories about adult men luring unsuspecting children into hookups—and worse—by pretending to be another kid online. It had taken a lot for me to overcome my natural suspicions to let Samantha meet her Internet friend.

Of course, in her case things had turned out wonderfully. Jonathan played viola, and last time he and his mother visited, the kids had filled the house with music—Samantha on piano accompanied by the rich tones from Jonathan’s viola. They really did make good music together.

June’s knitting needles clacked as we sat in companionable silence. She always brought some type of craft to work on during these visits.

I normally read or worked on cases while Samantha was busy doing her own thing, but I couldn’t do that and just leave June sitting in my living room. The last time she’d visited, I’d put in a movie, but she hadn’t watched much of it, just concentrated on her work instead, so I’d decided to leave the television off.

Of course, that left the house quieter than I was used to. If I didn’t keep myself occupied, I’d nod off on the couch, something that had started happening to me more often these days, especially after nights when my insomnia kept me company. Welcome to middle age, Abby Maxon.

I’d just started planning what equipment I’d need to take tomorrow and how I’d dress for a day of stalking the stalker—anything to keep from thinking about how I’d actually be spending my day watching Ryan’s fiancé; why had I agreed to this again?—when June interrupted my thoughts.

“Can I ask you a question?” she said, never looking up from her knitting.

I said sure, even though the way she asked the question made me wonder what was coming.

“Why do you do the kind of work you do?” She did glance up at me now, an almost apologetic look. “I mean, not that women can’t do any kind of work they want these days, that’s not what I’m saying, but it seems like what you do is dangerous. Don’t you ever worry about what would happen to your daughter if you got hurt?”

So not the question I was expecting.

I could have given her a flip answer. I’d certainly done that back when I’d been married and Ryan used to introduce me to his colleagues as his wife, the gumshoe.

“Most of the time, what I do isn’t that dangerous,” I said. “It’s not like in the movies or on TV.”

She grinned. “You mean you’re not the female equivalent of Thomas Magnum?”

I grinned back. “Hardly. I investigate accidents for insurance defense counsel. Interview witnesses. Serve subpoenas. Those are for civil cases, and most of the time the people involved are civil, especially to me.”

Her grin dimmed. “But sometimes they aren’t. The first time we met, your arm was in a sling and you were all bruised up.”

The week before we’d first met, I’d been kidnapped in a grocery store parking lot, thrown in the back of a panel van by a father and son who’d just killed a fifteen-year-old girl, and held captive in my own home. That case had started out as a search for a missing person.

“I don’t get involved with those kinds of cases anymore,” I said.

It was something I’d made clear to Norton Greenburger when I’d agreed to work part time for him. I was more than willing to track down and interview missing witnesses, but I wasn’t about to investigate crimes to try to find evidence to exonerate his clients. The real perpetrators tended to take a dim view of that, which I’d learned firsthand last December.

“Good,” June said. “I like you. You and your daughter, you’re what I call ‘good people.’ I don’t trust just anyone with my son, not if I’m going to let him stay for a day or two on his own.”

I tried not to do a double take. So far all the kids’ visits had been fully chaperoned, one-day things.

“Thanks,” I said. “I think you’re good people, too.” I got up from the couch and picked up her empty glass to give myself a distraction. “Let me get you some more water.”

I took the glass into the kitchen without waiting for a reply.

Samantha hadn’t said anything about Jonathan staying with us overnight. The kids must have chatted about it online where they did most of their talking, but it would have been nice if she’d mentioned it to me.

I shot a look down the hall as I brought June’s new glass of water into the living room. The door to Samantha’s room was still open. I could hear murmuring voices and the occasional giggle.

My daughter was growing up. She had a boyfriend. I supposed I should be grateful that she didn’t put up a fight because I wouldn’t let the two of them spend time behind closed doors, but I still felt a little hurt that she hadn’t mentioned the possibility of Jonathan spending more than one day here—on his own—with me.

It looked like we’d have to have a little mother-daughter chat. Not tonight. She’d be sad enough after he left, and I didn’t want to go into the discussion when her emotions were already heightened.

No, I’d wait until tomorrow night. After a day of tailing Melody, I’d need a little mother-daughter time. And maybe by then I’d figure out the right way to broach the subject so we could talk about it logically.

I hoped.

CHAPTER 4

BY NOON ON MONDAY I’d tailed Melody to the gym, to the bank, to a juice bar that sold smoothies and wheat grass extract, to the dry cleaners, and then back to the gym. I hadn’t caught sight of the man Ryan said was stalking her, and I’d begun to feel a little like a stalker myself.

When Ryan had texted me her schedule the night before, he’d also given me instructions not to let her see me. That got under my skin at first. I didn’t need Ryan telling me how to do my job. I’d never told him how to run his law practice.

Then I realized why he’d given me that specific instruction.

He must not have told Melody he’d hired me to find the identity of her stalker.

Did that mean he didn’t trust her?

Or did that mean she didn’t want anything to do with me, so I’d be the last person she’d want following her around?

While Melody and I would never be the best of friends, I’d never been one of those ex-wives who’d put the entire blame for the breakup on the other woman. The way I saw it, it took two to tango, as the saying went, and Ryan certainly bore his share of the responsibility for that particular dance.

Not that I’m a saint. If I’d had Melody and Ryan voodoo dolls in the house immediately after Ryan left me, they would have both ended up with mysterious aches and pains and maybe a broken bone or two, and I might have slept better at night after exacting my petty revenge.

Once I’d started to cope with the idea that my marriage was over, I’d also started to come to terms with the fact that Ryan, and by extension Melody—or her future replacement because lord knows she hadn’t been the only one who’d caught his eye over the years—would always be a part of my life because Ryan would always be Samantha’s father. Just because we didn’t get along anymore didn’t mean either one of us could make unilateral decisions about the major issues involved with raising our daughter.