Not that any of it mattered. Regardless of whether or not the baby was his, John intended to spend the rest of his life making sure Beckwith paid for what he’d done.
“Where is she?” Mrs. Brighton had apparently put her husband on speaker phone, because John could now hear him barking very clearly into his ear, “Where is my daughter, and what has she done now? If you’ve got her locked up, you can tell her from me that I’m not bailing her out again. I’m sick of all her wacko views. All I want is a kid who’ll go to college and get a job and stop spending all my money on pizza and spray paint.”
“Well, Mr. Brighton,” John said in his calmest tone, “I don’t know about any of that. All I can tell you for sure is that your daughter is currently in the maternity ward in the hospital on Little Bridge Island, Florida.”
“Florida?” Mr. Brighton repeated with as much horror as if John had said Hell.
His wife was a little more on the ball. “Maternity ward? Is—is she all right, Officer?”
“My understanding is that she will be. Congratulations. You’re grandparents. Your daughter’s given birth to a healthy baby girl.”
“What?”
Both parents were stunned into silence. As he waited for them to catch their breath, John listened to the sound of the waterfall by the side of the pool splashing in the courtyard below, along with the rumble of jets in the hot tub and the loud croaking of the frogs that lived in the bushes behind it. He decided to take the opportunity while the Brightons were still too shaken up to think better of revealing such personal information to ask, “Would you happen to know who the father is?”
“The father?” Mrs. Brighton murmured vaguely. She was still in shock at the news that she, an attractive and relatively young woman in her early forties—John had looked her and her husband up, and seen that they were wealthy suburbanites—was a grandmother. “No. No, how would I know that? I didn’t even know she was pregnant. We haven’t heard from her in months.
“Oh, my little girl,” Mrs. Brighton cried. “I just can’t believe it. My baby—has a baby!”
“Where is my granddaughter?” Tabitha’s father demanded. “When can I see her? And my daughter?”
“Well, just as soon as you can board a plane and get down to Little Bridge Island,” John said, hoping that neither Tabitha Brighton nor Molly Montgomery would be too displeased with what he’d done. Obviously Tabitha had the right to keep her whereabouts and the birth of her daughter a secret from her parents, with whom she’d apparently been feuding for some time.
But she had nearly died. And so had her child. These were things John felt her parents had a right to know, too.
“Fine,” said Mr. Brighton. “We’ll be there tomorrow. . . . Wait, where is this Little Bridge, exactly?”
It took John some time to straighten out the logistics of travel to Little Bridge Island with the Brightons, since there were no direct flights, unless they chartered a private jet. This irked Mr. Brighton, but his wife seemed eager to take the trip to see her daughter and granddaughter, no matter how many hours it took or how inconvenient it seemed.
John considered this a good sign.
What was decidedly not a good sign was when he ended the call, put his phone away, and turned to see Molly Montgomery standing in the open doorway to her room, glaring at him with her arms folded across her chest.
“What?” he asked. It was hard to tell with the light streaming from behind her, but her body language indicated that she was mad. He had a feeling that he knew why, but surely after the extraordinary sex they’d just had, she couldn’t be that mad.
Unless it hadn’t been as extraordinary for her as it had been for him. But she had certainly seemed to enjoy it. She’d been the one Mrs. Filmore had heard shouting, not him. He’d only knocked over a few piles of books . . . and of course, in the moment, nearly told her that he loved her, because—in the moment—he was sure he did.
Now he was glad he’d kept those words to himself.
“Did you honestly call Tabitha Brighton’s parents?” Molly demanded in a cold voice.
Okay. So she was mad.
“Yes, I did.” He stepped forward into the light so that he could see her face. Yes, she was definitely mad. Behind the lenses of her glasses, her dark eyes were pools of flames. Her lips were set into a firm line of disapproval, as well. “She nearly died. I felt they had a right to be informed.”
“She’s eighteen!” Molly cried. “She’s an adult!”
“She’s a runaway,” he shot back, “who swiped her parents’ credit card, fell in with a cult, got pregnant, trespassed, vandalized your library, and nearly died giving birth. If she were my daughter and someone found her in the condition that you did, I would want to know about it. So yes, I found her parents and called them.”
Molly had unfolded her arms and was now pacing up and down the length of the outdoor hallway, still sputtering. It was clear that Mrs. Filmore had gone back down to her room, but Fluffy the Cat had stayed behind and was now sitting in the doorway to Molly’s room, calmly licking a front paw and regarding them both with wide amber eyes that seemed to say, Wow, buddy. You sure screwed the pooch on this one.
John couldn’t have agreed more.
“You do realize that legally, she has a right to her privacy?” Molly demanded.
“Of course. But she isn’t one of your library patrons, Molly. She’s involved in a criminal investigation.”
This stopped Molly cold. She swung an incredulous look at him. “Are you going to press charges against her?”
“Maybe, if that seems like the best way to get her to give up Beckwith. I think she knows where he’s hiding.”
“John, she’s been traumatized!”
“All the more reason for her to give up the person who traumatized her. I know you think because she’s eighteen, she’s an adult, but she isn’t acting like one.”
“Well, maybe her parents are partly to blame for why she acts the way she does,” Molly said. “Maybe her parents are awful, and that’s why she ran away from them.”
John had to admit that Molly had a point. Tabitha’s parents had seemed pretty awful—at least the father.
He wasn’t going to say this out loud, however. He was pretty sure she wouldn’t like it.
“Don’t tell me you’ve never called the parents of a child,” he said instead.
“I’ve threatened to, lots of times,” Molly said. “But I’ve never done it. Kids have a right to their own privacy—and their own autonomy.”
“I agree—until they start hurting themselves, or others. And it isn’t true that you’ve never called the parents of a child. You came to me today with compromising photos of my daughter taken by one of your young patrons.”
Molly stiffened. “That was different.”
“How is it different?”
“Because that was part of your investigation. That was to help solve it.”
“So was calling Tabitha’s parents. I have to work my cases the way I see fit. Sometimes my methods may not be pretty, but they tend to work.” Except when they didn’t . . . case in point, Larry Beckwith III.
“But Tabitha’s parents are probably who she was running away from in the first place, John! And now you’ve told them exactly where to find her.”
“You don’t know anything about her.” John thought it was possible that he was going insane. She was making him insane. “You sat with her while she was bleeding to death and drifting in and out of consciousness, but that’s not the same as having a conversation with her, because believe me, if you had, you’d call her parents, and a social worker, and a shrink, and all the help you could get for her, because whatever has happened to that girl, it’s made her bananas.”
Molly blinked, hard. “John,” she said, in what sounded to him like a tearful voice, “I think you should go now.”
“What?”
“You heard me. It’s late, and I have to be at the library in the morning for a staff meeting. I think you should go.”
Belatedly, he realized that she was genuinely angry. And also about to cry.
“Molly, you’re not actually going to let this come between us, are you? Because I thought we had a very nice time this evening—”
“We did,” Molly said. “Physically. But I’m not sure we connect on more basic levels.”
“What’s more basic than what we did in there?” he asked, jabbing a thumb toward her room. “Where, I’d like to point out again, I think we more than connected.”
“I’m talking about empathy.”
If she’d struck him, he could not have been more surprised. “You think I lack empathy?”
“I don’t know how much empathy you can have when you refer to a woman who’s been through what Tabitha has as bananas.”
He shouldn’t have been surprised, he knew. She’d already called him amoral and unconscionable. Why not add lacking in empathy to the list?
But he still stood there feeling as if he’d been gut-punched, while the cat slowly began to lick its other paw. Don’t look at me, buddy, the cat seemed to be saying. I don’t know what’s going on here, either.