Cooper had just finished writing up his notes on an investigation he’d done for a case that was going to court: a messy custody case. He was glad to be done with it. He hadn’t been impressed by either parent of the six-year-old boy.
He was now a little bit at loose ends, which made him restless. He walked to his desk but kept standing, looking out the window to the street. Seeing Jamie Whelan again had broken something loose. Something he’d thought he had under tight lock and key. Not Whelan, he realized, she’d said her last name was . . . ?
I’m Harley Woodward.
The daughter’s name was Woodward, so Jamie’s was likely to be, too. Jamie looked a lot like Emma, and yet she didn’t. He remembered her from high school. She’d been skinnier, but not by much. Her hair had been blonder, he thought. Now it was a light brown. She’d had a quirky smile back then, like she was embarrassed, or a fish out of water. He hadn’t noticed that today. She’d been poised and . . . careful.
She was supposed to babysit that night.
Cooper had given the attack on Emma a lot of thought over the years. It was the event that had spurred him to go into law enforcement. He’d had an uncle who was a River Glen cop, now long retired, and he’d harangued the man for answers, begged him, damn near threatened him, to find out what had happened, but there were no clues that went anywhere. If Emma could help, then maybe, his uncle had told Cooper over and over again, but it became clear that was never going to happen.
His cell phone rang and he clicked on. “Yeah,” he answered Marissa.
“Mom won’t let me go to the mixer tonight! I can’t believe it!” she cried, practically in tears. “I have plans! I have friends!”
“The mixer?”
“At the school. It’s like music and stuff, and it’s the Halloween one early because already the school won’t let us do Halloween. It’s so unfair! It’s just so unfair!”
“Why won’t your mom let you go?”
“I don’t know. Can you talk to her?”
He knew better than to try to get between Laura and her daughter. Boy, did he know better. “Find out what her reasons are, and maybe then you can work it out with her.”
“You won’t help me?” She moaned, as if her life were destroyed.
“Find out,” said Cooper.
She moaned again and hung up. Ten minutes later, Laura’s number popped up on his cell.
“I don’t want her to go alone,” Laura said without preamble in a hard tone when Cooper clicked on. “There are drugs at the school. I don’t want her to be a part of it.”
“Drugs? This is something you heard?”
“Yes! There are drugs.”
Knowing he was putting too fine a point on it based on the tone of her voice, Cooper nevertheless waded in. “Do you mean kids are using during the day? Or just this evening?”
“Does it matter?” Her ire was rising.
It wasn’t that he was purposely making light of the issue. He didn’t doubt that a certain percentage of kids were experimenting with drugs. It was what happened at every school. What he was objecting to was Laura’s capacity to come up with excuses to win an argument or have her way, whether she believed what he was saying or not.
And he didn’t believe Marissa and her friends were users.
He said, “Marissa goes to school during the day, so the drugs are there when she’s there . . . ? But she can’t go to the school tonight because the drugs will be there?”
“I don’t think tonight will be chaperoned the same way,” she delivered through her teeth. “Unless you want to go there? Be the policeman for all those teens? You want to do that?”
Hell no.
“Sure,” he said. “Just let me know when I should pick Marissa up.”
She hung up on him.
* * *
“We’re not going to spread Mom’s ashes tonight,” Jamie said as she threw together a peanut butter sandwich for Harley and slid it onto the table.
“Good,” Harley expelled with relief.
“I’ve got to pick up Emma at five and then you’re going to that party. . . .”
“Mixer.” Harley fell on the sandwich like a ravenous wolf. “I didn’t eat lunch,” she admitted around a huge bite that was obviously sticking to the roof of her mouth.
“I gave you money,” Jamie reminded her, pouring her daughter a glass of tap water. That was one thing about Oregon. The water was good.
“I just didn’t like what they had.”
Jamie held back further comment. She’d been the same way. Starving herself all day for similar reasons. But why couldn’t growing up, school, be better for Harley? That was all she wanted.
Harley rolled an eye at her. “Maybe you and Emma can just spread the ashes without me.”
“No. I called my father. We changed the date. He and Debra are coming over Sunday afternoon.”
Harley put down the glass of water and stared at Jamie. “I thought you hated him.”
“Hate’s a pretty strong word.”
“Yeah? Well . . . ?”
“Emma and I blamed him for leaving Mom, yes. It was a tough time and he didn’t handle it well. We all thought Debra was a passing thing, but she wasn’t. I wasn’t sure Dad knew Mom died, so I called him this afternoon and left a message on his phone, and he called me back.”
She’d worked up the courage to even phone her father, calling herself all kinds of a coward for making something that should be so easy, so hard. She’d been relieved to leave a message, and when he’d phoned back she’d been in her bedroom and had answered with trepidation.
“Hey . . . Dad,” she’d said diffidently.
“Hi,
