he’d recognized the name. Ali had seen it in his eyes. She wished they had a photo of Daisy. But she didn’t. Just a general description provided by the people who’d known her during her brief stay in Braden. “Medium height. Slender. Red hair, green eyes? Maybe she married?”
His expression revealed his disbelief. “No way.”
“Does she often use an alias? Are there other names she goes by?”
His lips were pressed together.
She let out a little breath of frustration. “If you think your silence will make me give up, you’re wrong, Mr. Cooper. Regardless of what she’s calling herself these days, I’m looking for her. And I intend to find her.”
“You and about a dozen others. If you’re here because my sister owes somebody money, you’re out of luck. You won’t get it from me.”
“This isn’t about money.”
“I don’t care what it’s about.” He tried closing the door again, only to glare at her even harder when he couldn’t because she’d quickly planted her heavy boot in the doorway.
“So you don’t care about her abandoned baby?” Ordinarily, she would have cringed a little at her own bluntness, but these weren’t ordinary circumstances.
This time she didn’t have to look closely to see the shock that crossed his handsome face. He closed his aqua eyes for a second. Then he frowned and moved away from the doorway. But he didn’t try shutting the door.
It was invitation enough for her and she stepped inside.
The interior of the house was only slightly less derelict than it had been when she’d confronted the teenagers. Then, the kids had been sprawled around on sleeping bags and tattered beach chairs. Now, only one piece of furniture remained in the main room—a couch that was presumably new, considering the thick plastic wrapped around it. It was pushed to one side of the square room and sat beneath a foggy-glassed wall mirror. A couple of packing boxes were stacked next to it, along with what appeared to be new, unfinished kitchen cabinets. On the other side of the room were gallon cans of paint along with paint rollers stacked atop a tarp. Clearly he was preparing to paint over the graffiti-covered walls.
The problems she and her sister were having with the Victorian they’d been restoring were owed strictly to the age and decline of the house. He had to deal with an old house plus neglect and outright vandalism.
He disappeared through a door near the paint cans and she followed, setting the thick book on top of one of the boxes as she passed the stack.
He was standing in the middle of the kitchen, seeming to stare at nothing at all.
He made no sign that he even recognized her presence. Chewing the inside of her cheek, she stepped around him to reach the sink against the cabinetless wall. When she’d been here before, the kitchen had had vile yellow cabinets and she wondered if he’d pulled them out in preparation for the new ones, or if it had been vandals.
The white enamel sink was still chipped, but it was no longer filled with cigarette ashes and discarded beer cans. In fact, it looked scrupulously clean. There was a dish drainer sitting on the bottom of the sink and she pulled one of the glasses from it. It was still damp from being recently washed, and she filled it with water.
He hadn’t moved a muscle.
“Mr. Cooper, why don’t you sit down?” She gestured to the round table wedged in the space between an avocado-green refrigerator and a tin-doored pantry cupboard.
He still didn’t move.
His chambray shirtsleeves were rolled up his sinewy forearms and she cautiously touched his elbow through the cloth.
He jerked as if she’d prodded him with an electric rod and glared down at her.
She pushed the water glass toward him until he had no choice but to take it. “Maybe this will help,” she said calmly despite the distraction of his intensely colored eyes. “Would you mind if I sat?”
His eyebrows lowered as she pulled out one of the padded metal chairs without waiting for his answer. She sat on the edge of the yellow vinyl cushion, hoping he would follow suit.
She needed his cooperation. It would be easier to get that if she could get beyond his annoyance and his shock. In her experience, sitting together at someone’s kitchen table was a step in the right direction.
After a brief hesitation, he pulled out a second chair. The metal legs scraped against the black-and-white checkered linoleum floor. He sat, and finally drank down half the water.
Then he set the glass in the middle of the table and sighed. He rested his forearms on the Formica and pressed his fingers together until the tips turned white around his short, neatly clipped fingernails. “I didn’t know she’d had a baby,” he said after a moment. His voice was low. Gruff. “Or that she was in Braden. We—” He broke off and cleared his throat, curling his fingers into fists. “We haven’t spoken in a while.”
Ali very nearly reached out to cover his hands with her own. Instead, she clasped them together in her lap just to be sure she kept them under control. She wanted to ask what his and his sister’s connection was to Braden that they’d both ended up here during entirely different time frames. Braden was simply too small for it to be coincidental. But she held back that particular question for now. “How long is a while?”
His jaw shifted. “A while.” He focused those unsettling eyes on her face. “How do you know this baby you’re talking about is Karen’s?”
She couldn’t fudge the facts about that. “I don’t know for certain that she is,” she admitted. “Only that a child has been abandoned, and the evidence seems to point to her being Karen’s.”
“What evidence?”
An old-fashioned electric clock hung on the wall opposite them, above the stove. It was shaped like a black cat, with a long tail that swung right and left in time with the ticking hands of the clock face on the cat’s belly. “There was an unsigned note left along with the infant. We believe your sister wrote it. Her wording was distinct.”
His eyebrows rose slightly.
“‘Jaxie, please take care of Layla for me.’” Ali recited the brief missive from memory.
Grant sat back in his chair. His expression turned annoyed again. “How does that tell you anything? Except the kid’s name is Layla. You don’t even know for sure that the author of the note is Layla’s mother. You’re just assuming.”
“In the absence of any other information, it’s the only assumption we have to make. Maybe Daisy isn’t—”
“Karen.”
“Karen. Maybe she isn’t the baby’s mother, but she clearly had some involvement with the child or she wouldn’t have written the note.”
“If she wrote the note. Do you even have proof of that? And who the hell is Jaxie?”
She glanced at the clock again. Gowler would take lateness even worse than he would her personal use of a department vehicle. God only knew what he would
