Undercover in Copper Lake

He’d driven around Copper Lake the night before, noticing how much things had changed and how much they’d stayed the same. New businesses and old ones, new people and old ones, familiar places, even a good memory or two. Charlie’s Custom Rods on Carolina Avenue looked as if the only turnover had been in merchandise. The front plate-glass window that Sean and his buddies had cracked late one Saturday night a lot of years ago was still there, the crack still covered with duct tape grown ragged.

The SnoCap Drive-In was still open, too, though it had had an update on its paint from neon turquoise to a subtler shade, and the same old guy who’d run it fourteen years ago was behind the counter.

The Heart of Copper Lake Motel still stood on Carolina, too, seriously renovated, but he would have recognized it. That was where he’d checked in, taking a parking space on the back side of the building even though his room was on the front.

After a restless night’s sleep, Sean knew the first thing he had to do today was talk to Maggie. He’d left the motel with that in mind but decided to have breakfast first. An hour had passed, and he still sat in the coffee shop on the downtown square, a couple blocks from the jail, nursing his third cup of regular sugar-and-cream coffee, reluctant to confront two blasts from the past at once: the sister he’d let down and the jail where he’d spent more than a few nights himself.

The bell above the door rang every few minutes with customers arriving and departing. Most of them were in a hurry to get to work and paid little attention to anyone besides the couple filling orders. They were named Joe and Liz, husband and wife, he’d picked up eavesdropping, and they were strangers to Sean. He’d seen a few older faces that were vaguely familiar—lawyers, maybe, or probation officers or social workers—but none that he could put a name to.

The knot in his gut knew his good luck wouldn’t last.

Liz was topping off his coffee when the doorbell sounded again. “Morning, Sophy,” she called, then asked him, “Can I get you anything else?”

“No, thanks.” Without glancing her way, Sean stirred sugar and cream into his cup. He’d been concentrating on the scene outside the window—square, gazebo, flowers, war memorials, traffic, pedestrians—for so long that he’d memorized it, but it was better than actually making eye contact with someone.

It beat the hell out of making eye contact with someone who might recognize him.

A young and unhappy voice came from the vicinity of the door. “I. Want. To. Go. To. School.”

“I know you do. You’ve made that perfectly clear. But you’re not old enough,” a woman, presumably her mother, replied. She sounded tired, as if they’d been having this conversation for a while.

“That’s not fair! I’m not a baby!”

“I didn’t say you were. You’ll start next year.”

“I want to go this year!”

Sean had never had conversations like that when he was a kid. For starters, his mother had left them when he was about five, and they’d all been born knowing not to tempt their father with tantrums. Patrick Holigan hadn’t been a talkative lad to start with, but he’d had loads of things to say about what happened to children who disrespected their dear old pop.

“You want your usual for here or to go, Soph?” Liz asked, and Sean detected hopefulness for the second option in her voice. The coffee shop was too peaceful a place for a small child who excelled at whining.

“We’ll take them to go,” Sophy said. Hopefulness in her voice, too, as if the kid might suddenly become sweet and sunny when they walked back outside.

Good luck with that, lady.

He shifted his head enough to see Sophy, her back to him, wearing a red dress that clung to a sleek body—muscular arms, narrow waist, well-toned butt, great legs. She wore her blond hair in a ponytail falling halfway down her back and shoes that seemed a compromise between looking good and feeling good. It was a great backside. Did the front side live up to its hype?

Standing beside her, also with her back to Sean, was the girl with the voice pitched to cut glass. Her red shorts skimmed her knees, her top was red with purple stripes, and on her feet were yellow flip-flops decorated with fuzzy, sparkly blue-and-green butterflies. Too much color for this early in the morning.

Her hair was straight, too, pulled into a ponytail that was falling loose, but unlike her mother, hers was jet-black. Her arms were folded mutinously across her middle, and she was tapping one foot as if planning how to break into school and stay there.

Pushing them out of his mind, he rubbed one hand over his jaw, two days’ worth of beard scratching even over the calluses years of mechanic work had built on both his hands. He’d called the jail when he got in last night and found out that they were generous in their visiting hours, taking breaks only for meals. In double the time it would take him to drive over and find a parking space, he could be sitting in a room with Maggie.

Telling her Don’t talk to anybody. Don’t cooperate. This is worth going to jail for.

Most of Craig’s employees in his other businesses knew that from the start. Don’t snitch; don’t inform; take the heat and the time from any trouble they got into, and they’d get along just fine with the boss.

Maggie hadn’t known, probably hadn’t cared. Hell, she’d gotten herself and her kids on Craig’s radar without the benefit of even one paycheck.

If there’s a bit of trouble around, you kids will find it, Grandpa Holigan used to say. Apparently it was still true.

Sophy and the girl left, taking drinks in paper cups with them. He waited a minute to give them time to walk away, left a decent tip for table rental, and walked out to find Sophy standing at one of the outdoor tables and chairs that had been in his blind spot, talking to an older woman, and the girl stealthily making her way to the corner of the building.

Sean passed her, turned the corner and, totally surprising himself, stopped, waiting for the little girl to slide around the corner to freedom. It came in about five seconds, ending in a sudden halt as she realized she wasn’t alone. Her gaze traveled up from his work boots, over his legs, on up across his black shirt and finally reaching his face.

If his shaggy hair and unshaven face scared her, it didn’t show. She still looked as bold as could be. But the sight of her put fear into him. The dark skin and black hair he’d seen in the shop, but the delicate features of her face: the shape of her nose, the deep dark eyes with long lashes, the mouth, the jaw, the fragile, vulnerable, tough air about her...

This was his niece. Maggie’s baby. The threat Craig was using over both him and Maggie.

“Who are you?” She had the sense to whisper so her voice wouldn’t draw Sophy’s attention.

“The one who’s gonna drag your butt back to your foster mother if you don’t go on your own.”

A scowl transformed her pretty little face into a pretty little unhappy face, and she folded her arms over her chest. “You’re not my boss.”

Matching the scowl was easy. He’d perfected it sometime between crawling and learning to walk. No five-year-old could do it better.

After a stare-off, she backed up a few steps, curving around the corner until she was out of sight. Her voice whispered back, though. “I don’t like you.”

“Good for you.”

A moment later, Sophy called, “Come on, Daisy. It’s time to get to work.”

Leaning one shoulder against the warm brick wall, Sean imagined just being with Daisy all day was work in itself, especially for a pretty blonde who hadn’t been raised in the Holigan ways. Apparently, it was too hard for Maggie when she had been raised in the family.

He watched Daisy dance away as Sophy tried to claim her hand to cross the street. Sophy won that round. The kid dragged her feet, but Sophy kept her moving. Daisy deliberately walked on the wrong side of the light pole at the next intersection, forcing Sophy to release, then quickly reclaim her hand. His gaze followed them all the way to their destination, an old house with a shop on the first floor and living quarters upstairs, just down the street, then he spun around and headed for his car.

He’d seen the younger of his nieces. Now it was time to see Maggie.

* * *

The county jail was located behind the Copper Lake Police Department. Back in the day, most of the cells had been in the basement with only small, barred windows high on the outside walls. The only thing a prisoner could see, depending on his position, was the sky or the feet of people walking by. The glass, inlaid with wire between the layers, had been thick, making conversation tough though not impossible. Being loud and disruptive was one of the Holigan family qualities.

Sean parked his car, shut off the engine and stared at the squat brick building ahead. He could think of about a hundred things he’d rather be doing—even wrangling the youngest Holigan had to be easier than this—and he seriously considered putting it off for an hour or two or five. He hadn’t talked himself into action either way when abruptly the driver’s door was jerked open.

Sean flinched, leaned away, drew one leg onto the door frame for a quick kick, but a flash of images stopped him: eyes he’d once known as well as his own, an ear-to-ear grin, a gold badge, a holstered weapon. That was all he had the chance to notice before strong hands pulled him from the car and into a bone-jarring hug.

“I’ll be damned,” Ty Gadney said, letting him go, then giving his shoulder a punch that made him fall back against the car. “Granddad always said you’d be back someday, and here you are. Hell, Sean. You could keep in touch with the people who tolerated your smart mouth at least once every fifteen years.”

Ty, all grown up, shaved head, a detective, just like he’d always wanted to be. How many nights had Sean shared his room, dimly lit, the box fan in the window drawing in the damp night smells, talking about what they were going to do someday?

Sean had to force his voice to work. “How is Mr. Obadiah?”

From behind Ty came the answer in a distinctly sultry, sweet Southern woman’s voice. “Feisty and sassy as ever.” She stepped into view, pretty, womanly, and maternal and sexy all at once.

Ty’s grin widened as he slid his arm around her waist. “My old buddy Sean. My fiancée, Nev Wilson.”

She offered her hand, and Sean took it after a moment. She held on longer than he expected. “So you’re Daisy and Dahlia’s uncle. Heartbreakers, all of you.”

Saying that he’d only learned of his nieces’ existence yesterday, that he’d caught his first glimpse of Daisy this morning, didn’t seem the way to ingratiate himself with Nev, so he pulled his hand back. “Don’t blame them. You can’t choose your family.”

“Oh, don’t I know it,” she said.

There was a story behind that fervent agreement, but he wasn’t here to learn anyone’s story but Maggie’s.

Letting his hold on Nev slide free, Ty circled to the front of the car, hands on hips, an admiring look on his face. “So you got The Car. Babe, from the time he was thirteen, this was all he ever talked about—this car. A 1970 Chevelle SS 454. Oh, man, she’s a beauty.”

When Nev made a dismissive sound, he gave her a chastising look. “Don’t be making fun of my appreciation for a fine vehicle. You practically cried when your car burned up at the Heart of Copper Lake, and it had nothing on this one.”

“That car was my baby.”

“This car is his baby.” Like a cloud passing over the sun, Ty went serious. “You here to see Maggie?”

“If she’ll see me.”

“Of course she’ll see you. Why wouldn’t she?”

Sean could think of fourteen years’ worth of reasons.

“Hold on, and I’ll go in with you.”

Taking Nev’s hand, Ty walked with her to a big old Mercury a few spaces away, half a block long and two lanes wide, hell on gas but with enough room for a party inside, all done up in baby-blue. Sean had worked on that car plenty of times when he was living with the Gadneys—and plenty of times when he wasn’t. It was the only way he’d had to repay Mr. Obadiah for giving him a place to stay when he needed it.

Another thing he would have to do: go see Mr. Obadiah, knowing that he’d let him down, too. This trip was going to be all kinds of fun.

After kissing his fiancée and helping her into the car, Ty stood back and watched as she drove away. Sean watched, too—his old friend, not Nev—then quietly said, “She’s a beauty, too.”

“Ain’t that the truth.” Ty grinned. “I’m a lucky man.” He slapped Sean on the back and turned him toward the jail entrance. “So what have you been doing all these years, and where have you been doing it?”

What have you been doing? Patrick used to ask Declan and Ian, among other relatives, when they showed up after an absence. Time was the answer so often that it became a family joke.

One fifteen-month stint in prison had taken all the humor from it for Sean.

“Working on cars.” Being able to give a respectable answer sent a kind of relief through him. “Mostly for people who buy cars like mine and don’t have the time or the skills to restore them.” Honest work, even if his boss wasn’t.

“I’m not surprised. You’ve always had the magic touch. And where?”

Sean walked through the glass door Ty held open. “Norfolk.” Just inside, he stopped. An air-conditioning vent in the ceiling nearby blew cold air onto the back of his neck—the reason a shiver was doing its damnedest to break loose. Not nerves. “Tell me, Ty. How much trouble is Maggie in?”

As Ty’s face went somber again, Sean could see traces of his grandfather in him. “A lot. This is the third time she’s been caught making meth at home with the kids. You know she’s got kids?”

Sean nodded.

“She loves Dahlia and Daisy as much as she can, but...she’s an addict, Sean, and a bad one. She’s got to get straight before she kills herself, for the kids’ sake if nothing else.”

His gut knotting, Sean stared at the wall behind the check-in desk. He figured pretty much his entire generation of Holigans had experimented with at least marijuana, but he didn’t know of any who’d gotten addicted. Like their father and grandfather and their fathers before them, most Holigans preferred a good Irish whiskey to feed the soul, enliven an evening and dull the pain.

“You ready?”

Though he wanted to run away like a scared kid, he nodded and followed Ty to the desk. Within ten minutes, he was in a communal visiting room filled with round fiberglass tables with four stools of matching orange attached. They reminded him of playground seating, somewhere between child-and comfortable adult-size, with no back support to lean against. They were bolted to the floor so they couldn’t be used as a weapon and seemed pretty indestructible. A box of ragged toys occupied one corner, and signs warning against physical contact of any sort hung on the institutional-green walls.

It was depressing as hell.

He was standing at one of the barred windows overlooking the alley when the door opened and Maggie shuffled in. The fact that she was here, finally in a room with him after so many years, shocked him. Her appearance really shocked him.

Her hair had been bleached blond at some point in the recent past and hung, greasy and tangled, to her shoulders, the strands about equal parts blue-black and dingy yellowish-white. She was fourteen years older, a few inches taller and thin, emaciated, looking more like a scarecrow than the girl he remembered. She didn’t lift her feet when she walked, and she had a bad case of the shakes, like a kid on a major caffeine high—or a meth head on an involuntary withdrawal.

People who knew him, other than maybe Craig and Ty, would scoff at the thought, but his heart broke just looking at her.

Her gaze darted around the otherwise-empty room, skimming across him a couple of times before finally settling. “Look at this.” She turned to include the guard standing impassively at the door in her words. “My big brother, Sean, finally come home. You know, me and Declan’s kids had bets going for a while that you were dead somewhere. Guess I win.”

Part of him wanted to step forward and wrap his arms around her and cuddle her the way he used to when bad dreams woke her in the night. The other part of him recoiled from the idea. “Hey, Maggie.”

“What brings you back here?”

“You.”

“Took you long enough. I’ve been here more than three weeks.”

“I just found out yesterday.”

She shuffled to the nearest table and plopped down on one stool, making the entire thing tilt. “Well, if you hadn’t run off and pretended the rest of us didn’t exist, you would’ve known sooner.” Picking at a sore on her arm, she asked, “You gonna get me out of here?”

“I—” Sean was at a loss for words. Craig hadn’t said anything about bailing her out, and he hadn’t given it a thought. If he did pay her bond, he could take her home, talk to her in private, have unlimited time to persuade her of the best action to take.

Or maybe run away with her.

Though if he took her home, Craig and his thugs would know where to find her. They could take care of her at their convenience, and him, too, and maybe Daisy and Dahlia. Surely she was safer in jail. Yeah, they could reach her there, but it would have to be harder inside than out.

And if he took her home, he would have to duct tape her wrist to his. She’d been an expert at sneaking out when she was thirteen. Twenty-eight and in need of a high, she would disappear the first chance she got. He’d be on the hook for the money and for her escape.

“I don’t have that kind of money,” he lied. “Sorry, Maggie.”

Anger knotted her thin little face. “What the hell you been doing all these years?”

“I work on cars.”

“Of course.” She rolled her eyes. “You always did love them stupid cars more than any of us. So if you’re not gonna bail me out, what the hell are you doing here?”

“I—I want to help you.” Help you get out of this life, help you stay alive, help you clean up... Though she didn’t look much interested in getting clean at the moment.

For a time she stared at him, then a ghost of the grin he remembered so well touched her mouth. “If you want to help me, go to Marian at Triple A Bonds and buy her goodwill with ten thousand bucks. That’s ten percent of my bail. Otherwise, I’ll take care of myself, Johnny boy, like I’ve been doing ever since you took off.”

Johnny. Only family had ever called him by the American version of his Irish name. Hearing it stung.

As she stood, hitching up her too-big pants, and walked away, he blurted out, “Maggie, I saw Daisy this morning.”

That stopped her a foot or so from the door. Slowly she turned, gave him a flat look, then said, “Yeah. Well. She’s five years old. If you hadn’t run off, you could’ve seen her a lot of times.” Dismissing him, she turned back to the guard. “Come on, bubba, get me outta here.”

After the door closed behind him, Sean exhaled heavily. “That went well.”

Oh, yeah, this trip to Hell was going to be all kinds of fun.

Chapter 3

Hanging by a Thread, Sophy’s quilt shop, opened at 10:00 a.m. six days a week. Business was good enough that she could hire Saturday help—Rachel, just graduated from high school last spring—but weekdays were generally hers alone.

Hers and Daisy’s.

Sophy turned the Closed sign to Open, switched on lights all around the shop, stowed her purse in the storeroom and booted up the computer before giving her attention to Daisy. If only she were the older of the two girls, the morning would have gone so much more easily. Daisy thought school was a grand adventure: other kids, toys, books, play, classroom pets. She wanted to go.

Dahlia didn’t.

She’d never been away from her sister. She was so much more suspicious of strangers and so much more aware of her family’s place. She didn’t trust anyone but her mother and Daisy—and Sophy wasn’t sure about Maggie. Her job had always been to look out for Daisy, to make sure she didn’t talk to anyone or say anything she shouldn’t. She was the protector, and how could she protect when she was locked up in a stupid school with stupid people?

Daisy was walking in circles around the worktable Sophy had made available for her and Dahlia, the rubber soles of her shoes squeaking every other step. Her ponytail had failed completely, the band hanging from a small clump of strands, ready to fall any moment. Pink from her strawberry milk rimmed her upper lip, while her lower lip was stuck out in major pout mode.

“What do you want to do this morning?” Sophy asked with a cheer that was mostly phony.

Daisy gave her a look that was mostly stony. “I want to go to school with Dahlia.”

“Besides that?”

“Nothing.” She gave her foot a little twist, intensifying the squeak against the wooden floor, then did it again.

“Stop that, please.”

Defiantly, she did it again.

Jaw clenched, Sophy turned to her own work area. In addition to selling fabrics and quilting supplies, she offered her own quilts for sale, taught classes, made custom pieces and machine-quilted tops for customers interested only in the piecing aspect. She always had a dozen or more projects in the works, and as Daisy continued the noise-making, she pulled out a plastic tub that contained one.

The piece was a twin-size quilt, creamy-hued pieces of fabric, plain or with tone-on-tone patterns so subtle she had to look twice at some to see them. It was a simple quilt, twelve-inch blocks with a scalloped edge. The beauty of this one was in the quilting, a meandering maze that led to a small outline-stitched heart. Though the long-arm quilting machine stood a few yards away, Sophy was finishing this one by hand because it was special.

It was for Dahlia, and maybe it would be with her when she someday found her heart’s desire. Please, God, let it be more worthy than her mother’s.

Daisy continued to wander, but the shop was a reasonably safe place to let her do that. The back door required a key to open the dead bolt. The stairs that had once led to the second floor ended at a blank wall and were used for display. There was a bell at the front door that chimed the instant anyone stepped on the floor mat, before they’d had a chance to even touch the door, and the windows were secured with extra locks.

As Sophy settled in, a sense of peace seeped through her. She loved every aspect of quilting, from choosing a pattern to assembling fabrics, cutting and piecing and quilting. To make her parents happy, she’d tried to major in business in college, dutifully attending classes at Clemson, stuffing dull facts she cared nothing about into her brain, giving up her social life and spending all her time studying. Quilting was the only other thing she made time for, and when one of her quilts won a major competition, she’d thrown in the business-major towel. Though there had been some lean times the first years the shop was open, she’d never regretted it.

Thanks to a Christmas gift from her sister, Miri, she wouldn’t have to worry about money for a long time.

When the bell dinged, she secured the needle in the fabric, then set the quilt on the worktable. Neither Daisy, too short to be seen over the stands of fabric bolts between them, nor the customer was visible from Sophy’s location, but clearly they could see each other as Daisy greeted the newcomer.

In a particularly Holigan sort of way.

“What are you doing here?”

Giving her chair a hip bump to slide it into place, Sophy hurried down the wide center aisle.

“Maybe I came to make a quilt.”

Sophy blinked. The voice was low and gravelly and definitely male, definitely not anyone she knew. It was the kind of voice that belonged on the radio in the middle of the night with a half-moon casting slivers of light across the bedroom floor while the half-open windows provided brief drafts of air cool enough to dry the skin. She would have recognized it if she’d heard it before. She would have dated this voice without caring a damn about the rest of him.