Night Whispers Read online

  Given all that, it was understandable that she was shaken by the discovery that there was one enormous family secret to which she had never been privy.

  Sara sank down at the kitchen table and thought about how often she had sat at kitchen tables with Sloan and Kimberly. Thousands of times.

  Sloan looked over at her friend. “Would you like a sandwich?” she repeated.

  “I realize this is none of my business,” Sara said, feeling a little like an outsider for the first time since she’d met Sloan and Kimberly, “but can you at least tell me why you kept all that about your father a total secret from me?”

  Sloan swung around, startled by Sara’s hurt tone. “But it wasn’t a big secret, not really. When you and I were kids, we talked about our fathers, and I told you about mine. When my mother was eighteen, she won a local beauty contest and the first prize was a trip to Fort Lauderdale and a week in the best hotel. Carter Reynolds was staying at the same hotel. He was seven years older than she, impossibly handsome, and a hundred times more sophisticated. Mom believed it was love at first sight and that they were going to get married and live happily ever after. The truth was, he had no intention of marrying her or even of seeing her again until he found out she was pregnant, and then his disgusted family gave him no choice. For the next couple of years they lived near Coral Gables, scraping by on what he could earn, and Mom had another baby.

  “Mom thought they were blissfully happy until the day his mother arrived at their house in a limousine, offered him a chance to come back into the family fold, and he grabbed it. While my mother was in tears and shock, they persuaded her that it would be selfish of her to try to hold on to a man who wanted his freedom, or to try to keep both his babies away from him. They convinced her to let them take Paris back to San Francisco with them for what Mom thought was a visit. Then they got her to sign a document agreeing to a divorce. She didn’t know that in the small print she had relinquished all her rights to Paris. They left in the limousine, three hours after his mother arrived. End of story.”

  Sara was staring at her, her eyes filled with tears of sympathy and outrage for Kim. “You did tell me that story a long time ago,” she said, “but I was too young to understand the . . . the ruthlessness of what they did and the torment they caused.”

  Sloan took instant advantage of Sara’s own words to press home her point. “And now that you do understand, would you want to admit you’re related to that man or his family? Wouldn’t you want to forget it?”

  “I’d want to kill the bastard,” Sara said, but she laughed.

  “A healthy reaction and honest description of the man,” Sloan said approvingly as she put two tuna salad sandwiches on the table. “Since killing him was not an option to my mother and since I was too young to do it for her,” Sloan finished lightly, “and since talking about him or my sister or anything associated with that day used to make her incredibly sad, I convinced her when I was seven or eight that we should pretend none of them ever existed. After all, we had each other and then we had you. I thought we had a pretty terrific family.”

  “We did. We do,” Sara said with feeling, but she couldn’t smile. “Wasn’t there anything Kim could do to get Paris back?”

  Sloan shook her head. “Mom talked to a local lawyer, and he said it would cost a fortune to hire the kind of high-powered attorneys she’d have needed to fight theirs in court, and even then he didn’t think she’d win. Mom has always tried to convince herself that in living with the Reynolds family Paris has had a wonderful life with advantages and opportunities that Mom never could have given her.”

  Despite her objective tone, Sloan felt swamped by anger. In the past, her strongest emotion had been indignation on her mother’s behalf and contempt for her father. Now, as she recounted the story, she was a grown woman, and what she felt was far more fierce than indignation; it was empathy and compassion so intense that it made her chest ache. For her father—that callous, selfish, cruel destroyer of innocence and dreams—what she felt for him was not merely contempt, it was loathing, and it grew as she considered his presumptuous phone call earlier. After decades of neglect, he actually believed he could make a phone call and his abandoned wife and unseen daughter would leap at the chance for a reunion. She shouldn’t have just coldly dismissed him on the phone; she should have told him she’d prefer spending a week in a snake pit to a week with him anywhere. She should have told him he was a bastard.

  7

  The fire had been noticed at approximately nine-thirty P.M., according to Mrs. Rivera’s neighbor who saw smoke seeping under a front door and called 911. Within six minutes, the fire department was on the scene, but it was already too late to save the shabby frame house.

  Sloan had been on her way home from work, intending to change clothes and walk across the street to the beach where Pete’s bachelor party was underway, when she heard the radio call and decided to offer whatever help she could. By the time she arrived, the street was already jammed with fire engines, ambulances, and police cruisers, their emergency lights flashing like grim beacons in the night. Sirens were wailing in the distance, and fire hoses were stretched across the street, slithering over the yards like fat white snakes. Police officers were cordoning off the immediate area and trying to keep a growing crowd of curiosity seekers from getting too close.

  Sloan had just finished taking statements from several neighbors when Mrs. Rivera suddenly arrived on the scene. The heavyset, elderly woman plowed past the officers and onlookers like a frantic linebacker heading for a touchdown, tripped over a fire hose, and landed in Sloan’s arms, her momentum nearly knocking them both to the ground. “My house!” she cried, struggling to free her wrist from Sloan’s grasp.

  “You can’t go in there,” Sloan told her. “You’ll get hurt, and you’ll only get in the way of the men trying to save your house.”

  Instead of being calmed or deterred, Mrs. Rivera became hysterical. “My dog—!” she screamed, struggling to free herself. “My Daisy is in there!”

  Sloan wrapped her arm around the woman’s shoulders, trying to detain and console her at the same time. “Is Daisy a little brown-and-white dog?”

  “Yes. Little. Brown and white.”

  “I think I saw her a few minutes ago,” Sloan said. “I think she’s safe. Call her name. We’ll look for her together.”

  “Daisy!” Mrs. Rivera sobbed, turning in a helpless circle. “Daisy! Daisy—where are you?”

  Sloan was scanning the street, looking for likely hiding places where a small, terrified animal might seek shelter, when a little brown-and-white face, covered in soot and grime, suddenly peered out from beneath an unmarked police car. “There she is,” Sloan said.

  “Daisy!” Mrs. Rivera cried, rushing forward and scooping the terrified animal into her arms.

  After that, there was nothing Sloan could do except stand beside the bereft woman and offer the solace of companionship while they watched the ravenous flames devouring the roof, licking at the front porch. “One of your neighbors told me you have a daughter who lives nearby,” Sloan said gently.

  Mrs. Rivera nodded, her gaze riveted on her collapsing house.

  “I’ll radio for a car to pick her up and bring her here to you,” Sloan offered.

  • • •

  By the time Sloan got home, she was already so late for Pete’s party that she couldn’t possibly take time to shower and wash her hair. She parked her car in her driveway, grabbed her purse, and hurried across the street, where she had to turn sideways to sidle between two of the cars parked along the street. As she edged between the cars’ bumpers, she thought she saw someone sitting in the driver’s seat of another car parked far down the row; then the shadowy figure disappeared, as if the person had slouched down in the seat or leaned over out of sight.

  Sloan suppressed the impulse to investigate and walked swiftly across the sidewalk. She was in a hurry. Perhaps the person in the car—if it had been a person—had dropped something on th