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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 assign her to next. Janitorial, maybe. It was about the one thing he hadn’t done. Yet. “Maybe I should start at the beginning.”
He gave her a long look that seemed to say “you think?” “Maybe you should.”
She suddenly felt too warm and unzipped her jacket. “An infant was left on the doorstep of a home owned by two brothers in Braden last month. The only identifying item left with the baby was the note. Unsigned, as I said. On common, white paper. No clear fingerprints. But the reference to Jaxie presumably meant Jaxon Swift, who is one of the occupants of the home. Mr. Swift owns a business in Braden and he had an employee for a short while named—” she inclined her head slightly “—Daisy Miranda, who was the only one who ever used that nickname for him. But she left Mr. Swift’s employment more than a year ago and he hasn’t heard from her since.”
“So? The kid is his. Why else leave her for him? What’s the problem?” His eyes looked cynical. “Jaxie doesn’t want to take responsibility?”
“That was our assumption, too, at first. That he was the father, I mean. But DNA tests have already disproved his paternity. He’s not Layla’s father. The business Mr. Swift owns is a bar. Magic Jax. Karen was a cocktail waitress. Their uniforms are, um—”
“Skimpy?”
She hesitated. She’d been known to work as a cocktail waitress at Magic Jax a time or two for extra money. She was taking a few shifts right now to help get her car out of auto-shop jail. “Let’s just say the outfits are closely fitted. Given the timing, it’s unlikely that your sister was even pregnant when she quit working there. There are no records locally about Layla’s birth, but we estimate she’s now about three months old.”
“So where is the baby?”
Ali kept herself from shifting. “The judge in charge of her case has placed her temporarily with a local family while we investigate.”
His lips twisted. “He’s put her in foster care, you mean.”
The term was accurate, but implied a formality and distance that wasn’t the case at all, since it was Ali’s own sister Maddie and her new husband, Lincoln Swift, who were providing the care. “Yes. A very good foster family. Can you give me any information about Karen’s friends? If she was involved with a particular man?”
“No. I didn’t even know she’d been here in Wyoming.”
Ali waited a moment for him to explain further, but he didn’t. And even though she tried to give him her best demanding stare, his gaze didn’t shy away.
She was afraid that she was the one who came away