Page 82 of No Kind of Hero
“I called Simon,” Beth said. He could see the white on her knuckles as she gripped the steering wheel, but her voice sounded calm. Like a lawyer’s. He’d never understood how Beth could be so different from her mom, but maybe he was realizing today that there were some similarities there. Beth was tougher than she seemed. “A senior partner can ask for pretty much anything. I didn’t want to tell you until I knew we could get results. I wasn’t sure at all.”
“I’m guessing he wasn’t happy about it,” Evan said.
“Nope. I promised I’d come back on Thursday and give him a hundred and ten percent from here on out. I said it was the only favor I’d ever ask him.”
“And that worked?” He couldn’t think about the “Thursday” part now. His mind couldn’t take in one more thing.
“No. It didn’t. It worked when I told him about Gracie’s big blue eyes and the way she hangs onto her daddy. When I told him how sick she was, and how her mother took her without her medicine when she had that terrible fever. He has three grandchildren, and the youngest one’s a baby girl. He has their pictures on his desk. They’re in little bitty frames, and he hides them behind his stack of files, but they’re there.”
“Oh.” Fifteen miles out. “Good. So what’s the plan? If we can’t snatch her back?” Everybody had been completely clear on that, and on bribing April, too. Neither thing, both Beth and Joan had told him, would help him one bit in a court case. And he couldn’t think of any other possible way to get Gracie.
He still needed to know where she was. He needed toseeher. And somehow, he’d keep from grabbing her and running. Somehow.
“Pretty simple, really,” Beth said. “My mom rings the doorbell and talks her way in. April’s friends are worried about her, because the police have been asking questions and saying that the baby’s in danger and they’re going to press charges, so they got in touch with this group my mom belongs to today. My mom’s from a women’s rights organization that helps moms who’ve lost their kids unfairly, and she’s come to help.”
“Why would your mom help?”
Beth didn’t sigh. She said, “Well, she’s not my mom, obviously. The group isn’t real, either. She’s a middle-aged volunteer lady.”
“Which I am,” Michelle said, “except that I don’t care for the term ‘middle-aged.’ I’m a community organizer. I dressed down.”
She had, Evan guessed. If cream slacks and a navy top that looked like silk were “dressed down.” Simple, anyway.
“I left off my rings,” Michelle said, “other than my wedding band. And I didn’t accessorize.”
“And then what happens?” Evan asked. “You get Gracie and run? I thought we couldn’t do that.” This plan made no sense to him.
“No,” Michelle said. “I get April to come with me to take the baby to the doctor, if she hasn’t done it. I take her to buy diapers and clothes and the right kind of formula, because youknowthey won’t have thought of that. Probably feeding her regular milk. Who knows what they’re doing. I pay for everything with the ‘organization’s’ funds. I take over and make everything easy, and we do lots and lots of errands, until April’s worn out and Gracie’s cranky and tired and it all seems too hard. Beth’s my driver. I give April the papers someplace in there, when the time is right, like I’m doing her a favor, and I tell her we’ll help with an attorney, because the WHW assists women in their legal struggles. Which I will,” she added. “I’ll get her an attorney so she can’t come back later and say she was pressured. This is the beauty of it. I’m not even lying.”
“What’s the . . . the WHW?” Evan felt like he was in some alternate reality. Some bizarre role-playing game that only a woman could dream up.
“Women Helping Women,” of course,” Michelle said. “I figured it should be simple. This girl doesn’t sound very bright to me. Let’s hope Gracie got your brains.”
“I thought Evan didn’t have brains,” Beth said.
“I was mistaken,” Michelle answered. “I asked his mother yesterday. He went to college. His grade-point average was perfectly respectable.”
“Isn’t it going to be a problem,” Evan said, “when she gets in the car with Gracie and I’m here?”
“It would be,” Michelle said, “if you were. I thought we’d drop you off a ways away. And if we get Gracie back, which I fully expect to do once I tell April how sorry I am about how hard this has been for her, and how soon the hearing will be and how I’m sure she’ll end up getting Gracie most of the time—which will scare her to death—and a few other things I have in mind, we’ll drop April back at the house and pick you up a ways away again.”
“What am I doing in the meantime?” Evan asked. “Why am I here?”
“Well,” Michelle said, “Beth and I thought you might want to hit this Chris. But do it outside the house. Fingerprints.”
Talking about the plan had helped Beth calm down, and so had her mother’s bulletproof confidence. When her mom had laid it out like that, she’d actually started to believe that it might work. Evan was sitting back there, his hope and his fear both strong enough to touch. Ithadto work.
She was nearly to Liberty Lake when the GPS told her to turn right. “County road,” she told her mother and Evan, amazed that her voice came out so level. “He’s out in the boonies, just like April’s girlfriends said.” They were following the GPS along a two-lane road lined with pines and interrupted by the occasional gravel driveway. “No neighbors.”
“Good,” Evan said, his voice sounding all the way dangerous. It had been a bad idea, this part. What if he actually hurt the guy? What if he were prosecuted?
Her mother had said, when she’d voiced her doubts, “Men don’t talk about these things. Of course this Chris won’t press charges. He’d have to stand there in court and say that Evan hit him and he couldn’t defend himself, and his buddies would laugh at him.”
“Mom,” Beth had said, “that’s not necessarily how it works.”
“It’s how it works in Idaho,” her mother had said.
“It’s Washington.”
