Broken Lullaby. Pamela Tracy
after pulling over a kid who’d stolen a car. Kid had a gun.”
“His family is still having a hard time dealing with it. His sixteen-year-old daughter, Angelina, has a little boy now.”
“So young,” Mitch murmured.
“It’s her baby that’s missing. Sunday she took her son to a festival in town. Somebody snatched him.”
Sunday. Mitch felt prickles up and down his spine. On Sunday, while he was busy shooting a fellow police officer, here in small-town America somebody was stealing a baby. “What do you have there?” Mitch sat down next to Eric and reached for the piece of paper.
“It’s a drawing. Right now we’re calling her a person of interest. She’d approached Angelina at the festival and touched the baby. Angelina thought she was just admiring little José. When José was taken, Angelina thought again.”
The sketch was of a young Hispanic woman, probably no more than eighteen. Her dark hair spilled past her shoulders. Her cheekbones and the lines of her chin were too thin. Her eyes radiated sadness. There was nothing special about her except…
Suddenly, he remembered. Six months ago, an illegal crossing gone wrong near Yuma cost a young man his life. He was shot while trying to cross the border by a crooked border patrol officer.
Mitch had seen a photo of a girl that the dead man carried in his pocket.
Same girl.
Mary Graham winced as the U-Haul bounced over the uneven pavement of the Santellis Used Car Lot. It was all hers now: every broken window, every cracked sidewalk, every shattered dream.
“Justin, we’re here.” She tapped her son’s shoulder and removed one of the earbuds that ran from his ever-present iPod into the sides of his head.
“That’s nice.” Justin shoved the earbud back in. He was still punishing her for picking up their lives and moving yet again.
After three years on the run, she thought it would feel good to come back to Gila City and Broken Bones, Arizona, the place she had grown up—the place she used to call home.
Mary climbed out of the car and looked around.
She should be excited that she and Justin could settle down again in a place with family.
She wasn’t.
Not with her family.
As Mary surveyed the ramshackle car lot, she pictured herself standing in that same spot three years before—the day her estranged husband, Eddie, had been led away in handcuffs and her life in Arizona had ended. From the looks of things, the decades-old family car business had ended that day, too.
The grimace on her son’s face as he joined her broke Mary’s reverie.
“This is it?” Justin, way too discerning for an eleven-year-old, muttered after getting a good look at his mother’s inheritance. “You’re kidding. Dad really used to work here?”
Like something out of a low-budget 1950s horror flick, the one-level main building that rose out of the dusty parking lot was dingy-white, almost gray, with a large bay behind it where cars were once repaired. By the street, an oversized sign still had enough pitiful letters for Mary to make out the words: S-ntel-s Us-d Ca-Lot.
Looking at Justin in this setting from her past made her realize again how much he looked like Eddie, the Eddie she had at one time loved, the Eddie who had broken her trust and her heart. She softly said, “He actually managed the place.”
“When?”
“From the time you were a baby. Your father took over the business two years before you were born and ran it until just a few years ago…”
“You mean until I went in the hospital and he got arrested,” Justin stated quietly as he looked around. “Until we left Phoenix,” he added.
The lot took up a full acre of land in a prime location just off the Interstate. According to the estate executor, the deserted gas station next door was also part of her inheritance.
“Did it look like this when Dad worked here?”
“Oh, no. Your father kept it up.”
And Eddie had. Truthfully, he hadn’t sold many cars, but the place had somehow managed to look like a semisuccessful business, not just a front for her father and brothers’ criminal activities.
Justin tried to look impressed, wanting no doubt to believe he could be proud of something his dad had done. Mary understood; she had felt the same way about her own father once.
As if he could read her mind, Justin asked, “Did Grandpa work here, too?”
The very thought made Mary want to chuckle. Of the great line of Santellises, Yano Santellis had been the most successful of all. Well, if you thought that having a finger in just about every till in Gila City made you a success, that is. Her dad was happy to skim most of the profit from the dirty dealings the used car lot fronted, but seldom got his own hands dirty.
In Mary’s eyes, her father was neither successful nor great. And now the great Yano was a mere shadow of his former self, Alzheimer’s had claimed his mind. Mary finally shook her head in response to Justin. “Grandpa owned it.”
Except that wasn’t true. Mary owned it. And had for some time, according to the will her grandfather left behind. Conveniently, Eddie hadn’t passed that information along. She’d only discovered it when the detective her brother hired had tracked her down a few weeks ago. “Your grandfather was here a lot, but he hired others to actually work it.”
“Dad worked for him?”
“Yes.”
“Will I get to help you fix this place up?” Justin frowned.
“Probably.”
Justin made a face that Mary pretended not to notice. No matter what the lot looked like now, it would be good for him to be part of something that belonged to the two of them, because nothing had belonged to them for a long time. She’d made the decision to go into hiding when Eddie was arrested, knowing she could be charged as an accomplice in whatever crimes he had committed and that Justin might be taken from her if social workers believed that her family connections had put him in danger.
After all, she was Eddie Graham’s wife, even if they had been separated for years. If she had been arrested, too, what would have become of her son? Justin had been hospitalized after swallowing some pills that he had mistaken for candy—pills that Eddie had stashed in the back of his car when he came for a visitation.
On that awful day, Mary never left Justin’s side, not even as she heard the nurse say she was being reported to social services, not when she heard the words protective custody, not when she heard the term aggravated assault and not even when the photographer started snapping pictures right in the hospital room to start the criminal investigation.
Right there in the hospital that day, a tightness gripped her heart as she realized what she’d allowed to happen, what she’d become—way too many years ago. She was as much to blame as Eddie because she knew. She knew!
The only way she could live with herself was to get Justin away from the life she’d always known and to make a change. That meant getting away from not only her husband but also her family. Rather than wait for the fallout, she ran. She’d do anything to keep her son safe and away from the life the rest of her family had chosen.
She and Justin had spent the past three years moving to a new place every time Mary feared someone was watching. He’d heard more “We’ll see” and “Not this time” putoffs than a kid deserved.
He headed toward the abandoned bay. Mary let him go. He was pushing for space and she needed to let him have some. Once again, everything in his life had changed. But this time, they were home. At least, she hoped it could be home again.
“Maybe