Jex Malone (37 page)

Without looking at him, she hands him the chalk drawing.

It's a picture of a gorgeous meadow with beautiful willow trees and a swing in the yard. The sky's brilliant blue and the grass is summer green. In the middle of the picture is a girl in a floppy hat running through beautiful yellow flowers. There is a blonde-headed little boy holding hands with the girl. In the bottom corner, the artist didn't sign her name. She drew a rainbow.

It. Is. Her. Signature.

“Pa-Patty?” Cooper says in a quivering voice.

“Hi, Cooper,” says Patty Matthews. And with that the girl with dark shiny hair and a sweet smile drops her chalk, stands up, and throws her arms around her little brother.

“Yeah, you wanna see my hall pass?”

—Julie Barnes,
Mod Squad

I stand there unable to move until I feel shaking next to me. It starts as a slow vibrating and then becomes more forced, like a little baby earthquake. Deva's standing next to me hysterically crying, whole-body-racking sobs coming from her tiny, designer-clad frame.

I can't really tend to her because the next sensation I feel is a pair of large hands firmly gripping both of my shoulders and ripping me around in a half circle. Before I can scream, the hands spin me around until I'm face-to-large-cop-chest with … my father!

“Oh … oh … oh,” I gasp, thinking my heart might actually stop.

Detective Malone doesn't want to hear what I have to say, but begins to speak nonstop into my face.

“Do you know how worried I was about you? I thought something terrible happened to you!” he says in a thick voice that I have never heard before. “What would I do if something bad happened to you? I couldn't go on if something happened to you. Don't you know how I really feel about you? You are my daughter. My baby.”

My head is spinning and for a second the rest of the world is completely shut out. It's just us.

Dad. And. Me.

“A long time ago, a young girl vanished in my neighborhood. On my watch,” Dad says, still holding me by both shoulders now in the closest thing we have come to a hug in a long, long time.

“Baby, I thought the same thing happened to you,” Dad says in a low voice into my ear. Then he leans even closer and whispers, “Was it so bad this summer? Do you hate me? Did you have to run away from me? Don't you want me to be your dad—even just a little bit?”

With those words, I just let it all go and burst into sobbing tears, throwing my arms around his large neck. Then something inside of me makes me quietly say a word I haven't used since I was five.

“Daddy, I'm sorry. For … ” I can barely get the words out, but I do.

“For all of it,” I whisper.

“I'm sorry, too. For all of it—and more,” he says into my hair, and then he pulls back and kisses my forehead.

So this is what it's like to have a dad.

I know I have to say more and I want to say it. “I do want you to be my dad,” I whisper into his ear as he holds me suspended in the air near his chest. “I want it. Not just a little bit. I want it a lot.”

Dad obviously doesn't care if I look cool in front of my friends and that boy he is certainly going to throttle when all of this is over. He just lifts his little girl into his arms even higher because to him I weigh no more than a toothpick. When my feet leave the ground again, he gives me a fierce bear hug that never seems to end.

Out of the corner of my eyes, I see Deva crumpled over crying and fanning herself at the same time as her mascara races down her face. Both of us notice a limo pulling up to the castle. For a second I think it might be some huge star or more cops, but then I hear Deva gasp when she spies her parents step out of the stretch and then race up to her.

“You're alive! You're fine! And you look fabulous,” her mother, a willowy model type, says while hugging her. Her short, thin father is only a step behind and adds, “Deva, we traced your credit cards and found that you've been staying at the Four Seasons and bought five tickets to this God-forsaken Wonderland. We understand the Four Seasons, but why would you want to bake out here in the heat?”

Their limo door opens wider and Nat's and Cissy's parents come pouring out to alternatively yell at and hug their daughters. Amid the apologies and the “we needed to help Cooper” speeches, we try to explain the sudden need to disappear from sight and go AWOL.

I just stand there holding my father's XL-size hand thinking that in all the ways it counts, I just moved into that princess castle—the modern version where you might just have a bunch of parts and even a few different houses with various parents, but it still adds up to an amazing whole.

Then it dawns on me that there's one other thing that has to be put right.

“Uh, Daddy, I mean … Dad,” I begin, still getting used to calling him the D-word. “There's someone else that you're probably going to want to say hello to out here. Right here, in fact. I promise you. You're gonna
love
this part, too.”

At that moment, Cooper walks closer to us with his arm wrapped around his sister. I can see my dad's eyes narrow like he's going to kill him for leading me on and then hugging this other girl, so I blurt out the one thing that I know will stop my dad in his tracks.

“Dad, I'd like to reintroduce you to one of your … I mean our … neighbors,” I say, reaching out to touch Patty's arm and pulling her a bit closer. “This is Patty. Cooper's sister.”

“Long time no see, huh?” I blurt.

Even with a father now, I haven't really changed all that much. At least not in the last three minutes.

“Patty Matthews?
The
Patty Matthews? Patricia Matthews?” Dad stammers in only half his hardened cop voice because he is truly stunned. I can tell from my crack-detective genes and training that he never thought for one minute that she was still alive.

I have rendered my own father the uber-homicide detective utterly speechless.

Case closed!

Of course, Patty is very alive, smiling and holding onto her brother's arm. And for the first time in a long time, the neighbors can hear Miss Patty Matthews speak to them.

“Mr. Foster saved my life—along with my mother,” Patty says in a quiet voice.

At that moment, Ricki steps out of a smoke-belching cab and quietly walks up to both of her children.

She hugs them like she will never let go.

What happens next feels like a bit of a blur. First, my dad makes a few phone calls, and within minutes Wonderland security is escorting our ever-expanding group to a private conference room tucked behind a vanilla-scented bakery. We sit around a big table and stare at each other for several long minutes.

“Okay, I think we're due an explanation,” Dad says, gesturing to the other parents. “Patty, do you want to start and tell us what happened?”

Patty swallows hard. I figure she knew eventually this day would come, and she looks both frightened and relieved to finally tell the truth.

“I came home that night of the block party, and it was just horrible. The worst night of my life,” she starts. “When I got home, Ricki was packed and ready to go. She had Cooper's little suitcase there in the doorway and I didn't know where Dad was. I guess he was out drinking.'”

Ricki says nothing, but nods her head in agreement.

“Ricki was getting out while she still could. It was getting dangerous to stay in the house because Dad's drinking was so bad. You have no idea how mean he could be. It was really scary,” Patty continues.

Cooper puts his hand on her arm for moral support, and she draws a deep breath before she goes on. “Anyway, Ricki said I couldn't go with her, and I knew why. She wasn't my biological mom and she never adopted me. She had no legal right to take me with her. If she'd taken me, Dad would have called the cops and arrested her for kidnapping. He threatened to do that if she ever left with both of us kids. I was his natural daughter and there wasn't anything anyone could do about it.

“If Ricki ever took me, Dad would be so mad … Well, I don't even want to think about what would have happened if he got that angry with us,” Patty says with an involuntary shudder.

She takes a drink from a small cup of water the Wonderland security officer has offered her.

“So Ricki was leaving. She didn't tell me what was going to happen next, and for a few minutes you can only imagine how bad I felt having been betrayed by my boyfriend and then my family—at least the only family I'd ever known. And now they were abandoning me too. So, I went into my bedroom and started to write in my journal.”

I want to interrupt and tell Patty we found the journal. But I don't dare say a word.

Patty takes another deep breath.

“A few minutes later, I heard Mr. Foster in my house. It really freaked me out because I was kind of scared of him, too, and now I was all alone,” Patty says.

“But Mr. Foster isn't really scary. He just looks a little scary and I knew from his wife, Lillian, that deep down he is really a solid guy who used to be a high school principal in Normal, Illinois. He loves kids, but has had enough of them at the same time. Anyways, it turns out Mr. Foster was there to help me and told me to grab some things because I was leaving in a fast and forever way. All I could do was grab my backpack. I couldn't think straight. I had put my journal back behind the drawers, but first Mr. Foster told me to rip out the last few pages and hand it to him. We didn't want to leave a trail.

“Mr. Foster told me to go out the back door and wait in the alley behind our house. Lillian was waiting in her old Buick car. She told me she had a plan for me. It was all Ricki and Lillian's idea.

“I got in the car with Mr. Foster and Lillian and the entire time he was telling her that this was wrong,” Patty says. “But Lillian told him to hush and she wouldn't have it. I'd never seen her so determined like that.

“I had no idea what was happening. We dumped my backpack behind some hotel on the strip. There was blood on it from when I sliced my hand at school in home ec before the school year was out. It wasn't much blood. But I guess even a little bit of blood was enough for people to assume it had something to do with what happened to me. Mr. Foster said we should throw the backpack away to throw off the cops. He didn't even know there was blood on it.

Then we drove through the desert. At a rest stop near Indio, we pulled over and Lillian told me I was going to California to live with her sister.

“Lillian told me she wanted me to stay put in California until I heard from her. And her sister was so great about it. She fed me and had fresh clothes. Her name was Margaret. She became the mom I never had.”

At that moment, Ricki looks at Patty and quietly starts crying. Even though she still looks tough in dirty jeans and an old Van Halen T-shirt, I want to put my hand over her hand. But I don't move a muscle because this is just too good.

“So, months and months went by and I never heard anything,” Patty tells us. “Margaret had me cut my hair and dye it dark once I got out here. She knew some people and got me a new birth certificate, new school transcripts, and everything. My name is Patty Michaels now. Margaret kept telling me they'd figure out what to do with me once things settled down.

“We looked up the newspaper stories in Nevada. God, the case was so big for a while. The town spent close to a half a million dollars, I read, looking for me. But then a few months passed and it seemed like everyone just forgot about me,” Patty says.

At this point, Dad clears his throat and says, “Patty, some of us never forgot about you. In fact, what happened to you changed many lives.”

Dad actually puts a hand over mine.

Patty looks at Cooper, who is also nodding.

Touching his hand, she says, “And then Dad died. I wished I felt worse about it, but I didn't. The Dad I'd loved died long before that car crash. He just wasn't the same person when he was drinking.

“At that point, Lillian called Margaret and told me to stay put,” Patty says. “She was worried that I'd end up in foster care and so would Cooper if I surfaced and the cops started asking me too many questions about where I'd been and who I'd been with. I was still underage and Ricki didn't think she or I could keep lying to Detective Malone once he started questioning us.

“Lillian did come to visit every few months. No one thought anything about it. She was just visiting her own sister. No one suspected an old lady,” Patty continues.

“Ricki and Lillian didn't want me turning myself in and undergoing questioning by the police. They kind of doubted I'd be a good liar,” Patty says, laughing a little. “Plus, there was the matter of the town spending so much money looking for me. We figured Ricki and Lillian would be arrested and forced to pay that money back. Neither of them had half a million dollars.”