Thread of Innocence (The Joe Tyler Series Book 4)
Jeff Shelby
Mission Bay Publishing (2013)
Thread of Innocence
by
Jeff Shelby
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
THREAD OF INNOCENCE
All rights reserved.
Copyright ©2013 by Jeff Shelby
Cover design by JT Lindroos
This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material or artwork herein is prohibited without the expressed written consent of the author.
First Edition: December 2013
Books by Jeff Shelby
The Joe Tyler Novels
THREAD OF HOPE
THREAD OF SUSPICION
THREAD OF BETRAYAL
THREAD OF INNOCENCE
THREAD OF FEAR (December 2014)
The Noah Braddock Novels
KILLER SWELL
WICKED BREAK
LIQUID SMOKE
DRIFT AWAY
The Moose River Mysteries
THE MURDER PIT
LAST RESORT
ALIBI HIGH
The Deuce Winters Novels (Under the pseudonym Jeffrey Allen)
STAY AT HOME DEAD
POPPED OFF
FATHER KNOWS DEATH
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ONE
My daughter Elizabeth was running.
She was about a hundred feet ahead of me, her feet pounding the sand, sprinting away from me, a few feet from the ocean’s edge.
I tried to keep up with her but she was faster than I was, younger than I was, and my lungs burned as my feet turned over in the soft sand.
She slowed as she hit our imaginary finish line, stuck her hands on her hips, then turned and waited for me to come in second.
I finally reached her and bent over, my hands heavy on my knees.
“I won,” she said, breathing hard. “Again.”
I nodded, but couldn’t get the words out in between gasps. I twisted my neck, looked up at her, and smiled.
She smiled back.
She’d been home for a week. Not from a vacation or from a trip, but from a nightmare. I’d spent years looking for her and I’d finally gotten lucky. Found her. She’d been back for a week and nothing was normal. Everything was awkward. Her mom and I slept in different rooms. She didn’t say a whole lot. We tiptoed around each other, unsure of our words, our expressions, our body language. Strangers, all of us, in the same house.
But she and I found a small bit of normalcy in running.
I’d laced up my shoes the second morning after bringing her back to Coronado and she asked if she could go along. I could’ve been going anywhere and I would’ve said yes. She went upstairs, changed her clothes and then promptly kicked my ass in a swift four mile run along the Coronado sand. She’d done it repeatedly all week, insisting on sprinting at the end, always beating me by a wide margin to our finishing point. It didn’t make things more normal between us, but it was at least something.
I straightened and she wiped at the sweat on her forehead.
“You were closer this morning,” she said. Her breathing was steady, almost normal and I was still gulping mouthfuls of air.
“I think you’re mocking me,” I said.
She shrugged, pushed the wisps of hair out of her eyes, looking strikingly like a younger version of her mother. “A little, maybe.”
We walked slowly up the sand, cooling down. My thighs burned, but my lungs were finding the air they needed after the sprint.
“We’ve always lived here, right?” she asked as we walked.
I sidestepped a pile of seaweed. “Yep. I’ve been here since I was a kid.”
“That’s what I thought,” she said. “But I wasn’t sure.”
She wasn’t sure about a lot of things, but that was to be expected. Her memory was spotty, a product of blocking out some of the things she wanted to forget in the time we had been separated. We weren’t pushing to bring the memories back. We were trying to let her go at her own pace.
“I keep trying to remember,” she said. “And there isn’t much there.”
“Everyone is telling us that’s normal,” I said. “It’ll take time.”
We walked a little further into the morning sun, the backside of the Hotel Del coming up on our left.
“I think I need to go back to Minnesota,” she said, stopping, her back to me.
A knot formed in my gut and I tried to keep my voice neutral. “Okay.”
“I mean…” She shook her head and swung around to face me, her hands on her hips. “I don’t know what I mean.”
“Say what you need to say, Elizabeth. Don’t keep it in.”
“She doesn’t feel that way,” she said, cutting her eyes at me.
She was Lauren. Her mother. My ex-wife. Elizabeth hadn’t yet gotten so comfortable with us that she called us mom and dad again. It hurt, but it was understandable. So she referred to us with non-threatening pronouns, words that didn’t bond us to her or her to us. She’d called other people mom and dad for a decade and no matter how much it stung, we couldn’t just make that go away over night.
“She’s stubborn,” I said. “But it’s not to hurt you. Everybody’s struggling.”
Her hands stayed on her hips but she started walking again. “I guess.”
“But say what you need to say,” I said. “To me.”
We walked for about thirty seconds before she spoke again.
“I need my things,” she said. “And I need to talk to them.”
“The Corzines, you mean.”
She nodded. “Yeah.”
The Corzines were the family in Minneapolis that she’d ended up with. I still wasn’t sure how she’d arrived in their arms and I was still determined to find out who was responsible. I wasn’t sure what fault to place on them. But, regardless, Elizabeth knew the Corzines as her family. Her parents. And as quickly as she’d been taken from our front yard years earlier, she’d been removed from their lives just as fast.
“Are you saying you need to talk to them to figure out where you want to live?” I asked. “Or something else?”
The breeze played with a strand of her hair, tugged on it, and she tucked it behind her ear. “I don’t know.”
“You know you aren’t a legal adult yet.”
“Uh, yeah. She reminds me anytime I even think about Minnesota.”
She, again, being Lauren.
“Sorry,” I said. “That came out wrong.”
Elizabeth didn’t say anything.
“I meant that legally, you belong with us,” I said. “But I’m listening. You think you need to talk to them.”