Family at Stake

Father—MacArthur Edwards.

All the blood in Rachel’s body fell to her feet and she saw stars, her skin crawled. Rachel fingered the red-arrow sticker on the front of the file that meant Frank thought Amanda should be removed from the home.

From Mac’s home.

Oh, Mac, what went wrong? She shook with a sudden chill that filled her bones.

“Rachel? You okay?” Olivia asked, her hand brushing Rachel’s shoulder.

Rachel took a deep, shuddery breath. “I’m fine,” she lied. “I need to get back into work.” She stood, ignoring Olivia’s protests. She scooped up the files and her half-eaten salad and ran back to her office like a possessed woman.

Mac Edwards had a daughter.

And she was in trouble.

Rachel shut her office door and sat at her desk, rolling her chair up tight so the edge of the desk bit into her stomach. She cleared a small space on her ink blotter and opened Amanda Edwards’s file. There was a shaking in her stomach, an awful quiver. A million thoughts buzzed and careened through her brain like bees.

Mac has a daughter and Frank thought she should be removed from the home.

There had to be some kind of mistake. The man she knew would have become a great father. He had been a caring, gentle boy with patience and kindness to spare.

Look at what your brother made me…

Rachel shook her head, pushing the memory to the black hole it came from.

But something had happened to Mac and his daughter. And when something happened to a twelve-year-old girl it was usually because of the parents.

Rachel touched the picture of Mac’s angry little girl, tracing the eyes that looked as if they had seen too much.

What went wrong?

Rachel dove into the file, tearing through pages, trying as best she could to gather the available information from the clues Frank had left behind.

Amanda Edwards, runaway age twelve. Amanda and a fourteen-year-old girl, Christie Alverez, were investigated six months ago in connection to a fire that burned down a barn and an acre of pasture on a horse farm ten miles away from New Springs.

The farm belonged to Gatan Meorte.

Wow. Gatan Meorte. Rachel wiped her hand down her face as memories assaulted her. She would have thought that old recluse was long dead.

Amanda and Christie had been missing for two days and were caught hitchhiking along Highway 13 the day after the fire.

Horrifying images of what could happen to two girls on the highway flooded Rachel’s imagination and cramped her stomach.

Frank’s notes, printed precisely in damning black and white, filled the last page.

Amanda is an angry young girl, with violent and suicidal tendencies. Her grades have dropped significantly in the past year since her mother’s death. It is my opinion that the mother was Amanda’s primary caregiver and when she died, the father did not pick up the slack. I recommend this child be removed from the home because Mac Edwards is in denial of his daughter’s behavior to the point of delusion.

He says he has never seen her act out and that his daughter’s running away was a complete shock to him. Amanda needs to live in a reality-based situation where her actions have consequences, as opposed to having her behavior excused or swept under the rug as is the case with her father. Even more disturbing, when told that Amanda could be removed from the home if he did not face the reality of his family, Mr. Edwards had a violent outburst. He broke a chair and a window and had to be physically restrained. It is my opinion that there is probably some underlying abuse between Mr. Edwards and his daughter. In light of this and Amanda’s growing criminal record, she needs to be removed from the home.

Rachel had to read the words five times before they sank in.

She leaned back and counted the ceiling-tile squares, a calming exercise that rarely worked, but that she tried with unwavering faith.

She couldn’t begin to picture the gentle, funny Mac she knew breaking a window or a chair in rage.

We could get married, that way you could stay.

She squeezed her eyes shut until the memory faded.

What happened to the mother? Rachel wondered. She went back through the file, but other than the note that the mother was deceased there was no mention of her.

How ironic that Rachel could have been the one with the twelve-year-old daughter—Mac’s daughter. That night at the quarry had been thirteen years ago almost to the day. A twist of fate and her life would have been completely different.

Rachel checked the date of the file. It was one of Frank’s last cases. The last time he’d interviewed Amanda was three weeks ago—the same time he’d told Mac that DCFS might take his daughter.

Mac might have run. Packed up and taken Amanda…where? The Mac she knew had no family outside of his mother and her series of husbands. Maybe he went to his wife’s family?

In any case, Amanda Edwards’s file needed to be updated.

Rachel should not take this case. She knew that. It was a conflict of interest if ever there was one. What she should do is march right back to Olivia and say, “I know this guy. Loved him, actually. I think. I definitely broke his heart. So, I can’t take the case.”

She should do that.

But she didn’t.

CHAPTER TWO

RACHEL PARKED HER CAR and turned off the ignition. It was Friday, two days after finding out about Mac and Amanda, and she had finally been able to clear her late-afternoon schedule and drive to their home.

She shook out her numb hands. She’d been gripping the steering wheel a tad too hard. She had not counted on what it would cost her to drive to New Springs. Every time she looked in the rearview mirror, the scared, unsure girl who had left thirteen years ago stared back at her.

Obviously she wasn’t as detached from the past as she thought.

She grabbed her briefcase and got out of the car. The slam of the door sent a bird flying from the brush bordering the small gravel parking area, beside a low brown house built into a mountain and surrounded by avocado and lemon groves. The trees flourished on the hillsides surrounding New Springs, and all of the houses along the mountain road she had just traveled were farmhouses. The file said Mac was a farmer, and Rachel could see Mac working this land. It made perfect sense.

Rachel still wasn’t convinced she would take this case. She was just here for preliminary fieldwork, a rudimentary home visit that should tell her if Frank had been right. And then she would be better able to determine what to do. She wasn’t convinced that this case was worth all that she had at stake. She could get into big trouble if Olivia became aware of what had happened between Mac and Rachel—it could cost her the job she loved. As she had convinced herself during the trip here, she was just sussing things out.

Rachel had gone into social work to help families. It was her job. And she was good at it. She knew better than to become emotionally involved. And without emotion, this was just another case. Mac was just another father—one who was possibly failing his daughter.

Rachel had to help. Or at least see if help was needed.

There were no ghostly remains of some kind of romantic relationship. They had been friends. Clumsy lovers and then they’d lost touch. End of story.

She checked her watch. Five-thirty, usually a good time to catch people at home. She’d learned early in her career that calling people to tell them she was coming just gave them the information they needed to not be home at the right time.

The gravel crunched under her feet. Somewhere a wind chime made careless music in the soft breeze that blew across the mountain, bringing with it the smell of white sage.

She stepped onto a flagstone path that led to the door, which appeared hidden underneath the eaves. A tomato plant grew like mad in a bucket next to a basil plant growing in a coffee can.