“But I knew—” Beckwith looked almost tearful. “I knew someone would be coming into the building the next day. I’d overheard the construction workers talking, so I knew there was going to be an inspection, and that someone was going to find her.”

  “So rather than call nine-one-one for her yourself, you just decided to risk letting her die?”

  “I was drunk, all right?” Beckwith wasn’t just tearful now. He was actually crying. He reached up and angrily swiped at the tears in his eyes. “I wasn’t thinking properly. I’ll regret it for the rest of my life, but—that’s what happened.”

  John felt a sudden jolt of clarity.

  No. It couldn’t be. And yet the proof was right in front of him.

  Larry Beckwith had feelings. He had actual feelings. And for Tabitha Brighton, of all people.

  “You love her,” John said, in a tone of disbelief.

  “What?” Beckwith looked up from his damp fingers.

  “You love her. You love that girl. That’s why you stuck around after the rest of your band of merry muck-making men left. To make sure Tabitha and the baby were all right.”

  To John’s surprise, Larry Beckwith III began to blush scarlet. “No!” he said, sullenly. “Absolutely not. I don’t care what happens to them.”

  “Yes, you do,” John said. “That’s why you stayed, and that’s why you got caught. You care about her. You love her.”

  Beckwith’s face had gone crimson—whether with rage or embarrassment, it didn’t matter. John knew the truth.

  “I don’t!” the boy cried. “I mean, obviously, I don’t want her or the baby to die, especially if it’s my baby. She told me she couldn’t get pregnant—she swore to me. And by the time I figured out what was going on, it was too late. She insisted we keep it.”

  “That scheming hussy.” John shook his head with mock sympathy.

  Beckwith glared at him, but his red-rimmed eyes gave away his true feelings.

  “I didn’t even know if it was mine! How could I be sure? I hardly knew this girl. She just showed up out of nowhere, claiming she’d read about me on Facebook, wanting to join the group. But really it was me she wanted.”

  John, still feigning sympathy, shook his head. “That must have been terrible for you.”

  “I’m serious!” Tears streamed down Beckwith’s face. “Do you know what my dad is going to do to me when he finds out about this? Cut me off. He didn’t mind the other stuff, but getting a girl pregnant?”

  “Absolutely,” John said with a straight face. “She deserved to be left like that.”

  “That’s not what I’m saying.” Beckwith shook his head with enough force that tears streamed back toward his ears. “We made sure, you know, the baby got born all right and left it in a safe place, where someone decent would find it—people who go to libraries are all smart, you know—civic-minded? People who read books are found to be more empathetic than those who don’t. They have some idea, at least, of how to raise a kid. And then we ran.”

  “It was the least you could do,” John said, and meant it. It was the very least the kid could do.

  “Right? But somehow . . . I don’t know. I couldn’t—I couldn’t leave.”

  “When you say ‘we,’ who do you mean?”

  “Aw, those idiots from last year.” Beckwith rocked back in his chair, thoroughly disgusted with his own choice in friends. “You remember.”

  “From the MTV house?”

  “Yeah, same group, more or less.” Beckwith, having once claimed he wouldn’t say a word until his lawyer showed up, now couldn’t shut up. He seemed to be finding catharsis in spilling his guts to the sheriff. John wondered if he knew every word he said was being recorded, observed by the state’s attorney as well as numerous other individuals, and jotted down by John himself in his notebook. “Bunch of followers. Not an original idea or spark of imagination in a single one of them. At least Tabby really believed in the movement, though, you know? And in me.” Beckwith’s voice caught on a sob. “She always believed in me.”

  John nodded, jotted the words Is this guy for real? in his notebook, and underlined them. “Maybe that’s why you couldn’t leave.”

  “What?” Beckwith looked up from the pity party he was having for himself. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m just circling back to my original question. After you so generously abandoned your own baby in a place where she would be found by someone more civic-minded than yourself, and then left your girlfriend to die—”

  “Hey, I told you, I didn’t leave her to die!”

  “I’m sorry, let me rephrase that. When you left her bleeding to death in an empty building and took her cell phone so she couldn’t call for help—”

  “God, would you stop ragging on me?” Beckwith pleaded. “I’ve already got a father to do that, okay? I don’t need you doing it, too. I know I screwed up, all right? And guess what, I never wanted to be a father myself, but I guess if I have to, I want to be a good father, not like mine, who’s never done anything but tell me what a loser I am, practically from the day I was born. Nothing I’ve ever done was good enough. Not like he was ever there for me—”

  “Well, fortunately you’re going to be there for your child,” John said, closing his notebook with a snap and rising to his feet. “You’re going to be doing it from jail, but you’re going to be there for her. She and her mother can come see you every Sunday during visiting hours. I’m pretty sure you know that, though. That’s probably the real reason why you let yourself get caught. So you wouldn’t have to take any more parental responsibility toward her than that.”

  “No!” Now Beckwith, who’d been completely unresisting up until then, took a lunge at him. “That isn’t true!”

  John pushed the much smaller man back down into his seat.

  “Oh, pipe down, Larry,” he said irritably. “It’s true and you know it. Your days of living off Daddy’s money, not to mention other people’s property and hard work, are over, and you knew it the minute you heard you yourself were a father. That got you so scared you decided you’d rather go to jail than face up to life as a parent. So suck it up. You got what you wanted. And no lawyer in the world is going to be able to bail you out of this one.”

  With that, John turned and left the interview room, only to run into Pete Abramowitz in the hallway.

  “How was that?” he asked the attorney.

  “Magnificent.” Pete was grinning. “He’s in there sobbing like a toddler right now.”

  “Because I said he likes a girl.” John felt disgusted with himself and the world in general.

  “Well, hearing that kind of thing has to be hard on a sociopath.”

  “Good,” John said. “Don’t accept a plea.”

  “No worries. I’ll make sure he gets the max. You do realize he won’t be in your jail for long though, right? Once he’s convicted, he’ll probably get sent to prison upstate.”

  John thought with relish of all the seaweed that needed removing on Little Bridge’s beaches, and how unhappy Beckwith was going to look in an orange jumpsuit, raking it.

  “I know,” he said. “But I’ll enjoy his stay while it lasts.”

  Pete winked. “Okay, then.”

  It was at that moment that Marguerite came up to them and said, “Excuse me, Chief? There’s someone waiting to see you in your office.”

  John tried not to make a face. It wasn’t the sergeant’s fault. “Marguerite, I thought I told you, no interviews with the press until—”

  “It’s not press, Chief.” Marguerite was having a hard time suppressing a grin. “It’s Molly Montgomery, the librarian and, uh . . . she’s holding a pie.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Molly

  Molly was examining the five-foot-long stuffed dolphin sitting in the corner of John’s office when the door suddenly opened and he walked in. She straightened guiltily, though what she had to feel guilty about she didn’t know. There was no law against looking at other people’s stuffed dolphins.

  “Oh,” John said, when he saw her. “Someone donated that for Baby Aphrodite. I was going to take it over to the hospital, but I keep forgetting.”

  “Cosette,” Molly said, automatically.

  John appeared confused. “What?”

  “Cosette. Tabitha named the baby Cosette, after the character in Les Misérables.”

  “Oh.” John stood there in the doorway looking, as always, tall and dark and impossibly handsome in his uniform. It was all she could do to keep herself from throwing her arms around his neck then and there and kissing him.

  But of course that’s not what she’d come there to do. She’d come to apologize. Hopefully kissing might follow, if she was lucky.

  It would all depend on what happened in the next few minutes.

  “Well,” he said, closing the door behind him. The door had a large piece of plywood in the middle of it where Molly imagined there’d once been a plate of glass. She supposed something had happened to break the glass—possibly it had been shattered by the elbow of an unruly perp who’d needed subduing.

  John headed toward his desk, which Molly saw was scrupulously—some might say even compulsively—tidy.

  “I guess Cosette is better than Aphrodite,” he said. “Easier for other kids to spell when she gets to school, anyway.”

  “Yes.” Molly stood there awkwardly, wondering how to begin. She wasn’t used to being wrong, so this was difficult. Not that she was wrong wrong, but she didn’t want to go around being the word police. That was wrong. People had the right to express their feelings. “Listen,” she began. “I want to apolo—”

  “No, I want to apologize,” he interrupted. “I never meant to—”

  “No, let me go first.” Molly approached his desk, refusing to allow its tidiness to intimidate her. “I’ve just come from the hospital. I met Tabitha—and her parents.”

  “Oh.” He hadn’t sat down, or offered her a seat, either. They each stood, the desk separating them. “That must have been . . . interesting.”

  “It was. You were right.” Molly plopped the pie she’d purchased from the Mermaid Café onto the center of his desk. “Banana cream pie. Tabitha is a deeply confused girl. I wouldn’t personally call her bananas, because I find that term insensitive. But she’s got a lot of growing up to do, and she definitely needs her parents, even if she’s intent right now on pushing them away.”

  “Well,” John said, looking down not at the pie, which was covered in a clear plastic lid glistening with condensation, but into Molly’s eyes. “I just got through interrogating her boyfriend. And he’s a real treat. I don’t blame her for being so messed up after what he’s put her through, even though—get this—the guy is in love with her.”

  Molly’s jaw dropped. “What?”

  “Yeah. Don’t get me wrong—he’s completely conflicted about the whole fatherhood thing—who wouldn’t be? Parenthood is the toughest job in the world. But he loves her. That’s why he let himself get caught, and confessed, even. He feels terrible about what he did, even if that doesn’t excuse it, or mean he isn’t going to be punished for it.”

  Molly shook her head in wonder. “Well, Tabitha will be happy to hear that. She thinks he’s coming to get her and the baby, and take them sailing around the world.”

  “That isn’t going to happen. Not for fifteen to twenty years anyway. Maybe a little less, with time off for good behavior.”

  Molly shook her head. “People do crazy things for love.”

  “Oh, yeah?” His grin pulled at her heartstrings. “What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever done for love?”

  Molly looked down at the pie between them. “Probably this.”

  His glance fell down to the pie, then moved swiftly back up to her eyes. His grin faltered, and he reached a hand out across his desk to grasp one of hers. “Molly,” he said, in a voice gone suddenly hoarse.

  Molly clutched his fingers in her own, unnerved as always by the brightness of his electric-blue eyes, and felt her pulse race. She began to babble. She couldn’t help it.

  “I’m not saying I love you, of course,” she prattled. “It’s much too soon for that. But I certainly like you—more than like you. And I’d enjoy spending more time with you, if that’s something you’d be interested in.”

  His fingers tightened over hers. “That’s something I’d be very interested in,” he said. “I more than like you, too, Molly.”

  Then he pulled her toward him by the hand, gently, so that their lips—nothing else, only their lips—were touching across the desk. It started out as the sweetest kiss Molly had ever experienced, full of forgiveness and hope.

  But the longer it lasted, the more desire crept in. He really was, Molly decided, the best kisser she’d ever met. And since this time they weren’t being interrupted by a knock or a cell phone ring, when he slid a hand around Molly’s waist to pull her closer, she didn’t mind leaning so dangerously near the pie that she almost put a knee in it—it was worth it, if she could feel more of this man who had the ability to melt her insides at his slightest touch.

  Who knows how much more intimate things would have become between them if the door to his office hadn’t been flung open suddenly and a young girl’s voice hadn’t said, “Hi, Dad—Oh!”

  Molly tore herself away from the sheriff and threw herself into a nearby office chair.

  “Oh, Katie.” John sat down quickly behind his desk. “Is school out already?”

  “It’s a half day.” Katie looked suspiciously from her father to Katie. “Teacher conferences. What were you two doing just now when I walked in?”

  “Dance lesson,” Molly said, just as John said, “Kissing.”

  Molly threw John a disbelieving look, but he only returned her glance with a So, what? shrug.

  “She’s going to have to know the truth sometime if we’re going to do this,” he said to Molly, who felt herself turning red. To Katie, he said casually, “Miss Montgomery and I are dating. And it’s polite to knock before you enter a room, Katie.”

  Instead of looking horrified or bursting into tears or doing any of the things Molly most feared a teenage girl might do upon hearing her father was seeing a woman other than her mother, Katie Hartwell laughed and dropped into the visitor’s chair opposite Molly’s.

  “Ha, I knew it,” she said, letting her legs dangle over the arm of the chair. “So where are we going for dinner?”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Molly

  WELCOME TO SNAPPETTES MOTHER/DAUGHTER NIGHT!

  Snappette Mothers Dancing with Their Snappette Daughters

  –Admission $15–

  –All proceeds go to support the Snappettes Dance Team–

  Saturday Night @ 8 pm

  Little Bridge High School Auditorium

  –Go Snappers!–

  Feeling nervous, Molly chose to save a row in the middle of the auditorium—not too close, but not too far back, either—for all the friends she had who’d bought tickets but hadn’t yet arrived. Draping the long scarf she’d worn—on which was printed images of books, of course—across the row so everyone would know the seats were taken, she selected the aisle seat for herself, so she could make a quick escape to the lobby or to the stage, just in case . . . well, just in case.

  Molly had never before considered the importance of being able to make a quick escape from a theater—or of sitting with her back to the wall of a restaurant, and not the window or door. But these were all things that were becoming second nature to her now that she was in a relationship with a lawman.

  She seemed to know more than half the people in the audience, and they recognized her, as well, waving to her as they sat down. Molly waved back. She was beginning to appreciate how nice it was to be the only children’s librarian in a small town—and the sheriff’s girlfriend.

  “Scoot,” Henry said as he appeared at the end of the row holding two bags of popcorn. He had no appreciation of Molly’s role as the town’s only children’s librarian, or the sheriff’s girlfriend. “If you’re going to hog the aisle seat, you have to be prepared to move over for everyone else.”

  Molly twisted in her seat so that Henry could move past her. “How crowded was it out in the lobby?” she asked anxiously.

  “Packed.” Henry moved her scarf and plopped down into the seat beside her. “The whole town is here, practically.”

  “Oh, God.” Molly took the bag he offered her and began to shove the overly salted popcorn into her mouth. “What if he’s terrible?”

  “You and Katie have been rehearsing with him for like what, twelve weeks?” Henry rolled his eyes. “He can’t possibly be terrible. And even if he is, isn’t that kind of the point? He’s the comic relief.”

  “I don’t want him to be the comic relief! The girls and I want him to be good.”

  “I’m glad you became a librarian, because you have no understanding of theater whatsoever.”

  “Who has no understanding of theater whatsoever?” Patrick O’Brian and his husband, Bill, were standing at the end of Molly’s row, dressed, as usual, to the nines. Patrick was holding a bouquet of roses. Molly’s stomach lurched.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “Who are those for?”

  “Your honey bunch,” he said. “To celebrate his dramatic debut. Scooch over so we can get in. Or did you drape that scarf across those seats for someone else?”

  “They’re for you guys.” Molly stood up to allow them to squeeze past her. “But please don’t give those roses to John in front of everybody. It’s the girls everyone should be celebrating, not him. The girls and their moms have worked really hard on this show. John’s only in one number, they’re in six.”

  “Oh, sweetie.” Bill smirked at her as he went by. “John’s the one getting these. Especially if he wears a Snappettes uniform. He is wearing one, isn’t he?”