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.”

She adjusted her hair tie, tucking away the wayward strand as we walked. “I just need to…figure stuff out.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I just…I don’t know. Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize,” I said, wiping my forehead on my sleeve. “You have nothing to apologize for.”

“They are my family,” she said and the words cut me like razors. “I mean, I know they aren’t. But to me they were. Does that make sense?”

“Nothing makes sense, Elizabeth,” I said. “But I understand it’s hard. For you and for everyone.”

She stopped, dug the toe of her shoe into the sand and looked out at the ocean. It was gray-blue, a mirror image of the sky. “I’m just not sure about anything.”

“I don’t think any of us are,” I said

She bent over and hugged her chest to her thighs. Somewhere along the line, in the time she’d been gone, she’d turned into a runner. A pang of loss jabbed at my gut, knowing I’d missed out on something that I couldn’t get back. I wondered who’d introduced her to running, what kind of shoes she bought to start, if she’d run any races. It was a constant thing. I was always wondering. Always.