Page 29 of Always Be My Baby

“Oh no, my dear.” She placed a hand to my arm. “Sasha and I went to visit my sister up in Petoskey for the weekend. We just got back maybe two hours ago.”

“Did anything seem out of place in your house?”

“No, no… I guess whoever broke into your house didn’t feel like an old lady like me would have anything worth taking.”

“Possibly. But you’re not old.”

She laughed at me. Outright laughed. “You are so sweet,” she said. “I’m glad Girard finally met a good woman. I like you. I want you living next door for a long time to come.”

“I like you too. But… um…” I had to get down to the business at hand and get back to my house. “Do you think you could watch Floyd for a little while? All the activity is kind of freaking him out right now.”

“Oh yes, bring him in. Sasha will love to have her friend over.” Mrs. Calhoun opened her front door. Sasha sat in the living room wagging her tail—well, her stub, as Weimaraners tended to get clipped tales. I hated the practice myself. But Mrs. Calhoun hadn’t gotten Sasha as a pup. She’d been a rescue dog.

“All right, well, thank you. I’ll come back and get Floyd as soon as I can. But I really need to get back home.”

She waved me away as I dashed back across the small strip of grass that separated our driveways.

The process took forever. Before Girard and I could go back inside, the officers had to dust for fingerprints or look for any other signs of biological evidence, such as hairs that might have fallen out. We were directed to stay in a hotel for the night, as this part of the investigation would take a while.

I wanted to sleep in my own bed, but seeing as not all that long ago, it had been Girard’s bed in the first place, as long as I had him next to me, I could weather through this. We checked in at one of the fancy hotels in the tourist district. It wasn’t large, but it was expensive.

We stopped by Sammy’s, a local pizzeria, to pick up dinner for the night. Then we made a stop at the liquor store because we both needed it tonight. Then we headed to our room.

It was late, after we’d eaten ourselves into carb comas and settled our nerves with sloe gin fizzes, one of my favorite drinks, we lay in bed holding each other.

“Are you going to be okay?” he asked, kissing the top of my head.

I rolled into him. My cheek pressed against his chest, my arm slung around his waist, and my bent leg resting over his thighs. “I don’t know,” I said honestly. “It’s such a violation to know someone was in your home.”

“I should’ve done this already, but we’re having a security system put in the house. If someone got in now, they could get in again. That’s our home, Lee. I won’t have you feeling unsafe there.”

“That’s a good start.”

The next afternoon, we got a phone call from the police. We were asked to come back to the house because now we had to see if anything was missing. It was a long process because we sort of had to start cleaning as we searched the house in order to be able to tell if anything was gone.

“I don’t get it,” Girard said, running his fingers through his hair. “My copper pots are still there. I have some collectibles in my office that would fetch a pretty penny on an online auction site. But we’ve searched the basement, the bedrooms—we’ve searched everywhere. I can’t figure out why they did this.”

“So you’re saying nothing is missing?” Officer Dombrowski asked.

“Not that I can see,” he answered.

“Something is missing,” I said to Girard, then I looked back and forth between him and Officer Dombrowski. “An old family Bible. And byold, I mean the earliest entries are from around the Revolutionary War.”

“Is it worth money?” Officer Dombrowski asked what came down to the crux of this situation.

“Not that I know of. It’s not in terrible condition, but it’s not perfect… and it’s been written in. I’m not sure why anyone would want to pay for a history of my family.”

“Is it a property dispute?” Came his next question. “Somebody else in your family want this Bible?”

“Jimmy and Tess don’t even live in the state, and they don’t know I have it. So—” I gasped, whipping my head around to look at Girard. Coming off our wonderful weekend away and then facing a vandalized house, I’d completely forgotten about the one person who’d specifically asked for the Bible. God, I felt like the biggest idiot on the face of the planet to not have thought about it sooner. In my defense, I tried to push that whole upsetting encounter out of my mind… but I was still dumb. Apparently so was Girard because he didn’t think of him until just this moment either, and that made me feel a little better.

“Lachlan,” we both said at the same time.

“Lachlan?” Officer Dombrowski asked.

“Yes, my dad left my family when I was ten. He apparently started a new family with another woman.” I paused to take a breath. “I feel so stupid to not think of it ‘til now, but it wasn’t a pleasant meeting and left me pretty upset. So I did everything in my power to forget him.”

“It’s understandable,” the officer said to me, but I read his ‘you stupid woman’ clearly on his face.

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