“You asking about Cavanaughs strictly by birth, or are you including the ones by marriage, too?”
Brennan shrugged. “The latter, I guess.” He’d heard that once you entered the inner circle, you were a Cavanaugh for life.
“Haven’t a clue,” Thomas admitted honestly, keeping a straight face. “But I’m betting we could have easily had enough people to storm the Bastille back in the day.” The oldest of the Cavanaugh-Cavelli branch—not counting his father, Sean—Thomas grinned as he raised his glass in a toast to Brennan. “Welcome to the family.”
Brennan laughed. “Thanks,” he said, draining his own glass. Being part of what was perceived to be a dynasty felt rather good from where he stood.
* * *
Tiana Drummond didn’t pray much anymore.
It was an activity she’d given up even before her father, Officer Harvey Drummond, had died. There didn’t seem to be much point in engaging in something that never yielded any positive results.
The official story given out about her father’s untimely demise was that he’d died on the job, in the line of duty. That, strictly speaking, was true—as far as it went. But the whole truth of it was that her father had died
because
he’d been drunk while on duty and it had drastically robbed him of any edge he might have had. Drawing his weapon faster than a punk bank robber hadn’t even been a remote possibility and consequently, Officer Harvey Drummond had died by that bank robber’s hand.
At the funeral—a no-frills version mercifully paid for by the patrolmen’s union—she and her younger sister, Janie, had heard glowing words about a man neither one of them recognized, much less knew. It was the way his fellow officers on the beat knew him.
The father that she and her sister remembered was a man who’d been both too bitter and too strict to do anything but give them the minimal basic shelter while trying to verbally and physically break their spirits every opportunity he got. For her part, rather than run away from home the way she’d been tempted to do more than once, Tiana had done what she could to protect her sister. She got between her father’s punishing hand and Janie time and again. Some of the scars didn’t heal.
Harvey Drummond blamed both of his daughters for the fact that his wife had left him, disappearing one day while they were at school and he was at work. Sylvia Drummond had left nothing in her wake but a note secured by a fish-shaped magnet to the refrigerator that said “I can’t take it anymore.”
The note had been written to him, but Harvey maintained that it was their behavior she couldn’t take, hers and Janie’s. He took his rage out on them every time he was drunk. Which was often.
Tiana and her sister endured hell on a regular nightly basis.
But once their father no longer walked among the living, life got better. Harder financially despite his pension, but better because she and Janie were finally allowed to pick up the pieces of their souls and do their best to reconstruct those pieces into some sort of workable whole again.
But the years they had had to endure with their father had left their mark, affecting them differently. Tiana, always self-sufficient, became more closed off. More distrustful of any man whose path crossed hers. Any relationships that looked as if they might have some sort of potential she quickly shut down before they ever flourished.
Janie, on the other hand, desperately craved attention, hungered for affection and was starved for approval—the three
A
s Tiana called them—and looked to any man hoping that he would provide her with them. Janie, Tiana had asserted more than once, was far too trusting, while Tiana only trusted men to stir up trouble and make situations worse. She knew that she wasn’t being altogether fair in her estimation—but at least she was being safe.
Tiana would have been the first to admit that their late father was good for one thing—he had, without really meaning to, provided her with valuable connections. Connections on the police force. While Tiana had never wanted rules bent in her favor, she wanted to make sure that they weren’t bent
against
her, either. All she had ever wanted was a fair shot at whatever she set her sights on. In this case, it was becoming part of the police department.
Eventually, while taking college courses on her computer at night, Tiana joined the San Francisco police force, managing to impress them with her physical stamina—another unintended “bonus” of surviving her father’s brutal treatment.
Once she joined up, it wasn’t long before she found her way to the crime scene investigative unit, a subject that had always fascinated her.
Every penny Tiana earned that didn’t go to cover basic living expenses went toward Janie’s education. Her only request was that Janie attend a college within the state so she could keep an eye on her. Janie was very disgruntled at what she perceived to be a restriction. “You’re just like Dad,” she’d railed.
The words cut her deeply, but Tiana had remained firm on this one condition. She had to since she felt that Janie, while not exactly outwardly rebellious toward her, was far too naive and prone to making bad judgment calls.
Like the boyfriend she’d gotten mixed up with, a supposed senior at the same college that seventeen-year-old Janie was attending—the University of San Francisco.
When she first met Wayne Scott, the light of Janie’s life, Tiana had felt really bad vibes coming from this man. The occurrence took her by surprise because she generally didn’t believe things like that were possible. There was just something about him; he was too verbally obliging, too ready to take her—Tiana—anywhere she wanted to go. There were a few times she could have sworn the college senior was actually coming on to her.
Tiana tried as gently as possible to encourage Janie to see other guys. But for her sister, the sun rose and set around Wayne’s close-shaved head. Tiana instinctively sensed that the more she’d say against Wayne, the more Janie would defend him and dig in her heels, at the same time turning her back on the only family she had.
So Tiana had kept her peace and even refrained from saying anything when it became apparent that Janie was cutting classes to hang out with this loser.
But when one of Janie’s friends called to ask if Janie had quit college altogether, all sorts of red lights and alarms had gone off in Tiana’s head. When she asked around, it came to light that
no one
had seen Janie either in her classes or at the part-time job she’d gotten to help with her schooling expenses approximately two weeks ago. Sick with worry, Tiana only became more so upon learning that according to her roommate, Janie hadn’t been to her dorm room for those same two weeks.
And no one had seen her boyfriend, either.
Tiana immediately went into high gear to try to track down her sister’s movements and current whereabouts. Accessing local cameras around the college and the places that her sister had frequented had ultimately yielded eyestrain and nothing else. For all intents and purposes, both Janie and her boyfriend had completely disappeared from the San Francisco area.
Tiana tried calling Janie on her cell phone both day and night to no avail. All her calls went straight to voice mail until finally, the metallic voice told her that the mailbox was full.
Growing increasingly desperate, Tiana tried to get coordinates on her sister by using the GPS feature of her cell phone. That had eventually gotten her sister’s phone—abandoned in a Dumpster—but not her sister.
“C’mon, Janie,” she had pleaded, glaring at the cell phone—an electronic fixture her sister would have never willingly thrown away. “Give me a clue, something to work with. Anything. Where
are
you?”
And about that time the rumors regarding a white slave ring operating somewhere in the general vicinity, “recruiting” new faces or, more aptly, new bodies, began to circulate.
The moment she heard, a cold chill had gone down her spine. And she knew,
knew
this was the direction she had to go in.
Further investigation on her part pointed to the trail working its way down to the southern portion of the state. She had no jurisdiction outside San Francisco and she knew she’d be strictly on her own.
But since nothing in the world was more important to her than Janie, Tiana did what she had to do. She requested a leave of absence and took off that very day, following the only lead she had—a confidential informant who owed her a favor since it was her work in the lab that had eventually cleared the man of some pretty nasty charges. The informant told her that Wayne was mixed up with the traffickers.
When she was a kid, Tiana had prayed feverishly, seeking the help of a higher power. She had prayed that her mother would come back to take them away, out of her father’s reach. She also prayed nightly that her father would change, suddenly regret the way he had treated them and do his best to make it up to her and her sister. Finally, all but devoid of hope, she still prayed that someone,
anyone,
would come to their rescue.
But their mother had never returned to take them with her, their father had continued to mistreat and abuse them—especially her—until the day he died and no one ever came to rescue them.
A week after their father was killed, Tiana turned eighteen and
she
was the one who rescued Janie.
She
was the one who stood up and did what had to be done, taking care of herself
and
her sister. And, since none of her prayers were ever answered, she concluded that there was no one listening. So she gave up praying.
She still didn’t pray.
Faced with the huge challenge of tracking down her sister and bringing her home, Tiana saw no reason to go back to something that had only failed her time and time again. In this big, wide world, Tiana had discovered that the only person she could rely on with any sort of certainty was herself.
So be it.
She just had to gather her inner fortitude and her strength together. She intended to do whatever had to be done to find her sister. And if, along the way, she ran into Wayne, she felt confident that she could be forgiven for pummeling the worthless piece of garbage into the ground for having kidnapped Janie.
Tiana was convinced that was what had happened. He’d drugged Janie and kidnapped her. There was no other reason why Janie hadn’t gotten in contact with her in two weeks. Always before, no matter what kind of an argument they’d had, she and Janie had never gone for more than a few days without getting in contact with each other. Neither one of them had ever held any sort of a long-term grudge, although this campus Romeo had definitely thrown a wrench into the works and caused an upsetting schism to form between them.
But this went beyond even that. Something was definitely wrong.
She could feel it way down deep in her bones.
“If anything bad has happened to Janie,” Tiana promised the missing Wayne between clenched teeth as she packed a few essential things, then threw the single suitcase into her car, “I am going to fillet you and make you wish you were never born.”
Voicing the threat aloud didn’t make her feel immeasurably better.
But it helped.
Copyright © 2014 by Marie Rydzynski-Ferrarella
ISBN-13: 9781460331828
LATIMER'S LAW
Copyright © 2014 by Melody Sanders
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