Stolen(91)

“There’s a cabin about a mile from here—a forest service hut. I woke up with him there one morning. We were both naked.” She laughed—a nervous laugh. “Whit acted like nothing was wrong. Hey babe, where do you want to go for breakfast? Was it as good for you as it was for me?”

Caity looked like she was going to leap from the couch directly onto the chandelier, but Spense stayed on point. “And you couldn’t remember anything, could you?” he asked.

“Not a damn thing,” Lisa said. “I was so confused. He insisted it wasn’t rape. And even though it felt wrong, I knew I couldn’t go to the police for help. I’d already filed a false complaint against Grady Webber, and I’d continued to date Whit for several months after the first incident. He was a golden boy, and I was just some slutty dropout who drank too much and took Quaaludes. Who would believe me if I didn’t even believe myself?”

Caity locked eyes with Lisa, “This is not your fault. But I am wondering why now, after so much time has passed, and you understand what really happened to you, with Whit so much in the public eye, why haven’t you come forward?”

Spense had been waiting for the right moment to confirm his suspicion—and this was it. “For Laura’s sake,” he answered the question for Lisa. “She’s your daughter, by Whit Chaucer. Isn’t that right?”

Lisa opened her mouth and closed it again. A gurgling sob came out of her throat. Caity, looking nearly as flustered as Lisa, got up and handed her a tissue she’d pulled from a pack in her purse.

Wiping her tears, Lisa said, “Whit and Tracy adopted Laura when she was six months old. Neither Tracy nor I knew it, but he’d been dating Tracy the whole time he was seeing me—he said he loved me, but I wasn’t good enough for his family, or for his aspirations. He said he and Tracy could give Laura a better life than I could—and they did . . . up until someone kidnapped her, and I could hardly blame them for that. But now, she’s missing again, and they’re saying awful things about her on the news.”

Caity’s mouth parted in seeming disbelief. “Lisa, help me understand. Whit was the father, but you said he adopted Laura. Walk me through how that came about.”

“You mean walk you through how I could ever give my daughter up to a rapist?”

The silence in the room was mercifully short. Lisa rushed to fill it. “Believe me, I’ve asked myself the same question just about every day for the past decade. But the truth is, I did the best that I could for Laura at the time.” She let out a long, shaky sigh. “I was a basket case. Literally. When I found out I was pregnant, I was terribly confused and depressed. I wanted to give the baby up for adoption, but my parents didn’t want me to make a decision while I was in that state of mind.” She offered a weak smile. “I guess parents don’t always make the right decisions for their kids, but mine had my best interests at heart. They convinced me to wait until the baby was six months old and then revisit the idea of adoption. They hoped I’d be well by then, and that I would have bonded with the baby.”

“But that’s not what happened?” Caity asked gently.

Lisa shook her head. “No. I didn’t get well. I got worse. And I didn’t bond with Laura. My doctors said post-partum depression compounded a pre-existing mood disorder. I tried to kill myself more than once. I was in and out of hospitals for the first six months of Laura’s life while my parents took care of her . . . and then Whit stepped in.

“At the time, my parents and I believed he really wanted to take care of his daughter. Now I think he just wanted her because she was his. You know, like a possession—but back then, I still blamed myself more than him for what had happened. My parents thought he was a good guy, and that I was confused and ill, which I was.”

“But if Whit was the father, he didn’t need to adopt Laura.”

“He said that was the best way to handle things since his name wasn’t on the birth certificate. His parents and Tracy didn’t know the baby was his, and he wanted to keep it that way. He wanted a closed adoption so that Laura would never know about me, and neither would Tracy. I was to sign over all my rights. If I didn’t, he said, he’d deal with his parents and Tracy, make a paternity claim in court, and he’d win because of my mental instability. He said I was too fragile for a court battle. The kicker was he promised to send pictures of Laura to my parents, and to pay my medical bills, which were bankrupting them.”

“That must’ve been a terribly hard decision for you to make,” Caity said.