No Offense: A Novel (Little Bridge Island Book 2)

John couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt this happy. He whistled “My Favorite Things”—the Coltrane version, not the one from the movie his daughter had liked so much as a kid—as he fried up bacon and eggs for breakfast.

He didn’t have to worry about anyone nagging him for eating such fatty foods, because Katie had spent the night with a friend from her dance team and wasn’t due to return home until noon. He had the house to himself to do whatever he wanted.

And what he wanted to do was eat breakfast and think about Molly Montgomery, at least in the short amount of time he had before he had to get back to the office and figure out how to catch Larry Beckwith III.

It was as he was thinking about Molly Montgomery and the impossible softness of her skin that his cell phone rang. He glanced down at the screen, irritated by the interruption, then saw that it was Peter Abramowitz, the state’s attorney. He picked up before the second ring.

“Pete,” he said. “What’s up?”

“You tell me what’s up.” Pete sounded as casual and good-humored as always. Like any true surfer, he didn’t get wound up about things that didn’t matter, which was one of the reasons John liked him. “What happened last night?”

“Beckwith hit the Tifton house.” John chewed on a piece of bacon. “Least, I’m pretty certain it was Beckwith. I’m still waiting for Murray to get back to me with prints. But I’m sure they’ll match. I’ve got every officer on staff out combing the island for that little twit. We’ll find him, and when we do, I need you to nail him to the wall this time. I don’t care what kind of big-deal lawyers his father brings down from the mainland, I want you to put the screws to—”

“I’m not talking about that.” Pete was laughing. “I already know about that. I’m talking about you and the librarian.”

John stopped chewing. He felt suddenly cold, even though Katie kept the air-conditioning at a meticulous seventy-five degrees, far too warm for him. But his daughter, like many in her generation, was ever conscious of wasting precious resources, frightened for the planet and its imminent demise. “What do you mean, me and the librarian?”

“The new children’s librarian. The one you were macking on last night at the bar on Jasmine Key.”

Macking? John had to take a hasty swig of coffee in order to wash down the bacon, on which he’d nearly choked.

“Don’t think I didn’t see you.” Pete was practically crowing. “Everyone did. You couldn’t have been more obvious.”

“We were not macking,” John said, when he could finally speak. “Miss Montgomery—Molly—is a very kind, intelligent woman, and we were merely—”

“Jesus Christ!” Now Pete was hooting with laughter. “I’m messing with you. Not that we didn’t all see you two kissing. But I think it’s great. How long has it been since you’ve been on a date? Not since you and Christina split, right? And before that, what was it, high school? Hasn’t Christina basically been the only woman you’ve ever—”

“All right.” John was on his feet, his breakfast and Coltrane forgotten. “We don’t need to go into the details about that. Especially since nothing happened last night. I got the call about the Tifton place and took Molly home.” He didn’t feel it was necessary to fill his talkative friend in on the details about what had happened after he’d taken Molly home. “End of story.”

“But you’re gonna see her again, right?” Besides being an excellent attorney—the Beckwith case aside—Pete Abramowitz was a good and supportive friend. He’d never missed a Snappettes performance since Katie joined the team, and had brought every single one of his relatives—including his elderly mother—to the jailhouse zoo when they visited Little Bridge for the holidays. Why, yes, that is a convicted felon holding a lop-eared rabbit on his lap. Go ahead, you can pet it. “You like her, she likes you, yadda yadda yadda?”

John’s mind went back to the night before. The softness of Molly’s body as she wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed up against him. The little sounds she’d made in her throat as he’d kissed her. The eagerness with which her nipple had hardened beneath the palm of his hand as he’d cupped her breast.

“I think so,” he said, and then had to clear his throat. “Yes, I like her, and I think she likes me. I asked her out for dinner sometime later in the week, and she said yes.”

Pete hooted so loudly that John had to hold the phone away from his ear. “That’s what I like to hear,” he said. “Now don’t mess it up.”

“How am I going to mess it up?”

“Well, like we just discussed, it’s been a while since you dated, buddy. The rules have changed. Don’t think you can take this little librarian out to dinner and then jump her bones.”

John was horrified. “I wasn’t planning on doing that.”

“Good. Because it takes three dates, bud.”

“Before you can jump someone’s bones?”

“That’s what I’m telling you. Unless she jumps yours first.”

“How very enlightening. Thank you for this information, Mr. State’s Attorney.”

“Oh, and none of that, either,” Pete said. “None of this acting like a grumpy dad instead of your actual age. She won’t like it any more than I do.”

John was offended. “I don’t act like a grumpy dad.”

“Are you kidding me? May I introduce you to Sheriff John Hartwell? I can’t have more than one beer on a weekday. My pants are too tight. The music these kids today listen to has too many bad words. Get off my lawn.”

Although some of these sounded slightly familiar, John still felt annoyed. “I’ve never said that last one. And if you drink too much beer, your pants are going to get tight, unless you work out. That’s a fact.”

“Just try to play it cool with the librarian, okay? Don’t do anything stupid.”

“Such as jump her bones before the third date?”

“Such as text her right away. Or bring her flowers when you haven’t even—”

Fortunately, another call came through. When John glanced at the screen of his phone, he saw that it was Dr. Nguyen.

“Pete,” he said. “I gotta go. It’s the ob-gyn. She’s probably calling about the abandoned baby or her mom.”

“Talk to you later, buddy.” Pete sounded as cheerful as ever. “And keep me posted about—”

John clicked over to the other call. As was her habit, Dr. Nguyen wasted no time on social niceties. What she lacked in bedside manner, she made up for with competence.

“You can come interview the mother now if you want to, John. She’s out of the ICU.”

John was sure he knew who she was talking about, but since it seemed too good to be true, he checked to be certain. “Tabitha Brighton?”

“Correct. We got her temperature back to normal, but she’s still a little weak from blood loss. So please go easy.”

“But she’s going to be okay?”

“She’s going to be fine,” the doctor said. “Physically. Mentally? It could take a while. She’s been through a lot.”

Out of habit, he reached for his notebook. “She tell you anything? Who took the baby? Who the father is?”

“No, nothing like that. Giving birth to a baby under conditions like she did is trauma enough. Still, she asked to see the baby, and as you know, our goal, as well as Child Services’, is always to reunite mothers with their babies if we possibly can. Tabitha’s been holding her baby, and even took a stab at nursing. I consider both hugely positive steps forward.”

John grunted. “And the baby is okay?”

“Baby’s fine. Tox screens were completely clean. The mother’s were, too.”

“So she wasn’t partying while pregnant.”

“Not at all. But I’m still worried about her. She’s barely eating. And she hasn’t asked to make a single phone call, which I find unusual. You’d think someone who’s been through what she has would call someone. No one has called her room, either, or come to visit her. Part of that is because you’ve been so careful not to release any news about her to the press—but doesn’t she have any family? Or friends?”

“Yeah.” John tapped his pen against the page he had open. No cell phone had been found among Tabitha’s belongings. Beckwith had probably taken it, the way he’d taken the baby, and stashed it somewhere. “She does, but they don’t seem too anxious to get in touch. Something’s not right. Thanks, Doctor. I’ll be over there soon.”

And he was, twenty minutes later. Standing in what served as the maternity ward for the small island—four private rooms and a desk—he stood with his arms crossed in front of Nurse Dani, who seemed to have made a remarkable recovery from her inebriated state at the ball last night and was looking professional and alert in pink scrubs covered in purple teddy bears.

“Don’t you normally work in the ER?” he asked.

She smiled. “I do! Thanks for remembering. Couple of the nurses up here were out sick with that cold that’s going around, so I volunteered to fill in. What a week to be short-staffed! Ever since that news station showed us on TV, we’ve been getting calls around the clock from people begging us to let them adopt Baby Aphrodite. As if we have any say in the matter.”

John shook his head grimly. The same thing had been happening down at the station house, and probably, he suspected, at the library, too. He wondered if Molly regretted her well-intentioned but enormously ill-considered decision to go on TV with her story about finding the infant.

“Has Tabitha Brighton said anything to you?” he asked the nurse. “Anything at all about how she ended up here, who put the baby in the library, who the father might be?”

He’d noticed that women opened up more to other women than they did to men—and certainly to members of law enforcement—and Nurse Dani was the chatty type. If anyone could get a kid to talk, it would be her.

But she disappointed him by shaking her head.

“Sorry, no, nothing. She just lies there and cries and watches TV. Food Network, mostly, which is weird, because she won’t eat. We’ve got her on an IV for hydration, of course, but Dr. Nguyen says if she doesn’t eat soon, we might have to resort to a feeding tube. Which is terrible, but what else can we do?”

He shrugged. “If someone won’t help themselves, how can you help them?”

“Exactly. Honestly, I know what she did is awful, but I feel bad for her. You’re not going to charge her, are you? She’s just a kid.”

John was getting a little tired of everyone—mainly women, mainly Molly Montgomery—asking him this. Luckily, Marguerite chose that moment to come strolling up.

“What took you so long?” he asked. He didn’t want to do the interview without a female officer present, and he preferred Marguerite over his younger female deputies because the sergeant was both more experienced and possessed a mother’s radar for lying.

“Incentive.” She held up a white paper bag with a couple of golden arches on them. “I heard the kid wasn’t eating.”

John shook his head. “But fast food? I thought these eco-friendly hippie types stayed away from it . . . except for pizza, of course.”

“Trust me, when she gets a whiff of these fries, she’ll go to town on them. I remember not wanting to touch a thing they were serving in this place after I gave birth to my kids. It all looked like congealed mush. But this stuff? Manna from heaven. She’ll eat every speck.” Marguerite wasted no time throwing open the door to the girl’s room. “Hi, honey. Hope we aren’t disturbing you.”

They weren’t. At least John didn’t think they were. The pale, slightly doughy-faced girl was doing exactly what Dani had said she’d been doing—watching the Food Network, with tears streaming down her face.

“Oh,” she said when she saw them, looking startled but not wildly so. “Are you the police?”

“Sheriff’s office, honey,” Marguerite said, swinging the girl’s food tray around so it sat in front of her, and unpacking the white paper bag. “This is Sheriff John Hartwell, and I’m Sergeant Marguerite Ruiz. We brought you a little something to eat, just some fries and a couple of cheeseburgers. I already checked with your doctor, and she said it was okay.”

John knew this was a complete lie, but he didn’t imagine it could matter much. The girl’s nose was twitching like a hungry rabbit’s at the aromas coming out of the paper sack. “Are there any chicken nuggets?” she asked faintly.

“There are,” Marguerite said. “I didn’t know which dipping sauce you liked, so I brought them all. And a soda and a vanilla milkshake, too. You’ve been through a lot, so you really need to eat. I know, I’ve had three kids myself, right in this very hospital. I also know how bad the food is here. So try this instead.”

The girl, her gaze darting nervously between John and his sergeant, murmured a polite “Thank you so much,” even as she began discreetly shoveling fries into her mouth. Score one for Marguerite: the hospital food was why she hadn’t been eating. Though she probably had plenty of deeper trauma, too.

“So, Tabitha,” John said, lowering himself into the visitor’s chair by the window, which had a very stunning and healing view of the island’s garbage dump. “Your name is Tabitha, isn’t it? Tabitha Brighton of New Canaan, Connecticut, and you’re eighteen years old? Because that’s what it says here.”

The girl, who’d been taking a large slurp of her milkshake, stopped midswallow and stared owlishly at the driver’s license he’d pulled from his shirtfront pocket. She had mouse-brown hair that was currently parted in the middle and hung like curtains on either side of her face. It gave her an innocent and rather nunlike appearance.

And like a nun, she didn’t lie. Slowly, she nodded. “Yes,” she said in a tiny voice. “That’s me.” Then she burst into tears, this time noisily, with large, gulping sobs. “Are you going to arrest me?”

“Oh, sweetheart,” Marguerite said, moving to wrap the girl in her arms. “Shhhh.”

John was more glad than ever that Marguerite had come along. He also wondered if Tabitha had noticed Marguerite had not said no.

“Well,” he said. “Why don’t you tell me what happened first, starting with how you ended up here in Little Bridge to begin with.”

The girl gave a tiny shrug—all she could manage with Marguerite sitting beside her in the bed, her arms still around her. “I . . . I don’t know. I’d always heard Little Bridge Island was a nice place.”

“Right,” John said. He’d heard this a thousand times—maybe a hundred thousand times—in his lifetime. “Everyone thinks Little Bridge Island is a nice place. It’s one of America’s top tourist destinations. But usually when people come here they rent an Airbnb or a hotel room. They don’t break into a public building, squat in it, and then vandalize it with trash and graffiti.”

Tabitha’s eyes overflowed again. She looked as sorrowful as any human being John had ever seen. . . .

And yet he thought he saw a spark of indignation in her hazel eyes, as well.

“Just because some people reject societal norms and resist total assimilation to the dominant culture doesn’t mean our values don’t have worth,” she said in a shaky voice.

It was obviously something she’d learned by rote.

John didn’t have to ask where she’d learned it, either. He’d heard it—like he’d heard the thing about Little Bridge being nice—a thousand times.

But he’d only heard what Tabitha was spewing from one person . . . and that person’s followers.

He closed his notebook with a snap.

“Okay, Tabitha,” he said. “Where is he?”

She blinked several times. “What—who do you mean?”

“Dylan.”

“I—I don’t know any Dylan.”

“Oh, you don’t? Dylan Dakota?”

She shook her head. “N-no.”

“Never heard of him?”

“I t-told you. No.”

She was a very bad liar. Not only did she not make eye contact when she lied, but she did the same thing that Katie did when she lied, which was to glance up at the ceiling and far to the right, as if the way out of the difficult situation she suddenly found herself in might be found there.

This made John feel slightly more sorry for her, but he still had to do his job.

“Don’t give me that, Tabitha,” he said, sternly. “Only one person in this town goes around spewing that nonsense about societal norms and resisting total assimilation, and that’s Dylan Dakota—whose real name, in case he failed to mention it, is Lawrence Beckwith III. I know he probably told you some fanciful tale about being raised in an orphanage in Morocco, but guess what? Larry is from Cleveland Heights, Ohio, where his father owns a very popular chain of tire stores, and his mother is a homemaker. Larry himself graduated from Ohio State—although I’m sure he wishes it was Brown or Dartmouth or some other Ivy League school so he could brag about how he dropped out because he was rejecting our society’s dominant norms. Maybe that’s where this sense of entitlement he has comes from—that he never got the fancy art degree that he feels he deserves from a top-tier school. Anyway, I don’t know about any of that, and I don’t care. I just want to know where I can find him so I can arrest him for what he did to you and your baby and Miss Montgomery’s library. Do you have any thoughts about that?”

She swallowed, her stare still glued to the ceiling. “I . . . I don’t know Dylan Dakota or this Larry Beckwith person. And I don’t know what happened to me. I gave birth, and it was beautiful, and then I fell asleep.” She finally brought her gaze back toward his. Now she was telling the truth. “When I woke up, the baby was gone, and some lady was there.”

Marguerite had drawn her arms away from the girl and slipped off the bed. “Is that what you’re going to tell your daughter about her birth when she’s older? How beautiful it was, giving birth to her on the dirty floor of an unfinished building surrounded by empty liquor bottles and pizza boxes and without an epidural or any medical aid?”

“And you didn’t fall asleep,” John added. “You passed out from blood loss. Your so-called friends abandoned you. Not one of them has come here to visit you or even called to see how you’re doing. And that lady was the children’s librarian, Miss Molly Montgomery. If she hadn’t found you, you’d be dead. Same with your daughter. Someone—I’m guessing it was your good friend Dylan—put her in an empty box of trash bags and dumped her in a bathroom at the library. She’d have frozen to death if Miss Montgomery hadn’t found her.”

“I—I don’t believe you.” Tabitha reached up to wipe her tears with one of the napkins Marguerite had given her. “This is what he said you people would do. Try to demonize us for rejecting the materialism and technology of today’s world.”

“No one’s demonizing you, sweetheart,” Marguerite said in a kind voice. “We’re trying to make you see common sense. Eat a chicken nugget.”

“Who’s he?” John asked. “Dakota?”

“You fear us, you know,” Tabitha said, her eyes still bright with tears, but also now with defiance. Nevertheless, she listened to Marguerite and nibbled on a nugget. “That’s what he says. He says you fear us because we reject your definition of happiness, finding fulfillment in a life without money, mortgages, material goods—”

“We found cell phone and laptop chargers all over that room.” John felt more sad than angry. “For a group that rejects material goods, you sure seem to enjoy going on Facebook.”

“Only so we can spread our message of peace and love.”

“You know, Tabitha, we’re on the side of peace and love as well,” he said. “Your side, and the baby’s. We know what happened to you was traumatic . . . probably so traumatic that you haven’t even been able to face it. At likely the most vulnerable moment of your life, you were left for dead by people you thought you could trust. Let us help you by finding these people and stopping them from ever doing this to anyone else. Because next time, there may not be a Miss Montgomery around to save them.”

Tabitha’s eyes went right back to the ceiling. “There isn’t going to be a next time.”

“What are you talking about?” He shook his head. “Are you telling me that Dylan Dakota isn’t going to take advantage of some other naive girl like you, get her pregnant, and then leave her and her newborn baby for dead somewhere?”

For the first time, she smiled at him. It was a wan and sickly-looking smile. But it was a smile just the same.

“Yes,” she said, looking him dead in the eye. “That’s what I’m telling you. Because Dylan loves me. He loves me and the baby. And he’s going to come back for us. Just you wait and see.”