Buried Innocence - A Mary O'Reilly Paranormal Mystery - Book Thirteen (Mary O'Reilly Paranormal Mystery Series) (12 page)

Mary poured the hot
water from her coffee maker into her oversized mug. The tea bag lying in the
cup danced and swirled as it met with the hot water. She sighed softly. She
knew she shouldn’t have eaten those last couple pieces of pizza, but they
looked so good. And today she was paying the price. She hoped the chamomile and
ginger in the tea would help calm her stomach. She picked up the tea, sniffed
the fragrant steam rising from it and smiled. Relief was only a few minutes
away.

She walked to her
desk, put the cup on top of the coaster and started to sit down when she felt a
swift kick to her abdomen. But the kick was from the inside out. She
froze,
her eyes wide with wonder. She slowly slid her hand
to her belly and waited.

Thump.

There it was again.
Her baby.
She just felt her baby kick.

Tear-filled eyes
looked up when the door of her office opened.

“Mary,” Bradley
began, and then he stopped, realizing she was bent over her desk, clenching her
stomach with tears in her eyes. “What’s wrong?”

He rushed to her
side and placed his arm around her, trying to guide her to the chair. “Is it
the baby?” he asked.

She nodded happily,
tears sliding down her cheeks. “I felt the baby,” she whispered in awe. “The
baby kicked me.”

He slid his hand
over hers. “Here?” he asked. “You felt the kick here?”

She looked up at
him and nodded again. “We are having a martial arts expert,” she said, her
voice brimming with laughter. “You should have felt the power of that kick.”

They both fell silent,
waiting to feel the baby again.

“There!” Mary
cried. “Did you feel it?”

Bradley shook his
head. “No, I didn’t,” he said.

She pulled her hand
out from under his and guided his hand to the spot. “Now, you’re closer,” she
said, holding his hand tightly against her body. “Wait for it.”

Breathing slowed,
all their concentration focused on their hands, they waited.

Thump.

“There!” she cried
happily. “Did you feel it?”

Bradley seemed less
impressed. “Kind of,” he said. “It was like you hiccupped.”

“No, it was a major
kick,” she argued. “Didn’t you feel it?”

He shook his head.
“Not really,” he admitted.

She sighed. “Well,
maybe because the kick came from inside me, I can feel it more,” she reasoned.

“Makes sense,” he
agreed. “But I’m sure in a couple of weeks I’ll be able to feel them, too.”

She put her hands
on her belly, feeling another little kick. “So, I kind of get a sneak preview
of coming attractions,” she said.

Bradley leaned over
and kissed her forehead.
“Seems only fair since you have to
do all the hard work.”

She sighed and
cuddled into him. “Bradley,” she whispered.

“What?” he
whispered back.

She reached up on
her toes so her mouth was next to his ear. “We’re going to have a baby.”

He wrapped his arms
around her and hugged her. “Yes, I know.”

“But now it feels
so real,” she explained. “I mean, I feel our baby. This is actually going to
happen.”

He smiled down at
her. “Yeah, this is actually going to happen,” he said. “And I can’t wait.”

Joey Amoretti
stumbled out of his bedroom and made his way down the hall, following the scent
of coffee. He blindly reached for a mug and poured himself a cup of the dark
brown liquid. Nearly scalding his tongue, he gulped down half a cup before he
turned to his wife, who was sitting at the kitchen table reading the morning
paper, already dressed and ready for the day.

“You didn’t come to
bed last night,” he grumbled.

“I had things to
do,” Gigi replied, her eyes not leaving the newsprint. “We have an appointment
this afternoon down in Quincy.”

“Quincy?” he
scowled. “That’s more than three damn hours away. I drove all day yesterday. I
ain’t
driving again today.”

She slowly lowered
the paper and looked at him, her stare angry and cold. “I beg your pardon?”

Scuttling back, he
sloshed hot coffee on his hands. Juggling the mug back to the counter, he
dropped it with a crash and then grabbed a dishtowel to
blot
up the remaining coffee. “I’m sorry, my dear,” he apologized. “I didn’t mean
any disrespect. I wasn’t thinking straight.”

She continued to
stare at him like a panther toying with its prey. He twisted the dishtowel
nervously in his hands. “Sweetheart?” he ventured.

“You do recall what
I do to people who cross me,” she said casually, although her tone didn’t fool
him.

He swallowed and
shook his head. “Yes, I do,” he replied.

“You do recall how
I took care of the threat to our enterprise, don’t you?” she asked.

He immediately
pictured the four large gravesites in the woods beyond the barn, nestled
between smaller ones and remembered the looks of surprised bewilderment on the
faces of the builders when Gigi nonchalantly shot them each in the forehead.
She had anxiously waited for them to appear the morning after she had reviewed
the nighttime security footage revealing that one of them had returned,
unannounced, to the barn. “Yes, dear, I do,” he replied.

“Then don’t make a
nuisance of yourself,” she said, picking up her cup of tea and sipping
delicately.

 
Brushing the perspiration off his forehead, he
nodded at her. “I’ll just go wash up,” he said.
“Won’t take
me but a moment.
Then we can be on our way.”

“Wear your light
blue suit,” she ordered, picking up the paper again and scanning the columns.
“And make sure you shave.”

Joey was dressed
and ready to go in record time. He had recovered his good mood by drinking
enough whiskey to dull the pain, but not enough for Gigi to detect. “You
gonna
tell me about the merchandise?” he asked.

“I’ll tell you all
about her as we drive down,” she replied. “And this time you’d better control
yourself. We have very angry subscribers who are looking for an event worth the
money they’ve spent.”

“We taking her home
with us tonight?” he asked as they drove south towards Quincy, Illinois.

Gigi shook her
head. “No, we are only meeting with the parents to demonstrate what loving and
caring Christians we are,” she replied scornfully. “And once we convince them
how saintly we are and, of course, give them the right information for a
background check, we will be picking up our newest daughter within the week.”

Joey chuckled
maliciously. “It’s like taking candy from a baby,” he said. “It’s so easy when
you are dealing with people who aren’t as smart as you are.”

Gigi glanced over
at Joey, derision in her eyes, and just shook her head. “Yes. It is.”

Mary studied the
missing
persons
reports she received from the Galena
Police Department looking for Steve. Out of the half dozen reports she had
received, she had narrowed it down to a possibility of two different men.
Sighing, she glanced at the phone on her desk, willing it to ring. Bradley was
running a background check on the family who had taken Liza, and he promised he’d
call as soon as the results came in.

“Why are you
staring at your phone?”

Startled, Mary
looked over to see Steve sitting on the other side of her desk.

“Good morning,” she
said.

“Really?
Good morning?” he asked caustically. “The last time we met you dropped the
bombshell that I’m dead, and all you can say to me is good morning?”

She started to
apologize then shook her head. I am not going to be bullied by a ghost, she
thought angrily.

“Listen, Steve,”
she said, leaning forward aggressively on her desk, then catching a whiff of
him and changing her mind. “I didn’t kill you. I didn’t have anything to do
with your death. I’m taking time out of my life to help figure out what
happened to you, to help find you. And if you think you can just appear before
me smelling like a crap and having an attitude that’s worse than your smell,
well, then you can just crawl back into your mine shaft and wait for the next
guy to rescue you.”

Abashed, Steve
sighed and slowly nodded his head. “You’re right,” he said. “You’re trying to
help me, and I’ve been a jerk.”

Mary gave a little.
“Well, I understand that finding out you are dead can be a little bit of a
shock,” she said.

His lips turned up
in a small curve. “Well, yeah, that can pretty much ruin your plans for the
rest of your day,” he said, “or your life.”

Chuckling softly,
she nodded. “Yeah, I can see that.”

She pulled out two
reports and slid them across the desk. “I’ve been going through the missing
persons reports from the Galena Police Department,” she explained. “And these
two reports seem to fit you best. A friend of mine, Andy, who lives in Galena,
suggested you might have fallen into an old mine shaft on your property and
were never discovered.”

Steve thought about
it for a moment. “I remember there was light, and then, suddenly, there was
darkness and pain,” he said. “As I was falling, I hit against the rock wall a
couple of times, hitting my head, my shoulder, my leg. And when I finally
landed, it was in what seemed to be a river or quicksand. But it was too dark.
I couldn’t see.”

Taking a shaky
breath, he closed his eyes for a moment and then looked at Mary.

“The water closed
over my head,” he said. “I couldn’t breathe; I thought I was going to drown. I
was flailing my arms around, trying to grab hold of something, anything to pull
myself up.”

Looking down, he
held his hands out in front of himself. “Finally, I grabbed onto the rock wall.
It was limestone and slippery, but I could dig my fingers in and pull myself
up, out of the water.”

He stopped and closed
his eyes once again, trying to remember. “My leg,” he said, opening his eyes as
the memories returned. “My leg wouldn’t move. It must have been broken. I
bobbed down in the water, trying to touch the bottom, but it was deeper than
six feet, so I kept clinging to the wall. I screamed for help, over and over,
until my throat was raw and I couldn’t scream any longer.”

Pausing for a
moment, he looked up at the ceiling, tears forming in his eyes. “I was so
alone,” he said. “But I didn’t want to die.”

He took another
deep breath and continued. “I was exhausted, but I knew if I fell asleep I
would lose my hold on the rock and I’d drown,” he said. “So I dug my fingers
into the rock, looking for little crevices for support. I climbed up, dragging
my leg behind me. The first time, I got about two feet up, and I lost my grip
and slipped down the rock wall. I scraped my
face,
and
my body and was plunged back into the water. But, I pulled myself back up and I
tried again.”

He looked at Mary.
“I had to live,” he said. “I had to get back to my kids.”

Mary nodded. “Yes,
I understand,” she said.

“I started the
process again,” he continued, “slowly pulling myself up using my hands and
arms. It was dark, so I really didn’t know where I was going; I just felt my
way along. Finally, I think I was about four feet above the water, and I found
a cave. I think it was a cave. Anyway, there was enough room for me to climb in
and rest. I was cold and shivering, but more than that, I was exhausted. So, I
lay down against the rock and went to sleep.”

“You did everything
you could to get back to your family,” she said. “My friend Andy said the mine
shaft might have been covered with sod, so no one knew what had happened to
you.”

“I don’t want my
kids to think I left them,” he said. “I don’t want them to think I didn’t love
them enough to stick around.”

Nodding, Mary
pulled the reports back across the desk and scanned them. “Okay, does the name
Steve Sonn sound familiar?”

His eyes widened,
and he slowly nodded. “Yes, Steve Sonn,” he said, his voice growing with
excitement. “That’s me. That’s who I am. I’m Steve Sonn. Mary, you’re a
genius.”

“Well, it was a
fifty-fifty chance,” she replied. “So, not a lot of genius was required.”

“Well, what do we
do next?” he asked. “When can I see my kids?”

“According to the
report, you’ve been missing for about twenty years,” Mary explained. “So, your
kids will be close to the age you were when you died.”

“I’ve missed their
whole lives,” he said sadly. “I missed everything. Baseball games, Christmases,
birthdays, graduations. I wasn’t there for them.”

“That wasn’t your
choice,” Mary reminded him. “You would have been there if you could.”

“They don’t know
that,” he said. “All they know is their dad left them.”

“Okay,” Mary said,
pulling her keyboard in front of her and typing. “Then we’ll let them know the
truth.”

Steve leaned
forward.
“How?
How are you going to find them twenty
years later?”

“I’m going to do a
web search for them,” she said. “They probably have some kind of social media
listing.”

“A
web search?
Social media?
What are you talking
about?” he asked.

Mary looked up from
her computer screen. “Wow, that’s right. Twenty years has really made a
difference in the world hasn’t it?”

The results came
back for his oldest son’s name, and Mary clicked on a popular social networking
site. “Why don’t I show you rather than try to explain it,” she said, turning
her computer monitor so Steve could view it, too.

A page with photos
of Steve’s son, Gregg, and his family showed on the screen. “That’s
Greggie
,” Steve said, pointing to the little boy in the
photo who looked to be about six years old. “He hasn’t changed at all.”

Mary shook her
head. “No,” she said, pointing to the man holding the child. “That’s
Greggie
, and that’s his son, Stevie.”

Steve looked up,
tears filling his eyes. “He named his son Stevie?” he asked.

Mary nodded. “Yes,
he did.”

“Thank you, Mary,”
he said with a tearful smile. “Now all we have to do is find me.”

Mary nodded. “Yes,”
she said. “And I’ll start working on that right away.”

He started to fade
away. “Stevie,” he whispered. “I have a grandson named Stevie.”