Emily Kenyon 01 - A Cold Dark Place

aside the urge to shove a pregnant woman.
    She started for the door, planning to find David at the hospital. Suddenly she noticed that the house was decorated in a kind of spare, contemporary way, with stark, simple lines and a lot of leather and chrome. David hated contemporary furnishings. She allowed a slight smile to come to her face.
    Good. He’s getting everything he never wanted.
    On her way to the car, she tried to calm down. At some point, Emily knew she could never really forgive David for the affair. She wanted to. Even though the marriage was “irretrievably broken” as the lawyers said, she knew they were connected forever. Although they’d be apart, they had a little girl to raise and love. It hurt so deeply that they would not do that together. Her vision for her life had been the same one she’d grown up with in Cherrystone. Two parents. A stable home. A place where birthdays would be celebrated. Holidays observed. Memories made together as a family. But that was all fractured when he betrayed her with a student nurse.
    “She meant nothing,” he had said at first. “I screwed up “
    As Emily’s anger grew, his story changed. Soon after the impetus for the affair belonged to her. “You weren’t there for me”’
    To some degree, he’d had a point. That crushed her. Playing a role in the disintegration of her family was almost impossible to bear. The only joy she could allow herself was when she learned that he’d cheated on his girlfriend with a young office assistant, Dani. Once a cheater always a cheater.
    As Emily slid behind the wheel, Dani called out, “Emily, I really do want us to be friends.” Her voice was intentionally loud enough for her well-heeled neighbors to pick up on her troubles. Dani liked a little drama, it seemed.
    Emily pretended not to hear. She just slammed the car door shut. There was no need to fan the flames, and nothing out of her mouth would seem anything but venomous. She glanced over her shoulder as she backed out. Dani was there by the front door, holding her mineral water, and looking either sad or mad. It was hard to say.
    Her phone rang as she pulled away. It was Olga’s number.
    “Hi there,” Olga said, her voice cheerful. “I’ve got something for you. I set up a dinner date for you”
    For a moment it flashed through Emily’s mind that she’d probably talked too much about not having found a decent man. She was like bloody chum tossed in a shark cage. Desperation must have oozed from every pore.
    “A dinner date,” she said, sighing. “I don’t know. .
    Olga laughed. “Not that kind of a date, my dear. A date with Tina Winston. You’re seeing her at Embers on Stewart downtown”
    “Oh really?”
    “Yes. Tonight.”
    “Tonight?”
    “Yes. And one more thing.”
    Emily hung on Olga’s words. This is going to be big. Olga knows something.
    “Order the fish.”
    Saturday, 4:42 P.M., Seattle
    Nick Martin and Jenna Kenyon stood outside 1225 Stone Way and looked up at the four-story red brick building with green awnings that looked like eyebrows over the street level windows. It was an edifice with a past. Several in fact. At the turn of the previous century, it was the home of the Seattle Bulletin and its considerable printing operations. Today, an old letter press with brass fittings gleamed like a museum piece in the front lobby. After the paper folded, it became apartments, then offices, and now it had gone condo. It was its incarnation as an office building that interested the teenagers standing before it.
    That’s when it had been the home to Angel’s Nest, an adoption agency.
    “I guess this is where I came from,” he said.
    Jenna, still angry at her father about keeping Dani’s pregnancy secret, stood quietly before saying, “Let’s go to the library.”
    Her father had said that Angel’s Nest had been in the news in the early 1980s. He had rounds to conduct “or I’d go with you”
    Jenna saw that as just another lie. When she pleaded to let her and Nick try to find out a little information before turning themselves in, she lied, too.
    “Dad, we’ll go to the police this afternoon. All of us. When you get back from hospital rounds”
    David Kenyon took the bait then. Too easily, she thought. Jenna knew that he had already crossed over that invisible line between new family and old. He didn’t care about her. Maybe Dani wouldn’t let him care. She was pregnant. She was young. She held all the cards.
    “I promise,