Gabriel - Jessie Cooke Page 0,45

She loved it because they let her take the baby with her.” Again, his eyes clouded when he mentioned Patrice. At least the man had some kind of conscience.

“She never filed taxes,” Blackheart said.

“Yeah, well, sometimes in small towns things aren’t always above board,” he said, with a shrug. “She didn’t make much, but they were struggling at the time and what they wanted was someone they could pay in cash. My friend Grayson Little and his wife owned it at the time. Grayson is still there, but he and the wife split up quite a few years back. Anyway, Kasey was willing to agree to that. I got her the job right after the baby was born and at the time it was all she had to live on. Then when we got together, I insisted on moving her to a bigger apartment and paying the bills. She didn’t take that well, at first, but eventually we settled into a routine and she kept the cash they gave her because she was planning on going back to school someday. She really wanted to be a doctor.”

“She couldn’t get some kind of grant or something for school?”

“She had a scholarship, but she gave it up when she found out she was pregnant and let someone else take it. She wanted to wait until the baby was older because medical school would take her away a lot. She used to say she had a ‘ten-year plan,’ that by the time Patrice was ten, she’d have enough money to at least pay for her first year and Patrice would be old enough that leaving her so much wouldn’t be so hard. She was crazy about that kid...but she was smart, really smart, and it was hard for her to just stay at home and be a mom. When she wasn’t working at the Inn, or busy with the baby, she was always reading. She bought every second-hand medical journal she could find...she devoured them. Such a shame...Kasey’s death was a big loss to the world.”

“And you never wondered what happened to her daughter?”

“Of course I did. But the officer I talked to told me she’d been turned over to Kasey’s family, so I just hoped she was okay.”

“Did Kasey ever mention being suicidal to you? I mean, when they said she killed herself, were you surprised?”

He took another drink of water and said, “She was crazy about that kid, so yeah, I was surprised she’d leave her like that.” He hesitated and then he said, “But sometimes she was sad, about hiding her from her family...I tried to talk her into telling them many times but she told me I just didn’t understand how conservative they were, and she said she knew they’d never accept the child. Thinking about her family, or when she’d call them and lie about being in school, those were the times when she was really down. So...no, to answer the question, she never mentioned suicide. But she was more anxious than I’d ever seen her before about going home, so I guess I let myself believe that maybe the stress of all of that got to her.”

Blackheart still wasn’t buying it. This was a woman who wrote in her diary about her life, religiously, loved her kid, and had a plan for the future. He still found it strange that her own family had just gone on without questioning any of it...and it pissed him off. He had his own guilt about Patrice, and forgetting Kasey...but he knew if he’d been in touch with her at the time he damned sure wouldn’t have just swallowed the suicide theory whole and left it at that. Despite what he’d said to Patrice so far, he admired her for wanting to find out the truth...especially because a lot of what she was going to find out might hurt more than not knowing at all.

“That man in there lived with me and my mother. It should be me in there talking to him,” Patrice said, running her fork through her eggs, absently.

Gabe wasn’t sure if it was going to piss her off more or not, but he was compelled to defend Blackheart, again. “I know he’s a little hard to take sometimes...but, I can promise you that everything he’s doing here is coming from his heart.”

She rolled her eyes. “He’s so damned pushy, like a big Harley and ten thousand dollars’ worth of tattoos make him king of the fucking world.”