Page 46 of No Offense

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 andwatches 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 notime 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 withMarguerite 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.