Page 19 of Cooper’s Promise

“Tell him to come in. I have sweet tea and pie.” The man ushered him into the house. Cooper soon found himself seated at their kitchen table, surrounded by pictures of children.

“How long have you been taking in kids?” Cooper asked.

“Since the early nineteen-eighties,” Sue Ellen Salmon answered. She slipped a large piece of pie in front of him. It was cherry with ice cream. He was in heaven. “We always wanted a large family. When we found we couldn’t have any more than our daughter Alice, we decided to take in some others. The social worker just kept bringing more. Back then we lived in a bigger house.”

Ed Salmon let his wife do most of the talking, but Cooper felt his presence. He was waiting for Cooper’s questions.

“How is your daughter doing?”

“Oh, she had babies, and her babies had babies,” Sue Ellen laughed. She pointed to a picture of a happy family surrounding a Christmas tree. “We’ve been blessed. Not only do we have great-grandchildren from Alice, but many of our foster kids have blessed us with grandbabies.” The woman gave him a beautiful smile. “Do you want another slice of pie?”

“Something tells me that Ed won’t be happy if I end up eating all of his dessert,” Cooper teased.

“You’d be right.” Ed chimed in. “So tell us what kind of shit that Josiah is into.”

“Ed,” Sue Ellen admonished. “Maybe it’s not that bad.”

“It’s going to be bad, honey. It always is.” The older man reached out and put his arm around his wife. He looked at Cooper. “How can we help?”

“I’m trying to figure out who Josiah’s friends are. Where he might have run off to. Like I told you, he told his employer that he was moving to Georgia to take care of his sick mother.”

“His mother died years ago,” Sue Ellen explained. “You said Josiah is stalking someone. Has he hurt her?”

“Do you think he’s capable of that?” Cooper asked.

“Yeah, I do.” Ed answered. “We took Josiah in when he was thirteen. He’d been in three different homes, and we made a commitment to each other that he was going to age out with us. At the time, we didn’t have any other children living with us.”

“On the surface he seemed like a good boy,” Sue Ellen explained. “But he had demons.”

“What kind of demons?” Cooper asked.

“According to the social worker who had worked with him, his father had abused him. He set fire to the last house he had stayed at. He was a handful. I’d just retired from the Tampa Police Department, so we figured I could handle him. He knew he had to be respectful of Sue Ellen.”

“But when he was sixteen, we got a call from the social worker that they wanted us to take in another foster child. She was twelve. We did. It lasted two months. We found her locked in the bathroom, too scared to come out. She never told us what happened. There were no physical marks on her, but Josiah had scared the hell out of her. We immediately got her out of our home and into a safer environment. We didn’t take on any other children until Josiah left our house. We also got him into counselling, for all the good it did us.”

“So you never found out what happened?” Cooper pressed.

“Never. But Leslie was placed in a good home two weeks after she left ours. The counselor told us that Josiah had inappropriate obsessive control issues, and that he was incapable of comprehending boundaries. It all sounded like psycho-babble to me,” Ed said with disgust.

“He’s one of the few children that we didn’t really keep in touch with. He’d call us, but we didn’t reach out much to him,” Sue Ellen sounded guilty. Cooper watched as Ed hugged his wife closer and whispered something in her ear that made her smile.

“We tried our absolute best. We got him counselling. We went to every one of his high school plays. I tried to get him to open up. But two years after he left our home, one of my old colleagues showed up on my doorstep. Josiah had been caught trying to sneak into a girl’s dorm room. He was given probation. I told Steve that Josiah was just going to do it again. The kid was bent, despite everything we tried to do for him.”

Sue Ellen picked a napkin up off the table and pressed it against her eyes. Cooper felt for the couple that had tried to do everything they could for Josiah, but couldn’t break through.

“So what has he done? Why are you here, and not the police?” Ed wanted to know.

“I’m trying to get a sense as to whether he will escalate into violence. Right now, he hasn’t touched Brenna, but he has her running scared. The fact that he pulled up stakes and is continuing his stalking behavior tells me that we probably have a real problem on our hands.”

Ed leaned forward and looked Cooper dead in the eye. “Who is Brenna to you?”

“She means everything to me.”

“Keep her close. I’ve always thought that one day Josiah would be on the evening news.”

“Ed, you never told me that.” Sue Ellen clutched her husband’s arm.

“I’m sorry, sugar, there just hasn’t been anything we could do. If this gentleman has an opportunity to keep his woman safe, then he needs to do it.”