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Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Vindication.

There was the name right on the mailbox. A. Burnadette. The very same name that had flashed on Bowen Reeve’s newly purchased Caller ID machine last night at midnight.

He had him. He had the little punk who had been pestering him with prank calls two or three times a week for the last three weeks.

“’Are you my daddy,’ indeed,” Bowen muttered to himself, and sank low in his truck seat, pulled his ball cap over his narrowed eyes, and surveyed the house.

Truthfully, it wasn’t quite what he was expecting. Kids who were running wild at midnight usually came from homes where nobody gave a damn about much of anything. And he considered himself something of an expert, having once been a kid who ran wild at midnight.

But looking at that little white house of A. Burnadette it was evident whoever lived here gave a damn. The picket fence was freshly painted, the grass in the small yard was neatly trimmed, red flowers bloomed in the window boxes. On the covered verandah a colorfully cushioned swing swayed gently in the slight breeze.

That was a good thing, Bowen told himself. A. Burnadette gave a damn. As a phys ed teacher at Montgomery Bridge Memorial High School, he dealt with lots of parents who didn’t. Lots of parents who, if he confronted them about their child being the prankster calling at midnight, would look at him blankly and wonder why he didn’t unplug his phone.

Why hadn’t he unplugged his phone?

Bowen had stubbornly picked up the phone every single time, even though he knew he had only one midnight caller, even though he knew the exact pattern of the call by heart.

“Hello.”

His greeting would be followed by a long silence.

“Hello?” he’d say again, irritated now, and then there would be another long silence.

And then a voice, cleverly disguised to sound like a young child, would whisper, “Are you my daddy?”

It was some sort of terrible cosmic joke, of course, that out of several million potential victims the prankster had found him, Bowen Reeve, a man haunted by a choice made while he was still in high school.

“I’ve decided to give the baby up for adoption,” Becky had said.

The right choice, of course. The only choice. They’d been unmarried, young, and poor, not so much in love as looking for an escape from the grim realities of their lives. Becky had moved away shortly after the birth of the baby, and Bowen had been saddened to read of her death in an automobile accident two years ago. It should have been the end of the chapter, but it wasn’t.

Because he had held his baby, his son, once.