Lover's Lane by Jill Marie Landis Read Free Book Online Page B

she had disappeared in the first place.
    Mr. and Mrs. Charles Saunders, a wealthy Long Beach couple, heartbroken grandparents, had been the darlings of the local media in the first few weeks after their only son’s death as they appealed to the public to help them find their missing grandchild and his mother. Not only that, but the Saunders just happened to be the parents of an old friend of Jake’s.
    They had wanted the best for their late son’s love child, wanted to give him all the advantages of their wealth and power, to make all the dreams they once dreamed for their own son come true. But Caroline had taken the boy and disappeared.
    Why not let them support her and the boy? It was a question no one had been able to answer because no one had ever found Caroline.
    He’d been at it since she first disappeared, and not only because back then he had worked for Alexander and Perry, one of the biggest private investigative firms in Southern California, the firm Charles Saunders hired to find Caroline Graham.
    He’d asked to be on the case because he’d known Rick since the summer they were both fifteen, the summer they’d met on the beach in Cabo after the billfishing tourney.
    It was 1988. Jake had been with his grandfather, Jackson Montgomery; Rick had come along with his dad, Charles. It was the first year ever Jake had been willing to spend the whole summer with his granddad, and he’d convinced himself that even if he and his grandfather sparred the whole time, the trip down the coast to Mexico would be well worth it.
    By the time they’d reached Cabo, he was sure he’d made a big mistake. Not only had his grandfather been at his most pompous and belligerent, but all the other young men had grown up in or on the water in exclusive beach communities. Not so, Jake, and from the beginning they’d made him feel like an outsider—until one afternoon when Charles Saunders had come aboard Jackson Montgomery’s sixty-foot Hatteras Sportfisher, bringing his son with him.
    At first Jake suspected it had been a mercy visit, that maybe his grandfather had asked Charles and Rick over expressly to get the boys together. After Jake got older, he realized his grandfather would never have thought to do anything of the kind and that the visit had been serendipitous.
    While the older men talked, drank tequila, told fishing stories, Jake and Rick had eyed each other with carefully postured teenage disinterest, until out of boredom and a need to escape, Rick asked Jake if he wanted to walk into town with him.
    Rick had led him straight to a bar on a back street so full of rowdy college students there was barely room to move between the tables. The music was loud, the crowd raucous, and no one appeared to notice that the boys, both lean and tall and obviously turistas , were under the drinking age of eighteen.
    They bonded on the beach that night as they barfed their guts out not far from a bonfire surrounded by other young people drinking cold long-neck bottles of Mexican cervezas and bellowing Jimmy Buffett lyrics at the moon.
    That was a lifetime ago. He was good at what he did now. Damn good. That’s why it frustrated him to no end not to have been able to find Caroline and Rick’s son. Even after he’d left Armstrong and Perry to start his own P.I. firm in Long Beach, he’d continued to devote time to searching for some clue that would lead him to her.
    On a professional level, he was curious to know how and why she had been able to hide her identity for so long. On a personal level, duty drove him to find her for Rick, to make certain Rick’s son was being well cared for and above all, to get the truth out of her, to find out why she’d run.
    The night mist enfolded Jake as he zipped up his leather jacket and started down the street. He wasn’t ready to face the rose-infested room yet, so he let the sound of the ocean draw him toward Plaza Park.
    He jaywalked across the street, and looking back, saw her through the