by Lauren Carr
Daniel Cross was never seen or heard from again. Many rumors emerged about where his body had been hidden—including a wall in a renovated section of the intelligence wing at the CIA headquarters.
Thinking back over his life, Chris concluded that breaking the news of Blair’s death to his daughters was the most difficult conversation he had ever had with anyone. It was harder than when he had told them about her supposed death years earlier. The news was especially heartbreaking with the realization that for years, their mother had been living only an hour away from them. While Chris emphasized that she had sacrificed being with them for their own safety, that did not make the feeling of abandonment any easier.
There were many tears shed that day and the days that followed.
It took no time for the media to learn the identity of the brave communications officer who had discovered the report outlining Daniel Cross’s traitorous activities and revealing his murderous crimes. One could only imagine the damage he could have done if he had been confirmed for Director of Central Intelligence.
Blair Matheson was a hero who had sacrificed her life to save her nation.
The calls to interview her husband and daughters were constant.
Not wanting his daughters to become part of the circus, Chris fought to keep Blair’s funeral in Harpers Ferry as private as possible. Friends of the family who happened to be off-duty or retired police officers volunteered to guard the church and cemetery to keep interlopers out.
The dreaded day of the funeral arrived much too quickly. The farmhouse was eerily quiet while the family dressed for the service. Guests were invited back to the Matheson home for a reception following the graveside service. Doris had arranged for a caterer to prepare a buffet in the formal dining room and country kitchen.
The aroma of good food floated up to the top floor while Chris got dressed in his black suit, at which time he realized Murphy had never returned his gray suit. His mouth watered at the smell of the Swedish meatballs simmering in the kitchen while he sent a text requesting the suit’s return.
“Dad, are you decent?” Katelyn called to him from the bottom of the stairs.
“I’m never decent,” he replied while looping a black tie around his neck and shoulders.
With a giggle, Katelyn trotted up the stairs with Sterling. She had Thor tucked under her arms. the plain black suit she reserved for funerals washed out her fair features.
“What do you think?” She held out Thor, who was dressed in a black silk dress. Katelyn had tied a black hat with lacey veil onto the bunny’s head.
Sitting next to her, Sterling wore a black vest with white trim to resemble a shirt. The vest included a design resembling a black tie that was tucked into the vest. Katelyn completed the ensemble with a black hat with a wide rim.
“Well?” She prodded Chris for his reaction.
Furrowing his brow, Chris tried to think of what Sterling resembled. Unable to think of it, he said, “I’m really not the best judge for fashion.”
“Nonni said Sterling looks like an Amish dog.”
“She’s right.” Chris grinned. “That’s exactly what he looks like.”
Katelyn’s eyes blazed.
“Not that looking like an Amish dog is bad,” he said. “It’s just ... Sterling isn’t Amish.”
She spun on her heels to leave.
Sterling dropped to the floor and pawed at the hat until he had removed it.
“But Thor looks great,” Chris called down to her.
At the bottom of the stairs, Katelyn turned back to him. “Nikki says she’s not going.”
“She has to go.”
“She says she’s sick.”
With a groan, Chris finished tying his tie.
Since the news of Blair’s death, Nikki had been the most withdrawn of the girls. It was her way. She was not one to whine or cry or embark into drama. While Chris despised the drama that tends to be part and parcel of raising girls, he also preferred not to get blindsided by a sudden blast of emotion. He had discovered that people who keep things bottled up inside tend to explode at some point—and always at the most inconvenient times.
Chris grabbed his suit coat and headed down the stairs.
Sterling picked up the offending hat into his mouth and shook it as if to ensure that it would not land on his head again.
The angel clock was playing its melody when Chris passed Emma’s room.
Across the hall, Nikki’s bedroom door was closed. Chris rapped his knuckles on it. “Nikki, are you ready to go?”
“I’m sick.”
“Can I come in?” Chris turned the doorknob and waited for her reply. When he received none, he pushed the door open a few inches. “Nikki, hon, we have to leave in a few minutes.”
“I don’t feel good. My stomach hurts. I think I have the flu. I don’t want to spread it around.”
Chris opened the door the rest of the way.
Of the three girls, Nikki was the most like him. Her room was messy—the same way he had kept his room when he was a child. Her dresser was covered with clothes. Her closet door was open because it was too filled with toys to close it. He stepped on the top of a riding boot when he entered. Its mate rested across the room.
Nikki was stretched out on the bed on her stomach with her face buried in the pillows. She was dressed in her pajamas and bathrobe.
Carefully, Chris picked his way across the room to her bed. He didn’t want to trip over anything. Once there, he laid his hand on her head. She felt cool. “You don’t feel hot.”
She rolled over. “You can be sick without having a fever.”
“If you had the flu, you’d have a fever.”
She glared up at him. “Where did you get your medical degree?”
“It’s common knowledge.” He sat on the edge of the bed. “I know you don’t want to go to your mom’s funeral, but you have to go.”
“I already went to her funeral. Three years ago. I was there. I’ve got plenty of witnesses. Ask Nonni. She’ll tell you. I shouldn’t have to go again just because Mom faked her death and hid from us.” She clamped her mouth shut into a tight line and folded her arms across her chest. “I don’t want to go, and you can’t make me.”
Chris folded up his suit coat and laid it on the foot of the bed. “You’re right.” He laid down on the bed next to her. Folding his arms across his chest, he looked up at the ceiling. “I can’t make you go to Mom’s funeral.”
“Good.” She uttered a deep sigh.
“You have every right to be angry with her,” he said in a soft voice.
“Why did she leave us, Daddy?”
Chris shot a glance at the side of her head. The tough girl façade had slipped away to reveal the hurt that comes from feeling abandoned. He had shown the girls the final part of their mother’s recording—admitting her mistake, apologizing for it, and declaring her love for them.
Katelyn was mature enough to accept her mother’s apology.
Emma found comfort in the unwavering belief that her mother never did abandon her. She lived in the angel clock on the shelf in her room and sang to her every night.
Nikki was another story.
“She made a mistake,” Chris said.
“She wanted a career more than she loved us.”
“She had a choice. She made a bad decision and ended up paying for it. It broke her heart not being able to come back home to us. Being mad or holding a grudge is not going to punish her for what she’d done. She’s dead. The only thing that we can do is forgive her.”
Nikki sucked in a deep breath. She tightened her folded arms. Her chin stuck out in defiance. “I don’t care if she is a hero like everyone is saying. She left us.” She looked at him. “She left you, too. How can you forgive her, Daddy?”
“It’s not easy,” he said, “but I am working on
it. You remember what we talked about in Sunday school?”
Her nosed wrinkled. “I know. I know.” She said in a mocking tone, “You have to forgive seventy times seventy.”
“If forgiveness was easy, Jesus would not have had to command it.” He rolled over onto his side. “If it was easy, he’d only have to recommend it.” He lowered his voice. “I’m going to tell you a secret about forgiveness.”
She narrowed her eyes. Suspicion filled her face. “A secret?”
Chris looked around as if to make sure no one was listening to them. “When you forgive someone, you aren’t letting them off the hook. You’re actually letting yourself off the hook. You see, when you refuse to forgive someone, you’re hurting yourself more than you’re hurting the other person.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Once, I got really mad at a friend of mine,” he said. “He’d screwed me over really good. I was furious. I was so mad that I was trying to plot revenge against him. I just wanted to get back at him for what he’d done to me.”
“What did he do?”
“I forget.” Seeing that she didn’t believe him, he laughed. “Seriously. At the time, I thought it was something that I could never get over, but now, I can’t remember what he’d done. I guess that means it wasn’t that serious.”
“Mom left us, Dad. How can we ever forget that?”
“The thing is, your grandfather told me that holding on to anger is like grabbing a hot coal to throw at someone else.”
Her face screwed up.
“Have you ever grabbed a lump of hot coal?”
She shook her head.
“You end up burning yourself. That’s what happens when you hold onto a grudge. You end up hurting yourself more than the other person. It takes a lot of energy holding onto anger. Your stomach hurts.” He sat up and looked down at her. “Your stomach hurts, doesn’t it? Anger makes you sick.”
“How—”
“Forgiveness doesn’t happen overnight, Nikki,” Chris said. “It’s something that you have to work on. But over time, with a lot of prayer, it comes. The first step is going to Mom’s funeral. One day, you’ll look back on today, and you’ll regret it if you don’t go.” He went to the dresser where Doris had laid out a black dress for her to wear. He held it out to her.
She refused to get off the bed. “Do you still love Mom?”
“Yes.” He tossed the dress onto the bed. It landed on Nikki’s head.
She pulled the dress down from where it covered her face. “You love Helen, too, don’t you?”
Chris smiled. “Yes, I love Helen.”
“Are you going to marry her?”
“Do you want me to marry Helen?”
She sat up. “Of course. We all took a vote.”
“You all took a vote? Who all took a vote?”
“The four of us. Me, Katelyn, Emma, and Sierra. We want you to marry Helen. Katelyn said that now that Mom has died again, you can’t marry Helen for another year on account of appearances. That’s a bummer. If Sierra moved in with us, then she could have her own horse to ride whenever she wants.”
“Well, I’m sorry your mother’s murder screwed up everyone’s plans.”
Nikki frowned.
Chris lifted her chin to look at him. “Your mother is so very sorry for hurting us. I forgive her.” He kissed her on the forehead. “And she loved you very much. Don’t you ever forget that.”
Nikki’s face crumbled. She wiped the tears that spilled from her eyes with the back of her hands and threw her arms around him. Her tears soaked his white shirt as he held her tight.
Chris was glad to see Lieutenant Murphy Thornton, with his wife on his arm, limp into the church before the start of the service. Tristan Faraday was also on hand with Spencer tucked under his arm. They said she insisted on seeing her crush, Sterling, who had been left at the farmhouse to monitor the caterers.
Chris and Murphy greeted each other with a warm hug and pats on the back.
“Have you ever been to Prague?” Murphy asked him in a low voice. He shot him a sly grin.
“No,” Chris said. “Where’s my suit?”
“Would you like to go to Prague?”
“No. Where’s my cell phone? It has all of my contacts.”
“It’s with your suit. You know there’s a lot of funky stuff happening in Prague. If—”
“I’m too old for funky stuff,” Chris said.
“Blue Eyes!” Francine swooped in to give Murphy a hug. “I’ve got some friends who are dying to meet you.” She hissed into his ear, “I told them that you were my toy boy. Just go along with it. Okay?”
As she ushered him away, Murphy held his hand to the side of his head, his thumb to his ear and pinky to his mouth in the sign of a phone. “Call me,” he said to Chris.
Chris was still shaking his head when Jessica greeted him with such a warm hug that one would have thought they were old friends.
“I want to thank you and your friends for saving Murphy’s life,” Jessica said. “I don’t know what I would have done if I had lost him. I can never thank you enough.”
“Hey, he helped me escape from federal custody and got me a phony ID,” Chris said with a laugh.
“I just wish authorities had been able to stop Leban Slade from leaving the country,” she said. “He may not have killed your wife, but he was certainly behind all of this. Murphy says some of the classified information that Slade had bought from his spies gave away the names of operatives in foreign countries. Most likely, he dealt their names in exchange for contracts. There’s no telling how many people died because of him. Yet, monsters like Slade just fly away in their private jets and live on their private islands like kings.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
Jessica noted his calm demeanor. “Your children lost their mother because of Slade’s greed. Don’t you want justice for her?”
“There’s always justice. When a case goes cold or our justice system fails, that doesn’t mean the guilty party isn’t going to pay. The guilty always pays, because God is just.”
“We want to see Slade in an orange pantsuit,” Jessica said.
“Seeing Slade in handcuffs confirms that sense of justice,” he said. “We have to see him suffering for his crimes to prove that there is justice in this world. Doesn’t that indicate a lack of faith?”
Jessica cocked her head at him. “What does faith have to do with it?”
“If you truly believe that God is just, then you know there will be justice.” Chris tapped his chest. “You know it here. I don’t need to see Slade in an orange jumpsuit or handcuffs, because I have faith that God will take care of it. No matter how far Leban Slade flies in his private jet, he won’t be able to escape God’s judgment.”
“But they still haven’t arrested Blair’s killer,” she said. “It would be nice if you could give your daughters that closure.”
Chris saw Ivy Dunleavy making her way through the church’s double doors. “They’ll have closure soon.”
Unsure of how Spencer would react to Thor, Nikki ran into the house ahead of everyone to lock the bunny in Emma’s room. Sensing Sterling keeping company with another animal besides her, the rabbit thumped the floor with her hind paws and grunted her protest.
The buffet set up in the country kitchen offered a lovely view of the backyard blanketed with fallen leaves. As guests arrived at the farm, many would stop to admire the view of the river and the horses grazing in the pasture.
Bruce manned the bar, which included a wide selection of wines from his winery. Between serving guests tastes of vino, he played blackjack with Sterling and lost miserably, much to Tristan’s amusement.
“You do know he’s counting the cards?” Tristan asked while trying unsuccessfully to pull Spencer’s tongue out of the German shepherd’s ear. The sheltie knew noth
ing about playing it cool.
His eyes blazing, Bruce turned to Jacqui, who covered her mouth to conceal her giggle. “Didn’t I tell you? The dog is a cheat!”
In the living room, the younger guests took great delight in hearing Ray’s account about how he had led two killers in a car chase via remote access from the comfort of his computer room.
Chris was still trying to explain to his insurance company how his truck had gotten blown up. Instead of the truth, he told them that some unknown suspects had stolen it while he was traveling on the metro.
Murphy was the center of attention for a collection of female guests, both young and old. Sitting in a wing-backed chair to rest his injured leg, he was waited on by no less than five women—Francine among them.
While Doris admired Murphy’s good looks, she was more smitten with Elliott, who had saved her son’s life from Burnett. They were making plans for a beach getaway in the spring for her to finish the portrait she had started.
Mourning the death of her best friend and her husband, Ivy Dunleavy arrived in her red Mercedes. While Chris and Helen gave her a tour of the hundred-and-fifty-year-old farmhouse, Ivy remained strong until they were alone in the study.
Breaking down, she apologized for her husband’s role in Blair’s murder. “I never dreamed,” she sobbed. “Stu always kept his business dealings to himself.”
Helen offered her a drink to ease her nerves and asked what she would like to drink.
“Do you know how to make a martini?” Ivy asked.
With a pleasant grin, Helen went to the kitchen to ask Bruce to make the drink.
Chris sat across from Ivy. “As world famous as Leban Slade is, you had to know that he was Stu’s biggest client.”
“I knew he’d met him, and that his firm had done some work for him, but I never knew—” She gazed up at Chris with tear-filled eyes.
He said nothing.
She cocked her head at him. “Don’t you believe me?”
Doris arrived with the martini. “How’s this, Ivy?”
Helen and Ripley slipped into the room while Ivy tested the drink.