by J. R. Ward
It wasn’t that Danny didn’t remember all of those incidents. But on the rare occasion he recalled them, they were a black-and-white foreign movie with subtitles projected onto a tiny screen—all of the frame-by-frame with none of the immediacy.
That was how it had to be. Otherwise, you’d crack.
“—some fucked-up shit.” Moose shook his head. “I mean, that old lady got tore the fuck up.”
Duff shrugged. “Just made me hungry. Any chance we can get goulash for lunch?”
“You are some kind of Hannibal Lecter,” Doc muttered from up in front.
Moose stared at Duff. “How can you say that after you saw Betty White lookin’ like that?”
Danny stared out the window. They were passing by a stretch of strip malls, the boutiques, hair salons, and cafés all locally owned and struggling. The sun was out and people were walking in small groups. What day of the week was it? Friday?
Guess so.
“—ain’t that right?”
When Moose knocked Danny in the thigh, he realized the statement had been made to him. “Sorry?”
“You and me are making lunch when we get back.”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“Come on,” Duff spoke up. “How do you guys not want goulash?”
Danny returned to the view outside. As they rumbled along, the smoky postnasal drip down the back of his throat made him nauseous.
Just focus on the here and now, he told himself. And you’ll forget everything else. That’s how it’s always worked.
chapter
30
At the end of the day, Tom got into his SUV and told himself that he did not just put a clean shirt on and tuck it into a pair of khakis. He also did not get out his best set of Merrells from the back of the closet, the ones that he was still breaking in. And he most certainly hadn’t shaved a second time.
Yeah, clearly all of that had been done by an alien who had taken his body over for a temporary, earthly visit.
He was pulling away from the stationhouse when his cell phone went off, and when he saw who it was, he cursed but answered it anyway. “Look, I told you I was working on getting the tree removed. I thought we could get over there today, but we were slammed.”
For godsakes, he’d been dealing with an apartment fire started when a man with schizophrenia carved up his grandmother and tried to eat her intestines for lunch.
“I’ll make sure it happens tomorrow,” he told his sister, “and yes, before you ask, I’ve already arranged for two of the boys from the six-one-seven to patch the roof. I’m on it. You won’t have to put up with Mom for more than another twenty-four hours—”
Anne jumped in. “She can stay as long as she likes.”
And speaking of aliens, who the hell are you and what have you done with my sister.
“I thought you were desperate to have her out of there.”
“Listen, Tom, do you remember the fire at the Ripkin estate. About a year ago.”
“Yeah. Of course.” He took a left and headed to the better side of town. “What about it?”
“So, I’ve been reviewing the file over here. No charges were ever filed.”
“Gas line malfunctioned. Backed up into the house. When she lit the fireplace, everything ignited.” He hesitated to mention Anne had been at the scene and surely recalled all that. “Why?”
“So I’m working the warehouse fires.”
“Which ones? Down by the wharf?”
“Yes. And I went to see Charles Ripkin up in Boston today.”
“How’d you manage that? From what I’ve heard, the man’s office is like a fortress.”
Her voice got dry. “Funny how if you mention you’re an arson investigator, doors open.”
“I gotta remember this.”
He braked at a red light and watched two young women pass in front of his SUV. They both looked at him, did a double take, and stared like they were sizing him up for a fuck.
Ah, yes, the younger generation with their high standards and fine-tuned morals at work. And if he had any sex drive at all, maybe he’d reroute from this stupid meeting and go pick the two of them up in a bar.
Instead, he might as well have been checking out a pair of bicycles.
There was something very, very wrong with him.
“Hello?” his sister said.
“Sorry.” He hit the gas as the light changed. “What were you saying?”
“I never got to sweep the house. As soon as the fire was out on the first and second floors, we got called onto another alarm. The six-one-seven closed the scene and you were the Incident Commander.”
“Yeah. So?”
“Did you guys find anything that wasn’t in the official arson report?”
“Are you accusing me of withholding evidence?”
“No. I’m asking because the investigator from my office died before he finished his job on the scene, and I’m worried that information was lost.”
“Oh . . . shit, that’s right. I remember something about the guy dying. Lemme think, I mean, you saw it all yourself: old house, daughter was a mess, Charles Ripkin shows up the next day and does a presser on how he owes the department an unbelievable debt. A month later, he sends a crew to break ground on the new six-one-seven. Daughter, Kristina, survived, but was scarred.”
“Constance was her name.” There was a pause. “It just doesn’t add up. Why’d she make her way to the attic? While she was on fire?”
“She panicked. Instead of dropping and rolling, she ran and ended up in the elevator. She told us later she thought that was where a fire extinguisher was. She flailed around, pushed a bunch of buttons, fell out upstairs. She was found half in and half out of the open doors of the thing.”
“That makes no sense.”
“It’s what she told police happened. Why would she lie?”
“I don’t know. I want to find out, though.”
“Anne, you’re not a homicide detective, and the case is closed. Oh, and there was a fire extinguisher in the elevator, mounted under the button panel.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“So why didn’t she use it on herself?”
“I guess she collapsed. I don’t know.” There was a silence. “Hey, before you go. What’s up with you and Mom? You can’t wait to get rid of her most times and won’t even talk to her on the phone—and now she’s staying with you, all open-ended?”
Up ahead, the Canterbury Inn’s lit-up exterior looked like an ad for autumn in New England, the maples on either side just beginning to turn red, the colonial’s yellow clapboards, white trim, and black shutters as traditional as they were attractive.
“She’s fine,” Anne muttered. “It’s whatever.”
As Tom pulled into the lane that went back to the parking area, he was aware of a loosening in him, his breath entering his chest and exhaling with greater ease. How long had he been suffocating? he wondered.
Okay, that was a question he’d do well not to dwell on.
“Thank you,” he heard himself say. “Thank you for . . . being with her. She loves you a lot and has never understood why you hate her so much.”
* * *
Anne was pulling into her driveway as she ended the call with her brother, and as she tossed her cell into her bag, she glanced back at Soot.
“You ready for dinner?”
The dog wagged his tail and chuffed, which was something he was starting to do. After a couple of days of food and antibiotics, his personality was beginning to emerge. Turned out he was a talker, ready to respond with a vocalization whenever he was addressed. He’d also started dreaming, his paws twitching and muzzle working when he was at rest.
He was also sleeping with her now, apparently. After she’d found him in her bed the night before, she’d tried to crate him when she and her mom had gone upstairs. He’d stared at her with such tragedy in his eyes that she’d brought him to her room . . . and woken up with him curled in against her in the morn
ing.
It had been the first good night’s sleep she’d gotten since before she’d lost her hand.
Too bad she was not going to enjoy one again anytime soon. Thank you, Ripkin.
Hooking Soot to his leash, she went up to her front door and—
Her mother opened things before she could unlock them, and the woman was ever perfect, ever smiling. The scent of meatloaf, home-cooked and prepared with a mother’s love, made Anne want to think up something she absolutely had to do—on the other side of town.
“You’re home!”
Charles Ripkin’s shark eyes came to mind. “Yes. Hi. Um, hello.”
As she stepped in, she stopped and looked around. “What the hell have you done?”
Her mother closed the door. “Well, I thought things would work better this way. The flow was blocked by your sofa, that chair was going to fade in the sun, and I bought you that new coffee table.”
“Where is my old one?”
“I put it down in the cellar. It wasn’t right.”
Anne shut her lids and started to count to ten. When that got her nowhere, she decided to shoot for a thousand. “Mother. You can’t just take over here. This is my house, my things, and I don’t care about ‘flow,’ okay? Cut it out.”
“But it’s better this way.”
The words came out before Anne could catch them: “Your better and my better are not the same. Just like you and I have absolutely nothing in common and never will.”
Her mother clasped her hands together. “I am sorry. I just . . . I thought you would like it.”
“Didn’t it occur to you that I put the furniture where it was because I wanted it there? And stop trying to please me. You’re only making me mad.”
“You’re so like your father.”
“I am not like him at all. But whatever, that’s a compliment compared to being like you.”
“Anne!”
She let Soot off the lead and put her purse down. “You are the most passive-aggressive person I’ve ever been around, yet you crumble when it counts. You always have.”
Cue the tears. “I’ve only ever tried to love you. I know that you don’t . . . respect me because you think I’m just a housewife. But I’m proud of you, I always have been, and I’ve been worried about you.” That high-pitched voice with the Watertown accent, cracked. “When you were in the hospital, recovering, I just wanted to—”
“Rearranging my furniture is not the way to work out your issues about my injury.” Anne forced herself to dial back on her anger. “My hand is not your problem.”
“But I would like it to be. I want to be your mother, Anne. Even though you’ve only ever seen me as your father’s wife.”
Anne laughed harshly. “I don’t see you as that, either.”
“How can you say such cruel things?”
Crossing her arms over her chest, she looked around her little house and realized this confrontation, which had been coming for years, was the reason she hadn’t wanted to be with her mother. There were things you couldn’t take back, words that were daggers, glares that left marks.
But courtesy of Ripkin, she couldn’t have her mother leave. As much as she would have preferred to have the woman anywhere else, she knew Nancy Janice was safe here. The house had a good security system and great locks. Plus Anne was just down the hall if anyone broke in.
Lowering her head, she decided she needed food and Motrin. “I apologize. I’m sorry.”
She didn’t mean it. But people had levers to be pulled in certain circumstances and her end goal was to have her mother safe until she figured this Ripkin thing out.
At least she knew the woman was safe here.
“I am, too,” her mother said sadly.
chapter
31
Striding into the Canterbury Inn’s lobby, Tom felt the floorboards under the deep red carpeting bend beneath his weight, the shifting causing creaks to rise up each time he put a foot down. Everything was brass-chandelier, old-school New England, lithographs of American revolutionaries on the walls, grandfather clocks in the corners, simple moldings on the low ceiling.
He half expected a lobster in colonial dress to be behind the front desk.
Wrong. It was a brunette in a uniform.
As she looked up at him, he gave her a wave and pointed in the direction of the dining room. She nodded and went back to whatever she was doing.
Probably refreshing her memory on the Boston Tea Party. Paul Revere. Faneuil Hall.
None of which was in New Brunswick, all of which the city had commandeered as part of its tourist trade, like a little brother mugging his older sibling’s stuff.
The dining room was red and navy blue, all patriotic, the tables set far apart, the place more than three-quarters full of the white-hair-and-dental-implant set. Autumn always brought the leaf peepers, busloads of over-seventies riding the highways through the colorful season so they could return home with Vermont maple syrup, fake ivory carvings from Maine, and miniature laminated maps of the Freedom Trail from Massachusetts.
“May I help you?” the hostess asked from behind her stand.
“I’m here to meet—”
“There you are!” Graham Perry came out of nowhere like a gremlin. “We’re in a private room.”
In any other circumstances, Tom would have been pissed that he had to deal with the guy. But he would have taken anyone as a chaperone for this, including Mr. Hi-how’re-ya.
“I’m not staying long,” Tom said. “And why the hell are we meeting in a private room. I thought campaigns like to save money.”
“We’re building a coalition.”
“And you can’t do this at a Howard Johnson’s?”
“They don’t exist anymore. And no, we can’t.”
Perry opened a door, and yup, it was another boardroom setup, but this time Tom was looking at a whole bunch of aftermath, the seats turned away from the table, bound reports open and cockeyed, mint wrappers and half-empty Snapple and Poland Spring bottles next to glasses with melting ice in them. A portable screen and projector were in place, and a laser pointer that had been left on was beaming across at the side wall, a red eye focused on nothing of import.
“The mayor must have gone to the bathroom. Hold on.”
Perry shuffled to the exit and Tom felt like following the trend. Instead, he sauntered over and checked out one of the reports.
“Warehouse District Repurposing Proposal” was the title, and he smiled. Flipping through the pages, he saw Ripkin Development’s name all over the place.
“Thanks for coming to see me.”
Tom looked up at Mayor Mahoney. Navy blue dress tonight, same figure, same hair, same scent. God, he wished he weren’t attracted to her.
“Warehouse wharf development, huh.” He tossed the report on the table. “Big plans. Expensive plans—what were you saying about firefighters and teachers?”
“We need businesses to thrive in this city.”
“I thought we weren’t allowed to talk about your father.”
She almost caught the frown before it hit her face. Almost. Her problem was that he’d seen it so many times, that expression that reflected the internal thought: Wow, you really are the asshole people say you are.
“It’s not about my father.”
“So is it about Charles Ripkin? I see his name all over that.”
“He’s a potential major investor.”
“Who owns a lot of property down there.”
“Which is why we have to get him involved.” The mayor shook her head. “But that’s not why you’re here.”
Tom became very aware that Perry had not returned to the room. And that the doors were closed.
He put his palms up and took a step back. “Oh, no you don’t. I did not come here to get hit on.”
“What?” The frown returned. “Are you suggesting I would—are you serious?”
“Don’t pretend that it doesn’t happen. And you’ve made it clear you’l
l do anything to get re-elected.”
Mayor Mahoney’s jaw clenched, and he found it interesting that she was forcing control over her emotions—because it suggested there might be some heat underneath all that composure. Then again, he’d just accused her of using sex to get an endorsement, soooooooo . . .
“I would like to make this very clear,” she bit out. “I asked you here to discuss my plans for addressing the city employee pension deficit so that you can have some confidence that your firefighters will get what they deserve when they retire. I was also going to ask for your help with on-the-job injury compensation. There are some best-practice models out of LA and Chicago that we might be able to use. What I most certainly was not offering was any part of me.”
Mirroring her pose, he crossed his arms, too. “I guess I misread you,” he muttered in a bored tone.
“You know, you’ve got a problem, Chief Ashburn.”
“Do I.”
“You have a reputation around town for being inflexible and closed-minded. No one can argue how you take charge of and oversee the department and its equipment and facilities, but you are very difficult to get along with and people are forced to work around you.”
“You know, it’s strange. I thought my job was to run the fire department for the city, including its equipment and facilities.”
“It is.”
“So I’m knockin’ it out of the park.”
“Not really. Compared to national standards, you have among the highest levels of personnel dissatisfaction and burnout. Your men and women feel disempowered to make changes in procedures, they’re frustrated by a lack of support from management, and they’re worried about their futures. You are the head of a very unstable unit, Chief.”
“What the hell are you talking about? You don’t know anything about my people.”