by Lisa Jackson
“You should be checking out leads, trying to find the bastard who did this to her.” Matt stepped into the room, closer. Kelly’s nerves tightened and she silently chided herself for her reaction.
He stared down at his sister, and the play of emotions across his bladed features showed signs of a deeper emotion than she would have expected from the rogue cowboy, who had become, according to town gossip, a solitary man. Yes, there was anger in the set of his jaw, quiet determination in his stance, but something else was evident—the flicker of guilt deep in his near-black eyes. At some level Matt McCafferty felt responsible for his sister’s condition. He reached over the rails just as Kelly had minutes before and took Randi’s small, pale hand in his big, tanned fingers. “You hang in there,” he said huskily, his thumb rubbing the back of his sister’s hand, only to stop less than an inch from the spot where the IV needle was buried in her skin.
Kelly’s throat tightened as she recognized his pain.
“Your little man, J.R., he’s needin’ ya.” Matt cleared his throat, slid an embarrassed glance at Kelly, then turned his attention back to his sister. Obviously he felt more comfortable shoeing horses, mending fence or roping calves than he did trying to come up with words of encouragement to a comatose sibling. And yet he tried. Kelly’s heart twisted. Maybe there was more to Matt McCafferty than first met the eye, than rumor allowed. “And the rest of us, we need ya, too,” he added gruffly. With a final pat to his kid sister’s shoulder, he turned on his heel.
Kelly let her breath out slowly. Who was this man and why did she react to him—dear Lord, her hands were sweating, and if she didn’t know better, she’d swear her heartbeat accelerated whenever she saw him. But that was crazy. Just plain nuts.
Giving herself a quick mental shake, Kelly followed him through the door into the central hallway to the hub that housed the nurses’ station.
“Where’s Espinoza?” he asked, sliding a glance her way.
“Probably back at the office. He finished up here on another case, but he’s aware that you’re concerned. He’ll call you tonight, but I don’t think he can give you any more information than I have.”
“Damn.” They walked to the elevator and stepped into a waiting car. She ignored the fact that her pulse had accelerated, and she noticed that he smelled faintly of leather and soap. As the doors to the elevator shut and they were alone, his dark eyes focused on her. Hard. She wanted to squirm away from his intense, silently accusing eyes. Instead she stood her ground as he asked, “So why were you in Randi’s room?”
“Just to keep my focus. I hadn’t seen her for a while and after your visit this afternoon, I thought I’d see how she was getting along. I’ve kept in contact with the hospital, of course, gotten updates, but I thought seeing her might make me clearer on some points.”
“Such as?”
“Such as why was she up in Glacier Park? Where was she going? Who were her enemies? Who were her friends? Why did she fire the foreman of the ranch a week or so before she left Seattle? What happened at her job? Who’s the father of her child? Those kind of questions.”
“Get any answers?” he asked sarcastically.
“I was hoping someone in the family might know.”
“I wish. No one does.” He leaned against the rail surrounding the interior as the elevator car landed and the doors opened to the lobby. He straightened, his jacketed arm brushing hers. She stepped out of the car, ignored the faint physical contact. “What do you know about a book your sister was writing?”
“I’m not sure there is one,” he said as they crossed a carpeted reception area where wood-framed chairs were scattered around tables strewn with magazines and a few potted trees had been added to give some illusion that St. James Hospital was more than a medical facility, warmer than an institution.
“Your housekeeper, Juanita Ramirez, said she was in contact with your sister before the accident and that Randi had been working on a book of some kind, but no one seems to know anything more about it.”
“Juanita didn’t even know that Randi was pregnant. I doubt if she was privy to my sister’s secrets,” Matt muttered as he made his way to the wide glass doors of the main entrance.
“Why would she make it up?”
“I’m not saying Juanita’s lying.” The first set of doors opened automatically, and as Kelly stepped into the vestibule, she felt the temperature lower ten or fifteen degrees. Thank God. For some reason she was sweating.
“But maybe Randi fibbed. She’d talked about writing a book since she was a kid in high school, but did she ever? No. Not that my brothers or I ever heard of.”
The second set of doors opened and a middle-aged man pushed a wheelchair, where a tiny elderly woman was huddled in a wool coat, stocking cap and lap blankets. Outside the snow was falling, flakes dancing and swirling in the pale blue illumination from the security lamps.
Matt squared his hat on his head, the brim shadowing his face even further. “Talk to anyone and sooner or later they tell you about the book they’re gonna write someday. Trouble is that ‘someday’ never comes.”
“Spoken like a true cynic,” Kelly observed as she buttoned her coat and felt the chill of Montana winter slap her face and cool her blood, which seemed a few degrees higher than normal.
“Just a reality check. If Randi was writing a book, don’t you think one of us, either Thorne, Slade or I, would know about it?”
“Just like you knew all about her job and her pregnancy,” Kelly threw back at him, using the same argument he’d given her earlier about the housekeeper’s belief that Randi had penned some literary tome.
Matt was about to step off the curb, but stopped and turned to face Kelly. “Okay, okay, but even so. Big deal. So what if she was writing her goddamned version of War and Peace? What’s that got to do with the price of tea in China, or more specifically what happened to her up in Glacier Park?”
“You tell me.”
“You’re the cop,” he pointed out, his eyes flaring angrily. “A detective, no less. This is your job, lady.”
“And I’m just trying to do it.”
“Then try a little harder, okay? My sister’s life is on the line.” With that he stepped off the curb, hunched his shoulders against the wind and strode through the blowing snow to his truck. Kelly was left with her cheeks burning hot, her temper in the stratosphere, her pride taking a serious blow.
“Bastard,” she growled under her breath, and headed to her own car, an unmarked four-wheel drive. She didn’t know who she was more angry with, the hard-edged cowboy, or herself for her reaction to him. What was wrong with her? She was nervous around him, nearly tongue-tied, so…unprofessional! Well, that was going to change, and now!
Once behind the wheel, she twisted on the ignition, flipped on the wipers and drove to her town house on the west end of town. With a western facade, the two-storied row house had been her home for three years, ever since she’d scraped up enough of a down payment to buy her own place.
She parked in the single garage and climbed up a flight to the main floor, where she kicked off her boots in the tiny laundry room, then padded inside. Tossing her keys onto the glass-topped table that served as her eating area and desk, she walked into the kitchen and hit the play button on her answering machine while shedding her coat.
“Kelly?” her sister’s voice called frantically, bringing a smile to Kelly’s lips as her sibling was nothing if not overly dramatic. “It’s Karla and I was hoping to catch you. Look, it’s about six and I’m still at the shop, but I’m gonna close up soon and pick up the kids at the sitter’s then run out to Mom and Dad’s. I thought maybe you could meet me there…call me at the shop or try and reach me out at their place.”
Kelly checked the wall clock and saw that it was nearly seven-thirty. There were no other messages so she placed a call to her folks’ house and Karla picked up on the second ring.
“Got your message,” Kelly said.
“Kelly, great! Mom jus
t pulled this fantastic pork roast from the oven, and from the smell of it, it’s to die for.”
Kelly’s stomach rumbled and she realized she hadn’t eaten anything since the carton of yogurt and muffin that had sufficed as lunch.
“We were hoping you could join us.”
With a glance at the paperwork on the table, Kelly weighed the options. She wanted to go over every ounce of information she could on Randi McCafferty, but she figured she could wedge in some time for her family first. “Just give me a few minutes to change. I’ll be there in half an hour.”
“Make it twenty minutes, will ya? My kids are starved and when they get hungry, they get cranky.”
“Do not,” one of the boys countered, his high voice audible.
“Just hurry,” Karla pleaded. “The natives are restless.”
“I’ll be there in a flash.”
“Good idea. Put on the lights and siren, clear out traffic and roar on over.”
“I’ll see ya.” Kelly whipped off her uniform and changed into soft, well-worn jeans and her favorite cowl-necked sweater. She took half a minute to run a brush through her hair, then threw on a long coat and boots and dived into her old Nissan, a relic that she loved. Fifteen years old, a hundred and eighty thousand miles on the odometer and never once had the compact left her stranded. At a stoplight, she applied a fresh sheen of lipstick but still made it to her parents’ house, the bungalow where she’d grown up, in fifteen minutes flat.
“Kelly girl!” her father called as he pushed his wheelchair into the dining room where the table was already set. Once tall and strapping, Ron Dillinger had been reduced to using the chair for twenty-five years, the result of a bullet that had lodged in his back and damaged his spinal cord. He’d been a deputy at the time, and had been on disability ever since. “Glad you could join us.”
“Me, too, Dad,” she said, and bent down to kiss his forehead where thin strands of white hair couldn’t quite cover his speckled pate.
“You’ve been busy, I see,” he said, holding up a folded newspaper. “Lots going on.”
“Always.”
“That’s the way I remember it. Even in my day, there weren’t enough men on the force.”
“Or women.”
Ronald snorted. “Weren’t any women at all.”
“Maybe that’s why you weren’t so efficient,” she teased, and he swatted at her with his newspaper. She ducked into the kitchen and was greeted with squeals of delight from her nephews, Aaron and Spencer, two dynamos who rarely seemed to wind down.
The boys charged her, nearly toppling their mother in the process. “Aunt Kelly!” Aaron cried. “Up, up.” He held up chubby three-year-old arms and Kelly obligingly lifted him from the floor. He had a mashed sandwich in one hand and a tiny toy truck in the other. Peanut butter was smeared across the lower half of his face. “You comed.”
“That I did.”
“Came, she came,” Karla corrected him.
“You’re such a baby,” Spencer needled.
“Am not!” Aaron rose to the bait as quickly as a hungry trout to a salmon fly.
“Of course you’re not,” Kelly said, swinging him to the ground and wondering just how much peanut butter was transferred to her sweater. “And neither are you,” she said to her older nephew, who grinned, showing off the gap where once had been two front teeth. Freckled, blue-eyed and smart as a whip, Spencer enjoyed besting his younger sibling, a half brother. Karla, two years younger than Kelly, had been married twice, divorced as many times, and had sworn off men and marriage for good.
“Here, you can mash the potatoes,” Karla said as she snatched a wet dishrag from the sink and started after a squealing Aaron, who took off into the dining room.
“Papa!” Aaron cried, hoping his grandfather would protect him from his mother’s obsession with cleanliness.
“He won’t save you,” Karla said, chasing after her youngest.
Kelly’s mother, Eva, was adding a dab of butter and a sprinkle of brown sugar to already-baked acorn squash. The scents of roast pork, herbs and her mother’s favorite perfume mingled and rose in the warmth of the kitchen as she shook her head at the melee. “Never a dull minute when the boys are around.”
“I see that.” Kelly rumpled Spencer’s hair fondly, cringed at the wail coming from the dining room, then rinsed her hands and found the electric beaters so that she could whip the potatoes. Over the whir of the hand mixer, Aaron’s screams, the microwave timer and comments from Charlie, her parents’ pet budgie, who was perched in his cage near the front door, Kelly could barely hear herself think.
“I’ll make the gravy,” Karla said as she tossed the dirty rag into the sink.
“Mission accomplished?” Kelly glanced down at a more subdued Aaron. His face was clean again, red from being rubbed by the washcloth.
“Yeah, and it’ll last all of five minutes. If we’re lucky.”
Kelly’s mother chuckled. A petite woman with fluffy apricot curls and a porcelain complexion, she doted on her two grandsons as if they were truly God’s gifts, which, Kelly imagined, they were. It was just too bad they had such louses for fathers. Seth Kramer and Franklin Anderson were as different as night and day—their only common trait being that they couldn’t handle the responsibilities of fatherhood.
“Are we about ready?” Eva asked, and Kelly clicked off the beaters.
“I think so.”
It took another five minutes to carry everything into the dining room, find a booster chair for Aaron, get both boys settled and served up, but soon Kelly was cutting into a succulent slab of herb-seasoned pork. She finally relaxed a little, the tension in her shoulders easing as they ate and talked, just as they had growing up. Except there were two more chairs crowded around the Formica-topped table now, for two boys who were as dear to her as if they’d been Kelly’s own.
“So what gives with all that business with the McCaffertys?” her father asked around a mouthful of pork. “I read in the paper there’s speculation about foul play.”
“Isn’t there always?” Kelly asked.
“With that group there is.” Eva’s eyebrows pulled together, causing little lines to deepen between them.
“Yeah, they’re an untrustworthy lot, there’s no doubt of that.”
“Amen,” Karla said as she cut tiny pieces of meat for her youngest son.
Kelly didn’t comment. For years the name McCafferty had been tantamount to Beelzebub or Lucifer in the Dillinger home. She saw her mother give off a soft little sigh as Eva poured gravy onto her potatoes. “I suppose it’s all water under the bridge,” she said softly, but the pain of the old betrayal was still evident in the lines of her face.
Ron scowled into his plate. “Maybe so, but it doesn’t mean I have to like ’em.”
“John Randall is dead.”
“And I hope he rots in his grave.”
“Dad!” Karla said sharply, then glanced pointedly at her sons.
“Well, I do. No reason to sugarcoat it. That son of a bitch didn’t care a whit about anyone but his own kin. It didn’t matter how many years your mother put in working for him, passing up other good jobs, he still cut her loose when times got a little rocky. And what happened to her pension, huh? There wasn’t any, that’s what happened. Bad investments, or some such crock of—”
“Dad!” Karla said again.
“Karla’s right. There’s no use discussing it in front of the boys,” Eva agreed, but the sparkle in her eyes had faded. “Now, if you’ll pass me the pepper…”
And so the subject was gratefully closed for the duration of the meal. Their father even found his smile again over a piece of his wife’s lemon meringue pie.
After the plates had been cleared and the dishwasher was humming with a full load, Ron challenged the boys to a game of checkers on a small table near the fire. Aaron climbed onto his grandfather’s lap and they played as a team against Spencer, who thought he could beat them both as he’d practiced how to outmaneuver a
n opponent on a computer.
“The boys could really use a father figure,” Karla observed, watching her sons relate to their grandfather as she fished in the closet for her sons’ coats and hats. Sadly, she ran a hand through her spiky strawberry-blond hair. “All they’ve got is Dad.”
“They do have fathers,” Kelly reminded her.
Karla rolled her expressive green eyes. “Oh, give me a break. They have sperm donors, nothing else. Boy, can I pick ’em. Some people are athletically challenged, I’m love challenged.”
“You and the rest of the women on the planet.”
“I’m not kidding. I can see when anyone else is making a mistake, but I seem to have blinders on when it comes to my choice in men.”
“Or rose-colored glasses.”
“Yeah, those, too.” She was pensive, running long fingers along the stitching in Aaron’s stocking cap. “But then you never take a chance, Kelly. I mean, not on love. You take lots of chances in your career.”
“Maybe I’ve been too busy.”
“Or maybe you’re just smarter than I am,” Karla said with a sigh. “I don’t see you making the same mistakes I did.”
“You forget I’m a career woman,” Kelly said, reaching for her coat. “A cop.”
“So am I—a career woman, that is—and don’t tell me that being a beautician and owning your own shop doesn’t count.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Kelly said, laughing.
“So…when are you going to tuck your badge away long enough to fall in love?”
“As soon as you put down the perm rollers, shampoo and clippers.”
“Very funny.”
“I thought so.” She slipped her arms through the sleeves of her coat, hiked it up over her shoulders and began working on the buttons.
“I think we both could take some advice from Randi McCafferty. You know she wrote a column for single people?” Karla asked, then added, “Of course you do—what was I thinking? You’ve been working on the case for weeks.” She held up Spencer’s coat, then called toward the living room. “Come on, boys. Time to go.” Both kids protested and Karla said to Kelly, “I was only kidding about Randi McCafferty’s column. The last person I would take any advice from is a McCafferty.”