McQuaid's Justice

by Carly Bishop

  Cy folded his arms. He knew she was right. He also knew she could have no concept of what it was like to play hardball with a man like her uncle.

  If they were right, Perry Reeves had murdered once, clearly demonstrating he would stop at nothing to ensure he got what he wanted since what he had really wanted had been out of his reach since the hour he’d taken possession of street drugs he’d intended to hawk.

  Cy scowled, congratulating himself on having achieved the exact opposite of his intentions in coming here at all. Amy was unlikely to back off now. “Do you want to know what will happen if you pursue this?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “That’s easy to say, Amy, but you have to think through the consequences. How will you answer when your father asks you what you’re trying to prove? If we nail Perry, do you think he won’t take your father down with him? All he would have to do is say that your father knew exactly what had happened. Do you think he wouldn’t at least make that threat? Or that your father’s career would survive the accusation even on the federal bench?”

  “My father would be the first to throw your argument out the window.”

  “We’re not talking abstract principle here, Amy—”

  “No. We’re not. I intend to ask him. I think he would survive it—but that isn’t even the point, Cy. If it came to that, my father would resign from the bench first.”

  She waited for him to say something. When he only looked at her, she looked at Paulo scurrying around loading bricks into the wheelbarrow. Cy could see the struggle going on inside her. If she couldn’t persuade him that her uncle had committed murder, then maybe she was wrong to think she could take it on.

  “You think I’m being naive, don’t you?” Her hands spoke of a babe in the woods.

  He had the feeling there was more going on inside her heart than he knew. That she felt herself a babe in dangerous woods her uncle lorded over, and equally, unwilling to be bullied anymore.

  “The thing is,” he answered, “your father won’t ever get to make that call because the buck stops with you. You’re the one who has to decide. Now we know that’s what was going on yesterday. Your uncle was putting it right there on the line, Amy. He was saying, Cross me and see what happens to your father’s career—not to mention his life.”

  “Yesterday,” she went on stubbornly, “I was afraid of what would become of me if you kept going.”

  “You weren’t wrong, Amy. You’re not wrong now. If you could make the case for your father, if you went to him and just laid out what you believe right now, how do you think he would decide what the truth is?”

  Her eyes filled with tears but she began to laugh. “He would probably call the men in white coats to come take me away.”

  Cy’s heart thumped hard because her laughter wasn’t anything like the unpleasant noise Seth had made when he was amused because he couldn’t hear and didn’t know better, but a beautiful, bittersweet laugh a hearing woman would envy.

  Her smile faded. “This isn’t about him anymore, Cy. It’s about me.” She looked at him, in his eyes. “Do you want to know how I know that?”

  Choked with an emotion he didn’t even begin to understand—hope, maybe—he asked. “How?”

  “Because in my dreams last night—a nightmare, really, I knew I could still hear, if only I weren’t so afraid.”

  ON THE WAY TO Steamboat Springs early Monday morning, they stopped in the blink-and-you’ve-missed-it town of Kremmling and had lunch. An hour later, Cy shifted into four-wheel drive to accommodate the deeply rutted, snowy mountain road. Headed up an incline of twenty, maybe twenty-five degrees in places, the road led to the secluded Victorian mansion where Amy had spent her first five years.

  This was where it had all begun, and ended, and the place Amy chose to start. To cross the line her uncle had drawn in the sand.

  The sky was overcast, it was snowing fiercely, and the wind didn’t blow so much as suck massive clouds of the white stuff down the naked swath cut through the evergreens. The weather was fit for nothing.

  Cy let the pickup come to its own stop in the drifts. Amy raised her hood and got out by herself, trudging through the snow to the front porch. The place filled her with foreboding. She hadn’t been inside it, save in her nightmares, since her father bought the house in Denver next to Hank Takamura.

  Brent lived in the old mansion now. Freeloading, according to Perry. Brent pretty much did exactly what he wanted to do and little else, tending bar or filling in on ski patrol when he needed cash, skiing otherwise, or chasing women.

  Enormously popular, he had a reputation around the ski town for hard drinking, doing the hot-dog jobs—volunteering on the fire, rescue and avalanche control teams—and a flair for uproarious impromptu standup given a mike in the bars.

  Amy hadn’t seen him in over three years.

  Cy waited behind her while she rang the doorbell several times. When she got no answer, she knelt next to the wooden bench and retrieved a key cleverly hidden in a small crevasse-like compartment of one of the wooden slats.

  She handed the key to Cy.

  “Are you sure we should just let ourselves in?”

  She nodded. “He knows I’m coming. He rents out rooms, too, so yes.”

  Cy opened the lock, then shoved the door open. The darkness inside made Amy think of a yawning abyss. She shook off her mood and crossed the threshold, turning on entryway lights in hanging fixtures so old they had had to be converted to electricity.

  She pulled off her other glove, then shed her coat. The temperature, at least, was welcoming. Scraping snow from his boots outside, Cy took off his Stetson, went in and closed the door behind him.

  “This is it,” she signed. “There are the famous stairs, the library,” she pointed to one side of the stairs, then the other, “the parlor.”

  Looking around, he hung his hat up. “Is it pretty much like you remember it?”

  “It’s exactly the same, Cy.” Nothing had been done to update or redecorate the house in all the years that passed. It was clean enough, but not even the position of the furniture had been changed. It was still sitting in all the familiar places. She glanced into the parlor, to the magnificent old bric-à-brac shelves cluttered now with ski trophies and the like. “Everything but that. There, on those shelves, is where Fiona’s music box collection was when I was little.”

  Cy crossed the age-darkened hardwood foyer to the extraordinarily wide staircase. A worn runner, itself three feet wide and tacked at the top of each riser, ran up as far as the eye could see.

  He took the first seven steps two at a time to the landing where the staircase changed direction and sat there, looking for something.

  She drew nearer to the wall directly beneath him and looked up. “What?”

  He looked down at her from between a pair of balusters. “This is where you sat listening to them all when you came down at night?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded.

  From her vantage point, she knew he could no longer see anywhere in the house but straight ahead and down into the foyer. Nor, she thought, could anyone have readily seen her sitting there. “What are you doing?”

  He shrugged. “I was looking to see if I could tell where you used to touch the wallpaper.”

  Confused, she signed, “Did you find it?”

  “No.”

  She went up the stairs, passed him, and sat on the step above the landing. “Here. Where it’s gone all shiny. See? Should I turn the light on?”

  He shook his head. Now that she’d pointed out the worn place on the wallpaper, he wasn’t looking at it.

  “Why?”

  “Why... what?”

  “Why were you looking for this?”

  “No reason, Amy.”

  “No?”

  “It’s just been on my mind, is all.”

  “Me touching the wall has been on your mind?”

  He gave her a long look. She could tell he wanted to shrug it off. He
wanted her to leave it be. She didn’t know how to leave it alone if the fact of her touching that hideous old wall was occupying his thoughts.

  “Cy—”

  “Amy. Look. It’s not some weird pervert thing about you touching things.”

  She swallowed. She began to feel her heartbeat. “I didn’t think it was.”

  “The image just stuck in my mind, okay? It just... stuck in my mind.”

  But she guessed, then. It made her stop breathing. Made her stop forming witless, awkward questions in her own mind. There was a tender and deeply human emotion inside him for what she had gone through, crouched here in this exact spot trying to hear things in the dark to reassure herself, trying desperately to feel safe by the touch of the velvety wallpaper.

  “Cy.” She touched his cheek, stroking opposite the direction his whiskers grew with her thumb. Feeling maudlin, she dived overboard the other way. “You are an idiot.”

  He cracked a smile. The feel of it beneath her hand, reaching his cheek, filled her up with emotion.

  “I’m flattered.”

  She shook her head, signing with her other hand that no, she was the one who was flattered.

  He turned his head ever so slightly, till his parted lips reached the mound of her flesh below her thumb. Her pulse began to speed, to hammer. A tremor of desire rose inside her. His breath warmed her skin. She watched his lips part further and close over her skin, pressing kisses to the wildly sensitive inside of her wrist. And she watched the tip of his tongue slowly, slowly trace the creases and hillocks of her palm and then she couldn’t watch anymore because the sheer rocketing pleasure of it became too fierce and the sensual aches inside her scattered so near and so far, so hard and deep that her neck arched. Her head fell back, exposing her throat, inviting his lips, his kiss, his tongue nearer her heart, nearer her tightening breasts.

  But his lips never reached her throat. Instead he pulled back, lowered her hand, his jaw clamped tight, his frustration thick.

  Afraid to know why, she forced herself to meet his eyes.

  “Your brother is coming.”

  She jerked her hand away from him. He laughed because the alternative would have been to cut her brother off at the knees when he walked through the front door. Standing, he pulled her to her feet, then loped casually back down the stairs with her at his back.

  Brent Reeves came barreling through the door. When he saw her behind Cy, he jerked the shotgun he was holding up and away.

  “Jesus, Amy! I could have blown you to kingdom come.” He glared at Cy. “What are you doing here?”

  “Why don’t you put that thing away so we can tell you,” Cy snapped.

  “Yeah? And who the hell are you?”

  Cy pulled out his credentials. “Cy McQuaid. FBI. Put that thing down now.”

  Brent turned around and set the shotgun down in the corner of the foyer nearest the door. “There. You happy?”

  Cy blew off the surge of adrenaline. “Happier.” No one mistook him for mollified.

  “Brent,” Amy signed. “We didn’t mean to alarm you.”

  “I can’t understand you, Amy. What is—” he repeated what he could remember of her signing.

  Cy translated for her. “She said we didn’t mean to alarm you.”

  “Yeah, well.” He rubbed his forehead. “You did. And I already talked to you guys. This guy Chuck Something-or-other.”

  “Jones.”

  “Yeah. Him.” He dumped a pile of mail on the small telephone table and shrugged out of his coat, turning to Amy. “I got your E-mail, but I thought you were coming alone. I thought it’d be just the two of us.”

  “When has it been just the two of us since I went deaf, Brent?”

  He looked at her, trying to act like he got it, but he didn’t have a clue.

  Cy repeated aloud what she’d signed.

  Brent flushed. “Well, it’s all kind of useless anyway, isn’t it?” he demanded. “I mean, I already told them everything I know. What can I tell you?”

  “There are things only you and I know about growing up in this house, Brent. I’m hoping you can help me remember some of it.”

  “Why? What good’ll it do now?”

  “To see if anything I remember is accurate for one thing.” She signed to Cy, “Tell him we just want to sit down and talk, okay?”

  He nodded. “Look. Brent. Your sister just wants to talk, and I didn’t come here to go over the same ground you already covered with Jones. Do you mind if we sit down?”

  “Would it matter if I did?”

  Cy shrugged. “Your call.”

  He looked at Amy again and heaved a sigh. “Might as well take your coats off. I don’t care. If she wants to talk it’s no skin off my nose. Come on back to the kitchen.”

  He led the way through the parlor and dining room to the kitchen beyond a heavy old varnished oak swinging door. Amy dumped the teapot sitting on one of the burners, refilled it with water and turned on the gas. Brent opened the back door to the closed-in back stoop and let in an aging golden retriever whose tail thumped wildly when she spotted Amy.

  He sat in the yellowed vinyl chair at the far end of the table, took off his boots and angled his feet over the corner of the table.

  Sitting opposite him, cradling the retriever’s head in her lap, Amy smiled. “Granny Fee would have a heart attack.”

  “Nah,” Brent returned amiably after Cy had translated what Amy signed. “Nothing’s going to kill that old lady. You seen her lately?”

  Amy nodded. “A couple of days ago. She really is getting fragile. You should go see her. She’d like that.”

  “You’re kidding yourself, Ames. She didn’t have any use for me or Mom either.”

  He was wrong. Fee had asked about him many times, but Amy knew how he might feel as he did. Her grandmother wasn’t always easy to be with, and she loved Amy more than any of them.

  “It’s something Fee said to me that I wanted to ask you about.”

  “How is it,” her brother asked, giving Cy a sideways look, “that you can sit talking to Granny? She can’t understand you either, can she?”

  Amy smiled. “No. But she’s patient enough to sit writing notes back and forth.”

  “Well, hell. She’s got a lot of time on her hands, I guess.” He laughed at himself. “Like I don’t. Geez, Ames. Sorry I was such an asshole.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she signed. She looked to Cy. “I can’t tell if he means it or not, Cy.” She got up to take the whistling teapot off the burner. “Where are the tea bags?”

  Brent frowned. “How’d you do that? How’d you know?”

  “To get the teapot?” She smiled. “Your faces.”

  “I’m impressed.” He got up and got a handful of mugs and a box of mixed teas. Cy just grabbed one. Amy chose a mint flavor. “So what did Fee say to you?”

  She dunked her tea bag, then let it steep for a moment. Cy was translating as fast as she could sign. He half-knew what she was going to say anyway. “She said Amy was a difficult child to love.”

  Brent choked on his sip of tea. “Geez, she just cut right to the chase, didn’t she?”

  “Come on. I couldn’t have been that bad.”

  He’d grown more comfortable, watching Amy, listening to Cy. “Are you kidding me? You were a holy terror.”

  “How?” Cy asked, not waiting for her.

  “Hell. She was...you were like this little phantom shadow. Nobody could turn around without falling over you. No conversation was safe. You weren’t a tattletale, exactly, but I was in trouble all the time because of you.”

  “How, if I didn’t tell on you?”

  “How? You really don’t remember? You went around parroting everything you heard, so any smartass remark I made got right back to Mom. It was just you jabbering to your dolls or your stuffed animals—no. Mostly it was Beeka. If it wasn’t your rabbit it was Beeka.”

  “Oh, wow!” Tears sprang to her eyes. Cy didn’t get it. “Beeka,” she signe
d, “was my imaginary friend. I’d forgotten all about her. There was HooDoo too. And Pilly.”

  Cy grinned. “HooDoo?”

  She gave him an arch look. “I still have my Pilly. She’s this really ratty old pillow. I’m allowed to say that, by the way. You’re not. Say what you want about HooDoo, but do not disparage Pilly.”

  Straight-faced, Cy held up his hands in a Who, me? gesture, then just mentioned the other names of her imaginary friends for Brent.

  “Yeah. She had a regular menagerie.”

  Cy sucked up half his tea. “Sounds more like fun than trouble to me.”

  “The judge thought so.” He shrugged. He’d rarely referred to Amy’s father as anything but “the judge.” “But when HooDoo spoke—trust me, Amy was putting on a goddamned one-woman, three-character act all the time, I was in deep shit.”

  Cy poured himself more hot water, dunked his tea bag again, then helped himself to milk from the refrigerator.

  “Me too,” Amy signed. “To the top.”

  He filled her mug. “So how did your mother know Amy wasn’t just playing, making things up as she went along?”

  “Half the time Amy was repeating things Mom said. You know. Not just the general drift. I mean verbatim. Words she probably didn’t even know the meaning of. It wasn’t hard to figure out.” He looked at Amy. “You couldn’t have had any idea the things you were saying. Fee thought you were a clairvoyant, only with hearing things.” He frowned, thinking. “Clairaudient she called it.”

  “That was your fault,” she accused. “You were the one—”

  “What?” Surprise, angry surprise flitted over Brent’s expression. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  She’d meant her accusation in fun, but something had been lost in the translation.

  Incredulous, Cy didn’t take the time to straighten it out. “Wait a minute. You mean like hearing voices?” he asked incredulously. “Joan of Arc stuff?”

  “Yeah.” Brent looked hard at her, then shrugged it off. Whatever it was. “Fee thought so. Pissed ol’ Unca Perry off—big time.” He turned around in his chair and grabbed a half-empty bag of Oreos out of a drawer. “He was convinced the old lady’d singlehandedly turn Amy into a schizo like her. What a farce.”