The Kindness of Strangers (Skip Langdon Mystery #6) (The Skip Langdon Series)

by Julie Smith

  Goddammit, she was the only adult I ever thought I could trust.

  She killed my lover!

  Somehow, this made her feel better. The melodrama of it. It felt… removed, somehow.

  He really wasn’t, though, Torian thought, and for the first time, she knew it was true. She and Noel hadn’t made love, and probably never would have. They were having a flirtation, that was all.

  For him.

  But deep down, somewhere on the wrong side of her belly, she knew that maybe it was true for her, too—that this wasn’t true love, that even she would have tired of it soon.

  But she wouldn’t tire of his memory. For now, she loved him desperately.

  I have to hold onto something, she thought.

  Yet their love, the most vivid thing in her young life, was starting to fade in her memory.

  A random thought crossed her mind: I wonder if it’s because of Boo?

  She had gone to see Boo, at Skip’s request. It was about a week after they’d been rescued—after Skip had broken the news about Noel and Paulette.

  Torian had been at Sheila’s, and Skip had come in and said she had a message for her. She said Boo wanted to see her, and that she, Skip, thought Torian should call on her.

  Torian had said sarcastically, “I’m sure she really means it.”

  “She does. Listen, she’s cool. You’d be surprised.”

  And because Skip currently got Torian’s vote as Most Evolved Homo Sapien Over the Age of Twenty, she went.

  The older woman, her lover’s wife, greeted her with a hug. “Torian, I’m so sorry this happened to you.”

  Torian was speechless.

  “Come in, will you? I made some coffee.”

  Torian liked that. Coffee. If it had been lemonade, she would have understood the subtle put-down. Coffee meant Boo wanted to treat her as an adult.

  Torian followed her into the kitchen, but Boo said, “I’m just going to put things on a tray—we can sit upstairs if you like. In the meantime, would you like to see Joy? Go on up if you want to. Her nap’s about over— you can wake her up.”

  “Okay.” It felt weird in Boo’s kitchen. And the truth was, she was dying to see Joy—she hadn’t realized how strong the need was till she actually saw the baby, sleeping as if nothing had happened.

  “Joy? Hey, Joy girl, wake up.” Torian used to sing “Summertime” to her, with its references to enviable parents; the words flitted through her neurons, and she found that she could bear them. She changed Joy’s diaper, just as she used to do, and brought her in to Boo, now in the library beyond the bedroom.

  Boo said, “I wanted to apologize to you,” and Torian felt her cheeks turn red.

  She stammered. “I … uh …” Surely she was the one who should apologize. That is, if they were going to have the bad taste to talk about Noel.

  Boo put up a hand, stopping traffic: “I didn’t see what was happening. Adults are supposed to protect children. I didn’t do a very good job of protecting you.”

  “But… uh …”

  “Yes. Noel was my husband. But what he did was pretty bad to both of us, don’t you agree?”’

  “I’m not sure I… no. I don’t see how.”

  “You agree he was bad to me?”

  Torian nodded.

  “Okay, that leaves you. Look. He had some need for you, so he took you. What do you think would have happened eventually?”

  He would have dumped you and married me. She couldn’t say that, of course.

  “Suppose he dumped me and married you—he still couldn’t do that for years. You’re fifteen, Torian. You’re a sophomore in high school. Do you really want to be married?”

  In fact, before she met Noel she had no desire at all to be married. She wanted to sail the seven seas, go to college, get a job—be somebody who’d made it on her own. Somebody far away from Lise.

  Marriage was the last thing on her mind.

  “I just thought… I thought… it was the only way to be with him.”

  “Look, you don’t really get along with your mom, do you?”

  That made her a little mad. “How’d you know that?”

  “Ohhhh …” She drew it out. “I know Lise.”

  That was interesting. Did other people see what Torian saw?

  “Also, I’ve been a kid. I know what it’s like to want to get away from something. Maybe that’s more what you really wanted. And Noel wanted to help you. I feel sure he did.”

  “Yes! He did.”

  “Listen, it’s none of my business …” She paused, holding her breath, evidently calculating something. “Well, no, I think it is. You’re a child who should have been protected in my house, and we’ve gone through a tragedy together. So I’m going out on a limb here. Do you know what Ala-Teen is?”

  Torian shook her head, too dazed to have any idea where this was going.

  “It’s a group for kids whose parents are alcoholics.”

  All Torian could think was, How on Earth does she know Lise drinks? She felt oddly defensive about it.

  Boo went on a bit, telling her about the organization, in which Torian hadn’t the least interest, and then she said, “Okay, that’s enough of me being mom.”

  Surprised to hear the word, Torian looked at her face and thought how gentle she looked, how much like a nice person. And for the first time came out of her daze long enough really to see her, to understand what it had probably cost her to ask Torian to visit, to talk to her about Noel.

  As she was walking home, she had an odd idea about Boo: I wish she were my mother.

  * * *

  Boo looked in the mirror and was almost disappointed to see her same old face. She had taken to doing this several times a day—examining her visage as if she were a doctor looking for disease.

  But it was not disease she expected to find. She felt like a snake leaving its skin in a scaly curl on the floor of the forest. She could not look the same. Surely no one who had been through what she had, was still going through it, could look the same.

  And yet she did.

  My hair didn’t even turn gray overnight.

  She was changing from minute to minute and not always, she thought, for the better. Things were battling within her, almost as if there were a good Boo and a bad Boo.

  The good one—oh, hell, don’t be so Christian! At least say the healthy one and the … what? … the sicko?— The healthy one could see it all so plain: white sand stretching for miles in every direction.

  The sicko was lost in the thicket, a pathetic, gnarled crone, all-over warts, unable to straighten her warped body.

  The healthy one had invited Torian over, had spoken to her in so civilized a fashion, indeed felt for her, loved her, wanted to give back what Noel had robbed her of. Oh so generous.

  Oh yes! This was the one who took care of Joy, ever so bravely, who went about her day picking up the pieces. She was the kind lady to whom the neighborhood cop had brought a little boy who needed shelter the night of the hurricane, the lady you could depend on, who could take care of a second kid with one hand and make her husband’s funeral arrangements with the other.

  (As it happened, she’d had to take care of burying the kid’s dad as well.)

  This one could cope like crazy, might even give therapists a good name if anyone was watching. God, she was adult!

  She missed Noel. She lay awake at night, missing him, crying over him, yet so furious she didn’t know why the sheets didn’t catch fire.

  How could a grown man be such an idiot? Not to get himself killed, anyone could have done that, Skip had explained that—this guy Jacomine was like those traffic demons who’d shoot you if you got in their face while they were trying to get your parking spot.

  Getting killed wasn’t Noel’s fault—even Sicko Boo didn’t think that. But Torian! Where did a grown man, the father of a baby who could barely walk, get off seducing a fifteen-year-old girl?

  Noel, why in the hell don’t you grow up? she wanted to holle
r, and it saddened her all the more that now he wasn’t going to get the chance.

  Okay, okay, the healthy one knew that he was never going to anyway, and that she had a part in that—she didn’t want to let him grow up, she knew that; she could see that.

  Oh, yes, yes, yes. She could see it all so plain, she was so very rational.

  And if anyone ever found out how attached she was to little Billy Aaron, they’d take him away from her.

  As it turned out, he had no relatives. None. Not one. Or at least no one close enough to give a rat’s ass. He’d been born to a couple of junkies, one of whom had waited just a little too long to straighten out, and one of whom never had. Each of them had one living parent, neither of whom had the money or inclination to take on a child, and there were no kindly uncles or aunts in either family.

  Boo wanted to adopt him, and that would be a good thing, a very good thing, if she could manage to get the sicko under control.

  When she saw him in the rain that night, his little white face so tragic, his tiny shoulders trying so hard to straighten up, despite what he’d been through, she’d felt everything fall away except a need to take care of him.

  Everything. Even her love for Joy.

  She wanted to hold him until they melted together.

  That was the sicko in action—she had to help out, she had to fix, she had to solve and straighten, she had to be Big Mama.

  It was the thing that had drawn Noel to her, and the thing that had driven him away. If he had gone because he’d outgrown her, that would have been a different matter. Instead, he was still the child she’d made him— or helped to make him—even she knew she didn’t do it all herself. And he’d found himself a playmate. She could not forgive herself, or Noel. It pissed her off that he was dead, so she couldn’t at least have at him with a baseball bat.

  But the thing was, the whole thing, was not to do it to Billy—fix him when he didn’t need it; rip him up and put him together again. This kid was so lovable. He wanted love so bad he had put his arms around her that night— that very first night, when his dad had just been killed and she was a stranger.

  Talk about responsive. He needed a mom so bad he practically trailed her like a puppy.

  And she needed him just as badly.

  Joy was healthy. Boo was doing a good job with her, raising her right. She was in great shape, and couldn’t answer any of the sicko’s needs right now. This kid Billy needed fixing.

  The part of her that could see things so plainly, laid out bald on that great desert of white sand, was trying hard to hold the other one down, to protect Billy from strangling in a barrel of honey, but the fight exhausted her.

  She wanted to look in the mirror and see naked baby skin, shining soft, the new Boo out from under the dry curl on the forest floor.

  Every day she was disappointed.

  She wanted to rip out the mirror and throw it on the flagstones of the courtyard. But that would be seven years’ bad luck, and she couldn’t afford it.

  Chapter Thirty

  CAPPELLO CALLED. “So how’re you feeling?”

  “Fine.” Skip answered automatically before she realized it wasn’t a rhetorical question. “Wait a minute, let me revise that. Not bad. For me, not bad.”

  “Recovering?”

  “It’s a damn good thing that man didn’t die, or I’d probably be in the bathtub with a razor.”

  “The man you shot? No, you wouldn’t, you’d just be on Prozac like everyone else.”

  Skip sighed. “I wonder if I could get Sheila on it.”

  “She’s not doing too well?”

  “Actually, she’s doing fine in most ways—she almost got raped, did get kidnapped, then almost got murdered. She seems perfectly able to cope with that, but her best friend’s moving away. You’d think it was the last act of Hamlet.”

  “Ah, she’s a kid. Say, how’s Faylice?” Cappello had gotten to know the girl in the aftermath of Lockport.

  “She’s fine. She came to dinner last night, along with Torian. Lots of tears—everyone saying good-bye to the California Kid.”

  “Where’s she living?”

  “Well, now, that one had a happy ending. She has this nice aunt who finally realized the kid can’t make it with her drugged-out mom. Faylice is with her now, and the aunt’s trying to get custody.”

  “I like that kid.” Cappello had kids of her own, but she didn’t believe in getting too sentimental about them.

  She switched to professional mode. “Back to your mental health.”

  “Well, I now get out of bed on weekends and hardly ever dream about Shavonne—or even think about her. Although, ouch; I wish I hadn’t said her name. Yeah, I’m better. Some therapy, huh? Head-to-head with a lunatic. Cops are not normal people.”

  “Listen, Joe asked me to call you. He said to get you back in here before you blow up the state or something.”

  “He did? He wants me to come back?”

  “Christ, even the chief wants you to come back. You’re kind of a folk hero right now.” Skip could almost see her grinning.

  “Now I get it. He wants me back in the office so he can take me down a peg or two.”

  “You got it.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  She could hear the sergeant’s sharp inhalation.

  “Oh, Sylvia, you know I’m coming back. I just don’t know if I’m ready yet.”

  “Hey, don’t be ridiculous. You’re out there doing police work without a badge. You’re just going to keep on embarrassing us.”

  “I’ll have my people call your people.”

  She hung up and padded barefoot into the kitchen for a Diet Coke. The nice tiles Jimmy Dee had installed back when he occupied the apartment were cool to her feet. The white of the cabinets against the green of her hanging plants was pleasing to her eye. The Diet Coke could have been champagne.

  Her mood had nothing to do with the phone call—she was simply pervaded by a sense of well-being, an appreciation of this moment in this day.

  But because of the call, she noticed the moment. I’m alive, she thought. I’m snapping back.

  The thought saddened her a little, and that told her she’d grown used to her melancholy—even, possibly, come to enjoy it in some way.

  She had a new thing these days to brood over— Jacomine’s disappearance. After what happened in Lockport, she wanted him all the more. She wanted him in a cell, and she wanted to cuff him herself, to feel those metal circles closing around his wrists. Failing that, she could at least go look at him in jail.

  She had tracked down the murder charge against him, but big deal—the point of that was to ruin his campaign. It was laughable now: I have a thousand bigger fish to fry.

  Her scalp prickled as she remembered where she’d heard the phrase. Shit! He said it himself! He’s in my brain.

  Cindy Lou had suggested, in her shrinky way, that maybe being vindictive wasn’t the healthiest thing in the world. But her obsession wasn’t that.

  It was fear. Skip simply didn’t believe she could ever feel safe again until Jacomine was behind bars. What she had seen, the machinery he could put in motion, the vast energy he was willing to exert on anything in his way, or anything that might conceivably get in his way, was bewildering at first. Bewildering before you even noticed it was frightening—because no sane person would do it, because it really was what it seemed.

  Pure evil.

  The devil in human form.

  The bogeyman come to life.

  You didn’t see something like that every day.

  * * *

  After she came back from Lockport, the only people she had wanted to see were Steve and Sheila, because they’d been through it with her, and Jane Storey, because she knew. She understood. Skip could maunder on and on about Jacomine, and Jane would listen attentively, would swear she needed it as much as Skip did, to confirm her own experience.

  When she was able to look past the bewilderment, fear grabbed her with a
thousand tiny suction cups, like the things on the wrong side of an octopus. Cindy Lou was damned right vindictiveness wasn’t healthy, and who did Skip know who wasn’t the poster boy for mental stability? Jacomine was perfectly capable of marshaling his resources against her and hers under any rationale his twisted mind could invent.

  He might decide she was still dangerous to him— and if she could in any way arrange it, she most assuredly was.

  Or he might simply decide he wanted revenge.

  And he knew exactly how to get her: Get Sheila, get Kenny. Get Steve or Jimmy Dee.

  How in hell could she protect them?

  “You can’t,” said Boo, who agreed to take her on again, at least for a few sessions, after the night of the hurricane. “You have to live life, Skip. You can take precautions—burglar alarms, things like that, but unless he’s actively threatening their lives, you have to let it go. Especially with the kids—you want them to grow up as paranoid as he is?”

  “I just want them to grow up.”

  Her hair stood up when she thought of what Sheila had told her. How, when Jacomine had come for her, he had ranted, “Do you know who you’re talking to? I am your Daddy! I am your father on this Earth!”

  The man thought he was God, and that made him as scary as the devil.

  But she saw the sense of what Boo said. With the resilience of youth, and certainly its callousness, its surpassing capacity for denial, Sheila, rather than brood on her various fortuitous escapes, was reveling in her current notoriety.

  Kenny was pissed because he’d missed all the fun.

  Jimmy Dee was threatening playfully to go back to pot-smoking (something he’d given up when he got the kids) on grounds his nerves needed calming.

  Steve wanted to know when he could partner up with her again.

  Nobody wanted Skip on their back about security. And there wasn’t really very much she could do anyway. Except one thing, and she did it: She took a private vow that she’d never let down her guard, never forget Jacomine and what he was capable of—that somehow or other she’d get him before he got her and hers.