Errant Angel

by Justine Davis

  It was these memories that had driven him to break his vow of isolation, that vow she still didn’t understand. True, that kind of childhood did little to build trust in others, but there was something much more than a lonely, harsh childhood that had brought Dalton here, like a wounded wolf to its lair, to hole up and either heal or die. Something dreadful, and it was killing him, slowly draining away every bit of his desire to live.

  “I told Ms. Law you were a race car driver,” Jimmy was saying enthusiastically.

  It hit her so suddenly, so fiercely, that for a moment she thought she’d somehow touched him—an image, brilliantly clear, deafeningly loud, astonishingly tactile. She felt cramped in the tiny space, the smell of hot rubber made her nose wrinkle, the roar made her cringe, the sudden heat made perspiration break out on her forehead, and the feel of a jumping, nonresponsive steering wheel in her hands made her fingers curl tightly in desperation.

  She felt a slight thump, then a solid, bone-shaking blow. The wheel jerked uselessly beneath her hands, out of control. The horrendous squeal of straining tires, the rending of carbon fiber and the clank of metal giving way echoed in her ears. Her body tensed, waiting for the crash she knew was coming.

  The image vanished.

  She sat there, shaken. Her heart was pounding, her breath coming in little gasps. If it had gone on another instant, she didn’t know what would have happened. She’d never felt anything like it. Never, even in direct contact with a person, felt anything so vividly.

  “I wish you’d tell me about it. I mean, racing formula cars. Wow!”

  Jimmy’s voice was youthful, excited and so normal that she clung to the sound of it for a moment, trying to get her bearings. Carbon fiber, she thought inanely. Was that what race cars were built of these days? She didn’t know. But she’d known in that vision. And suddenly she had another image of that crash, minus the vivid reality this time, an image that ran, rewound and repeated, time after time after time, like a film clip caught in an endless loop....

  “That’s ancient history,” Dalton said, the chill in his voice snapping her back to her surroundings in a way Jimmy’s hadn’t quite been able to.

  “But—”

  “I don’t talk about it.” Dalton stood, cutting him off sharply. “Ever.”

  Jimmy stared up at his idol, trying to mask the hurt. Evangeline felt trapped, caught between the boy’s stunned pain and Dalton’s once again impenetrable barriers. She watched as he strode away, pausing only at the cash register to pay his bill before he walked out into the night.

  “I didn’t mean to make him mad,” Jimmy said, his voice wavering.

  Evangeline dragged her attention back to the matter at hand. “You didn’t, Jimmy.”

  “But I know he doesn’t like to talk about that, and I asked him anyway—”

  The boy was so upset she knew this called for stronger measures. She reached out and grasped Jimmy’s hands; he was so disturbed he didn’t pull away.

  “I promise you, Jimmy,” she intoned steadily, making him meet her eyes, “you have nothing to do with why he’s angry. Dalton is carrying around a lot of pain, a lot of grief, and it makes him like a wounded animal. If you probe the wound, he lashes out. It’s not your fault.”

  She sent him all she could of reassurance, and gradually a calmer look came over his face. She let go of his hands.

  “Okay?” she asked.

  He nodded slowly, looking a little puzzled. “How do you know so much about him?”

  She shrugged. “I’ve seen people like him before, who keep their pain locked up inside. They can’t talk about it, to anyone.”

  Jimmy considered this. “You think...why he’s hurting, like you said, is something to do with his racing? That crash, maybe?”

  “It does all seem to be tied up together, but I don’t know, Jimmy. I don’t know what happened back then.”

  “A guy died.”

  Evangeline blinked. “What?”

  “In that crash. A guy died. Some older guy. He was on the same racing team as Dalton, or owned the team, or something like that. I asked Mr. Kirkland about it, but he’s not much of a racing fan, so that’s all he knew.”

  Was this the answer to Dalton’s pain? She pondered that question as she and Jimmy walked up to the cash register so she could pay the bill, and felt a twinge of pain herself when she found Dalton had already paid it.

  “You think maybe that’s his way of saying he’s not really mad? At me, I mean?”

  “Probably, Jimmy. It’s not easy for him to say it. He’s so closed off.”

  Jimmy seemed to be considering that thoughtfully as they walked back to the school to pick up his bike, then walked home. He didn’t say much, but Evangeline was encouraged. He was thinking deeply and it was hard to stay angry when you were thinking.

  At the Kirkland’s house, she introduced herself to Mr. Kirkland, a studious, rather bewildered-looking man who was, she sensed, having a difficult time relating to the troubled boy who had come to live with them.

  He had apparently gotten a phone call from his wife that Jimmy was in the café and relatively safe for the moment, at least, and he gave her a grateful look as Jimmy said goodbye and ran upstairs. The boy spared barely a nod for his foster father, and Evangeline sensed that he saw the man as vaguely nice but pretty much ineffectual. Which was, she realized as she spoke to the man, just about how Bob Kirkland saw himself when it came to dealing with Jimmy. But she also sensed a core of stiff determination, and thought that one day Jimmy might be surprised at the strength of this man. She sent Mr. Kirkland what reassurance she could, and he smiled at her as she left.

  She went across the street and spent a few moments chatting with Mrs. Webster, complimenting her on her lovely crochet work and the old but obviously well-loved pieces that furnished the house, then she went up to her room.

  She sat in the comfortable chair, fingering the pendant around her neck idly, not opening the connection, just thinking. Thinking, as she had far too often of late, about Dalton.

  She could tell them, she supposed, that if she was going to help Jimmy she needed to know everything she could about the man he idolized. Or that if she was going to help Jimmy, she needed to know enough about Dalton to keep him from unintentionally interfering.

  But she knew that the moment she opened communications with them, they were going to know that the qualifier about helping Jimmy was only an excuse. A valid one, perhaps, but still an excuse; she wanted to know all she could about Dalton MacKay for reasons of her own, reasons she didn’t fully understand herself.

  So how was she going to find out? She’d relied on the bosses for all her information for so long that she was momentarily at a loss. Then she nearly laughed at herself. If he’d been as famous as Jimmy had implied, then he must have been big sports news. So, the first chance she had tomorrow, she would fall back on the classic human way of searching out answers.

  She would go to the library.

  * * *

  Evangeline closed the magazine, staring at but not really seeing the colorful but grim cover photograph. Tragedy At Indy, the banner across the photo read. Even the eventual winner of the race had lost out to the coverage of the death of one of racing’s most venerated icons. Veteran driver Mick Graham had been beloved by all, it seemed. But he’d been especially close to the young man he’d plucked out of his own support crew and turned into the hottest new, young driver on the circuit. Dalton MacKay was going straight to the top, everyone said. And it was thanks to the mentorship of Mick Graham. A mentorship, the magazine article had said, that had been personal as well as professional; the two had been like father and son.

  Idols usually have feet of clay.

  Did yours?

  No.

  The memory of that exchange, and of the harsh, broken sound of his voice when he’d answered, came back to her now with stunning clarity. She shivered, wondering how anyone survived that kind of pain.

  She carefully gave the magazine back to
the librarian, to be returned to the stacks—the small Three Oaks library hadn’t quite reached the age of microfilm yet. She wished it had; she could have done without the grim color photographs of the spectacular wreck that had wiped out half the field. It had been a fluke, the reporter had written. Dalton finding a hole and charging through at the same instant a tire had blown on the car on his outside, making it veer sharply. Dalton’s car had been sent careening out of control. He’d broadsided Mick, sending him into the wall.

  At the same time she was regretting the grim clarity of the magazine pictures of the wreck, another photographic image was seared into her mind; Dalton, lean and fit in his racing jumpsuit, hair tousled by the wind and a wide grin on his face as he stood with Mick beside Mick’s car during the qualifying runs. He had been, the caption had said, teasing his race partner, telling the older man he was going to blow his doors off and take the pole position.

  She didn’t know what had affected her more about that photograph; the exuberance soon to be felled by tragedy, the obvious affection between the two men, or simply that she had never imagined what a happy Dalton would look like. What she did know was that she had to get out of here, quickly. Her eyes were stinging, and no matter how impossible it was supposed to be, she felt like crying.

  She’d expected only to learn what had happened, but the story she’d read had told her much more. Not, as she had told Jimmy, by what it had said, but by what it had not. It had not said Dalton was to blame, in fact, had pointed out that he’d been as helpless as Mick once that tire had blown, and that the entire racing community knew there was nothing he could have done. But she knew now the source of that incredible guilt he carried; Dalton MacKay was a much sterner judge than the racing world.

  And she knew something else, as well, the identity of the woman he’d been trying to write to that first night, the woman who had caused the thoughts that had swamped him with such a fierce pain that Evangeline had been able to sense it from a block away.

  Mick Graham’s widow’s name was Linda.

  Five

  “I think they were stupid,” Jimmy repeated categorically. “The world’s not fair, never has been, and never will be.”

  Evangeline smothered a sigh. She knew where that answer had come from; she’d heard enough like it from Jimmy in the past week, ever since he’d started going to the garage again. He’d made this pronouncement during a class discussion on the Civil War, and at last she felt compelled to confront him about his attitude.

  “What,” she asked, now that they were alone in the classroom, “makes you say that?”

  “You gonna tell me it’s not true? That everything is fair?”

  “Of course not.” How could she, she thought wryly, when the world’s frequent lack of fairness and justice was her whole reason for being here? “But neither is everything unfair. No matter what Dalton says.”

  Jimmy looked at her suspiciously. “How do you know what he says? You haven’t been around.”

  “Maybe I’m wrong,” she said, dangling the bait. “What does he say?”

  The boy hesitated, then lifted a shoulder in a half shrug. “He says if the world was fair, some good people would still be alive.”

  And some who didn’t deserve to be wouldn’t.

  It came to her so strongly, so clearly, that she knew it had truly been the rest of Dalton’s thought, even if he had managed to not say it to Jimmy. She was getting things in the strangest ways on this job. But when she looked at the boy, she sensed he was thinking of something else. With only a little reach, she knew what it was.

  “You mean, like your parents?” she asked softly.

  Jimmy’s face went stubbornly rigid, a heart-wrenching imitation of Dalton’s when she had probed too close to the bone.

  “Don’t matter,” he said gruffly. “I can make it on my own. I don’t need anybody.”

  Just like Dalton doesn’t need anybody.

  This time the unspoken words came from Jimmy, but the sentiment was undoubtedly Dalton’s, and her heart ached for both of them. Ached so hard she had to press a hand to her chest in an effort to ease the pain.

  She was going to have to see about that adjustment. She couldn’t function like this. For the first time she truly began to see the wisdom of the bosses in making certain their people didn’t have to deal with this kind of thing. It was impossible. And exhausting. She didn’t remember ever living with this kind of tension before.

  “That’s a very sad and lonely way to live, Jimmy.”

  He wouldn’t look at her. “Dalton’s doing okay.”

  “Is he? Is he really?”

  His head came up then. “What do you care? You don’t even like him.”

  Taken aback, the only words Evangeline could think of were the ones she’d used a few moments before. “What makes you say that?”

  “He told me so.”

  She took a deep breath. “Dalton told you I didn’t like him?”

  “Not exactly. But he said you had a fight.”

  She reached out with her senses, hoping Dalton hadn’t told him what the fight was about. She read nothing of guilt in the boy, as she expected she might if he’d known they’d in essence been fighting over him, and let out a breath of relief.

  “We...sort of argued.”

  “He called it a fight,” Jimmy insisted. “He said that you didn’t like him much, or the way he had to live.”

  “Had to live? Is that what he said?”

  Jimmy nodded. “He said you were—”

  “Were what?” she prompted when the boy stopped, flushing.

  “Nothin’.”

  “Jimmy—”

  “I gotta go. We’re going to Mr. Kirkland’s mother’s tonight.”

  She could hardly keep him from that, she realized, no matter how much she wanted to know what Dalton had said about her.

  “Oh. You’d better go, then.”

  He grimaced. “Don’t know why they make me go with them. I’m nothin’ to her, and she’s nothin’ to me.”

  “So she doesn’t like you?”

  His brows lowered slightly. “Why should she like me? I mean, she’s always nice and everything, but she kinda has to act that way, ‘cause I’m living with her son.”

  “So you think this lady goes to all the trouble of putting on an act, just for you?”

  He blinked, obviously never having thought of it in quite that way. “Well...”

  “Go ahead, Jimmy. I don’t want you to be late. But think about something for me, will you? You asked why she should like you. Maybe you should look at it this way—why shouldn’t she?”

  He gave her a considering look as he picked up his books. She thought she had succeeded in planting a small doubt among his assumptions; now she could only hope that it would take root.

  And she still didn’t know what Dalton had said. As she watched Jimmy hurry away, she almost regretted the restrictions on reading people’s thoughts, although she knew they were right, and necessary. Only in case of need, they said, and she knew they didn’t mean her need.

  Her need. God, she thought as she walked out to her car, she missed that cool, calm impartiality she used to have. She couldn’t take this much longer. Tonight she would have to contact them, to tell them she needed something done, fast, to get her back to normal. Her normal. Maybe tonight, while Jimmy was gone, they could get it done quickly, so she wouldn’t lose any time with him.

  She was making progress, she could feel it. But every time she got a step ahead with the boy, Dalton MacKay dragged him back. She was sure he didn’t mean to, but his outlook was rubbing off on the boy. And that outlook was, no matter how understandable, too sour even for someone Dalton’s age, let alone Jimmy’s.

  She’d been driving for a couple of minutes before she realized where she was headed. She should turn around, she told herself, turn around and go home, contact the bosses, and have them fix whatever it was they had to fix. But she couldn’t seem to do it, and when she reached the garage sh
e pulled into the driveway almost against her will.

  She wondered ironically if this was how people felt when she exerted her power of will over them to get them to do what she needed them to do at the moment. With a sigh—Lord, she’d been doing a lot of that lately—she parked the Chevy and got out.

  * * *

  Dalton groaned the moment he heard the Chevy pull in. He didn’t need this now. He hated doing inventory, anyway—the numbers and paperwork of this business were the worst part—the last thing he needed was to have to cope with Ms. Evangeline Law chewing him out again on top of it. The woman did crazy things to his equilibrium.

  I thought you were a bigger man than you are.

  Her words, spoken so sadly, had echoed in his mind for hours. And no matter how many times he’d told himself it didn’t matter what she thought, that it didn’t matter what anyone thought since he already knew the truth about himself, he hadn’t been able to forget them.

  And who knew what she wanted to yell at him about this time. He’d made sure Jimmy didn’t cut classes to come here, and tried to nag the kid into doing his homework while he was here, what the hell else could he do?

  He rechecked the card in front of the shelf of oil filters, and made an entry on the reorder form on his clipboard. He went on to the stacks of air filters and made another entry. And tried to ignore those so distinctly feminine footsteps that again were echoing hollowly in the garage as she walked toward him.

  She came to a halt. He didn’t look at her, just moved to the next stack of boxes.

  “I owe you an apology.”

  He nearly dropped the clipboard as his head snapped around toward her; that was the last thing he’d expected her to say. “What?”