“I count on it.” Jess glanced at the wall clock. “We both better get back.”
“Right. And even if it might not be all over yet, I think it was good you explained things to security before Gayle did. I’m proud of you.”
Jess shrugged. “I get it that you don’t think she’s anything but honest and fair. But . . .”
“But what?”
“If anyone asked me, I’d say it was nothing but a setup: Gayle hauling me away from my dinner and sending me into that exam room. I’d say she won’t let up till she sees me fired. Those drugs probably weren’t even in that bag of stuff. Maybe the grandson swiped them from her medicine cabinet. Look at that cook’s son—it happens. Or—” Jess cocked a brow—“maybe it’s even worse than that.”
“What do you mean?”
“Between you and me, I think someone ought to make sure Gayle gets a specimen cup.”
“NOT TOO MUCH DAMAGE, considering how far it fell.” Eli stood in the Barclays’ doorway, hefting the weather vane in his hands. “The screws are missing. Rusted, from the look of these holes. And one wing’s bent. Maybe the snout, too.” He looked from the metal pig to Lauren and shook his head. “I’m trying to avoid the symbolism here. Me at your door. Actually invited.”
“Well . . .” Lauren shrugged, and her beautiful lips hinted at a smile. “You said you were going to be in the neighborhood.”
“Emma wanted her Barbies at the sleepover,” he confided, noticing that Lauren had pulled her long hair up into a casual knot with several pieces escaping to brush the skin left bare by her tank top. The strands were wavy. More coppery than gold in this light . . .
Eli was staring; he knew that. Holding a stupid flying-pig weather vane and staring like a complete fool. It occurred to him that maybe this sudden, embarrassing fascination with feminine detail was the result of carting dolls around for too many years. Dealing with hair clips, lacy socks, and Little Mermaid pillowcases. Maybe he should spend a few more hours at the gym. Up the weight on his bench press. And take that four-day marlin fishing trip with the PAs from Memorial Hospital.
“The Donnellys live a few blocks north,” he continued to explain after clearing his throat. “On Tradewinds.”
“I remember that from our phone conversation. Please. Come in.” Lauren stepped away from the doorway, gave the hem of her running shorts a discreet tug as she walked. “You can put Wilbur over there on the hall tree.” She smiled at the look on his face. “From Charlotte’s Web. Mom bought that weather vane when I was in grade school. And this isn’t the first time our ‘radiant’ pig has taken a dive from the family roof.”
Eli couldn’t stop the memory of Marsha Grafton, of what she’d confided about her daughter and Jessica. Lauren would want to know that. And he’d tell her. Eventually. Right now he didn’t want to talk about the hospital. Didn’t want to think about pain, tragedy, or family problems. Lauren’s or his, especially. Eli only wanted this. The two of them together.
“Okay, then.” He settled the weather vane on the oak hall tree’s bench top, next to a stack of mail and an umbrella stand. Then he glanced around the cozy, wallpapered entry. Pink had to be Pamela Barclay’s favorite color. “Where’s your dog . . . Hannah?”
“Why?” Lauren asked, a Nike running shoe dangling from her hand. She peered at him from the adjacent kitchen. “You worried?”
“Hardly.”
“She’s safely tucked away in my parents’ bedroom. With her Vanilla Woofer dog treats and a pile of toys. Including what’s left of my new Journal of Emergency Nursing. We can usually tempt her to trade for something else, but . . .” Lauren wobbled toward him, attempting to wiggle her foot down into the shoe. “Orthotic—necessary evil. Anyway, Hannah Leigh’s settled for a while. We’re doing better, actually. I think this new training is working.”
Eli stopped himself from asking who was training whom. He wasn’t stepping into that one. There had been more than enough conflict for one day. Right now he was looking for something much, much different. Spending quality time with an intelligent and caring woman whose coppery hair was going rebel wild in the humidity, who somehow smelled of sun-warmed berries and—
“Ready?” Lauren asked, reaching for her keys. “Mom’s weather feed says there’s only a short window before the rain starts up again. It’s going to be dark before too long.” She cocked her head. “You came here to go for a run, remember?”
“Right.”
“I’ll drive us to the track.” Lauren nudged Eli with her key. “Top down on the Beetle. I don’t care if it’s insanely windy. I need to shake this day off. It’s going to take wind in my hair and then maybe thirty minutes of running.” Her eyes narrowed. “Lace up your shoes, Landry. I’m warning you: I’m fast. Fletcher could never beat me to the ice cream truck. And the day I let some pirate catch me will be—”
“When pigs fly?”
- + -
Fletcher hated the sadness in Jessica’s eyes and wished he hadn’t come empty-handed tonight. Empty was the opposite of what he felt when he was with her. Even when she didn’t seem to notice he was here.
“I asked to speak with the manager at Sugarbaby’s,” he explained, thinking that sitting at this visitors’ table outside the Houston Grace ER was the closest they’d ever come to a date. He shifted his weight on the cement bench, his leather gun belt squeaking. “I told him that discontinuing the Dippity Doo Dah was a big mistake. He asked me if it was a crime; he had me there. I couldn’t exactly threaten to shoot him if he wouldn’t bake my . . . neighbor her favorite cupcake.”
“It’s okay.” Jessica’s thin shoulders rose and fell with a sigh. “I should cut back on desserts, anyway. You wouldn’t like me fat.”
I would love you in any shape . . . in any lifetime.
She propped her elbows on the table, sank her fingers into her hair. Her expression was impossible to read. “Don’t tell anyone. I’m making an escape plan.”
“Escape from where?”
“Work . . . judgment . . . my whole life as I know it.”
His gut tensed. “Jessica, hey . . .”
“Don’t panic, pal. I don’t need a rescue team—or your holy shrink. I just need someone to ring the bell for recess. Remember? When we’d watch that big clock, hold our breaths. Listen forever for the last stinkin’ tick before brrrrrrrring—recess!”
“You’re planning an escape to play hopscotch?”
“Fletcher, Fletcher . . .” Jessica reached across the table, patted his hand. “Why did you have to go and grow up on me? You used to be a lot more fun. Not hopscotch, silly. More like sandbox.” Her eyes lit. “Galveston beach. Midnight. I’ll be there. Just forty-one miles south to a perfect escape.” She slid her hand away. “You should try it sometime. It would do you a world of good, serious guy.”
She was right; he wasn’t that boy on her roof anymore. He’d traded an astronaut suit for a gun and a badge. Grown up. Found soul-deep priorities that put fun farther down on the list. But some things would never change. “You’re driving to the coast after your shift’s over?”
“Not even stopping at the homestead.” Her nose wrinkled. “Tupperware bowls are a major part of this escape.”
“Tupperware?”
“Doesn’t matter. If it rains, I want it falling on my face, my hair, every inch of me, directly from the clouds—” she raised her hands high—“while I’m running barefoot in the sand. And singing, maybe . . . like one of those sirens of the sea.”
Oh, man. Please don’t do that to me.
A single squawk from Fletcher’s radio—static, nothing serious—brought a cold shower of disturbing images: a woman stranded with a flat tire on an isolated stretch of road, alone on a darkened beach with men drifting down from the boardwalk bars . . .
“I see it in your eyes.” Jessica’s giddy expression was gone. “You’re going to say something about my overprotective sister having a serious hissy fit . . . and all the annoying reports of Glorietta wiping us all off th
e face of the earth. You’re going to—”
“Pick you up right here.” Fletcher gave the tabletop a rap with his knuckles. “At 11:30 sharp. I’ll bring the coffee.”
- + -
“A cab?” Leo let the kitchen curtain drop and stared as Gayle closed the door behind her. “You came home in a cab? Where’s the Camry?”
“Towed.” She was too exhausted to lie. “I was about to pull out of my parking space, but I had to run back inside to use the bathroom.” Gayle grimaced as her intestines gurgled again. She might have to make a dash for the powder room any minute. “I got back to the car and it was hoisted up like one of those ugly red groupers you and Wally used to catch out in the Gulf. Remember? You’d—”
“Quit!” Leo lumbered forward. “You’re not making sense—towed? The Camry died on you? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Died?” Her laugh was as uncontrollable as her incessant heaving in that cab. She was certain the driver had cursed her in a foreign language. “That’s a good one. I should have thought of that when everyone in the entire hospital asked me what was going on.” She hugged her body against a vicious chill. “It was repossessed, Leo. Because we’ve missed two payments.”
His jaw went rigid. “You told me you made those payments.”
“Sure . . .” Tears rose without warning. “I told you a lot of things. I said what you needed to hear. Because you were hurting, worried, discouraged. Because I love you, Leo. . . . And then I kept on doing it because I was afraid that—” She watched as his fist began to grind into his palm. “I wish everything I told you was true, but . . .” She was stepping into the eye of a storm; she knew it. “We’re behind on everything except the rent—and the cable bill. We can’t have you miss a boxing match. So we are in a hell-deep hole because you haven’t worked in thirteen months. The medical bills won’t go away. Even with overtime that’s costing me my sanity, I can’t do it.” She took a step toward him, her temples beginning to pound. “Do you hear me? I can’t do this any—”
His fingers closed around her wrist like a vise.
“Leo, stop.” Gayle wriggled in his grasp, nausea swirling. His hand tightened until she felt a grating pop. Her knees weakened. “You’re . . . breaking it.”
She struggled to free herself. He twisted her wrist again, and in desperation she raised her knee toward his groin. In an instant, his beefy hands were around her throat, cutting off her air. “Leo . . . no . . .”
“You—” His obscenity was delivered in a spray of spittle. “Try that again and you’ll be sorry.”
“I’m sick,” Gayle whimpered, her voice raspy as she struggled for air. “Please. Let me go to the bathroom. Just let me go . . .”
He loosened his grip a fraction. “You smell sick. Go ahead, get yourself cleaned up. But first, tell me something. The truth this time.” His thumb threatened her airway again. “Those pills you got for my back pain. I looked at the labels—it’s not my name on those bottles. What did you do, Gayle?”
“I . . .” She withered against the pressure of her husband’s stranglehold—and a sickening rush of guilt. “Okay, please . . . let me get a breath. Let me breathe, and I’ll tell you what I did.”
“YOU SURPRISED ME.” Lauren slid the elastic hair band over her wrist, gave her head a shake. There was no point wrestling her stubborn mane in this humid breeze. She smiled at Eli, sitting beside her on the bench she’d claimed as her own way back in grammar school. “You kept up with me. Almost passed me a couple of times the first few laps of the track.”
“Almost died . . . trying.” Eli laughed, letting his head fall back as he drew in a deep breath of air fragrant with camphor leaves. His hair clung to his damp forehead, the mild sweat giving him a healthy and very appealing glow in the fading light. Below the beard-stubbled angle of his jaw, his throat quivered with the still-rapid beat of his pulse.
“I was born competitive.” He turned and smiled, a flash of white in the deepening dusk. “Older brother and all.”
“Drew’s five years older?”
“Almost six. Believe me, he reminded me of that. Not in a ‘you’re a pest’ kind of way; more like he was letting me know he was there to look after me. Older and wiser, and I should listen up.”
Lauren nodded, wondering if Jess ever saw it that way. More likely she saw Lauren as the pest.
“He was good at everything,” Eli continued, glancing toward the sound of childish laughter from the school playground. “Soccer, basketball, football, swimming. Scouts. And school—put me to shame there. Dad was sure he’d be adding his firstborn’s name to the list of partners on the Landry Law letterhead.” He shook his head. “I think I was the only person who knew what Drew really wanted to do with his life.”
“What?” Lauren asked, wondering immediately if she should have. “What did he want?”
The metallic hum of summer cicadas filled a few beats of silence.
“To go to seminary.” Eli chuckled. “Seriously, my brother the preacher. When I was tying Mom’s dish towels around my neck for Superman capes, Drew was all fired up about Jesus, planning foreign missions in a journal he kept in the box with his baseball mitt. He’d show me photos of starving kids, tell me how he was going to go to all those places someday. Save their souls. Feed their bodies. Change lives—change the world.”
Lauren stared at Eli, staggered by his brother’s dream. “That’s why his praise music’s so important to him. All these years.”
“No. Only since last year. Emma asked me to load her favorites onto his iPod last Christmas when he was so sick. I should have thought of it myself a long time ago. I’m ashamed that I didn’t.”
“I’m glad he has it now.” The streetlights blinked on through the line of camphor trees. “That look on his face . . . Drew’s faith is still there, Eli.”
He held her gaze. “How can we know that—any of that?”
Lauren reminded herself of what she’d said countless times. That any serious relationship between herself and a man would have to have God at its center. But Eli—
“Excuse me,” he told her, glancing at his buzzing cell phone. Worry etched his features. “I should grab this. It’s Mimaw’s.”
- + -
“I appreciate it, Vee.” Eli glanced, phone to his ear, to where Lauren waited on the bench a few yards away. She’d pulled something from her pocket—lipstick, maybe. “I wasn’t trying to trade on our friendship or get you in any kind of trouble.”
“No worries,” Vee reassured with that faint lisp. “I didn’t think you were. But you can understand our situation here. We’re bound by the law.”
Bound. Eli’s jaw tensed, her choice of words bringing an image of his brother tied to that ICU bed. Panicked, helpless. “I’ll talk to my parents, smooth things over. How’s the Champ doing tonight?”
“Coughing. But Florine said his chest sounds okay. Ate most of his dinner, and—” there was a warm chuckle—“he wanted his music played out loud so we can all hear. He was very insistent about that. Your brother’s quite the evangelist.”
“Maybe so.” Eli thanked her again, disconnected, and walked back to Lauren. Lamplight, filtering through the tree branches, lit her face enough that he could read her concern even before she spoke.
“Is he all right?”
“Still coughing, but not worse.” Eli sat down beside her, deciding to risk telling her the real problem. He wished he could keep his family battles out of their relationship, but that was as easy as putting a gag order on those cicadas. “My parents were visiting. When Dad heard Drew had an asthma flare-up this morning, he had a fit that I didn’t think it was necessary to have his physician come for an assessment.” He shook his head. “He read Florine the riot act for calling me and insisted the pulmonologist should have been the one to come. Apparently the words real doctor were mentioned several times. With malice.”
“Ouch. I’m sorry, Eli.”
“I’m used to it,” he told her, wondering if alcohol had provi
ded fuel for his father’s tirade. He hoped his mother had been driving. He had to approach her again about that situation. “I don’t really remember a time when my father approved of anything I did. Maybe before Drew’s accident. I can’t say for sure.”
“That accident . . .” Lauren’s voice was soft. “I know it involved a boat. And Drew was struck by it. But I never heard exactly how it happened.”
Because Eli didn’t talk about it. He took a slow breath.
“Dad bought this fishing boat. Small—fourteen-foot—aluminum. For the ‘Landry men,’ he said. He told us he was going to make us fishermen.” Eli tried to smile. “Drew wanted to call it Fishers of Men. Dad stenciled the boat with Legal Eagles. We took it out on the Gulf for a couple of years. Lots of times. The three of us. Mom doesn’t like water. She always made us count life jackets while she watched.”
Lauren’s blue eyes were luminous in the pale lamplight.
“She didn’t want us to go out that day. The weather was changing . . .” Eli hesitated, remembering. He’d never really told the whole story to anyone. “It was one of the only times I remember her arguing with him. But she lost. We counted the life jackets and left her standing in the driveway.”
“Was it stormy?”
“Not at first.” Eli inhaled, swearing he smelled brine. “And we caught fish. Great catches, more than we ever had. None of us wanted to quit. Even when the water got choppy and the wind started up. Even when the other boats headed back to shore. I remember Dad said something about Landry men being tougher than that.”
Lauren moved closer, slipped her hand into his.
“I was sitting up in the bow. We’d turned into the wind and I put out my arms like I was flying—like I was Superman. Clowning around like always.” Eli swallowed. “That’s what you do when you’re the younger brother to someone like Drew. We weren’t wearing our life jackets. We never did. The boat must have hit something . . .”
Lauren pressed her other hand to her throat.
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