Kim reflected on the shabbily dressed and slightly odorous man who had come into the office several times lately. Dr. Groene was doing his best to preserve the fellow’s few remaining teeth, but one of his molars was just begging to be pulled.
“It’s pretty obvious that Abe Fugal hasn’t ever been to a doctor—or a dentist, for that matter,” Kim agreed. At some point in life, the fellow had broken several fingers, and the bones had fused in such a way as to render his left hand almost useless. His eyesight was poor, and he blinked repeatedly as he asked about the sterilized tools spread out on the tray next to his chair. And as for his mouth … well, it was safe to say those teeth hadn’t seen a toothbrush in many a long year. “You know,” Kim continued, “even though we didn’t need to use gas today, I was concerned about him driving. Doesn’t he usually have a woman here with him?”
“Yes, June Bixby—long gray hair and brown eyes. She’s been here a few times. I was hoping to get a look at her teeth one of these days too.” Dr. Groene tugged off his white coat and dropped it into the laundry bin. “Well, anyway, I hope it hasn’t been too much for you this week.”
Though they worked closely together, Kim rarely spoke to the dentist at any length. She viewed her role as one of support and assistance. Occasionally he chose to consult with her about a perplexing situation, but usually he chatted with the patient and ignored Kim almost completely. She didn’t mind. Ben Groene had an excellent reputation in the area, and his office was filled with patients from the moment Kim arrived in the morning until she left each evening. He paid her well, provided excellent health and retirement benefits, and treated her with respect.
“The extra hours are fine,” she assured him. “I appreciate your willingness to let me take so much time off for Luke.”
“Not a problem,” he said. “Seems like one of my six is always into some kind of trouble—a broken arm, a fever, a loose tooth, a skinned knee. The older ones run my poor wife around the bend with their hormone surges. If they aren’t in love, they’re sobbing their eyes out in the bathroom. The dramatics would do Shakespeare proud.”
Kim laughed. “Lydia is almost eleven, and I’m starting to see some of that. She constantly challenges our rules.”
“Eleven’s about the right age for the rebellion to start. My wife taught me the secret to good discipline. If anyone knows how to manage kids, it’s my Mary. When they’re little, the occasional time-out or a single swat on the backside will do the trick. About the time the pimples start, be ready to ground them when they misbehave. No TV, movies, time with friends—that kind of thing. When they hit fifteen, you’ve really got the keys to good behavior.”
With a sly grin, he pulled a key ring from his pocket and jangled it to emphasize his point. “Threaten to take away the car keys, and they’ll do anything you want,” he declared. “You see these? They’re Jordan’s. He’s eighteen and thinks he rules the world. But Dad owns the car. And when Jordan misses his curfew by an hour, Dad takes the keys. You can bet that kid will come home on time from here on out.”
Recalling the night Lydia had screamed and Luke had knocked the spoon from his frantic sister’s hand, Kim wondered if Dr. Groene’s parenting technique was really that simple. And it didn’t take into account the fact that her own family now had another authority figure living with them.
What would make Grandma Finley a help rather than a hindrance?
“I guess Luke is getting along pretty well these days,” Dr. Groene commented as he took a bottle of cold water from the refrigerator and twisted the cap until the seal broke. “Good thing Derek’s mother was able to come down from St. Louis and help out for a while. It shouldn’t be long before your boy gets his routine figured out.”
“He’s managing, but … it’s hard to be away from him. Even when I’m deep in the middle of a procedure, I realize I’m worrying about Luke.”
Dr. Groene nodded. “Yes, I can imagine.” He eyed her as he took a sip from his water bottle. “I remember how my wife worried the first few months after I was diagnosed.”
“You? Are you … are you a diabetic?” Kim stammered.
He smiled. “You make it sound like you just found out I’m an alien. Diabetics are not as rare as you think. I was nineteen when my doctor diagnosed me with type 1. Mary and I had been married less than a month.”
“I never knew. All these years.”
“I don’t let the disease own me. I like to be the boss, you know.” He winked as he stepped toward the door. “Here’s my motto: If you’ve got to be a diabetic, be a good one. Be disciplined. Monitor yourself.
Get a buddy to keep an eye on you for signs of trouble. Mary knows that if I start acting odd, she needs to take charge right away. When my blood sugar gets low, I dislike being compliant, and sometimes I’m even a little combative. But years ago we made a pact, and I’ve learned to obey my wife. The kids have known about my diabetes all their lives, and we’re used to it. In fact, I don’t even bother to look for a private room to give myself insulin. We can be watching TV or fooling around in the backyard, and I’ll whip out the ol’ kit.”
Kim stood staring at him, stunned. Never once had Dr. Groene mentioned having diabetes. He acted so normal about it. Even casual. As if it weren’t really a factor in his life.
Heading out the back door toward his car, he spoke over his shoulder. “All I’m saying is, Luke will be fine. Don’t worry.”
The door closed behind him, and Kim walked to the front of the building to lock up. Was it really possible to be a diabetic and still have a full, happy life? Ben and Mary Groene had enjoyed a long marriage. They had six healthy children. They lived on the lakeshore in a large, beautiful home. Their oldest daughter attended Yale University.
As she settled into her car and drove toward Deepwater Cove, Kim reflected on the serenity with which Dr. Groene conducted his life. Everything went like clockwork at the office. She had always thought that was simply a reflection of his tranquil personality and the calm demeanor of the staff he had hired. But maybe he had taught himself to be orderly and careful so he could keep his blood sugar levels regulated. “If you’ve got to be a diabetic, be a good one,” he had told her. Ben Groene must be among the best.
As she pulled into the driveway of the Finley house, Kim realized that her employer had given her the advice she’d been looking for ever since the endocrinologist had uttered Luke’s frightening diagnosis.
Order, she thought. Serenity. Peace. Pondering how she could implement this atmosphere at home, Kim was stepping out of the car when the front door flew open. Lydia hurtled through it, with Derek in hot pursuit.
“No way!” Lydia screamed at him as she tore across the porch and into the yard. “I won’t! I will not take it off, and you can’t make me!”
“Get back here, Lydia!” Derek caught up to the girl in a matter of seconds. With one arm, he snagged her around the waist. His knee gently knocked her feet out from under her, and she slumped backward onto the grass.
“You can’t do this!” she shrieked as he stood above her, hands at his waist. “You’re not my real father! You have no power over me. Let me go, you jerk!”
“Lydia!” Kim cried out, rushing toward them. “Derek, what’s going on?”
“Get up, kid,” Derek barked in a tone Kim had never heard. His forehead furrowed, he glanced at his wife. Then he turned back to the skinny girl writhing on the lawn. “I said—get up! Now!”
“Ow! He hurt me!” Lydia hollered as she curled into a ball. “I’m calling the police! I’m calling the child-abuse hotline!”
“What on earth—?” Kim dropped her purse and fell to her knees. Memories of her first husband flooded Kim’s mind. She had been thrown across a room, knocked onto a couch, slapped on the cheek so hard her ears rang.
“Lydia, are you all right?” she asked, gathering her daughter in her arms. “Sweetie, what are you doing? What happened?”
“He did it!” Lydia spat. “He said I had to … to …”
Wearing his Water Patrol uniform, Derek stood over them. Kim was taken aback by the fury in his eyes. Her husband never got angry. Part of what had drawn her to the man was his composure, his detachment even in the midst of crisis. But now she feared he might whip out his baton or even his gun—as he had the other night when he’d thought there was an intruder in the living room.
“Take a look at your daughter,” Derek said. “Then ask her what happened.”
Kim’s focus shifted to Lydia. Dark smudges of mascara streaked toward her temples. Deep blue eye shadow stained her lids. A thick layer of foundation ended at her jawline, as though she were wearing a mask. Two spots of bright pink on her cheeks matched the glossy sheen on her pouting lips.
Stepping out of the painful memory of her own past, Kim was suddenly able to see her daughter’s face. Her fear turned to confusion. “Lydia, why are you wearing my makeup?”
“It’s not yours. It’s mine. I bought it with my allowance, and I have the right to wear it.”
“But you’re only ten years old, honey,” Kim said in dismay. “You don’t wear makeup.”
“I’m almost eleven, and I can wear it if I want to. I’m going to spend the night at Tiffany’s house. She gets to wear makeup. Her mom even helps her with it.”
“Well, I don’t care what Tiffany and her mother do together,” Kim said firmly. “You don’t have our permission.”
“I don’t need Derek’s permission,” Lydia sneered. “He’s not my dad.”
Kim fell silent for a moment as she tried to remember what Dr. Groene’s life had shown her: order, serenity, peace. She had been raised with so much discord and confusion that she had rarely known what was allowed or what wasn’t. Her mother had been sober only part of the time, and rules seemed to ebb and flow with the alcohol.
At a loss, Kim studied the comical looking child in the grass and then turned her attention to her husband. “Derek, what happened?”
“I’ll tell you what’s happening.” The voice came from Miranda Finley, who was crossing the lawn toward the others. She had on a pale pink knit top, matching linen shorts, and a pair of pink beaded sandals. “These children are a mess, Kim. All Luke wants to do the entire day is play games on his little machines. Lydia is either on the phone or the computer. When I try to get them up and outside, they argue with me. I tell them I’ll go with them down to the lake to swim, but they refuse. I offered to take them shopping at the outlet mall. Only Lydia agreed, so we had to leave Luke at home.”
“You left Luke by himself?” Kim cried.
“Derek was home,” Miranda pointed out.
“But you came here for Luke, not Lydia. He’s the one who needs to be watched.”
“Which is exactly what I was doing the whole time this little imp was upstairs getting carried away with her makeover.”
“You helped me buy the makeup, Grandma Finley,” Lydia retorted. “You even picked out the lip gloss.”
“You let her buy this junk?” Derek turned on his mother. “Lydia doesn’t have permission to wear makeup! She’s ten, for crying out loud.”
“Every girl should learn to use a touch of cosmetics,” Miranda shot back. “And who better to teach her than me? My mother took me for a professional consultation when I was ready to start doing my face. I don’t think Lydia is too young to practice.”
“She’s too young to go to her friend’s house looking like that,” Derek said. “Lydia is sweet and innocent. She’s pretty, like her mother, and I don’t want that to change.” His tone had softened as he spoke, but his face went grim again when he touched his gun belt. “I’ve gotta go. I’m about to be late to work.”
“But what about taking me to Tiffany’s house?” Lydia whined. “You promised, Derek! You told me you would drive me—”
“Grounded,” Kim said, cutting her off. Dr. Groene’s wise words formed in her mind as she stood and pulled Lydia up from the grass. Taking her daughter by the shoulders, Kim spoke firmly. “You are not going to Tiffany’s house this weekend, and you won’t go next weekend either. If you can follow the household rules until then, I’ll consider letting you invite her over here for the night. Now walk back inside and take that stuff off your face.”
“I’m sick of this stupid, ridiculous family!” Lydia shrieked as she marched across the yard. Fists clenched, she shook her head. “I wish I lived with my real father.”
“You do live with your real father!” Kim retorted loudly as she watched her daughter slam the door. Derek had already backed his truck out of the garage, and he drove off without even a glance at his wife. Turning to her mother-in-law, Kim eyed the blonde, spiky hair and the bright blue eyes rimmed in dark liner. Come to think of it, Miranda Finley wore far too much makeup for Kim’s taste.
Unable to think what to say to the woman, Kim picked up her purse. “I’d better help Lydia find the cold cream,” she murmured.
“I have an exfoliating cleanser that works so much better,” Miranda called after her. “Cold cream can really clog young pores!”
As Derek steered his boat toward the mile marker where he and another officer had agreed to meet that afternoon, the recent unusual drowning nagged him. But for some reason, Lydia’s unexpected outburst bothered him even more. The child had sassed her stepfather with more venom than most of the belligerent drunk boaters he’d ticketed. Worst of all, her rage seemed to come out of nowhere.
He had been crossing the living room to greet Kim before heading to work when he spotted Lydia on the stairs. At the sight of her heavily made-up face, he had stopped dead in his tracks. All he said was “Whoa,” and the kid lit into him. It was almost as if she knew he would forbid her to go out wearing makeup, so she had preplanned her temper tantrum.
But why had that one word triggered such a response? Why had Lydia kept mentioning her real father, when she and Luke always dreaded spending time with Joe? And how about the way Kim had rushed to Lydia’s side before even stopping to talk to him? That bugged him more than he cared to admit. Then his mother had jumped into the fray.
“Women,” he muttered as he pulled up beside Larry Marshall’s patrol boat.
“What’s that?” the other officer asked.
“Too many women at home,” Derek groused. “Mother, wife, daughter. All on my case.”
“Yow, that bites.” Larry paused. “Speaking of women, did you hear the news? We just got the call from headquarters in Jefferson City. The unidentified Code 4 you found over by Deepwater Cove was a female.”
A wash of disbelief ran through Derek. “No kidding? I would have sworn on a stack of Bibles it was a man. The jeans, the boots, the T-shirt.”
“Me too. I had it pegged as a male all the way. But you’ve gotta admit, the decomposition was pretty bad.”
Derek frowned at the memory of the body he had found tangled in fishing line not far from the small cove where he and Kim made their home. That afternoon, a light breeze had carried an odor in his direction, and he recognized it immediately. As a patrolman, he had worked deaths on the lake before, but he’d never been the one to locate the remains. It was an image he would just as soon forget.
Trained to treat every death as a homicide, they would have to wait until that scenario was ruled out. All the same, such circumstances were rare at Lake of the Ozarks.
“My guess is she was drinking on a dock or a boat,” Larry said. “She sure wouldn’t be the first drunk to fall into the lake, and she won’t be the last. Probably passed out and drowned.”
Derek shrugged. “If you’d seen the way the line was wrapped around her, you might think differently.”
“You really believe it could have been a homicide?”
“It’s possible. Then again, who would wrap a person in fishing line?”
“Someone who wanted to immobilize her?”
“I can snap that line with my bare hands,” Derek said. “I checked.”
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br /> “Yeah, but this was a woman.”
“True, and there was an awful lot of line. I just can’t believe that no one has called her in as a missing person.”
Derek shook his head at the realization that not only was the woman still unidentified, but she hadn’t had a funeral, nor had her body been buried. Whether her death was a homicide or an accident, she had once been a living, breathing human.
“I’d better get on over to Party Cove,” he told his friend as he checked his watch. “It’s prime drunk-hunting time.”
“I reckon we’ve got five or six hundred boats out there,” Larry told him. “People are starting to head home so they can get ready to go barhopping.”
“Every weekend they cut the animals free.”
Larry chuckled. “It’s Sodom and Gomorrah all right.”
As Derek parted from his friend, he thought about Larry’s reference. Derek knew that Sodom and Gomorrah were bad places, but he had no idea why. He thought it might be from the Bible, but he had grown up in a home where God was rarely mentioned, and his limited knowledge of the Bible came from the few times his grandparents had taken him to church.
In that area, Kim couldn’t be more different. On free evenings or weekends, she always had her nose in one of her religious books. She tried to read the Bible every day, and she kept markers in all kinds of how-to manuals, self-help books, and Christian novels.
Not that Kim was overly holy by any means. Derek reflected on his wife as he steered the Donzi toward the Glaize arm of Lake of the Ozarks. The breeze cooled his skin, and the hum of the twin motors soothed his nerves. To Derek, Kim was more attractive than ever. The way she made him feel sent goose bumps down his arms. It was hard to imagine how her first husband could have been so stupid as to let her get away.
Kim was a great woman. She took good care of her children, she cooked delicious meals, she kept the house tidy, and she satisfied his every need. Even her religious bent appealed to Derek. Kim’s Christian faith had given her a gentle and kind spirit that he treasured. She loved him more deeply than he would ever have believed possible. What more could a man want? How big a loser did you have to be to start knocking around a woman that wonderful? And she had been pregnant at the time. With twins!
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