by Kelly Irvin
She emphasized off-limits as if it were a direct quote. No doubt it was.
“I know. He told me that too.” Nina slid a box from the top shelf in the back of the closet. The muscles in her upper arms flexed as she eased it on top of another stack and popped off the lid. “I’m looking for some papers I need.”
Aaron straightened. Brooklyn was the oldest seven-year-old he’d ever met. Having two parents trade deployments to faraway places a person could barely find on a map would do that to a child. She handled it with an aplomb he admired. Now this. “I’m sorry about your grandpa.”
“Me too.”
“Where’s your mommy?”
Brooklyn ran her free hand along Runner’s knobby back. The dog emitted a low sound like a hum. “She’s in my bed. She squeezed in next to me in case I was sad during the night. She thinks I’m a baby.”
“But you’re not.”
“Nope.”
“It’s still early. You still shouldn’t be up yet. You should go back to bed.”
“I’m hungry. I want breakfast.” The expression in Brooklyn’s blue eyes, so like Jan’s, grew pensive. She rested one hand on Runner’s back. The dog was nearly as tall as she was. His head bobbed closer to hers. “Pearl said she would make pancakes for breakfast. Mom said she should heat up the sausage-and-egg casseroles. Why do people give you casseroles when someone dies?”
“So you don’t have to cook.” Nina sounded as if she’d lost the thread of the conversation. She shuffled through the box’s contents, then held up one sheet. Eyebrows lifted, her gaze traveled to Aaron and back to the paper. “And because they feel bad and they want to do something nice for you.”
“Nice would be chocolate chip ice cream. I don’t like sausage.” Brooklyn tugged a rubber band from her hair, letting a wild tangle of blonde curls spring up like a mane around her freckled face. “Can you make pancakes, Aunt Nina?”
“I can make pancakes.” Aaron answered when Nina didn’t. Her gaze was glued to the contents of the box in front of her. “When your mom gets up, we’ll have pancakes with chocolate chips. How about that?”
“Runner can’t eat chocolate. It’s bad for dogs.”
Brooklyn’s legion of pets enthralled Aaron. His mom had been allergic to cat dander and to the mess dogs made. He had a gerbil once, but it died. Brooklyn planned to be a veterinarian. She’d told him so on numerous occasions and wasn’t above practicing on humans, should they need a bandage for a paper cut or minor surgery, such as removal of a splinter.
“I’ll make his without. I saw an apple-cinnamon strudel cake on the counter. We’ll have that for dessert.” Aaron high-stepped over the boxes blocking his path so he could squeeze in next to Nina and pick up the prize box. “Why don’t you go see if your mom is ready for breakfast and take her order. When we get done with all this adult stuff, we’ll make breakfast together. Okay?”
“There’s ice cream in the freezer. Pearl gave me ice cream for breakfast once when Daddy was in Iraq and Mommy went to Fort Hood for training.”
Good for Pearl. “We’ll see if we’re still hungry after the pancakes.”
Brooklyn trotted away, Daffy still reclining in her arms like a doll, all four paws limp, Runner two steps behind.
Wishing he had his camera, Aaron tore his gaze from the small parade and focused on Nina. “Is this it?”
Nina held up the sheet of paper. “Credit card receipt for a room at the MGM Grand Las Vegas.”
“Why would he keep all this stuff?” Grunting, Aaron picked up the box, trying not to think about her fresh scent of spearmint and eucalyptus. The soap she used in the darkroom to relieve her stress and cut the chemical odor. “Why didn’t he get rid of the evidence?”
“My father was incapable of getting rid of a piece of paper. I imagine he thought he could figure out a way to use the purchase of another home to his advantage on his taxes.”
“Only if he could figure out how not to claim his winnings.”
“If there were winnings. Do you really have to claim winnings as income?”
Aaron, who’d never been to Las Vegas or gambled in his life, for that matter, had no idea. Melanie would know. She knew everything. “We better get this box up to your apartment.”
Nina nodded, but her gaze was fixed on the contents of a smaller Reebok shoebox wedged underneath the bottom shelf. Scrawled across the side in black magic marker were the words miscellaneous letters. “This might be something.”
“Your mom said one box, didn’t she?”
“Hmmm.” Nina tugged the shoebox from its resting spot and settled it on top of the receipt box. “I’m just curious what letters he would keep. They’d have to be old. Most correspondence occurs via email or text. No one writes snail mail anymore.”
She popped the lid off and peered inside. Her face hardened as she lifted a slim stack of envelopes from the box. “I can’t believe it. He was such a liar. Such a liar.”
“What is it?”
“Letters from my mother.”
Pretty romantic for a guy like Geoffrey Fischer. He didn’t strike Aaron as the type. Why did writing letters to his wife make him a liar? “When were he and Grace ever apart for more than a week or two?”
Nina held out a yellowed envelope. “Not Grace. My mother. My biological mother.”
13
The letters that weren’t. Nina ran her fingers over the crumbled, yellowed envelopes that Geoffrey told her, more than once, didn’t exist. She didn’t recognize the loopy handwriting, but why would she? As far as she knew, her mother had never written to her. According to Dad, her biological mother had never tried to contact him or her two children. Yet there was her name—Liz Fischer—on the return address. Dad always called her Lizzy. Short for Elizabeth. Apparently she preferred Liz. Nina didn’t remember that. Why didn’t she remember that?
“Are you okay?”
She forced her gaze to Aaron’s concerned face. He stood frozen, the box of receipts in his arms.
“It’s just . . . one more thing my dad lied about.” She shuffled through the envelopes with shaking fingers. Sixteen lies. “He said she never tried to get in touch with us after he brought us here. We would run out to the mailbox on our birthdays and at Christmas, just thinking, hoping, like little girls do . . . but we never found anything. And whenever I asked Dad about it, he said he didn’t know where she was. That he hadn’t heard from her. He said she ended up in prison and he didn’t want us mixed up in that.”
“Only he did hear from her.”
Nina flipped the last envelope up. “Sixteen times.” Her fingers touched something else. Something slick. She glanced down. A photo. She dropped the box on the shelf and tugged the photos from the bottom of the box. Faded color prints. Poor composition. In the first one, her mom sat on a bed somewhere—a cheap apartment or a motel room, probably in Florida—with Jan on her lap, a cigarette in one hand, and Nina standing next to her. Scrawny, hair unkempt, face surly. She might have been six or seven. Before they landed in the tent city, but not long before. Her mom wore a dirty white T-shirt, which bore the words Biker Mom in purple letters, and blue jeans. She was so thin, her arm around Jan seemed like a child’s. Jan grinned for the camera, but Nina looked miffed. She’d never liked getting her picture taken. She preferred to be on the other end of the camera. Even then. She had no recollection of this photo being taken. Or who took it.
“Is that you and your mother?” Aaron leaned closer, his scent of aftershave mixing with the smell of his mint toothpaste. “You were a cute kid. That could be Brooklyn at that age.”
Brooklyn looked like her grandma, with her petite nose, her dimples, her blue eyes, and her curly blonde hair. If God was as good as Aaron insisted, she wouldn’t inherit anything else. Addiction ran in families, which was why Nina and Jan had made a pact—when they were old enough to understand such things—to never drink.
Nina cleared her throat. “I’ve never seen a photo of me with my mom.”
“You don�
�t have any photos of your mother?”
“Not one.”
“You should take the box up to your apartment. You can read the letters in private.” Aaron picked his way through the boxes as he talked, his biceps bulging with the weight of the one he carried. “You can have Jan with you.”
“I need to read them first . . . without Jan. Just in case, you know, there’s something in them . . .”
Something hurtful, like a request that Dad adopt her girls because she had a new life and it didn’t have room for them. Like she’d finished drug rehab, met a great guy, married, and started a new family. Or she was dying and wouldn’t ever be around again, so go ahead and adopt them. The scenarios rumbled through Nina’s head, each one a little more hurtful than the one before.
Aaron paused at the doorway and looked back. “I can work on breakfast in the kitchen while you do it, you know, to give you some privacy.”
She imagined the empty apartment with its dusty dinette table, smell of burnt coffee and chemicals, and unread mail. “I’d like for you to be there, if you don’t mind. I’ll ask Jan to get breakfast started. By now Brooklyn has gone off on one of her quests. She’ll take a rain check.”
“I don’t mind. I’ll take this box up and we’ll go through it together.”
“What’s in the box?”
Aaron nearly dropped his burden. Nina did better. She managed to slip past Aaron into the main office where sunrise began to shed light through the huge east windows. She tried to wipe away the night’s trauma from her expression. Mango snuggled in his arms, Trevor stood outside the door of the study. Only his head breached the door frame.
She dropped the shoebox into Aaron’s box and strode across the room to wrap her brother in a hug. “You’re here. At the crack of dawn. I’m so glad to see you.”
Mango whined in protest and wiggled from Trevor’s grasp. Trevor stepped back as well. “What happened to your face?”
“Collided with the door in the middle of the night.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Trevor—”
“Don’t lie to me. I always know when you’re lying.”
It was true. Dad used to say Nina would never be able to play poker. Every emotion, every thought played out on her face. Trevor removed his wire-rimmed glasses with careful precision. He wiped at his pale-blue eyes with his shirtsleeve. With even greater precision, he returned the glasses to his nose, hooking the wires behind his big ears. “Tell me.”
She ran through the events of the previous night, glossing over her injuries. “It happened in a split second. He was here. He was gone.”
“So instead of calling the police, you’re cleaning up Dad’s office?”
Aaron’s snort turned into a cough.
“Something like that.” To her chagrin, her voice broke.
“Ah, come on, Nina, don’t get all goopy on me.”
“You’re the goopy one, and dopey too.” She never thought of Trevor as her stepbrother. He was the big brother who accepted two prickly, street-smart, foul-mouthed kids, who didn’t know how to bathe themselves or brush their teeth, into his life as if he got new sisters from Florida every day. “I’m sorry you had to hear about this from Rick. It must’ve been an awful drive back from Dallas. How are you doing?”
His nose was as red as his bloodshot eyes. He’d lost weight. Not having Pearl to cook for him, most likely. He probably lived off microwave dinners and Chacho’s tacos.
He looked over her shoulder and fixed Aaron with an accusing stare. “What are you doing here so early?” He scowled at Nina, who barely reached his shoulder despite her above-average height. “How could you let a TV person in our father’s study? The place where he . . . ?”
His Adam’s apple bobbed under the straggly black hair on his chin. Trevor always wanted a beard. He thought it would make him more distinguished when he finally got that professorship he desired at one of the local universities. His genes wouldn’t cooperate. He couldn’t grow a decent beard to save his life.
“Aaron’s here as a friend. I asked him to come.” Nina tugged her brother away from the door and into the hallway. Aaron followed with the box. “I just wanted to look at some old papers.”
“Ouch!” Trevor jerked his hand from hers. He cradled it against his chest. “No need to pull on me.”
The knuckles of his left hand were raw and red. “What happened to your hand?”
He glanced down at his fingers as if they belonged to someone else. “I smacked it on something yesterday.”
“At a philosophy conference? What were you doing? Arguing with someone about the theory of nothing?”
He let his hand drop. “What papers are you looking through?”
He wouldn’t allow her to change subjects. Nina took a breath. Grace hadn’t shared her story with Geoffrey’s only son. Nina didn’t blame her. She could barely breathe thinking about it. Trevor had just lost his father. He didn’t need to lose his respect for him as well.
His expression uncomfortable, Aaron edged toward the stairs. “I’ll let you two talk—”
The doorbell tinkled a bright, airy song that had always grated on Nina’s nerves. Or maybe that was the tension that wrapped itself around adrenaline and coursed through her body. “It’s six o’clock in the morning. If it’s a reporter, I will call the police.”
Trevor’s scowl suggested he agreed. “I’ll see who it is.”
Nina nodded and turned to Aaron. She waited until Trevor made it to the door before she spoke. “Take the box upstairs. Put it somewhere. I’ll be up as soon as I can.”
“Maybe we should go to the police with all this.” Aaron hesitated. “Or not.”
“It may have nothing to do with his death.” It wasn’t her intent to impede a murder investigation. She wanted the murderer found. And she wanted to prove she didn’t do it. These papers would only serve to point a finger at Grace instead. Nina simply needed a little time to figure this out. Someone had wanted her dad dead and it might or might not have something to do with his gambling. “Why ruin his reputation if it’s irrelevant? I can’t do that to Grace. Please, take the box upstairs.”
“Okay.”
“It’s some guy in a suit. I don’t recognize him.” Trevor peered out the skinny windows that ran down the sides of the mahogany door. “He’s holding up a badge. He has a gun on his belt.”
“King.” Adrenaline shot Nina’s heart rate into orbit. The detective was the only one with the guts to show up at this hour. She ran to the door and peeked out. “It’s him. Hurry, Aaron. Go. Now!”
14
Nina opened the door a crack. Detective King bulldozed his way past her, forcing her to swing the door wide open. He looked freshly shaved and far too chipper for six o’clock in the morning. He held two extra-large Starbucks cups—which explained the self-satisfied grin on his face—and a manila envelope under one arm. Mango took one look at him and disappeared into the interior of the house.
“It’s a little early for house calls, don’t you think?”
“I’m a morning person with a full agenda today.” His grin faded. His glance went from Nina to Trevor and back. “What happened to your face? And who is this?”
She should simply call a news conference and announce it to the world. At least then she wouldn’t have to keep repeating herself.
Ignoring the first question, she introduced her brother.
“Yeah, what happened to your face?” Trevor ignored King’s extended hand. “And don’t say you walked into a door.”
“I’ll tell you, but I need more coffee first.”
King held out the cup. “Talk.”
She repeated her story just as she’d told it to Aaron earlier.
Neither man spoke for two long beats.
“And you didn’t call 911?” A low growl emanated from Trevor’s throat. He sounded like Runner when Peanuts wanted to play.
“And you didn’t call me.” King’s hand went to the cuffs on his belt. “I should a
rrest you for obstruction of justice or impeding an investigation. Something.”
“There’s no law that addresses impeding an investigation. That’s a TV bluff, if I ever heard one. Besides, I thought you were a homicide investigator. This was a burglary.”
“I’m the lead investigator on Geoffrey Fischer’s homicide. Someone rifled through my victim’s office and stole a laptop, I need to know.” King raised a Starbucks cup to his lips and sipped. “I’m positive you’re intelligent enough to discern a connection.”
“I do. The guy ran off. He was dressed in black head to foot. I didn’t see his face. None of that is different at six in the morning than it was at three in the morning.”
“Somebody smashed you in the face and you called no one?”
“I called Aaron.”
“Of course. The guy who’s just a friend.” King’s gaze raked over Nina. He moved on to Trevor. “Where were you? Why didn’t you hear anything?”
“I didn’t get here until this morning. I drove all night.”
“Are you left-handed or right-handed?”
“Why?”
King cocked one index finger at Trevor. “You hurt your knuckles. Left hand.”
Trevor examined the hand as if he’d never seen it before. “I’m left-handed. But I did that trying to fix my bathroom sink. It was stopped up and I—”
“Yeah. Okay.” King brushed past him down the hallway to the study, his black Ropers barely making a sound on the rug. He paused at the open door, swiveled, and stared at Nina. “What would make a woman go back into a room where she’d found her father dead on the floor?”
Nina studied her bare feet, considering the responses. “I was looking for closure.”