“Oh no,” the widow said in stunned tones. “It only gets worse. Look, this one goes beneath the toilet. My husband approved of his art on a shag rug that surrounds the base of a toilet.” Lifting it up, she peered at Angel through the distinctive cutout.
Oh my. Lainey’s pretty face and horrified expression, framed by the little rug, were suddenly too much for Angel. Biting down on her lower lip, she spun toward the countertop.
“What’s the matter?” Lainey asked, crossing toward her. “Are you all right?”
Hastily nodding her head, Angel waved the other woman back. “Mmm, mmm.” She pressed her lips together harder.
Lainey halted. “Why…why, you’re laughing.”
Feeling lower than a rat and all humor evaporating, Angel spun back, ready to apologize. But Lainey was looking down at the rug in her hand.
Then her serious gaze lifted to Angel’s. “Short of the ‘Artist of the Heart’ toilet paper,” she said, her voice glum, “this is the tackiest thing I have ever seen.”
“T-toilet paper?” Angel echoed.
And then, God forgive her, she burst out laughing. And then, disaster upon disaster, Lainey joined in. To make matters worse, as the widow continued to laugh, she clutched Angel’s arm as if they were truly sharing something—as if they were friends.
“Why?” Lainey finally choked out, still holding on to Angel with one hand and shaking the offending rug in the other. “Why this? Why toilet paper? What was he thinking?”
Angel couldn’t help herself. “That he wanted to be on the minds of men everywhere?”
That set them both off again. When the laughter died down, it was Angel who poured coffee for Lainey. Then she freshened her own mug and joined the other woman to sit at the kitchen table.
Pushing the bath items aside, Lainey frowned at them, then sighed. “One of my bigger regrets is that the last work Stephen gives to the world will be these.”
Angel took a swallow of her coffee. “So you didn’t want to burn the new paintings?”
Lainey shrugged. “That was his wish, that the unfinished work be burned.” Then she sighed again. “Which meant all the past year’s work was lost. It was his habit to leave a little piece of each painting undone. Then, come the month before his annual show, he’d paint like a maniac to finish them. I’d bring food to the tower, but half the time he wouldn’t eat it.”
Lainey’s expression turned bleak and Angel heard herself rushing to reassure her. “I’m sure you took very good care of him, Lainey,” she said, though she was keenly aware it wasn’t objective reporter-speak. The trouble was, she not only liked Lainey’s coffee, but she liked Lainey too. “I’m sure you did.”
“That was my job. To make his life comfortable so that he could concentrate on his work.” Her gaze met Angel’s. “But what am I going to do now?”
Angel instantly pretended an interest in the inside of her coffee mug and wished herself in a galaxy far, far away. “Well, uh, I don’t know.” This was what she got for staying past her one-coffee limit: emotion-heavy, teary-eyed questions. “What did you want to do before he came along?”
Lainey laughed again, but this time there wasn’t the smallest grain of amusement in it. “I wanted him to come along.”
Angel jumped out of her chair. The other woman’s answer cut too close to what she’d wanted when she was a little girl. It was also what she’d vowed never to want once she was old enough to understand why her mother had married—disastrously—on the rebound from Stephen Whitney’s defection.
Because by then Angel knew it was the very worst kind of dependence, tying your happiness to a man. Tying yourself to a man at all.
“May I see Katie now?” She took her mug to the sink. “If she becomes upset, I won’t push.”
At the mention of her daughter, Lainey’s expression shifted from sad to worried. “Talking might do Katie some good, actually. I can’t seem to get anything out of her—the rest of the family either. Go on up the stairs, her room’s the first door on your left.”
Angel nodded, turned.
“She hasn’t cried since her father’s death,” Lainey added. “A friend sent me a book on children and grief and it says she should cry.”
In one swift woosh, Angel’s stomach tightened.
“Maybe you can do something about that.”
“Um, maybe.” Right after I poke myself in the eye with a sharp stick. There was nothing, nothing Angel wanted to avoid more than a girl crying over her missing daddy.
Chapter 10
Thank goodness Katie did not appear the least bit teary-eyed when she responded to Angel’s knock on her half-open door. Nonetheless, Angel tried to establish a lighthearted mood by striking a melodramatic pose, the back of her hand pressed against her forehead.
“Please, please. It’s an emergency. I’m desperate for a blow-dryer and some quality time with an electrical outlet.”
Hair was a sure way to any female’s heart. Within seconds she was standing in the bathroom adjoining Katie’s spacious bedroom. And within another few her hair was looking slightly better than it had in weeks. After returning the blow-dryer to its place on a shelf, she took a deep breath and pretended she was hair-fluffing instead of heavily stalling.
You can do this, Angel commanded her reflection.
Was she, or was she not the professional, Fearless Girl Reporter that she’d fantasized about becoming since she was twelve years old?
Sure, she could write a story about Stephen Whitney without interviewing Katie. There was no guarantee she’d get anything worth using, after all. But she’d had other opportunities to talk to the teenager over the last couple of weeks and she’d ducked every one of them.
Angel Buchanan did not duck opportunities. Or hard truths. Or even the other daughter of her father.
And while she could hair-fluff with the best of them, she didn’t stall either.
Sending herself a hard-eyed look in the mirror, Angel allowed one more second of delay. Then she reemerged into Katie’s room to find the girl lying on her bed, reading a magazine.
Angel cocked her head, recognizing Teen People by its Clearasil ad and white-toothed celebrity shots. “They’re not back together, are they? Britney and Justin?”
At a noncommittal hum of reply, she shrugged, then spun a slow 360, taking in the room’s bookshelves, entertainment center, computer, and printer. One wall was dominated by a bulletin board crowded with the usual stuff—photos, certificates, a recent report card that was all A’s except for a C in PE.
She glanced over to catch Katie looking at her. Angel put on a smile. “How’s it going at school?”
“All right, I guess.”
She nodded at the report card. “Mine looked just the same. Physical fitness test nailed me every year. Push-ups, pull-ups. I have zero upper body strength.”
Katie shrugged, her cool expression unchanging.
Geez, I’m dying here. Angel usually did well with children, because, she suspected, she’d yet to stop looking like one. But she wouldn’t give up quite yet. That first day, outside the church, hadn’t she managed to get a few laughs out of the girl?
She crossed toward the bed and perched on the lower corner. “I’m leaving soon. Going back to San Francisco the day after tomorrow.”
Katie’s gaze flicked to Angel’s face again. “You’re done with your story?”
Angel shook her head. “I’ll write it when I get back home. But I’ve pretty much talked to everyone around here who knew your dad.”
She paused. Wait for it.
“Not to me.”
There. It was so much better for the first move to come from Katie herself. Angel didn’t feel nearly as guilty that way. “Well, I did ask your mom if we could talk. She said it was up to you.”
Now the girl looked away, closed off again. “I don’t know what I’d have to tell you.”
What it was like to have a father who stayed.
The thought wrapped around Angel’s throat, sque
ezed. Digging her fingernails into her palms, she forced it free. She was too tough to wimp out now, too strong to let the old pain hurt her.
Just ask a few commonplace questions about their relationship, she bargained with herself. Then she’d cut ties with these people forever.
“Is your father still alive?”
Startled by the sudden question, Angel whipped her head toward the girl. “What?” It came out like a croak, so she swallowed and tried again. “What did you say?”
“Is your father still alive?”
“Um, well, no. No, he’s not.”
Katie sat up straighter on the bed. “For how long? I mean, since you were how old?”
A little spooked by the conversation, Angel dropped her gaze, watching herself draw an imaginary circle on her denim-covered knee. “My parents split up when I was four years old. I never saw him again.”
“Did your mom…did she marry a second time?”
The urgency in the question caught Angel’s attention. Looking over, she saw that the girl’s wooden expression had livened up—with a distinct spark of anxiety.
Poor thing, Angel thought, helpless against a sharp tug of sympathy, she’s already bracing for more changes to her life.
“My mother married a couple times after she was with my father,” she answered. “Now she lives with her husband in France, just outside of Paris.”
“Paris.” The expression on Katie’s face returned to its previously frozen state. “My mom and I met my dad there once, when I was eight.”
Angel again tried smiling. “EuroDisney?”
The girl nodded. “We were only there for a few days. My dad went to France a bunch of other times, though.”
Angel felt her insides go still. “A bunch of times, you said?” She tried to keep the question casual, even as she calculated the exact years she and her mother had hidden in Europe. “Do you remember when?”
The girl shrugged. “I’m pretty sure he hadn’t been outside of the States until that first time when I was eight. After that he traveled a lot more.”
Angel’s blood started pumping again. For a minute she’d thought Stephen Whitney had gone looking for them. For her. Stupid. Stupid, how she could still hope after all these years that he’d given her a second thought.
She jumped to her feet and walked around the room, determined to distance herself from the old bitterness. Pausing at the bulletin board again, she stared at Katie’s report card. “Yep,” she said, to prove to herself she sounded normal. “My report cards were exactly like this.”
She looked back, steeling herself. It was time to forget about PE and Paris and the kid’s obvious misery. It was time to get on with the interview.
Angel opened her mouth, but found herself hesitating again. And then again. Get on with it, Angel.
Why was she letting the girl get to her? Why did she feel this crazy need to protect her? Biology aside, she wasn’t this kid’s family! She didn’t owe her a thing! She didn’t owe anyone a thing!
But that didn’t stop Angel’s feet from walking back to the bed. She sat down again, closer to Katie this time. “I know…I know what you’re going through is hard.”
Fine, it was a lame remark, as even those kinds of remarks went. She was admittedly lousy at airing out feelings and actually preferred bottling them up herself. But she’d had years more practice than Katie.
“Really hard,” Angel added, shifting uneasily. “But you’ll be all right.”
She said that last part brightly.
God, she was an idiot.
Truly an idiot, because her mouth was moving again and she was continuing to speak in that dumb, cheerful voice. “You’d be amazed at what hard times you can get through.”
Apparently Katie thought Angel was an idiot too, because she pinned her with that near-expressionless stare. “What’s the hardest time you’ve ever had?”
It wasn’t so much a challenge, Angel decided, as a declaration that she and all the other adults in Katie’s world didn’t have a clue about what the teen was going through.
Fifteen years old sucked.
Remembering that, Angel did her best to answer. “The hardest time for me…I don’t know…” She thought of the stories she’d written over the years for West Coast magazine. “I lived on the streets for a week before writing a piece on homeless women.”
When the girl didn’t say anything, Angel found herself confessing more. “Of course, it was summer, and at night I slept on a cot at one of the shelters.” Even to her own ears it sounded like a camping trip, not a hardship.
“And then there was the time I—” She broke off, knowing that crewing a two-day yacht race didn’t hold a candle to losing your father.
Sighing, Angel wished she could let this go, wished she did not feel this sudden urge to give the girl some hope—or at least something else to think about. She dropped her head back, inhaling a long breath as she stared at the clouds that someone—Stephen Whitney, surely—had painted on Katie’s ceiling. “The hardest time I ever had was the year I pretended to be a boy.”
“What?” Katie drew back, her eyes rounded.
Woke you up now, didn’t I? Angel sucked in another breath. “I told you that my mother and father split, right? Well, shortly afterward, my mom married someone else, a police officer. He, uh, he wasn’t a nice man.”
“How wasn’t he nice?”
Angel hesitated.
“Yeah, how wasn’t he nice?” It was Cooper, shooting her a half-apologetic look as he stepped into the room. “Sorry, but Lainey asked me to check on you two. I wasn’t intentionally eavesdropping.”
Fear—or something very much like it—made her stomach dip, scooping right below her belly button. This wasn’t something to share with Cooper. She couldn’t even say why she’d decided to tell Katie.
No, she did know that. She remembered that day at the church. The teen had smiled then. Angel had nearly made her laugh, and now she couldn’t shake the feeling that it connected them somehow—like being responsible for a person whose life you’d saved.
But she couldn’t do this with Cooper listening in!
“Angel?”
It was Katie’s voice and Angel glanced at her, then couldn’t look away. “He, uh, hurt my mom,” she continued quickly. “But because he was a police officer, she was afraid to bring charges against him.”
Katie’s eyes had gone wide again, so Angel took that as her cue to skate over the worst details. “We decided to…to get away.” Run away. “He had access to lots of methods of finding us, though, so we hid from him by changing our identities often and moving around a lot.”
She could feel Cooper’s gaze on her, feel its steady regard, and knew that he could cross all the t’s and dot all the i’s that she was leaving out.
“So for the sake of putting him off the scent,” she said, moving briskly to the point, “I went through third grade as a boy.”
Katie appeared dumbfounded all over again. “But…you…you look…” She laughed.
At the sound, Angel’s stomach dipped once more, but this time it was a warm, gentle movement. Telling the story was worth just that one moment of real amusement on the girl’s face.
“I know,” Angel said. “I look like the girliest girl you ever met. I was as girlie and as shrimpie then too. That’s what made it so difficult.”
“But you managed.”
Katie’s brief spurt of laughter had brought real life to her blank expression. Angel didn’t flatter herself that she’d made a big difference for the girl, but it was a start. A start.
“I did. I made it through my hard time.” She smiled at Katie and, without thinking, reached over to take her hand. Their linked fingers rested on Justin Timber-lake’s pretty face. “A person is tempered in fire. Never forget that. It only makes you stronger.”
Then, embarrassed by her hokey homily, she winked. “And I’ll tell you something else that experience proved to me.”
There was almost a smile on
Katie’s face. Almost. “What?”
Angel threw a quick glance over her shoulder at Cooper, then leaned forward and stage-whispered. “The fact is, boys really drool. And girls…girls truly rule.”
Sitting on a blanket stretched on the sand of Cooper’s secret beach, Angel watched the sun slip quickly, and without a splash, into the Pacific. The wind instantly quieted, warming the air of the protected cove.
It should have been a calm time of the day. And it should be a calm time for her in the story-writing process, with the data gathered, contacts made, interviews completed. She was about to begin the part she liked best, when she molded the raw input into a form not only to inform, but also to ignite a reader’s emotions.
But still, she felt jittery.
She flopped back against the blanket and closed her eyes.
Then she heard it, the humming, its echo announcing the progress of someone coming through the tunnel to the cove.
That someone was the source of her jitteriness—Cooper. She’d been hiding from him ever since she’d left the Whitney house that morning. The way he’d murmured, “We’ll talk later,” as she’d said goodbye to Lainey had warned her that he wanted to rehash what she’d revealed in Katie’s bedroom.
That wasn’t going to happen. Her past wasn’t a weakness, by God, but sometimes it had the strange effect of making her feel that way.
The humming stopped. “There you are.”
She didn’t open her eyes. It had been pointless to try to run away once she knew he was nearing, but she could get rid of him quickly, couldn’t she? “Do you mind? I was hoping to be left alone.”
“Sorry, but you’d have to take your bra off for that.”
Her eyes popped open and she rose up on her elbows. “Huh?” Certainly he couldn’t tell there wasn’t one beneath the thick sweatshirt she was wearing.
Dropping down to the blanket beside her, he grinned. “I thought that would get your attention. It’s the old signal my sisters told me to use if I wanted uninterrupted time on the beach.”
“If only I’d known…” Angel murmured, leaning back and closing her eyes again.
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