Suddenly Joe knelt down as though he were going to pick something up or retie his wading shoe. It took Alan a moment longer to realize what Joe was doing, and he turned his back to them immediately. There was a tightness in his throat, a sense of happiness and loss so mixed he could hardly breathe. Was this what fathers felt like when their daughters married? The river doubled, then tripled in his vision. He felt absurd and yet the feeling was pure and good and sweet.
This was what it felt like to be a father. He laughed at the river, at the fish underneath it, at the dark blue winter sky and the beginnings of the stars coming out directly overhead. He was a father. He waded to shore, reeling up his fishing line and trying not to stumble. He’d meet them at the truck. What was that line that Joe always muttered?
“All will be well, and all will be well,” he said to himself, grinning like a foolish old dog. “And all manner of things will be well.”
Colorado Springs, Colorado
“Well, here we are,” Gerri Matthews said, leaning back in her chair. Eileen wrapped her fingers around her own mug and grinned at Gerri like they were little girls at a tea party. The Victorian house hummed with psychologists and social workers working on marriage problems and abuses and relationships. The place no longer bothered Eileen. In fact, she believed she was going to miss it.
“Last session, right?” Eileen hadn’t killed either Bennett or Scott, as it turned out. She’d re-broken two of Scott’s ribs when she shot him the second time.
“Last session,” Gerri said. “You’ve come a long way. And you’re taking your father up to Wyoming to meet your parents?”
“Right after New Year’s,” Eileen said. “I think they’ll love him as much as I do.”
“And you love Joe Tanner,” Gerri remarked.
“Love, love, love,” Eileen said comfortably. “Yes, I can say love. I even think I can do love, now.”
“Too bright for the ordinary traps, as always,” Gerri laughed. “I just have one question, Eileen. For me, not for my notes.”
“Okay,” Eileen said.
“What happened that night you killed Teddy Shaw? Why did you lie to me about it?”
Eileen was still for too long. Gerri looked at her solemnly. Caught by Gerri after all, and at a time she was least expecting. She looked down at her hands. Thoughts of Teddy Shaw had faded so much from her mind that she’d forgotten what she’d done, how she’d lied.
“I’ll tell you,” she said slowly. “But you won’t think very well of me.”
“I think well of you, Eileen,” Gerri said calmly. “That’s not going to change.”
Eileen grimaced and twisted her tea mug around in her palms. It was empty and dry but still smelled faintly of sweet herbs.
“I have to start way back, if you want to understand why I did what I did,” she said. “All the way back.”
“At the traffic accident where your parents found you.”
“Yeah. I didn’t tell the whole story there, either, Gerri. My Dad—that’s my adoptive dad, not Alan—had climbed in next to me and steadied my head. He’d put his own shirt on the cut on my arm. But I was starting to pull all the fuses. Too much had happened, I think. I was just—shutting down. He saw that, and he tried to get me to talk to him, to tell him my name and where I was from. But I was just fading. I remember what it was like, just easier not to pay attention to what was going on out there in the world around me.
“Dad, he knew he was losing me. Maybe I was going catatonic or maybe I was going into shock and I was going to die. I don’t think he knew. We never talked about what he did. But he did it. He reached around to my mother and pulled her head over so I could see her. She was dead and her eyes were open.” Eileen swallowed hard.
“‘She’s dead,’ my dad shouted into my face. ‘She’s dead and you’re alive and you’re going to stay alive.’”
“That brought you back?” Gerri said.
“Like being slapped across the face,” Eileen said. “I don’t think I’ve ever thought about it clearly until now. He showed me the worst demon of my life and she was dead. I couldn’t shut down. I couldn’t die. I know she was ill, she wasn’t really a monster, but then and there she was to me. Even with all the love mixed in, I was more afraid of her than anything else. If I died, I might end up right back with her.”
“You did the same to Jeannie Bernowski?”
“Oh, worse,” Eileen said with a wry smile. “She’d pulled almost all the fuses. She was almost entirely gone, which is what I would be in the same situation. I knew it, too. But there was something there, something behind her eyes that was still alive. So I pulled her up and showed her Teddy Shaw lying in the grass in front of her. I used the same line on her that my dad used on me.” Eileen looked out of her tea mug and into Gerri’s face. “And I know I’m not a professional therapist. That’s why it isn’t in my report. I broke the rules.”
“I see,” Gerri said. She took an absent mouthful of cold tea and made an awful face. She put the mug down and picked up her pen. “And?”
“And I put my pistol in Jeannie’s hands,” Eileen said. “I aimed it at Teddy Shaw’s body and I told her that if she needed to, just go ahead and pull the trigger. Shoot him again and again until she knew that he was gone and was never going to hurt her again.”
Gerri closed her eyes and leaned back in her chair.
“I sure hope you don’t plan on writing this down,” Eileen said.
“Only if you promise never to do such a boneheaded thing again,” Gerri said.
“But it did work,” Eileen said. “She came back. She put the fuses back in and turned on the lights in her head, just like I did. She never pulled the trigger. Just knowing she could gave her back enough to want to stay alive.”
“Let’s just leave the shock therapy to the professionals from now on, okay?”
“Well, it worked,” Eileen said again. She tried a smile on Gerri. Gerri glared at her for a moment, then sighed and relaxed into a smile.
“Okay,” she said. “I won’t put it in my report.”
“Thank you.”
“There’s a trade-off, though,” Gerri said, fixing Eileen with a stern glance.
“What?”
“Once a month, my tea, your time. Finding your birth father and getting married is a pretty tough transition. You’re going to need my help. I’ll give you a good deal on cost and you never, ever lie to me again. Deal?”
Eileen thought it over for a few moments. She liked Gerri. Most of all, she liked the Eileen that Gerri seemed to see. Flawed and not entirely grown up, but decent just the same. A good person.
“Deal,” Eileen said. “I’ll even keep drinking your crappy tea.”
Epilogue
Great Falls, Virginia
Lucy hung up the phone and jumped up from her office chair. Hank, examining a toy in his playpen with the intensity of a research scientist, looked up. Fancy woke out of her daytime doze in her padded bed and perked up her ears.
Lucy danced around the office, arms above her head, making cheerleader sounds. She scooped Hank up into her arms, Tonka truck and all, and whirled around and around.
“I get to be a maid of honor,” she said to Hank. “I’ve never been one, did you know that? Lots of times a bridesmaid, but never the maid of honor. Oh, wait, I’m the matron of honor. This is going to be such fun. And she’s getting married next summer, so Daddy and you and I can take a whole week’s vacation.”
She turned to her computer and hit the key to save her report. She’d upset her boss, Steven Mills, once again. Involving herself, even unofficially, in what was definitely an FBI case was strictly against policy. Fred Nguyen had written a glowing report that gave her credit for her involvement and got her into furious hot water. For a while she wondered if she were going to keep her job.
Then her two new friends came through. Tate and Randy had more clout than she realized. They seemed like college students down in their archive dungeon, but they weren’t. They’d gon
e through Pentagon channels to give her credit for the recovery of the Tesla file. Exposing Jacob Mitchell’s “earth resonance” project had shaken the Pentagon’s black program management to the core and might lead to a congressional review.
Lucy didn’t care much about that, but she did care that Mills was off her back again. She might even get a raise. A raise would be very nice.
Tate and Randy had been to the house to celebrate the return of the Tesla file and Lucy and Ted had fixed them an Italian dinner to remember. After a couple of bottles of good red wine, they’d all agreed, Ted included, that it was for the best that Tesla’s earthquake designs were damaged. The documents were stored within the machine itself and machine oil had obliterated some of the crucial ink drawings when Joe Tanner had destroyed the machine. Tate and Randy carefully stored the damaged documents anyway back in their original folder with Tesla’s handwriting on the cover.
“So how did Mitchell find the Tesla machine in the first place?” Ted asked, one arm holding a sleepy Hank and the other a wineglass.
“The FBI transferred a section of files from their own archives to ours. The section included the whole Tesla grouping,” Tate said. His face darkened. He was still angry about the theft. “Mitchell must have heard about the Tesla file from someone in the FBI. So he got to them before they came to us.”
Then Tate had coughed delicately into his fist and set down his wineglass and, after a look at Randy, had offered her a job. They often encountered puzzles and mysteries, and they needed an analyst who had some time to investigate them. An analyst might have prevented Jacob Mitchell from carrying off the Tesla file, for example. They had approval for a generous salary and they’d make great bosses, they earnestly declared. They liked her.
Lucy, flattered and astonished, had told them she’d think it over. She still hadn’t decided, even though the long string of Christmas beads haunted her mind. What were the stories locked in those boxes?
Hank shifted in her arms, and she looked down into his glorious dark eyes.
“Woolgathering again, Hank,” she said. “I don’t know about this job. But I do know I have to lose weight. You’re weaned and I have no more excuses. I want to look good for Eileen’s wedding. We’ll have such fun!” She danced around with Hank, and Fancy leaped to her feet and joined them, panting.
Lucy was sure they looked like idiots, the three of them. She didn’t care. Hank laughed in her arms and Fancy barked and turned in circles and grinned her doggy grin, wagging her tail as though it would never stop.
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