by CJ Snyder
Lizzie sighed again, even more distraught. “Mom won’t let me get my belly button pierced and I have to spend all day Saturday at the clinic with her, instead of at the mall.”
“Why’s she going to the clinic?” He disguised his worry under a cheerful tone. Mim was diabetic, the disease diagnosed just months after his return. She was careful with her diet, exercised and watched her weight, but the illness continued to spiral out of control.
“Puffy ankles,” Lizzie complained. “She could go on Friday, or even Monday, but no, it’s gotta be Saturday. And I can’t stay with you because you’re too busy.” She shot him a glance, trying to look nonchalant and failing badly. Lizzie couldn’t do nonchalant if her life depended upon it.
“Well, I’m sorry, but your mom’s right. Can’t you go to the mall on Sunday?”
“Pat’s Piercing isn’t open on Sundays.”
“I thought she said you couldn’t–”
“Too late for that when it’s done, right?” Her grin was one hundred percent conspiratorial now. “You can sign for me.”
Max didn’t bite. “Don’t put me in that position, Liz. Did you ever think that maybe she wants you to go to the clinic with her? That maybe she’d enjoy your company?”
Lizzie snorted. “Not Mom. She’s a rock.” Her lips pursed and her eyes narrowed. “A mean, stubborn rock.” She glared at Max.
He shrugged. “It’s her duty to make her daughter’s life miserable, Lizard. I’ve told you that for years. Your mom’s just one of the best. She knows you’re here, doesn’t she? Where is she? Home?”
Lizzie shrugged. “At the doctor’s. I’m s’posed to take the bus home, but I’m out of money.”
“What happened to your money?” No way Mim turned Lizzie loose without bus fare home.
“I was hungry.” Obviously, his intelligence quotient was falling like a brick in her eyes.
“Of course.” Max nodded dutifully. “So you bought–”
“Just a candy bar. And a cappuccino.” Her glance assessed his reaction. “Don’t scowl, Uncle Max. It’s very unbecoming.”
“So are caffeinated little girls.”
“I am not a little girl. I’m nearly eleven and I’m getting boobs.” She swiveled her legs off the couch and faced him to catch the full impact of her little bomb.
Max dropped his gaze to his desk, knowing that didn’t hide the heat slowly climbing his neck. Boobs, indeed!
The phone rang. He sighed his relief and hoped it was something that required his immediate attention so he could tell his troublemaker niece to hightail it home.
“Max, it’s Miriam.” He could hardly hear her whisper.
“I’ve got her, Mim. She didn’t have enough for food and bus fare. I’ll bring—”
“No. I need you.”
Miriam never asked for help. “Where?” Max grabbed his keys. It was bad, whatever it was.
Lizzie’s unusual silence didn’t register while Max raced his truck toward the clinic, but as they crossed the parking lot side by side, Lizzie’s hand crept into his. That registered. Max slowed his steps. His fingers tightened reassuringly around her smaller ones. “It’ll be okay, Lizard.”
Surprisingly, she didn’t object to the nickname. “Did Mom tell you what’s wrong?”
“Nope. But we’ll find out. You’re gonna be fine, honey. If she needs to stay awhile, then you’ll come home with me. You know I’ll always take care of you, don’t you?” The wide automatic doors to the clinic swooshed open and Lizzie tugged back on his hand. Max stopped obediently, crouching to sweep her shaking frame into a massive hug.
“You won’t leave, will you?”
He would have pushed her back to see into her eyes, but she held his neck in a death-grip. “Leave? Of course I won’t leave. Why would you ask that?”
“Mom always says you might not stay. You left before.”
Damn! Max stood with the force of the emotion that ambushed him, lifting Lizzie with him. Would it never end? Miriam still didn’t trust him. Even all these years later. The pain of the lies he’d told were alive and well in his niece. For a long minute he just held on and let her cry, wishing he could cry himself.
“I’m ready to see her,” Lizzie whispered in his ear long seconds later.
He set her down, crouching when her arms tightened one last time. “I won’t leave you, Lizard. Not ever. That’s a promise.”
“Okay, ” she whispered back. “Then I’m really ready.”
“Right now,” he agreed, then closed his eyes as she wiped her cheeks against the rough nap of his jacket. The simple unconscious gesture—one she’d repeated often over the years—sent his mind flying back. . .back. . .to the first time. A scraped knee, such a terrible tragedy at almost-four. After his hug, she’d smeared his polo shirt with three-year-old tears and the remnants of her snuffly nose. Max kissed her streaked pink cheeks and doctored her knee with a colorful Band-Aid.
He didn’t have a Band-Aid big enough to cover the pain of her mother’s illness. Or the lies that still stood between his sister and him.
Lizzie led him up to the receptionist’s desk. “Miriam Clark, please. We were called.” Max smiled at the bold confidence in his niece’s voice and gave a nod to the receptionist. Lizzie obviously knew the place better than he did, because when the receptionist told them the room number, his niece bounded off. By the time Max reached the open door, she was snuggled in her mother’s arms up on the examining table, chattering away.
“I told him it wasn’t bad, Mama. And that you’d be okay. I think he’s kind of upset, though. But he said he wouldn’t leave.”
Miriam met his eyes over her daughter’s head and Max’s heart sank. It wasn’t all right. And it was going to get worse before it got better. He smiled, though, for Lizzie’s sake. A smile wasn’t about to fool Miriam. Nothing ever fooled Mim. “Hey, Sis.”
Miriam’s arms tightened around Lizzie and she tried to smile back at him. “Find Doctor Tomlinson, would you, Max?”
Max nodded, touched her foot where it stuck up under the blanket over her legs and left the room. Dr. Tomlinson would tell him the bad news, and then together, he and Mim would tell Lizzie.
Two hours later, Max fastened Lizzie’s seat belt next to him in his truck. Miriam’s ambulance was well on its way for the three hour trip to Denver. Lizzie wouldn’t meet his eyes and her lips were pursed in a thin line. Not a good sign. “Want to bring a friend?”
“To watch Mom get a new kidney?” The look she gave him clearly stated she’d met smarter rocks. She shifted the pillow wedged by her side, one of a few items she’d brought from home. “Just go, already. Don’t know why we have to live three hours away from decent medical care. What a stupid state!” Lizzie stuffed the earbuds into her ears and shut her eyes with a long, exaggerated sigh.
Thin, tinny country music spilled into the car and spoke volumes. Lizzie’d chosen one of Miriam’s favorite songs on her mp3 player instead of her usual alternative rock. He should yank the buds out of her ears and force her to talk about everything she had bottled up inside. But what would he say? In his book, emotions were just that. Meant to be felt, not discussed and picked apart like a crime scene.
By the time he and Lizzie settled into a hotel room near the Denver hospital, it was after ten. His niece’s temperament slid steadily downhill all afternoon. Lizzie flopped onto the closest bed, burrowing into the pillows until Max shook his head and nudged her. “Other bed, Lizard.”
She shot him a cross glare. “Why? Because I like this one?”
Tempted to agree, he shook his head instead. “It’s the closest to the door.”
She thought in grumpy silence for a moment and then her eyes widened. “Bad guys?”
Max smiled. “Yeah. Bad guys.” He tossed his duffel onto a low dresser. A shower would help. Lizzie asleep after his shower was probably too much to hope for.
“You always do that, don’t you? Take care of everybody.”
He glanced back into the ro
om to see she’d obediently switched beds and was looking at him strangely. “It’s my job, babe.” He winked at her. “Somebody’s gotta.”
Lizzie didn’t smile. Max put down his shaving kit and crossed to her bed, giving her braid a playful tug. “It’s going to be okay, sweetheart. With your mom.”
Lizzie shook her head. “Can I ask you a question?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Tell me about when you were a spy.”
Max kept his features rigidly impassive as he sat. “A spy?”
“Mom told me.” She nodded, but the twinkle usually evident in her eyes when she teased him wasn’t there. “While you were dead—when I was little. She said everyone thought you were dead, but you were really just working for the government. And if you disappear and you’re working for the government then you have to be a spy.”
Or a sniper. The thought was fully formed before he could stop it. He was far more tired than he’d imagined. He kept his gaze trained carefully on his niece’s pert nose. “I wasn’t a spy, Lizard. It was just business.”
“Secret business.”
“Secret business,” he agreed. “I’m gonna take a shower. You get ready for bed, and we’ll see about a little television before you go to sleep.” With any luck at all, she’d be out before he finished. That thought almost made him laugh. Not likely. But he needed time to think. To push all this emotional turmoil back inside, because Lizzie’s innocent question had sprung the lock on the box where he kept it all latched up tight. Miriam’s upcoming battle had him on the edge for sure.
His emotions were back under rigid control twenty minutes later. Lizzie had done as he asked for once, and was under the covers in her designated bed. But she wasn’t asleep and her gaze pierced him as soon as he stepped out of the bathroom.
“Was part of your business taking care of someone?”
For the life of him, he couldn’t figure out what was behind the sudden interest in his past, but he could easily see the intensity and the fear there in her eyes, so he stifled his sigh and pulled a chair close to her bed. So much easier to make up bedtime stories when she was four. Honesty, he reminded himself. But he couldn’t speak of that awful time, and not just because of the oath he’d taken. There were some things a child should never have to know.
“I’ll tell you what I can, Lizzie, but it won’t be everything.”
“You promised you wouldn’t tell?” He nodded. She did, too. “I knew it! You were a spy!”
“I was not a spy. Turn out the light.” No way he wanted her looking at him if she got too close with her questions. She’d inherited her mother’s ability to see right through him. When the room was dark, he heard her roll back close to him just before her hand crept into his.
“Tell me about Mom, then,” she whispered. “Before you were a spy. She took care of you?”
“Always. Your grandma and grandpa died when I was young—”
“Cause they had you late, right? Just like Mom and Dad had me late.”
“Exactly like you, Lizard. That’s why you and I get along so well. Your grandpa worked for the government and he wasn’t a spy.”
“If you have to have the operation to give a kidney to Mom, who’ll take care of me?”
Listen long enough and the heart of the problem will out, Max thought wryly. Lizard was paying attention when he’d filled out donor forms. Miriam was to start dialysis immediately while the doctors stemmed an infection in her toe. “We’ll figure something out. Something you’ll like.”
“What did you do before you were a spy?”
He should be used to her lightning speed changes in subject matter. “I was not a spy, Lizard.”
“Then before you worked for the government.” He could hear the grin in her voice.
“I’ve always worked for the government. Ever since college.”
“Mom said you lost your heart . Was she pretty? What was her name?”
In the darkness, Max closed his eyes. “As pretty a girl as you’ll ever see,” he whispered. The old bittersweet pain swept through him, still strong enough to tighten his throat. “Her name was Katherine. But everyone called her Kat. And she had these dark, blue-green eyes, like velvet.”
“Is that why they called her Kat? Was she a spy, too?”
“Lizard! I was not a spy.”
“All right, already. Was she a spy?”
“Kat was not a spy.”
Sure would have made it easier.
“Why did you break up with her?”
Max winced in the darkness. He never lied, but he wouldn’t–couldn’t–be honest about Kat. Couldn’t admit how he’d failed to protect her from the pain of his world.
Lizzie’s voice was drowsy as she continued. “Tell me about the day you met her,” she asked dreamily. “Then we can make up a happy ending together–like when I was little.” When he didn’t answer, she continued. “Please, Max,” she whispered. “I gotta concentrate on something. Otherwise, I see Mom.”
Max’s fingers tightened automatically around hers. “Okay, sweetheart.”
“How did you meet her?”
Max closed his eyes, seeing the day like it was yesterday, or this morning. Certainly not twelve aching years. No, the day he met Kat was forever etched with startling clarity in his mind.
Chapter Two
Kat Jannsen couldn’t stop thinking about the day she met Max. With nothing but a three-hour drive ahead of her, it wasn’t surprising. She gripped the wheel tightly and accelerated into traffic, headed north from Denver on Interstate 25. Thoughts of Max kept her mind off Lizzie and Miriam, the reason for her trip. For ten years, Miriam sent a picture and a note every month outlining her daughter’s deeds and misdeeds. Until this month. Even worse, she couldn’t get an answer at Miriam’s house.
Yes, thoughts of Max were better than the alternative. Exactly ten hours before her flight to the East Coast to visit her mother. Which made all of this her mother’s fault. If Ellen wasn’t certifiably insane, Kat wouldn’t be here now, breaking every rule she lived by. Daring Fate. If not for her mother, she’d never have met Maxwell Crayton. Never enrolled at the university in Chapel Hill. Never been so distraught that momentous day.
“Miriam, where the hell are you?” Kat wailed, grabbing up her cell phone. But at Miriam’s house in Bluff River Falls, the phone just trilled until the answering machine cut it off. An entire week now, and Kat didn’t have a choice. Something was wrong. Time to find out what.
Thoughts of Miriam led, of course, back to Max. Kat tried futilely to focus, but with nothing to do but drive, it was hopeless. And it was easy, just so easy to remember. The years slipped away as effortlessly as the miles beneath her tires.
Twenty-one year old Kat had pleaded with her irate mother through the Plexiglas. Ellen Jannsen, still a beautiful woman at forty-seven, didn’t look much like a murderer. Except when she was angry. She was definitely angry now.
“No! Answer my question! What are you doing to get me out of here?”
“All that I can, Mom. But you’ve got to work with the psychiatrists. If you won’t even see—”
“Head shrinkers? You want me to talk to the creeps that think I’m nuts? Oh, excuse me, not creeps, your idols. You’re going to be one someday, just like your father. Only I’m not crazy, Katherine. Eleven years I’ve been here. Get me out!”
Kat had heard it all before. “I’m trying, Mama. But if you won’t talk to them, I don’t—”
“You can find an investigator to prove I didn’t do it,” her mother spat back. Then Ellen stood, placing her hand flat over the plastic in front of her daughter’s face, effectively blocking her out of her life as she voiced her exit line. “Don’t come back until you do.”
Kat had one more glimpse of her mother’s flashing green eyes before she turned her back. Giving in to the urge that had grown since she’d first angered her mother, she let her shoulders slump forward. How could she help if her mother wouldn’t cooperate? She blinked to stop the prickling that was a pre
cursor to tears. Her visits always ended in tears. Her tears. In the beginning, years ago, her mother cried too. She didn’t any more. Kat doubted she even could. Suddenly conscious of the guard’s questioning stare, she pulled herself to her feet, glad the tears hadn’t escaped. Or was that the first sign? No more tears. . .no more regret. Cold decisions, snap judgments. Kat shuddered, snuggling into her warm coat. Was this how insanity began?
Still pondering her mother’s refusal to help herself, she made the drive back to the university. In the large tiered classroom, she slid into her seat and dutifully rummaged for her notebook. The irony of her life slapped her squarely in the face several times a day. A psych major with a mother serving a life sentence for murdering her father. She had three months to go until graduation. Then seven more years for medical school. By then she’d have the answers she needed, the nightmares would end, her mother would have help, and the fear that enunciated every breath she took would ease. Wouldn’t it? Surely a forensic psychiatrist could solve her own self.