by J. R. Ward
“Ah, let me go check my house. I’ve . . . ah, I’ve got a dog and I need to make sure he’s secured before you come in. I’m not sure how he’s going to do with strangers.”
“You got a dog? You should have told me.” The hurt that flared in that face went through Anne’s chest like a spear. “But it’s all right. I’ve been telling you for a year to get a pet. This is really good.”
“Stay here.”
Anne jogged up to her front door and punched in her code. Inside, she leaned in, expecting to see the sofa shredded. Nope. Proceeding into the kitchen, she found the trash bin was where she’d left it, no garbage strewn about. But he also wasn’t in his crate.
Dear Lord, her mother was going to spend the night.
As she wondered how this had happened, she was very cognizant that in most families, it was commonplace—.parents staying with their children.
But then their family hadn’t been normal. It had only looked that way from the outside, the hero firefighter, the perfect homemaker, and a boy and a girl to boot. Real nuclear stuff until you scratched the surface, particularly when it came to Tom, Sr.
And that was Nancy Janice’s problem. The woman was only surface, no substance.
Whatever, though. She could make it through one night with her mother.
After Anne finished with the first floor, she got paranoid. Soot had snuck out somehow and she all but ran upstairs. Flipping on the hall light, she—
As she looked through the open door of her bedroom, she saw her dog curled up on her bed, his nose tucked under her pillow as if he wanted her scent with him in her absence.
“Hi, Mr. Man,” she said softly.
He startled and lifted his head, sleepy eyes blinking. Then that bony tail of his thumped on the comforter.
Anne went across and stretched out with him, putting her face against his and breathing deep. In response, Soot nuzzled her, and she marveled at the connection they had. It felt as though she had had him all her life.
Pulling back, she stared at him. “I need you to do me a favor and not eat my mother, ’kay? She’s only going to be here until the morning, and she’s . . . well, I think she’d taste like a marshmallow Peep, anyway. Way too sweet. Not your kind of entrée.”
* * *
Soot was a perfect gentleman, and Nancy Janice fell in love with him. Then again, her mother’s very nature was fall-in-love. Everything in her life was “perfect” and “beautiful” and “wonderful.”
Her glass was not just half full. It was overflowing with rose-scented denial. And Anne refused to see her intolerance of the woman as some kind of moral failing.
They had nothing in common and never had—hell, maybe that was why Anne had felt so betrayed when she had learned what kind of man her father really was. Even though Tom, Sr., had passed when she’d found out the truth, she had been prepared to live up to his memory for the rest of her days, to follow the example of bravery and charisma he had seemed to set.
Instead, the curtain had been pulled back on his true character and that had left her with nothing in common with her family. Her brother had already been living his own life and going into the Academy, and as for Nancy Janice? Anne had barely made it through a childhood of being forced to wear dresses and ringlet curls and paten leather shoes.
She’d already been waaaaaaay done with being pigeonholed into a feminine standard she didn’t care about by a woman she did not respect.
“Everything is so neat.” Nancy Janice stood up from petting the dog. “So tidy.”
“You make that sound like a bad thing.” Anne dropped her mother’s fifty-pound overnight bag at the foot of the stairs. “I have to take him out. Come on, Soot.”
“It’s not a bad thing.” Her mother followed the way to the back porch. “It’s just so spare.”
“I don’t see the need to clutter my space up with the Home Shopping Network.”
The way her mother sighed told her that the message had been received as it had been intended: That house Anne and her brother had grown up in had been crammed full of space-saving ideas, knickknacks, fads, and cutesy “moments.”
Nothing like being raised in an infomercial ecosystem.
“Out you go, Soot.” She opened the door and stood to the side. “Go on. G’head.”
Soot stood in between the jambs and eyed the sky with suspicion.
“You want me to go out with you?” Please make me go out with you. “Here, we’ll go together.”
“I’ll make tea,” her mother said. “Where’s your kettle?”
“I don’t have one. I use K-Cups. And I still don’t drink tea.”
“What’s a K-Cup?”
“Don’t worry about it. Help yourself.”
“I don’t drink coffee.”
“Come on, Soot.”
Thankfully, the dog decided to commit to a visit to the backyard, and Anne took the opportunity to breathe deep and brace herself for the return. When they came back in, her mother had set out two mugs and was boiling water in a pan.
“Don’t worry, Annie-Banannie, I brought plenty of Celestial Seasonings for the both of us.”
Annie-Banannie. God, she had hated that nickname her entire life. Annie-Banana would have been bad enough, but of course that cutesy end had had to be tacked on, a pink bow on a pink box.
The smile her mother sent over her shoulder was cheerful in a determined kind of way. “It’s for nighttime. For rest.”
Anne grabbed a dish towel and bent down, taking each of Soot’s paws in turn, wiping off the mud. “I told you. I don’t drink tea.”
“Oh. Well, I could make you a coffee? I could—”
“No. Thank you. I don’t need anything.”
“Oh. All right.”
Anne lowered her head. “I’ll sit with you.”
“Oh, I would love that. I’ve missed you.”
Yeah, wow, she’d forgotten how three-quarters of Nancy Janice’s statements started with “Oh”—as if she were constantly shocked by conversation, in spite of the fact that she was a chatter. Then again, she’d been a seen-and-not-heard wife to a flamboyant force of nature. It probably was still as surprise, even after all these years, that anybody listened to her.
It wasn’t Anne’s job to step into the void, however. And giving her mother an opening to speak was like setting off an entire can of Febreze in an enclosed space—and thinking you could keep the flower-fresh stench from your nose by batting the air away from your face.
She sat down at her table and told herself she needed to ask what the woman had been up to, but she wasn’t sure she could feign interest in Pilates, bridge, and senior center volunteering.
Especially as she thought about Emilio in that hospital bed, Danny struggling to find his way, and the people who had died in those warehouse fires down by the wharf.
See, this was the problem, There was a vast, uncrossable distance between what her mother worried over and what Anne had on her plate. It was Kleenex to surgical gauze. Sandals to steel-toed work boots. An off-key hum to a scream for help.
Her mother took a green-and-white box out of her corgi-themed purse and put a tea bag in each mug. Then she poured the hot water from the pan and brought her solution to insomnia over.
As she put the tea in front of Anne, her pale eyes were like those of a dog begging to be let in from the cold.
“Just in case you change your mind,” she said softly.
I won’t, Anne wanted to holler. For godsake,, is this the reason Dad cheated on you?
chapter
27
The following morning, Danny pulled his truck into the parking area behind the 617 stationhouse and checked his phone. He was fifteen minutes early, but not because he’d planned it that way and set some kind of an alarm.
You needed to be able to sleep to worry about alarms. And anything e
ven remotely REM-related had been a nonissue.
Lighting a cigarette, he cracked his window and blew a stream of smoke out. Following the storms, the early September sun was back out with a vengeance, the bright sky and utter lack of clouds making him think of someone starting an organic diet after an ugly binge.
He blinked gritty eyes. Drank some coffee. Smoked some more.
Five minutes ’til nine, he doused the butt in his cold Dunkin’ and got out. The chief’s shiny new stationhouse had a dedicated administrative entrance, so at least he didn’t have to enter through the front and face the crew, all of whom would know why he was here.
Anne’s brother was going to love this meeting.
And hey, at least his last act as a firefighter was going to be making someone’s day.
Danny pulled open the glass door and stepped into a waiting room as fancy as any you’d find in a lawyer’s office downtown: leather couches, coffee table, flat-screen TV, even a throw rug that picked up on the gray-and-blue color frickin’ scheme.
Nice to know that Ripkin’s people saw to everything. Not just the donation and the building, but the goddamn curtains and the furniture.
It even smelled nice.
Given how fancy everything was, he always expected some executive assistant to come out and demand his ID and fingerprints before he could get in to see the big man.
Nope. He just walked over to the fishbowl. The chief’s office was three sides of see-through, and the man was sitting at an old beat-up desk, paperwork everywhere, the phone in danger of falling off the far edge, a dead plant off to the side on shelves that were mostly empty.
Ashburn was like an isolated contaminant in all the otherwise perfectly orderly and new.
Tom looked up. “Come on in.”
Or something to that effect. The office was soundproof.
Danny walked around and pushed his way inside. “Morning.”
“Sit down.”
Why bother. He wasn’t going to be in here long. But Danny followed the order, parking it in a creaky wooden chair.
He crossed his arms over his chest. “So this was quick.”
Anne’s brother eased back and steepled his fingertips like he was a school principal with a delinquent. The man looked exhausted, dark circles under his eyes adding age to his face, that salt-and-pepper hair pulling an assist on the almost-fifty vibe. The poor bastard was just in his mid-thirties, though.
“Dr. McAuliffe got back to me yesterday.”
“Where do I sign?”
“What?”
Danny sat forward and motioned over the paperwork. “On my release papers. I already know I wasn’t on service long enough to vest my pension, but I want my COBRA.”
The chief didn’t respond. Then again, no doubt this was like a good meal, something to be savored.
“I want you back on shift. But you’re on probation.”
Danny shook his head like he had to reset his ears. “What?”
“You heard me. Because of Emilio being out, I’ve shuffled the crew at four-nine-nine around, and you need to finish today’s shift out, off tomorrow and Sunday.”
The chief picked up a piece of paper, his eyes scanning back and forth. Then he looked up. “Why are you still in here? You’re late for roll call at the four-nine-nine.”
Danny was aware of a shaft of anxiety hitting him in the chest. “I don’t get it.”
“I think I’m being clear enough.”
“Why aren’t you firing me?”
“You really want to argue this point?”
Danny shook his head. “I’m confused.”
“That’s because you think it’s personal between you and me. It’s not. The therapist’s report stated that she felt you were suffering from severe trauma and undiagnosed depression. She’s advocating for a three-month suspension and mandatory follow-up. She also believes you have a problem with alcohol and is recommending that you address this.”
“So why are you putting me back on shift.”
“If I waited for a clean bill of mental health for all my firefighters, I’d have engines with no engineers, lines with no one to hold them, ladders with nobody to climb.”
Danny clasped his hands together because he had a case of the shakes he didn’t want to share. “Thank you.”
The chief’s eyes went back and forth on the paper, but in the same position as he read the same line over and over again. After a moment, he said gruffly, “Payback. We’re equal now.”
“I wasn’t aware we had a debt to discharge.” That was a lie. There was Anne. “A recent one, at any rate.”
“Chavez.” Tom glanced up. “If you hadn’t said anything, I wouldn’t have . . . anyway. Yeah.”
In the back of his mind, Danny did the math on switching one unstable man for another, but he was not going to argue. Something was finally breaking his way.
“There’s a condition.”
Here it comes. “Which is.”
“Not one violation of any procedure or policy. Everything will be by the book, and yes, I’m putting this in your personnel file. I am not fucking around. I will fire you and to hell with the personnel shortage.”
Hard to argue with that standard, Danny thought.
“So. Don’t miss roll call.” Tom got to his feet. “And shake my hand. So we both know we have an agreement.”
• • •
Boston traffic was a thing.
As Anne passed another marker on 93, she checked her clock on the dash of her municipal sedan. She’d called Ripkin’s office first thing and informed them she would be arriving at nine sharp. She wasn’t going to make it, but they’d said they didn’t expect the big man in until nine thirty.
New Brunswick had its share of big buildings, but it was JV next to the pros when it came to Beantown’s glass-and-steel forestland. The fact that Ripkin owned an entire building was testament to his wealth, and she was impressed.
She wasn’t ever going to know what that kind of money was like. Then again, she wasn’t going to be a ballet dancer, a mathematician, or, with her hardware, a world-class juggler. Golf was also out of the question.
Fly-fishing wasn’t.
The lanes of the highway were congested, making her think of clogged arteries, sump lines that were full of silt, gutters that had yet to be cleaned of autumn leaves. She also thought of all the lives in all of the cars, the details, the timelines, the beginnings, middles, and ends. In this respect, every morning and every evening, in every major city across the globe, biographies gathered on the asphalt, books lined up one to another as if on a shelf, the pages at once anonymous within the collection and totally personal between the covers, within each automobile.
Humanity was a galaxy, countless, unfathomable, too vast to comprehend.
Not that she’d ever wanted to be God.
When she finally pulled into the Ripkin Building’s underground parking garage, it was 9:20. She got her ticket, found a slot on the third of the six levels, and was not surprised to learn that Ripkin’s office was all the way up at the building’s top floor, a king surveying the world he had conquered.
When she stepped off the elevator, there was no question which way to go. Down to the right, a wall of glass bearing the Ripkin logo cordoned off a reception area that seemed to be built around an enormous crystal R.
Anne entered and went over to the black granite desk. The attractive blonde was like any other piece of art, dressed in a black, her hair slicked back into a bun that gave Anne a headache just looking at it.
“I’m Inspector Ashburn,” she said. “I’m here to see Mr. Ripkin.”
Flashes of Bud Fox showing up at Gordon Gekko’s office and getting put on the back burner for hours made her thank Don. He was on Soot duty for however long this took.
“But of course. He’s expecting you.”
“But of course”? When was the last time she’d heard that expression? But she wasn’t going to argue with the access.
“Please come this way.”
The blonde didn’t so much stand up as levitate, and as she led the way down a long gray hall, Anne wondered whether she was a fembot or something. She moved like she had no bones and ball bearings for joints.
Utterly bizarre, Anne thought as she looked around at all the closed doors. She didn’t hear any phones ringing. There were no voices. Nobody else striding the corridors.
“Mind if I ask you something?” she said.
The blonde glanced over. “As you wish.”
As I wish? Is this an Alfred Hitchcock movie? “Is this Ripkin Development headquarters?”
“Ripkin Development takes up the top ten floors. This floor is for Mr. Ripkin.”
“An entire floor. Wow.”
“Mr. Ripkin is a very busy man.”
“Well, I would think he would be with all the buildings he owns.”
“You are very lucky Mr. Ripkin decided to see you. Ordinarily, he is booked months in advance.”
“Arson is a priority. Especially when it happens on property you own.”
“Mr. Ripkin is not worried about meeting with you.”
Okay, Bob Vance, Vance Refrigeration. “I didn’t catch your name?”
If she said Phyllis, Anne was going to believe for sure God existed.
“Persephone.” The future Stepford wife stopped in front of a pair of dove-gray doors that were tall as a waterfall. “Please wait here. I will announce you to Mr. Ripkin.”
As she was left to her own devices, she wondered if Mr. Ripkin was sleeping with good ol’ Persephone/Phyllis. It was a fair bet that was a yes. Loyalty like that either had to be bought with a good wage, or it had to be seduced with the promise of a good lifestyle. Besides, hadn’t the original Mrs. Ripkin died a few years back?
The doors opened again. “Mr. Ripkin will see you now.”
As the woman stood to one side, Anne entered a room she knew she was never going to forget. The ceilings were even higher than the doors, and the square footage was nearly that of a hotel lobby. Everything was covered in gray marble, great sheets of the stone covering the walls and the floor. No rugs, no paintings, just windows on three sides, and three or four sitting areas with conference tables.