Mary's Child Page 14

  “I don’t know.” Zeke shook his head. “She never mentioned telling him, so I don’t think so.”

  “Okay.” She nodded, thoughtful, sad, reluctantly aware of how many other divergent pathways might have led to Mary’s death than even Joe could have guessed. And determinedly mindful of the possibility of how little Joe could be trusted to play it straight in his need to protect Mary’s memory among the families. Especially if his need to hide Mary’s foibles was as strong as Hallie thought—or until he was given no other choice, or it was too late.

  A word she used only when she was out among the guys rose to mind unbidden. One hell of a night had sure turned into one great bitch of a morning—in more ways than one.

  Beside her, George rose, thrust his forepaws straight out in front of him in a long stretch, then came over and reached up to nose the bare spot between Maura’s hikedup pant leg and her bootee. The baby jumped excitedly in her arms and Hallie bounced her lightly, absently talking to her about the dog while her mind wended its way elsewhere.

  If Joe didn’t know about Mary’s sessions with Zeke, therein could lie any number more of the needed puzzle pieces that would help them to bring this wannabe nightmare into perspective. She chewed the inside of her cheek. It might also provide her with some idea of what Joe was hiding from her, and possibly from himself.

  She glanced through the kitchen pass-through, listened to make sure Joe wasn’t yet returning from the basement, and eyed Zeke.

  “You think you could step back far enough from the fact Ben and Sam are in some of these pictures to take ’em and give me your professional opinion of who this person might be or what he’s capable of?”

  “Oh, gee, Hal.” His entire face shrugged. “Aside from the kids being some of the subjects, I’m a sit-down-and-I’ ll-listen-while-you-spill-your-guts therapist, not a profiler. I’d need a lot more information to render a decent opinion than a handful of pictures with a couple of strange notes on ’em.”

  “Even though Mary was the first subject and one of your patients, and I tell you everything Joe told me about what he found out about Mary that even as her therapist you might not know?”

  “Hmm.” He looked thoughtful. “I suppose maybe. I can’t guarantee absolute accuracy, but I know a couple of people....”

  Hallie nodded. “Just keep it quiet, huh? I’ve got a strange feeling about this.”

  “That you won’t share with me,” Zeke said.

  Hallie smiled grimly. The more timid bits and pieces she learned about her late friend, the more it seemed that each of the men Mary took into her life had been given different ingredients of her psyche to hold on to and keep separate from any of the rest. As though perhaps, as Zeke suggested, if they were all put together in one place, an explosion of unwanted proportions might occur.

  “That I’m not sharing with Joe yet, either,” she said.

  “Ah, well.” Zeke grinned. “At least then I don’t feel so bad.”

  Hallie laughed, a deep, no-longer-bitter sound of acceptance of the things that had not worked in her marriage. “Did you ever?”

  He shook his head. “Probably not. But then, analyzing my way out of every argument—”

  “‘Argument’ was my word for them,” Hallie reminded him, grinning. “You called it ‘discussion.’”

  “Fine,” he agreed, smiling back. “Every ‘discussion’ we had was my part of screwing up our marriage.”

  “Yeah.” She nodded. “And wanting to confront and fix everything was mine.”

  “Joe’d suit you better in that regard.”

  The remark was offhand, unexpected and took a moment to register.

  “What?” Astounded, she stared at him.

  Zeke shrugged. “You always argued about everything because you enjoyed the debate. You were honest with each other to a fault, you told each other everything including things most people won’t tell their analysts. And instead of making you worse friends and partners, it made you better. Extrapolate the rest of a possible relationship from there. I did.”

  “You—what?” Even more dumbfounded, her mouth agape, Hallie stared at him. “You extrapolated a relationship for me and...” The question petered out as disbelief flared into outrage. “Tell me, Dr. Thompson, were you still married to me at the time you did this extrapolating?”

  “Briefly.”

  The desire to sink to wronged-fifties-movie-heroine depths and slap the man for his thoughtless stupidity rose in Hallie for the first time in her life.

  “You unbelievable bastard.”

  He nodded. “I think you called me that back then, too.”

  She gave him “huffy.” “Because it was true, no doubt.”

  He grinned. “No doubt.”

  They measured each other in silence for a moment; not for the first time, Hallie was glad that the marriage hadn’t gotten in the way of the divorce. Then she drew a breath and shifted gears, returning to her immediate concern.

  “I want to look at her file.”

  “What?” It was Zeke’s turn to look nonplused. “Whose file? Mary’s? Hallie, you know I can’t—”

  “Yeah, yeah,” she agreed impatiently. “Client confidentiality. Save it, Zeke. You can’t break confidence with the dead. And there might be information in it to protect the living. And that includes our sons and this baby, Zeke, so—” She broke off.

  Joe’s heavy step sounded on the basement stairs. She swept her free hand at the spread of pictures on the table.

  “I’ll get copies and fax ‘em to your private machine? Nobody sees ’em but you?”

  “Sure.” He nodded. “But about Mary’s file...”

  “I’ve gotta have it, Zeke. If Joe’s telling me the truth, it’s taken him a year to come up with practically nothing. I need to see the file.”

  The basement doorknob rattled; Hallie watched Zeke, waiting.

  He hesitated, breathed deep, and reluctantly, silently assented.

  Hallie patted his arm. “Thanks,” she whispered and turned to greet Joe.

  His face, when he appeared in the dining-room doorway, was somber.

  “Your phone line’s been cut inside the house,” he said.

  Reconnection was a simple matter of pulling the excess phone wire across the basement ceiling to the wall, poking it through the foundation—and the snow—and hooking it up to the box outside.

  With Zeke’s I-have-no-idea-what-I’m-doing help, repairs were quick and relatively painless.

  Except that even when completed, the phones still didn’t work.

  It was Hallie’s turn, then, to come up with the simple thought of handing Maura to Joe and pulling the kitchen phone off the wall. Sure enough, in the easiest sabotage possible, besides cutting the line near the external source in the basement, the phone had also been unplugged from its wall socket. The same proved true of the phone in Hallie’s bedroom, and the one in the downstairs library-cumoffice-cum-guest-room.

  As far as her police radio and cell phone were concerned, the power sources had been removed from them, too, and the charger for her extra cell-phone battery was also unplugged, the battery discharged. Finding this, a strange and disturbing connective thought occurred to her. Grabbing her jacket, she went out to the garage and lifted the hood of her minivan.

  Oh, yeah, there it was. She sucked air between her teeth and swore under her breath. The distributor cap was missing.

  Furious, she spun about, forced herself to examine the garage, and not to succumb to fury’s blindness.

  Figuring that, like the phones, this would be another of those nasty Halloween-like pranks that would cause frustration at best and time lost in an emergency at worst, she searched up, down, and around the garage for the distributor cap, making herself look and not miss the obvious setit-aside places just because they were. The cap wasn’t far away, merely sitting squarely in the open on the windowsill, not quite hidden by Joe’s truck parked in the garage beside hers; but it was out of the van nevertheless.

  An
ger edging the corners of her mouth, Hallie plucked the cap from the window ledge and turned it over in her hands several times, examining it, before she replaced it in the van. Finished, she turned to glance soberly at Joe, who was standing just inside between the interior house door and the screen door that opened onto the garage landing; Maura sat snugly in the crook of his arm, an afghan covering her against the chill. When Hallie caught his eye, he set his jaw and nodded; handed Maura over to Zeke behind him and stepped into the garage, closing the inside door after himself.

  “Everything worked before we left to pick up your man,” she said without preamble.

  “You had no reason to move the van once you got home from work yesterday?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “And I didn’t use it last night because I was with you in the truck.”

  “I remember,” Joe said wryly. “I was having a hard time keeping my attention on the road because of it.”

  “Yeah, well, hmm.” Hallie looked at him. “We can discuss our mutual distractions at another time, okay? Right now we’ve got this—”

  Sudden noise interrupted her train of thought. From outside the garage came the definitive buzz of a multiplesnowmobile chorus accompanied by the distinctive bass roar of at least one of the county’s four-by-four Suburbans and the basso-profundo thunder of something that sounded suspiciously familiar, but which Hallie had no desire to identify at the moment. The entire orchestra rumbled to a halt in Hallie’s driveway. Zeke opened the living-room door and poked his head into the garage.

  “Company,” he announced.

  “Company?” Joe looked at Hallie.

  She regarded him innocently.

  “Hallie...”

  “Welll—” She tipped her head, acknowledging his tone. “Timing’s bad, you’re right,” she said. “But last night, before... Well, before, you made me so mad I couldn’t resist.”

  Suspicion sharpened his gaze. “What have you done?”

  She folded her hands behind her back. “Well...”

  “We’ve covered well,” Joe advised her.

  She made a face, narrowed her eyes, calculated the moment, the words key to it. Thought of some. Brightened.

  “You know that old saying about there being safety in numbers?” she asked.

  “Hallie.” Not her name, a command.

  She nodded, regarded the exterior garage door, picked her moment to coincide with its raising and Joe’s first view of a vast array of snow-booted feet beneath it.

  “I called Gabriella last night and told her you were home.”

  Calling his sister Gabriella, Joe decided not for the first time, was often tantamount to issuing an open invitation to be visited at will by the plague or Murphy’s Law. You simply didn’t do it unless you really had a grudge against a man—which he supposed defined Hallie’s use of his I‘llarrange-the-party-just-tell-me-when-and-where-you-don’ t-want-it-and-I’ ll-be-sure-everybody-comes sister to welcome him home in style.

  Although he doubted very much that even Hallie would have meant to have Gabriella’s sense of the impromptu descend upon them before lunch on a snow day.

  He sighed. Family was a wonderful commodity—except when you’d been away too long without either their approval or sending them at least a postcard.... Well, if your family was large and close and you did that, you’d better be prepared to come back and find them all staring you down, waiting for an immediate explanation.

  Or most of them, anyway.

  Ranged at the yawning mouth of Hallie’s garage, he counted at least three of his sisters and their husbands, two of his brothers and their wives, nieces and nephews too many to count, his mother and father, his-uncle-the-priest, Mary’s mother, Hallie’s mother and Ben and Sam—and Frank and four of the other guys from Fugitive Apprehension, Hallie’s captain—hardly a good sign, that—and four deputies, two of whom, Crompton and Montoya, he’d met last night.

  “Surprise,” Hallie said.

  “Oh, it is,” Joe agreed darkly—and with some menace. “You planned this.”

  “Not for this morning, obviously. But since they’re here...”

  “Communications out from the inside,” he mused, nodding, catching her drift immediately. Amazing how rapidly they could fall into the old habit of apparently telepathic exchange without missing a beat, but even for the densest investigator this one had to be a gimme: whoever had cut wires, unplugged phones and removed the distributor cap obviously had easy access to the house. Possibly even while Hallie or the deps who’d baby-sat Maura last night were in it. “Family here, safety in numbers and you get to do a little snooping while I get chewed out by fifty people who just happen to be able to get here even though the rest of the county’s shut down because of last night’s blizzard.”

  Hallie beamed at him, a visual pat on the head if ever he’d seen one.

  “Basically,” she said. “Aren’t snowmobiles wonderful things?”

  “Yeah, absolutely,” he agreed dryly. “And the fact that one of my brothers works for the road commission and plowed the route is pretty useful, too, huh?”

  She fluttered her lashes at him. “We do what we can.”

  “So it would seem,” he muttered, then bent his head to make sure the threat he was about to make was heard by her ears alone. “Bat those lashes at me again and I’ll back you up against my truck and kiss you so hard, your mother’s eyeballs will pop and your clothes will fall off by themselves.”

  “That could be interesting,” Hallie murmured, turned her back and stepped in front of him, brushed her hand surreptitiously over his crotch. His jeans promptly got way too tight; he bit back a groan and contained similar retaliation with an effort. “But like this,” she continued without missing a beat, “hardly useful at the moment.”

  Then she stepped forward and braced herself to catch Ben and Sam, who hurled themselves excitedly through the garage to greet her.

  “Mom, Mom!” Sam, rosy cheeked and sparky eyed, nearly beside himself with eagerness. “Guess how we got here!”

  “In Uncle David’s—” Joe’s road-commission brother “—snowplow!” Ben exclaimed before Hallie had a chance to guess. “He stopped at Grandma’s and said everybody was coming here—”

  “—and Grama made us put on all these clothes—” Sam indicated the scarves, hats, doubled mittens, snowmobile suits with thermal socks pulled over the legs showing above their boots. Having grown up with her mother, Hallie was pretty certain this was only the top layer; that if she looked, she’d find at least two or three more layers underneath. “Coz she said it’s a lot colder riding on a snowplow—”

  “So we wore even more clothes than we did when Dad drove us over to her house on the snowmobile—”

  “And we’re having a family reunion for Uncle Joe—”

  “An’ Uncle David says maybe he and Uncle Rob—” Joe’s other present older brother, Roberto, the family ACLU attorney “—can beat some sense into him about Maura—”

  “And we said,” Sam finished, “we thought that would be good—”

  But as usual, Ben put in the final word. “If you didn’t already do it for them.” He looked up at his mother, confident in his perception of her capabilities, and Joe’s less obvious frailties. “Did you?”

  “No.” Hallie shook her head. “I did not beat sense into him. I never beat sense into anyone. I persuade. Nicely. With words only. You know that.”

  “Oh, right.” Ben nodded, not the least disappointed. “I forgot. Did you persuade him, then?”

  Hallie glanced at Joe. His eyes were hooded, his mouth hooked slightly upward without telling her anything.

  He knew what he’d force himself to say eventually, but he couldn’t say or show it now.

  She slid her fingers into the crook of his hand and squeezed, offering, he thought—feeling instantly humbled—understanding and comfort without censure or disillusion. Then she returned her attention to Ben.

  “We’re still talking,” she said lightly, and Joe’s
heart clenched.

  “Talking’s good.” Ben nodded sagely, the eight-year-old son of a psychologist and a law-enforcement officer who’d spent more than a little of her career talking people out of doing things they shouldn’t do, or into doing things they should. “Talking means there’s hope.” He tipped his head back to see Hallie’s face. “Right, Mom?”

  “Right, sport,” Zeke said from the doorway. “Hallie, could I see you a minute? Joe, why don’t you and the boys bring the family in and let’s get this party on the road.”

  It was a wonderful way for the kids to spend a snow day.

  With plenty of their peers to play with, Hallie’s boys were in their element as hosts. Instead of stopping to bring Joe’s nieces and nephews—and, he noted, a few neighborhood strays—into the house, they let George out, then, without any urging, led the thundering herd of youngsters straight through the garage’s back door and into the yard. Within minutes snow forts, snowmen—and women and other creatures—and snow battles were in progress, divesting the local world of its snow-insulated cocoon of silence.

  Joe had a moment’s heartbeat-skip when he realized neither he nor Hallie had picked up the pictures on the dining-room table, but when he looked, they were gone. He raised a brow at Hallie and cocked his head toward the table the first time he got her attention. She gave him a quick thumbs-up Got ’em and disappeared after Zeke into the room that had once been the parish office and impromptu confessional. Within minutes, Frank and two more members of the FAT squad followed, shutting the door behind them.

  Being deliberately left out of the meeting gave Joe an odd feeling—especially knowing that Zeke was part of it. What part, he had no idea, but he really didn’t think it would change how he felt about it. Zeke was in, he was out. Territory—for the moment—established.

  He didn’t have long to contemplate what might be happening behind the closed door, however, before his family pounced on him.

  Individually and collectively they cornered him, offering unsought opinions, advice and chastisements, advice on how they felt he should go on from here, condolences he’d never given them a chance to tender in the days and weeks following Mary’s death when their sympathy would have been appropriate. In short, without putting it into so many words, they let him know how much he’d denied not only himself but them a year ago. They’d needed the chance to grieve with him, to celebrate with him through their tears when Hallie had learned the embryo transplant had indeed taken and she was carrying not only his, but Mary’s, child.