Mary's Child Page 16

  “Mrs. Montalban, are you all right?” It was Ben this time, and as always, he was more curious than worried.

  “Fine.” She coughed, sipped the water Hallie pressed into her hand, cleared her throat. “I’m fine, dear.” She still sounded a little hoarse but better. She took another sip of water, shook her head and sighed. “There, that’s better.” She looked at the children. “Just a little frog in my throat.”

  To a youngster, Joe’s nieces, nephews and the neighbor kids accepted this explanation and went more quietly on their way to the playroom at the back of the house. Sam and Ben, however, stared at Mary’s mother, bug-eyed and fascinated.

  “You have a frog in your throat?” Sam asked. He sent his own mother a priceless look of total, horrified mystification. Joe watched Hallie swallow and cover her mouth, trying not to laugh. The boy turned back to Clara Montalban. “A frog?”

  “How did it get there?” Ben, as usual, was more direct. He pulled a folding chair over, climbed up onto it and studied Maura’s grandmother’s throat with a scientist’s excitement. “Can I see?”

  Taken literally aback and not knowing what to say, Clara took two steps back. Looking ready to explode with mirth, Zeke stepped out of the crowd and hoisted Ben off the chair, grabbed Sam up under his other arm and headed quickly for the hallway.

  “C’mon, guys, I’ll explain it to you later.”

  “But, Dad, how can she have a frog in her throat if—”

  The front-hall bathroom door shut behind them, cutting off whatever “if” question Ben might have had.

  Eyes bright with thwarted laughter, Hallie soothed Clara with a vague explanation of how literal boys of a certain age—especially if they had Zeke as a parent—could be. She waited until Clara, suspicious but almost mollified, moved off to find someone more obviously sane to speak with, then she fled. Joe grabbed her arm, bringing her to a halt.

  “What’s up?”

  Nearly choking with laughter, she gasped, “I can’t right now, Joe, really.”

  “Hallie...”

  Sputtering with mirth now, she peeled his fingers from her arm and begged, “Later, I promise. Really, please, Joe. Gotta help Zeke.” And she was gone.

  Joe watched her meet Zeke and the boys, swallow her laughter long enough to ask her disgusted-looking boys something, and when they nodded, send them on their way. Then she and Zeke took one look at each other and collapsed together, howling but trying to hide it, over some private joke.

  Jealousy struck without warning, stopping Joe in his tracks. Hell in a handbag, had she already reduced him to this? One night and...

  But it wasn’t merely one night. It was thousands of them, shared before she’d ever met Zeke—thousands of them afterward spent in patrol cars and on stakeouts, sharing their own private jokes.

  Sharing everything, Joe used to think, without ever wondering why he’d done so. Even though he himself had never shared quite everything with Hallie, especially after Zeke and Mary had entered their respective lives. And since every marriage had its moments, of course she’d have private jokes with Zeke; she’d been married to him for nearly eight years, after all.

  But that didn’t mean Joe liked either what he saw or what he understood of it. High-school of him in the extreme, no doubt, but there it was. Emotion that overwhelmed but that also remained undefined and therefore uncommitted was like that. Especially for a guy who had the funny feeling that in a single night he’d found everything he’d ever been looking for but now that he’d found it, he had no idea what to do with it.

  Particularly when it—she—had been under his nose for thirty years.

  Cursing the vagaries of his sense of duty versus his responsibilities and his desires, Joe turned around to avoid watching Hallie with Zeke and nearly ran into Montoya.

  “Sir,” she said, startled, snapping back out of his path and nearly, Joe thought, saluting.

  Which, given the circumstances and the fact that he no longer had rank nor had he even—as far as he knew—been her instructor when she was in training, seemed odd to him. Given it was a day full of oddities, however, he dismissed this one as unworthy of note.

  “Talk to you, Montoya?” he asked.

  She cast a glance over her shoulder—no doubt looking for rescue, Joe thought—then nodded.

  “Hallie—” He paused. No, too personal. Better to keep this official-sounding in spite of the party atmosphere. He corrected himself. “Lieutenant Thompson mention to you the way we—she—” Yeah, he’d been the one to send Montoya and Crompton home last night, but no sense advertising he’d also spent the night. “Found the phones this morning?”

  “No, sir.”

  Too formal. Uncomfortable with him. Possibly been told to hold her distance, damn it. By whom? Frank? The captain? Hallie...

  “That’d be Sergeant Nillson.”

  Frank, Joe thought. “He ask you if anybody stopped by? You saw or heard anything? Make or get any calls last night?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Yes, sir, what? Joe wondered, exasperated. Yes, sir, all three, or only the first. No, she definitely was not comfortable with him. He contained impatience with an effort. “And?”

  “Oh, of course, yes, sir.”

  She expelled a breath and drew herself up, a young dep in report mode. Except she wasn’t all that young. And regardless of his former department status, he was the last person in the house to whom she’d have made a report.

  “It was late, sir. No one stopped by. Leroy—Deputy Crompton, that is—made rounds outside when we thought we saw a vehicle stop in front of the house. We didn’t think to check the phone wires, sir, and the vehicle moved on before we could get a license on it. We figured it was probably all right.”

  She shrugged her mouth, a move uncharacteristic with the rest of her presentation, and continued. “There was enough snow by then, too, sir, that Deputy Crompton would have found footprints if anybody’d been up next to the house. We didn’t take any calls for Lieutenant Thompson, but I believe Deputy Crompton phoned his wife when he came back inside after his rounds.”

  Joe nodded. “You make any calls yourself, Deputy? Use the lieutenant’s police band at all?”

  “No, sir. No need, sir. Had our own unit with us.”

  Another nod. “Thank you, Deputy.” The dismissal, That’ll be all, rose in his throat; he bit it back. He turned away, saw Montoya’s posture relax out of the corner of his eye; turned back as a sudden thought occurred to him. “One other thing, Montoya?”

  Stiffness returned. She viewed him guardedly. “Yes, sir?”

  “Do we have a problem here I don’t know about?”

  She paled. “Pardon, sir?”

  “A problem, Montoya.” He was patient, circumspect, trying not to spook a less experienced investigator with his need to know something she might not be supposed to reveal to him. “You seem familiar. Have we met before last night?”

  She hesitated. Her cheek worked, back teeth chewing it from the inside.

  He wanted to be kind, but sometimes kindness was more hindrance than help. “Spill it, Deputy.”

  She inhaled deep, expelled the breath. “Yes, sir.”

  “Yessir, what?” Impatience getting the better of him. In his opinion, hesitation in a deputy was not a good thing. Another dep’s hesitation had once gotten Hallie shot. “Yes, we’ve met before, yes, we have a problem, yes, you seem familiar. Yes, what?”

  Her mouth thinned, lip curled briefly and was controlled; she drew herself up. “Yes, sir, all of it, sir. We’ve met before, we’ve had a problem, you make me uncomfortable, I’ll live.”

  “Refresh my memory. I’m older’n you, I’ve got a lot on my mind right now and time’s short.”

  “’Bout two years ago, sir.” Her tongue shoved out her lower lip from the inside, stiffening it, then relaxed. “I was a state trooper then. There was a domestic at my house—my boyfriend was out of work and drunk. I was dressing for work. He got hold of my weapon. My daughter and I.
.. we were hostages. He threatened us...threatened her. Neighbors heard us yelling. He fired a shot. They called it in. You were first on the scene.” She swallowed, wet the inside of her mouth, her lips. Looked at Joe, recognized the dawn of comprehension. Nodded. Continued. “Yes, sir, that’s it. Bullet ricocheted, turned my daughter into a vegetable until she died a little over a year ago. He saw you and panicked, put the gun to my head, took it away and started firing at the neighbors. You had no choice, you put him down.”

  Joe nodded, remembering the time with revulsion. All shootings were subject to internal investigation, but this one had been worse than most. Montoya had pushed the matter with IID and it had gotten ugly. Despite all her boyfriend had done, Montoya had wanted Joe charged with her boyfriend Tomas’s murder. She’d claimed that what had happened to her daughter was an accident and that if then Sergeant Martinez had handled things properly, the entire matter might have been resolved without further shooting.

  Even when he’d finally been exonerated by internal investigations, Joe had questioned his actions for months after. Still questioned them, truth be known. When you were by yourself out there and an incident occurred, all you had was your own judgment, your own perceptions of the situation to back you up. And in Joe’s perception at the time, Montoya’s boyfriend had been begging to go down. Joe had held off, trying to talk to the man, but the situation went downhill faster than fast. When he’d begun firing wildly about the neighborhood, there’d been no other choice; Joe had taken him out.

  When there were no amends to be made, he’d tried hard to put it behind him, had only succeeded when Mary’s death blasted everything else from his mind. He should have remembered Cat more clearly, though. Her name, her appearance, something. She’d changed a lot physically, true, but that was little excuse when you’d been the instrument by which another person’s life changed forever. He could only imagine it was the change in her uniform that did it: she’d shed the navy blue of the state police for the county’s beige and brown.

  “You left the troops after the investigation because of your daughter.” A statement of memory, not a question.

  She nodded. “They gave me an extended mourning, then I took a leave. When she died six months later, I, uh, I came back for a while. It didn’t work out, so I went home to Texas until...until things...” She hesitated. “Until things felt better. Then I came back here again and hired in as a dep.” There was another hesitation. Then she lifted her chin and looked him in the eye. “I wanted to tell you I’m sorry for everything I put you through at that time, sir. I wasn’t myself. You did what you thought you had to. I accept that.”

  Joe swallowed regret. “Thank you, Montoya. That, uh, that—Thank you. It means a lot. I never got a chance to tell you then how very sorry I was for your loss. I still am. And I appreciate you being willing to work with me, look after my daughter the way you did last night despite our history.”

  “No problem, sir.” Montoya’s eyes were neutral dark brown pools in her face. “Lieutenant Thompson’s baby—” her very lack of emphasis on changing Maura’s parentage from his to Hallie’s supplied the italics for her thoughts “—wasn’t even a breath on the wind. She didn’t have anything to do with it. And anyway, the past is dead. It’s the future we have to pay attention to.”

  “True,” Joe agreed. “But thank you anyway, Montoya.”

  She gave him a clipped nod. “Is that all, sir?”

  “That’s all, Montoya.”

  He would have sworn she ducked by him and fled.

  When Joe finally had a chance to talk with him later, Crompton verified Montoya’s story—although in his version, it was Montoya who’d noted the vehicle out front, pointed it out to him. The only time the two deputies were out of sight of each other was, as Montoya stated, when she was upstairs with Maura, or when Crompton went out to look around.

  By the time he was able to catch up with Hallie again, lunch was ready. Eager to sample the first real food he’d had since he’d been gone—Hallie’s burn-your-mouth-andprivates chili didn’t count—he forked up a mouthful of paella the moment his plate was passed. With barely a pause in dishing out, his mother reached over and rapped his hand with the flat of a spatula and sent him a quelling glance.

  “Grace first,” she reminded him.

  Feeling like a chastised little boy despite his age, Joe gulped his mouthful of rice, put down his fork and waited. Although he rarely prayed anymore himself, he’d forgotten what it was like to be “home,” with all its rules and entanglements.

  In the serving line ahead of him, he saw Hallie glance over her shoulder at him, eyes bright, shoulders shaking with silent laughter. It was a sight he knew and relished. Part of Hallie’s charm was that regardless of almost anything he’d done or felt bad about, she was able to laugh at him, point out whatever it was he needed to see to laugh at himself.

  She was also singularly able to understand when laughter was not the key; when silence, darkness and arms wrapped around him were all that would keep the hounds of hell at bay. He’d done the same for her.

  They’d shared any number of those nights: all of Mary’s miscarriages; the night Zeke finally left. The day he’d shot Montoya’s boyfriend and the weeks after, when hell was his own self-doubt.

  The afternoon she’d nearly died and he’d held her, covered in her blood, begging her to live. She’d even been there when he’d finally broken down and wept over that at her bedside later, alone except for the faces of the other deputies and detectives peering through the wall of glass surrounding her room in intensive care. Then she’d come out of her coma to squeeze his hand, touch his cheek—tell him in a voice that was barely a whisper that he’d better quit soaking her bandages or the nurses would pin back his ears.

  And had made him laugh in spite of himself then, too.

  Now, when she took her plate through to an almost-quiet, spot in a corner of the playroom at the back of the house, he followed. His entire life, it seemed, he’d never been able to do anything less.

  Had never wanted to.

  “All right, it’s later,” he said without preamble. “What’s so funny about Clara having a frog in her throat?”

  Hallie’s lips compressed around laughter. “That’s driving you crazy, isn’t it?”

  “Unfortunately.”

  Laughter escaped. “You really need other things to think about, Joe.”

  “True, but that’s never stopped me before.”

  She gave him grinning-but-earnest. “I can’t tell you here. Really, Joe. It’s the wrong place and time. Later, I promise. After everybody’s gone. Truly.”

  “Hallie...”

  “Okay. I’ll give you a hint.” Her eyes danced with mischief. “I won’t only tell you about it later, I’ll demonstrate.”

  “Thompson—”

  “Think about it, Joe. That’s all you’re going to get.”

  He made a face and swore under his breath, ready to grumble, but accepting there was no way he’d get anything further out of her now, so he changed tactics—and subjects. “How’d the huddle go?”

  She shrugged, not bothering to pretend she didn’t know what he was talking about. “Not sure yet.”

  “What’s Zeke got to do with it?”

  Amusement formed her mouth again, teasing him, tempting him, taunting him. He wanted to wipe the grin away with a kiss she wouldn’t forget. All in good time, he promised himself. All in good—

  “Jealous?” she asked, interrupting his promise to himself. The question was sophomoric, she knew, but she needed to distract him until later when she could explain... what she’d done—and was about to do—and why.

  “Damn right,” he said.

  Shocked, she studied him.

  It was his turn to let his shoulders rise and fall, to look away. “Sorry. You’ve never included Zeke in an investigation and left me out before. With the frog stuff, that’s twice today. A lot’s happened and I’m curious and insecure, sue me.”

  Emotio
n swamped her at his admission. She touched his face and sighed. Sometimes male egos were a thorough pain in the butt. “I’m not all that secure about what’s happening here either, Joe, but Zeke saw the pictures. They freaked him a bit. Can’t blame him. They freaked me, too. So even though it’s not really what he does, I asked him to try to profile the shooter. Keeps him out of our hair and gives him something to concentrate on that might actually help.”

  “And?”

  “Jury’s still out. I told him not to broadcast them, but he’s got a friend who does profiling for the Minneapolis PD when they need it. They’ll consult and let us know ASAP.”

  “Okay.”

  They sat in silence for a bit, enjoying the paella, beans and fruit salad, watching the children eat, giggle, play. Awareness was an invisible line between them tying them together beyond where their knees touched, their shoulders met where they sat close together on the small sofa.

  It was also comfort and discomfort at once: if Hallie turned only slightly away from him, it would have been easy for Joe to wedge her into his side, against his hip; slide her under his shoulder and slip his arm around her, across the top of her chest—or inside her shirt where the cool smoothness of her camisole seemed to beckon him to skim his hand down to find her breast. Or he could cup her chin and turn her face into his kiss, lose himself in hers.

  In her turn, Hallie knew his warmth along her side and found herself craving his heat, as well. It was not in her nature to back away from anything, but especially not from Joe. So she let sitting beside him bring them closer by hauling one of his younger nieces up onto the couch on her other side, forcing herself to lessen what little distance there was between them. Then she canted her head to listen to something the little girl was trying to tell her, exposing her neck to Joe—making herself vulnerable and flirtatious at once, reminding him of other things she’d learned from him.