Читать книгу Christmas in Hawthorn Bay - Kathleen O'Brien - Страница 8

Eleven years later

MOTHERHOOD, NORA CARSON decided as she retreated to the kitchen, leaving her eleven-year-old son pouting in the living room, was not for the faint of heart.

Nora had three jobs—mayor of Hawthorn Bay, co-owner of Heron Hill Preserves and mom to Colin Trenwith Carson.

Of the three, being Colin’s mom was by far the toughest.

At least it was this week. Last week, when the Hawthorn Bay City Council had been sued by a recently fired male secretary claiming sexual discrimination, mayor had been at the top of Nora’s tough list.

Luckily, Nora had kept some of the secretary’s letters, all of which began Deer Sir. She produced them at her deposition, explaining that she didn’t give a hoot whether their secretaries were male, female or Martian, as long as they could spell.

The lawyers withdrew the suit the next day.

Now if only she could make this problem with Colin go away as easily. But she had a sinking feeling that it was going to prove much thornier.

She put the blackberries and pectin on to boil—she had orders piled up through next Easter, so she couldn’t afford a full day off. She read the letter from Colin’s teacher while she stirred.

Cheating.

Fighting.

Completely unrepentant.

These weren’t words she ordinarily heard in connection with Colin. He wasn’t perfect, not by a long shot. He was a mischievous rascal and too smart for his own good. But he wasn’t bad.

This time, though—

“Nora, thank heaven you’re home!” Stacy Holtsinger knocked on the back door and opened it at the same time. She was practically family, after eight years as business partner and best friend, and she didn’t bother with ceremony much anymore.

Nora folded the letter and slid it into the pocket of the World’s Greatest Mom apron Colin had given her for her birthday. “Where else would I be, with all these orders to fill? Out dancing?”

Stacy, a tall brunette with a chunky pair of tortoiseshell glasses that she alternately used as a headband, a pointer or a chew toy, but never as glasses, went straight to the refrigerator and got herself a bottled water. She wanted to lose ten pounds by Christmas and was convinced she could flood them out on a tidal wave of H₂O.

Nora thought privately that Stacy would look emaciated if she lost any more weight, but the water sure did give her olive skin a gorgeous glow. She wondered if Stacy had her eye on a new man. She hoped so.

“Well,” Stacy said, raking her glasses back through her hair as she slipped onto a stool, “you could be down at city hall, I guess, trying to knock sense into those Neanderthals. Which would be disastrous right now, because I need you to make an executive decision about the new labels.”

Nora groaned as she added the sugar to the blackberries. Her mind was already packed to popping with decisions to make. What to do about the latest city-council idiocy—trying to claim eminent domain over Sweet Tides, the old Killian estate by the water? What to do about that crack in her living-room wall, which might be the foundation settling, something she could not afford to fix right now?

And, hanging over everything, like a big fat thundercloud—what to do about Colin?

“Labels are your side of the business.” The berries were just about ready. Nora pulled out the tablespoon she’d kept waiting in a glass of cold water, and dropped a dollop of the jam on it. Rats. Not quite thick enough.

“Come on, Nora. Please?”

Nora looked over her shoulder. “Stacy, do I consult you about whether to buy Cherokee or Brazos? What to do if the jam’s too runny? No. I make the product, you figure out how to sell it, remember?”

“Yeah, but—” Stacy held up a proof sheet. “This is a really big change. And I drew the artwork myself. I’m sorry. I’m weak. I need reassurance.”

Nora put the spoon down. It was probably true. Stacy was one of the most attractive and capable women Nora knew, but her self-esteem had flat-lined about five years ago when her husband had left her, hypnotized by the dirigible-shaped breasts of their twenty-year-old housekeeper.

Zach was a fool—although rumor had it he was a happy fool, having discovered that The Dirigible was into threesomes with her best friend, whom Stacy had dubbed The Hindenburg.

“Okay.” Nora wiped her hands. “Show me.”

Nora would have said she loved it no matter what, but luckily the new label was gorgeous. Done in an appropriate palette of plums, purples, roses and blues—all the best berry colors—it showed a young beauty on a tree swing, with a house in the background that was the home of everyone’s fantasies—wide, sunny porch, rose-twined columns and lace curtains fluttering at cheerful windows.

Everyone wished they’d grown up in that house.

But Nora really had.

She looked up at Stacy. “You used the real Heron Hill?”

The other woman nodded. “You don’t mind, do you? I changed it a little, so that no one could sue or anything. But it is the ultimate dream house, don’t you think? It was our business name before you sold the house, and we’ve worked that out legally with the new owners, so—” She broke off, fidgeting with her glasses. “I mean…you really don’t mind, do you?”

“Of course not.” Nora smiled. She’d been born at Heron Hill. And Colin had spent his first few years there. It had indeed been the dream house. But when her father had died, and Nora discovered that the Carson fortune was somewhat overrated, she and her mother had decided to sell it.

Heron Hill was now a very popular local bed-and-breakfast. Nora’s mother had moved to Florida last year, so she didn’t have to pine over the loss. It stung Nora, though, sometimes, when she passed it and spotted a stranger standing at the window of her old bedroom. But whenever that happened, she just reminded herself of the big fat trust fund they’d set up for Colin with the proceeds from the house, and she’d walk on by, with her chin up and no regret.

“The label is gorgeous,” she said. “It will sell so well I won’t be able to keep up with the demand.”

“Great. I’ll tell the printers today.” Stacy tucked the proof back into its protective folder and gazed happily up at Nora. “Now, can I return the favor? I haven’t a clue whether Cherokee or Brazos blackberries taste better, but I do have a breakdown of their sales figures for the past three years, which might—”

Nora laughed. “No, no, I’ve got that part covered. But I—I could use some advice about Colin. He’s gotten himself into some trouble, and I’m not sure how to handle it.”

Stacy raised one eyebrow. “Colin’s in trouble? Trouble he can’t charm his way out of? I didn’t know there was such a thing.”

Nora knew that wasn’t just empty flattery. With his curly black hair, big blue eyes and dimpled smile, Colin was already so handsome and winning that most adults couldn’t stay mad, no matter what he did. He’d get caught right in the act of something devilish, like the time he’d learned the signs for several off-color words and had the class rolling out of their seats with laughter while his poor teacher tried to figure out what the joke was. Or the time he and a few friends had fiddled with the school’s front marquee and changed the phrase We Love Our Students to We Love Our Stud Nest.

Both times, Colin had apologized so humbly—even, in a nice touch, using the sign for ashamed—that the principal had ended up praising his honesty instead of kicking him out of class.

“I know, but this time it’s different,” Nora said. The jam was ready, and she began to pour it into the sterilized jars she had lined up on the central island. This little house, which she’d bought after selling Heron Hill, wasn’t much to look at, but it had a fantastic kitchen.

“Different how?”

Nora sighed. “They say he and Mickey Dickson cheated on their math test.”

Stacy raised her brows. “What? He hates Mickey Dickson. Heck, I hate Mickey Dickson. Sorry, I know he’s some kind of cousin of yours, but the kid is a brat. And an idiot. I take it Mickey cheated off Colin’s paper, not vice versa?”

“Yes, but Colin let him. He said he knew Mickey had been doing it for months, so this time he made it easy…and he deliberately answered all the questions wrong, so that Mickey would get caught. He said he didn’t mind going down, as long as he brought Mickey down with him.”

“Yikes.” Stacy shook her head. “That’s gutsy. Dumb, but gutsy.”

“Yeah, and that’s not all. After school he and Mickey had a fistfight on the softball field. Tom called about an hour ago. He and Mickey just got back from the emergency room. They thought his nose might be broken, but apparently not, thank God.”

Stacy twirled her glasses thoughtfully and let out a low whistle. “Wow. It does sound as if Colin has slipped off the leash. What are you going to do?”

“I have no idea. He starts his Christmas break soon, which is both good and bad. Good, because he won’t have to see Mickey, but bad because he’ll have way too much spare time. Colin and ‘free time’ are a recipe for disaster.”

“Maybe you can get him to help you with the jams.”

Nora laughed as she screwed the lid onto the first of the filled jars. “No way. He’s a bull in a china shop. Last time he helped, he broke a gross of jars and ate more berries than he canned. We’d be out of business by New Year’s.”

Stacy laughed, too, but she kept twirling her glasses, which meant she took the problem seriously.

“Besides,” Nora went on. “Hanging out here with me is too easy. We’d have fun. I want to give him some chore that really hurts. Something he’ll hate so much he won’t even think about getting in trouble again.”

Stacy scrunched up her brow, thinking hard. “Man, I don’t know. What did your parents do when you got in trouble?”

Nora tilted her head and cocked one side of her mouth up wryly.

“Oh, that’s right,” Stacy said, laughing. “I forgot you were the reigning Miss Perfect for a couple of decades there.”

“Miss Boring is more like it.” Nora began wiping down the countertop, though she hadn’t spilled much. “My friend Maggie used to say that if she weren’t around to keep things stirred up I would probably turn to stone.”

“I wish I could have met her,” Stacy said. “You always make her sound like a human stick of dynamite. I’ll bet she’d know how to handle Colin.”

Nora’s eyes stung suddenly. She turned around so that Stacy couldn’t read her face too easily. “Yes,” she agreed. “She probably would.”

“Well, okay, let’s think. I wasn’t exactly dynamite, but I wasn’t Miss Perfect, either. I remember one summer, when I was about sixteen, and I’d just met Zach. I stayed out until dawn. I thought my dad was going to kill Zach, but my mom held him back. They made me spend the rest of my summer volunteering every night at the local nursing home.”

“Oh, yeah? How did that go?”

“It was hell. I wanted to be wrapped in Zach’s manly arms, and instead I was reading the sports section to an old guy who hacked up phlegm into his plastic cup every few sentences and kept yelling, ‘Nothin’ but net!’ every time I mentioned the Gamecocks.”

Nora laughed.

“It’s not funny,” Stacy said, though there was a twinkle in her eye. “It could have scarred me for life. To this day, whenever I see a basketball, I twitch.”

“Okay, then, I won’t send Colin to the nursing home just yet. I’ll reserve that for the day he comes home at dawn smelling of Chanel.”

She looked toward the living room, which was suspiciously quiet. “Right now he’s in there stuffing candy canes into the goody bags for the Christmas party. Even that little punishment annoyed him. He seemed to think nearly breaking Mickey’s nose was a gift to mankind, something to be applauded.”

“In there?” Stacy pointed with her tortoiseshell glasses. “Sorry, but I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure I saw him climbing the tree when I came in.”

Nora frowned, then, without stopping to say a word, reached for the latch. She yanked the door open and, pulling her sweater closed against the blast of December wind, took the steps down to ground level quickly.

Oh, good grief. Stacy was right. Colin wasn’t indoors, working through his punishment. He was about six feet up the leafless maple tree, hanging by his knees from a large, spreading branch. His sweater nearly smothered his face, leaving his skinny rib cage exposed and probably freezing.

Beneath him, his friend Brad Butterfield squatted in the middle of about two dozen scattered candy canes, some broken to bits inside their plastic wrappers. Both Brad and Colin were eating candy canes themselves, letting them dangle from their lips like red-striped cigarettes.

“Come on, Colin, you’re only hitting like thirty percent. Let me try. It’ll take us all day to do these damn bags at this rate.”

“Shut up, butt-head,” Colin said, his voice muffled under folds of wool. “You’re the boat, and I’m the bomber. That’s the deal. Now…target ready?”

With a heavy sigh of irritation, Brad began moving the paper bag slowly across the winter-brown grass. When he was directly under Colin’s head, a candy cane came sailing down. It fell squarely into the bag, and both Colin and Brad made triumphant booming sounds.

Stacy, who now stood at Nora’s shoulder, chuckled softly. “Well, what a coincidence,” she said. “Nothing but net.”

MOST PEOPLE IN HAWTHORN BAY said the Killian men had an unhealthy obsession with gold. A Civil War Killian ancestor supposedly buried his fortune in small caches all over the Sweet Tides acreage, and no Killian since had been able to drag himself away from the house, no matter how hard the community tried to run them off.

But Jack Killian, who hadn’t set foot in Hawthorn Bay for twelve years and therefore had a more objective perspective, didn’t think their problem was the gold.

It was the water.

Living in the South Carolina lowlands meant your feet weren’t ever quite dry. Thousands of acres of spartina marshland, endless blue miles of Atlantic coastline, haunted black swamps and twisting ribbons of tea-colored rivers—that was what Jack saw when he dreamed of home, not the antebellum columns and jasmine-scented porches of Sweet Tides.

And certainly not the gold.

Almost every major incident in his life was tied to the water. He’d been four the day they’d dragged his grandmother out of the river behind Sweet Tides, where she’d unsuccessfully tried to drown herself. He’d been nine the day he’d broken his fibula learning to water-ski behind their new boat—Killian luck never lasted long, and that boat had been sold, dime on the dollar, before the cast had come off Jack’s leg. He’d been sixteen the day his mother, lying on the floor in a pool of her own blood, had sent him to find his father, who’d been drinking malt liquor at a shanty on the edge of Big Mosquito Swamp. It was the first time Jack had driven a car alone.

And, of course, he had won Nora Carson on the water—the day they’d wandered away from a high school science trip to a loblolly pine hammock, and he’d kissed her beside a cluster of yellow water lilies.

He’d lost her on the water, too, the day he’d taken her filthy cousin Tom out to a deserted spoil island, beat the crap out of him and left him there to swim home on his own. He hadn’t realized that he’d broken Tom’s arm, rendering the jerk unable to swim an inch, but the cops had decided ignorance was no excuse.

Jack had escaped an attempted murder charge by the skin of his teeth, and by a timely enlistment in the United States Army.

He hadn’t been home since. Until today.

He drove his Jaguar around back, between the house and the river. In Jack’s lifetime, no one but the sheriff had ever entered Sweet Tides from the fancy front, where gray, peeling Doric columns guarded the portico like ghosts from a long-lost world.

Yeah, the front of Sweet Tides was pure Greek tragedy, but the back was merely pleasantly ragged, with mossy oaks, leggy camellias, crooked steps and weathered paint that all needed a lot more tending than they ever got.

Jack’s brother, Sean, stood at the back porch. When Jack killed his engine, Sean loped down the uneven steps, arms open, a huge grin on the face that looked so eerily like Jack’s own.

“You made it! I thought surely the minute you hit the marsh flats you’d break out in hives and make a U-turn back to Kansas City!”

Jack folded Sean in with one arm and ruffled his unkempt black curls with the other. They both still wore their hair a little longer than other men—it was Jack’s one rebellion against the establishment. But while Sean clearly still cut his own with the kitchen scissors, Jack paid a small fortune to someone named Ambrosia, who knew how to keep the uptown-edgy-lawyer look from revealing its roots as backwoods bad boy.

“I thought about it,” he admitted. “But curiosity got the better of me.”

Sean raised one eyebrow into a high, skeptical arch, a favorite Killian trick. “You managed to keep your curiosity under control for twelve long years.”

“Yeah, but this time you sweetened the pot. I couldn’t pass up the chance to thwart the evil plans of that lowlife Tom Dickson and his cronies.” Jack popped the trunk, exposing a suitcase and a garment bag. “Give me a hand with these, okay? I brought some extra suits, in case the bastard puts up a fight.”

Sean smiled. “Oh, he’ll fight, especially once he realizes you’re his opponent. Somehow I don’t think he’s ever forgiven you for trying to kill him.”

Jack hoisted one of the black leather cases and extended the other to his brother. He held onto the handle an extra second.

“Just for the record. If I’d ever tried to kill Tom Dickson, he’d be dead.”

“Point taken.” Sean chuckled as he led the way into the house. “Though I’m not sure that logic will cut much ice with Tom.”

Given the dilapidated state of the exterior, Jack was surprised to see how neat and clean—if somewhat Spartan—the interior of the mansion had been kept. The rooms had all been painted recently enough to shine a little, and the heart-of-pine floors were freshly varnished.

There wasn’t much furniture. Their dad—Crazy Kelly, his friends called him—had sold all the antiques years ago, in his attempt to set the world record for butt-stupid poker playing. He’d lost the grand piano betting on a pair of tens.

But the few pieces Sean had scattered around were sensible and high quality. Even Kelly Killian hadn’t found a way to sell the marble off the walls, or the carvings off the cornices, so the interior still made quite an impression.

As they walked past the elaborate painted-brick archway that led to the living room, Jack realized he was tensing up instinctively. Their mother had kept her collection of miniature glass unicorns in there, and it still made Jack cringe to remember how he and Sean had occasionally joined in their father’s mocking laughter. “Unicorns! Are you daft in the head, Bridey, or just a goddamn fool?”

When she’d fallen that day, she’d hit the case and broken every one. Jack didn’t look into the living room as they passed, but out of the corner of his eye he imagined he still saw the twinkle and glitter of shattered glass.

So, he thought. Not all the ghosts had moved out.

But overall, the place had definitely changed for the better. It didn’t smell damp and defeated anymore, as if it stood in a stagnant bog of booze and tears.

“I put you in your old room,” Sean said. “But let’s have a drink first, okay? There’s some stuff I probably ought to fill you in on.”

They dropped the cases at the foot of the wide, curving staircase and headed toward the smoking room, where the liquor cabinet had always been kept. Jack didn’t wonder, even for a second, what kind of drink Sean intended to offer him. Neither of them had ever drunk liquor in their lives—except for that one night, the night before Jack had joined the Army. Jack had gotten plastered that night, and it had scared the tar out of him. There was no nightmare more terrifying than the fear that they’d turn into their father.

“Soda? Or iced tea?” Sean had obviously tossed out the cherry-inlaid liquor cabinet, with its front scarred from Kelly’s fury when Bridey had dared to try to lock him out. Instead, Sean had installed a handsome modern marble wet bar. “I’ve got water in six flavors. The chicks love it.”

“I’ll take a Coke,” Jack said. He parked himself on one of the bar stools and looked around the mostly bare room. “I have to tell you, buddy. For a junk dealer, you have remarkably little junk.”

Sean handed over the cold can and shrugged. “Yeah, well, I buy to sell. I don’t keep. I don’t care much about stuff, you know? All these people, they accumulate these expensive trinkets, hoping the stuff will define them, or save them, or…whatever. Bull. If material things had any power, then Mom…”

He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t need to. A hundred crystal unicorns, and not enough magic in the lot to stop a single tear from falling.

Jack’s apartment in Kansas City was equally spare.

“Anyhow,” Jack said to cover the silence. “Fill me in. You said that the city council has let you know they want to buy Sweet Tides. And that they’ve hinted that, if you don’t sell willingly, they’ll find a way to claim eminent domain. Somebody wants to put up a shopping plaza or condo complex or something like that, right?”

“Yeah. They brought it up earlier this year, but I thought they were just trying to rattle my chains, you know? I thought they’d back off, because it’s such a stupid idea. Unless they can claim that Sweet Tides is a blight, it’s going to be hella hard to assert eminent domain. But they haven’t let go of the idea. They’ve already tried, informally, of course, to talk numbers with me.”

“And what kind of number did they suggest?” Jack knew that, unfortunately, the people displaced by eminent domain often ended up taking less than their property was worth, just because they didn’t have the savvy to know how to fight back. “Was it even in the ballpark?”

“That’s what made me nervous. They offered top dollar. Does that make sense to you?”

Jack shook his head slowly. “Not as a first offer. They have to know they need bargaining room.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“So what’s going on? You know these people better than I do. Do they really want to put a shopping plaza out here that bad? Didn’t look to me as if the commercial area had spread out this far yet anyhow.”

“It hasn’t. And no, they don’t want that blasted shopping center. They couldn’t. The one they built last year doesn’t have full occupancy yet.”

Jack sighed. “So. Can I assume this is just a new case of Killian fever? Someone has decided that the trashy Killians can’t be allowed to live this close to decent folk?”

“Maybe.” Sean looked thoughtful. He came out from behind the bar and stood at the picture window, which looked out toward the river. “Or maybe it’s a different kind of fever. Maybe it’s the gold.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Sean. No one really believes that anymore. Everyone knows that, if there had been gold on this property, dad would have found it and bet it all on a pair of tens.”

Sean was quiet a long time, just staring out the window, as if he was hypnotized by the moss swaying from the oaks. Finally he turned around.

“But what if there is? We used to think we’d find it, remember, Jack?”

Of course he remembered. The two of them had sneaked out almost every night for a year, right after their mother had gotten sick, and had dug holes until they’d been so tired and dirty all they could do was lie on their backs and stare at the stars. And whisper about what they’d do with the gold when they found it.

Sean, who was two years older and much nicer, had always listed a detox center for their dad first. Jack had called him a moron. Betting that Kelly Killian could get off the bottle? You might as well throw the whole treasure away on a pair of tens.

“I remember,” Jack said. “That’s about a thousand hours of our lives we’ll never get back, huh?”

Sean shrugged. “Another piece washed up last month. We got six inches of rain in two hours. When it stopped, there was a Confederate coin out on the South Forty.”

Jake wasn’t impressed. Coins had washed up at odd intervals for the past hundred and fifty years. Just enough to keep the rumor alive. Never enough to make anybody rich.

“So, look, Sean, what exactly do you want me to do? I can try to get an injunction against the city council, preventing them from pursuing the eminent domain claim. But it’ll only slow it down. If they’re determined, they just might win in the end. The Supreme Court has ruled that this sort of thing, to bring in necessary revenues, is legal.”

“Slowing them down is enough.” Sean looked tired, Jack suddenly realized. “Truth is, Jack, I don’t really care about the house. I’m ready to let go of it. Too many memories, I guess. I’ve done everything short of an exorcism, but the damn place is still haunted, you know?”

Jack nodded. He’d never understood why Sean stayed in the first place. Their only living relative was their grandfather, Patrick, who had once been a strong force in their lives, but who now resided in the local nursing home.

A major stroke had brought him down—no one was sure how clear his mind was now, Sean had explained when he’d called Jack after the stroke. Patrick had almost complete loss of motor control on his left side. He couldn’t even leave his bed, unless the nurses hoisted him into a wheelchair and strapped him in.

Surely he could be moved to another nursing home, in some other city, if Sean really wanted to get away.

Jack certainly had wanted to. Once Nora Carson had made it clear she never wanted to see Jack again, Hawthorn Bay had held nothing for him. He was sick of fighting the Killian reputation—even if he had contributed plenty to it himself.

And he wouldn’t have lived in this house for all the gold in the world.

“Okay. But if you don’t want to save Sweet Tides, why did you need to import a big-shot Kansas City lawyer like me?”

Finally Sean smiled. “To slow them down, like you said. I want time, Jack. I want time to find the gold. And I want you to help me.”

Jack hesitated. Then he laughed. “You sure you haven’t taken up the bottle? You’re talking crazy now.”

“No, I’m not. A friend of mine, a woman named Stacy Holtsinger, she’s found something. You don’t know her, she came here after you’d already left. But she’s doing a master’s in history, and she’s going through a lot of the old Killian letters for her thesis. She found one that seems to talk about the gold.”

“Everyone talks about the gold,” Jack said irritably. “Words are cheap.”

“She’s got the letter now, but I’ll show it to you tonight. I think you’ll see what I mean. It feels important. It feels real.”

“Sean, look, you told me you needed a lawyer, not a treasure hunter. I’m afraid I left my metal detector at home. Besides, I’ve got a job. I’ve got cases in Kansas City that—”

“A month. That’s all I’m asking. Every big shot can get at least a month off, can’t they? It’ll mean we have Christmas together. And you can see Grandfather.”

That would be nice. He and his grandfather had been close when Jack was little. Patrick had provided the only affectionate “fathering” Jack had ever gotten. Some of his happiest memories were of walking through the marshes with his grandfather, bending over to inspect the bugs and butterflies Patrick pointed out.

When Patrick and Jack’s dad had fought for the last time, Patrick and Jack’s grandmother Ginny had moved away. Through the years, he’d visited them often—glad that he didn’t have to return to Hawthorn Bay to do it.

But he hadn’t seen Patrick since his grandmother’s funeral last year. He hadn’t seen him since the stroke. He had to admit, it was tempting.

“And hey,” Sean said, “we can clear out the rest of the stuff in the attic while you’re here. So even if we find nothing, the time won’t be a waste.”

Sean put his tea down on the bar and shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans. He stared at Jack, and his face had that mulish look that all Killians got when they weren’t planning to back down, come hell or Union soldiers.

“Come on, Jack. I haven’t asked for a damn thing in twelve years. Can’t you give me one month?”

Jack couldn’t say no. He’d started out tough, and the Army and the law had only made him tougher. But not tough enough to say no to Sean when he sounded like this.

Besides, Jack was already here. That had been the biggest hurdle. Now he might as well look around. And if Sweet Tides was going to get bulldozed to make room for Slice O’Pizza and Yuppies R Us, he might as well stick around long enough to say a proper goodbye.

He’d say goodbye to old Patrick, too.

He stood. “Okay. I’ll stay till after Christmas. Meanwhile, I’ll go talk to the city attorney and see what this band of weasels is planning. I’ll pretend we’re going to fight tooth and nail. I’ll see if I can buy you some time.”

“Thanks, Jack. Really, thanks a lot.” Sean looked pleased, but still, oddly, a little uncomfortable. “I—Well, if you’re going right now I guess there’s one other thing I probably should tell you.”

“Yeah?” Jack raised the Killian brow. “What’s that?”

“Know how I told you Tom Dickson is on the city council?”

“Of course. That’s how you got me to come, remember?” Jack grinned. “Actually, I could probably have guessed that anywhere there’s a band of weasels, Tom Dickson will be nearby. What else is there? Have I got some other old friends on the council?”

“Sort of. Not exactly a friend, and not exactly a councilman. You see, it’s the mayor.”

“Okay. Tell me. Who is mayor these days?”

Sean paused.

“I’m sorry, Jack. It’s Nora Carson.”