Читать книгу Undercover in Copper Lake - Marilyn Pappano - Страница 8
ОглавлениеAs Sophy combed conditioner through Daisy’s silky black hair, the little girl peered up at her. “Are me and Dahlia stupid?”
Startled by the question, Sophy lost her balance and slid from her knees to the floor beside the bathtub. “Of course you’re not stupid. Why would you think that?”
“We played a game at church, an’ the teacher asked a lot of questions. Me and Dahlia didn’t know the answer to any of ’em, and this kid named Paulie said we were stupid. I think any boy named Paulie is stupid.”
Sophy sighed internally. Paulie Pugliese’s father was a deacon, his mother the choir director. They loved their authority in the church and their spoiled brat of a little boy better.
From the far end of the tub, hidden beneath a dress and cap made of fragrant pink bubbles, Dahlia deigned to join the conversation. “Miss Jo said you can’t know a subject you ain’t been taught. She asked Paulie to count to ten in French, and he couldn’t do it. She said he wasn’t stupid and we weren’t stupid. We just needed to learn.”
“Un, deux, trois.” Sophy smiled awkwardly when both girls scowled at her. “Counting in French. Miss Jo’s right. If you’ve never been to church or read the Bible, how could you know what’s in it?”
“It don’t matter.” Dahlia stretched one leg up and fashioned a bubble high heel. “Mama’ll be home soon, and we won’t have to go again.”
“I kinda liked it.” Daisy anticipated her sister’s censure and didn’t wait to respond, “Sorry! But they sang songs, and they had pictures to color, and there were doughnuts. I like doughnuts.”
Sophy pushed to her feet and dried her hands. “You guys get rinsed and dried off and put your jammies on, and maybe we can have our bedtime snack outside.”
Dahlia almost drowned out Daisy’s cheer. “Sitting on dirty wooden stairs? Oh, boy.”
“It may have escaped your notice each time we’ve gone into the shop, but there’s a lovely porch downstairs with flowers and chairs and everything. Go on, now, and help your sister.”
The last wasn’t necessary, she acknowledged as she left them in the bathroom. Dahlia was always quick to give Daisy whatever she needed. Maybe part of it was just being the big sister. Probably a larger part was that their mother had rarely been in shape to help the kids herself.
In the kitchen, she pulled out the industrial-size blender that used to make margaritas when she had friends over but now mostly turned out fruit smoothies. Listening to the up-and-down of the girls’ voices, the words indistinguishable, she spooned in ice cream, milk, a little vanilla and three crumbled chocolate-chip cookies her mother had sent home from dinner with them.
By the time the girls shuffled in, she’d divided the milk shakes between three tall cups, added straws and long spoons, and placed them with a pile of napkins on a tray painted with sunflowers.
Used to her inspections, Dahlia had brought a towel and the wide-tooth comb. Neither of them minded water dripping down their backs from wet hair, Daisy had earnestly explained to her, and Sophy had just as earnestly explained that she did. She gave both heads a quick rub, combed their hair, made sure they wore flip-flops, then picked up the tray of shakes.
After securing the front door behind them, Sophy led the way down the stairs and around to the front porch. With the flip of a switch, two ceiling fans came on, one above each side of the porch. The glass-windowed doors in the center looked in on the dimly lit quilt shop, all bright colors and endless possibilities, and a path led across the tiny yard to the picket fence and the sidewalk.
The evening was relatively quiet. Most church services were over. All the bars were closed. An occasional car passed on Oglethorpe Avenue, and a few couples strolled around the square, their destination A Cuppa Joe or one of the restaurants still serving customers. It was her favorite time of day, a time to reflect, to unwind, to set her worries to rest and consider the next day.
Or to answer questions.
“What is this?” Daisy asked. Dressed in ladybug pajamas, she ignored the rocker and crouched back on her heels, holding the drink in both hands.
“A milk shake.”
She jiggled it. “It doesn’t shake.”
“No, but it can make you shake. It’s cold.”
“What’s in it?”
“Milk, ice cream and a surprise. You have to taste it to find out.”
Hesitantly Daisy put her mouth to the straw and sucked until her jaw puckered. “I can’t get any.”
“It’s got to melt a little first. Use the spoon.” Sophy took a large bite of hers, savoring the richness of the ice cream and her mom’s incredible chocolate-chip cookies.
“Where’d you learn to make it?”
“My sister taught me.”
“Miss Reba?”
“That’s the one.” Sophy used one foot to keep her rocker moving. To Reba’s kids, Daisy and Dahlia had just been two more kids to play with after Sunday dinner. Their mother hadn’t been so accepting.
You brought Hooligan kids into your house? You’ll wake up one morning trussed like a hog with all your money and your car gone.
They’re five and six years old. Where do you think they’re going to go?
Reba had scowled. I see TV. I read the news. The little one works the pedals while the big one steers. Besides, my friend Linda is a foster parent, and she said they couldn’t pay her enough to take those kids again. Her friend Tara fosters, too, and she said they set her house on fire. They climb out windows, they jump off roofs, they run away, they steal. Neither one of them’s ever spent a day in school.
Sophy had given her a dry look. Then they’ll keep me alert and aware and on my toes.
Reba had sighed. Oh, Sophy.
Sophy knew what that meant: poor, childless, clueless Sophy. Overprotected, overoptimistic, all sunshine and rainbows. Reba had forgotten the Christmas when Sophy had been threatened by two armed killers in the back room of her shop. She wasn’t Mary Sunshine. She knew bad things happened in the world, and if she could keep a few from happening to Dahlia and Daisy, she would be happy.
“Miss Reba doesn’t like us.” Dahlia sat cross-legged in her chair, all skinny limbs, her usual scowl fading only when she took a bite of ice cream. “She called us Hooligans.”
Heat flooded through Sophy. She’d thought the kids were occupied in the family room with Reba’s kids and her father when her sister had started that conversation. She should have known better. Know-it-all mother-of-four parenting-expert Reba certainly should have.
“She shouldn’t have said that,” Sophy agreed. “It was rude, and it’s not true.”
Dahlia shrugged. “’Course it’s true. Mama says most people don’t like us, and that’s okay because we don’t like ’em back.”
Sophy didn’t know what to say to that, because sadly that was the case. Way back in middle school, when some kids had been giving Maggie a hard time, she’d overheard one teacher ruefully tell another, Everyone has to have someone to look down on. Maggie, it seemed, had gone out of her way to give people reasons to look down on her. Where someone else might have taken it as a challenge to prove them wrong, she’d been in their faces, flaunting every bad decision and behavior.
Granted, she’d never been taught anything different. Her brothers, her father, her uncles...Holigans had made an art of reveling in their reputations.
“I like you,” Sophy said. “And Mom and Dad, and Mr. Ty and Miss Nev and Miss Anamaria.” Lord, it was a short list. It made her heart ache.
Dahlia responded with a disbelieving snort before taking a huge bite of ice cream. On the floor, without lifting her gaze from an ant crawling across the boards, Daisy asked, “What’s a hooligan?”
“Remember, Mama told us. It’s someone who runs wild and breaks all the rules and misbehaves and acts like a heathen.”
“I like running wild and making people shake their heads and say, ‘You ain’t nothin’ but trouble, Daisy Holigan.’” Daisy grinned. “I like being a hooligan.”
Wondering which neighbor or irresponsible family member had told her that, Sophy forced a smile. “You like acting that way. But the secret is, you and Dahlia are clever and smart and capable little girls who can be anything you want to be.”
Another snort from Dahlia, and she’d lost Daisy’s attention completely. The girl had risen to her feet and was avidly staring at the sidewalk—rather, at the dog being walked there.
“Good evening,” the man at the other end of the leash called.
Sophy repeated his greeting as Daisy moved to the second step. “What’s your dog’s name?”
“Daisy! We don’t talk to strangers!” Dahlia whispered fiercely.
“But he’s got a dog.”
Sophy made a mental note to talk to the girls about strangers and ruses involving pets.
“Her name is Bitsy,” the man said. “You want to meet her? If it’s okay with your mom.”
The girls’ voices drowned each other out: “She’s not our mom,” from Dahlia and “Please, can I?” from Daisy.
“Sure.” Sophy followed Daisy into the yard as Bitsy pulled her owner through the gate. Wiggling from nose to tail, the dog sniffed the girl, making her giggle. The sound almost stopped Sophy’s heart. Was that the first time she’d heard Daisy laugh?
The man offered his hand. “Hi. I’m Zeke.”
“Sophy.” She shook his hand, his fingers long and strong, his palm uncallused. She still thought of Copper Lake as a small town, but he was one of the twenty thousand or so residents who weren’t a regular part of her life. He was fair skinned with auburn hair, blue eyes and a grin that had surely charmed more than his share of women. Though only a few inches taller than her, he was powerfully built—broad shoulders, hard muscles, not lean but solid. First impression: he was the sort of guy who could make a woman feel safe.
Though she knew better than to rely on first impressions.
“You picked a perfect evening for sitting on the porch with milk shakes.”
She glanced at the glass in her left hand. “The day’s not over until we’ve had ice cream.”
“A woman after our own hearts. Bitsy loves the ice-cream shop, but we’ve got to be careful. Her vet caught us there once and wasn’t happy.”
A glance at the short distance between the dog’s rounded belly and the ground made that easy to believe. “Cute name,” Sophy said while thinking the opposite. All of the dogs she knew had solid names—that they lived up to—Frank, Misha, Scooter, Elizabeth, Bear. Bitsy sounded so fussy for a grown man’s dog.
Zeke winced. “My daughter named her. Bitsy has a digging fixation, and my ex is a big-time gardener, so Bitsy came to live with me.”
So he was handsome, friendly, liked dogs and was single. Sophy was beginning to wonder how their paths hadn’t crossed before tonight. She thought she’d dated every friendly single guy in town.
Every one of whom had wound up married or engaged. To someone else.
Oh, Sophy. Reba’s sigh echoed in her head. It wasn’t a good time to meet anyone new, particularly anyone handsome with a quick grin. She’d taken on a huge responsibility when she’d volunteered to keep Daisy and Dahlia, and that meant putting her social life on hold.
“Your daughter and Bitsy are lucky you were able to take her.”
“There’s not much I wouldn’t do to make my kid happy...besides get back together with her mom. And I’ve kind of grown attached to the mutt, too.”
A car turned onto Oglethorpe at the nearest cross street, and they both glanced in that direction. The engine made a low growl, one that spoke of power tightly reined in. Sophy wasn’t much of a car person, but she could tell the vehicle was older than she was, was meticulously maintained and pretty much defined the phrase muscle car.
And it was painted a gorgeous deep metallic red. Her favorite color.
The air shimmered and the ground vibrated as the car slowly passed. Okay, maybe that was a little fanciful, but it felt that way. When it was gone and she turned back to Zeke, he was crouching on the ground beside Bitsy, head ducked, coaxing her to offer Daisy her paw for a handshake.
When the dog finally obeyed, he stood. “We’d better head home. She always wants a treat when she shakes, and I didn’t bring any. It’s been nice meeting you, Miss Daisy, Miss Dahlia...Miss Sophy.”
“Nice meeting you, too. Maybe we’ll see you again.”
Zeke grinned as he and the dog headed toward the gate. “You can bet on it.”
* * *
Monday was the kind of late-summer day that helped keep Sean in the South. The temperature was in the low eighties, the humidity down for a change, and occasionally when the wind blew across the Gullah River, he could smell the coming of fall, cooler weather, changing leaves, shorter days.
He’d driven around Copper Lake the night before, noticing how much things had changed and how much they’d stayed the same. New businesses and old ones, new people and old ones, familiar places, even a good memory or two. Charlie’s Custom Rods on Carolina Avenue looked as if the only turnover had been in merchandise. The front plate-glass window that Sean and his buddies had cracked late one Saturday night a lot of years ago was still there, the crack still covered with duct tape grown ragged.
The SnoCap Drive-In was still open, too, though it had had an update on its paint from neon turquoise to a subtler shade, and the same old guy who’d run it fourteen years ago was behind the counter.
The Heart of Copper Lake Motel still stood on Carolina, too, seriously renovated, but he would have recognized it. That was where he’d checked in, taking a parking space on the back side of the building even though his room was on the front.
After a restless night’s sleep, Sean knew the first thing he had to do today was talk to Maggie. He’d left the motel with that in mind but decided to have breakfast first. An hour had passed, and he still sat in the coffee shop on the downtown square, a couple blocks from the jail, nursing his third cup of regular sugar-and-cream coffee, reluctant to confront two blasts from the past at once: the sister he’d let down and the jail where he’d spent more than a few nights himself.
The bell above the door rang every few minutes with customers arriving and departing. Most of them were in a hurry to get to work and paid little attention to anyone besides the couple filling orders. They were named Joe and Liz, husband and wife, he’d picked up eavesdropping, and they were strangers to Sean. He’d seen a few older faces that were vaguely familiar—lawyers, maybe, or probation officers or social workers—but none that he could put a name to.
The knot in his gut knew his good luck wouldn’t last.
Liz was topping off his coffee when the doorbell sounded again. “Morning, Sophy,” she called, then asked him, “Can I get you anything else?”
“No, thanks.” Without glancing her way, Sean stirred sugar and cream into his cup. He’d been concentrating on the scene outside the window—square, gazebo, flowers, war memorials, traffic, pedestrians—for so long that he’d memorized it, but it was better than actually making eye contact with someone.
It beat the hell out of making eye contact with someone who might recognize him.
A young and unhappy voice came from the vicinity of the door. “I. Want. To. Go. To. School.”
“I know you do. You’ve made that perfectly clear. But you’re not old enough,” a woman, presumably her mother, replied. She sounded tired, as if they’d been having this conversation for a while.
“That’s not fair! I’m not a baby!”
“I didn’t say you were. You’ll start next year.”
“I want to go this year!”
Sean had never had conversations like that when he was a kid. For starters, his mother had left them when he was about five, and they’d all been born knowing not to tempt their father with tantrums. Patrick Holigan hadn’t been a talkative lad to start with, but he’d had loads of things to say about what happened to children who disrespected their dear old pop.
“You want your usual for here or to go, Soph?” Liz asked, and Sean detected hopefulness for the second option in her voice. The coffee shop was too peaceful a place for a small child who excelled at whining.
“We’ll take them to go,” Sophy said. Hopefulness in her voice, too, as if the kid might suddenly become sweet and sunny when they walked back outside.
Good luck with that, lady.
He shifted his head enough to see Sophy, her back to him, wearing a red dress that clung to a sleek body—muscular arms, narrow waist, well-toned butt, great legs. She wore her blond hair in a ponytail falling halfway down her back and shoes that seemed a compromise between looking good and feeling good. It was a great backside. Did the front side live up to its hype?
Standing beside her, also with her back to Sean, was the girl with the voice pitched to cut glass. Her red shorts skimmed her knees, her top was red with purple stripes, and on her feet were yellow flip-flops decorated with fuzzy, sparkly blue-and-green butterflies. Too much color for this early in the morning.
Her hair was straight, too, pulled into a ponytail that was falling loose, but unlike her mother, hers was jet-black. Her arms were folded mutinously across her middle, and she was tapping one foot as if planning how to break into school and stay there.
Pushing them out of his mind, he rubbed one hand over his jaw, two days’ worth of beard scratching even over the calluses years of mechanic work had built on both his hands. He’d called the jail when he got in last night and found out that they were generous in their visiting hours, taking breaks only for meals. In double the time it would take him to drive over and find a parking space, he could be sitting in a room with Maggie.
Telling her Don’t talk to anybody. Don’t cooperate. This is worth going to jail for.
Most of Craig’s employees in his other businesses knew that from the start. Don’t snitch; don’t inform; take the heat and the time from any trouble they got into, and they’d get along just fine with the boss.
Maggie hadn’t known, probably hadn’t cared. Hell, she’d gotten herself and her kids on Craig’s radar without the benefit of even one paycheck.
If there’s a bit of trouble around, you kids will find it, Grandpa Holigan used to say. Apparently it was still true.
Sophy and the girl left, taking drinks in paper cups with them. He waited a minute to give them time to walk away, left a decent tip for table rental, and walked out to find Sophy standing at one of the outdoor tables and chairs that had been in his blind spot, talking to an older woman, and the girl stealthily making her way to the corner of the building.
Sean passed her, turned the corner and, totally surprising himself, stopped, waiting for the little girl to slide around the corner to freedom. It came in about five seconds, ending in a sudden halt as she realized she wasn’t alone. Her gaze traveled up from his work boots, over his legs, on up across his black shirt and finally reaching his face.
If his shaggy hair and unshaven face scared her, it didn’t show. She still looked as bold as could be. But the sight of her put fear into him. The dark skin and black hair he’d seen in the shop, but the delicate features of her face: the shape of her nose, the deep dark eyes with long lashes, the mouth, the jaw, the fragile, vulnerable, tough air about her...
This was his niece. Maggie’s baby. The threat Craig was using over both him and Maggie.
“Who are you?” She had the sense to whisper so her voice wouldn’t draw Sophy’s attention.
“The one who’s gonna drag your butt back to your foster mother if you don’t go on your own.”
A scowl transformed her pretty little face into a pretty little unhappy face, and she folded her arms over her chest. “You’re not my boss.”
Matching the scowl was easy. He’d perfected it sometime between crawling and learning to walk. No five-year-old could do it better.
After a stare-off, she backed up a few steps, curving around the corner until she was out of sight. Her voice whispered back, though. “I don’t like you.”
“Good for you.”
A moment later, Sophy called, “Come on, Daisy. It’s time to get to work.”
Leaning one shoulder against the warm brick wall, Sean imagined just being with Daisy all day was work in itself, especially for a pretty blonde who hadn’t been raised in the Holigan ways. Apparently, it was too hard for Maggie when she had been raised in the family.
He watched Daisy dance away as Sophy tried to claim her hand to cross the street. Sophy won that round. The kid dragged her feet, but Sophy kept her moving. Daisy deliberately walked on the wrong side of the light pole at the next intersection, forcing Sophy to release, then quickly reclaim her hand. His gaze followed them all the way to their destination, an old house with a shop on the first floor and living quarters upstairs, just down the street, then he spun around and headed for his car.
He’d seen the younger of his nieces. Now it was time to see Maggie.
* * *
The county jail was located behind the Copper Lake Police Department. Back in the day, most of the cells had been in the basement with only small, barred windows high on the outside walls. The only thing a prisoner could see, depending on his position, was the sky or the feet of people walking by. The glass, inlaid with wire between the layers, had been thick, making conversation tough though not impossible. Being loud and disruptive was one of the Holigan family qualities.
Sean parked his car, shut off the engine and stared at the squat brick building ahead. He could think of about a hundred things he’d rather be doing—even wrangling the youngest Holigan had to be easier than this—and he seriously considered putting it off for an hour or two or five. He hadn’t talked himself into action either way when abruptly the driver’s door was jerked open.
Sean flinched, leaned away, drew one leg onto the door frame for a quick kick, but a flash of images stopped him: eyes he’d once known as well as his own, an ear-to-ear grin, a gold badge, a holstered weapon. That was all he had the chance to notice before strong hands pulled him from the car and into a bone-jarring hug.
“I’ll be damned,” Ty Gadney said, letting him go, then giving his shoulder a punch that made him fall back against the car. “Granddad always said you’d be back someday, and here you are. Hell, Sean. You could keep in touch with the people who tolerated your smart mouth at least once every fifteen years.”
Ty, all grown up, shaved head, a detective, just like he’d always wanted to be. How many nights had Sean shared his room, dimly lit, the box fan in the window drawing in the damp night smells, talking about what they were going to do someday?
Sean had to force his voice to work. “How is Mr. Obadiah?”
From behind Ty came the answer in a distinctly sultry, sweet Southern woman’s voice. “Feisty and sassy as ever.” She stepped into view, pretty, womanly, and maternal and sexy all at once.
Ty’s grin widened as he slid his arm around her waist. “My old buddy Sean. My fiancée, Nev Wilson.”
She offered her hand, and Sean took it after a moment. She held on longer than he expected. “So you’re Daisy and Dahlia’s uncle. Heartbreakers, all of you.”
Saying that he’d only learned of his nieces’ existence yesterday, that he’d caught his first glimpse of Daisy this morning, didn’t seem the way to ingratiate himself with Nev, so he pulled his hand back. “Don’t blame them. You can’t choose your family.”
“Oh, don’t I know it,” she said.
There was a story behind that fervent agreement, but he wasn’t here to learn anyone’s story but Maggie’s.
Letting his hold on Nev slide free, Ty circled to the front of the car, hands on hips, an admiring look on his face. “So you got The Car. Babe, from the time he was thirteen, this was all he ever talked about—this car. A 1970 Chevelle SS 454. Oh, man, she’s a beauty.”
When Nev made a dismissive sound, he gave her a chastising look. “Don’t be making fun of my appreciation for a fine vehicle. You practically cried when your car burned up at the Heart of Copper Lake, and it had nothing on this one.”
“That car was my baby.”
“This car is his baby.” Like a cloud passing over the sun, Ty went serious. “You here to see Maggie?”
“If she’ll see me.”
“Of course she’ll see you. Why wouldn’t she?”
Sean could think of fourteen years’ worth of reasons.
“Hold on, and I’ll go in with you.”
Taking Nev’s hand, Ty walked with her to a big old Mercury a few spaces away, half a block long and two lanes wide, hell on gas but with enough room for a party inside, all done up in baby-blue. Sean had worked on that car plenty of times when he was living with the Gadneys—and plenty of times when he wasn’t. It was the only way he’d had to repay Mr. Obadiah for giving him a place to stay when he needed it.
Another thing he would have to do: go see Mr. Obadiah, knowing that he’d let him down, too. This trip was going to be all kinds of fun.
After kissing his fiancée and helping her into the car, Ty stood back and watched as she drove away. Sean watched, too—his old friend, not Nev—then quietly said, “She’s a beauty, too.”
“Ain’t that the truth.” Ty grinned. “I’m a lucky man.” He slapped Sean on the back and turned him toward the jail entrance. “So what have you been doing all these years, and where have you been doing it?”
What have you been doing? Patrick used to ask Declan and Ian, among other relatives, when they showed up after an absence. Time was the answer so often that it became a family joke.
One fifteen-month stint in prison had taken all the humor from it for Sean.
“Working on cars.” Being able to give a respectable answer sent a kind of relief through him. “Mostly for people who buy cars like mine and don’t have the time or the skills to restore them.” Honest work, even if his boss wasn’t.
“I’m not surprised. You’ve always had the magic touch. And where?”
Sean walked through the glass door Ty held open. “Norfolk.” Just inside, he stopped. An air-conditioning vent in the ceiling nearby blew cold air onto the back of his neck—the reason a shiver was doing its damnedest to break loose. Not nerves. “Tell me, Ty. How much trouble is Maggie in?”
As Ty’s face went somber again, Sean could see traces of his grandfather in him. “A lot. This is the third time she’s been caught making meth at home with the kids. You know she’s got kids?”
Sean nodded.
“She loves Dahlia and Daisy as much as she can, but...she’s an addict, Sean, and a bad one. She’s got to get straight before she kills herself, for the kids’ sake if nothing else.”
His gut knotting, Sean stared at the wall behind the check-in desk. He figured pretty much his entire generation of Holigans had experimented with at least marijuana, but he didn’t know of any who’d gotten addicted. Like their father and grandfather and their fathers before them, most Holigans preferred a good Irish whiskey to feed the soul, enliven an evening and dull the pain.
“You ready?”
Though he wanted to run away like a scared kid, he nodded and followed Ty to the desk. Within ten minutes, he was in a communal visiting room filled with round fiberglass tables with four stools of matching orange attached. They reminded him of playground seating, somewhere between child-and comfortable adult-size, with no back support to lean against. They were bolted to the floor so they couldn’t be used as a weapon and seemed pretty indestructible. A box of ragged toys occupied one corner, and signs warning against physical contact of any sort hung on the institutional-green walls.
It was depressing as hell.
He was standing at one of the barred windows overlooking the alley when the door opened and Maggie shuffled in. The fact that she was here, finally in a room with him after so many years, shocked him. Her appearance really shocked him.
Her hair had been bleached blond at some point in the recent past and hung, greasy and tangled, to her shoulders, the strands about equal parts blue-black and dingy yellowish-white. She was fourteen years older, a few inches taller and thin, emaciated, looking more like a scarecrow than the girl he remembered. She didn’t lift her feet when she walked, and she had a bad case of the shakes, like a kid on a major caffeine high—or a meth head on an involuntary withdrawal.
People who knew him, other than maybe Craig and Ty, would scoff at the thought, but his heart broke just looking at her.
Her gaze darted around the otherwise-empty room, skimming across him a couple of times before finally settling. “Look at this.” She turned to include the guard standing impassively at the door in her words. “My big brother, Sean, finally come home. You know, me and Declan’s kids had bets going for a while that you were dead somewhere. Guess I win.”
Part of him wanted to step forward and wrap his arms around her and cuddle her the way he used to when bad dreams woke her in the night. The other part of him recoiled from the idea. “Hey, Maggie.”
“What brings you back here?”
“You.”
“Took you long enough. I’ve been here more than three weeks.”
“I just found out yesterday.”
She shuffled to the nearest table and plopped down on one stool, making the entire thing tilt. “Well, if you hadn’t run off and pretended the rest of us didn’t exist, you would’ve known sooner.” Picking at a sore on her arm, she asked, “You gonna get me out of here?”
“I—” Sean was at a loss for words. Craig hadn’t said anything about bailing her out, and he hadn’t given it a thought. If he did pay her bond, he could take her home, talk to her in private, have unlimited time to persuade her of the best action to take.
Or maybe run away with her.
Though if he took her home, Craig and his thugs would know where to find her. They could take care of her at their convenience, and him, too, and maybe Daisy and Dahlia. Surely she was safer in jail. Yeah, they could reach her there, but it would have to be harder inside than out.
And if he took her home, he would have to duct tape her wrist to his. She’d been an expert at sneaking out when she was thirteen. Twenty-eight and in need of a high, she would disappear the first chance she got. He’d be on the hook for the money and for her escape.
“I don’t have that kind of money,” he lied. “Sorry, Maggie.”
Anger knotted her thin little face. “What the hell you been doing all these years?”
“I work on cars.”
“Of course.” She rolled her eyes. “You always did love them stupid cars more than any of us. So if you’re not gonna bail me out, what the hell are you doing here?”
“I—I want to help you.” Help you get out of this life, help you stay alive, help you clean up... Though she didn’t look much interested in getting clean at the moment.
For a time she stared at him, then a ghost of the grin he remembered so well touched her mouth. “If you want to help me, go to Marian at Triple A Bonds and buy her goodwill with ten thousand bucks. That’s ten percent of my bail. Otherwise, I’ll take care of myself, Johnny boy, like I’ve been doing ever since you took off.”
Johnny. Only family had ever called him by the American version of his Irish name. Hearing it stung.
As she stood, hitching up her too-big pants, and walked away, he blurted out, “Maggie, I saw Daisy this morning.”
That stopped her a foot or so from the door. Slowly she turned, gave him a flat look, then said, “Yeah. Well. She’s five years old. If you hadn’t run off, you could’ve seen her a lot of times.” Dismissing him, she turned back to the guard. “Come on, bubba, get me outta here.”
After the door closed behind him, Sean exhaled heavily. “That went well.”
Oh, yeah, this trip to Hell was going to be all kinds of fun.
