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Authors: Eileen Dreyer

Head Games (5 page)

BOOK: Head Games
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Molly ignored him.
“I figured …” Down went Patrick's head. Up went the shoulders. “I don't know … nobody gives a damn what I do at home. Why should you?”
“Juanita was beside herself,” Molly said. “She was just about to get in touch with your parents.”
“I told you. They're in China.”
“You know, it's amazing. China is getting to be a very modern country.
It even has phone service now. Which means you don't have an excuse for not calling them with the news.”
He just shrugged. “Like they really give a rat's ass what happens to me.”
With any other kid, Molly would have argued the point.
Of course your parents care what happens to you. It may not seem like it …
But Molly knew Patrick's parents. At least she used to know them. And truth be told? She didn't have a clue whether Marty would even notice Patrick had disappeared if he were still in that fancy house in Virginia with him.
“What about Sean?” she asked of Patrick's younger brother.
His sneer said it all. “Ah, the shining light. The real heir apparent. Obvious to everyone from the day of his blessed birth.”
Molly could have been a lot tougher on Patrick if she hadn't understood that sentiment all too well herself. It was tough getting noticed when you had to be seen past perfection.
“Juanita also seems to be missing some cash …”
That brought Patrick right to his feet. “I didn't take it! I've been using my credit card. God, what do you think I am?”
Molly carefully shrugged. “I don't know. But whatever's going on, you're going to have to go home and face it.”
For a second he closed his eyes, as if struggling with her betrayal. When he finally opened them and faced her, Molly saw the kid who didn't relate to anything but abandonment.
“Why?” he demanded. “They don't care where I am. I can go to school anywhere. What if I just stayed here for a while?”
“I work two jobs, Patrick. And no matter what you'd like to believe, you're still not an adult. And to be perfectly frank, I'm not sure I'd leave you alone all day with the booty in this house.”
“Give me a chance,” he pleaded. “Nobody else has.”
No, she thought. Yes.
A child. A child who was the age hers might have been. Back in the days when she'd wanted children so badly she'd tried anything to have them.
It was a stupid impulse, one her therapist would have identified and quashed in a minute. If she still had a therapist. Number three on her list
of things to do tomorrow. Get in touch with Patrick's parents. Make sure the bone was a stupid mistake. Find a new therapist.
Tomorrow was going to be a very busy day.
“We'll talk after I get in touch with your father,” she decided, straightening. “Which, blessings to the gods of communications, I can do tomorrow. Which also, thankfully, is two full days before I have to go back to work, so that I can keep an eye on you. Till then, you can do some manual labor around here to make up for my having to spend my evening with the police.”
“I didn't do anything,” he protested yet again.
“You can have the room you and Sean share when you come into town.” When they'd come into town the three times in their lives. “Don't try and sneak anywhere, because Magnum will let me know. He's not used to you yet, and he might hurt you.”
“He's sure used to
him
,” Patrick challenged, motioning to Frank, who still sat on his tilted chair enjoying the drama.
Molly scowled. “I have no explanation for that.”
“Dog has taste,” Frank said with a lazy smile.
“Dog's been bribed,” Molly retorted, and stretched with meaning. “Now then, gentlemen, before anyone has a chance to do something stupid like dump the rest of that skeleton or my other nephew over the backyard fence, I'm going to bed. I suggest you do the same.”
Frank grinned like a sailor on leave. “Happy to.”
Molly glared. “At your house, Frank,” she said. “Where your children live, who probably miss you, even in their sleep.”
Even so, Frank waited until Patrick was safely upstairs before letting Molly usher him out the door. As he stood there on her porch, the mist glistening in his hair and his shoulders hunched a little against the breeze, Frank took a considered look upstairs.
“Far be it from me to give you advice, St. Molly—”
“Considering I'd never take it.”
He grinned. “Considering that.” He motioned up toward the light that had just gone on in the right front window. “Be careful, St. Molly. I'm not sure that's your battlefield.”
Molly didn't know whether to laugh or cry. “I know it isn't, Frank. But sometimes we don't exactly get to choose.”
Frank contemplated her a minute and shook his head, his eyes wry. “No wonder you're the Martyr of the Midwest.”
She scowled. “You can call me names the day you desert those three kids of yours and Joey, your homeless friend.”
“I didn't have a choice,” he challenged. “My wife died and Joey was my catcher when I pitched Khoury League.”
Joey, who went to Vietnam with Frank and never really came home. But that was a problem for another day. Frank was still staring at her, waiting for an answer.
“I'll be fine, Frank.”
His grin was the stuff of sexual harassment suits. “I know how to make you better.”
Molly laughed so loud her voice echoed off the house across the street. “Dream on, tort boy.”
Frank laughed, too, but Molly knew damn well he wasn't retreating. He smiled and dipped his head in a formal kind of salute.
“Just remember what I said,” he said. “Never trust a teenage boy. Especially
that
teenage boy.”
Then, with an elegant flick of his wrist, he pressed the instant start button on his keychain, and his Mercedes purred to life in the driveway.
“Now, this teenager is going home,” he told her. “Unfulfilled. Unloved.”
“Unrepentant.”
He grinned, just as she knew he would, and dropped a kiss on her forehead before swinging down the steps.
Maggie watched him go, and then locked up the house.
She went to bed that night and dreamed of other battlefields where she'd cared for other young boys. She dreamed of hot jungles and cold indifference and fear.
And the worst part was that when she woke up the next morning, it was the fear that followed her into the light.
Molly's wake-up call the next morning sounded distressingly like an accusation.
“You obviously think I've been bored.”
Rubbing hard at sleep-encrusted eyes, Molly turned to check the bedside alarm clock. Nine A.M. Way too early to be fielding outraged phone calls from her second boss.
“Morning, Winnie,” she grated, closing her eyes again and settling back into bed to ease the pounding in her head. “How are you?”
“I'm seriously considering hiring a new death investigator,” the St. Louis City Chief Medical Examiner informed her with little patience. “One who doesn't go out drumming up new business for this department. I have real work to do here. I do not have time to play with painted Tinker Toys.”
Which meant that Winnie had gotten hold of the bone before Molly'd had a chance to explain.
Molly sighed. “I agree with you.”
That didn't mollify her boss a bit. “Get down here,” Winnie growled. “Today.”
And hung up.
Molly groaned. She did not want to go in to see Winnie. The Chief Medical Examiner, when in a less than charitable mood, was a terrifying spectacle to behold. And Molly just wasn't up to terrifying spectacles today. Every joint and muscle protested at shattering pitch, she was exhausted, and she had to figure a way to get Patrick back home before she made the inexcusable mistake of trying to save him from himself.
Ah, Patrick. A bigger problem than any she faced at either of her real jobs. A bigger potential disaster wrapped in hormones, self-righteous indignation, and bravado.
But, God, she thought, closing her eyes, she felt sorry for him. She'd grown up in a house much like his, with parents always off to more important obligations than their children. She'd spent way too much of her life trying to be good enough to merit their notice.
Martin and Catherine Louise Burke's real children had been framed on their walls and tucked onto glass shelves in the sitting room, their real accomplishments listed in obscure State Department dispatches from unexceptional countries. When they died, they were mourned by no one, least of all the daughter who had disappointed them from the day she'd been born.
One Christmas about eight years ago after sufficiently fortifying herself on egg nog and scotch, Molly had tried to warn her brother Martin that he was perilously close to matching his parents' behavior. He'd been so grateful that he hadn't said another word to her for five years.
Until today, Molly really hadn't cared.
Oh well. Nothing for it but to get her next confrontation with her little brother over with. Wincing her way out of bed, she spent a long few minutes soaking away morning-after agony in a hot shower and then gingerly made her way downstairs to let her dog out and ingest vitamins, Paxil, and coffee, in that order.
Patrick was there ahead of her.
Molly would have sworn that teenagers never rose before noon of their own volition. But there was Patrick, now in white T-shirt and the same rumpled, oversize khaki work pants, standing before the Picasso in the family room as if sizing it up for market.
“You can't have that one either,” Molly greeted him from the doorway.
The family room was the only room in the house that was truly Molly's. While the rest of the house reeked of pervasive museumism, this room was lived in. A brace of overstuffed chintz couches sat at ninety-degree angles beneath windows that exposed her own museum-quality yard. End tables spilled over with magazines, books, and tchotchkes her neighbor Sam had given her. A utilitarian TV sat in one corner, and an underused sound system took up another. At center stage reigned the Picasso, a sharp, savage
painting from his postdivorce period, all angles and great misplaced eyes with tears that pierced like weapons.
Old Picasso and Molly had become good friends. Besides the Winslow Homer watercolor she'd absconded with for her bedroom, it was the only indigenous part of this house she truly enjoyed.
“Ya know,” Patrick mused, head tilted to consider the jagged passion of the piece. “I remember the first time I saw this house. I mean, I'd heard Mom and Dad talk about it, but I guess I really didn't believe them. It seemed … too much. Like a story kids would tell to impress their friends.”
Molly thought of the priceless artifacts she mostly ignored these days and nodded. “Yeah. I know.”
“I didn't want to live in our house. I wanted to live here. Our house is … seriously unexceptional. Carefully tasteless, like a chain hotel with money.”
Molly had seen his mother's decorating, and she had to agree. Bland extraordinaire, with abortive attempts at
House Beautiful
. Everything in precise place and clean enough to do open-heart surgery on. But without any real taste. Molly's parents might have had many faults, but they had never lacked style.
“It's not all it's cracked up to be,” she said anyway.
But then, Patrick couldn't hear the whispers of disdain that crept along the floors or smell the old, stale secrets that were forever hidden away beneath exquisite carpets.
He turned on her, stiff with resentment. “You don't even like it here.”
Molly smiled. “Nope. But that doesn't mean I'm leaving.”
And then she walked out to get that coffee.
 
 
It took the entire morning to track down Patrick's parents in Beijing, where it was even later the next morning. Molly felt absolutely no remorse at interrupting an official luncheon.
“Patrick?” her brother Martin said in bemused tones. “He's fine. Why are you calling me in China to ask me about Patrick?”
“Because he's here with me, Martin. He evidently decided to make use of his inheritance a little earlier than expected, and came a thousand miles to collect it.”
What followed was a silence punctuated by bursts of muffled mumbles. Conferencing with the missus, evidently. What Molly noticed was that her announcement hadn't been met by any outraged disbelief.
What? Our Patrick? Impossible. I just talked to him
kind of thing.
What she finally did get was a disconcerted clearing of the throat, and then a sigh. “It's nothing,” Martin insisted. “Probably a misunderstanding.”
Molly laughed out loud. “Martin,” she assured him, “this is not a misunderstanding. This is a sixteen-year-old boy in my kitchen instead of his own house half a continent away, who was caught redhanded committing a Class A felony.”
“Yeah … yeah, I know. But we're awfully committed here, Molly. We're
in
the middle of something important. And we wouldn't be able to straighten it out till we got home anyway.”
“In time for Christmas, I assume.”
“If all goes well, of course.”
“And in the meantime?”
“Just send him back. Juanita will take care of it.”
Molly saw red. “Juanita is a semiliterate Nicaraguan housemaid,” she accused, “which would make her less than ideal to talk to the Jesuits about Patrick's expulsion from school, don't you think?”
“He …”
“The reason he thought he might need a little ready cash, evidently. He'll explain it to you when you get home.”
Another sigh. A bitten curse. “We'll take care of it,” he assured her. “And trust me. He'll be punished. He shouldn't be bothering you like this.”
Bothering her. What a charming term for attempted burglary.
“Sean wasn't with him, was he?” Martin demanded suddenly, concern finally edging his voice. “He didn't talk Sean into this stupid stunt?”
“No. Evidently Sean is still safe in the arms of the Jesuits.”
Molly was sure she heard a relieved sigh. “Well, we'll take care of it. As long as everything is intact at the house.”
“What about Patrick?” she asked. “Who
is
at my house. What do we do about him?”
“He'll be back in school when the new term starts. I can promise you that.”
Molly wasn't concerned about the new term. She was concerned about
the next three or four weeks. She was terrified she was going to end up with this kid in her house for Christmas.
“Martin. What do I do with him now?”
“Just … oh, I don't know. Send him back to Juanita.”
Molly said it before she even thought about it. She said it because she knew that if she sent Patrick back right now, he'd just think of something even worse to get his parents' attention. And in this day and age, at sixteen, worse covered a lot of ground.
“Tell you what,” she said. “Stop by St. Louis on your way home and you can pick him up here. I'll put him to work to pay for the trouble.”
She got another telling pause, and then her brother's hesitant voice. “You sure? Between you and me, he can be a real handful.”
“I gathered that. All I ask is that you keep in touch. You want to talk to him?”
“Oh … well, I'm sure his mother would like to, of course.”
Molly fought a surge of renewed anger and remembered just why she only had these family chats when they had to update the trust.
“Patrick, your father's on the phone,” she said, handing it over. “You're going to stay with me till they get back.”
Patrick didn't react. He just took the phone and walked to the other end of the kitchen.
The conversation lasted only a few minutes. All Molly could gather from Patrick's end was that he'd mastered the art of the sulky grunt and bitten monosyllable. She found herself wondering by the end of it if his parents even knew he could speak English.
“My mother says to say thank you for taking me off their hands,” he said finally, holding the phone out to her as if she'd used it to betray him.
Hand out, Molly snorted. “She did not.”
Patrick just lifted an eyebrow, those soft hazel eyes briefly and intensely disdainful. “Thank you.”
Well, at least his mother had said something. The punishment when Molly had been a child had been cold, exquisite silence. She could still see it on her mother, pursed lips and frosty eyes and a deliberate turning of the back. Molly would have sobbed with relief if her mother had given way to just one snarky shot.
“Did you bring clothes?” she asked, hanging up the phone.
“Some. Juanita will send me more.”
“Okay,” she said. “Next item of business is a job. They need bussers at a couple of the restaurants on Euclid, which is a block over, so you won't have to worry about driving.”
Patrick glowered. “I drive.”
“Not in my only form of transportation, you don't. I don't have any money to replace it. In fact, I don't have any money at all, so you're going to have to figure out how to enjoy yourself on a third of your paycheck, since the rest is going to go into room and board. But I'm happy to have you, Patrick. As long as you abide by my rules—which, I might as well tell you, are strict. Not only that, but my best friends all look just like Officer Smith. Do you get my point?”
He also seemed to have perfected the sneer. “You don't have any money? Have you seen what you have in your living room?”
“Not
my
living room, Patrick. I can't touch a thing in this house. I can't so much as move anything farther than two rooms in any direction. I only get the privilege of living here rent-free till I die, so it's intact for you and Sean and your children to be able not to touch. Next time you decide to take advantage of the trust, you might read its stipulations first. Now, I repeat. Are we agreed?”
“Without even knowing what the rules are?”
Molly's smile was dry. “This isn't a business deal. I will give you rule number one for free, which is an oldie but goodie. Thou shalt not steal. Not a Picasso, not a paperweight. The rest are just as easy to comprehend.”
“Just your basic prison without so much as a VCR or Nintendo.”
“I get enough death and violence at work. I don't need to rent it from Blockbuster, too.”
“I bet you don't even have Internet.”
Molly's smile was cheerful. “Sure. At work, where I actually might need it.”
“Then how do I get hold of my friends?”
“Ya know,” she said, really tired of this already. “I hear there's a great new invention by this guy named Franklin. It's called a post office. And it costs under fifty cents to use. You might want to try it.”
For just a flash of a second, Patrick betrayed rage. Hot, teen frustration. Then he seemed to reconsider. He took one long look around and
shrugged, determined to be surly. “Well, it'll probably be the only chance I'll have to live here until I'm fifty.”
BOOK: Head Games
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