Per ardua ad astra
, Aunt August had so often reminded her. Through hardship to the stars.
The courtroom was filling rapidly. The city had become enamored of the trial, and the press had been all over her from day one. Every local newspaper and television news show featured her face, highlighting her cross-examination of this witness or that, reporting every caustic remark exchanged between India and Jim Cromwell, the city’s best-known criminal defense attorney, who had drawn the unsavory court appointment to represent Thomas.
India set up her exhibits in front of her on the long pine table and stacked a pile of yellow legal pads and a score of pens where she could easily reach them. Today she planned to present physical evidence to the jury. Blood smears and DNA, strands of hair found in Thomas’s car that had come from the head of his third victim, a nine-year-old girl who had played soccer and read Nancy Drew books, who walked her elderly neighbor’s dog and baby-sat for her little sister. For a long moment, memory brought India face to face with another young girl who had once played soccer. Who had loved Nancy Drew. Who had played with India on the dunes of Devlin’s Beach …
India slammed a file onto the table.
This
one would go
down
, she promised, and would
stay
down. There would be no deals, no safe place for Axel Thomas.
By four-thirty in the afternoon, India was drained and frustrated, and no closer to the end of the trial than she’d been at eight o’clock that morning. Procedural arguments had dominated the entire day. The minute that court was dismissed, India gathered the exhibits that had been lost in the mire of Cromwell’s rhetoric and their dueling citations of case law. Her carefully prepared charts and photographs would have to wait until court resumed on Monday morning, when, hopefully, she would have an opportunity to place them into evidence. India tucked her portfolio under her arm, pointedly ignoring the smirking defendant, who whistled an upbeat version of the theme from “The Bridge on the River Kwai” as she prepared to leave the courtroom for the weekend.
“It’s time to deal, Lady Prosecutor. Deal or lose,” Thomas said, sneering mockingly from twelve feet away.
She turned to snap a response, when a waving hand from the third row caught her attention.
“Indy!” Corri jumped up and down, trying to restrain herself from shouting.
“Corri, what on earth—” She started toward the child, then saw the man who stood behind her. “Nick? What are you doing here?”
“We came to take you out for your birthday.” Corri clapped her hands excitedly.
“My birthday?” India repeated, then recalled the date. “It
is
my birthday. I’d forgotten.”
She made her way through the thinning crowd to hug Corri to her, closing her eyes for a moment of solace as the child’s thin arms wrapped tightly around her neck.
“Aunt August told me it was your birthday, so we brought you dinner and a cake.” Corri beamed.
“Where is Aunt August?” India searched for her in the still-crowded courtroom.
“She couldn’t come. She had a migrate,” Corri announced, “but Nick said we couldn’t let you celebrate your birthday alone, so he brought me.”
“You mean a
migraine?”
India frowned. It seemed that
her aunt’s headaches were increasing in frequency. She wondered if Dr. Noone had been consulted.
“I offered to bring Corri because she had her heart set on surprising you,” Nick explained.
“Nick, this is really very sweet …”
“I hope that isn’t a
but
I detect.” Nick lowered his voice and leaned closer to her. “Corri would really be disappointed, Indy.”
“No, no, of course not,” she assured him. She had planned to stay up half the night to go over today’s proceedings, but she would have the rest of the weekend for that. Tonight she would put it aside and be with Corri. And Nick. “I’m just so surprised, that’s all. I didn’t even realize it was my birthday, I’ve been so wrapped up in this trial. But I’m delighted, truly. Just let me get my things. And Corri, you can help me carry—”
She stopped in midsentence. Corri stood all but frozen, facing the front of the courtroom, her gaze held fast by the man in prison blues. Axel grinned meaningfully with the eyes of a son of Satan.
“Nick, take Corri out into the hallway. I’ll meet you there.” India practically shoved the girl into Nick’s arms. “Please.”
She turned and walked toward the defendant’s table, too enraged to speak.
“That your little girl, Madame Prosecutor?” Axel drawled as he was pulled to his feet by the bailiff. “She’s a pretty little thing.”
“Don’t even look at her,” India hissed like a maddened viper across the defense table, “or you won’t have to wait until the jury convicts you. I’ll rip your heart out myself.”
Axel laughed as he shuffled toward the side door, where he’d be loaded into a van and returned to his cell until Monday morning.
Shaking from head to foot with the raw terror that washed over her with all the force of an unforeseen tidal wave, India folded her arms across her chest and sought to control her breathing. She forced her feet to carry her back to the prosecutor’s table, where, with trembling hands, she began to pick up stacks of paper and shove them mindlessly into folders.
“India, my God, what is it?” Herbie Caruthers took the papers from her hands. “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”
“For a moment, I guess I thought I had.” India dropped into a chair and rested her head in her hands.
“Here.” Herbie handed her a glass of water. “Are you okay?”
She sipped at the water, which had grown tepid as the day progressed and the chips of ice melted in the warmth of a sunny, late September afternoon.
“I’m good. Thanks.”
“Look, how ’bout if I take this stuff back to the office for you,” Herbie said, packing up their case documents, “and I’ll meet you in the conference room in an hour and we’ll go over today’s testimony.”
“It’ll have to wait until tomorrow morning,” she told him, her composure slowly returning. “I have a birthday to celebrate.”
“Since when has a minor detail like a birthday come between you and a big case?”
“Since now.” She thought of Corri’s little upturned face, so filled with the joy of having a surprise for Indy. India couldn’t remember the last time anyone had offered her so great a gift. She had no intention of disappointing the child.
India gathered her things and left the courtroom, her briefcase under her arm and her shoulder bag swinging along next to her, filled with the sudden certainty that whether she worked tonight or not, Axel would not walk away with a sweet plea bargain this time, as he had done in the past. He may have dealt his way through other states, other jurisdictions, but this time he had chosen Paloma in which to play his evil games. Backed by a district attorney who had been elected on a strong anticrime platform, India had the blessing of the department to take this one all the way. Unaware of promises she had made long ago, promises she had spent her entire adult life trying to keep, Axel Thomas had made the mistake of getting caught in a city that had no interest in making deals. Had she been in any danger of forgetting those promises, the unvoiced threat to Corri had been more than enough to remind her.
Tonight she would celebrate her birthday with a child who asked only that India love her. Tomorrow she would
return to the task of putting away Axel Thomas once and for all.
“Indy, can I play with your soaps?” Corri bounced into the bright kitchen, having emerged from the first-floor powder room with a basket filled with little soaps in various shapes and colors—a house-warming gift to India from a co-worker, which, until now, had been pretty much forgotten.
“Sure,” India said, laughing.
“How does one play with soap?” Nick asked from the corner of his mouth, and India nodded toward the carpeted area between the kitchen and the dining room, where Corri had planted herself and proceeded to remove the soaps, one by one, from the basket. All the starfish went into one pile, the flowers into another, the little animals into yet a third. Corri then separated them by color.
“I see.” Nick grinned as he hoisted a large basket onto the kitchen table.
“What’s in there?” India tried to peek under the lid, but Nick closed it from her view.
“Dinner. Complements of August. She gave me strict instructions. Let’s see now, where did I—oh, here they are.” With a flourish, Nick removed a sheet of folded paper from the pocket of his blue and white pinstriped shirt and snapped it open. “Now, let’s see what I need here … a long baking pan—got one of those?”
His eyes were dancing as he looked into hers, and she nodded, somewhat dumbly, that she did in fact have one of those … whatever it was he had asked for. It was hard to concentrate when he stared directly into her eyes like that, like they were the oldest, the very best of friends, friends who had shared so very much.
But then again, she told herself, they had shared something special. They had both been blessed with Ry’s presence in their lives. It made Nick less of a stranger, more of a friend.
“And we need to set the oven to 350 degrees,” Nick said, reading from her aunt’s crisply printed instructions.
India rummaged around in her cupboard and emerged with a baking pan. “Will this do?”
“That’ll do just fine.” He smiled, and those little dimples she’d noticed that day on the beach emerged to taunt her.
She handed him the pan, wondering what she had done to deserve having a man like Nick Enright show up on her birthday to cook her dinner.
“August said to heat these up in the microwave.” From the deep basket he removed a dish of rosemary potatoes in one hand and a brown bag in the other. He plopped the bag onto the counter. “These we can just steam. Green beans. The last from Liddy Osborn’s garden.”
“And what’s in there?” She pointed to the long object wrapped in foil and packed in ice, which Nick had removed from the basket.
“That’s what we need the baking pan for.” Nick began to unwrap the bundle.
“Ohmygod!” India nearly melted in anticipation. “Aunt August’s stuffed bluefish.”
“We caught it,” Corri piped up, “me and Nick. Out by Heron Cove.”
“I can’t believe it!” Indy all but swooned. “My favorite dinner. You don’t know how I dreamed of Aunt August’s stuffed and baked bluefish. Just thinking about it makes me ravenous.”
“Well, you sit right down there, Birthday Girl—” Nick pulled out a kitchen chair and motioned for her to sit— “while I prepare to make your dream come true.”
“And I will set the table.” Corri abandoned her little zoo of soap animals and hopped on one foot into the kitchen. “I know how.”
“Is that a deck I see out there?” With one finger Nick drew the curtain aside from the window overlooking the small back yard.
“Yes,” Indy replied. “The previous owners had it built. I haven’t used it much.”
“I want to see out back,” Corri told her, the table-setting assignment momentarily forgotten.
India unlocked the back door and opened it to step onto the deck, which faced an overgrown yard.
“Indy, you need to cut your
grass.”
Corri pointed toward the lawn.
“I know, sweetie,” a somewhat abashed India admitted. “I just haven’t had time.”
“It’s too tall to walk in,” Corri said, frowning from the bottom of the steps.
“I’m sorry, Corri. Maybe by the next time you come I’ll have gotten to it.”
Nick appeared in the doorway.
“Got a lawn mower?” he asked.
“Well, yes, I do, but …”
“Get it out,” he told her, “and I’ll cut the grass. You don’t have much of a yard. I’ll have it done by the time the oven has heated for the fish.”
“Nick, you don’t have to cut my grass. I’ll do it tomorrow. Or I’ll try to find someone in the neighborhood—”
He had already bounded past her and down the steps. “Out here?” he asked, pointing to the small cedar-sided shed that stood near the far corner.
“Well, yes, but …”
He was already into the shed and had lifted the small lawn mower out before she had finished her sentence. Soon he had the mower running, and she leaned on the deck railing, watching as he left trails of grassy clumps in his wake as he crossed back and forth across the small yard, the mower humming as he attended efficiently to the task.
“You really didn’t have to do all this,” she told him as he finished and turned off the mower.
“It’s your birthday,” he said solemnly, “and it was important to Corri to be with you, to surprise you. Ry talked a lot about making a difference in her life—it was important to him to try to give her some security after she lost her mother. He said he knew just how frightening it was for a child to lose a parent. He didn’t want her to feel alone.”
India nodded. “Our mother died when Ry was barely four years old, just about the same age as Corri was when Maris died. I was just a baby, but Ry said many times how scared he had been, that she just seemed to have gone away, and he never saw her again.”
“Maris’s death was hard enough on her, but now, with Ry gone, I think it’s even more important for her to feel
wanted, to feel a part of something. I owe it to Ry to do what I can, when I can. Corri really wanted to celebrate your birthday with you. I needed to make sure that happened for her. And for you.”
“Thank you, Nick,” she said simply. “For Corri. And for me.”
“And for Ry,” he reminded her.
“Certainly,” she said softly, “for Ry.”
Of course, that was why he had made this trip, why he had brought Corri to her. Because of Ry, because of his respect and fondness for her brother. Unexpectedly, her heart was stung by the slightest trace of disappointment as she acknowledged the reason for his presence there, in her home, on her birthday.
But even knowing that, once back inside her tidy house, she watched him fill her kitchen with energy and humor and wondered if she had ever known a man quite like him.
Dinner was exquisite, lacking only Aunt August’s presence to make it the perfect birthday feast. Nick lifted the bluefish from the oven and slid it onto an old platter, happily chattering with Corri, taking pains to draw India into the conversation from time to time. They talked about various personalities in Devlin’s Light, about the start of the school year and who was in Corri’s class, why the art teacher was great and the music teacher not so. All in all, it was a wonderful birthday. India could not remember the last one that had brought her more pleasure.