The Off Season (23 page)

“Sorry I took so long.”

“That—that’s fine. Thank you so much.” She opened a hall closet containing coats, jackets, and assorted winter gear, her movements jittery. Using a foot, she pushed aside a pair of boots to make more floor space. “You can drop the dog food right here.”

“When I went to pay, the woman working the desk at the vet’s office wouldn’t take my money,” he said as he lowered the sack of what had to be pricey prescription pellets. Max, he noticed, was nowhere in evidence. Probably somewhere sleeping off his big adventure.

Closing the closet door, she said, “I called them after you left. Told them to put it on my bill.”

“The woman said you had, but she wanted me to let you know the dog food’s on the house—and they were so sorry to hear about the fire and everything.”

Christina stiffened, looking mortified. “You told her?”

“Didn’t have to. This isn’t Dallas. It’s usually so quiet here, especially in the dead of winter. When something happens, people talk, especially when it involves one of our own.”

“Of course. It’s just been so long.” She turned and stalked into a formal dining room, but not before he glimpsed her using the back of her hand to wipe her eyes. “But I don’t want anybody’s pity or their charity. I just want this nightmare to be over. Is that too much to ask?”

He’d struggled with the same embarrassment, the same confused mix of gratitude and frustration after returning from the naval hospital to continue his recovery from the graft surgeries he’d endured. Returning to a hero’s welcome while still stinging from what had felt more like a failure. But he sensed there was more to Christina’s outburst.

“What’s going on?” he asked as he transferred the grocery bags to the gleaming, oval surface of a dark wood table. “You’re upset.”

“And why wouldn’t I be, Harris? I thought I was doing the right thing, coming back here to be closer to my family. And now . . .” Her eyes filled once again, her throat bobbing as she fought to keep herself under control. “Now it seems like someone wants to kill me. Someone who’s not particular about who else gets hurt.”

“Come here,” he said, taking the item she’d been holding—which turned out to be not a book, but a computer tablet in a leather case—and placing it on the table next to the bag holding a still-warm rotisserie chicken in its plastic shell.

As he moved in to wrap her in his arms, her stiffness melted away. He stood rubbing her back and rocking her, trying to focus on the framed painting of a lighthouse weathering a storm—he recognized the familiar red-and-black of the Willet’s Point light—hanging near a china cabinet. He didn’t dare speak for fear he’d blurt out a suggestion that he had no damn business making.

But it was impossible to ignore the warmth of her body, the yielding softness of her breasts against his chest. Desperate to distract himself before she felt exactly how her nearness was affecting him, he looked down at the iPad and saw a search-engine results page with a list of links. The purple ones, he realized, were those she’d clicked and read, sites such as Children Who See Dead People, Psychic Kids, and Does Your Child Talk to Angels?

What the hell?
He’d expect that her sister’s searches were overrun with such links, but it was hard to believe that down-to-earth Christina would be swayed by Annie’s flaky theories.

He must have tensed because Christina pulled back, then sucked in a breath when she followed his gaze down to the tablet.

As she quickly flipped the cover closed, she said, “You’ll stay for dinner, won’t you? It’s getting late, and I’m sure you haven’t had a thing all—”

“What’s your daughter said now?” he asked. Seeing the denial taking shape on her face, he added, “Don’t bother lying to me. You’d never make a poker player, not with that blush.”

She hesitated, her gaze darting from the doorway they’d just entered to the one leading to the kitchen, which had been sealed off with heavy plastic sheeting.

“You aren’t thinking of making a break for it, are you?” he asked.

“Of course not. I was just thinking we should eat now, before the food gets cold.” Turning her back to him, she went to a glass-front china cabinet, which contained a display of deep-blue-and-white plates, along with a collection of crystal glasses his own mother would have been in awe of. “We’ll use the good china, since Mom’s everyday stuff is all packed up.”

“Dinner can wait a few more minutes,” he said as Christina opened up the door.

She struggled to get out plates one-handed until he said, “Let me get that before you pop your stitches.”

Backing away to let him in, she said, “Grab one of the smaller plates for Lilly, will you? She was exhausted from the hospital—fell asleep right where she was playing, leaning against Max—but she could wake up hungry any minute.”

He did as she asked, turning to see her pulling a chair with a booster seat from the corner. “Come on, Christina. Don’t make me drag it out of you. What else has Lilly said?”

She went back to the cabinet and opened a drawer containing silverware. As she reached for the forks, he saw her hand trembling like the last autumn leaf barely clinging to a branch.

“There has to be a rational explanation,” she insisted.

“There always is,” he told her, thinking of the many investigations he’d seen, both as a marine and as a civilian. Thinking of how often a situation made no sense until one piece put it all into perspective. A missing piece such as the discovery Zarzycki had just offered that proved to be the key. “It’s just a matter of whether we can find it. Tell me what happened, and I’ll help you.”

She turned to face him, her eyes shining. “Lilly—Lilly showed me with her toys. Showed me how Katie’s mommy whispers in her ear. And then she pretended she was the doll, telling me how the bad men killed her. How she’d only wanted to see her babies . . . and it all seemed so damned
real
.”

Maybe it was the hushed quality of Christina’s voice or a draft from the room’s curtained windows, but a chill swept over him, as slowly and gently as one of those slow-breaking, half-frozen waves that rolled in on a bitterly cold day.

“How could she know, Harris? How could she know more than anybody unless—”

“So you’ve bought into Annie’s theory?”

“Channeling? Reincarnation? I guess those aren’t any crazier than imagining Lilly’s been in touch with the dead. I swear, I must be losing it. I’ve never for a single moment believed in any of this woo-woo stuff. I can’t, but . . .”

Harris saw her struggle for some rational explanation. Something that followed the rules of the world she lived in and belonged to.

Throwing her a lifeline, he asked, “What if this same woman who called Annie has found a way to get to Lilly? Have you had her out somewhere? Maybe at the library at story time, or the church’s Mother’s Day Out program?”

“I haven’t had the chance, working days the way I have been. But I think Renee’s taken her to the church with Jacob a few times so she could run some errands. I told her I didn’t mind, but should I have checked it out first? Is there any reason to believe someone there might be involved?”

“I’d have to look into it, but then there’s also that baby monitor you were using. What if the same person who hacked in to speak to you was able to use it to talk to Lilly?”

Christina frowned, her gaze unfocused, before shaking her head. “I don’t think the monitor works that way. Isn’t her end microphone only?”

“There’s a speaker,” he said, warming to the theory as he spoke. “I took down the model number and found the instruction manual on the Internet. It’s made so you can reassure your child from the handheld unit, or the one you were keeping in the master bedroom.”

“I’m embarrassed to say I never knew that. The system was a shower gift, and I never got through the booklet that came with it. There was—I had a lot going on right then.”

“I understand,” he said, noticing the way her gaze avoided his. “Life gets hectic, and babies are a real adjustment.”

“For some of us more than others,” she said quietly, still not meeting his eyes.

There was something there, he realized, some hidden guilt he ought to root out. But his cop instincts were trampled by a deeper and more basic impulse, the need to make her understand that whatever inadequacies she was feeling, she was not alone.

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” he said. “Sometimes even good parents cut a few corners, while flawed novices like me blunder through the best we can.”

He caught the scent of cooling chicken, its once-tantalizing aroma morphing into something rancid. Or maybe it was the memories making him sick, memories he’d tried and failed to block.

She looked up again, insisting, “You’re great with Jacob. And not only with him, but with kids in general.”

“I’ve worked at it. A lot,” he admitted. “As I have no doubt Renee has told you, I didn’t exactly start out a shining example of a dad or husband. In fact, I—”

“You never really cheated.” She shook her head, a glimmer of what he dared to interpret as hope written on her face. “Did you?”

“Is that what Renee said?”

“Not in so many words, but she led me to believe it.”

He grimaced. “Makes me wonder why she didn’t just come out and let you—let the whole world know—what I really did. Maybe she thought that was worse, admitting that she’d stayed after—after I . . .”

“You what?”

“I never committed adultery. Not once, Christina, but I did worse. I—I hurt my wife. Bad enough that she didn’t leave the house afterward for weeks.”

Christina stared at him in disbelief, hearing the surge of blood in her ears. He’d hit Renee? Tiny Renee? She pictured them arguing, their faces red as they shouted at each other. For some reason, the scene she imagined had no sound, and why would it? The cause of the disagreement didn’t matter.

What did was the moment she imagined him drawing back his arm, raising a fist like a small boulder. The moment he smashed it into the woman he’d vowed to honor and protect. The woman who’d given him a son he claimed to love.

Seeing the remorse, the shame in Harris’s face, Christina’s eyes filled with tears. And in that moment, whatever fantasies she’d been entertaining died, fantasies that had lapped like warm, summer surf around her ankles, tricking her into thinking—at least on some unconscious level—that maybe somehow they could find a way back to what they’d almost had. A way to get it right, this time with the man who’d sprung from the wreckage of the thoughtless boy who’d hurt her.

Except he was still hurting women, only physically, just like the wife-beating father who’d raised him.

“It was an accident. I swear it,” he said.

She’d heard the same excuse in the ER, from so many men, whose wives and girlfriends
accidentally
walked into an open door to blacken their eyes or slipped and fell and cracked a cheekbone, along with a rib or three.

He grimaced. “After—after the explosion, the doctors at the naval hospital spent a lot of energy putting my body back together. A lot of surgeries. A lot of treatment—hyperbaric chamber, water therapy, you name it.”

“Looks like they did a good job of it,” she said, though she suspected that, in places hidden beneath his clothing, he bore scars that would be hard to look at, especially for someone who’d never been around burn patients. But his face remained heartbreakingly handsome and clouded with regret.

“They did what they could, and believe me, if you’d seen what I looked like in those first months—the first year or two, to tell the truth.” He pulled out a chair and sank down into it, as if the admission had drained him. “But the thing is, with everything I had to go through to get physically functional again, I never took the other side seriously—the emotional fallout of getting myself blown up and finding out four people hadn’t made it.”

Claiming a chair a seat away from his, she nodded, telling herself that no matter what he’d done, he deserved the same compassion as any of the patients she saw. Patients who had included, on more than a few occasions, men and sometimes women suffering from PTSD as a result of past military service.

But as much as she sympathized with everything they’d been through, she’d seen the other victims, the spouses sporting fractured mandibles and petechiae—broken blood vessels beneath the skin and the whites of the eyes—from strangulation; the children, so traumatized they’d lost the capacity for speech. Had Jacob been there when Harris had hit Renee? Had that innocent, sweet-natured boy absorbed that response to frustration into his developing psyche?

“I kept saying I was handling it,” Harris said, his eyes distant, “kept resisting every effort to get me to open up about what I’d been through.”

She swallowed hard, relating in spite of her intentions. Hadn’t she responded with the same denial when Doug had first suggested that something was amiss? Hadn’t it had equally disastrous results?

At least you never did anything that endangered your husband or your child.

No sooner had the thought risen than a buzzing built in her ears, punctuated by the drumbeat of her own heart. Because she knew, deep down, that left untreated, she could have done just that. Could have eventually been tricked into the unforgivable by the voices she’d been hearing.