Sandra Brown - Ricochet

She was casually spreading butter on a slice of toast, but he recognized a loaded question. “I usually grab something on the way to work.”

“Always? I thought there may be a…” Her eyebrows lifted eloquently.

“No. Not even a…” He matched her strategic pause. “No one who stays for breakfast.”

Her chest lifted on a quick breath before she resumed buttering her toast. A few minutes later when she pushed aside her empty plate, he remarked, “You were hungry, too.”

“Very.”

“I think you’ve dropped a few pounds.”

“It’s the clothes. I bought them too large.”

So not to draw attention to that body while playing dead, he thought.

She picked up her coffee mug and studied the gay daisy pattern on it. “Tell me about the grandmother who lived here.”

“Well, she actually lived in Savannah. This was a weekend getaway until my grandfather died, then she moved out here permanently. She thought the town house was too big for her to live in alone. Three stories were two too many, so-”

“Your town house.”

He admitted it with a nod. “She deeded it over to me. Which was more generous than any of us realized at the time.”

“Those old town houses are prize real estate now.”

“If I were trying to buy it, I couldn’t come close to affording it. Not on a cop’s salary. I thank Grandmother every day for her generosity.”

“She must have loved you very much.”

“Yes,” he said with a slow and pronounced nod. “She did. I can’t blame any of my shortcomings on a love-deprived childhood.”

“Good parents?”

“The best.”

He received the expected reaction when he told her that his dad was a minister and that he’d grown up in a parsonage, never missing a Sunday of worship unless he was sick. “Go ahead, ask,” he said.

“Ask what?”

“What happened to you? Why didn’t you turn out better than you did? Why didn’t the religious training take?”

“It took.”

Her voice was soft, but direct, and it made his heart thump against his ribs.

“You’re a decent man, Duncan. Even when you’re being tough, your basic goodness comes across. You feel things deeply. You try and do what’s right.”

“Not lately.” He looked at her meaningfully.

“I’m sorry,” she said softly.

“Don’t be. They were my choices to make.”

She went back to studying the daisies on the coffee mug. “Did you always want to be a policeman?”

“No, I decided that my junior year of high school.” She looked at him inquisitively, an invitation to explain. “A good friend I’d grown up with was brutally raped and murdered.”

“How awful,” she murmured.

“Yeah. Even worse, it was generally believed-although nobody said it out loud-that the culprit was probably her stepfather. But he owned a car dealership and two radio stations. He was president of the Rotary Club. No one dared touch him, not even the police, who conducted a sloppy investigation. They eventually assigned blame to a retarded kid. He was sent to a state institution and locked up for reasons I’m sure he never understood.”

“You’ve been railing against the injustice of it ever since. So you became a policeman to right wrongs.”

“Naw,” he said flippantly. “I just like pushing people around and playing with guns.”

He expected a smile, but her expression remained solemn. “If you hadn’t been you, Duncan, I wouldn’t have trusted you enough to ask for your help.”

He let that lie for a moment, then said, “I figured it was because of what I said to you the night of the awards dinner.”

Carefully, she set the coffee mug on the table and stared into it. “That, too. I used what I…what I thought might work to get to you. I did what I had to do.” She raised her head and looked him in the eye. “Not for the first time.”

They were getting to the heart of the subject now. Again, he wanted to postpone it. He stood up and began clearing the table. She washed, he dried. They worked side by side, but silently.

When the chore was done, she said, “Can we go outside? I’d like to look at the water.”

In the early hours of the morning, the rain had stopped. The sun was out and everything had that washed-clean brilliance about it. The air was clear. Colors seemed more vivid. The sky was boasting a deep blue that hadn’t been seen for days.

He walked her out onto a fishing pier where he, his dad, and his granddad had often fished. When he told her that, she smiled. “You were lucky.”

“Not at fishing,” he said with a laugh. “The men of my family are lousy fishermen. We just enjoyed being in each other’s company.”

“That’s why you were lucky.”

They sat down on the edge of the rough wood pier, dangling their feet over the side, and watched the boats moving in and out of Beaufort’s marina. He waited a time, then said, “You weren’t so lucky?”

“In terms of family? No. It’s a classic case of total dysfunction. My father left before I was born. I never knew him. My mother married a man, had a baby boy by him, and then he left, too. More accurately, she ran him off.

“Although she was never diagnosed, my guess is that she was bipolar. To my half brother and me she just seemed…mean. Unpredictably she would fly into rages. I won’t bore you with the ugly details.”

After a short pause, she said, “My half brother and I survived by sticking together. Our fear of her forged a bond between us. I loved him. He loved me. We were all each other had.

“When I graduated high school, I began working at various jobs, with the short-term goal of getting my brother through high school and then setting us up in our own home.

“But, lacking supervision, he got in with a bad gang at school. Started doing drugs. Committed petty crimes. He was in and out of juvenile detention.” She turned toward Duncan. “Familiar story?”

“All too familiar. Typically it doesn’t have a happy ending.”

“This one doesn’t. One day my brother ran away. He left a note under the windshield of my car while I was at work.”

“What work?” he asked curiously.

“Video rental store. The owner practically turned it over to me to manage. I did all the ordering, inventory, classifying, bookkeeping, even cleaned the restrooms. I couldn’t wait to go to work every day.”

“To clean the restrooms?”

She smiled. “Small price to pay. Because basically I got paid to watch movies.”

“You like movies?”

“Love them. So that job was heaven for me.” Her smiled dissolved as the bad memories crowded out the good ones. “In the note my brother left, he said he had his own plans for his life, and those plans didn’t coincide with mine. It broke my heart. But that’s the way it was. He was gone and I didn’t know where to start looking for him.”

She threw back her head to look up at the sky and laughed at herself as she touched the nape of her neck. “It still feels funny. I keep forgetting my hair isn’t there.”

“I’m beginning to like it.”

“Liar.”

“No, really.” They shared grins, but then he prompted her to continue. She told him that her half brother had been gone for about a year, without a word from him, when her mother was diagnosed with cervical cancer. Elise assumed responsibility for her health care.

“Even though I was working and looking after her, I was also enrolled in art and film classes at the junior college. Things were tough, but going fairly well.” Gazing out across the water, she sighed. “Then I finally heard from my brother. It wasn’t good news. He was on his way to prison for drug dealing. Hard stuff.”

Duncan tensed. “Savich?”

“Savich. He had taken my impressionable brother under his wing. He caught on fast and showed an aptitude for the trade. Savich paid him well. Well enough for him to buy a house, the one where we…where we met that night.”