Maggie Shayne - Colder Than Ice

She dug into hers, as well. Poor stupid woman.

Joshua Kendall walked into Maude Bickham’s house in a state of shock. The woman, Beth Slocum, the resemblance…No, no, it was more than a resemblance. She was identical to the girl his bullet had torn apart eighteen years ago. The girl who’d lain in a deep coma as he sat by her bed, wishing he could change places with her. The girl he’d been told had no chance of surviving.

She was older, of course. The eyes he’d only seen closed in mindless slumber had a few lines at their corners that hadn’t been there before. God, how he’d longed to see them open, to know their color.

He knew it now. Emerald green, like the Gulf of Mexico at midsummer.

The round cheeks of youth had been replaced by sharper angles, but there was no question she was the same person.

He stumbled into the house, barely seeing where he was going, so many questions were whirling through his mind.

“Well, there you are. My goodness, I almost lost it out there. I have to tell you, son, I’m not used to telling lies.”

“You, uh…you did fine, Maude.”

“Well, it’s well worth it, if it’s to help protect Beth from whatever shadows she’s been running from. Like I always say, ‘You have to crush some tomatoes to get any sauce.’ This won’t wash for long, though. There are folks in this town have known me far longer than Beth has. Oh, I can put ’em off for a while. Sam and I were old enough when we bought this place that any kids we might have had would have been grown. Most folks don’t know we never had any. All but Frankie, anyway. She won’t be so easily—what is it, Joshua? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

“I…” He gave his head a shake and forced himself to pay attention to the woman. “It was a long drive. I guess I’m tired out.”

“Well, then, go on up to your room. I’ve put you in the blue room, and your boy in the one beside you. Go left at the top of the stairs. It’s the second door on the right.”

“Thanks.”

He took her advice and sought out the privacy of his bedroom. And the first thing he did was to make a phone call to Arthur Stanton, his longtime mentor, former superior officer, and the man who’d hired him for this job. Arthur was out. His machine told Josh to leave a message.

Josh held the phone to his ear, staring out the bedroom window. Down there on the scraggly lawn, a ghost was talking to his son. A woman who was supposed to be dead. He should know, he thought. He’d killed her himself.

“Arthur, it’s Joshua. Call me back and tell me what the hell is going on. Is this woman—is she—Jesus, Art, what are you doing to me here?”

He couldn’t take his eyes off her. Not even when the image of the girl she had been when he’d seen her last overlaid the scene below in his mind. He saw her as she had been: pale, far too thin, barely seventeen. Wires taped to her temples and forehead, and running from underneath her clothes. Tubes in her wrists and mouth. White sheets, white hospital gown, white skin. The damned incessant beeping of the heart monitor that sounded sluggish and slow.

A lot of kids had been caught in the cross fire when federal agents raided the Young Believers’ Compound eighteen years ago. But most of the bodies burned in the holocaust that followed.

Hers hadn’t.

Josh had been an ATF agent then, overzealous and eager to be a hero. And maybe a little too quick to fire back at the muzzle flashes coming from the compound. Ballistics matched the bullet that took her out with Joshua’s own rifle. When Josh had gone to the hospital to see her, they’d told him she wouldn’t live out the week.

She’d been haunting him ever since.

It couldn’t be her. It couldn’t be. Not like this, strong, older…alive, running now down the tree-lined lane, her strides powerful and confident. It couldn’t be her.

There was a knock on his door. “Dad?”

He shook himself, opened it. Bryan stood there with a large red-white-and-blue envelope in his hands. “Mailman was just here. Left this for you. It came express, so I figured it was important.”

He took it, eyed the return address.

“It’s from that guy who hired you—Arthur Stanton.”

The man who was like a father to him. The man he trusted, had always trusted, even after the raid.

“He was your boss when you were in the ATF, you said.”

Josh nodded. He’d been fired, because the nation needed a scapegoat. Not that he hadn’t been guilty—just no guiltier than every other man on the strike team that day. Art had been too well respected to be fired; he’d been moved, instead. Lost his command, gotten stuck behind a desk pushing papers for the rest of his career. Put to work for the Federal Witness Protection Program. If she was who Josh thought she was, she must have been one of Arthur’s first cases.

Jesus.

“So what was really going on down there?” Bryan asked.

Josh tried to focus on his son. “What do you mean?”

“With that woman. First you looked at her like you were seeing a ghost, and then you tried to cover—lamely.”

Josh pursed his lips. “I wasn’t trying to cover. She really does remind me of someone.”

“Yeah, so much you nearly lost your lunch.”

He averted his eyes.

“I mean it, Dad. I thought you were going to blow it out there. I mean, you’re the one who’s supposed to know what you’re doing here, the one who spent three straight days lecturing me on not blowing our cover. So I figure this is something major.”

He forced himself to meet his son’s gaze. “You might be right.”

“Then you know Beth Slocum from somewhere?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“But you think you might?”

He didn’t say anything, his gaze dragged as if by force to the envelope again.

“Right,” Bryan said. “It’s none of my damn business, anyway. You should have just said so. I’m going out.”

The tone jerked Josh back to the present. “Going out where?”

“Hell, Dad, I don’t know. I’m not sure what my options are around here, so I can hardly answer that one. Around, I guess. I’m taking the pickup.”

“Just be careful. And call if you’re going to be late.”

Bryan didn’t answer, just headed out of the bedroom. He didn’t quite slam the door, but he didn’t shut it any too gently, either.

Josh sighed, wishing to hell he knew how to be a decent father to his son. He probably shouldn’t have let him go, but hell, the boy was almost eighteen. It wasn’t like he needed baby-sitting.

He didn’t know what to do. He knew his son was in pain and acting out in anger, but he didn’t have the first clue what to do about it. And frankly, given the shock he’d just suffered, he was in no state to figure out the answer today.

He sat down on his bed and tore open the envelope. It contained a complete dossier on Elizabeth Marcum, aka Beth Slocum, beginning when she’d awakened from a coma eighteen years ago. When he read the hell she’d been through because of his bullet, he wondered if it might have been better if he had killed her after all.

She’d awakened with no memory, no life, facing years of rehabilitation and physical therapy. She’d lost all of it…because of him.

He was sure of only one thing: he owed her. And this assignment hadn’t come out of the blue. Arthur had chosen him deliberately, knowing he would protect Beth Slocum better than anyone else ever could, because of that debt.

Bryan thought he probably shouldn’t hate his father for keeping secrets from him when secrets were a part of his job. He did hate it, though. He hated just about everything his old man did these days. Every word out of his mouth seemed unreasonably irritating and made Bryan want to snap back, even when it wasn’t altogether warranted.