Dead Even (18 page)

“Maybe someone from the compound.” Genna hurried the girl toward the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street.

“They’re not. At least, I don’t think they are.” Julianne had paused to study them. “I’ve never seen any of those men before.”

“Well, I’m sure Daniel knows them, or he wouldn’t be talking to them. Come on, Julianne. The diner is another block up the street. It’s freezing, and I’m starving. Have you thought about what you might like?”

Minutes later, Genna and Julianne were seated in the diner, shaking off the cold. Every few minutes, Julianne looked out the window, as if watching for someone.

“Is something wrong?” Genna finally asked.

“I was just wondering if Daniel . . . if he was in some kind of trouble.” Julianne looked up and down the street.

“I’m sure if he’d been in trouble he’d have said something while we were crossing the street.”

“Can I bring you a nice hot cup of hot chocolate, honey?” The tall blonde waitress appeared with their menus. “It’s pretty nippy out there today.”

“Thank you.” Julianne smiled. “I love hot chocolate.”

“You, miss?” the waitress asked Genna.

“Coffee would be fine. Thanks.”

They were ready with their sandwich orders when the waitress returned with their hot drinks.

“It’s been so long since I’ve been in a restaurant,” Julianne told Genna. “Thank you for bringing me here.”

“You don’t travel with your father when he leaves the compound?”

“No. He doesn’t like me to leave. He didn’t want me to come today,” Julianne said sheepishly.

“What does he think will happen to you?”

“I think he thinks I’m going to be kidnapped or something.” Julianne shrugged.

“Why would he think that?” Genna asked.

“I don’t know.” She shrugged again. “Maybe he doesn’t really.”

“You mentioned your mother earlier. . . .”

“She died when I was little.” Julianne tore a tiny hole in the corner of her paper napkin.

“How little?” Genna asked.

“I was five.”

“That’s old enough to remember her,” Genna said. “I hope you have some good memories of her.”

“I don’t know. Sometimes I think I do, remember things, that is. But when I ask my father, he says I should just put it all out of my mind. That it was a long time ago and none of that matters now.”

“I lost my mother when I was nine or ten,” Genna confided. “And it still matters.”

“Did she die, too?”

“Eventually.” Even now, Genna found it hard to talk about her past, about the parents who abandoned her, about the life she’d led up until the time the state had placed her in the foster care of Patsy Wheeler. Genna recalled that time as one of fear and uncertainty, until she realized that with Patsy, she’d found her home. Her heart ached for Julianne, for all she would go through during the coming weeks and months. Before the next forty-eight hours had passed, Julianne would lose one parent and find another. She prayed that the shock wouldn’t devastate the child.

“You were old enough to remember your mother, too,” Julianne was saying.

“Yes. I remember her.” Not always fondly, Genna thought of the weak woman who had permitted a tyrannical husband to rule their lives with an iron fist and who had made fire and brimstone a part of their everyday lives.

“I guess your dad raised you, too,” Julianne continued.

“No. No, he died, too.” Why go into that now? Genna mentally shrugged it off. She was grateful when the waitress appeared with their sandwiches.

“I love potato chips.” Julianne grinned as she munched a chip. “We almost never have them at the compound. Mrs. Miller says they’re fatty and greasy and unwholesome. That’s her favorite word. Unwholesome.”

Genna bit into a pickle and wondered if Mrs. Miller, the cook, knew of her boss’s penchant for young girls. Now
that
was unwholesome.

“Can I get you some more hot chocolate?” asked Jayne, the waitress.

Julianne nodded. “Thank you.” She turned and looked out the window. “Oh-oh. Look at the snow. . . .”

“It is starting to come down, isn’t it?” Genna bit the inside of her lower lip, wondering if the snow would help or hinder their escape.

“I wonder where Daniel is.” Julianne stared out the window.

“Maybe he got held up someplace.”

“I hope he comes for us before it starts snowing too hard.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll be out of here in no time.” Genna glanced up at Jayne as the waitress served Julianne’s hot chocolate.

“You worried about getting a ride someplace?” Jayne asked.

“I’m sure our friend will show up soon,” Genna replied.

“Well, hey, I’m off in about fifteen minutes. I’d be happy to drop you someplace.”

“That’s very nice of you, but I’m sure our ride will be along,” Genna assured her.

“The offer stands,” Jayne said. “Just say the word . . .”

“That’s nice of her,” Julianne noted after Jayne had cleared the table and disappeared into the kitchen.

“Very,” Genna agreed.

“But I know Daniel will be along soon.” Julianne yawned.

“Tired, sweetie?” Genna asked softly.

“I don’t know why I am.” Julianne covered her mouth as she yawned again. “I just feel so sleepy. . . .”

Genna looked across the diner and met Jayne’s eyes. Jayne nodded and returned to the kitchen. Moments later she came back out, her coat over her arm.

“Well, I’m leaving now. Are you sure you don’t want me to drop you off?” she called to Genna.

“Well, maybe you could drive us a few blocks down, and we’ll see if our ride is ready,” Genna called back. “How ’bout that, Julianne? If the waitress drives us back to where Daniel left the car?”

“Not supposed to get into anyone’s car except Daniel’s.”

“I know, sweetie, but this one time will be fine.”

To Jayne, Genna whispered, “Was it necessary to sedate her?”

“Sorry, but yes. We need to get her out, and get her out fast. She’ll be fine, Genna. Won’t even have a headache when she wakes up. But I couldn’t run the risk that she’d be kicking and screaming all the way across the parking lot. We just don’t have time for that. There really wasn’t any option.”

Genna slipped into her coat, then helped the sleepy Julianne ease her arms into the sleeves of her jacket. With a nod to Jayne, the two women and the girl left the diner.

“This is my car,” Jayne said, pointing to a black Jeep with tinted windows.

“It looks just like the reverend’s car,” Julianne said as the two women helped her into the backseat and fastened her seat belt.

“You strap in, too, Genna,” Jayne told her as she hopped into the driver’s side and slammed the door. “We really have to fly now.”

“Why are we flying?” a sleepy voice asked from the back.

“Because we have to get you home, little girl.” Genna turned around to see Julianne’s chin rest upon her chest, her eyes closed. “You’ve been gone a long, long time, and now it’s time to go home. . . .”

CHAPTER
SIXTEEN

The storm had passed within the hour, and by three-fifteen, after a minor delay, the plane took off. Miranda gazed out the window as the plane rose into the clouds, which had just started to lift, then closed her eyes. She hated takeoffs and landings. It wasn’t so much that she knew the statistics, that most planes that crashed did so either while headed up or headed down. It was more the change in direction. She liked being on an even keel. Too much up or too much down disturbed her equilibrium and made her feel out of control somehow. And if there was one thing Miranda could not tolerate, it was the sense of not being in control.

She leaned back against the seat and feigned sleep. She didn’t want to talk to anyone right now, particularly Will, who sat in the seat next to her, flipping through the latest
GQ
that he’d picked up at the airport’s newsstand. She fully understood the similarities between her relationship with Will and her mother’s relationship with her father. That on-again, off-again thing—no strings, no commitment—may have been fine for Nancy Cahill, back in the day, but it wasn’t fine for her daughter. Not this day, not any day. Lucky for Miranda she’d figured it out in time. She could work with Will; she could socialize with Will; but they’d never be lovers again, because as far as she could see, they’d never be anything more than that.

But when she asked herself what more she wanted from him, she had no answer. None that she felt like dealing with, anyway.

She shifted uncomfortably in her seat, annoyed that she’d let Will draw her into a conversation about Jack. She refused to call him anything but that. Just Jack. As if by refusing to acknowledge him by anything other than his first name, she could disavow their blood relationship.

She’d always been better at that than Portia. She wondered if Jack had sent Portia a separate packet of photos. If he’d sent them to the house she and her sister shared, Miranda would have seen them. Maybe he’d intended for them to share the photos, though wouldn’t he have addressed the envelope to both of them? Unless he knew that Portia wasn’t there.

Of course Jack knew Portia wasn’t there; Miranda mentally slapped herself on the forehead with an open palm. She’d been in London last month on a short leave. She must have called him.

I’ll bet every dime I have that she called him.

The thought was so jarring that she sat straight up in her seat. Will looked over at her, one eyebrow raised in question.

“Just . . . dreaming, I guess.” She muttered the first thing that came into her mind.

“You weren’t sleeping,” he noted, and went back to the article he was reading.

“I was almost asleep,” she lied, and settled herself back into her seat again.

The more she thought about it, the more she knew that her sister had met with the enemy. Over the years, Portia had brought up contacting Jack many times, and Miranda had always blown her off. Well, Portia must have tired of waiting for her twin to come around, and had contacted him on her own. How else to explain the photos, the chatty letter, arriving out of the blue after all this time? To the best of her knowledge, he’d never shown much interest in either of his firstborns. Why now, unless Portia had pushed him?

She tried to move past the growing anger, but she found she could not. It was mixed too tightly with a lifetime of bad feelings and a sense of betrayal. She tried not to think about the photographs Jack had sent, but the scenes kept playing over and over in her mind. She’d lied to Will when she’d said she didn’t remember. Of course she remembered.

They’d spent the day on the beach, she and Portia and their mother and Jack, whom Miranda remembered as being impossibly tall, to her eye, the tallest man in the world. And he was strong, strong enough to carry Miranda on one shoulder and Portia on the other. Nancy had stayed on the blanket and snapped that little camera of hers just about every time one of them moved, so that if you placed the pictures in order and fanned them slowly, it was almost like watching a film. Portia used to do that, stack them in order and then flip them, so that she could watch Jack pick her up and plunk her down on his shoulder, then lean over to pick up Miranda and do the same with her. Then he walked for what seemed like forever down the beach, his daughters on his shoulders, all the time talking to them in that deep Brit voice about a beach in England he used to go to as a child, and how he’d take them there sometime.

Of course, he never had. It was all just a game to Jack.

Miranda remembered, too, how her mother had cried herself to sleep the next night, after Jack left. How her face went pale a week later when a photo of him with another of his celebrity girlfriends appeared on the cover of a magazine. There was always someone new for Jack, some beautiful model or singer—or, yes, even a princess. In the magazines, there was always someone young and beautiful on his arm, but never Nancy, who was not beautiful nor particularly talented nor clever—nor was she royal. She was the daughter of two science teachers from a tiny town outside Omaha. Every time Nancy saw one of those photographs, she’d crumble, and she’d stay crumbled for days, leaving her daughters pretty much to fend for themselves until she snapped out of it.

When Miranda was old enough to understand the situation, she’d yelled at her mother for having gone into one of her funks after seeing Jack on some award show.

“Mom, would you look at yourself?” Miranda had lectured. “You’re wasting your life waiting for a man whose greatest love is himself. He thinks he’s done just swell by you. He’s given you two kids and a steady income until we turn twenty-five, isn’t that what you said the deal was? Why do you keep pining for him, for a man who doesn’t love you? Every once in a while he drifts back into your life, and you let him.”

“But he does love me,” her mother had responded quietly, “and that’s why he keeps coming back. That’s why I let him.”

Miranda had been so shocked that she hadn’t known how to reply. So she’d simply left the room, and she never brought up the subject again. It had been years before she’d even repeated the conversation to Portia, who had her own ideas about the relationship between their mother and Jack.

“I do believe he loves her,” Portia had told her. “I think she’s probably the only bit of sanity in his entire life. She’s his rock, and he keeps coming back to her to get the rest of it out of his system.”

“Then he’s just plain selfish,” Miranda had snapped. “If he’s just using her to make himself feel good, he doesn’t care about her, and he certainly doesn’t care about us.”

“I don’t know.” Portia had been surprisingly kind in her judgment. “I don’t know what he thinks or what he feels or what motivates him. But I do know that he must care about Mum, or he’d just forget about us.”

“Don’t say ‘mum,’ “ Miranda had exploded. “It’s too . . .
English.
”

Portia had flounced off in a huff, and it had been a while before they’d talked about the relationship between Jack and their mother again.

She’s seen him,
Miranda told herself.
Portia has been to see Jack.

“Damn her.” She spoke aloud without realizing it.

“Damn who?” Will asked.

“No one,” she grumbled.

“Hey, Cahill, you want to talk about anything, you know—”

“Yeah, yeah. I know. You’re there if I need you.”

He laughed.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “That was rude. I know you’re trying to be a friend, and I appreciate it.”

“Sure,” he said. “Buckle up. We’re getting ready to land. Or did you miss the announcement while you were busy cursing out whoever it was who incurred your wrath?”

“I missed the announcement.” She searched for her seat belt. “I must have dozed off.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Shut up and strap yourself in like a good boy.”

Twenty-five minutes later they were picking up their rental car and heading toward Wynnefield on the Ohio-Kentucky border. Will drove while Miranda called the Wynnefield police and spoke with the sergeant, who gave her the good news. They’d located Ronald Johnson; he was working in a restaurant in Gilbert just ten miles away.

“We have a live one,” Miranda told Will when she ended the call. “The sergeant said to take a left onto Essington Road just before we get into Wynnefield. It should be coming up in about a mile or so.”

“What’s the name of the restaurant?”

“Buckeye Bob’s.”

“Cute.”

“I’m sure someone thought so.”

“Did the sergeant say if Johnson remembered Channing?”

“I didn’t get the impression that they questioned him. I think they just located him and confirmed that he’s the same Ronald Johnson.”

“Well, then, I guess he’s all ours.”

“Guess he is.” Miranda stared out the window. Autumn had come and gone here, leaving the trees mostly bare.

“It’s almost Halloween,” she said. “Few more days . . .”

“What?”

“I said, it will be Halloween in a few days.”

“I wondered why I keep having this sudden urge to rip the sheet off the bed and cut holes in it.”

“I would have expected something more creative from you. Please don’t disillusion me by telling me that the white sheet was your costume of choice.”

“Actually, I didn’t have a favorite costume. I mean, I didn’t have costumes.”

“They didn’t trick-or-treat where you grew up?”

“Well, yeah, they did. At least, everyone else did.”

“Are you saying you never trick-or-treated?” She frowned. “Every kid trick-or-treats on Halloween, Fletcher.”

“Not quite everyone.”

“So what was the deal? Chocolate allergy? Fear of rubber masks and fake teeth?”

“My parents wouldn’t let us go.” He glanced over with an odd smile plastered on his face. “Halloween is the devil’s holiday. Didn’t you know that?”

“Huh?”

“Sure. It’s all about devil worship. It’s a celebration of the occult.”

“You believe that?”

“No. But my parents did.”

“Wow.” She tried to think of something more intelligent to say, but could not.

“Yeah, wow. That pretty much sums it up.”

“I’m . . . I’m sorry, Will.”

“Thank you, Cahill. That’s the nicest thing you’ve said to me in a long time.” He continued staring straight ahead. “What was the name of that road again?”

“Essington.”

They drove in silence for another minute, then Miranda said, “It’s kind of sad, don’t you think, that we know so little about each other? I mean, we’ve slept together a dozen or so times, and we don’t really know each other very well at all.”

“I think the times we slept together, we weren’t concerned about how well we knew each other.”

“That doesn’t speak well for either of us.” There was a hint of regret in her voice.

“It’s not too late, you know.”

“For what?”

“To get to know each other.”

“Maybe,” she said softly.

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

“There’s Essington up there at the light.” She pointed.

“Are you trying to change the subject?”

“You betcha. Take a left here.”

“And then what?”

“Then you go about three hundred yards to . . . yes, there it is. Buckeye Bob’s. Right where it’s supposed to be. Pull in here. . . .”

He made a right into the parking lot and stopped the car.

“What are you doing?”

“Waiting for you to tell me where to park.”

“Very funny. Move it.”

He grinned and made a wide circle in the parking lot before parking the car in a space near the front door.

“Is this close enough for you?” he asked.

“You are pushing your luck today, Fletcher.” She got out of the car, slammed the door, and walked up the wide concrete steps, then paused at the top to wait for Will.

“I trust you’d like to do most of the talking,” he said as he came up the steps.

“Well, I am lead on the case, but you can feel free to chime in at any time.”

“I’ll do that.” He held the door for her, then held it a moment longer for the three women who were leaving the restaurant.

“Table for two?” the hostess asked.

“Please,” Miranda said with a nod.

“It will be about five minutes.”

“That’s fine,” Will told her, then stepped back so as not to block the doorway.

“What exactly does Mr. Johnson do here?”

“I think he’s the manager.”

“And this is his shift, right?”

“The sergeant said Johnson would be working tonight.”

A waitress appeared and motioned for them to follow her to a booth toward the back. Miranda slid into her seat and shrugged out of her jacket.

“Oh, look. There’s a sign that says they make old-fashioned milk shakes here.” She was grinning from ear to ear. “Yum.”

When the waitress reappeared with menus, Miranda shook her head. “Don’t need the menu. I’ll have a black-and-white milk shake and a burger.”

Will suppressed a smile and ordered the same.

“Copycat,” she taunted.

“It sounded too good to miss out on.”

“Portia and I used to go to this little place when we visited our grandmother in Nebraska. Dolan’s. They made the most incredible milk shakes ever. We’d arrive at the house and make nice with Gramma for a while, then when she and Mom would hunker down on the back porch with tea, Portia and I would race down to Dolan’s.” A cloud passed over her face briefly.

“What?” he asked.

“What what?”

“What was that little bit of a frown for?”

“Mr. Dolan wasn’t always very nice to us. He knew our mother in school, and sometimes, when we came in, he’d make a big deal out of us.” She lowered her voice. “ ‘Well, well, what have we here? Looks like Nancy Cahill’s little girls. How’s your mother doing, girls? She ever get married?’ “

“Wow. That’s ugly.” Will frowned. “Those must have been some great milk shakes, for you to keep going back there.”

“He wasn’t always there. Most times, someone else was working the counter. We used to sort of tiptoe in. If he wasn’t around, we’d feel like the gods were smiling on us that day.” She shrugged. “Besides, there was no other place to go in town, and I should also add that by the time we were eight or nine years old, we were used to hearing that in Morningside. This was a real small town, and everyone knew my mother’s family. Everyone knew the story of how Nancy Cahill had spurned the local lads to take up with a wild Brit. And just look at what happened to her.”