Midnight Sins (4 page)

good twenty-minute walk from the house that would

have taken Cami much longer as she labored for

breath.

She glanced at the clock, willing the doctor to call

her back about the prescription before it was too late.

She worked at the pharmacy, but still, Mr. Keene

wouldn’t like it if she had to let herself in tonight to fill

the prescription.

If he were in town, he would have come in himself

and done it, she knew. He liked Cami. Hell, everyone

liked Cami, except their father.

“How did you lose your medicine?” Cami’s

answer perplexed her. Her sister wasn’t an

irresponsible child. She’d been forced to grow up

young, and hadn’t had the luxury of being able to

forget the simplest things. Mark Flannigan, their

father, had little patience for teenage angst or

forgetfulness from his youngest child.

Cami shrugged at the question and turned her

gaze away to stare at the wall on the other side of the

bed.

“Cami?” Jaymi touched her sister’s chin gently to

turn her gaze back to her. “What happened to your

medicine?”

“I don’t know.” Her dry lips trembled as her eyes

filled with tears. “Dad came in the bedroom and he

was upset because there were dirty clothes on the

floor and the tissues were on my table. I think he threw

them away when he started throwing everything in the

trash.”

Jaymi’s lips thinned.

She knew better than to call him, or to appear at

the house furious over it. Mark always had a way of

making it look as though it were Cami’s fault, or even

pretending innocence.

While he did, their mother would stare at him in

resigned accusation before mumbling about taking

her medicine and heading for her bedroom.

She wasn’t going to allow this to continue, she

decided. Once Cami was better, they would go to the

house and pack her things before bringing them to the

apartment. Cami was being neglected in the most

despicable way. Even worse, Mark was risking her

health. He had to have known he had thrown the

medicine away. That wasn’t something that was done

by accident, and she knew Cami wasn’t a messy

child. She was too neat for her age and Jaymi

couldn’t believe there had been enough tissues on the

bed table for Mark to have missed the bottle of pills

and the cough medicine.

She just prayed the doctor was willing to fax the

prescription in to the pharmacy before Jaymi broke

several different state and federal laws and refilled the

prescriptions herself.

She would not allow her sister to suffer more

tonight, and the hospital was more than an hour away.

After the wreck she’d been in the week before, she

was wary about driving the mountain roads.

There shouldn’t have been anything wrong with

her brakes. There had been no reason they would go

out as she started down the mountain, causing her to

nearly crash over one of the sheer cliffs that dropped

to a boulder-strewn ravine below.

It had been sheer luck that had kept her from

going over. That and the fact that a rock slide from the

cliff above the road had caused the state to clear a

wide area on the other side of the road to make room

for debris.

She’d managed to steer her car to the other side

and the very fact that she hadn’t been going fast had

possibly saved her life, Joe Townsend had told her.

But he had acted oddly. He’d refused to look her

in the eye, and Joe was the type of man who looked a

person in the eye. But when he’d warned her to be

careful, and she had taken it as a warning, he’d been

more commanding than concerned.

“Jaymi, watch what you’re doing,” he told her

fiercely. “Don’t be taking any chances.”

She hadn’t been aware she was taking any

chances. At least not in her car.

But the night she and Rafe had stopped seeing

each other, another call had come in, and this time,

she was certain she knew who it was. Mostly certain

of it. There was just enough doubt that she had to see

him first, had to look in his eyes as he spoke to her to

be certain.

Each time she called him the call went to voice

mail. The one time she’d shown up at his office, he

had been “unavailable,” according to his secretary.

But he couldn’t hide forever. Sweetrock was a small

town, she was going to see him eventually.

The ring of her cell phone had her jerking the

device from the table next to the bed and flipping it

open. The prescription had been faxed in. The

pharmacy was closed, but the doctor was certain it

would be filled before the doors opened the next

morning.

So was she. She had the keys to the store and

she had the license to work behind the counter and fill

prescriptions. She was supposed to have it checked

by the pharmacist; she wasn’t supposed to fill

anything without Martin Keene’s presence. But this

was an emergency. It was her sister.

Cami fought to cough again, nearly losing her

breath as she tried weakly to clear the obstruction in

her lungs.

“Cami, I’m going to go get your prescription,” she

told her as she rose from the chair and grabbed the

jacket she’d laid at the end of the bed earlier. “I’ll be

back in a bit, okay?”

Cami nodded, her eyes drifting closed, her

breathing labored as she tried to rest before another

bout attacked.

“Get some rest, baby.” Leaning down, she kissed

her sister on the forehead before grabbing her purse

and keys and heading out of the apartment.

It was dark. The street lights glowed weakly in the

evening fog, casting sinister shadows along the nearly

deserted back streets.

She considered moving to the front of the block,

but it was the quieter part of the evening. There wasn’t

much traffic until Main Street and then heading south

toward the interstate.

The pharmacy was only a few blocks from her

apartment, which was why she liked the job. She

could walk to work and back, and even during the rain

and snowstorms, it wasn’t a bad walk. It would just be

a wet one.

Which was why Cami had bronchitis. Her father

had sent her the eight blocks from their home to the

pharmacy to get their mother’s prescription rather

than waiting for Jaymi to bring it to the house after she

locked up.

He had deliberately attempted to get Cami ill,

she thought as she tucked her hands into the light

jacket she wore and strode faster along the neat, welllit

back street.

Cami was susceptible to bronchitis and

pneumonia. If the first stage wasn’t treated quickly

and aggressively, then Cami could become viciously

ill. She’d been hospitalized twice in the past four

years, once for pneumonia, the second time for

double pneumonia.

Pausing at the street corner, she felt a chill race

up her spine and marked it down to the thought that

her father might be attempting to kill his youngest

child. If she was his youngest child.

Jaymi had done some counting in the past

weeks since her father had revealed his attempt to

convince Uncle Eddy and Aunt Ella to keep Cami

when they moved to Aspen.

Cami was thirteen. She would be fourteen in

three months. Add nine more months to that, and it

added up to the time their mother had taken Jaymi

and stayed in Denver with Aunt Beth for nearly a year.

Jaymi had been ten, and she remembered, even

now, how much happier her mother had been then.

She laughed, giggled on the phone. Sometimes,

Jaymi would wake up in the middle of the night and

thought she heard a man’s voice in the bedroom

across the hall.

She remembered the man her mother had said

was a friend of Beth’s. He had worn a uniform. Dark

hair, and eyes a soft, soft gray ringed with the same

odd blue color Cami’s were ringed with.

She walked across the street as realization

began to rush through her.

God, why hadn’t she made the connection before

now?

For years she had watched Mark Flannigan treat

Cami like shit, and had agonized over how a father

could be so cruel. Why hadn’t she remembered the

darkly handsome man with the gentle smile and big

hands?

Why hadn’t she remembered, during that time,

the day she had come home from the park with a

neighbor to find her mother sobbing as though she

were dying? Aunt Beth had been crying as well and

Uncle Jonah had been grief-stricken.

She unlocked the pharmacy and stepped in,

careful to lock the door behind her, holding her breath

as she heard a car easing down the street.

She prayed it wasn’t Mr. Keene, or the police.

She would hate to have to explain why she was here.

Even if she did have the key, she didn’t have

permission to be in before it was time to open the

pharmacy.

Moving quickly to the back, she began to fill the

prescription as those memories continued to ease

forward from whatever shadowed recess they had

been hiding in.

She was still shocked, dismayed that she hadn’t

remembered that summer so long ago. She should

have. Because she remembered her father showing

up not long after that and he and Uncle Jonah fighting

over something Mark had called a “whoreson” and

“wife-stealing brother.”

It was beginning to make sense. So much was

becoming more clear.

She had been pushing so many memories back

over the years, trying to keep the truth at bay. She

hadn’t wanted to remember, though it was something

Cami deserved to know. But that didn’t mean it

wouldn’t destroy her. Cami still had the hope that the

day would come that Mark would accept her as a

daughter and part of the family.

The fact that he never would wasn’t lost on Jaymi,

or Jonah, if she could remember the past well enough

to recall the screaming match they had gotten into.

Why? Why had she forgotten?

That question tormented her as she finished

filling the prescription, capped it, and printed out the

label before peeling the paper from it and sticking it

onto the bottles.

The antibiotic would take at least twenty-four

hours to kick in, but the cough medicine would ease

her labored breathing and the horrible coughing.

Did Cami take her susceptibility to bronchitis

from her natural father? Jaymi wondered as she

made her way to the back door.