Tangled Lies (4 page)

Sasha smiled as she sank down on the sofa and nodded. Bella put her muzzle on Blaze’s knee and promptly dozed off. Her loud snoring coaxed a reluctant smile out of Blaze and woke Mama with a start. She opened her eyes and smiled groggily as she looked around the room.

“Where is my Cathy?” she finally asked.

Sasha had wondered the same thing. Eve, who had always known everything about everyone, said, “She couldn’t come, Mama. She’s very sorry. She’ll call you soon.”

Blaze huffed out a breath. “She didn’t even bother to call.”

Pop stopped rocking. “You will not talk about your sister with disrespect.”

Blaze ducked her head, a flush spreading up her cheeks. “I just meant—”

“Enough,” Pop said gently. “Let’s enjoy those who are here.”

Sasha hid a smile as Blaze managed—just barely—to bite back another deep sigh. It would have been funnier if Blaze didn’t remind Sasha so very much of herself as a teen, all attitude and prickly desire for affection hidden behind walls of insecurity.

Just then the door opened and Cathy breezed in, movie-star shades hiding her eyes, straight black bob swinging around her face as she slowly walked to Mama in heels so high and a skirt so tight it was a wonder she could move at all.

Mama’s eyes widened and filled with tears. “My Cathy. You came.”

Cathy bent, careful not to tip over, and kissed Mama’s cheek. “It’s
Cat
now, Mama. Happy birthday.”

“You missed the party,” Blaze announced, earning a stern look from Pop. “I’m just sayin’.”

Cat straightened and noticed Sasha for the first time. “What are you doing here?”

Sasha stood and forced a smile. “Same thing you are, sister.” She took a step to hug Cat, but her sister retreated to a safe distance.

“I can’t believe you had the gall to show up here after what you did.”

“Cat, look, I’m sorry. Truly. I never meant to—”

Cat held up a hand. “You never meant any of the horrible things you did. You just didn’t think. Ever. Not about anyone but yourself.” She shook her head. “This was a mistake. I need to—”

“You will sit down.”

Every head turned toward Pop. Cat automatically plopped down in the nearest chair. Nobody argued when Pop used that tone of voice.

Mama fumbled with the remote, and the chair slowly raised her head and lowered her feet. Once she squirmed and settled, she looked at each of them, eyes still sparkling with unshed tears.

“My girls, together at last. Thank you for coming, all of you.” She clasped her hands together over her heart. “You have given me more joy than I ever expected, than I ever deserved.”

She wiped her cheeks with shaking hands, and Sasha had to sit on her own hands to keep from rushing over and begging her to stop. This kind of emotional display had never happened when they were growing up. Mama was always brisk and matter-of-fact, quick with a bone-crushing hug or an unexpected swat with a kitchen towel.

“I wanted my girls home, not just because it’s my birthday, though I thank you from the bottom of my heart for sharing this day with me. No, I want something more from you three oldest.”

Sasha exchanged raised eyebrows with Eve, but Cat wouldn’t meet her eyes.

“Of course, Mama. Whatever you want,” Sasha said.

“If we can give it, we will,” Eve qualified.

Mama smiled. “Always a negotiator, my Evelyn.”

“I just meant—” Eve began before Mama interrupted.

“I know you do not make promises lightly, nor would I want you to.” She smiled and took a deep breath, looking from one to the next. “You all know about the chemo, yes? Pop has filled you in on the details.”

Everyone nodded.

“Good. He also told you they are trying an experimental therapy?”

Sasha, Cat, and Eve nodded, but Blaze sprang up and ran from the room, both dogs at her heels. Pop would have followed, but Mama laid a hand on his arm, a familiar gesture that jabbed Sasha in the heart. “Let her go. It may be best she not be here just now.”

Sasha fingered the mariner’s cross at her neck and exchanged another furtive glance with Eve. “What’s this all about, Mama?”

Again, the gentle smile. “Sasha, my impatient one.” She coughed, a deep, racking sound that raised goose bumps on Sasha’s arms. Mama leaned her head back and took several deep breaths before continuing.

Sasha leaned forward, hands clasped between her knees. “Mama, please. What do you need? How can we help?”

Mama smiled once more, and Sasha swore she could see right through her skin. It made her want to bang on the cypress paneling, so she gripped her hands tighter and waited.

“You remember Tony, no? My baby who was stolen from my arms before you girls came?” She pulled a ratty-looking teddy bear from the basket beside her chair, and Sasha’s heart clenched.

“Of course,” Sasha said. It was a story they’d heard many times. Mama and Pop’s biological son, Tony, had been three the day he disappeared. He had been playing in the yard, and Mama had gone in for another load of laundry. The phone rang while she was inside, and when she finally returned, Tony had vanished. Despite an exhaustive search by police and, later, a private investigator they’d hired, no one had ever been able to find a single trace of Tony. The prevailing opinion was that Tony had fallen in the water and drowned, his body swept out to sea.

Mama stroked the ragged bear, and apprehension flitted down Sasha’s spine, mingling with her confusion. “But what does that have to do with us?”

Mama took a deep, rattling breath and focused first on Eve, then Cat, then Sasha before she said, “I want you to find him.”

Sasha fell back against the sofa as though she’d been pushed. She locked eyes with Eve, whose shock no doubt mirrored her own. Cat looked equally shaken. “Find him?” Cat said. “Mama, what are you saying? What are you asking?”

Some of the familiar fierceness returned to Mama’s faded brown eyes, and Sasha’s shock eased a fraction. “I have not lost my mind. I am sick. I have been sick.” She held up a hand. “And before you all tell me I will be fine and I will get well, we don’t know that. Although I have faith that God will heal me.” She patted Pop’s hand. “So, in either case, I need to know what happened to my boy, my firstborn.”

Eve cleared her throat. “Um, what if he’s, ah . . .”

“Dead?” Mama nodded. “It is a possibility. They never found one single trace of my baby. But in here”—she patted her heart—“I believe he is alive. I want to meet him. I want to know he is healthy and happy.”

“But-but that was—” Sasha scrambled to do the math, never her strong suit.

“Twenty-three years ago,” Pop said.

Sasha leaped to her feet and paced. “You should hire another investigator, someone who finds people for a living, someone who knows how to do this stuff.”

Eve moved to stand beside her, stopping her momentum. “I agree. While I understand why you want to do this, truly, we’re not the people who can help you. You need professionals.”

The whole time her daughters spoke, Mama simply shook her head. “You are family. Outsiders could not find him. I want you. My girls will find my boy for me. It is my final wish.”

“Don’t say things like that!” Sasha hissed, but Mama’s eyes were closed, and she pretended to be asleep. Discussion over.

Oh, Mama had strong-armed them into things before, innocent requests like helping around the house or keeping little secrets from Pop, but this—this was nuts.

Eve plopped down on the couch and covered her face with her hands. Cat wore a shell-shocked look Sasha understood. She had to get outside. The walls were closing in.

Her flip-flops smacked the knotty pine floor as she marched from the room and across the porch. She stomped across the soggy grass and onto the docks at the marina. She didn’t stop until she reached the farthest point. She stood, hands on hips, trying to catch her breath as Bella sidled up beside her.

By all that was holy, how on earth were they going to give Mama what she wanted?

Chapter 2

Sasha wasn’t surprised when she heard footsteps on the dock behind her. But she was surprised to see Pop. She’d been expecting Eve to chew her out for running away. Again. But her emotions and all that internal churning were why she’d stayed away to begin with.

Pop came and stood beside her, slipped his arm around her waist, and tucked her against his side. “It is good you are here, my Sasha. Mama has missed having you girls around.”

Sasha smiled at him, feeling warm all the way inside for the first time in years. “You were just glad to be rid of me.”

He pulled off his fisherman’s cap and pointed to his bald head and the wispy bit of fringe around the edges. “When you girls were young, you turned my hair gray. Then you left and it all fell out.”

“Hey, I can’t take all the credit. That you can blame Blaze for, I’m guessing.”

He settled the cap back on his head and laughed. “She is a handful, that one.” He paused, speared her with his dark eyes. “She reminds me of you.”

Sasha leaned in and rested her head against the reassuring beat of his heart. Pop’s easy affection had been the one constant in Sasha’s young life. Mama could be laughing one minute and screaming in Italian the next, but Pop . . . he was steady. Her anchor.

“You hanging in there, Pop?” Sasha felt him stiffen at the question, but he didn’t answer. She raised her head. “Pop? Is there more? Is it worse than you’ve said?”

He shook his head. “No, Sasha. It is bad enough, no? There is no more.”

She looked directly into his dark eyes, noticing how deeply the crow’s-feet had etched his skin, how worry had aged him. “I wish you had told me.”

He studied her face, then looked away. “I did not want to leave the news on your answering machine. I figured you would call—and come home—when you were ready.”

She started to say she would have come immediately, but didn’t. She wasn’t sure she would have, and the knowledge shamed her. She’d run long and hard to escape Safe Harbor. Instead she asked, “How bad is it really?”

“Your mama, she never gives up hope. Never. She is sure that this new experimental regimen will work, even though the others did not.”

She heard what he didn’t say. “You have doubts.” It hurt to even say the words.

He nodded once and looked out at the Gulf, calm as glass now after the storm had passed through. “I will pray. And I will hope.”

Sasha waited, watching his throat work as he studied the water. She could tell he had more to say but couldn’t seem to force the words out. Finally he turned to her and gripped her shoulders. “This quest, it is nonsense, Sasha. Pure nonsense. Tony has been gone for twenty-three years. This is the foolish hope of a desperate woman.”

Sasha agreed with him, though she wouldn’t have put it in quite those terms. She reached up and patted his hands.

“Maybe foolish, maybe not.” She shrugged. “But I’ll do my best.” She forced a smile. “And if we get Eve involved, well, then our chances go way up, immediately.”

He wrenched out of her grasp. “No!”

Sasha watched, stunned, as he paced. Back and forth, back and forth, hands fisted at his sides. Beside her, Bella whimpered, and Sasha reached down to reassure her. “It’s OK, girl.”

When Pop turned back her way, Sasha stepped into his path. “Pop. Stop. Please. Tell me why not.”

He wouldn’t meet her eyes, just kept shaking his head, muttering in Italian.

She reached out and grabbed his arm, holding him still. Finally he looked up, jaw clenched.

“It is a fool’s errand. A waste of time. And when nothing comes of it? Then I will be left holding her as she cries in the night again, desperate for her baby. I can’t, Sasha. I can’t watch her go through it again. He’s gone. Our Tony was gone years ago, and she can’t—” He stopped and wiped tears from his eyes. “Your mama, she can’t let him go. And I can’t watch her suffer anymore.”

He cleared his throat and visibly calmed himself. “Tell her no, Sasha. Tell her you cannot do this. Please. For me.”

Sasha swallowed the lump in her own throat, trying to find words, but nothing came out. How could she refuse him? This was Pop, the man who had found her living behind the marina in an abandoned shed when she was twelve years old, a filthy, starving runaway with nothing to call her own but the clothes on her back, a gold mariner’s cross she wore around her neck, and an attitude that screeched like rusty armor. It had taken almost a week, but Pop had finally coaxed her out of the shed with Mama’s homemade bread and deep-fried fish he’d caught that day.

Pop and Mama had saved her in every sense of the word. They’d loved her despite her attitude and had given her a home, no questions asked. After a while, she’d become part of their family and, later, part of their faith, too.

So how on earth could she tell one of them yes without breaking the other’s heart?

And how would she ever choose?

Jesse figured he should head to Clarabelle’s, start packing up and pitching the endless knickknacks and doodads his great-aunt had stacked on every available surface of her pink cottage. But he couldn’t seem to leave the marina. He’d waited out the thunderstorm in his truck, and now he climbed out and wandered down the dock, stopping to study the Gulf of Mexico rolling to the west as far as the eye could see. He’d been caught off guard when his feisty aunt suddenly died in her sleep at the ripe old age of ninety-three. He’d been even more surprised that she’d left everything she owned to him.

He still expected her to appear in the kitchen, cane tapping on the heart-pine floor, pointing an arthritic finger and scolding him for some childhood misdeed. What would she say about his stint in jail? He grimaced. She would poke and prod until the whole ugly mess spilled out. Then she’d tell him that doing the wrong thing for the right reason was still wrong. She’d thump his chest and tell him to confess, repent, and move on and live as the man she knew he could be.

Jesse smiled at the mental image, watching the water. He propped a shoulder against a post and scanned the aging dock, listening to the water lapping the pilings and the birds fighting over scraps from a nearby fishing boat, inhaling the smell of salt and seawater and engine fumes. He could breathe here.

He studied the slip where
The Painted Lady
rode the tide between a flats fishing boat and a sixteen-foot camo-green johnboat that had seen better days.
The Lady
was gorgeous, but her engine needed a lot of work if he expected her to win that race. And that was exactly what he expected. He needed that prize money. He had a promise to keep.

From somewhere off to his left, in one of the small outbuildings that dotted the marina’s perimeter, he heard banging, followed by muttered cursing and several more loud thwacks. He grinned and started in that direction.

He stepped into the open doorway and found Sasha hunched over a boat motor, just as he’d thought. Since they were teens, when she got nervous or worried, she paced and fidgeted with her cross necklace. But if she was furious, she took her feelings out on machinery, usually engines that wouldn’t run.

If memory served, this was Pop’s workshop. Sasha poked and prodded a half-assembled boat motor hanging from a lift. She checked pieces and parts, examining one after another, completely oblivious to his presence.

She wiped greasy hands on her cargo shorts and grimaced when she realized what she’d done.

He grabbed a clean shop rag from a stack and dangled it over her shoulder in front of her face. Startled, she grabbed it and spun around, looking him over with the same suspicion she would a snake that had just slithered in.

He lounged against the workbench, arms crossed, and wondered if she knew how obvious the emotions were that marched across her face. Suspicion, no question. But unless he missed his guess, he’d also seen a quick flicker of interest flash in those beautiful eyes before she looked away. His own interest came as no surprise, since he’d spent every summer of his squandered youth pining over the aloof and beautiful Sasha Petrov.

“Don’t you have better things to do, Money-boy?” She wiped her hands on the rag, then took a step back in surprise when he nipped it from her grasp and dabbed at her left cheek.

Jesse found he liked keeping her a bit off balance. “You always did get dirty when you worked.”

A big yellow Lab appeared and inserted herself between him and Sasha, shooting him a concerned look.

“This is Bella. She hides when I start banging, but she never goes far.”

Jesse leaned over and stuck out his hand for Bella to sniff. “She looks like the dog you had when you were a kid.” Color spread up Sasha’s cheeks, and she looked away. Interesting. “She’s yours?” he asked, though given the way the dog hugged Sasha’s legs, the answer seemed obvious.

“Since she was a pup. She goes with me everywhere.”

He eyed the suspended motor. “So what crime has this motor committed to make you beat it with a wrench?”

Her eyes narrowed, as if she wasn’t quite sure if he was teasing or not. She pointed. “Not the motor. Idiot owners. Gummed-up injectors. Lazy.” She shook her head and continued her inspection.

“You OK?” He hadn’t meant to ask; the words just popped out.

Her head snapped up. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

He studied her closed expression and decided not to mention Mama Rosa’s cancer. Clearly a closed topic. “Must be a bit awkward, coming back after all this time.”

This pulled a half smile from her. “Guess you know all about that.” She raised a brow and went back to work, leaving him to wonder just how much gossip she’d picked up. And how much of it was true.

“You all moved into Miss Clarabelle’s cottage?”

“Not yet. I’m going to have to shovel out a truckload of knickknacks first.”

“She did love her trinkets. And you, though you kept her on her toes.”

He laughed. “I still expect her to stomp into the kitchen and chew me out for something or other.”

“You always gave her lots to scold you for. She was a sweet little spitfire.”

“True enough.”
You’re stalling, Claybourne.
“So, I was going to take
The Painted Lady
for a ride. Want to come?”

She stopped, straightened, arms folded as she studied him. “She’s a pretty sweet ride. You going to let me take the helm?”

“Mama Rosa said you’re a boat captain. You ever pilot a vintage boat? They take a bit of finesse.”

“Not one as pretty as yours. But I’ve handled trawlers in heavy seas and just about anything else that floats.”

He indicated the door with a nod of his head. “We’ll see.”

She flashed him a quick triumphant grin, dropped her tools back on the workbench, and took a minute to scrub the grease from her hands at the industrial sink before she followed him out to the boat slip.

She stopped, hands on hips as she surveyed the boat. She let out a slow whistle.

“They sure don’t sell these babies at the local discount lot.”

All sleek wood and beautiful lines, ready to fly across the waves,
The Painted Lady
could tempt men into foolish, foolish decisions.

His gut knotted when he thought of just how much he had riding on the upcoming race. He stepped aboard and turned to offer her a hand.

She grinned. “Permission to come aboard?”

He wiggled his fingers. “Yeah, yeah, hop in.” He eyed Bella. “She needs to stay here.”

Sasha looked like she wanted to argue, but then she patted Bella’s head and said, “Sorry, girl. I’ll be back soon.” She untied the bow lines, turned, and in one smooth move, grabbed his hand and stepped aboard.

Jesse turned on the blower and reached back to untie the stern lines. Once they’d cast off, he expertly maneuvered them out of the small marina and followed the channel markers into open water. Out here in the Gulf, the water deepened about a foot per mile, so a smart man stayed in the channel and knew the tides or he could end up running aground on an oyster bed.

The small cockpit barely had room for both of them, but he sat behind the wheel, studying the gauges, judging
The Lady
’s performance. When he’d used the key from Aunt Clarabelle’s lawyer to unlock the air-conditioned storage unit, pulled back the cover, and gotten his first look at
The Lady
, he’d been stunned. Why had his aunt kept her hidden all these years? She looked showroom new, but her engine needed work, lots of work, after sitting idle for who-knew-how-many years. She wasn’t race ready. And he didn’t have a lot of time or money to get her in top form.

A few minutes later, he eased up on the throttle and moved to the side, one hand still on the wheel. “You ready?”

Her eyes widened even as a slow grin split her face, jabbing him like an unexpected fist. Did she have any idea what that smile did to him?

“I’m always ready.” She eased behind the wheel, took a moment to look over the various gauges, then smoothly eased the throttle forward. Faster, faster, faster. The 630-horsepower Chevrolet marine motor pushed
The Lady
up on plane, and they skimmed over the surface of the water with ease. He’d expected jerky movements and had braced accordingly. Sasha’s smooth handling made him relax.