The Homecoming (7 page)

“With chocolate syrup and whipped cream? Like Mrs. Brown makes?”

“Might as well eat sugar straight from the box,” Faith muttered.

“I suppose that could be arranged,” Kara agreed. “If you get an A on your spelling test.”

“Spelling’s easy,” he said with a grin that was missing a tooth. “I can ace that. Can we have pizza, too?”

“What’s a sleepover without pizza?” Kara asked, drawing a sigh of resignation from her mother, who’d always been as rigid about nutrition as she was about everything else.

“All right!” He pumped a small fist in the air.

“Your library book’s on the counter,” Faith informed him. “I found it in the den while dusting last night.”

Kara wasn’t sure, but she would’ve bet an entire month’s salary that her mother was one of the only people on the planet who dusted and Swiffered before going to bed every night. There probably wasn’t a flat surface in the house Dr. Blanchard couldn’t perform surgery on.

“Thanks, Gram,” he said around a mouthful of banana.

“You’re welcome. And don’t talk with your mouth full, young man.”

That earned an expressive eye roll, but he did finish chewing before he brought up the next topic. “Mom?”

“Yes?” Kara knew that tone. It was one that he pulled out only for the big stuff. One that preceded relentless wheedling.

“Can I take the box to school?”

“May I,” Faith said automatically.

As she felt the familiar clenching in her stomach, Kara didn’t have to ask which box. One of the suggestions of the family grief counselor the police department had assigned them was that together they choose possessions of Jared’s that meant the most to each of them. Those were kept in a box, with the rules being that Trey would not get them out unless they were both together. That way, the counselor had said, Kara could keep in closer touch with her son’s feelings of loss and abandonment.

“Oh, honey.”

The request had come from left field. She also didn’t need it right now. Such a sensitive topic required time. Trey had always been an easy child and she knew he wouldn’t ask if it didn’t mean a great deal to him. But he was also a typical eight-year-old boy. Which, as the third misplaced library book in a month showed, meant he could be careless.

“I promise I’ll take good care of it. And not lose it,” he insisted.

Kara resisted, just barely, taking a look at her watch. As sheriff, she felt it was important that she be the first on what could well turn out to be a crime scene. On the other hand—and wasn’t there
always
another hand?—her role as mother trumped that of sheriff.

She sat down in the chair across from him. Studied his small, earnest face, which was exactly like looking into Jared’s back when her husband had been the same age.

“We made the box for the two of us,” she said. “Why would you want to share it with the kids at school?”

“Because some of them don’t believe Dad was a hero. So, since today’s Take Your Dad to School Day, I wanted to bring his medals. Because it’d be kinda like he was there with me. And they’d prove I’m not making it up.”

More than one of the reporters in the news clippings Kara had collected had described the action that had won Jared the Navy Cross and Silver Star for “conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action against the enemy.”

Only after his death had she learned that when his platoon had been ambushed in Fallujah, he’d charged through enemy gunfire, knocked out one machine gun, disarmed an improvised bomb, and, along with three other brother Marines he’d enlisted in the attack, killed a dozen insurgents in close-range fighting; then, under yet more fire from a second wave of the enemy who were shooting from rooftops all around them, the four men had carried three wounded Marines to safety and recovered two bodies.

Jared, unsurprisingly, had been nonchalant about the medals, refusing to make a big deal of them, stating that everyone there that day should be recognized and he’d merely been doing the job the Marines had trained him to do.

And it was his absolute humility, more than his act of heroism during the firefight, that Kara thought of every time she looked at the medals. And even if Jared had shrugged them off, she knew that Trey would appreciate them even more once he grew up. Which was why she was reluctant to allow him to take them to school.

What if he lost one? The way he had his Hot Wheels Hummer just last week?

Also in the box was a police Medal of Valor, awarded posthumously by the Oceanside PD. Kara knew Jared would have been equally embarrassed by being singled out for that honor.

“Of course you’re not making it up.” She stalled as her whirling mind scrambled to come up with some sort of compromise. “And I don’t recall your mentioning anything about bringing fathers to school.”
Damn
. If she’d only known, she would have rounded up a surrogate. Or at least spoken with his teacher beforehand to warn her that Trey might be ultrasensitive today.

Thin shoulders, clad in the gray T-shirt he’d begun to outgrow but would not give up that read MY DAD WEARS COMBAT BOOTS, shrugged. “I didn’t want to make you feel bad. It’s not like you can bring Dad back just for a stupid school event.”

It hurt. And, dammit, although she’d do anything for her son, Trey was unfortunately all too right about this: She couldn’t bring Jared back.

“Why don’t I drive Trey to school,” Faith suggested, “instead of having him take the bus today? Then we can give the box to his teacher for safekeeping until he can show off his father’s medals. Then, depending on our schedules, either you or I can drive him home.”

Relief flooded through Kara. “That sounds like a perfect solution.” She tousled her son’s corn-silk hair. “Why don’t you run upstairs and get it?”

“Thanks, Mom!”

“Thank your grandmother.”

“Thanks, Gram!” The older woman seemed to freeze as he flung his arms around her waist and gave her a huge hug.

As her eight-year-old son clambered up the stairs after the precious box they’d decorated with Marine Corps emblems, Kara crossed the kitchen and laid her head on her mother’s shoulder.

“Thank you,” she said.

Kara’s father had always been a toucher. Faith Blanchard was not. But in a rare physical display of affection, she stroked the back of Kara’s head. “It was the logical solution.”

Logical, yes. But it also, for some reason, made Kara’s eyes mist up.

“Don’t you have surgery this morning?”

“It’s an easy day.” Faith extracted herself from the light embrace and began bustling around the kitchen again. “Rounds this morning, then what should be a simple TLIF—transforaminal lumbar interbody fusion—at eleven.”

“That sounds serious.”

“The patient’s a crab fisherman with recurrent herniated disks due to the physical nature of his work. I’m merely going to join two vertebral segments together, which will eliminate the movement in those joints. The ideal solution would be if he’d stop fishing, but since he also needs to feed his family, and fishing is not only what he does, but all he knows and wants to do, hopefully this will reduce the pain caused by movement and the associated compression of the nerve roots.”

She said it so casually. The same way Kara might talk about writing up a speeding ticket. But with a self-confidence that had always seemed to be bred in her mother’s bones.

“Then I have appointments at the office with a few patients whose referrals don’t indicate any serious problems,” she continued, “so I should be done by three thirty. If you’re still stuck out there at Douchett’s, my bringing Trey home shouldn’t be a problem.”

“I appreciate that.”

Faith shrugged shoulders elegantly clad in a cream silk blouse. “I’m his grandmother. It goes with the territory.”

Then, as if realizing she’d made it sound like a duty, she tacked on, “And, of course, he’s an absolute delight. Did I tell you the other day that he said he might want to be a doctor when he grows up?”

“That’s great.” Of course, last week he’d been determined to be a comic book artist. And before that, a superhero who had the power to blow things up with his nuclear glare.

“I’m thinking of buying him one of those toy doctor kits. Not to put any pressure or expectations on him, of course. But if a child shows interest—”

“He’d love it.” At the very least he’d probably love using the plastic hypodermic to inject killer poison into the bad guys when playing with his Transformers.

Five minutes later, after Kara had seen her mother and son off on their way to the school, the doorbell rang.

“Damned if I didn’t flat run out of coffee,” John O’Roarke said when she answered it.

His jeans, Kara noted with a cop’s eye for details, had been pressed to a knife-edged crease, which wasn’t exactly necessary for digging around in wet sand searching for more body parts. “Thought maybe I might be able to pick up some here before heading out to the beach.”

Not mentioned was the fact that he’d passed two mini-marts and the Harbor Market, which had recently added a coffee bar, between his house and hers.
Interesting.

“I’m sorry. Mom cleaned the pot. But if you’d like, I can make more.”

“That’s okay.” His weathered face took on the look of a depressed bloodhound. He glanced past Kara into the house. “So she’s left for the hospital already?”

“You just missed her.”

“I thought she didn’t have early surgery.”

Again, Kara found it interesting that he’d know that. “She volunteered to take Trey to school.”

“Oh. That’s nice.”

“Although she said it’s a grandmother’s job, I thought so, too.”

“She sure as hell don’t look like anyone’s grandmother,” he blurted out. Kara watched in amazement as the tips of the older man’s ears flamed as scarlet as a boiled rock crab.

“We’re in full agreement there. Sorry I couldn’t be of any help. But there’s a Union 76 station on the way. I hear you can even get coffee with cinnamon there now.”

“Humph.” He scraped a hand over the crew cut he’d been wearing as long as Kara had known him. “If things keep going on the way they are, next thing you know, they’ll be tearing down the Crab Shack and putting in a damn Starbucks. I just want a cup of plain old black joe.”

“Well, I’m sure the gas station still has the regular old-fashioned kind, too,” she assured him.

It wasn’t like John O’Roarke to complain about anything. He’d always been, along with her father, the most upbeat man she’d ever known.

Then it dawned on her: John had been a guest at dinner enough times over the years that he’d have to know that Faith didn’t ever do anything plain. Including her coffee, which was, these days, always an organic free-trade blend done French-roast style.

Using all the detective skills she’d learned while attending the San Diego Regional Law Enforcement Academy,
and
putting together all those markets he’d passed,
plus
his out-of-character frustration, Kara realized that John O’Roarke hadn’t come here, mug in hand, for coffee at all.

But to see her mother.

Although Sax wasn’t exactly surprised, given that she’d graduated top of her class and was probably the smartest woman he’d ever met, Kara turned out to be damn good at her job.

He
was
surprised to discover that efficiency and focus could be really, really hot.

She was definitely in her element. Within minutes she’d had the beach, along with the steps going down to it, cordoned off and had instructed her deputies, using stakes and string, to establish narrow lanes. Having conducted searches himself, Sax knew it was the best way to search with limited manpower. Such as a SEAL team. Or a small, local police force.

Apparently the state guys—conspicuous in their absence—weren’t all that excited about an old bone showing up. If he’d been in their place, Sax probably wouldn’t have been, either.

After the searchers, which included volunteers from Shelter Bay’s search-and-rescue unit, finished working the lanes, finding nothing, a grid pattern was established and they resumed working the area at right angles to their original lanes.

Sax would’ve preferred working the lanes himself to standing on his porch observing the action, but he also understood that while she might know he wasn’t some sort of crazed killer who’d buried bodies on the beach below his house, she also didn’t want to risk having to explain his presence in the event that anything possibly incriminating did turn up.

Which meant that, like most cops, she didn’t really trust anyone.

And couldn’t he identify with that?

Word spread. The search drew the inevitable lookieloos. Townspeople and vacationers flocked together like noisy seagulls outside the barricades. The possibility of a crime seemed to trump even whale watching.

As the hours dragged on, deciding that he might as well make himself useful, Sax went into the house, got busy in the kitchen, put together some spicy crab po’boys, and heated up some jambalaya and dirty- rice leftovers.

“That’s nice of you,” Kara said, as the searchers dug into the food he put out on a wooden table. “Of course, the county will reimburse you for the meal.”

“That’s not necessary. All it’d do is create more paperwork for you, and I already had the food. If they weren’t eating it, I’d just have to toss it out eventually.”

“It’s illegal for cops to eat for free.”

He laughed at that. Maybe he was perverse, but he found her hot even when she got all earnest and official. “Maybe down in the big city, sugar, but you’ve been gone too long if you don’t remember that the line between legal and illegal is a lot more fluid in a small town.”

“That doesn’t make it right.”

She might be hot, but damn if he wasn’t beginning to feel as if he was eating lunch with Jiminy Cricket. “Fine.” He pulled a stubby pencil out of the pocket of his jeans and scribbled an amount on a paper napkin. “Here’s your invoice.”