by Kate Flora
“Don’t know yet. Waiting for the delayed shock, I think. But Charity and the baby are okay, and her brother will be, and the bad guys have been caught—though that’s been kind of like Whack-a-Mole.”
“Alice and Fred?” she said.
“There was something about those two,” I said. “I took an instant dislike to them, while Andre kept urging me to be patient and cooperative. I hate to think, though, that people who ate at my table later were shooting at my husband and threatening that poor girl in labor.”
“The world is not a kind place, Thea. I see examples of that every day.”
“And yet you toil on, always working for your girls. Protecting them. Fighting for them. How do you do it?”
She shrugged. “However hokey this sounds, I think I’m called to do it. We do what we’re drawn to do. Otherwise, girlfriend, you would be doing some nice safe job, like Suzanne thinks you should be doing, instead of going up against bad guys time after time.”
“You make me sound a lot more heroic than I really am.”
Lindsay had returned with our drinks and was listening curiously.
Jonetta smiled and stretched. “I call it like I see it. So how was it, delivering a baby?”
“Amazing. Astonishing. Terrifying. I don’t know what I would have done if something went wrong.”
“Then, thank goodness it didn’t.” She tasted her drink and looked at Lindsay. “This is pretty heavy on the vodka, isn’t it?”
Lindsay grinned. “You’re on vacation.”
My drink tasted like ice tea and lemonade. I leaned back in my chair and looked up at the sky, the same sky that earlier had been flinging meteoric bad memories at me. There was something about being home, with everyone safe, and in the company of Jonetta, that was keeping the shock of events in that little A-frame at bay. Fine with me. I wanted to sit out here and relax and feel the soft summer air.
Andre appeared in jeans and tee-shirt, his feet bare, his hair wet and spiky. He looked delicious.
He pulled me to my feet and kissed me, never mind that we had an audience. “What time is Suzanne’s crew coming?” he asked.
“Around five.” It was a little before three right now. Plenty of time to veg out.
“I have a question about the unfinished guest room. I need your opinion on something,” he said. He gave Jonetta and Lindsay one of his patented disarming smiles. “Can you spare Thea for a few minutes?” Maybe Jonetta knew what was up, but Lindsay certainly didn’t.
We went upstairs and closed the bedroom door. “How are you really?” he asked, gently tucking a wayward curl behind my ear. He was so close I could feel his body heat. Smell the particular scent that was him, the one I’d recognize in a dark room.
I walked the last step forward so we were touching. “Shaken,” I whispered. “Glad it’s over.”
“You’re supposed to be avoiding stress.” It was just a whisper in my ear.
My clothes came off. So did his. We gently and quietly offloaded some of the day’s horrible fear and tension. My stress levels were lowered so much that I fell asleep right after. I didn’t wake up until he knocked on the door, leaned in, and said that Suzanne had arrived.
“Oh, and Malcolm’s here, too. I hope that’s okay? And Lindsay’s boyfriend. He seems like a nice kid.”
“As long as it isn’t Fred and Alice.”
“No chance of that.”
I splashed cold water on my face and went downstairs. Suzanne’s daughter Emily was sitting in her little plastic seat on the deck, conducting the crowd with a large plastic spoon. Paul, Jr. was at the deer fence, studying the hungry fawn at the edge of the woods and keeping up a litany of chatter to it. Jonetta and Lindsay and Lindsay’s boyfriend Sean were shucking corn, and Suzanne and Paul were talking to Andre and Malcolm by the grill. Malcolm’s arm was in a sling and he looked pale, which wasn’t good, but his intensity level was considerably lower. Maybe he’d taken some meds.
My medicine had been a healthy dose of Andre.
Suppressing a wicked grin, I said hello to everyone, settled into a chair, and smiled at the happy commotion. In the past two days, I might have faced down a bad guy with a gun and delivered a baby, but this was how I loved spending a warm summer afternoon: Andre grilling, MOC kicking, Emily cooing, and my good friends enjoying each other’s company. Andre and I had looked for a place to call home for a long time. Finally, despite some bad guys’ efforts, we’d found it.
Everyone stayed for dinner, a spectacular feast of platters and bowls piled high with steak and dogs and burgers. With corn and potato salad. I loved the idea of a family assembled from friends. Found myself attentive to everyone and wanting them to eat. For what seemed like the first time since Charity knocked on my door, I wasn’t tense. I expected no strangers at the door and no worrying phone calls. It was lovely. Perhaps sensing the loveliness, MOC chose a leisurely stretching instead of an acrobatic routine.
In the middle of dinner, Kinsman got a phone call. He excused himself from the table and went outside to take it. We could all hear his heavy steps as he paced back and forth. He was gone so long I was sure he was getting the bad news that the operation to rescue David Peckham had gone wrong and Charity’s joy at Amy’s safe arrival would soon be crushed. Or something had happened with Baby Amy.
Instead, when he came back in, his beaten-down look was gone.
He sat down at the table with the first genuine smile I’d seen from him.
“It’s over. David is safe. He’s okay. He’s flying up tomorrow.”
It was such wonderful news the whole table burst out with applause, and little Paul said, “Hooray.”
Later, when Suzanne and company left and Jonetta and Lindsay and Lindsay’s boyfriend had gone to bed, Andre and Malcolm and I sat in the living room, both men holding glasses of bourbon, and they caught me up on the fight at the A-frame. Andre and Malcolm outside, securing the area. Fred and Alice firing from the woods. Malcolm getting shot just as Norah and Tommy arrived and Fred and Alice, outgunned, surrendering soon after.
“They tried to bluff their way out,” Andre said, “not knowing we’d finally established their credentials were faked.” He sighed. “There’s so much talk about interagency cooperation, but when it’s feds and locals, things don’t always work so well. We still might not know for sure if the bodies of the real Fred and Alice hadn’t been found.”
Cowboy Boots—I never learned his name and didn’t care—arrived late to the gun party and never got a chance to get out of his car.
“I don’t like all this death and dying,” I said, “even if there was the miracle of a new life in the midst of it.”
I looked at Kinsman, who was drooping in his chair. “Are you allowed to tell us what the mission was that you and David were on?”
“Not really. Let’s just say we were helping to locate and shut down some drug smuggling tunnels along the border.”
“The army does that? Not Homeland Security?”
Kinsman’s smile was ironic and amused. “Ma’am,” he said, “Special Forces do all kinds of things folks never hear about.” The subtext was that was all he was going to say.
Andre shot me one of his “don’t press it” looks and leaned in. His mission-driven, male-bonding, take each other on faith world was different from my need to understand the whole picture. This time, he didn’t need to worry. Vagueness was fine with me. I really didn’t want to know. I wanted to see all of this in a figurative rearview mirror.
In the silence that followed, everyone thinking their own thoughts and processing the day, Kinsman suddenly laughed. “Uncle Malcolm,” he said. “Wow. A whole new chapter. I can’t wait to see David’s face.”
He stood. “I hope you don’t mind if I borrow your guestroom one more night?”
“It’s just a mattress on the floor,” I said.
“Right now, I could sleep on a bed of nails.”
He left us, and we heard his tired feet climb the stairs.
I m
oved from my chair to Andre’s lap. “Can we stop answering the door?”
“Stop answering the door? Soon as Dad and Ronny are done in the barn, we’re building a tower and I’m locking you in there.”
I snuggled into his shoulder. “Only if I get a tower to lock you in as well. And who will take care of MOC?”
“A moat, then,” he said.
“Dragons to guard us.”
“Guard dogs. Bite-trained.”
I sighed. “If this were TV, someone would stop by now to assure us that Jason has been convicted and sent off to jail.”
“Even on TV,” he said, his voice rumbling in his chest, “they’d have to knock on the door.”
I think I fell asleep then, ridiculously secure against his chest. In his arms. In a romance, we would have ended there. But I’m no small woman, and before I cut off the circulation to his legs, he nudged me to my feet. He led me upstairs, past all our sleeping guests. We climbed into bed, Andre curled around me. As I drifted back to sleep, I thought of Baby Amy, her tiny, red, squinched-up face and wise, dark eyes.
Sleep, I told myself. Soon my own nights would be interrupted by those tiny cries, those wise eyes, and someone new figuratively knocking on my door. Only this time, it would be life that came knocking.
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Page Ahead for an Excerpt From:
Death Sends a Message
Death Sends a Message
A Thea Kozak Mystery, Book 11
It was a clear and sunny late summer day, the kind that makes me feel good to be alive. MOC was tucked up in a baby wrap, small and warm against my chest, sound asleep. I was searching through a discombobulated bin of clearance baby things, trying to find a summer hat small enough to fit a tiny head. In all my hasty and interrupted prep, I’d forgotten to get one, and I’d been scolded for my negligence by an elderly lady who thought I was committing child abuse. Trying to find a summer hat at the end of August was impossible. I kept striking out. This was my third store and my temper was as worn as the meager supply of summer goods I was perusing.
At last, almost at the bottom of the bin, I found it, a small yellow embroidered number with a tipsy-looking duck. Hat purchased, I headed back out into the late summer sunshine.
On my way into the store, I’d passed another new mother—at least I assumed she was a new mother since the infant in her expensive carriage was tiny. She was sitting on a bench outside the shop, eating an ice cream cone.
The sight had inspired me and made my next planned stop the ice cream stand. Black raspberry with chocolate chunks. I could almost taste it. Almost feel the sticky warm-cold as it dripped toward the edge of my hand and I caught it with my tongue. I realized that my choice was risky. I didn’t yet know how MOC reacted to chocolate.
When I came out of the air-conditioned shop into the bright sun, the woman, well, a girl, really, was standing beside the carriage, waving her arms, screaming like I have honestly never heard anyone scream in the real world.
She was young and skinny, with pale arms and legs that had somehow missed the summer sun. No substance to her except what I took for nursing-mother breasts and a tiny post-delivery belly. Her nearly waist-length hair was thick and blonde and wavy. Magazine cover hair. Model hair. Hair that required time and money to create such a carefree look. She wore a blue striped sundress that came no more than halfway down her thighs, not quite long enough to cover some purple bruises. Elaborately strappy sandals in a matching blue. Her lips were puffed with filler and shone with gloss. She wore more eye makeup than I’ve worn in the last ten years. The noise she was making was so loud it blurred whatever she was screaming about.
For a moment, I thought it was theater. Some street thing staged to grab tourists’ attention. Her panicked expression said no.
I didn’t want her screams to wake my sleeping baby. Sleep was a rare enough thing that I cherished these quiet moments when I could enjoy the small, soft body without also having to deal with misery and unhappiness. Without pacing the floor in a darkened room. Still, I was concerned. She was another new mother, and something had set her off. I waited for someone to stop, approach her. Ask her what was wrong. There were plenty of people about who could have helped her besides me.
Plenty of people around who evidently didn’t give a damn. They flowed around the screaming girl and her huge baby carriage like she was a rock in a stream. Averting their eyes or pumping up conversation as though volume proved its importance and excused a failure to offer help to someone in trouble. Obviously, someone needed to help. I just didn’t want that helper to be me. I have done my share. More than my share.
I stood and watched the scene like it was something in a movie. The drama. The fear she was projecting. The absolutely hateful, shameful way people were ignoring her.
Damn them all!
If anyone had been with me, anyone who knows me, they would have said “Thea, don’t!” and dragged me away. But except for MOC, I was alone, and the kid may be good at using noise to manipulate me but hasn’t learned “don’t” yet.
I took a step closer. Near enough to see into that elaborate carriage. Near enough to see something that would make any mother scream. The carriage that had held a small, sleeping infant when I went into the store—a boy, if all that blue was true indicator—was empty, and the screaming girl wasn’t holding a baby.
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Death Sends a Message
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Also by Kate Flora
The Thea Kozak Mystery Series
Chosen for Death
Death in a Funhouse Mirror
Death at the Wheel
An Educated Death
Death in Paradise
Liberty or Death
Stalking Death
Death Warmed Over
Schooled in Death
Death Comes Knocking
Death Sends a Message
The Joe Burgess Mystery Series
Playing God
The Angel of Knowlton Park
Redemption
And Grant You Peace
Led Astray
A Child Shall Lead Them
A World of Deceit
About the Author
Kate Flora’s fascination with people’s criminal tendencies began in the Maine attorney general’s office. Deadbeat dads, people who hurt their kids, and employers’ discrimination aroused her curiosity about human behavior. The author of twenty-one books and many short stories, Flora’s been a finalist for the Edgar, Agatha, Anthony, and Derringer awards. She won the Public Safety Writers Association award for nonfiction and twice won the Maine Literary Award for crime fiction. Her most recent Thea Kozak mystery is Schooled in Death; her most recent Joe Burgess is A Child Shall Lead Them. Her new crime story collection is Careful What You Wish For: Stories of revenge, retribution, and the world made right. In 2020 there’s a romantic suspense, Wedding Bell Ruse, a story in The Faking of the President and one in Heartbreaks and Half-Truths, a new Thea Kozak mystery, Death Comes Knocking, and a new Joe Burgess, The Deceits of the World.
Flora’s nonfiction focuses on aspects of the public safety officers’ experience. Her two
true crimes, Finding Amy: A true story of murder in Maine (with Joseph K. Loughlin) and Death Dealer: How cops and cadaver dogs brought a killer to justice, follow homicide investigations as the police conducted them. Her co-written memoir of retired Maine warden Roger Guay, A Good Man with a Dog: A Game Warden’s 25 Years in the Maine Woods, explores policing in a world of guns, misadventure, and the great outdoors. Her latest nonfiction is Shots Fired: The Misconceptions, Misunderstandings, and Myths about police shootings with retired Portland Assistant Chief Joseph K. Loughlin.
Flora divides her time between Massachusetts and Maine, where she gardens and cooks and watches the clouds when she’s not imagining her character’s dark deeds. She’s been married for decades to an excellent man. Her sons edit films and hang out in research labs.
www.kateclarkflora.com
