by JoAnn Ross
“It’s a girl.”
Molly watched as the doctor placed her blue-eyed, black-haired daughter into her sister’s arms, and she suffered a jolt of loss so wrenching, she almost cried out.
“Have you chosen a name?” the nurse asked.
Lena was smiling down at the baby girl as if the entire world had just been handed to her on a silver platter. “Grace,” she said as she lifted her gaze to Molly. “Grace Margaret Longworth.”
Molly was moved by her sister using her name as the baby’s middle name. As for Grace, she realized Lena had chosen well. This infant was, indeed, a very special gift from God.
Thy will be done, Molly prayed silently. And struggled not to weep.
Also by JOANN ROSS
A WOMAN’S HEART
SOUTHERN COMFORTS
CONFESSIONS
LEGACY OF LIES
JOANN ROSS
NO REGRETS
To Marisa Ann Ross,
who reminds me that miracles do exist.
And, as always, to Jay, for all the years.
Once again, with heartfelt appreciation
to my editor and friend
Malle Vallik.
Contents
Prologue
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Part Two
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Part Three
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Epilogue
Prologue
1972
It was Christmas in Los Angeles. Although the temperature was in the mid-eighties the residents of the City of Angels were determined to rev up that old holiday spirit.
The venerable Queen Mary was decked out in its winter wonderland finery, Dickens’s A Christmas Carol was playing to standing-room-only crowds at the Hollywood Bowl, and at the Shrine Auditorium the Nutcracker ballet continued to entrance.
Richard Burton was narrating A Child’s Christmas in Wales at the Shubert Theatre, the Mickey Mouse Very Merry Christmas Parade had returned to Disneyland’s Main Street, and even the hookers strolling Hollywood Boulevard had gotten into the act, dressing for the season in skimpy red-and-white outfits.
But inside a small pink stucco house, located in the shadow of Dodger Stadium, the mood was anything but festive.
“Molly,” Lena McBride whispered desperately, “I’m going to pee in my pants.”
Ten-year-old Molly McBride drew her sister a little tighter against her. “No, you’re not, Lena,” she whispered back without taking her eyes from their daddy. “You can hold on.”
“No, I can’t. Please, Molly,” she hissed, as she recrossed her legs and pressed her small hand between them. “You have to do something.”
It was a common refrain, one Molly had grown up hearing. Although there was only two years’ difference between them, sometimes she felt more like Lena’s mother than her sister.
“Would you two brats shut the fuck up?” Rory McBride roared, aiming his gun away from his wife and at Molly and Lena.
Amazingly, his shout failed to wake three-year-old Tessa, who continued to sleep on the rug in the center of the room. Her baby sister had been cranky that morning with a cold. Afraid at what might happen if Tessa woke and began fussing, Molly was relieved that the cough medicine seemed to have knocked her out.
“How’s a man supposed to think around here with you brats babbling all the time?”
Having learned to keep quiet when her parents were drinking, which her daddy had been doing until he’d run out of liquor around sundown, Molly didn’t point out that it was the first thing either one of them had said since this all started six hours earlier. When her mama had come home from her afternoon shift at Denny’s smelling—as Rory had put it—of sex and sin, instead of cigarette smoke and fried eggs.
“Lena needs to go to the bathroom,” she announced.
“She’ll have to hold it, because she’s not goin’ anywhere.”
Molly lifted her chin and met his bleary, red-rimmed eyes with a level look of her own. “She needs to go to the bathroom.” Her voice was quiet. But insistent.
He drew in a long drag on a cigarette—his last—exhaled the smoke through his nose like a fire-breathing dragon and glared at her through the blue cloud. “You always have been a real mouthy little bitch, Molly McBride.” He shook his head with mock regret. “I think it’s high time your daddy shut you up.”
He pointed the revolver straight at her, winked and pulled the trigger.
A phalanx of police cars was parked out in front of the house. Klieg lights lit up the area, making it as bright as day. Behind the police barricade, despite the fact that it was nearly midnight on Christmas Eve, spectators stood in groups, talking about the action as if they were watching a taping of “The Rookies” while video crews from every television station in the city were jockeying over the best vantage positions.
“What we’ve got inside that house is potential multiple homicides,” Lieutenant Alex Kovaleski reminded his men. “The guy’s been threatening to kill himself and his wife and daughters for hours.” As chief negotiator of the Los Angeles police hostage team, it was Alex’s responsibility to see that didn’t happen.
“Why don’t we just rush the house?” a young, impatient rookie asked.
“This isn’t some Hollywood movie. We do that and there’ll be lots of gunfire that’ll look real dandy on the nightly news, but we could end up taking three little girls out of there in body bags.”
Alex knew all too well that when a guy took his kids hostage, his real agenda was to get back at his wife for some grievance, either real or imagined. Killing the kids was a surefire way to hurt a spouse, but Alex wasn’t going to allow any children to die tonight.
“Time’s on our side,” he reminded everyone. “If we get tired, we go home and they send in another fifty cops to take our place. And fifty more. Then fifty more after that. Hell, we can keep rotating cops until doomsday. We can outlast the son of a bitch.”
They’d already cut off the power and water to the McBride house. Intimidation tactics, certainly. The entire idea of hostage negotiation was to control the hostage-taker’s environment.
“I’m going to kill the fuckin’ bitch,” Rory McBride insisted yet again. It was the fourth time Alex had spoken with him on the phone since the standoff had begun. The previous three times the conversation had ended with McBride hanging up.
“That’s what you keep saying,” Alex agreed mildly. “But you know, Rory, I don’t think you want to do that. Not really.”
“What I want is a goddamn drink. And some cigarettes.”
“Can’t give you any alcohol, Rory. It’s against the rules, remember?” They’d been through this earlier, when he’d threatened to blow out his wife’s brains if the cops didn’t get him a bottle of Jim Beam. “But I suppose I could send a pack of cigarettes in.”
There was a long silence. Then a curse. “Okay. Make ’em Camels. Filterless.”
“Sorry, but that’s not quite the way it works.” The way it worked was that the cops t
ook everything away. Then negotiated things back, one item at a time. “Tell you what I’ll do, Rory. Since I’m feeling generous tonight, and I’d like to get this over with so we can all get some sleep, I’ll trade you two packs of Camels for those little girls.”
Rory McBride’s answer was a ripe curse. When the sound of a receiver being slammed down reverberated in his ear, Alex muttered his own curse.
Deciding to give McBride a few minutes to calm down, Alex studied the sketch of the interior of the house that had been drawn by a woman down the street who was friends with Mrs. McBride. The front door opened right onto the living room, which in turn opened to the kitchen, which meant that sitting on the couch, McBride would have a view of both the front and side doors.
It wasn’t the kind of house you could easily slip a gunman into. Which meant that they’d just have to wait. For as long as it took.
In that fleeting flash of time after she watched her daddy pull the trigger of the ugly black gun, Molly waited for the roar, stiffened in preparation for the expected pain. And even as she wondered how badly it would hurt to die, she worried how her little sisters would survive without her.
She heard the click of the trigger being pulled, her mama’s shriek, Lena’s scream. Then she heard her daddy’s harsh, cigarette-roughened laugh.
“You flinched,” he said, his grin showing that he’d enjoyed his cruel trick immensely. “Guess you’re not so tough after all, little girl.”
Leftover fear mingled with fury as her heart continued to pound in her ears. She heard Lena sob something about an accident, felt the moisture running down her own bare legs and realized her sister was not the only one who’d wet herself.
“You had no right to do that, Rory McBride, you sadistic son of a bitch,” Karla yelled. “Molly’s never done anything to you.”
“If you hadn’t gotten knocked up with that snotty little brat in the first place, I could’ve played pro ball. I was state high school All-Star first baseman for three straight years,” he reminded her. And himself. Sometimes those glory days seemed very far away.
“I didn’t get pregnant all by myself, hotshot,” Karla flared. “You were the one who was always tryin’ to get beneath my skirt.”
“A guy didn’t have to try all that hard,” he countered on a snort. “Hell, you were pulling your panties down three minutes after I met you.”
It was an old argument. Molly had heard it so many times, she could recite the lines from memory. She leaned her head against the back of the couch and closed her eyes.
Everyone in the neighborhood knew you were a slut. She mentally said the words along with her daddy. If I hadn’t been so drunk that day you told me you were pregnant, I would’ve figured out that it probably wasn’t even my kid.
Molly was already thinking ahead to her mother’s line that if she hadn’t been so stoned, she never would have married such a miserable loser, and, just to set the record straight, there weren’t any goddamn baseball teams in the country that would have signed a player with two bad knees, when a sound like a gunshot rang out.
Molly’s eyes flew open. She saw her mama’s hand still resting on her daddy’s cheek and watched as a muscle jerked violently beneath Karla’s scarlet-tipped fingers.
Rory slapped her back, a hard, backhanded blow that sent her peroxide-blond head reeling. Then he smiled evilly at his two older daughters.
“I’m going to kill your mama now.” He put the gun to Karla’s temple and pulled the trigger. This time there was a roar, followed by a blinding spray of blood.
As Molly and Lena watched in horror, their daddy stuck the barrel of the revolver against the roof of his mouth.
The thunderous bang reverberated through Molly’s head, followed by the crashing sound of wood splintering as the front door was kicked in.
Alex took in the murder scene—the woman sprawled on the floor, the man draped over her, the blood and pieces of brain tissue darkening the wall behind them.
On a raggedy brown couch facing the door, two little girls sat side by side, their arms wrapped tightly around each other, their eyes wide, their complexions as pale as wraiths’. Nearby, a pink-cheeked toddler sat in the center of a stained rug and screeched.
“Aw, hell.”
Alex dragged his palms down his face, and as the rest of the city celebrated the season of peace and joy, he found himself wishing that he’d listened to his mother and gone to law school.
Part One
Chapter One
December 24, 1986
Later, Molly McBride would look back on this night and wonder if the disappearance of the baby Jesus hadn’t been a sign. A portent that her life was about to dramatically and inexorably change.
At the moment, however, attempting to get to work on time, she had no time to ponder the existence of signs or omens. During the half-block walk between her bus stop and the hospital, she’d been approached by three panhandlers.
“‘Give to him who begs from you. He who has two coats, let him share with him who has none, and he who has food must do likewise.’”
A cloud of foul breath strong enough to down a mastodon wafted between Molly and an emaciated man, but she did not back away. The quiz, administered by the former Jesuit seminarian, was a daily event. And as much as she worried about the man she only knew as Thomas—Doubting Thomas, he’d informed her one day—Molly had come to enjoy them.
“Those are easy, Thomas. The first is from Matthew, the second Luke.”
She cheerfully handed over the cheese sandwich she’d made that morning. “Now I have one for you.”
He bowed and gave her a go-ahead sign as, with yellowed teeth, he began tearing the wrapping off the sandwich.
“God created us without us but he did not will to save us without us.” She waited, not willing to admit that she’d spent hours looking up that obscure quote.
Thomas wolfed down nearly a quarter of the sandwich, rewrapped the remainder and stuck it in his pocket. Then he rocked back on the run-down heels of his cowboy boots and clucked his tongue.
“Me dear, darling, Saint Molly.” His brogue could have fooled any of Molly’s ancestors back in County Cork. “A keenly educated Catholic girl such as yourself should know that Saint Augustine is required reading in any seminary.”
“Actually, I was thinking more of Saint Augustine’s message telling us that we must take responsibility for our salvation, and our lives, than winning today’s contest. If you’re not careful, you’re going to end up in the hospital.”
Beneath his filthy Raiders jacket he shrugged shoulders that reminded her of a wire hanger. “It won’t be the first time.”
“No. But it could be the last.” She put her hand on his sleeve. “I worry about you, Thomas.”
His smile was sad. “You worry about everyone. When are you going to realize, Saint Molly, that no matter what Saint Augustine told us, you can’t save the world?”
“I’ll pray for you, Thomas.” It was what she always said.
“Save your prayers.” It was what he always said. “I’m beyond redemption.”
Molly sighed as he walked away. Then continued on.
Mercy Samaritan Hospital sprawled over a no-man’s land in the shadow of the Harbor Freeway and Santa Monica Freeway interchange like a huge gray stone Goliath. The neighborhood where Molly spent her nights was home to some of the roughest bars, seediest transients and oldest whores in the City of Angels.
Thanks to gang members’ propensity for shooting out streetlights, once the sun went down, the streets and alleys were as dark as tombs. To the residents of these mean streets, the gilt excess of Beverly Hills and the sparkling sun-drenched beaches of Malibu might as well have belonged to another planet.
Mercy Sam, a teaching hospital established by the Sisters of Mercy nearly a century ago, had been more than a place of healing; it had been a living symbol of hope and compassion. Hope had long since fled, along with most of the population of the inner city. Fortunately, although Moll
y was the only Sister of Mercy still on staff, compassion had remained.
A visual affront to Frank Lloyd Wright’s famed concept of organic architecture, the building featured a hulking main building with two wings. Various outbuildings had cropped up over the years like weeds.
The pneumatic doors opened with a hiss as Molly entered the emergency department beneath the bright red neon sign. The triage area was nearly deserted, as were the fast-track cubicles, where patients with level-one complaints—bloody noses, scrapes and bruises, migraines, intestinal upsets, minor burns and strep throats—were treated.
She went into the staff lounge, changed into the cranberry red scrubs that had recently replaced the hated pink ones and joined the other nurses in The Pit, as the ER was routinely called.
“Merry Christmas,” Yolanda Brown greeted her.
“Happy Holidays to you, too.” Nothing in Molly’s voice revealed her painful memories of Christmas Eve. “I’m sorry I’m late.”
“It’s getting tougher and tougher to run that gauntlet,” Yolanda said with a frown. “Nobody rides the bus in L.A. Especially not at night and in this neighborhood. You really ought to get yourself a car.”
Molly smiled, feeling the shadows drift away as her equilibrium returned. “Why don’t you write a letter to the Pope and suggest he cosign a loan?”
Yolanda’s shrug suggested she’d expected that answer to the ongoing argument, but intended to keep on trying, anyway. “You didn’t miss anything,” she said. “It’s turning out to be a blessedly silent night. According to Banning’s report, it was pretty quiet on the day shift, too. Which is pretty amazing, given that not only is it a holiday, it’s a full moon.
