The Reluctant Daddy

by Helen Conrad

  “A princess,” Megan lisped. “Look, Mommy, I a princess.”

  Sarah looked at Glenna and grinned. “I see you’ve got an old-fashioned girl here,” she said in an aside Megan couldn’t hear.

  Glenna nodded and laughed. “Yes, I know it’s politically incorrect to want to be something so feminine. I mean, a with-it daughter might have chosen to be a lumberjack or a firefighter. But my kid wants to be a princess.”

  “More power to her, I say,” Liza chimed in from behind. “As long as Jimmy doesn’t want to be a princess, too, you’re home free.”

  They all laughed, and Sarah waved goodbye to Glenna and Liza and Daphne as she made her way out of the room. As soon as she was gone, Glenna turned, taking Liza’s hand. “I think I can let this thing run for a few minutes,” she said, glancing at the children. Most were dressed by now and were playing quietly. The camera was sitting sturdily on its tripod stand, taping away. It looked like the perfect time for a break.

  “Could you watch them for a moment?” she asked Daphne.

  The woman smiled, and suddenly she was so pretty, Glenna almost did a double take. She didn’t know Daphne well, but from what she’d seen, there was often a sadness in the woman’s eyes, as though there was some secret sorrow she just couldn’t shake.

  “Her husband died,” Liza had told her once. “And left her with a little one to raise all by herself. That’s all it is. It takes a long time to get over something like that.”

  Something told Glenna there was more to it than that, but right now she had other things to think about.

  Liza waved to her own daughter, who was trying on a lion tamer’s suit, and then turned and looked Glenna up and down, making a vain attempt to give her old saucy smile. “Hey, I haven’t heard any juicy gossip about you and that fire investigator guy lately.”

  Glenna was more worried than ever. She’d never seen Liza so down. “His name is Lee Nielsen. And there isn’t anything to tell.”

  Liza narrowed her eyes, remembering the conversation she’d had with him. “Really? I thought you two would hit it off. There was something about the way he talked about you that made me think there might be a spark there.”

  “There wasn’t.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” But Liza raised an eyebrow questioningly.

  Glenna hesitated, then blurted out, “Actually, I heard he was going out of town. Patrick said he had to go to Detroit to wrap up a case he was investigating, and then he was taking some evidence to a lab in Chicago for tests.”

  “Great. Then you can relax,” Liza teased.

  Relax? That was a laugh, but hardly relevant to the current problem. Glenna put a hand on her arm. “Liza, quit stalling. What is bothering you?”

  “Ah, yes.” Liza made a face. “Okay, here’s the first. Most people think the arson suspect is Michael Kenton.”

  “Michael Kenton?” Glenna remembered that she’d heard rumors about him before.

  “Yes, but there’s more.” Liza’s voice quavered, but only for a moment, and she faked a smile very nicely. “This Michael Kenton guy? He—he may be my half brother.”

  Glenna turned and stared at Liza, utterly at sea. Liza had a flair for the dramatic, but this was ridiculous. “What are you talking about?”

  “Crazy, isn’t it?” She shook her head. “I know. I couldn’t believe it at first. But when you come right down to it, the guy has the Baron look. He really does.” She smiled. “Handsome devil, of course.”

  Frowning, Glenna shook her head slowly. “Liza, you’re not making any sense.”

  “Honey, it’s like this.” Liza put on her worldly look, though the effort it took her was obvious. “My old man messed around. Isn’t that a kick in the head?”

  Glenna was shocked, despite herself. “Liza, he was your father.”

  “True. Until he decided to end it all and left my mother to raise us kids alone.”

  There was a bitterness in her tone she didn’t often show. In fact, Glenna didn’t remember ever hearing her discuss her father’s suicide before.

  “Now it turns out he may have had more indiscretions to feel guilty about than just the financial end of things.”

  Glenna felt sorry for her. She always had. Though she was a few years younger than Liza, she had always looked up to her and followed her comings and goings. Glenna knew it hadn’t been easy growing up without a father and with a mother who had to work very hard to keep the family together.

  “How do you know?” she asked her. “Just because this man claims to be a Baron doesn’t necessarily make it so.”

  “Of course not. In fact, he didn’t tell anyone about it until Edward looked into it, and there seems to be proof.” Liza shrugged. “Actually, I’m taking it fairly calmly. After all, it was thirty years ago. Practically the dark ages.”

  The sudden look of desolation that swept over her face revealed she wasn’t really as cavalier about this as she pretended. “I thought people weren’t supposed to have done things like that back then,” Glenna said faintly.

  “People have been doing things like that since time immemorial. Anyway, that’s how things stand. I find a brother and gain an arsonist. Neat, huh?”

  Glenna gave her hand a squeeze. “Do you really think he did it?” she asked, not sure whether she hoped Michael Kenton was guilty or not.

  “Glenna, I don’t know.” Liza pushed back her hair with a weary gesture. “I hardly know my own name at this point. Cliff says to relax, that it really has very little to do with us, but my mother is on the warpath and Edward is acting weird.” She spread her fingers helplessly. “You know what? This new brother—he’s really a nice guy. He came to dinner the other night and we had a wonderful time. I just don’t know.”

  It was the melancholy look on her face that stayed with Glenna for the rest of the day. But her words were haunting, too. Michael Kenton, arsonist. It didn’t ring true, from what Glenna had seen of him, but then, you never did know. And better him than... Well, she wasn’t even going to put that thought into words.

  She went home that evening, before anyone else in the family arrived, and put in the tape again, watching it, wishing this time it would show her something different, or show her a reason for what she saw. Whenever she was alone she watched the tape over and over again. Time after time, she wondered what it meant, and why her father’s car could be seen in the background, rolling into the empty parking lot when the plant was closed and a major fire was about to break out within hours.

  “I have to destroy that tape,” she told herself for the hundredth time. “I’ll do it tonight.”

  * * *

  THAT EVENING, SHE saw Lee again. She was running late and Megan had missed her nap and chaos was taking over her little family. Glenna had taken the children along grocery shopping, always a mistake, and after she’d told Megan she couldn’t have the huge stuffed Santa Claus the sadists who ran the store had put just above the cereal section, and she’d refused to let Jimmy have one more ride on the mechanical elephant, and she’d turned them both down for candy bars, so conveniently stacked right next to the checkout counter, none of them, including Glenna herself, was in a very good mood. So when the fight broke out as to who was going to get to hold the fruit snacks on the way home, there was no one left calm enough to referee, and Glenna found herself snapping at her children in a way she hardly ever did.

  “Be quiet, both of you!” she cried at last, and as she rose from fastening Megan’s seat belt around her car seat, furiously pushing her disheveled hair out of her face, she looked up and made eye contact with Lee, who was just about to go into the store himself.

  “Hello,” he said, pausing to glance from her children to her with a hint of humor in his eyes.

  “Oh, uh, hello,” she said, completely flustered. He looked tall and confident and she felt like the country mouse meet
ing the city mouse one more time. “I—I thought you were gone.”

  “Gone?” he repeated, employing just enough sarcasm to show he thought she might mean something more than what she’d said. “I’m leaving for Detroit in the morning, and then on to Chicago, but I’ll only be gone a few days.”

  “Oh.” She was dying to smooth her hair, but she didn’t want him to think she cared. Even though she did. “Do you have much more to do here?”

  His smile was enigmatic. “There are still some loose ends to tie up,” he told her evasively. “When I get back from Chicago, I’ll have at least another week’s work.”

  “Oh.” What else was there to say? There didn’t seem to be a thing, and, as if she knew that, Megan, tired and frustrated, began to cry. At the same time, Jimmy began to whine for the fruit snacks Megan was holding.

  Lee said goodbye hurriedly and disappeared into the building. And Glenna began kicking herself.

  She couldn’t believe it. Why, oh why, did he have to see her with the children now, when they were acting like little monsters? They were usually so well behaved, but the one time they fell apart, here came Lee trotting around the corner just in time to see it.

  Oh well, it wasn’t as though he would have changed his mind about everything if he’d seen her babies acting like little lambs. And what did she care, anyway? The man was going to ruin the town. He might even end up accusing someone...someone she cared about. The best thing she could do was stay away from him, far, far away.

  But she couldn’t stop puzzling over the way he’d acted, the mystery of his on-again, off-again interest. She’d racked her brain over why he’d withdrawn from her so suddenly the way he had. She’d gone back over every word she could remember, everything he’d said, everything she’d said.

  He’d mentioned something about not wanting to start anything because he wouldn’t be around long enough to make it fair to her, or something like that. And he’d said something about children—about not wanting to get involved with someone who had children. But how would that affect him? It wasn’t as though she was looking for a new father for them or anything. And what did he have against children, anyway? How could anyone dislike kids? Glenna didn’t really believe it.

  What is the good of thinking about it? she asked herself. And of course, there was no good in it. None at all. They’d had a nice walk and he’d kissed her. So what? Things like that happened every day and meant nothing.

  But they don’t happen to me every day, a little voice inside her kept saying. And they don’t happen with a man like that.

  Well, the heck with him. “Love me, love my kids,” she muttered to herself.

  And of course, that was the way it had to be.

  * * *

  IN A HOTEL ROOM in Chicago, Lee Nielsen was thinking about kids and love, and his thoughts were definitely confused. Frowning, he pushed the subject of kids aside and focused on the fire. That was what he was paid to do. That was why he was here.

  Lying on his bed, he went back over the facts and then went on to the suppositions. He was keeping in daily contact with the investigation still ongoing in Tyler, and he knew all about Sarah Fleming’s claim to have been with Michael Kenton on the night of the fire—that was old news. Was she telling the truth? There was no way of knowing just yet. But Tyler’s police chief, Brick Bauer, had told him that Michael had left town four days ago.

  Lee grimaced and shifted, trying to get comfortable on a bed as hard as a rock. This was one of the messiest cases he’d been on yet. There were just too many loose ends to please him. He was still satisfied that the fire had been set, but how and why and by whom were up in the air. He would be going back soon and he hoped to have some answers by then.

  Meanwhile he had to finish up the lab work here in Chicago, and it was slow going, giving him a lot of free time. He’d taken advantage of that to go home to Madison to see his children. As was so often the case lately, things had started out awkwardly. But at least Jenny had deigned to have lunch with him at a nice restaurant.

  They’d spent an hour talking around things, trying to make polite conversation, and he’d hated every minute of it. Here he was sitting across the table from one half of his heartbreak, and he couldn’t seem to get the courage to try to mend it or to find the right words to say. She was so lovely, and so unwilling to bend.

  “Why are you so angry with me?” he’d asked her at last.

  She stared at him with eyes as dark as the sky before a storm. “I adored you when I was little,” she told him evenly. “Do you remember how I used to follow you everywhere? How I would beg to ride along whenever you took the car out?”

  He remembered, and the memory was just as painful as all the rest. He could close his eyes and see her now, her cute little face looking up at him.

  Please, Daddy, take me! Take me! I gotta go, too.

  “And sometimes you would let me go along,” she went on coolly. “And I would ride in the big seat, up front, with my feet out straight in front of me, and I would be so proud. I was with my daddy. And you would smile at me and call me your little Pumpkin.”

  “I remember,” he said huskily, his eyes momentarily blurred.

  “Do you?” Her own eyes softened and she looked at him doubtfully. “I wish I could believe that.”

  He shook his head, searching her face. “Why would you think anything else?”

  “Because you left.”

  He winced. “That’s what happens in divorces, baby. The daddy leaves. But you were there. You know darn well it wasn’t my choice.”

  She nodded, her eyes unreadable. “I know Mother was the one who wanted the divorce. She says it was because you were gone so much doing other things—that jazz club, and then training to be a fire investigator—that you grew apart. She wanted her life to move in a new direction and decided she had to move on for that to happen.”

  “That’s right,” he said stiffly. “That’s what she told me, too.”

  Her eyes were suddenly swimming in tears. “Why didn’t you do something to stop it?” she demanded, her voice shaking. “You let our whole family go down the drain. You should have stopped it.”

  Reaching for her, he held her head against his shoulder and stroked her hair, filled with love and dismay at the same time. “Don’t you see, baby?” he asked softly. “It was too late. I couldn’t stop it.”

  She pulled away from him, dabbing at her eyes and regaining her composure. “I think you could have stopped it if you’d tried. I think you didn’t want to stop it,” she said. “You were ready to move on, too, weren’t you?”

  Her words brought him up short. Was there something to them? When Shelley had turned into a stranger, when she’d told him she didn’t love him anymore, his world had come crashing down and the anger from that day still burned in his soul. But had he secretly known he no longer loved her, either? Was he just as much at fault?

  He stared into his daughter’s eyes and told her honestly what he thought.

  “Your mother and I couldn’t hold it together any longer, Jenny. She and I can barely talk to each other. But I’ve always loved you and your brother. That will never stop. I didn’t divorce you two. I want you in my life. Please...please don’t shut me out.”

  She stared at him, her lower lip quivering, and then she flew into his arms, holding him very tightly as she sobbed against his chest. “Daddy, I love you,” she told him brokenly.

  For an hour, he was happy again, a father again. They talked and Jenny made promises.

  “I’ll talk to Mark, really I will,” she told him. “Maybe after Christmas we can all get together.”

  “That would be wonderful,” he told her.

  He left her feeling much better about things between them, and yet not completely at peace. He knew one afternoon couldn’t change things back to the way they had been before.
But having a heart-to-heart talk with Jenny was a first step. At least things didn’t feel so hopeless. Someday he might even feel that he had his children back again.

  As he thought about it now, lying on his cold, hard hotel bed, he groaned. Divorce was hard on kids. He’d spent the last few years mainly thinking about what it had done to him, but his kids had suffered even more than he had, and he hadn’t taken that into consideration the way he should have. “Shelley, Shelley, what have we done?” he whispered into the night.

  But even as he said her name, another woman’s face floated before his eyes. Glenna Kelsey McRoberts. Lee seemed to be thinking about her more and more the longer he stayed away from Tyler. He knew she’d been bewildered by the way he’d turned away from her that night at the end of their walk.

  What had he said to her? Something about short-term romances and not wanting children in his life. Pretty incoherent stuff. But he’d meant it then, and he still felt the same way.

  His thoughts shifted to seeing her in the parking lot of the supermarket, trying to calm her cranky kids, and he knew she’d thought his seeing her children that way would feed into his dislike of them. She didn’t get it at all, and that was his fault. He just didn’t know how to tell her.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t like kids. It was that he liked them too much, and he’d learned firsthand what love could do to a man. The more you loved them, the deeper the pain when you lost them. That was what he was afraid of and why he would never let himself get close again. Kids did nothing but break your heart.

  * * *

  GLENNA’S KIDS WERE all bundled up, their arms sticking almost straight out in their stiff, thick jackets. A cold wind was whipping through the town square, and their cheeks were red as apples. But they weren’t about to give up their places in line to see the reindeer and tell Santa Claus what they wanted for Christmas.

  Glenna stomped her feet to fight the cold, watching them from the sidelines with the other parents. Then, grimacing at the wind, she pulled her gloved hands from the pockets of her coat, raised the video camera and began to record the scene, as a little girl skipped up to sit on Santa’s lap.