Running Scared

by Lisa Jackson

  “You would’ve called animal control,” Jon accused her.

  “The dog’s old, Jon,” Kate said softly. “And vicious.”

  “And he doesn’t deserve to be put to sleep! Just because Eli died doesn’t mean that Roscoe—”

  “It’s all right,” Daegan said. “You can keep comin’ over and seein’ him if you want. To tell you the truth, the dog won’t have a thing to do with me. I think he’d just as soon rip my throat open than lick my hand.”

  Jon’s eyes narrowed. He looked from his mother to Daegan again, as if expecting some kind of conspiracy. “You mean it?”

  “Hold on…” Kate interjected. Right now, with the frightening visions Jon had been having, he needed to stay close to home. And she wasn’t sure she could trust this stranger. Not yet

  O’Rourke offered a hard smile. “I bought some dog food in town, but Roscoe—that’s his name, right?” Jon nodded slowly. “Old Roscoe won’t go near it. Acts like I’m trying to poison him.” He lifted a shoulder. “Maybe I bought the wrong brand.”

  “He doesn’t like anybody.”

  “Great,” O’Rourke said sarcastically. “Just what I need. Another headache.”

  “You’re gonna keep him?” Jon was suspicious.

  The cowboy lifted a shoulder. “If he doesn’t die on me or take a chunk out of my leg first. Maybe you could come over and show him that I’m okay.”

  “I don’t know,” Kate said quickly. This was all happening fast. Way too fast. “I don’t think—”

  “Oh, come on, Mom, please.” Jon was suddenly pleading.

  “Something about this doesn’t feel right—”

  O’Rourke straightened and rubbed one shoulder. “Well, it would help me out. I think Jon might’ve left some of his things over at the house.”

  Jon froze and he looked at the ground. Hot color washed up the back of his neck.

  “What things?” Kate asked, bracing herself. These days it seemed as if her son had another life—entirely separate from her own. She couldn’t imagine what kind of stash Jon was hiding from her, but she was certain she was about to find out.

  “Well, I just assumed they were his. A jackknife and a comic book or two, deck of cards, that kind of thing. No big deal. It’s just that I’m cleaning things up and I didn’t want to throw out anything valuable.”

  Jon lifted his eyes slowly, studying the man before him.

  “Tell ya what, Jon. I’ll save them for you, and next time you come over to see the dog, you can pick ’em up. Fair enough?”

  Kate watched as Jon’s eyebrows flattened into one thoughtful line. “Fair enough.”

  Daegan extended his hand again, and this time Jon took it, his gaze locking with the uncompromising stare of their new neighbor.

  “Good.”

  For a second Jon just stood there shaking O’Rourke’s hand then quickly yanked his fingers away and his voice was the barest of whispers when he asked, “Who are you?”

  “I told you. My name’s—”

  “I know what you said.” Jon’s nostrils quivered and a breeze lifted the hair that fell over his eyes. “But you’re lying. Who are you and why are you here?”

  Kate’s muscles flexed. “Jon, Mr. O’Rourke—” Her voice gave out as she saw her son back up a step and lick his lips nervously. The hairs on her nape lifted in sudden premonition and her insides turned to mush. Oh, God, no.

  “You killed someone,” Jon said, his voice shaking, his color bleached away by fear. “You killed someone, didn’t you, someone you cared about!”

  Daegan held the boy’s gaze steadily, didn’t even flinch. “What the devil are you talking about?”

  “There was a fight and you…oh God, you…you…” Jon blinked hard as he sometimes did when the image he was seeing began to fade.

  Daegan shook his head. “Believe me, Jon, I’ve never killed anyone in my life. Not even when I was in the army.” Was this child really his? Were the eyes staring so intently at him O’Rourke eyes—Sullivan eyes? What would happen if the kid ever found out the truth? “Where’d you get a notion like that?” he asked, and refused to be sucked into the emotional whirlpool that threatened to drown him.

  Jon swallowed and stepped back, nearly tripping on the porch. He rammed his hands into the back pockets of his baggy jeans. “I, um, don’t know, I just—” He shrugged and Daegan felt as if he’d been kicked in the gut. The kid just knew? In that second Daegan was convinced that Bibi hadn’t been lying; not only did the boy bear a resemblance to the Sullivans, he also had the gift, that special little touch of ESP that had been floating along Sullivan bloodlines for centuries, long before the witch trials, all the way back to Dublin and rumors of black arts. Not everyone in the family possessed it; sometimes it skipped an entire generation, only to show up later in a grandchild or niece, those with the right combination of Sullivan genes. This kid, the product of a union between first cousins, had been cursed or blessed, depending upon your state of mind.

  Daegan loathed the gift himself; it had brought him nothing but trouble. The feelings were always there, just under the surface, ready to remind him that he was, in fact, a Sullivan. Though that special intuition had helped him when he’d been a tracker, he’d just as soon he never experienced that tingling sensation of reading someone else’s thoughts again.

  “Sometimes Jon…he has premonitions,” Kate said, her fingers working nervously on the antenna of the phone she still held in one hand. Her demeanor had changed and she looked at him as if she were staring at the very devil himself. Wariness darkened her amber-colored eyes.

  “Well, this time he’s wrong.” He needed to ease her mind in order to keep up his charade. If she doubted him, his job would be all the more difficult. “I was in a fight once, with a cousin of mine—a bad fight.”

  Jon’s expression didn’t change. “He’s dead.”

  Kate’s fingers tightened around the phone. “Is it true?”

  No reason to lie. “That’s right, but I didn’t kill him.”

  A small, sharp sound escaped her and she covered her mouth with one hand.

  “The police thought you did.”

  “They were convinced otherwise, Jon.” Daegan rammed stiff fingers through his hair. “It was all over a long time ago.” Daegan offered a smile he didn’t feel, trying to set Kate at ease, then reminded himself that he had a job to do, one that had to be accomplished swiftly. Besides, this woman wasn’t as lily-white as she pretended to be; she was in on the adoption scam from the get-go. Now, it seemed, she really cared for her boy, hadn’t done a half-bad job of raising him, but she’d still walked on the wrong side of the law—a side that was familiar to Daegan. Whatever bonds existed between this woman and boy, they were secondary in importance. At least for now.

  He just wished he could wash his hands of this mess. He wondered how he was ever going to tell the boy that he was his father, that he didn’t know Jon had existed for nearly fifteen years, that the kid was a product of a forbidden and unloving union? How was he going to explain about an obsessed and dying grandfather, one of the richest men in Boston, a man who had now determined to change the course of the boy’s life forever, a man who didn’t take no for an answer?

  “This sight, does it help you see into your teacher’s grade book?” Daegan asked, trying to change the subject.

  Jon didn’t crack a smile.

  “I wish.” Kate laughed nervously, her gaze never leaving Daegan’s face. If he’d ever hoped to gain his trust, he’d blown it by letting the kid touch him.

  He inclined his head. “Thanks for the use of the phone. I’d better go back and see if the guy from the telephone company is really going to show up.” His gaze settled on Kate’s for just an instant, long enough to see the questions in her eyes, long enough to feel like a heel for what he was about to do.

  The boy, not so much as a glimmer of a smile in his eyes, glared at him. Daegan felt a great rending in his soul as he realized his son—the only kid he’d ever bring for
th on this earth—not only distrusted him but probably hated him as well. And if he didn’t yet, he would soon.

  He loped back to his truck and climbed inside. Through the open window, he yelled, “Anytime you want to come over and pick up your things and see that poor excuse of a dog, you’re welcome.”

  Jon didn’t answer. He shifted slightly, placing his body between Daegan’s pickup and his mother, as if he sensed a threat from Daegan, a threat to Kate.

  “Hell,” Daegan muttered under his breath. No matter if the adoption had been dirty, this woman and boy cared for each other and they faced the world together alone. Just like he had with his own mother.

  He backed out of the drive and wished to high heaven that he’d never laid eyes on Bibi Sullivan or the rest of the damned family. But it was inevitable that they’d met. To Daegan, in his youth the wealth and glitter of his father’s other life had constantly drawn him, like the pull of the moon on the tides. Daegan had been doomed from the second he’d learned that he was Frank Sullivan’s bastard son, and because of it, a life of privilege and wealth would be dangled in front of his nose like a carrot, only to be yanked away.

  He’d come a long way from Boston, a long way from the scared little boy he’d once been…

  BOOK TWO

  DAEGAN

  1968–1990

  Chapter 6

  “He’s…well…I don’t know how to put this delicately, Joanna. Mary Ellen O’Rourke’s boy is…he doesn’t have…there’s no man in the picture, if you get my drift. I’m afraid he’s illegitimate…a bastard.”

  Sister Evangeline, on the other side of the glassed partition, slid a guilty glance in Daegan’s direction, and he, not quite six at the time, realized immediately that the ugly word referred to him. After having dared utter the profanity, the good sister quickly crossed herself and turned her attention back to the secretary, a lay-woman who was struggling to fill out Daegan’s admittance forms.

  The nun reminded Daegan of a vulture as she hovered in her dusty habit with the frayed hem. A rosary dangled from a pocket hidden deep in the folds of her voluminous black robe, and her hands, covered with age spots, fingered the worn beads anxiously.

  Most of the whispered conversation between the two women drifted into the reception area, and Daegan’s mother, sitting next to him on the bench polished by the rumps of truants and worried parents, fiddled nervously with the strap of her purse. She was wearing her best dress, black with white polka dots, and a black hat perched at an angle on her head; her long red hair had been pinned into something she called a French twist, and she’d been extra careful with her makeup, forgoing her favorite cherry-red lipstick for a faded coral.

  Across the room, above another bench, was a crucifix, large and life-like, and Daegan concentrated on Jesus’s crown of thorns and the painted blood that dripped down his gaunt, serene face. Near the window was a clock, the pendulum unmoving, as if time stopped once a potential student passed through the vestibule of St. Mark’s Elementary.

  The slow-paced clacking of typewriter keys stopped completely. “So then who’s the boy’s father—?” the gray-haired secretary, bending over ancient keys, asked.

  “She didn’t say.”

  “But if there’s a problem at school and I can’t reach her—?”

  “She gave a friend’s name, it’s here, listed on the form. Rindy DuBois.” The sister’s voice again, frigid and superior. Daegan looked through the glass to stare at her pale face and tall, draped body. Her skin, wrinkled already, was further furrowed by the tight wimple that hid so much that not even a strand of her hair showed. Maybe she was bald. She seemed to feel his gaze and he saw it then, a little window into her mind, that opened suddenly to him. Devil’s spawn, she said wordlessly and returned his open-faced stare with an imperious glare.

  He shuddered and his mother whispered, “Don’t stare. It’s not polite.”

  “She hates me.”

  “No, babycakes, she’s just trying to help.” Mama patted his hand, but she looked nervous—the way she did when Frank called to tell her he wasn’t stopping by.

  Daegan knew better. His “sight” wasn’t complete, and he couldn’t read minds, but he caught glimpses of people’s true feelings. He had been able to do this for as long as he could remember, but he didn’t tell his mother about Sister Evangeline’s thoughts because the one time he mentioned being able to see what people were thinking, Mama had slapped him hard across the face and told him that he was never to mention it again. People would think he was crazy or possessed by demons or something very bad. And it wasn’t as if he could look into everyone’s thoughts or that it happened all the time.

  Now, she stroked the side of his cheek. “You just do your best in school, honey, and everything will be all right.”

  “Miss O’Rourke,” the sister’s nasal tone was commanding, her hands folded piously as she stood in the doorway between the secretary’s room and the reception area. “If you could give Mrs. Bevans your insurance information, that sort of thing, I’ll take David down to—”

  “Daegan,” his mother said.

  The sister’s eyelids settled downward for a second, as if she was gathering her imminent patience. “Of course, Daegan. I’ll take him down to the classroom so he can meet the other children. You know, school started last Monday.”

  “I—I know; we were out of town…” Her voice faded away as if she knew how feeble her excuse sounded. She was lying, Daegan knew. They hadn’t been away; she had just been fighting with his father again. She’d wanted Daegan to go to the other private school and Frank had refused to allow it, wouldn’t pay for it, so they were here, at St. Mark’s.

  “Well, you’re back now and Daegan’s already behind in his lessons. Come on, son, I’ll show you to your room. Sister Mae will be your teacher.” She swept out of the room and Mama bent down and kissed him on his cheek.

  “Don’t you worry,” she told him, her smile wobbly as she squeezed his hands. “St. Mark’s is one of the best schools around and you’ll make lots of new friends.”

  Daegan wasn’t sure he believed her as he took in the dark wood walls, yellowed linoleum floors, cold benches, and glass windows with wire threaded through them. To him, the school was a prison.

  “You be good for the sisters,” his mother ordered softly.

  “I’ll be back to pick you up when you’re done today, so you won’t get lost. Now, run along.”

  Clutching his lunch pail, he took off after Sister Evangeline, who, after rounding a corner, paused in front of a scratched wooden door. Inside the room, kids were already seated at wooden desks on runners that were bolted to the floor in perfect rows. Each desk with its slanted top was full. Not an empty one in sight. Students in navy and green uniforms twisted their heads to look at him as if he were a curious animal in the zoo.

  “Sister Mae, this is Davi—Daegan O’Rourke, the new student I told you about.”

  “Ah, yes, well, he’ll have to sit at the table in the back of the room until we can come up with another desk—or…no, Daegan, why don’t you share a desk with…uh…Lucas…Lucas Bennett…there, Luke B., raise your hand.”

  Luke, a short freckle-faced kid without any front teeth scowled as he halfheartedly waved at Daegan. With Sister Evangeline shepherding him, Daegan squeezed into one side of the chair. “Be good and pay attention. I want no trouble out of you,” the vulture-nun whispered.

  “There we go.” Sister Mae seemed pleased, her plump face flushed as she smiled.

  Duty done, Sister Evangeline slipped piously out of the room.

  With a warm smile and bright eyes behind her rimless glasses, Sister Mae insisted that everyone greet her new charge. “Come on children, let’s welcome Daegan. Everyone.”

  Daegan wanted to drop through the floor.

  “Hello, Daegan,” the class said in somewhat distorted unison.

  “You can meet everyone at recess. All right, class,” she added, her gaze all-encompassing once again. “We were sta
rting to learn the alphabet…how many of you can recognize this letter?” She pointed to a tagboard alphabet strung across the top of the blackboard. A hand shot up. A girl in the front row with springy curls and a smug little smile slid glances to either side of her, checking out her academic competition.

  “Amy?”

  “That’s a G,” she sang confidently.

  “I hate Amy Webster,” Lucas grumbled. “She’s a stuck-up snot.”

  Daegan smothered a grin and decided maybe Lucas wasn’t so bad after all.

  “Very good…and this one?” Sister Mae pointed again and Amy, waving frantically, practically peed her pants trying to gain Sister Mae’s attention again.

  Daegan’s mind wandered. The room smelled of chalk and floor wax and oil from Lucas’s dirty hair, but the teacher seemed kind and so he tried to pay attention, as he’d promised his mother he would. “You’re lucky, you know,” she’d told him the morning after her fight with Frank about where their son was to receive his lessons. Her eyes had been red-rimmed, her voice lacking conviction. “Not every father would pay for his son’s education in a private school.”

  Daegan wasn’t too young to know that Frank Sullivan didn’t give anything away without exacting a price. That’s the way it had been since the first time he’d laid eyes on his father. Daegan hadn’t asked at the time, but he couldn’t help wondering just what it was his mother was expected to give for her son to attend St. Mark’s.

  School turned out to be okay, though as he grew older, he came to understand the full meaning of being branded illegitimate, being the only kid in his class with such an ugly distinction. Everyone had a father and a mother, except for Derrick Cawfield, whose dad had been killed—crushed by crates of frozen fish that had slipped off a crane while he’d been working on the docks.

  Daegan, the new kid, had been teased at first, his lunch stolen, spiders put in his desk, taunts hurled in his direction until he proved that even though he wasn’t as large as some of the kids in the class, he could use his fists as well as anyone. He suffered two bloody lips and a black eye, but gave as good as he got, and soon he was accepted and the bullies turned their attention and jeers to Max Fulton, a thin boy who’d been born with only one thumb. His left hand had four fingers and some kind of freaky-looking stump. Max was embarrassed about his deformity and kept his hand hidden under his desk a lot of the time. He never missed an answer in class, received A-pluses on every paper he ever turned in, and was the teacher’s pet, much to Amy Webster’s dismay. The entire class, including Amy, hated Max. Daegan was just glad someone else was taking the heat.