by Sharon Sala
“Mr. Parks, there are dozens of calls coming in from media. Some of it worldwide.”
“Tell all of them I’m not making any statements or granting any interviews.”
“Yes, sir,” she said.
Cyrus lurched from his chair and strode to the windows. The leaves were beautiful in Richmond this time of year—a veritable color wheel of reds and golds, with patches of evergreens throughout. He should have been thinking of roaring fires and mulled wine, of hot chocolate in his mother’s kitchen on a cold day. Instead, he was still picking at the sore Jade Wyrick was on his ass.
He knew after the three-day shutdown that she was dangerous. And then finding out she’d been a part of shutting down Fourth Dimension had been the last straw. He hadn’t said a word to anyone at UT about that, but there was only one person on earth who could have taken down the security that was in place there, and that was the person who’d built it. Then when he found out Charlie Dodge was involved, he knew she’d been there.
He accepted his part in why she shunned them now, but her existence was a threat to his life’s work. At first, she had cheated death, and he wanted to know how. But that desire had long since passed. Now she was that thing he’d left undone.
He watched a single red leaf come loose from a branch, then float toward the ground. When it finally landed, he sighed. Having witnessed the death of something beautiful, he was uncertain of how many more seasons he would see. It made him nostalgic for his youth all over again.
He could hear the phones ringing in the outer office. His poor secretary. Maybe hiring a hit man hadn’t been the best idea, but he couldn’t figure out how Wyrick knew what he was before he’d even made an attempt. Something else had to be going on with her now. It was almost as if she was psychic.
And then it hit him. One of the DNA donors they’d used in the experimental lot from which she’d come was a psychic.
Crap. What was she turning into next?
He already knew she was a mathematical whiz, and a tech genius, and her scientific understanding of everything was beyond human comprehension. She healed herself of cancer. And if she also attained psychic skills, it would explain how she’d outed Boyington.
“Why do we yearn to create that which will destroy us?” he muttered, then picked up the coffee cup on his desk and threw it across the room.
It shattered against the wall, leaving coffee splatter on the wallpaper and shards of pottery all over the floor.
His secretary heard the noise and came running.
“Mr. Parks! Are you okay?” she asked, staring at the mess in disbelief.
“No, I am not. Get the janitorial service in to clean this up. I’ll be out for the rest of the day, and I am unavailable. Period.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, and hurried away.
Cyrus took a back exit out of the building and headed home. Just thinking of all the power brokers who kept UT’s donations healthy made him anxious. They weren’t the kind of people who bought into the “it’s the thought that counts” mindset. They gave money to make it back many times over. Even if it was his personal money, they would not be impressed.
At first, he didn’t know how he was going to sell this, and then it hit him. The men he’d been dining with when his money first disappeared knew he’d been hacked. If he could make them believe it was the hackers who’d done this, too, then the rest of this would all blow over.
Except for Wyrick, who wasn’t going to go away.
* * *
Charlie sent Wyrick a text the next morning and got an instant reply.
I’m back in town.
I know.
Fine, but since I’m not tracking you like a lost dog, are you okay, and are you still working from home?
Yes, and yes. Found a missing granddaughter for a client via internet. Case closed. Merlin is failing. 24-hour nursing at his home and Hospice involved. I am his heir. As if I wasn’t rich enough already. Life is a joke on all of us.
Charlie read between the lines of her text. Maybe because he’d just lived it, he saw the fear and sadness, but he couldn’t empathize. She would slit his throat before she’d let him say he was sorry for her in any way.
No more trouble from daddy dearest?
He just donated 40 million dollars to survivors of Hurricane Dorian. A real bighearted guy.
* * *
Charlie blinked. A forty-million-dollar hit for siccing a hit man on her? He couldn’t help but grin. Damn, but he did like the way Wyrick rolled.
Fourteen
Three days later
It was late afternoon when Charlie left Dallas with Annie’s ashes. She hadn’t ridden in the car with him since the day he moved her into Morning Light, and this ride was going to be their last. He glanced at the box in the passenger seat and then back at the highway, blinking back tears.
“So, lady...why do I feel like you’re really here? Maybe because the best part of you came along for the ride?”
He wasn’t expecting an answer, so he wasn’t disappointed by the silence. Instead, he turned on Sirius XM to the Willie Nelson channel and caught the end of “Seven Spanish Angels.”
“Ah...missed one of your favorites, honey. But it doesn’t matter now, does it? You’re a real angel now, even though you were always mine. Oh hey, here comes my favorite...‘You Were Always on My Mind’...and that’s the truth, Annie. No matter where I was, or what I was doing, you were always on my mind. I don’t know how the hell to function without you. Even when you forgot me, then forgot you, I remembered us. I don’t want this to be over, but it already is, isn’t it? I’m the one who’s still struggling.”
And so he and Annie drove for two and a half hours to Lake Texoma, with Willie singing background. After he reached the lake, he wound around it to the turn leading to “their” rental cabin down by the water. He had a sack of groceries in the back seat, and Annie riding shotgun—just like they’d done so many times before.
He pulled up at the cabin just in time to watch the sunset, then got Annie and the groceries and went inside. He set everything on the kitchen table and turned up the thermostat.
“Damn, but it’s cold in here. I’ll get a fire going before we roast the wieners and marshmallows. Remember the last time we were here? We came to have a little cookout, only it was July and pouring rain. Remember that fire we built in here? It was the middle of the summer, and despite the rain, I have never been so hot or had as much fun in my life.”
He talked as he worked, because the silence was painful, and when the wood finally caught and the logs began to burn, he went back to the kitchen.
“Gonna be a full moon tonight, Annie...and no rain predicted.”
He found the roasting forks in a cabinet, and put three wieners on one and carried it to the fireplace.
The fire crackled as he put the fork into the flames, and soon the fat from the meat began dripping into the blaze, smoking it as it roasted. When the wieners were all blackened on one side and dripping on the other, he pulled them out.
“Looks about right to me,” Charlie said, and carried it back to the kitchen and made himself three hot dogs with mustard. He popped the cap off a bottle of beer, and carried it all back to the fire, then sat and ate in silence.
Another hour passed until the beer was gone and the hot dogs eaten. At that point, he got up and went back for marshmallows. He put as many as he could get on another roasting fork and then held them into the flames, turning them as he did until they were brown and toasty, on the verge of turning black.
“Just like you like them,” Charlie said, and pulled them out of the fire, then carried them and Annie outside onto the porch.
He set the box with her ashes down beside him, then, one by one, pulled the marshmallows off and ate while watching night come to the lake.
It was too cold to hear frogs or crickets, but the night bi
rds were out. The hoot from an owl sent something small and furry scurrying into the underbrush nearby, and the silhouette of a loon floating majestically in the path of moonlight was otherworldly.
Charlie popped the last marshmallow into his mouth, then licked his fingers.
The moon looked blue, just like Charlie felt, but putting this off wasn’t going to make it easier, so he wiped his hands on his jeans, then looked down at the box.
“Let’s do this, baby. Our last hurrah.”
He picked it up, and as he started walking toward the shore, he began hearing the gentle lap of water against the rocks.
He stopped at the edge and looked up, gazing into the moonlight and to the billions of stars above him, holding Annie in his arms.
He stood within the silence until the view before him blurred from welling tears. Then, swallowing past the lump in his throat, he took the lid off the box.
“Always in my heart...always on my mind,” he said, and flung the ashes out across the water in an arc.
Some of them caught on the wind—some seemed suspended in midair, as if they’d just performed a delicate jeté—and then they were gone.
Charlie had done the impossible.
He’d finally let her go.
* * *
Charlie locked up the cabin and left for Dallas before sunup, and the farther he drove, the lighter he felt. The sadness was still there, but that heavy weight in his chest was gone.
One day, one thing, one step at a time.
He smelled like smoke, or he would have gone to the office just because he didn’t want to be home. He wasn’t quite ready to jump back into the world of lost people, but he needed something besides himself on which to focus.
So he went home and cleaned up, then drove to work.
It was the first time he’d ever been there without Wyrick, and opening up and turning on lights as he went made him realize how much her presence there meant.
The computers were off. The coffee wasn’t made, and there were no sugar-crunch bear claws under the glass dome in the coffee bar—and no bossy woman at the front desk telling him what to do.
He strode into his office, hung his Stetson on the hat rack and his coat in the closet, then popped a little pod of coffee in the coffee maker to make himself a cup.
While it was brewing, he turned on his computer and went straight to personal email. There were over four hundred messages to wade through, so he went to get his coffee, then settled in, going through them one by one until he was done.
By then it was midafternoon and his belly was rumbling. He shut everything down and walked out, locking the door behind him. Just like he used to do before Wyrick came to work for him.
She had been the game changer. He could never have solved the cases he’d solved later without her. She was a royal pain in the ass to deal with, but she was his royal pain.
He stopped at a steak house on his way home and ate an early dinner. By the time he got back to his apartment, he felt better. Today had been productive and his belly was full of beef. It was enough.
* * *
Cyrus Parks was still battling the media’s curiosity. By his not giving any kind of interview, or making any public statement, the media was creating their own version of the truth, using various photos of him taken throughout his life, and writing stories with vague hints of who he was, and what Universal Theorem was about, and assumptions of his wealth.
He was pissed, and some of the shadow figures in his organization had backed off from him, because they did not want to be dragged into the publicity of his existence.
And, if that wasn’t bad enough, two agents from the FBI showed up at his home. He was horrified to find out that his name had been mentioned as the man who’d put out the hit on Wyrick, and they were investigating him in a possible connection to Darrell Boyingon’s murder.
“Gentlemen, I can assure you, I have no connection to some hit man’s demise,” Cyrus said.
“But you have a connection to Jade Wyrick. She used to work for Universal Theorem.”
“Well, yes, I know her. But she was let go after she became ill from cancer. She hasn’t worked for UT for years. I have no idea where she’s even at.”
“Well, we know that’s not true, because during the statement she gave when she filed charges against Boyington for stalking her, she mentioned the names of a couple of private investigators in Dallas who you had hired in the past to keep tabs on her. We have spoken to them, and they corroborated her statement.”
Cyrus’s chin came up. “Do I need to call my lawyer? Am I under arrest for something?”
“No, sir, but we may have further questions.”
“Not without my lawyer present we won’t. We’re through here,” he said, and rang for his housekeeper. “Ruthie, these gentlemen are leaving now. Will you please see them out?”
“Yes, sir,” she said. “This way, please.”
As soon as they were gone, Cyrus called his lawyer. His life was spinning out of control and he didn’t know how to stop it. Mistakes had been made. Big ones. There had to be a way to rein this in.
* * *
Wyrick hadn’t heard a thing or sensed even the slightest disturbance from Cyrus Parks since she’d dropped her bombshell on him. But she knew he was likely being inundated by the media from the number of times he was showing up in the tabloids.
She didn’t care how uncomfortable she’d made him. It was nothing compared to what he’d done to her, and she had more important things upon which to focus, like her friend who was upstairs, dying.
Even though Merlin had given her carte blanche to move up into the main house whenever she wanted and do whatever she wanted to do to it, she wasn’t about to disturb him. She wanted him to see what was his, in the places that he wanted it, for all the days he had left.
The cleaning service kept it spotless, and the nurses who came and went kept Merlin as comfortable as possible.
As for her, she spent evenings with him after his dinner. And on the days that he felt like it, playing cards in his bedroom—usually poker—and beating him every time because she could.
Merlin loved it.
“Wow. No pity for a dying man here,” he said when she laid down a royal flush.
Her eyes narrowed as she leaned across the table to rake in the chips.
“Money won’t get you into heaven, so don’t expect me to feel sorry for you. If you hadn’t been watching that nurse’s backside as she walked out of the room, you wouldn’t have lost count of the cards.”
Ignoring the fact that she’d alluded to his sexual interest in a woman’s backside, he rubbed a hand over his rapidly thinning hair.
“Are you insinuating that I count cards?” he asked.
“I insinuate nothing, Arthur Merlin, and you know it.”
Merlin threw back his head and laughed, then stopped and thumped his chest when he started to wheeze.
“Ah, God, don’t make me laugh. I can’t breathe and laugh at the same time anymore, and I do not want to die on a losing hand.”
“Then beat me,” she said.
He shook his head and tossed in the cards he was holding.
“You are unbeatable, unabashed, unconcerned and unforgivably brilliant, and if I have to lose to someone, I pick you,” he said.
“Thank you,” she said. She kept picking up the cards and then stacked them into a neat pile, putting them back in the box. “It’s past your bedtime, and there’s no need playing another hand tonight and watching you lose. I’ll bring the Old Maid cards up tomorrow. Maybe you can beat me at that.”
Merlin grinned.
“Sleep well,” Wyrick said, and then leaned over and kissed his forehead.
“Bring me some more tomatoes!” he said.
“That’s something you can do better than me,” Wyrick said. “I’ve never gro
wn anything successfully.”
“Have you tried?” he asked.
She paused, then shrugged. “No.”
“Then you don’t know what you can do until you’ve tried,” he said.
“Is that fatherly advice?” she asked.
“No. Dr. Phil,” Merlin said.
Wyrick walked out laughing.
Merlin swung his legs back up on the bed and stretched out, smiling to himself. He could count the number of times he’d heard her laugh like that on one hand. It was satisfying to know he’d been the cause of it.
“He’s all yours,” Wyrick said as she walked through the kitchen, where Ora was making a cup of tea.
“I heard you both laughing. Laughter is good medicine,” she said.
“It won’t cure Merlin,” Wyrick said.
Ora paused. “Honey, I’ve been doing this kind of work for a really long time, and there’s one thing I’ve learned. When it’s our time, it’s our time. My job is to make every day count for them in whatever way they need. After that, the rest is up to them and God.”
Wyrick felt the words like a caress. No one had ever said anything to her quite like it, and it made her wonder about her own healing in a whole new way.
“Thank you,” she said. “I’m going to my apartment now, and I’ll be going back to the office in the morning. So if you need to contact me through the day, just call or text.”
“I will do that,” Ora said. “Sleep well, honey. We’ve got Merlin’s best interests at heart, always.”
“I know that,” Wyrick said. “But I’m still just a call away.”
Her steps were slow as she went downstairs. She wrote a note to herself to get some tomatoes for Merlin before she left for work tomorrow, and then she sent a text to Charlie.
Done hiding. Opening up the office tomorrow. You do you.
It was that kind of night for Charlie—kicked back in his recliner watching football and eating tacos, happy with the moment. Then his phone signaled a text.
