“I’ll be fine.” She wasn’t sure she would be able to get much sleep, all things considered, but she’d been thinking about it all afternoon and was trying to look on it as just one more challenge to be met.
Sean took Amanda’s hand in his and walked with her up to the back of the house, their arms swinging between them, their hips hitting once or twice. When they got to the back door, Sean reached around Amanda to push it open, and she turned, looking up.
“I seem to remember being right here in this spot not too long ago,” she said. “And you reached around me, just like that, to open the door. And then you—”
“Then I leaned down like this, and kissed you, like this. . . .” He did just that.
“No, I think it was more like this. . . .” Amanda put her arms around his neck and tugged his head down gently.
“I think you might be right.” He nibbled at the corner of her mouth. “As a matter of fact, now that I think about it—”
Greer opened the door. “Sean, is that—” It was a toss-up between who was more startled.
“Oh. Well. Sorry . . .” she said, and promptly closed the door.
“Thanks, Greer.” He laughed good-naturedly and murmured into Amanda’s ear, “Way to ruin the moment.”
“Guess we might as well go in,” Amanda told him.
“Might as well. Now that she knows we’re here and what we were doing, she’s going to be timing us.” Sean pushed open the door and permitted Amanda to precede him into the warm house.
“Hey, Steven. How was the trip?” he called to Greer’s husband, who was just walking into the kitchen.
“Good, good. Hey, way to go, Sean. Solving the crimes, putting that Giordano back in prison where he belongs, keeping the people of our little town safe.” Greer’s amiable husband spoke like the political animal he was. “You sure did make us proud.”
“Thanks. I’m just glad it’s over. It’s been tough for everyone involved,” Sean told him as he opened the oven door and peeked in, thinking that he had been right. Neither Greer nor her husband had a clue of what had really been at stake last night. “Something smells really good.”
“Get out of there.” Greer smacked him on the back with a dish towel as she came into the kitchen.
“What can I do to help?” Amanda asked.
“I was just about to set the table. Maybe you could take care of that while I finish up in here.”
“Sean, hand me that stack of plates.” Amanda reached for them as he passed them to her.
“It’s already after seven,” Greer noted as Amanda carried the plates into the dining room. “You both must be starving after the day you two had.”
“I could eat.” Sean grinned. “I guess Amanda could, too.”
“I’m really proud of you, Sean.” Greer turned the flame down under a pan at the back of the stove. “You did such a fine thing. I’m just . . . well, proud.”
“Thank you, Greer. I appreciate that.”
“I kept watching the coverage on the television this morning, and I kept thinking, ‘That’s my little Sean. He’s a hero.’ ”
“If anyone’s a hero, it’s Amanda. She permitted herself to be used as the bait to catch Giordano,” Sean said as he filled his arms with empty water glasses and headed toward the dining room. “She’s the one you should save your praise for.”
“Well, I am proud of her, too, of course I am.” Greer turned her back to the door and began to shred lettuce for the salad. “I know having to stay away from her house, having to practically live with a stranger all week long, has been a terrible strain for Amanda.”
“It never felt like living with a stranger, Greer,” Amanda said.
Greer turned around. “Oh, I thought you were Sean.”
“He sent me in for the flatware.”
“You know where to find it.” Greer pointed to the drawer next to the sink.
“It was good of you to take me in. I don’t think I really thanked you for making me feel at home.”
“It was my pleasure. I’m glad I was able to help.”
“So am I.” Amanda counted out the forks, knives, teaspoons.
“I can’t imagine what it must have been like to know that someone like that terrible man was after you. You must have been very frightened.”
“I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t. But somehow I knew that Sean would be smarter than Vince was.” Amanda took four napkins from the next drawer. “At least I hoped he would be.”
“Sean wouldn’t have let anything happen to you. He cares too much about you.”
“It’s his job, Greer. I don’t think it mattered who I was.”
Greer looked about ready to say something else when Sean came into the room.
“Greer, that chicken has to be about done by now, because I’m about ready to pass out from hunger.”
“Everything is ready,” she told him. “Now, you two go on in and sit down. Sean, you get Steve away from that damned television and bring him to the table, would you?”
At eight-ten, the doorbell rang.
“I’ll get it.” Steve placed his napkin on the table next to his plate and pushed back his chair.
“Were you expecting anyone?” Greer asked.
“Beverly mentioned she’d drop off the minutes of last night’s council meeting for me to look over,” he said as he went into the hall.
“Beverly is the borough secretary,” Greer explained to Amanda.
Voices drifted in from the hall. As they moved closer, Sean recognized the new voice as belonging to Ramona. He rubbed a hand across his chin, wondering if Greer had set this up, mildly annoyed at the thought that she might have. He looked over to meet Amanda’s eyes across the table, but she was looking up, ready to greet the newcomer. He felt obligated to do the same.
“Honey,” Steve said as he led Ramona into the room, “you have a visitor.”
“Well, Ramona.” Greer put her fork down on her plate. “This is a surprise.”
“I’m sorry, I’m interrupting your dinner.” Ramona blushed scarlet. “I should have called first. It’s just that . . .”
“Steve, pull that chair over for Ramona. Have you had dinner? I can make you a plate. . . .” Greer started to stand, and Ramona shook her head.
“No, no. I don’t want to be a bother. And I’ve already eaten.”
“Coffee, then?”
“Sure. That’s nice of you. Thank you.” Ramona sat on the edge of the chair Steven brought in for her. She brushed a long strand of red hair back from her face and looked at Sean. “I didn’t know you’d be here. Sorry to intrude, Sean.”
“Guess someone must have stolen my Jeep, then. I left it parked out front.”
“I meant, I didn’t know that you were here until I pulled up in front of the house. I had wanted to talk to Greer before I spoke with you. . . .”
“I can always leave.”
“Sean, would you please sit back down and just stop it.” Greer carried a pot of coffee in one hand and a cup and saucer in the other. She placed both in front of Ramona, then took her own seat.
“I saw you on television this morning,” Ramona said to Sean. “It was amazing, what you did. And you.” She turned to Amanda. “You were so brave.”
“Not so very brave at all. I was hiding in my closet.” Amanda smiled, trying to turn the conversation from Sean, who had made no attempt to hide his feelings at Ramona’s arrival. “And Sean was in the room with a gun, and there was a well-armed FBI agent in the guest room across the hall.”
“I wouldn’t have even been there, if I’d thought that crazy man was going to come into my house with the intention of killing me.” Ramona shivered.
“Okay. We all agree that Amanda is brave.” Sean rested his fork and knife across the top of his dinner plate. “Now why don’t you tell us why you’re here.”
“Sean, you’re being rude,” Greer admonished him.
“No, he’s right.” Ramona looked up at Sean with all the warmth he’d been givi
ng her.
“You two look alike, you know that?” Steve said. “Except for her having red hair. You have the same eyes, the same nose—”
“Steven.” Greer shot him a look that shut him up.
“Now, Ramona, if something’s happened . . .”
“Oh, something’s happened, all right.” She took a deep breath. “I found Veronica.”
“You found . . .” Greer’s eyes widened.
“Yes. I found our mother.” She looked from Greer to Sean, then back again. “Well, I found her grave, anyway.”
“How did you find her?” Amanda asked.
Ramona turned to her. “Internet search.”
“How did you manage to do that? I mean, I’ve been searching for months. . . .” Greer looked thunderstruck.
“When I couldn’t find any match for a Veronica Mercer who could have been our mother, I started looking up Veronica Michaels, her maiden name. I finally found a match with Veronica Michaels Keenan.”
“Keenan?” Sean asked.
“She apparently remarried about three years after she gave me up.”
“Where . . . where is she buried?” Greer asked softly.
“She’s in a small cemetery down in West Clearbrook.”
“I don’t want to know about this.” Sean pushed back from the table.
“I want to know, Sean.” Greer put her hand out to stop him from leaving. “I want to know everything.”
“Why would you care, after all these years? The woman abandoned you, Greer. She abandoned us, walked away from us”—he glanced at Ramona—“from all three of us—and apparently never looked back.”
“I guess I want to understand, Sean. I guess I want to know why she left us, and where she went after she did. Did she have another family, did she—”
“Leave me out of it, then,” he said abruptly. “I don’t want any part of it. The past is just that. Let’s leave it there.”
“I can’t do that, sweetie,” Greer told him softly, her eyes pleading with him to stay, to understand, to open his heart and his mind.
“You two are on your own, then.” He headed for the door. “Amanda, I’ll talk to you tomorrow. I’m going to need you to sign your statements.”
His back stiff with what everyone recognized as a heavy burden of pain, Sean walked out the back door and closed it softly behind him.
It was close to eleven when Amanda parked her car across the street from Sean’s house. She sat alone in the dark for several minutes, then got out and walked up to his front door and knocked.
“Amanda,” he said when he opened the door. “What are you doing here?”
“I saw the lights on, so I figured you were still awake.”
“I was just about to turn them off.”
“May I come in?”
He stepped aside to let her enter.
She looked around for a minute, then said, “I’ll take the ottoman, you can have the chair.”
She moved a stack of newspapers from the ottoman to the floor, then patted the seat of the chair and said, “Come sit down, Sean, and talk to me.”
“Did Greer send you over here?” He stood, hands on his hips, near the door, which still stood open.
“No. I came because I wanted to. I wanted your company. I wanted to talk. I was hoping you’d want to talk to me.”
“What would you like to talk about?” He closed the door behind him.
“I know how you must feel about your mother—”
“No, you don’t know, Amanda,” he said flatly as he lowered his tall frame into the chair.
“I think you probably feel pretty much the same way about her as I feel about my mother.” She paused. “Did I tell you about my mother, about her other family?”
“You told me she’d remarried and you had half siblings.”
“My mother has four children with her second husband. When I talk to her, that’s what she talks about. How beautiful her daughters are, how brilliant. What excellent athletes her sons are. What perfect grandchildren they’ve given her.” She bit her bottom lip. “My mother can’t remember my birth date and hasn’t sent Evan a Christmas card in years. It’s as if we don’t exist.”
“I’m sorry, Amanda, but it really isn’t the same.”
“In a way, it is,” she insisted. “I have siblings that I don’t know, don’t want to know, because they have a place in her life that I will never have. Because she loves them in a way she will never love me.”
“She didn’t abandon you when you were a very young child, Amanda,” he pointed out.
“No, she didn’t. She waited until I was in my teens.”
“Do you have good memories of her from your childhood?”
“I do.” She tried to smile. “Oddly enough, at one time, we were a happy family.”
“Maybe she wasn’t as happy as you thought. Maybe she only really became happy when she divorced your father and married her second husband.”
“Maybe.” She crossed her legs and rested her elbow on a raised knee, cupped her chin in her hand. “Oh, I’m sure that was it. She just didn’t have to make it so damned obvious that Evan and I were part of the bad baggage she was only too happy to leave behind.”
“Did you live with your father then?”
“We did. Through his second and third marriages, then we both went to college.”
“You still talk to your dad?”
“Sometimes. Not the way I wish I could talk to him, or the way I wish I could talk to my mother, though.” She brushed away the tears. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this. I hadn’t planned on talking about me.”
“I’m glad you did.” He reached out and took her by the wrist, pulled her into his lap and just held her.
“Well, this is pretty pathetic, wouldn’t you say?” she tried to joke. “Talk about your dysfunctional families. There’s not one solid parent figure between the two of us.”
“And yet we’re both pretty solid, responsible people,” he told her. “How do you suppose that happened?”
“Some people just have something inside. You just want to be better than what you could have been.”
“That might be it.” He held on to her, feeling her soft breath against his throat.
“Do you think it’s possible to overcome all that, to move beyond it all and be truly happy, to fall in love?”
He didn’t respond at first. Then finally his fingers tightened on hers, and he said, “I think it’s not only possible, I think it’s necessary. I think in the end, we all want to believe the future will be better than the past. You just have to be willing to take a chance, you know? Roll the dice and go with it.”
They sat in silence for a very long time.
Finally, she pushed herself up wearily and said, “I’m falling asleep. I have to get home.”
“I think you’re too tired to drive,” he said, his lips brushing the side of her face. “I think you should stay here.”
“Oh, let me guess.” She grinned, sitting up and making a point out of looking around the sparsely furnished house. “His and hers sleeping bags here at Camp Mercer?”
“Hey, I have a bed.” He tried to look wounded.
“Right. One of those inflatable mattress things, I’ll bet. Now, do you have the kind you blow up with a bicycle pump, or the kind that inflates itself?”
“Why don’t you come on upstairs and find out?” With one motion, he picked her up, rose from the chair, and swung her over his shoulder.
“Looks like I’m about to do just that . . .” She laughed as he headed toward the steps.
Amanda closed her eyes and held on to the moment. Maybe, just maybe, Sean was right. Maybe the future could be better than the past.
She was more than willing to roll the dice.
Vince Giordano sat on the edge of the hard wooden seat, his hands cuffed behind him, and looked around the infirmary where he was about to have his intake physical. He had spent an hour with his lawyer that morning, then spent the rest of the
day facing reality.
This time, there would be no reprieve.
No one was coming to step forward with proof that a member of the law enforcement team that brought him in had planted evidence or had lied in their report. After all, half the Broeder police department had been at Crosby’s house—plus that hot FBI agent—when he’d been taken down.
Not even a chance of crying police brutality. He didn’t have a mark on him. They’d barely touched him.
Well, that was that. He’d had a good run, hadn’t he? And he’d come this close to his final target. He wondered if Channing had felt this same sense of letdown when he’d realized that that last target had eluded him.
And he wondered if Archer Lowell would do even as well, if he’d be equal to the task. He wondered if Archer Lowell would even try.
Well, shit, this was all his idea. He damn well better try. He damn well better succeed. He owes Curtis Channing. He owes me. . . .
It occurred to Vince that Lowell should be getting out pretty soon. His sentence must be nearly up by now.
He damn well better keep the trust.
Vince grew agitated just thinking about all that Channing had done for Vince, all that Vince had done for Lowell.
Well, there was nothing he could do about it now. He was in High Meadow, and was going to stay in High Meadow for the rest of his natural life. Unless, of course, he got the death penalty. Pennsylvania was, after all, a death penalty state, wasn’t it?
Soon Lowell would be out, and Vince would bet every last dollar he had stashed away in the wall of the old barn that Lowell was not going to give a second thought to him or to Channing once he walked out of here.
Sure. His dirty work had already been done for him. What did he care about honoring Channing’s memory by taking care of his business? What did he care about keeping a sacred promise?
Damn, but Vince was really beginning to steam.
A shadow passed the door, then paused.
“Vince? That you? Vince Giordano?” A dark head poked through the doorway.
Dead Certain Page 29
