by Pat Warren
Briana wondered if he knew just how heartbreaking he sounded. She walked over to join him, sitting down in one of the chairs and looking up at him. “And up to that point, you hadn’t had a clue that something was wrong between them?”
Slowly, Slade shook his head. “I thought we had an ideal life, but what does a kid know? We had a nice house in this small town outside Sacramento, with a big yard and a pool. Dad was gone a lot, but when he was home, he taught me to swim, to ride horseback, took me camping. Mom was always laughing. We were happy. Then, without a word of explanation, without a backward glance, he drove away. I stood on the porch long after his car was out of sight. I didn’t cry. I think I was in shock.”
“And your mother, did she say anything later, give you some reason? Maybe they had a quarrel?”
“I never heard them argue, not once. I never heard my father raise his voice, not to me or to my mother. No matter how many times I asked her why he left, she never gave me a reason.”
Briana had known Jeremy to be closemouthed, but to walk away from his only child like that. It was shocking. “Your mother must have taken it hard, too.”
He let out a bitter laugh. “Yeah, you could say that. She’d married young, wasn’t trained to do much besides clerical work. She no sooner got a job than she lost it. We moved out of the house, probably because she couldn’t afford to keep it. We were always moving after that, one crummy apartment after another.” Abruptly, he turned and sat down, feeling weary.
“Surely, if there was a divorce, Jeremy had to pay child support. You were so young.”
“He did. The envelopes arrived every month, like clockwork, despite our many address changes. No note, just the check. But still, there was never enough money.” He reached for the glass of iced tea he’d set down before answering the door. “You’ll be happy to know I’m off the sauce.” He swirled ice in the glass, staring at it.
“You see, we kept moving to stay ahead of the bill collectors. We couldn’t pay even the rent half the time because my mother decided the bottle was her best escape.” He took a long swallow of tea. “Maybe that’s why I gave booze a try recently, to see if I could discover what pleasure she found in passing out night after night so I’d have to put her to bed. Or wandering off to bars and forgetting to come home so I’d have to go looking for her.” Another grim laugh escaped from him. “Damned if I know what it was because all I found was a major hangover.”
“She’s not the first person who’s tried to find the answer in alcohol, nor the last. What pain she must have been in.”
“She suffered, that’s for sure.” He gazed around, his eyes bitter and angry. “And all the while, he was sitting in this expensive house stockpiling money and paintings.”
She studied him as he leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his stubborn chin set, his gray eyes stormy. “You hate him very much.”
It wasn’t a question, he knew. He set down his glass and let out a rush of air. “I’ve sure as hell spent a lot of years trying. I hate what he did to us, but I keep thinking he had to have had a reason. I need to know mat reason.”
He’d tried to hate, but wound up hurting instead. It might have been easier on him if he could have kept that edge of anger. “Have, you looked through his papers? Maybe he left you a letter or some explanation.”
“I haven’t gone through everything, but I did separate his legal papers into piles. There’s no letter.”
She wanted badly to offer him some hope. “Maybe, in reading everything thoroughly, you’ll find an answer. I’m surprised your mother, if she drank so much, didn’t slip and tell you.”
“I used to try to get her to open up when she’d been drinking, thinking the same thing. All she ever said, over and over, was that she loved Jeremy, but he didn’t believe her.” He looked over and guessed what she was thinking. “You think he came home early and caught her with another guy, right? Could be, I suppose. But I want you to know that never in all the time between him leaving and her dying the week after my nineteenth birthday did I see her with a guy. Not once. Even in the bars, she sat alone, she drank alone, she staggered home alone.”
“Heartbreaking. What did you do after she died?”
“I joined the navy to see the world. I pretty much did, too. It wasn’t such a bad four years. They let me finish college, taught me to fly.” He’d come back stronger, tougher, but just as unhappy.
A misfit, Slade had decided, that was what he’d been. A man without a family, without a home to come back to or a city he could call his own. He’d tried one job after another, one town after another, one woman, then another. Too many. None seemed right, no place ever seemed like home. Then one day, he’d met a guy who’d pointed him in a positive direction.
“After the navy, I became a firefighter, flying planes to put out all those California brushfires. It was exciting work and paid well.”
“I had the impression you were a fireman on the ground.”
“I was, after I quit flying.” That was where he’d found his real calling. For five years, the guys at Number 105 Engine & Ladder Company had been like his extended family. Hell, they’d been his only family. Then had come the incident that had sent him into a new kind of hell, one of his own making.
“You said yesterday you wouldn’t go back to firefighting again.”
Slade sat back, realizing he’d talked more about himself in the last half hour than he had in the last five years. He hadn’t even told the company shrink as much as he’d revealed to Briana today. He looked over at her, afraid he might see pity in her eyes with all she’d learned about him. But he saw only understanding and a hint of what looked like admiration. “You listen awfully well, you know. Too well.”
She guessed what he was feeling and touched his arm gently. “Do you regret confiding in me? Please don’t. It’ll go no further. I think my behavior yesterday was far worse than anything you’ve said today.” She saw in his eyes that he was remembering that scene in the kitchen, the one she wished she could erase from both their memory banks. “And don’t be ashamed of what you’ve been through, Slade. It took courage, a great deal of courage, for a ten-year-old to survive against those odds.”
“I didn’t feel particularly courageous. I remember being scared shitless most of the time.”
“Undoubtedly, but you survived. You’re a survivor. Someone recently said that about me, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to be. Things happen sometimes and you feel as if it’d be easier to just give up, that it wouldn’t hurt so much. But my dear friend, Irma Tatum, said that there are two kinds of people in the world, the quitters and the survivors. And that you can pretty much tell at an early age with a child which way they’ll turn out.”
“You believe that?”
“Yes, I think I do. Or maybe I just want to. How about you?”
“I’ll have to give it some thought.” Slade drew in a long breath, then stood. “So, are you going to pick out some paintings for me to take over to the art gallery? Or do you want to get started on the house and we’ll do this later?”
“Let’s pick out half a dozen paintings now. That should hold Fern for a while.” Briana rose and walked to the end row. “Maybe you should choose one from each year, starting with the oldest, for six years. And make them just a little different, a seascape, maybe a street scene, then a lighthouse view. I know Jeremy must have several lighthouse paintings. I used to see him set up his easel down the beach and sit for hours on end.”
Slade didn’t want to talk anymore about his father. He was all talked out. So they methodically removed several canvases, looked them over, compared them, pushed a few back, picked out more. By the time they’d settled on six, it was noon, the lateness of the hour surprising them both.
“I’ll crate these up and take them over to the gallery in the morning,” Slade said as he opened the door to the room. “I appreciate your help.” He picked up the portrait of her grandfather. “Don’t forget this.”
“Slade, I don’t f
eel right about …” She hadn’t realized how close he was as he followed her out.
“Then we arm wrestle for it.” He smiled down at her. “But I warn you. I cheat.”
“All right, I give up. Then thank you. This portrait means a great deal to me.”
His eyes were friendlier than before, she noticed, suddenly a warm gray. Was it because she’d helped him with the paintings, or because she’d listened? At any rate, it was time to go, to leave this close, charged atmosphere and step out into the light of day. “I imagine you’ll want to change.” At least she hoped he would. Unable to stop herself, her eyes kept returning to those tight knit shorts. “I’ll meet you over there.”
“Right.” He waited at the top of the stairs until she left, then went to his bedroom.
Unlocking her front door, Briana hurried inside, holding Gramp’s portrait this way and that, wondering where she’d hang it. She’d just propped the painting on the fireplace ledge when she heard a mewing sound. Frowning, she moved to the kitchen.
A calico ball of fur leaped up onto the chair, then the table, startling her. “Rascal! What are you doing in here? And how did you get in?” It was then that she noticed that her back kitchen window had been smashed in, glass shards everywhere.
Staring transfixed, she saw that her back door was ajar, that once the window had been broken out, someone could easily have reached in and unlocked the door. Who had done it and why? And where was he now?
Oh, God! What if he was still inside?
Heart thundering, Briana ran back out the front door as if she were being hotly pursued and rushed back into Slade’s living room, yelling at the top of her lungs. “Slade! Someone’s broken into my house!”
Chapter Six
Sheriff Howard Stone had known and admired Andy Gifford as man and boy. Which was why he personally responded to the break-in call to Andy’s house. He’d also watched Andy’s granddaughter grow into a fine young woman. Smiling down at her from his six-foot height, he patted her shoulder.
“Don’t you worry, Briana. We’ll find out who broke in here.” The sheriff glanced at his deputy carefully dusting the broken glass fragments on the kitchen floor and the table under the window. “You did the right thing, leaving the house as soon as you noticed something wrong. Looks like he broke the window, then reached in and unlocked the door, easy as pie.”
“I don’t understand who’d want to break in here or why,” Briana said, truly puzzled now and less frightened. “I don’t recall Gramp ever mentioning burglaries or thefts in this neighborhood.”
Stone pushed his rimless glasses farther up on his nose and sighed. “True enough, but these are rough times we live in. I guess I don’t have to tell you that.” Like everyone else on the island, the sheriff had heard about the tragic death of Briana’s husband and son. “The world isn’t an easy place to live in anymore,” he added. “When I moved here thirty years ago and signed on as deputy, we had the occasional auto accident, some kids vandalizing now and again, maybe some petty thievery in a hotel once in a while. But now?” He waved a bony hand. “You don’t want to know.” But he leaned down and told her anyway. “Actually had an elderly tourist assaulted walking along Petticoat Row one evening last month.”
Hadn’t she just told Craig yesterday that she felt safer in Nantucket than anywhere else? Was her last bastion now gone? “That’s terrible.”
The sheriff shifted his shrewd gaze to the man in the worn jeans and T-shirt, the one who’d called in the report. “Don’t believe we’ve met, young man, but I knew your father well.” He held out his hand. “Sheriff Stone.”
Slade shook hands, thinking that if this man knew his father well, he was the only one who did. “Do you know of any other break-ins in this immediate area, Sheriff?”
“No, sir, I don’t. Couldn’t find any fresh footprints in back. Most of the yard’s cement, like the driveway apron, the walkway, and the patio.” He glanced over at the deputy, now scooping up shards and fragments. “Hopefully, we’ll get some fingerprints off the glass.”
“Still, they wouldn’t be helpful unless the guy’s got a record and his prints are on file, right?”
“Yeah, right” The sheriff sent Slade a look of grudging respect. “‘Course, we could get lucky.” He turned back to Briana. “Have you checked yet? Is anything missing?”
“I did a quick inventory, but there really isn’t much here to steal. I brought over only a few things and, as you can see, my grandparents didn’t live lavishly.” She looked up at Slade. “Kind of makes you wonder, if the thief was after money or something valuable, why he didn’t choose your house.”
“Jeremy’s house is wired for an alarm, but I haven’t been engaging it.”
“You should,” Sheriff Stone said emphatically. “You might want to consider installing one, too, Briana. Though I doubt this fellow will come back. Could be some kid, you know. A prank. Or …” He walked to the back and looked out. “Isn’t that the Reeds’ house past the shrub fence? Maybe their little girl tossed a ball through your window.”
“I doubt she’d have the strength at age six, Sheriff,” Slade said, wondering just how efficient this man was. “Besides, we didn’t find a ball in here.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right.” Annoyed that he’d conjectured aloud, Stone ran a hand over his thinning hair, feeling every day of his sixty years. “You finished, Simmons?” he asked the young deputy.
“Yes, sir.” Simmons sealed his evidence bag, nodded to Briana, and left through the back door.
“I’ll send someone over to fix your window, Briana,” the sheriff offered. “Least I can do for Andy’s granddaughter.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Slade answered before Briana could, “I’ll fix it and get some better locks as well.” He pointed to the flimsy slide-lock on the back door. “That’s not good. You need a dead bolt.”
“Just like in Boston,” Briana complained. “We have to live in fortresses. I hate it.”
Stone nodded. “Can’t blame you there. I too. I’ll be in touch.” With a nod to both of them, he followed his deputy out.
Briana opened the small kitchen closet and took out the broom and dustpan, wanting to sweep up all that the officer missed. “Thanks. I’m sorry I acted like such a ninny, running over to you. But all I could think of was what if he was still in the house.”
“And he could have been. Do you have a tape measure handy? I’d like to take care of this right away.”
She let her gaze drift down to his bare feet, knowing he’d been changing clothes when she’d run screaming to him. “Maybe you should get your shoes first.”
At least she seemed calmer now. “I will You want to look around while I do this and make sure nothing was stolen?”
Briana let out a nervous breath as she rummaged through a kitchen drawer, looking for the tape measure. “What’s in this house that someone would want badly enough to break in? I’m truly puzzled.”
“Did you bring any jewelry with you? Maybe someone saw you in town wearing something valuable.”
Her hand went to the gold chain she wore and the small heart that dangled from it. Robert had given the necklace to her when Bobby had been born. She never took it off. And she wore an amethyst ring in a gold setting, a gift from her parents. “I brought only the jewelry I’m wearing. I rarely travel with more. The few other good pieces I have are at home.” Which reminded her of something. “You know, my condo in Boston was broken into shortly after… after the funeral.”
Spotting the tape measure in the corner of the drawer, Slade took it out and walked to the window. “Anything turn up missing?”
“Two cameras from my darkroom.”
“That was it?”
Grabbing paper and pencil, she went over to watch him measure. “Far as I could tell.”
“You weren’t home at the time, I take it.”
“No. I’d gone to visit my sister in Florida, mostly because I was such an emotional wreck. But after four days, I f
lew back. I just wasn’t fit company for anyone. And I walked into a real mess. That time, drawers were open and everything spilled out onto the floor. Cupboards and closets had been gone through, everything scattered. But the worst thing was, they’d gotten into the darkroom I’d had built off the kitchen, ruined a bunch of new film and took two of my best cameras. I felt like sitting down and crying.”
“Did you report it to the police?”
“Oh, yes. Someone had forced open my patio door and gotten in that way. Easiest point of entry, the officer told me. He took down all the information and to this day, I’ve never heard from them.” She sighed, feeling frustrated. “That’s probably what will happen this time, too.”
Slade jotted down measurements, stuck the paper in his pocket. “I think Chief Stone’s a bit past his prime. Fingerprints rarely get you anywhere unless you’re dealing with hardened criminals with a rap sheet. Why would someone like that choose this small, innocuous house to break into?”
“You’re right. It doesn’t make sense. But then, who else is there?”
“Maybe not a visitor but a resident. Older people often keep cash squirreled away in secret locations. We had a fire once in a home where this elderly woman kept screaming that we had to go back for Mickey. I asked her who Mickey was—her husband, a child, her dog? Turned out to be a Mickey Mouse bank stuffed full of money. Did your grandfather keep cash around and maybe someone got wind of it?”
Briana was already shaking her head. “No. They were both retired business people. He had his own insurance agency and my grandmother had a store off Main Street called the Needle Pointe. They believed in banks. Also, this house stood vacant for several weeks after my parents came over and took Gramp to the nursing home before I decided to visit. If someone suspected there was something worth stealing, that would’ve been the time to break in, wouldn’t you think?”
“You have a point there. I’ll get my shoes and keys and run into town for the replacement glass and some sturdy locks.”
“I can do that. Give me the measurements and I’ll go. I don’t want to stay here alone just now.” Not an easy admission to make, but it was the truth.
