Heartbeat

by Joan Johnston

  Jack shut off the radio, but in the dark, in the silence, he had too much time to think. Too much time to remember.

  Where are you, Maggie? Let’s move it. Let’s get out of here.

  A little girl’s face appeared before him. Her trusting smile was so painful to see that Jack closed his eyes to make her go away. Since she wasn’t really there except in his mind, that accomplished nothing.

  Jack’s body tensed as the memory grabbed hold. He was in a motel room that reeked of gin. The smell of gin—his mother’s drink—made his stomach knot. A nearly empty bottle of Beefeater sat on the Formica bedside table, while the woman who had drunk it sat in the center of a messed-up, sagging motel bed. She was half covered by an olive-green tufted spread, her legs curled under her, the pillows stuffed behind her. A child of four snuggled securely against her side.

  The woman held a snub-nosed .38 pressed to the little girl’s heart. “Tina b’longs with me,” the woman sobbed drunkenly.

  Her mascara-streaked eyes were unfocused from alcohol, but her agony was apparent. She had lost custody of her daughter in a hard-fought courtroom battle with her wealthy husband. Instead of turning the child over to the father, the mother had run with her. She had told the father over the phone that she would kill herself and the child if he came after them.

  Because it was a kidnapping and the woman had fled through several jurisdictions, the Texas Rangers had gotten involved, and Jack had been assigned to the case. He had finally run down Lilly Mott in a seedy hotel in New Braunfels, a charming Victorian town off 1-35 between San Antonio and Austin best known for its killer flash floods in the spring and its German Wurstfest, featuring sausages and beer, in the fall.

  His job was simple. All he had to do was save the little girl’s life and bring the mother in for psychiatric evaluation. Jack had called for backup, then, posing as the manager, talked Mrs. Mott into opening the motel room door. But nosy onlookers gave away the game before help could arrive.

  Mrs. Mott had lurched away and produced a gun that she aimed at her daughter, forcing Jack to draw his weapon.

  She had stumbled backward to the bed and climbed up onto it, keeping her daughter close. “Stay away or I’ll kill her and shoot myself!” she cried.

  Jack had closed the door behind him to make sure she didn’t throw him out and started talking as fast as he could. “Don’t shoot,” he said. “I’ll put down my gun. Just don’t shoot.”

  He’d laid his Colt carefully on the floor in front of his feet. He knew any minute the local SWAT team would arrive and put pressure on Mrs. Mott to give up her daughter. He was equally certain that if they did, Lilly Mott would kill the little girl.

  Her despair convinced him she meant business. With nothing more to lose, it wouldn’t matter to her whether she lived or died and took her daughter with her. But whatever courage had brought her this far seemed to have abandoned her. She moaned and writhed hopelessly on the sagging mattress, like a worm trapped in a bed of ants that were consuming it alive.

  “Would you mind if I speak to Christina?” Jack said.

  “Why you wanta do that?” Lilly said in a slurred voice.

  “You have a very beautiful daughter, Mrs. Mott.” The little girl had brown eyes shaped like a cat’s. Her dark brown hair had a fringe of bangs and tiny pigtails held up by rubber bands with little red balls on them. “I just want to meet Christina, if that’s all right.”

  “Okay.”

  Jack extended his hand toward the little girl as an excuse to move closer to the bed. Christina hid her face against her mother’s breast and clutched at her mother’s soiled dress. He paused within a foot of the bed. Close, but not close enough yet to try grabbing for the gun.

  He let his hand drop to his side and said, “Hello, Christina. My name is Jack. That’s a very pretty dress you have on.”

  Christina peeked out at him, then picked up the hem of her navy and white pinafore to show it to him. “My mommy got this dress for me.”

  Jack made eye contact with Mrs. Mott and said, “I’m sure your mommy loves you bunches and bunches.”

  The little girl looked up at her mother, her smile revealing the gap between her two front baby teeth. “Mommy loves me bunches and bunches.”

  Mrs. Mott stared down at her daughter’s trusting face, her tired features strained in an agony of indecision. She looked up at Jack. In a way common to drunks, one he knew well, she spoke slowly, exaggerating each word to make herself understood.

  “I—am—not—an—un—fit—mo—ther.”

  “Of course not,” Jack agreed. “I know Christina’s welfare is the most important thing in the world to you. Don’t you think you should—”

  “We have you surrounded, Mrs. Mott!”

  Jack cursed as the amplified sound shattered the rapport he had been building with Lilly Mott.

  “Stay away!” she screamed at Jack, and then to those outside, “Leave me alooooone!”

  Jack heard the child cry out sharply as her mother jabbed the nose of the gun in her side. He backed up, his hands held wide to show they were empty, and said, “Easy, Mrs. Mott. I’m not going to touch you. I’m not going to get any closer.”

  Her drunken words were garbled as she rattled off a stream of obscenities, but he could see the panic in her eyes. The little girl started to whimper, and Mrs. Mott put an arm around her and kissed her forehead and soothed her fears.

  “It’s all right, baby. Everything will be fine. Don’t cry,” she mumbled drunkenly.

  “I’ll tell them to keep their distance,” Jack reassured Mrs. Mott. He shouted, “This is Texas Ranger Sergeant Jack Kittrick. Give us some peace and quiet in here to talk!”

  “You’ve got ten minutes.”

  Jack swore under his breath, wondering what idiot had set a time limit on getting Mrs. Mott out of the motel, thereby increasing the pressure on the unstable woman.

  She looked stricken. “Ten minutes,” she sobbed. “Ten minutes. It’s not enough.”

  “Shh. Shh, Mrs. Mott,” he soothed her, feeling his heart pound and sweat dampen his armpits. “I won’t let them come in here until you want them in here. You have all the time you need.”

  “He said ten minutes.”

  Jack turned his head and shouted, “Mrs. Mott needs more time. We’ll let you know when we’re ready to come out!” He turned back to the woman—who looked much older than she did in the recent picture her husband had provided of the three of them—and said, “Is that better, Mrs. Matt?”

  Her face was puffy from the booze, and her sunken eyes had dark circles beneath them and were red-rimmed and bloodshot from crying. New tears carried clumps of mascara farther down her face. She brushed at the streaks agitatedly, blackening her fingertips and cheeks. She swiped at her runny nose with the back of her hand, smearing mucus across her face.

  “I have to do it,” she said, looking up at him, seeking understanding . . . and approbation.

  Jack’s heart clutched. “No, you don’t,” he said, his voice harsher than he’d intended. “Think of Christina graduating from high school, Mrs. Matt. How proud you’ll be. Think of her walking down the aisle in her white wedding gown. Think of holding your first grandchild in your arms.”

  She looked up at him, her eyes blurred with tears, her mouth open and contorted as though she were screaming.

  No sound was coming out.

  “Mrs. Matt,” he said, working to keep his voice calm, though he felt frantic, desperate, knowing he was running out of time. “Think about—”

  “He won’t let me see her,” she babbled hysterically. “He says I’m an unfit mother. He says I’ll hurt her. I would never hurt my child.”

  Jack felt the rage welling inside him, bubbling and hissing and spilling over like hot lava. He wanted to shake Lilly Matt until her teeth rattled, until she woke up and listened to herself. I would never hurt my child. Bullshit. She was about to kill her kid! Didn’t that count? There were lots of ways to hurt a child besides the physical
ones. What about the shame and humiliation of having a drunken mother? Didn’t that count?

  Jack felt the ledge he was perched on crumbling out from under him. Why had he come in here in the first place? Why hadn’t he waited outside and let someone else do this? Lilly Matt was his mother come back to life, and he hated her the way he’d hated his mother. If she weren’t pickled in alcohol, he could talk to her. It was the gin that had turned her so crazy. The goddamned stinking booze!

  He could see Mrs. Matt was steeling herself to shoot, trying to find the nerve to end it all. He watched her finger squeezing the trigger. It was now or never.

  Jack lunged for the gun.

  Lilly Matt’s eyes widened until the whites showed all around, and her mouth formed a surprised O.

  Jack cried out in despair the same instant the gunshot resounded in the small room. The horrendous noise reverberated in his head, making his ears ring and sending shock waves through his body.

  Too late! Too damned late!

  His hand was clenched around hers on the .38, but he didn’t bother wrenching the gun away. He stared frozen in horror at Christina as her body slumped and her eyes went blank and a trickle of blood streamed from the corner of her tiny cherub’s mouth.

  Noooo! Noooo! Jack screamed in his head. But the sound was real. Raw and aching, it filled the room, echoed from the walls, and carried outside to the blue sky and the green grass and the policemen waiting with guns ready.

  A keening sound erupted from Lilly Mott’ s throat. She let the gun go and grabbed her daughter and rocked the limp, lifeless body of her child in her arms. The noise coming from her throat reminded Jack of the sounds his mother had made when she got the news his father had died. He recognized the hopeless lament. What followed after had torn his heart out and left a gaping hole in its place.

  The motel door burst open, and Jack was surrounded by cops with guns in their hands. He sat on the bed beside the grieving woman and the dead child, his body shaking so hard he couldn’t move. “She killed the kid,” Jack said.

  A tight-faced patrolman tore Mrs. Mott away from her child and another roughly cuffed her hands behind her. Two others were tender beyond words with the little girl, who couldn’t feel a thing.

  A policeman tried to help Jack stand up, but when he realized Jack was in shock, ordered the nearest uniform, “Get a paramedic in here. Move your ass!”

  It’s my fault. My goddamned fault that kid’s dead. I despised Lilly Matt because she reminded me of my mother. She must have seen the disgust in my eyes. She must have felt my loathing for her. She gave up hope because my eyes told her there wasn’t any.

  “Jack? Is that you?”

  Jack awoke from the nightmare and found himself staring into Maggie Wainwright’s curious eyes. She had pulled her coupe up beside his truck on the wrong side of the road so she could lean out the window and talk to him. A glance at the church parking lot showed it was still mostly full, but the street around them was empty. He glanced at his watch and realized thirty minutes had passed.

  “I saw the truck and couldn’t help looking to see if it might be yours,” Maggie said. “Sometimes cars from elsewhere in town find their way to this neighborhood,” she added with a smile.

  Looking at her, he felt the same fierce attraction he always did—along with another feeling that always came with it, one he hadn’t recognized until this moment. Fear.

  He was getting more deeply involved with this woman—an alcoholic, like his mother—every time he saw her.

  Get out while you can, Jack, a voice warned. It’s not too late.

  Maggie’s brow furrowed as she stared at him. “I thought you were going home. How did you end up here?”

  “I was worried about leaving you alone with all that booze. By the time I got turned around, you were leaving.” He shrugged. “I decided to follow you.”

  “Because you thought I was headed for a bar?”

  He nodded.

  She pursed her lips, and he could see she was perturbed. “I suppose I ought to thank you,” she said. “But I have to fight my own demons, Jack.”

  “I know that!” he snapped. “That doesn’t make it any easier for me to stand by and watch you struggle. What if you’d ended up in a bar, Maggie?”

  “I suppose we’d both have hated me in the morning,” she said, with a wry twist of her mouth.

  “That isn’t funny.”

  “Did you come in and listen?” she asked.

  “I heard you speak. I ended up with more questions than answers when you were done.”

  Several more occurred to him. Had Maggie been telling the truth about when she took her first drink? Had she perhaps been drunk when her family needed her? Was that why she blamed herself for what had happened to them?

  Jack took a mental step back and looked at the woman in the car across from him. The last thing he wanted was to want her. Maggie’s fight with alcoholism would provide a constant reminder not only of his painful childhood but also his failure to save a child because he had let the past color his present. To make matters even worse, Maggie had her own ghosts to fight and might be exorcising them by killing other people’s children.

  Jack knew he was playing with fire.

  Yet he couldn’t walk away. Without her, he felt as empty inside as a gutted steer. He would find a way to deal with her situation. He had no choice. Because of all the women he had ever known, only Maggie had ever filled up the hollowness he felt inside.

  If only she wasn’t a murderer, anything was possible.

  “I’ll follow you home,” he said at last.

  “It isn’t necessary,” she replied.

  “I want to make sure you get home without—”

  “Stopping for a drink?” she finished for him. “All right, Jack, you can follow me home. I imagine you’ll be more fun at the Hollanders’ picnic tomorrow if you don’t spend the night staring at the ceiling, wondering where I am.”

  “I’m right behind you,” he said.

  Even after he made sure Maggie got home, Jack didn’t sleep well. He spent the long night tossing and turning on a rumpled bed of unanswered questions.

  Chapter 12

  “Do you want a hamburger or a hot dog, Maggie?” Roman called out as he carried a platter of raw hamburgers and hot dogs out his kitchen door to the gas grill on the screened-in flagstone patio.

  “Hamburger,” Maggie called back. “And in deference to E. coli, char it, please.” She was treading water while hanging onto the side of Roman’s backyard pool. She provided a second set of watchful eyes on three-year-old Amy, who was being pushed by her mother around the shallow end of the pool in a colorful, plastic duck-shaped float.

  The Easter egg hunt, with Amy wearing a pair of paper bunny ears she and Lisa had made together, had been a painful reminder to Maggie of days gone by. She had forced her-self to smile and cheer on Jack and Tomas, who had followed Amy around pointing out eggs for her to find.

  “Hot dogs for me and Amy,” Lisa said before Roman could ask.

  “One hamburger, one hot dog,” Tomas volunteered from his seat on the springboard at the deep end of the pool. “Any way they come off the grill.”

  “A hot dog sliced down the middle with American cheese melted on it,” Isabel instructed from a lounge chair near the diving board.

  “Figures,” Roman said with a laugh. “You like everything American.”

  “Si, señor,” Isabel said with an exaggerated Spanish accent. “Todo Americana.”

  “Jack? What about you?” Roman inquired.

  “Hamburger. Rare,” Jack said from his spot half in, half out of the water on the stairs at the shallow end of the pool. “I like to live dangerously,” he said when Maggie opened her mouth to object.

  “Be sure to put on another hamburger and hot dog for yourself, Roman,” Isabel said.

  “Got ’em both right here.” The hot grill sizzled as the last of the meat went on. “I could use some help in the kitchen,” Roman said.
r />   “I’ll be glad to help,” Isabel offered, already half out of the cushioned lounge chair.

  “Don’t bother,” Lisa said quickly. “I’ll help Roman. I have some other things I need to do in the kitchen.”

  Maggie cringed at the obvious friction between Lisa and Isabel. Lisa had told Maggie when she arrived that things were a little better between her and Roman, but the strain on Lisa’s face, and the dark looks she darted at

  Isabel, left Maggie wondering just how much better things really were.

  She let her gaze roam from Isabel to Roman and back again. As far as Maggie could tell, Roman only had eyes for his wife. She wasn’t as sure about what Isabel felt for Roman.

  Lisa’s yearning look as she met Roman’s gaze told Maggie her friend was hoping for a few stolen kisses in the kitchen. Lisa obviously needed someone to take over with Amy while she was gone, but Maggie noticed Isabel wasn’t volunteering for that.

  Maggie looked longingly at Amy, but she didn’t trust herself to be responsible for the dark-haired, dark-eyed pixie in the water.

  “How about if I spell you?” Jack said to Lisa as he waded toward her.

  “Amy doesn’t usually take to—”

  “Hey there, kiddo,” Jack said, smiling broadly as he slipped an arm around Amy, duck float and all. Maggie noticed the little girl was entranced by Jack’s smile and didn’t see her mother slipping away toward the edge of the pool.

  Lisa gave Jack a thumbs-up and mouthed, “Thanks, Jack.” She leaned back in the water to wet her hair, then braced her palms on the aqua tile and used her arms to push herself quietly up and out of the pool like some sleek water mammal. Lisa never took her eyes off of Roman as she reached up with both hands to squeeze the extra water out of her hair, leaving her exquisite body outlined for him.

  Maggie saw the hungry look Lisa got from her husband and glanced away before she intercepted anything more embarrassing. She knew Tomas wouldn’t be interested, but she made a point of watching over Amy, certain Jack’s gaze would also be distracted by Lisa’s stunning white-bikini-clad figure. To her surprise, Jack’s attention remained totally focused on the child.