SULLIVAN'S MIRACLE

by Lindsey Longford

  It wasn’t exactly condemnation in his harsh face, though. The absolute concentration in his motionless pose reminded her of the way he’d touched her at Taggart’s, the way he’d shut out everything except her need. In the shadows of the porch, his narrowed eyes were unreadable. She wished he’d look somewhere else.

  Ignoring him, Maggie gestured in Tommy Lee’s direction as she spoke to Alicia. “A handful, isn’t he?”

  “Ho. There’s the understatement of the decade. That child’s going to make a name for himself one way or another. Not a mean bone in his body, but he’s got more ways to stir up a classroom than any kid his size ought to have. I hope we can get him to realize doing well is more fun than making mischief, but we’ll have to see. Little rascal’s only been with us a couple of weeks. We have a chance. Unless his mother has to move again,” she added to Sullivan and Maggie in a quiet aside.

  “She having more trouble with her bastard of a husband? He beating her again?”

  Glancing at Maggie, Alicia waggled her hand sideways. “I’ll tell you later. Wait for me in the office.” Alicia took three long steps to catch up with the line of toddlers. Tommy Lee had worked himself up to the third position and was making his move toward the head of the line. She locked onto Tommy Lee’s arm. “Whoa, hotshot. Last in the door, last in for juice.”

  “I’m helping Lala today.” The feet kept pumping, but the rest of Tommy Lee stayed in Alicia’s grasp. “I will pass the cookies.”

  “Nope. Don’t think so.” Alicia gently held Tommy Lee by her side, waiting for his original spot in line. As he squirmed, she bent to his level and turned his face to hers. “Don’t worry, sugar. We’ve got plenty of cookies. And juice. Hey, if we run out, Sullivan’ll scoot over to the store and buy as much as we need, right?”

  His face scrunched up until his mouth was nothing more than a grimy button, Tommy Lee cast a doubtful glance at Sullivan, who nodded and said, “Nobody goes hungry, kid. Not here.”

  “You can pass the cookies tomorrow, sugar, if you check first, okay?” Alicia said, patting Tommy Lee’s arm as she watched the line. “It’s your turn now. Go on.” She smiled at Maggie and Sullivan. “Catch you in a few minutes.”

  The door slammed behind her as she hurried after the children, leaving Maggie and Sullivan alone on the suddenly quiet porch.

  He glanced at her and away, too quickly.

  She pulled at the edge of her shirt, rolling it between her palms.

  “Look, I—”

  “Why don’t you—”

  They tripped over each other’s words.

  “Ladies first,” Sullivan said, all lightness vanished from his lean face. Hunched on the porch railing, which ran around the old house, he looked as though he’d been flayed alive.

  Maggie needed to ask a hundred questions, wanted, with a surprising need, to wrap her arms around him and take away the pain gouging lines around his mouth. Instead, she said only, “Why don’t I wait out here for you?” She pointed to a royal poinciana tree, where branches heavy with scarlet petals bent low, offering a canopy of shade in the heat. “You and Ms. Williams have things to discuss first. When you’re finished, I’ll talk to her. Then I’d like to walk over the bombing site.” She looked out at the peaceful street. “I thought it was near here…” She flipped open her notebook.

  “Right. Close.” He nodded but didn’t move. “Yeah. Leesha and I need to talk.” He nodded again.

  In the thick silence, his whispered, “Damn, damn, damn” was nothing more than a breath lingering in the still air.

  But Maggie heard. “Sullivan?” She started toward him.

  “Don’t. Maggie, don’t.” His head was bent and he gripped the railing so tightly his knuckles went white. “Leave me alone. Go away. For a minute. Please.”

  Go. Stay. Maggie didn’t know which to do, but she knew she couldn’t walk away and leave him alone with his pain.

  Walking over to stand next to him, she covered his hand with hers. He could reject the gesture if he wanted. He probably would.

  The door opened again.

  Big eyes and a tiny mouth surrounding a thumb peeked around the door edge. “Su’van?”

  Lifting his head against a weight Maggie couldn’t imagine, Sullivan looked at the three-year-old emissary. “What’s up, Katie?”

  A toe nudged the door back and forth. “Leesha said you c’n read. If you want.” Aware of the importance of her message, she enunciated her syllables very carefully, finally abandoning the comfort of her thumb.

  “Sure. I want to. You know I always read when I visit,” he said, straightening slowly.

  “Tommy Lee said you wouldn’t read to us. He said guys don’t read baby books. I’m not a baby. Tommy Lee is the baby. He don’t know nothin’, does he? Poor Tommy Lee,” she crooned, shutting the door behind her and shaking her head mournfully.

  Katie’s thumb served the same function as a sink plug. With it out of her mouth she was a fountain of volubility, words spurting forth. But she approached the adults tactfully, taking in their joined hands as she edged between them. “I told ol’ Tommy Lee I get to sit on your lap sometimes, but he could today.”

  She wiggled between Maggie and Sullivan. Her shoulder was hot against Maggie’s arm. “I told him it’s okay. Right?” Katie beamed at Sullivan, a small earth mother righting the wrongs of the world.

  “Right.” Sullivan curled her into his arm. “Whatever you want, Katie-o.”

  Leaning against Sullivan’s long thigh, Katie rubbed her head against his knee. Thumb plugging her round little mouth once more, she murmured, “I wuv you, Su’van.”

  Maggie didn’t know she’d made a sound until Sullivan lifted his head from Katie’s and stared at her, his expression shuttered and remote.

  As clearly as if he’d shouted the words, Maggie could read his expression now. Back off.

  *

  Chapter 6

  « ^ »

  Staring out the upstairs window of Alicia’s office after he’d finished story time, Sullivan watched Maggie wander through the yard, her pale T-shirt flashing in and out of shadows, catching his gaze again and again.

  He wanted to ignore her. He couldn’t.

  He should never have forced her to come with him to the daycare center.

  Seeing Maggie here in Lizzie’s old home was a peculiar torment.

  Everywhere he looked he saw Lizzie. He missed her past explaining, and a desolate weight settled in his chest where she’d once filled his heart. As he watched Maggie in the bright sunshine, a cold fog of gray loneliness wrapped around him, muffling everything, leaving him, as always, alone.

  It had been so long.

  And now Maggie with her vibrant hair and soft breasts was here in Lizzie’s place, confusing him.

  He looked at Maggie and shattered inside with longing for Lizzie. He looked at Maggie and hungered to touch her, to run his palms across her silky warm skin and lift the fog shrouding him, to bury himself in her softness and at last find oblivion.

  Touching the windowpane, Sullivan found himself tracing the outline of Maggie.

  When Alicia had hurried in after the children, leaving him and Maggie alone on the porch, he’d looked at Maggie’s gentle curves in her tight jeans, remembered the shape of her leaning into him at Taggart’s, remembered, too, the unconscious pleas for help in her dilated, shocked eyes, a poignant appeal he hadn’t resisted. In that moment on Lizzie’s porch, he’d wanted Maggie with such ferocity that he’d been appalled.

  Every time he looked at Maggie, the kernel of pain in his chest twisted, grinding deeper and reminding him of all he’d lost with Lizzie. And yet with the twisting pain came a different aching he didn’t intend to satisfy.

  But what if he did?

  Unbidden, the thoughts flooded in.

  What if he yielded to the obsession to wrap her hair around his throat, spread it over his chest, breathe in the scent of her skin, drown in pleasure?

  Unwanted images of Maggie coiling beneath h
im, brushing his mouth with eyelash kisses, sliding sleekly beneath him and drawing him deep into her warmth…

  The sweet forgetfulness of hot, wild sex.

  He longed for Lizzie and craved the touch of Maggie Webster.

  While never taking his eyes off Maggie, Sullivan pressed his face against the window and clenched his fist.

  There was no explanation for what he was feeling. Lust was simple. He could understand lust. What he didn’t understand—couldn’t understand—was the unpredictable feeling of tenderness Maggie stirred in him. Couldn’t understand and didn’t like. Not at all. He drummed his fingers on the window. Maybe he was still hung over.

  *

  As the afternoon drowsed on, Maggie wandered through the yard. Following a well-worn path to the west side of the house, she found herself in a courtyard, where a hummingbird feeder hung right in the center of a vegetable plot.

  Under the partial shade of a large Brazilian pepper, the waxy white flowers of a gardenia mingled its heady perfume with the smells of earth and honeysuckle. Enormous old oaks and shrubs absorbed the street noises, muting them to a distant hum, making the courtyard an island of serenity in the lazy afternoon.

  The pepper tree would have large bunches of berries at Christmas. Maggie wondered if Alicia and the children would make wreaths and mantel decorations with the deep red fruit.

  Looking around, she smiled in delight. Picnic tables and child-size chairs were scattered randomly on the brick-paved patio, where clay pots filled with petunias, tomatoes and strawberry plants testified to the children’s gardening interests and attempts.

  Fingering a pole bean plant staked to a yardstick marking its growth, she nudged aside the leaves at the bottom and saw Katie’s name neatly printed in ink with a red-crayoned K staggering off the card. Sweet, practical Katie had a yen for red.

  Thinking about Katie and the way she’d nestled against Sullivan, Maggie started as Alicia caught up with her in the courtyard, her rapid speech breaking the sleepy quiet.

  “Whew. Sorry you were left to conduct your own tour, but this is a busy part of the day.”

  “I’d guess your whole day is hectic.” Maggie sat down in one of the preschool-size rockers facing the house. Ground-eye view provided a whole different perspective, she found as she looked up at Alicia.

  Laughing at Maggie’s wry grimace, Alicia folded herself into an Adirondack-style chair and unselfconsciously draped her slim legs over the side. “Better?”

  “Much. Thanks. This—” she indicated the chair “—isn’t good for my image. And I’m not wearing my power clothes today, either.”

  “Shoot, I’m tall enough without you sitting in these itty-bitty chairs, Detective, even if you were decked out in a nifty buttoned-down suit.”

  “I think you could be formidable,” Maggie conceded, wrinkling her nose at the image of herself in the rocking chair. She swayed back and forth, the curved wood rockers underneath her squeaking cheerfully. “Yes, it’s the height and the no-prisoners-taken look you get on your face every now and then. Very intimidating, I’d think, to most people,” Maggie said, letting Alicia know it hadn’t worked with her.

  “I know.” Alicia’s smile was a flash of white, an acknowledgment of sisterhood. “But I try to save intimidation for special occasions—like squeezing funds out of the city council and fence-sitting rich folks.” She flipped a file back and forth, her finger picking at the edge of the manila folder. “Or sometimes for parents who don’t have the sense God gave a banana.”

  Maggie saw a silhouette in one of the upstairs rooms overlooking the courtyard. Sullivan. Watching her. Or Alicia. She cleared her throat. “The kids don’t see that side of you. They’re crazy about you.”

  “Vice versa. Usually. Not always. I don’t expect unconditional love and adoration from these kids. I don’t need that from them.”

  “What do you need?” Genuinely curious, and liking Alicia more than she’d expected to, Maggie stopped rocking and leaned forward.

  “I need to believe that some of them will leave here with a fighting chance in the world. Nothing more.” Alicia’s sculpted mouth curved down. “Fifty percent success is enough to make me jump up and down and click my heels.” Fanning herself with the file, she said. “Now. Sullivan told me you’re following through on that bombing and checking out some letters he’s gotten recently?”

  “Yes.”

  “He told me to answer any questions you had.”

  “I see. That explains the thaw.” Maggie smiled to take the sting out of her comment, but she’d taken careful notice of the reserve in the woman’s initial, quick assessment.

  “Sullivan’s my friend.” Straightforward truth shone in Alicia’s level gaze. “I wouldn’t even talk to you if he didn’t want me to. Not if it would hurt him. We’ve been in the trenches together.”

  “He’s lucky to have you for a friend.”

  “Again, it’s mutual.” On her guard once more because of Maggie’s comment, Alicia had resumed her professional attitude. She wouldn’t reveal anything carelessly.

  The children and Alicia were shining a light on Sullivan’s character that Maggie hadn’t expected. For a man who said he didn’t care about anything, Sullivan definitely cared about the people at the center. A loner, he was still bound up in the lives here.

  Not knowing where Sullivan was taking her when they left the pistol range, Maggie hadn’t prepared any questions for Alicia, but meeting the daycare director and thinking about her friendship with Sullivan had given Maggie several ideas. She pulled out her notebook and shrugged as Alicia eyed it. “One of the tools of my trade. How long have you known Mr. Barnett?”

  “Since shortly after Mary Elizabeth O’Connell hired me to help her start this daycare center. I had the college degree. She had the money and the house.” Alicia swung her long legs back and forth, setting a rhythm for her clipped phrases.

  “This house?”

  Nodding, Alicia fanned her long, elegant neck, which was gleaming with a hint of perspiration. “Some house, huh?”

  Maggie could imagine a family drinking iced tea here in the courtyard with the sun sliding behind the trees. It would be cool then. Even now in the blaze of afternoon, a sense of imagined coolness muted the heat. The evening sun would be red, a dying fire in the tops of the trees, then gone, leaving the people in the courtyard in a mellow twilight. For an instant, Maggie tasted the lemony tea, saw the fire glow and rocked tranquilly in a time long past.

  “Her folks left it to her. She took every bit of her money and plowed it into this place. Said she was the luckiest woman who ever walked the earth, and sure as God made sour green apples, she could afford to make life easier for kids who didn’t have much of a future ahead of them.” Alicia was silent. “She purely loved these kids.”

  A dragonfly landed on Maggie’s knee. Its wings fluttered dreamily, and then it lurched skyward toward the sun, pulling her gaze with it to the dark profile of Sullivan framed in the window. She wondered what thoughts kept him a solitary prisoner behind the window. Jumping as Alicia continued to talk, Maggie tried to put Sullivan out of her mind. Yet the image of that remote figure lingered on the edge of her awareness.

  “We’d been working for several months and had about forty kids at that point. We were trying to arrange for funding through some of the city and county agencies. See, this center is primarily for kids whose parents can’t afford full price for child care. That was Elizabeth’s whole point in starting the Sunshine Center.”

  Spread against the glass, Sullivan’s palm seemed to reach out to her.

  “Anyway, he came banging at the door—checking out some tip that we were understaffed and in violation of some nit-picking zoning ordinance. Elizabeth opened the door, and that was that. They were together almost every day after that until she died.”

  Mary Elizabeth. The woman whose picture Sullivan kept on his refrigerator door.

  Alicia stroked the wooden armrest of the chair. “She talked him into
writing a story that brought in funding like you wouldn’t believe. Frankly, I think the city council gave us the money to save their political necks.”

  “A biased story?” Maggie was surprised. She shifted in the diminutive rocker.

  “No way. Man, that Sullivan could blister the hide off an elephant if he had a mind to. Nothing but cold hard facts, one after another, piled on so thick even the councilmen—and women—had to see that it was in everyone’s best interests to make this center work.”

  “I don’t get it.” Maggie underlined city council in her notes.

  “There’s a lot of migrant labor in this area, a lot of single parents working at the juice plant, packing plants. And parents who both need to work just to pay the bills and keep food on the table. Lord, they don’t have a wad of extra cash to shell out for day care, no matter how worried about their kids they are. The kids have to go somewhere when folks don’t have relatives and they’re in a financial bind. ‘Course, some of the little guys stay in the family’s pickup truck or in the housing developments with older brothers or sisters.”

  “What about school?” Maggie thought about earnest little Katie. She wanted to pick her up and cart her home. And Tommy Lee, with his determination to get to the head of the line one way or another. “Don’t the truancy officers check up on them?”

  “Bureaucracy’s always a step or three behind. Some of these kids move around so much, they’re lucky if they get any schooling.”

  “Who had the most to lose if the center became successful?” Maggie had to quit thinking about the children in the house behind her.

  “Well, there was a group of buyers interested in zoning this area for commercial development. Some talk about another plaza or mall. They’d like to see us fail. There’s always talk about this or that council member hand-in-glove with some development group, but I don’t know any names. The center does stand in the way of some big-money projects, I know that. Elizabeth had contacts in the community through her family and she was able to put some pressure on, with her sweet, coming-at-you-sideways approach.”

  “What was she like? Who was she?”