No, she had not.
Any man worth the name would have lost his temper when he found out his wife was deliberately defying him. Still, he'd only shoved her a little instead of beating her the way her stepfather had beaten her mother. And then afterward, Monk had turned up real sweet, loving on her so nice she almost forgot how much he'd hurt her.
She felt a sharp pang of guilt and told herself she'd only gone back to the group just one more time after that. She wasn't sure why. Maybe because she'd felt safe there with Ria and Callie and the other women, like she wasn't really alone the way she felt sometimes.
And because she'd been hearing Missy crying in her dreams.
It had gotten real bad for a while. Sometimes she actually thought her baby was in the house. It wasn't like she was crazy, exactly. More like scared, which is why she'd tried to call Ria at the Center. Only Ria wasn't there.
By the time Ria had called back, she'd already calmed down to realize she couldn't ever tell anyone about … things. Not even Ria. Still, she'd felt real bad, hearing the concern in Ria's voice on the machine.
Going to the Center was a dumb mistake, she knew now. No one understood Monk the way she did. Callie was wrong about him. He didn't beat her. He loved her. And he'd promised to make her pregnant again.
Maybe a little boy this time.
Men always liked sons better than daughters. Look at her own father. After he and her mom had split, he'd taken her two brothers, leaving her behind to deal with her mother's drinking bouts. She'd never seen her father again.
Juggling two bulging sacks of groceries, Brenda hurried through the pouring rain toward her apartment. She had her key out, ready to unlock the door and her mind already searching for ways to get a meal on the table as quickly as possible, when suddenly the door jerked inward, throwing her off balance. She lost her grip on the already-sodden sacks, and they fell, sending the groceries flying.
She gave a startled screech before she realized that it was Monk who had his big hands wrapped around her arms.
"You bitch!" he shouted, spraying her face with spittle. "You really done it this time."
"I c-couldn't help it," she stuttered, backing away. "The b-battery died and—"
"I should have killed you, too, while I was at it."
Brenda felt the scream tug at her throat, but some sixth sense warned her not to give in to the terror pounding like a fever pulse in her veins.
"I'm sorry," she whispered. "Whatever I did, I'm sorry."
His eyes were black holes filled with fury, and his face had turned a frightening shade of purple. "I told you to get rid of that brat before she was born. I warned you."
"M-Missy?"
Standing only a few feet away, clenching and unclenching his massive fists, he gave no sign that he'd heard her. "It wasn't my fault."
Brenda tasted bile and struggled to gulp it down. "What … what wasn't your fault?"
"She wouldn't shut up. You said you'd keep her quiet. You promised."
Oh God, oh God, oh God! It was true.
Somehow she knew she had to get away from those fists and those terribly hollow eyes. But how?
"Why … why don't I fix you a sandwich and a beer. I got the kind you like—"
Before she could get out a word, he backhanded her, sending her crashing to the floor. Instinctively she braced herself with her arm, only to feel her wrist give way. The pain was crushing, bringing tears to her eyes. She retched, but managed to keep from vomiting.
"Please, Monk, I didn't say anything."
He stood braced, looking down at her for a long, frightening moment before he reached into the pocket of his jeans. He took out a business card and dropped it to the floor in front of her.
Though she'd begun trembling violently, she managed to pick up the card with her left hand. She had to blink a few times to bring the name printed there into focus: "Detective Sergeant Flynn A. Hardin, Homicide Division, Lafayette Police Department."
Raw terror squeezed all the air from her lungs and her vision clouded. A part of her wanted to give up, but the part that had started hating him the moment she'd realized just how wrong she'd been urged her to fight back.
It was then, at that moment, she heard again the echo of her child's cries. Missy had been the one pure thing in her life, and this man glaring down at her had taken even that from her.
"Where … where did you get this?" she asked, calmer now.
"From my ex-brother-in-law in Gary. Seems this son-of-a-bitch Hardin was up there talking to my ex, wanting to know if me and Arlene had any kids who died under mysterious circumstances."
Brenda stared. "You never told me you were married before."
"What I done before I met you is my business, just like I never ask you no questions about what you did with that pissant stepfather of yours."
Brenda felt ice form on her skin. "I didn't have anything to do with this, Monk," she said, holding up the card. "I swear I never said anything."
"No? Then how come this cop has the same name as the woman who runs that frigging Center?"
"How do you know he does?"
His face twisted. "Her face and her name were plastered all over the front page of the Journal-Courier when that place opened." He sneered a smile that made her flesh crawl. "Them other two, they were real pretty ladies. But Ms. Hardin, now that's one classy broad. Be a real shame if a lady like that ended up with her face burned off by acid, wouldn't it?"
* * *
Ria dug her toe into the webbing of the chaise and watched Jimmy hunker down, his face screwed into a knot of concentration as he sighted a line between his ball and his daddy's. From the glee on her son's face, Dad was a dead duck.
The three of them had been halfway through the rubber game of their daily croquet tournament when Flynn had called to fill her in on his progress. Since she'd been losing big-time, anyway, she'd been happy to retire from the field, leaving father and son to battle it out for the "Championship of the World" as her son had put it.
"Is the fact that Benteen had another child who also died from SIDS enough to bring charges?" she asked when Flynn ran out of words.
"Not without more evidence. Evidence we ain't got, sugar." His sigh dripped disgust. "The guy who handled his case originally was three days from retirement when he caught the squeal. From the looks of the file, he interviewed the Benteens' neighbors, ran a check for priors on the parents and come up empty. Bottom line, he did a wash on digging any deeper."
An outraged male bellow sliced through her thoughts, drawing her gaze to Grady's irate expression. His green ball was now hopelessly wired against a wicket. She smiled at the show her husband was putting on for their son, who was loving it.
Ex-husband, she reminded herself firmly. And likely to remain that way.
Grady had said he loved her—only not recently. He said he wasn't leaving. He said he wasn't interested in proposing—which should have eased her mind considerably since it was much too soon to think about anything more than Jimmy's well-being. Instead, she got a funny, sinking feeling inside when she thought of telling the boy that his parents had been divorced for nearly three years. That they'd been living apart and would continue to live apart. That when they left the lake he would be living with each of them in turn, according to whatever custody arrangement they hammered out, passed between them like a football.
She felt a deeply buried pain struggle to take hold and fought it down.
"What about Monk's ex-wife?" she asked, shifting her gaze to a sailboat tacking into the wind in the mid-lake channel.
"The poor woman's terrified. She only agreed to talk to me off the record and even then, she only hinted that she suspected Monk."
"What about the similarities? Both babies left in his care while the mothers were gone. Both dead when the mothers returned."
"Without hard evidence, even a lousy defense attorney could make a case for coincidence."
Ria worried her lower lip and let her eyes go out of focus.
"Somehow we have to get Brenda to testify." She was stating the obvious, but it helped cement things in her mind.
"Agreed. Any idea how to make that happen?"
"One of us will have to convince her."
"Right. Problem is, she seems to have disappeared. I've been by her place three times in the same number of days, and none of her neighbors have seen her. Her car's not in its space either."
"What about Monk?"
"His employer claims he's hauling liquid fertilizer to California. Won't be back for three days. I thought maybe he'd taken the wife with him, but the dispatcher swears it's against company policy."
"What about Brenda's family?"
"A mother and stepfather in Richmond. Claim they haven't seen her since she left the morning of her sixteenth birthday."
Ria worried her lip some more before admitting, "I should have tried harder to reach her when she didn't return my call, but I was so caught up in my own stuff that I let it slide."
"Understandable, sugar." His voice lightened. "So how's my nephew adjusting?"
"Better, thank goodness. At least he calls me Mom now, and sometimes he sounds as though he means it. Last night, when I went in to check on him, he had Trouble tucked under one arm and his old Pooh bear under the other. I think he's starting to remember things, too."
"That's good, right?"
"According to the therapist Grady talked to in California, yes."
"Then I'll hold a positive thought."
"Thanks."
"For family, anything, sugar." He cleared his throat. "What about Jimbo's mom and dad? Are you and my brother still snarling and snapping at each other like two puppies in a sack? Or have you finally admitted you belong together?"
Ria watched Grady line up his ball. She had to admit the man had the best set of buns she'd ever seen. Tight and hard, with just enough curve to fill out the seat of his hacked-off Wranglers. He was also patient to a fault, unfailingly polite and a tireless lover. If given a thousand chances to find the one man who fit her girlhood dream of Prince Charming, she would still choose him. So why couldn't she make herself love him again?
"That's three questions," she said when she realized she was listening to static in her ear. "Which do you want me to answer?"
"Your call, sugar. I'm easy." It was apparent to her now that Grady wasn't the only Hardin willing to indulge her. It both touched and annoyed her.
"We're not snapping. There's not a chance under the sun that your brother could be mistaken for a puppy. As for belonging together, neither of us wants to make another mistake."
She gazed out at the two males with identical swaggers walking toward her. Both her men needed haircuts. Grady's was almost long enough to make a tiny tail. Definitely nonregulation.
"You still talking to my brother?" Grady asked before plucking the glass from her hand.
"Yes, why?"
"Need to have a few words with him when you're done." He drained what was left of her tea in two swallows before setting the glass on the patio railing with a hard thump.
"We're done," she told him before adding for Flynn's benefit, "I'll keep trying Brenda's number. If I leave enough messages on her machine, she might get tired of hearing my voice and call me back."
"Good plan. In the meantime I'll run by her place on my way home tonight. I might just get lucky."
"Thanks," she said before handing Grady the phone.
While Grady ambled toward the house, his voice too low to be overheard, Ria watched an aluminum fishing boat easing around the point. Seated in the rear seat, with one hand on the outboard motor was the same determined fisherman in camouflage vest and orange cap she'd seen fishing the point before, two or three days in a row at least. He was certainly patient, trolling back and forth parallel to the shoreline, staying just at the edge of the channel about fifty feet from the beach.
The second time he'd appeared, Grady had checked him out, swimming out to hang on to the boat with one hand while they'd spoken. Her fears had subsided when he'd returned to assure her that the guy was a mechanic from Indianapolis visiting his sister who lived across the lake.
"Guess what, Mom? Grady said he heard from the lady at the marina that a guy fishing the dam hooked Old Whiskerface but he snapped the line."
She flipped up the bill of the SWAT cap he'd appropriated as his own. "Do I sense a heavy-duty fishing expedition forming here?"
His eyes shone as he dug into the bag of chips he'd left by her chair. "Grady has a neat idea for bait."
"He does?"
He crunched chips, spraying bits as he rushed on. "You know that macaroni gunk you made for lunch?"
She huffed. "Watch it, buster," she protested, her expression fierce. "I'll have you know there are people who would kill for the recipe for my pasta salad."
He went white, his hand frozen halfway into the bag. "I didn't mean it," he said quickly, his voice thin, his gaze darting and nervous. "Don't be mad, okay? I won't say it again, I promise."
Ria's stomach clutched. "Oh, baby, I was just teasing," she said quickly. "You can call everything I cook gunk and it wouldn't bother me."
"But you said … I don't want to get killed."
Oh, God. Oh, my God.
"Sweetie, I love you. Your daddy loves you. People who love each other sometimes say the wrong thing. They even hurt each other sometimes, but because they love each other, they forgive each other, too."
"They do?"
"Oh, yes." Though she wanted to wrap herself around him and hug him close, she kept her hands curled loosely around the chair arms.
"So it's okay if we use your, uh, pasta salad? Well, not all of it. Just the parts that look like bow ties."
"Of course."
He cheered, then grabbed the bag and headed for the door. "Did you hear, Grady? Mom said we could use those yucky bow tie things for bait."
Ria twisted around to find Grady standing at the edge of the patio, watching her. "Great," he said, his hand on the boy's shoulder, but his gaze was fastened on her face.
"I'm gonna pick out some really smelly ones right now, okay? So we'll be ready to shove off as soon as the sun sets."
Without waiting for permission, he slipped from his dad's grasp and went inside, slamming the screen door behind him.
Only then did she exhale the breath she'd been holding. "How much did you hear?" she asked quietly.
"Enough to fill in too many blanks about the people he's been living with."
She nodded, her insides shaking. "It seems like every time I open my mouth I say the wrong thing."
"Sounds to me like you said exactly the right thing."
"About the pasta?"
"About loving someone enough to forgive." His mouth slanted just enough to push a shallow crease into his hard cheek. "It's a hell of a thought."
He saluted her with a quick grin before following their son into the house.
* * *
Stevie tucked his tongue between his teeth and pulled on the rope real steady like, one hand over the other the way Grady had taught him. Above his head, the flag snapped in the wind.
It was his job to run the flag up the pole at the edge of the water every morning and take it down every night when the sun went behind the trees on the other side of the lake. After the first time, when Grady showed him how to fasten the clip things through the metal holes, he'd done it all by himself. Sometimes Grady never even watched. And he never nagged him about remembering or doing it right or calling him a dumb head if he messed up on the time or stuff, like Lance used to do.
Stevie thought it was way cool the way Grady treated him like a grown-up. Mostly he thought Grady was way cool, too. It was like, if he said he'd be home to go for a boat ride at four o'clock, he was there right on time. Most times he was early. Sometimes, though, he'd come blasting down the driveway at the last minute, looking kinda hassled. But he always came.
He let Stevie drive the boat, too. And not just real slow, but fast enough so's the boat sort of
lifted up out of the water. Stevie loved going fast.
He thought maybe he might even love Grady a little. He was pretty sure Grady loved him a lot. Nobody ever said they loved him before Grady did that first day in California when he came into the pink house where they'd taken him after Lance and Moira had gotten arrested.
It was that way with Mom, too. She was really neat. He knew he loved her. He was even thinking of maybe admitting he liked being called Jimmy. Maybe he even sort of remembered her calling him that before. Only, whenever he thought about that, he got that funny sick feeling in his belly.
It was the way he got sometimes watching scary movies right before something real gross happened.
"How come we have to take the flag down every night and put it up every morning?" he asked as Grady came ambling up carrying his tackle box, the poles over his shoulder. "How come we don't just leave it up?"
Grady glanced up, his face kinda soft like as he watched the flag coming down. "Because the flag is special and needs special rules to show that." He glanced toward the water and the guy fishing off the point. Jimmy had seen him pull in two already.
"Lance said he burned the flag once. Said it gave him a high."
Grady's face got so hard it was scary. "It's a funny thing, Jim. In some countries, Lance could be shot for burning a flag. But here all of us including Lance are allowed to say anything we want about the government or the flag, just as long as we don't break any laws while we're doing it."
"How come burning the flag isn't against the law?"
"Because the men who thought up this country figured we were all smart enough to get along with one another without loading us down with a bunch of rules."
"Did you ever say bad things about the government?"
"Sometimes, especially when I have to pay my taxes every year. But I would never burn a flag or spit on it or do anything but respect it. My mother's dad was killed fighting for that flag." Grady looked a little sad for a minute. "Need a hand with folding?"
"Wouldn't mind."
Grady put down the tackle box and poles and reached up to haul in the flapping material. "There's something else that's pretty neat about the flag, too," he said as he handed Stevie one end. "It can be used as a signal."
ONCE MORE A FAMILY Page 18
