“Great. Really. My aunt and my grandfather were very nice. Do you know what that piece of scum Hausner did? He did tell them of my existence, but lied to them and said I wanted no contact with them.”
JR shook his head. “The guy’s a real piece of work.”
“Has he talked yet?”
“No, he’s all lawyered up, as expected. But he’s behind bars and with murder charges pending, he won’t get out on bail. He’ll probably talk eventually—they’ll make him a deal.”
“Oh, I see.”
“Are you sure you’re okay?” he asked her. “This has been a lot for you to take in.”
She gazed at him for a moment, the frown between her brows deepening, then said, “You know something, JR? You really do have to stop worrying about me so much, feeling so responsible for me.”
“I guess it’s become a habit.”
She nodded. “And it isn’t all your fault, of course. I mean, I know I don’t act very mature sometimes. But, well, I have managed to get through nearly thirty years of life, somehow. I’ll never be as organized and sensible as you are, and I’ll probably never do things the way you do them, but I’m doing the best I can, JR. And really, it would be better for both of us if you stopped thinking of me as someone who needs constant looking-after. I have to find my own way. I mean, I had a father, a wonderful one, and I don’t need you to take his place.”
By the end of her speech, he felt as though he’d been sucker punched. Everything she’d said was the truth, of course; he’d had the same thoughts himself. Still…
“I see,” he said slowly. “So, what exactly are you saying? It sounds like you’re breaking up with me.” He tried to smile, as though he were kidding, but he didn’t think it came out that way. “And we’ve barely gotten started.”
She studied him for a few silent moments before nodding. “You know, in a way, I am breaking up with you. The old Carmen and the old JR need to say goodbye to each other.”
“But I love you.” It just burst out of him.
“Oh, JR. I love you, too.”
“Do you?”
She nodded. “Yes. You were right, of course, even though I didn’t like you telling me how I was feeling. I am in love with you.”
Elation flowed through him. “Oh, Carm.” He reached for her but she held up a hand.
“No, don’t. See, I think that the best kind of love should be between two equals, and we’re not. Equal, I mean. I depend on you too much. When I’m with you, I fall back into that old pattern of leaning on you, of finding my strength in you. It’s what Mom would call dysfunctional.”
“Patterns can change,” he said.
“Not easily.”
“No, you’re right. But they can.”
She gazed at him, studying his face for something, but he didn’t know what it was. Finally, she sighed. “Look, you need to get back, I know you do. I’ve been invited to hang around for a few days, get to know my grandfather and my aunt, meet the rest of the family.”
Another sucker punch, but he tried to hide it with a smile. “Just as long as you come back. To L.A.,” he said lightly.
Just as long as you come back to me, was what he’d nearly said, but had stopped himself just in time. She would perceive it as an “order.”
He was confused. Carmen was in love with him. This was good, really good, news. But at the same time, she seemed to be pulling away from him. Not so good.
His confusion must have showed on his face—or maybe she just intuited it—after all, they’d known each other a long time—because her next words were, “Give me time. Okay?”
So it wasn’t over. Yet. There was hope. Some, anyway. She loved him. He would keep that thought, fan that flame instead of giving in to despair. “Sure,” he said. “Take some time.” He gave a rueful chuckle. “Hell, I’ve been waiting for you for twenty years. I guess I can wait a few days longer.”
With that, he used his good arm to pull her close, then he kissed her.
Intent on imprinting himself on her sensual memory, he made it a deep, sexy kiss, running his tongue along her upper and lower lips before thrusting it into her mouth to meet hers. He was pleased to hear her response, a soft, throaty moan. There, he thought, drawing back. Her eyes were glazed with surprise and passion, just as he’d wanted. She wouldn’t forget him that easily now.
“See you soon, Carm,” he said, then gave her a jaunty smile and headed for the station door and the airplane home.
Thanksgiving smells had to be the best smells ever, Carmen thought as she gazed out the kitchen window that overlooked the driveway.
“Shane Coyle,” she heard her mother say behind her, “don’t you dare take another bite of that stuffing or there’ll be nothing left for the rest of us.”
“But, Mom…”
Carmen had to smile. It was the same whine she’d heard from her younger brother her entire life. “But, Mom…” He was twenty-four now, six foot two, had women draped over him wherever he went, had all kinds of firms bidding for his services after he finished up his Ph.D., but he still sounded like a five-year-old. “But, Mom…”
“Hey,” Shannon said, walking up to stand next to her. “Why do you keep looking out the window?”
“She’s waiting for JR,” Grace said.
“Thought so. That’s why you’ve been pacing like a caged lion for the past two hours.”
“I have not been pacing like a caged lion. I’ve been very busy making cranberry relish and the sweet potato thingie I make every year to even think about pacing.”
“You’ve been pacing mentally.”
“Shannon,” Grace chided. “Leave your sister alone.”
Shannon turned around to face her mother. “Excuse me? You’ve seen her. She’s about to jump out of her skin.”
“Yes, I have, and she doesn’t need you to tell her what she’s feeling. Shane? I warned you.”
“But, Mom…”
Carmen and Shannon looked at each other and laughed. Then Carmen put her arm around her much smaller sibling and hugged her.
Life was good. She’d returned from the Kurtzes earlier in the week, had taken care of some stuff at her place, then headed up here. She and Mom and Shannon—and Shane, after his arrival from the East Coast—had had talks about the family secret…good talks. Nothing had changed, really. She was still Carmen Coyle. It was just that there were now more family members in her life. As far as Carmen was concerned, you could never have enough family.
“Hey, Carm. Guess what?” Shannon said. “Your friend Mac? When he retires at the end of the year, he’s going to pitch in at the storefront.”
“That’s great.”
She only heard Shannon with half her brain. The other half was, indeed, on JR. They’d spoken briefly since her return, when she’d invited him up to Santa Barbara for Thanksgiving. He’d been snowed under with work, he’d told her, and looked forward to seeing her.
“Well, look who’s here,” Shannon said.
A car was coming up the driveway. It was JR’s Lexus. Carmen’s heart began to flutter wildly. She had so much to tell him!
She flew out of the back door and ran down the driveway. As soon as he opened the car door, she hugged him, tight.
He laughed. “Now that’s what I call a greeting.”
“Oh, JR, how I’ve missed you.”
His blue eyes, behind his gold-rimmed glasses, were warm. “Me, too, Carm.”
JR took in the pretty dress Carmen wore today, all browns and oranges and other autumn hues, but mostly he let his gaze feast on her face. Her bruises were mostly healed, her eyes were shining, her hair was clean and combed. She’d even put on some lipstick. None of which she needed to be beautiful to him. Still and always.
He reached into his car and pulled out a bag filled with several bottles of good wine. “Mom and Dad send their love. They decided to extend their cruise, but they’ll see us at Christmas.”
“Good.” Her eyes were shining as she smiled at him.
/> Shane, Shannon and Grace all came out of the house at once, the women hugging JR and Shane shaking his hand. Carmen handed her brother the bag filled with wine. “Take this in, will you, squirt?” She put her arm through JR’s bent elbow. “See you soon, everyone,” she called out. “My best friend and I are going for a little walk.”
Grace put a shawl around Carmen’s shoulders. “It’s chilly. You’ll catch a cold.”
“Once a mother…” she said, which earned a laugh from Grace.
My best friend.
JR repeated the phrase silently. She’d called him her best friend. Had she said that on purpose? Was that all that was behind her warm greeting? Was that all they were to each other? Was that all they were destined to be to each other?
They strolled down a familiar dirt path that ran behind the house and led into the woods. “I have so much to tell you, JR,” she said, looking up at him with those bright eyes. “But first, before I start blabbing away, tell me how you are.”
“Nothing major, Carm. I won a case, another one settled. I played racquetball. I saw a movie. And I thought about you. A lot. Now, talk. I want to hear everything.”
She let out a sigh. “Oh, JR. I finally know what I’m supposed to be doing with my life. I had some hints before but I didn’t know how to make a living from, you know, plants, so they were always a hobby. Well, forget that. It’s not my hobby anymore, it’s my calling.”
“Good, Carm. It’s the right thing.”
She squeezed his arm. “I knew you’d approve. My grandfather approved for sure. And my Aunt Barbara—boy, can that woman cry! Buckets and buckets. She’d always loved Phoebe, you see. Barbara was the older sister, the ‘good daughter,’ and Phoebe was always getting into trouble. By the way, I’m named after two of Phoebe’s favorite movie stars—Goldie Hawn and Raquel Welch. Anyhow, Barbara needed to talk about her, which was fine with me, of course. So I just sat and listened. It felt so healing, JR. For all of us, really, but they were so sad, and then we talked and I could see them cheering up, especially my grandfather. Actually, I don’t think of him as my grandfather, not really, because let’s face it, all I know is the Coyle family and Mom’s family, the Goodes. But you know.”
God, how he’d missed her! Missed her happy chatter, missed the way she hopped from one topic to another, but usually made it back to the starting line with that logic that was purely Carmen’s and nobody else’s he’d ever met.
“They have a new lawyer,” she went on, “and he’s much nicer. He said I needed to hire my own lawyer because I have a claim on the estate, and I said I really didn’t want anything and then my aunt said of course I did and that there was plenty to go around, even after Peter Hausner dipped into it. And then I was embarrassed because they were talking about money, so I started picking at the dead leaves on the philodendron that was on the coffee table—the poor thing was just starved for some minerals—and Barbara said, ‘Oh, my heavens, Phoebe used to do the same thing, take care of my plants.’ And then she cried some more.”
JR had to chuckle. “Too many tears for me.”
She grinned up at him and nodded. “It was definitely damp out. And that’s when I told them about how much flowers and plants mean to me. And then we got to talking some more. Well, actually, all this happened over a period of a few days. Barbara said maybe it was a blessing that I showed up when I did because Hiram is so old now and no one else in the family really cared anymore. About plants, I mean. That maybe we could talk about me taking over some of the business. At which point, I interrupted to say that, sorry, I have absolutely no head for business. Also that they were being very generous but that it was way too much and way too soon. But then I thought about it, and I told them the truth, which is usually the best way to go, right?”
“Right.”
A breeze came up as they walked along, rattling the leaves on a tree they were passing, and bringing with it the smell of the nearby ocean.
“I told them I wasn’t there to rob anyone or sue anyone for an inheritance. But that I would like a career and I’d like it to involve being around a plant nursery, and Barbara said they were expanding to Southern California, and I said maybe I could, you know, apprentice and learn the business from the ground up, even though, as I’d said, I don’t have a head for business. And she waved me away and said, ‘Silly, neither do I, neither does Hiram, that’s what lawyers and accountants are for.’”
She grinned happily. “See?”
God, he loved her! “Yes, I see.”
“And so I’m going to take a couple of night courses at Santa Monica College. You know, small business stuff and how to become more computer savvy. If I have trouble I’ll get a tutor to help. But you know, I don’t think I’m going to need help. I always had trouble in school because my mind was buzzing so loudly with all these voices telling me I couldn’t do it, wasn’t up to it, didn’t have the brains the rest of my family had. It was so noisy in there I couldn’t concentrate. And, now, if I don’t have those voices—”
She stopped dead in her tracks and gazed up at him, brown eyes wide and very serious. “Not that I hear voices, JR. I mean, I’m not saying that.”
He smiled, kissed her quickly on the nose. “I know you don’t. Go on.”
They resumed walking. A bird chattered on a high branch; another answered.
“It’s that buzz of self-defeat,” Carmen said. “That’s what those voices are. And, boy, does it get in the way. But I don’t feel that way now, so…down on myself. Something about these past few weeks has changed me. I’m still a Coyle and I still love and cherish my family. But I found out where I come from, or half of me, anyway, and back there, with the Kurtzes, I’m not an oddball. It’s, well, it’s just comforting. Barbara said Phoebe was just like me—isn’t that interesting? Not great in school, but basically smart and really gifted with flowers. I saw pictures of her and actually I look more like Dad, but there is some resemblance.
“From what I could tell, the estrangement from the family had to do with the expectations everyone placed on her—she was to go to the ‘right’ college and marry the ‘right’ man, take her place in that upper-crust Scottsdale society. Big expectations, big plans, without consulting her. So she ran away.
“And poor Hiram. As he got older, he knew he’d made a big mistake. And they tried to find her and they got Hausner on it and he reported to them that she’d died, but left out the part about me being born. At first. Later on, well, I already told you. What a piece of turd. He’s the kind that makes people hate lawyers, which isn’t fair. Not really.”
“But it makes for some pretty funny lawyer jokes.”
She grinned up at him again. “That it does. Okay if we keep walking? I have a lot of energy today.”
“So I’ve noticed. And walking’s fine.”
JR knew Carmen very well, as she did him, and, yes, she had a lot to catch him up on, but this veritable cascade of verbiage also meant that she was in avoidance mode. It was one of her patterns—pacing instead of dealing, speed-talking instead of confronting. Was she avoiding talking about the two of them?
He’d been doing some thinking of his own on the topic. A lot of it. He could bring the subject up, he supposed. Force her to talk about it now, rather than later. But he was reminded of what she’d said back at the Scottsdale police station: she operated differently than he did. She had her own ways of dealing with life and he needed to accept her rather than try to change her. Not an easy proposition, for him, for most people.
While he’d been musing, Carmen had been chatting away, and he’d lost track. “I’m sorry, Carm,” he told her, “go back to what you were saying about Hausner. Did they finally get him to talk?”
“Yes. Just like you said, he made a deal. Reduced charges and so on. But lots of jail time. And at least we got the whole story. It was just like you and Mac thought. Hausner kept the knowledge of my existence to himself. Then he got into trouble with the gambling. Especially with all the Native American ca
sinos around—he used to have to travel, you know, go somewhere else, to Vegas or Reno whenever he could. But now, it was practically next door.
“And so he began to siphon off money from the estate, not just from the Kurtzes, although they were the biggies. And every time he stole money, he worried about me and my existence more and more. What if I showed up one day and put in my claim? What if I wasn’t so easy to fool as the rest of them? And then he had a really bad night at the tables and he couldn’t siphon off enough money in time, so he went to the moneylenders. You know, the kind of guys who break arms for a living.”
“Bad move.”
“He’d stopped being rational. He needed to keep Hiram alive and needed me dead. That was the equation he came up with. Just until he could win all the money back on the tables. You know, the way they always think they’re going to, one day.” She shook her head at the stupidity of gamblers’ illusions. “So he hired a killer. And, by the way, not a top-notch killer—he didn’t have the money for that, can you believe it? He got one who didn’t cost as much. Isn’t that insane? I mean, discounted killers. Like there’s a coupon or something, fifteen percent off.”
JR laughed, and Carmen looked up at him and laughed with him. “Silly, huh.”
Oh, that joy-filled smile. How he’d missed it. “Extremely silly. Go on.”
“So this killer—Mac’s friend, Detective Florez, said he was some assassin in training, someone’s nephew—he followed me from home on the day I went to Nordstrom, watched me buy the sandals, followed me up the escalator, hung around while I went into the dressing room and then shot poor Peg Davis. And, yeah, it was a him not a her, by the way. Anyhow, he tried to break into my place the next night. He’d been told to search for papers, you know, to check and see if I was even aware of Phoebe’s existence.”
“We talked about that, remember? The night we were throwing ideas back and forth?”
“You were right. Anyhow, two days later, the nephew person found out that I wasn’t dead, which must have bummed him out big-time, so he kept tabs on my place, but I didn’t show up there—I was at your place, remember? Or Shannon’s. It’s hard to keep all the places I’ve been these past couple of weeks straight in my head.”
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