It's Never too Late

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  “He mentioned going back there.”

  “Probably would, too, if the house was there.”

  Shrewd eyes appealed her to understand.

  “You don’t want him to go back.”

  “He has so much more to offer than that place can give him.”

  “Shouldn’t that be his choice?”

  “Should be, but it ain’t. He’s saddled with me.”

  “He loves you.” She didn’t need to know him well to know that.

  “And I love him. So I sold the house.” She paused to breathe. “The money’ll pay for my medicine. And my burial, too, when the time comes.”

  “I still think you should tell him.”

  “Not yet. But I had to tell someone. Thank you, young woman, for having compassion on an old woman. Now, if you don’t mind, I need to rest.”

  With that, she closed her eyes. Addy rinsed their tea glasses and let herself out.

  She should have asked Nonnie about Mark’s scholarship.

  * * *

  ON HIS BREAK, Mark texted Ella again. He sat in the student union and set up his new tablet, playing with the features. He signed on to Wi-Fi to register for a class bulletin board.

  And tested internet speeds because...that’s the kind of thing he did. A guy had to know his specs.

  As a test case, he typed in fires in the Denver, Colorado, area twenty-five years before. Just on a whim. Addy’s house fire was none of his business. Unless she chose to tell him about it.

  He was only looking because he was studying fire safety and engineering. Because he was curious about the details of the fire in a purely scientific sense. And because he’d lost a friend to an explosion and could relate—if only minutely—to his new neighbor’s suffering.

  He didn’t find anything.

  * * *

  PROFESSOR CHRISTINE EVANS was deceased.

  Standing at her kitchen table, Addy stared at the woman’s file on the secure Montford server accessible only by Will and one or two other people. No one could legitimately accuse Will, or Montford, of poor record keeping. A scan of Christine’s death certificate was in the woman’s file.

  Cause of death was a fatal blow due to a car accident.

  But the shocking part was that she’d died before she taught that semester at Montford.

  Scrolling back to the first page of the file, Addy read again, checked dates. And then brought up the chart depicting a historical account of professorial ratings at Montford. She double-checked the dates of Christine’s student ratings and her performance reviews.

  She was right.

  The woman had been dead before she taught a course at the college.

  Which meant that someone had tampered with the records.

  Addy was onto something. And the something wouldn’t be good if it meant that someone Will trusted enough to have access to the secured database was altering records.

  With her finger on the page down key, she quickly flipped through the pages she’d read and then slowed when she came to the parts of Christine’s employment file that she hadn’t seen.

  A newspaper article written by a local reporter, dated January 2001. Just a few weeks after Christine’s one semester at Montford had ended.

  Dead Sister Saves Lives

  Addy read every word of the story. Two sisters, traveling together. An accident. One dies, the other lives...and the attending physician mixes up their identities.

  She read it again. And then, hands on the keyboard, typed quickly. Furiously searching for more. With her memberships to online sources, she accessed local public records. Legal and criminal records from the county courthouse. Montford databases.

  She looked at marriage licenses. And found adoption papers, too.

  And wondered if Greg Richards knew what she’d just learned. If that was why he had her looking into Will Parsons’s activities. Was it possible the sheriff was using her to find out what a prosecutor might uncover if Will Parsons was brought up on the charges that were alleged in the anonymous letter he’d received?

  Were they both using her? Because they knew there was something to find?

  Feeling sick to her stomach, she stumbled outside, fell into the cheap lounge chair on the tiny patio and sat listening to the tinkling of water in her fountain.

  Just listening. Focusing on the water. Searching for peace.

  Will Parsons was a good man.

  He would not lie to her.

  CHAPTER NINE

  NONNIE WAS IN BED ASLEEP, her chair parked beside the lowered double mattress in her room that allowed her to slide easily from bed to chair without assistance, when Mark got home shortly after eight that evening.

  It felt good to put in a full day of work again. Good to be providing. And he felt guilty as hell that Nonnie was spending so much time alone. She’d put him in an impossible position with this move of hers. He couldn’t not work. His scholarship-allotted living expenses would not cover Nonnie’s disposable undergarments. Or the heat therapy bands that eased her pain. They wouldn’t pay for her vitamin supplement drinks or, God forbid, any emergency that might arise.

  Closing her bedroom door—because she insisted on maintaining her individual privacy as a condition of continuing to live with him—Mark showered, pulled on a fresh pair of jeans and a sleeveless undershirt and helped himself to a beer from the refrigerator. As he sat at the kitchen table, nursing his beer, he looked through the small window over the sink into the equally small backyard, and wondered how the boys back home were doing. Pretty much every member of his crew had texted him at least once in the week and a half he’d been gone.

  He missed them.

  Missed knowing everyone in town and everyone in town knowing him. He missed the acre of land that greeted him when he looked out his back window at home.

  There was movement out there. Slight, but there, just the same. Giving his eyes a chance to adjust to the darkness outside, Mark watched the far corner of his neighbor’s patio.

  And was rewarded by the sight of her. Sitting in the dark all alone.

  Was she reliving the horror from the night before? What had happened to trigger her nightmare? Especially after so many years?

  Figuring he should probably just leave her be, he turned away from the window.

  She was new to town, too. Didn’t know anyone, either. Was she over there missing the town she’d come from? The people? The familiar?

  Was she dreading the homework that awaited her, too?

  He opened the refrigerator. Grabbed a second beer.

  And headed outside.

  * * *

  “WANT A BEER?”

  Addy stared up at the tall figure standing next to her in the darkness, knowing that she shouldn’t be glad he was there. He was wearing a white undershirt—like the macho, working-class hunks depicted in the old beer and cigarette commercials. “No, thanks,” she said. If he’d offered her a glass of wine she might not have been able to refuse.

  She’d heard him come in. Had been imagining him with Nonnie, asking about her day. Thinking about the things that his grandmother wasn’t telling him.

  He had a right to know.

  And telling him wasn’t Addy’s place.

  Nonnie was allowed to have her secrets.

  “How was your day?” He took a sip from his beer, still holding the other in his hand.

  “Good.” Mention the nightmare, she implored him. I’ll assure you that
it was an aberration. I’ll be calm. Unaffected. I’ll make it seem like a nonentity and we will never have need to speak of it again.

  “Nonnie said she’d called out to you. Invited you in.”

  “I visited with her a bit.”

  “How was she?”

  “Tired, but she seemed fine.”

  “I dropped by for a late lunch,” he said. She already knew that. She’d heard him come home. “She seemed tired to me, too. Hopefully she’s still just recovering from the trip out here.”

  His expression, or what she could make of it in the shadows, appeared pinched. Worried.

  “Is her disease progressive?”

  “Not so much as it comes and goes. At times it completely incapacitates her and then she goes into a form of remission and can get along fairly well.”

  “Can she walk at all?”

  “Not anymore. Her bones are too brittle and the arthritis in her knees makes walking too dangerous.”

  Mark hopped the low wall that separated their patios and returned with a chair that matched hers. He set it down a foot away from her and opened his second beer.

  She focused on the fountain. Searching for equilibrium in an unrecognizable world. “She told me that people dropped in on her all the time back home.”

  His gaze swung sharply toward her. “She’s homesick?”

  “She didn’t say that.”

  “Oh.” He turned back toward the fountain and was silent.

  “Other than when I’m in class, I’m here, Mark. Pretty well all day and all night, too. I’d be happy to sit with her, look in on her. Anything you need.”

  It was the right thing to do. For the Grans of the world. The women who took on other people’s children and loved them as their own.

  And for the children of the world who were the sole caretakers of their elderly loved ones.

  “I appreciate the offer,” he said. Addy had thought about the older woman on and off all afternoon. Nonnie was an example of the type of woman Addy longed to be. Independent. Strong. Capable. No matter what life threw at her.

  And Nonnie posed no threat to her, unlike her grandson. She had to go in.

  Still, the night, the darkness, held her trapped in its shadows.

  With a man she was drawn to as much as she needed to get away from.

  Staring at her fountain, she watched the jeweled droplets of water chase one another over the rocks.

  “It’s like they’re playing hide-and-seek.”

  “The fountain’s important to you.” There was a personal note in his voice.

  “I like fountains.” She watched the water, needing to be transported to a place she felt safe.

  “I know.”

  His tone was far too personal.

  “People give away things about themselves by the priorities they choose. Before you moved into the house, you set up your new fountain.”

  He was trespassing....

  “You’re perceptive.”

  He was quiet, and she waited, on edge.

  “Why fountains?”

  He wasn’t going to ask about the nightmare. And she couldn’t stay.

  “Hmm?” She sat forward in her chair, picked up her glass and sought a suitable way to say good-night that wouldn’t offend him.

  “What is it about fountains that speaks to you?”

  “The water.” Maybe it was all the lies she was being forced to tell that compelled her to speak the truth.

  Or maybe the water was too sacred to lie about.

  “The water?”

  “I find it peaceful.” She didn’t want him to think she was crazy. Coping devices were enlightened. Not crazy.

  “A lot of people find fountains peaceful,” he said, watching her now. “But it’s not their first priority when they move into a new home. Sheets on a bed, food in the fridge, those kinds of things usually come first.”

  She was going to tell him.

  As she sat there, her heart beating a mile a minute, Addy realized she wanted to tell him. Because he was a stranger passing in the night? Because he knew her as Adele, not Adrianna?

  Because he’d rescued his best friend from a fire?

  Not because she felt connected to him on any personal level. Please, not that.

  She was outside herself. Analyzing, as always. Watching from afar. And there was something different. She was feeling...

  “After the fire...I had panic attacks.” Counseling hadn’t helped. Sleeping in the same bed as Gran hadn’t helped. “The only thing that made them go away was knowing there was water nearby.”

  There, she’d referred to the night before. Gotten it out in the open. They could move on.

  And if Adrianna Keller was crazy, if she had some mental or emotional shortcoming, her secret was still safe. This man only knew Adele Kennedy.

  “Were both of your parents home that night?”

  “Yes.” Yes. That one word held so much hurt.

  “You were screaming last night. Over and over. Were you reliving the fire? Or had you been asleep until they rescued you?”

  “I screamed.”

  “What about the others? Were they asleep?” The words were delivered with a warm, soft tone, sliding over her with nonthreatening concern.

  She was okay. She was Adele. She could give him this. One stranger to another.

  “Mom and Ely were screaming, too.”

  “Ely?”

  “Elijah. My brother. His screams stopped first.”

  “How old was he?”

  “Seven.” It sounded so young. He’d been her big brother, not a little kid.

  “I thought if we all kept screaming, we’d be safe. I had to do my part. And then Ely stopped.”

  “Who else was screaming?”

  “Mom. She was screaming for Ely and me.” Over and over. Just their names. Ellllyyyy! Aaaadddyy! Over and over. She could hear her so clearly, even now. “I kept answering.” Ely had, too. Until he hadn’t.

  “Then she stopped.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No.” She had felt compelled to keep calling out, to keep playing the strange game even though the air was so hot and hurt so badly.

  “What about your father?”

  “He didn’t scream.”

  “But he was there.”

  She looked away from the fountain into the darkness of the walled-in yard. “Yes.”

  Everything went black inside of her mind. Not blank. Just black. She couldn’t picture her father. She could just see the blackness.

  Charred black. Burned black.

  “Adele?”

  Turning her head, Addy focused and saw Mark. Even in shadows, his face was gorgeous—his features strong and chiseled in all the right places, his gray-blue eyes filled with emotion.

  He’d called her Adele.

  She was safe.

  Adele knew things that Addy had never told anyone. Adele could talk for Addy, and then roll up her imaginary life and disappear as Addy moved back home to the life she’d built for herself in Colorado.

  Mark would understand. He’d pulled his friend out of the fire. He was studying fire safety and engineering.

  “Mom and Dad were high school sweethearts,” she told him. “Dad had always wanted to be a firefighter and started training while he was still in high school. He became an EMT, too. They got married and Mom stayed home to raise us kids.”

  Such a happy story. A happy family i
n a happy home. That’s how she remembered it.

  Mostly.

  Mark’s silence, his lack of judgment or commentary, left her back in time.

  “She was a great cook. It seemed like she was always in the kitchen, whipping up new things for us to taste.” She’d been five. How could her memories be so vivid?

  She’d prayed for them to fade. And prayed that they never would.

  “At first she just cooked for us and then, when people started asking, she cooked for parties and events around town. Eventually she entered some competitions and sent in her recipes to places and somehow was offered a cookbook deal in conjunction with a television show.” She remembered it from the perspective of a five-year-old. Her mother’s beautiful smile. The way they’d run together at the zoo that last day, Mom laughing and telling her and Ely about all the fun they were going to have.

  A warm hand covered hers on the arm of the chair. She turned her hand over and he wove his fingers together with hers.

  “My father couldn’t take her sudden fame. He felt threatened by it.” She’d never been told as much, but she’d figured it out. As an adult, she understood. “I remember him yelling at Mom, telling her that if she took the deal, she’d be ruining the perfect life they’d built together.” She hadn’t understood at the time, but she did now.

  It wasn’t her mother who’d ruined things.

  “He was jealous,” she said. That last day, picture day, she’d gone to her parents’ room, excited to have her mother see how she’d done her hair all by herself, and had overheard urgent whispering between her parents. Fearful, she’d stayed hidden outside the door so she could hear if she or Ely were in trouble. Her father had been telling her mother that if she picked fame and fortune over him, that was her choice, but he wouldn’t let her take his children, too. She hadn’t understood what that meant then.

  “He wanted the stay-at-home wife he’d married. A normal, ordinary family to come home to.” Some of that she’d heard. Some she’d later surmised. That photo shoot that had been one of the highlights of her short life had been her father’s undoing.