by Nancy Martin
“Don’t mind us,” Emma said, balancing two heavy boxes under her chin. “We’re dismantling the laboratory the twins set up in your basement. You don’t want to know what we found down there.”
“It’s important to encourage creativity in children,” Libby added. “But not homicidal tendencies.”
In the box Libby held, I caught a glimpse of Gray’s Anatomy on top of a microscope and a jumble of plastic bags filled with dark, gelatinous substances.
“I’ve canceled their forensics-camp registration,” Libby said. “I’m thinking a few weeks of Bible school is a much better idea.”
Emma’s phone rang in her hip pocket.
Libby and I waited for her to answer the call.
But she shook her head. “I’m out of business.”
“Exactly what kind of business?” Libby asked frostily.
“Poker games,” our little sister said. “I was organizing poker games for—well, for Mick. Setting up games, get it? For a cut of the pot, of course.”
“Illegal gambling!” Libby cried. “It’s a wonder you didn’t get arrested!”
“What, like selling stale cake to rubes on eBay isn’t a criminal act? How much money did you make with that scam?”
“Enough to pay for Bible school.”
Emma lugged the boxes down the porch steps and didn’t look back. Her new dog Toby, the shy Brittany spaniel, wagged his stumpy little tail at me, but he didn’t hesitate to follow Emma out to her truck. If he could help it, Toby never let Emma out of his sight.
As Libby lingered on the steps, I said, “Why don’t the two of you stay for dinner? I have some tuna to grill. We could make a nice salad.”
Libby hefted the box on her hip. “I don’t think so.” She withdrew a small plastic vial from the pocket of her velour jacket. She placed it in my hands. She was blushing.
“What’s this?”
“I know it was wrong,” she said. “I should have asked permission first, but you know that nice insurance inspector man who came around while the carpenters rebuilt your porch? Well, let’s just say his performance was—okay, it needed a little help. And I thought of these MaxiMan pills going to waste—you know, the ones Potty gave you. Why should they sit on your windowsill losing their potency when some deserving couple could put them to good use? So I—well, I should have asked before I borrowed them, but I wanted to slip them into his chocolate pudding last night when he—”
“Libby, you gave MaxiMan to the insurance adjuster? Without his knowing about it?”
Libby looked affronted. “Nora, I’m not the kind of woman who goes around injuring a man’s self-esteem! Why should I hurt his feelings? Shake his confidence? Why not just let a man enjoy the first good sensual experience he’s had in years?”
“Libby!”
“Well, it worked!” she cried. “He was wonderful! He enjoyed himself! What’s the harm?”
“You can’t go around drugging people against their will! Promise me you won’t ever do such a thing again!”
“Too late,” she replied.
“What?”
Hastily, my sister rushed down the steps, carrying the box full of her sons’ grisly experiments. Over her shoulder, she said, “It was an accident! I thought they were his pain pills.”
“Whose pain pills?”
“That Man of Yours! He’s upstairs packing his clothes. He was looking for some Advil for his leg, because they took off his cast this morning. So I grabbed the first blue pills I saw and—look, it was an honest mistake, Nora.”
“Libby! Michael has moved out! We’re not together anymore! We agreed—”
“Maybe he hasn’t taken them yet. Bye!”
“Dammit, Lib, if you—”
“Just let me warn you,” she called, already halfway to her minivan. “The proper dose is one tablet, but I handed him two. Maybe you’d better try to stop him before he swallows them.”
“Libby!”
She scrambled into the minivan, and my sisters disappeared down the driveway. Over Toby’s barking, I thought I could hear both of them laughing their heads off.
I could have waited for him downstairs. But there was still a chance he hadn’t ingested Libby’s drug of choice, so I went up the stairs two at a time to save Michael a long weekend of discomfort.
“Hey,” he said, in the act of tossing a shirt onto the bed from the closet doorway.
“How was the museum?”
“Strange,” I said.
“Feel good to be back at work?”
“Yes,” I admitted. “Very good, in fact.”
Having him in my bedroom after such a long absence felt very strange. The size of him startled me all over again. But seeing him alive and mobile lifted my heart. His Pescara cousin Benny, the sniper, had failed to kill him, and most of the other cousins were in jail—for the moment at least. Michael must have felt his family situation was under control if he had come unprotected to Blackbird Farm again.
“I’m glad you’re back on the job.” He returned to the closet and said through the open door, “It’s time you stopped spending every waking minute looking after Julie Huckabee. It’ll be good for you to work again.”
“You’re not the only person with that message today.” I sat on the edge of the bed.
He heard my tone and stepped out of the closet with a laundry basket in hand. He had come in jeans and a comfortable old flannel shirt, and I noticed he had a pair of boots on, not the walking cast he’d been wearing the last few weeks. With relief, I saw that he wasn’t limping much, either.
If not for the body armor worn beneath his biking leathers, he’d have been dead. As it was, he’d suffered broken ribs, which were just now healing. Although he’d lost weight, Michael was looking more like himself at last. The color in his face told me he’d been fishing lately. He needed a haircut, too, a strangely comforting sign that his life was getting back to normal.
I said, “Penny Devine came to the museum.”
His eyes widened.
I told him everything, and he listened without moving from the doorway.
“Damn,” he said at last. “So she wasn’t dead after all.”
“No,” I said. “She was more alive than I thought she’d be. It’s very strange, though. She had no remorse about her son Kell’s death. But she expressed interest in Julie. I guess that’s something.”
“Nora.”
“I know, I know.” I closed my eyes and rubbed my face with both hands. “I need to stop worrying about other people and take better care of myself.”
“But that’s not who you are,” Michael said.
I put my hands in my lap. “No, it isn’t.”
Michael stayed in the doorway, carefully keeping an agreed-upon amount of distance between us.
He leaned one shoulder against the doorjamb. “I took care of those jars the twins left in the refrigerator.”
“Oh, thank you! I’ve been afraid to open the door.”
“Oh, and your sister brought a bunch of drawings from Lucy for you. I left them on the kitchen table. You’re going to need an art gallery if she keeps it up.”
I said, “We can’t be together, Michael. You have to realize that I’ll always help a friend, even if it hurts me.”
He gave up trying to make idle conversation. “I know.”
“And I—I still don’t understand who you are. Or what the people around you are capable of doing. Aldo killing the man who grabbed me—it’s just more than I can cope with.”
“I know that, too. But I miss you.”
“I miss you, too.”
“That’s good to hear.” He smiled a little. “Because I’m not going to stop loving you.”
Maybe he was not as beautifully handsome as Ignacio or Raphael Braga or even Crewe Dearborne. But his heart was there in the open between us, and his body had all the qualities to make most women forget a few character flaws. Here in the bedroom where we’d made love and said things I’d never tell another soul, I felt my he
art skip. Because I couldn’t stop loving him, either.
But his moral code was so very different from my own.
He read my thoughts and said, “Listen, I left the telescope on the dining room table. It’s still in pieces. I’ll need a couple of boxes to get it out of here. Do you mind if it stays a little longer?”
“Not at all. Some of your puzzle books are in the nightstand, though.”
He found the Sudoku books and dropped them into the laundry basket, followed by the shirt and the boots he’d left under the bed. When all his things were gathered, he took the basket in one arm and kissed the top of my head. “See you around, Nora,” he said.
And he left.
I heard him go down the staircase.
I kicked off my shoes, got up from the bed and slipped off my dress. I hung it in the closet and came out into the bedroom to look for my jeans.
I had made mistakes in the past. No doubt I was going to make a lot more. The trouble came with making choices that felt so right or so good while they were in progress. I had helped Carolina ten years ago when she wanted a baby, and it still felt like the right choice. I no longer thought of that child as something of mine. Maybe my hormones had calmed down enough to let me understand the truth and see the situation from Raphael’s point of view. I’d been his worst nightmare, yes. The woman who wanted to steal his child away from her home. I saw that now.
Someday, if I was lucky, I’d have my own family. To raise and keep safe and love.
Back at the doorway, Michael said, “Look, I know I’ve done some things that are wrong in your world.”
I turned around.
He said, “But they’re right in mine.”
“Michael—”
“It’s going to take more than that telescope for me to see things differently, Nora. Hell, I can’t even get the damn thing put together by myself. I need your help.”
Even though I knew he wasn’t talking about the pieces on my dining room table, I said, “I don’t know anything about telescopes.”
He almost smiled. “I don’t want to be apart. I’ll move out, if that’s what will make you happy. But if you can forgive me first, maybe we can work on everything else.”
“Michael,” I said, “did you take the pills Libby gave you?”
He looked surprised. “Yeah. Why do you ask?”
