by James, Sandy
He wasn’t ready to admit he could feel anything for any woman except Miranda. It seemed...disloyal. No, he wasn’t attracted to Sarah Reid. It just wasn’t possible.
Turning back to the task at hand, Josh focused on his information. “Do you want me to tell you about your arrest record?”
Sarah arched an eyebrow. “By all means. Tell me what you’ve learned.”
“Several DWIs. Disorderly conduct. Drunk in public. You must’ve had a good lawyer. No time in jail for any of those, but lots and lots of community service.” Josh flipped to another page. “I imagine you got pretty sick of picking up trash along the highway.”
Her eyes narrowed and bored holes straight through him. “I did all they asked of me, and I haven’t been in trouble for years.”
“Yeah, it seems that your rap sheet stopped when you turned twenty-seven. That’s when Charlie Baxter died. Can we talk about what happened to him?”
Her reaction wasn’t at all what he expected as Sarah put her trembling fingertips to her lips and looked away. Were those tears in her eyes?
“Don’t you want to give me your side of the story?” he coaxed. “Maybe tell me what happened to him? Why you gave his family such a big chunk of the trust fund?” What was wrong with him? Why was he trying to let her off the hook?
“No.”
She didn’t even look indignant, nor did she offer any type of defense like he’d expected. What was her game? Where was the denial? Where was the begging to explain away things that had no excuse? He’d pegged her to claim to be a reformed sinner who now saw the light. It was, after all, a tried-but-true scam. But Sarah wasn’t playing ball.
Josh took another tack. “What made you start healing people?”
Sarah pulled her cardigan a little tighter, tucked her feet up under her long skirt, and sipped some more of her drink. She tilted her head, as if thinking over her response. “I didn’t want to be a healer.”
Her sad expression actually got to him. For a few moments, Josh could truly feel the hurt in her. Was that guilt, he wondered, weighing on her conscience? “If you don’t want to heal people, then why—”
“I had no choice,” she interrupted, following her words with a weighty sigh.
“Everyone has choices.”
“I didn’t.” Her voice sounded strained, matching the tensing of her face.
“If you won’t answer my questions, I’ll have to go with what I’ve got.” Josh wondered why his typical prod seemed so cruel when thrown at this fragile looking woman. What was it about her that made him want to curb his characteristic no-holds-barred-to-get-a story nature? “I really wanted to hear your side.”
She carefully put the cup on a small table. Ever so subtlety, her chin rose and her spine straightened. “And what exactly do you think you’ve got, Mr. Miller?”
“What I have, Miss Reid, is a thirty-year old woman who has a history of minor violations of the law, who was closely linked to a man’s death, and who now claims to be able to heal sick people. She won’t tell anyone where this power came from, and she’s been known to take money from people to heal them.”
A pained look crossed her features before she gave him a curt nod he took as confirmation of what he’d just said.
“That’s it? You don’t have anything to add?”
“What is there to say?” she replied with an exaggerated shrug of her thin shoulders. “You’ve obviously checked your facts. I don’t deny any of it.” She folded her hands in her lap. If it weren’t for the slight trembling of her fingers, he would think she felt serene.
“Don’t you want to tell me—?”
She shook her head before he even finished. “I don’t want to see a story about me, Mr. Miller. What I do doesn’t make good reading.”
“Oh, but I beg to differ, Miss Reid,” Josh asserted. “You’re not like the other healers who are out there. You don’t travel from town to town with your big tent and your choir and your roadies, stealing from people who really don’t have much to steal.” He let his gaze wander the rundown sunroom. “You don’t live in obvious wealth. You’re unique.”
“I’m unique because I’m real. Despite what you think, I’m not a thief.”
Josh smiled despite himself. “She can talk.” His teasing brought another hesitant smile from her that he really wished didn’t affect him. But it did.
How had he allowed that to happen? How could he possibly care about another woman, especially this woman? “I’ve tried to talk to a couple of people you’ve helped. They sing your praises. What really surprised me was that none of them have had a recurrence of their illnesses.”
“And you think that’s just the placebo effect, don’t you?” Sarah asked with an arched eyebrow.
He nodded before he could catch himself, wishing he had been more guarded in his response. The woman had disarmed him with an appealing smile and those haunted eyes. “Fine. Yes, I do. I think the human mind can be very powerful. Give a man who’s been injured a saline injection, but tell him it’s morphine, and he’ll feel pain relief.”
“What do you want from me?”
He couldn’t help himself. The reporter in Josh went in for the kill. “I want to know why you charge people thousands of dollars to help them.”
Those hazel eyes flew wide, her response for the first time unguarded. “Thousands of...” She began to breathe rapidly, her nostrils flaring slightly with each breath. A flush spread from her face down her neck. Her mouth opened then suddenly closed with a click of her teeth. All of those reactions, Josh had expected. What he hadn’t anticipated was the single tear that slid down her cheek.
“Write whatever the hell you want, Mr. Miller. I don’t care.” She jumped to her feet and practically ran out of the sunroom.
Josh just sat there for a moment, for once not entirely sure of what to do. He should leave, should simply go home and write a story about a woman who took money from people, large amounts of money, and then pretended to heal them. He could tell his readers she looked convincing enough that none of her former clients would say a bad word against her, and he could explain that her particular cure rate was very high. Perfect, actually. Then he could walk away feeling as if he’d done something good to help sick, gullible people.
Hannah appeared in the doorway. “I think you should leave now. Sarah’s very upset.”
She should be. She ripped people off. So why did he suddenly feel like a cad? “Thank you for your time,” Josh said as he made his way out of the old house.
Chirping off the alarm to his rental car, he sat down in the driver’s seat and glanced over his notes. Everything about this story should have been easy. She’d been in trouble with the law. She had a criminal record. She took money from people and gave them nothing in return. The woman had “shyster” written all over her life. But the bloodhound part of his personality screamed at him that there was more to this story than what he’d already learned. Much more.
The time had come to dig a little deeper.
Chapter 3
“Pop? Didn’t you say you wanted to see anything from her medical history? I think I found something you might be interested in,” Libby shouted from the study.
Josh turned the burner off, put the hamburgers aside, and went to see what his industrious daughter had discovered. He found her staring at the computer screen, as she did far too often, and reading. Wondering if she knew she moved her lips as she read, he said, “I thought you were working on your SAT prep, Miss Elizabeth.”
“You usually call me that when you’re pissed.”
“I am.”
Libby scoffed a laugh and gave her head a quick shake. “No, you’re not. Besides, I found what you were looking for.” She kept reading as she spoke then she attacked the keyboard again.
“I appreciate you doing some of my work for me, but—”
She waved the thought away with a quick flick of her wrist. “I love this stuff. You know I want to be a reporter too. Makes me feel like a voyeur.”
“Voyeur?” He had to chuckle at her. “Well, at least it seems like you’ve worked on the vocabulary part of the test prep.”
“My vocab’s better than yours.” She snorted a small laugh. “And you’re the professional writer.”
“I beg to differ, my erstwhile progeny. My extensive mastery of the linguistics and semantics of the English language rivals that of even the most pontificating professors of the hallowed sanctuaries of the Ivy League.”
Libby turned to stare at him before she rolled her pretty blue eyes. “Yeah? Well, who’s the one taking the SAT at thirteen, Mr. Smarty Pants?”
“Touché. You’re too smart for your own good. I suppose I should thank your mother for that. Intelligence is supposed to be inherited from the maternal side.”
“You’re partly right. It’s definitely feminine. Men tend to lack it,” she commented with a self-satisfied smirk that showed her braces.
Josh took a good, long look at her as she let her fingers fly across the keyboard, pulling up some more information. Her short, dark hair was spiked in just about every direction, and she’d dressed entirely in black again. Black shirt, black jeans, black socks. At least she’d foregone the heavy eyeliner today. He refrained from scolding her about her choice to embrace Goth, remembering at thirteen he’d been eccentric enough that he wore nothing but football jerseys. Usually the Miami Dolphins. If he remembered right, being thirteen was, indeed, a trauma. Libby would obviously live to tell the tale, and he would have tons of pictures to use to embarrass when she became old enough to make him a grandfather.
Thirteen. How in the hell had that happened? She was becoming a young lady right before his eyes. Miranda wasn’t here. Libby didn’t have a mother to guide her through the trials and tribulations of adolescence. And his daughter’s adolescence wasn’t ordinary by any stretch of the imagination. Of course, neither was her childhood.
Quickly realizing the extraordinary intelligence of their daughter, Miranda had insisted on home-schooling her. Libby had earned the equivalent of a high school diploma the year her mother had died. Now, at thirteen—thirteen!—she was contemplating universities, several of which had begun to court her after her PSAT scores made her a National Merit Scholar. And with all that intelligence, the silly girl didn’t want to be a doctor or a lawyer or a nuclear physicist. She wanted to be a reporter like her old man.
God help her.
Josh just wanted her to text message her friends and beg to have her ears pierced for a third time like normal girls her age. After losing her mother, the girl deserved a little normal in her life.
He stood behind her, put his hand on her shoulder, and looked at what she had unearthed. “You’re not doing anything illegal, are you?”
His daughter had the audacity to laugh at him. “Probably immoral, but not illegal.” She stopped, placed her index finger against her cheek, and pretended to be lost in thought. “But then again, I can hack through anything without leaving a single keystroke behind.”
Josh put his fingers in his ears. “I so didn’t hear that. La la la la...” Dropping his hands back to his sides, he leveled a stern parental stare at Libby. “Swear to me you’re not breaking any laws.”
“I swear. You taught me well.” His daughter giggled, got out of the chair, and spun it so the seat faced him. “Here. Sit down and look at this.”
Josh settled himself in the desk chair, scooted it up to the computer, and began to read about Sarah Reid as his daughter rested her elbows on his shoulders and propped her chin against her hands.
Libby had found a short write-up by a doctor from Indianapolis who offered some details into a patient of the same name who had been standing on the roof of the Indianapolis International Airport parking garage on what had appeared to be a clear day when she was unexpectedly...
“Oh, my God. She got struck by lightning? How long ago?”
“Almost three years. She had one big, bad entrance wound on her left hand,” Libby said, pointing to the web between her left thumb and index finger, “and several Lichtenbergs.”
“Want to say that in English?”
Libby sighed as she always did when she thought he was being obtuse. He hated that his own thirteen-year-old was sometimes smarter than he was. He hated it even more that she knew she was smarter.
“They’re burns that fan out in a pattern that looks kinda like a fern. In Sarah’s case, they went up her forearm. Didn’t you notice them when you met her?”
Josh shook his head. “She had on a long-sleeved sweater.”
How awful it must have been for Sarah. The write-up didn’t go into much detail about the incident itself, focusing more on the physical findings of the exam, and even those were sketchy. “Munchkin?”
“Hmm?”
“You did good.”
“I know,” she flippantly replied before heading toward the kitchen. “I’ll finish dinner because I doubt you’re moving for a while.”
Josh spent the next three hours searching for everything he could find about what happened to a person when she was struck by lightning.
* * * *
“I told you not to take money from these people,” Sarah shouted before realizing how much it would make her head hurt. “Now he’ll write that story and the crazies will come out of the woodwork again. I won’t be able to help people who need me.” She let her head sag as she rubbed small circles on her temples, wishing this whole nightmare would just disappear. All of it. Freakin’ ability to heal at the top of the list.
No. If she couldn’t heal, she couldn’t even the score.
That reporter was going to destroy her. Why wouldn’t he? This would make a hell of a story. He might have had kind eyes, but he was still a reporter, and all reporters were alike. Writing half-truths and not caring about how they hurt people in the process.
Once the story ran, the people who really needed her, people who would die without her, wouldn’t be able to get past the zealots who would surround her house all hours of the day and night. Zealots who supported her as well as those who hated her. They would make signs and sing songs and block the entrances to her home. They would turn her life into living hell. Again.
“We needed the money,” Hannah said, sounding hurt, probably because Sarah had yelled at her. Her sister could be such a child. “And it was only a few people.”
“I don’t care if it was only one. I will not be paid to heal people.” Why couldn’t Hannah understand?
Hannah set her fists against her hips. “They offered. And we needed the money. Doug... Well, Doug went and—”
“I should’ve known. He did it again, didn’t he? What was it this time? Home Shopping Network? Lottery tickets?”
“He lost a bunch when he went to the riverboat.”
Sarah’s head snapped up. “He went gambling? Again? Damn it, Hannah.”
Hannah nodded, looking pitiful. Sarah figured she would look pitiful too if she had been the unfortunate one to marry Doug Fanning.
What a ridiculous mess. Sarah knew she was reaping what she’d sown. Focusing on the people who needed her, she had allowed Hannah and Doug to deal with the day-to-day running of the household. They paid the bills and handled the money because, since the day she had started to heal people, Sarah had simply been too tired to do much of anything else. “Damn it,” she muttered again before tossing a glare at her sister. “What in the hell was he thinking?”
“You don’t have to cuss at me,” Hannah said. “God wouldn’t like it. And Doug didn’t mean to lose so much. Besides, we’re fine now.”
“How much did you take from them?”
“Just a little... Just what people offered,” she said before lowering her voice and adding, “or we suggested.” Then she stared intently at her shoes.
“Damn it!”
“I told you, you don’t have to cuss at me.”
Sarah shook her head and walked out of the kitchen to sit in one of the wicker chairs in the sunroom, hoping the evening had a l
ittle bit of light left. She desperately needed to feel some warmth on her skin. Gathering her feet up under her skirt, she closed her eyes to think.
At the rate she was going, she knew she would collapse. Soon. Each healing she performed stole a little more of her strength away.
But how could she turn away people who would die? Even if it meant putting herself at the same risk?
She’d been given this gift for a reason, a good reason. Healing was penance. Healing was making up for wasting most of her life getting buzzed and getting into mischief. Healing was supposed to save her soul, even if the cost became her life.
If Sarah took money for curing sick people, the sacrifice wouldn’t count in bringing the cosmic balance back to her world.
And she would never finish paying the price for killing Charlie Baxter.
* * * *
“Josh, you’re not listening to me,” Cheryl said as she placed the glasses of iced tea on the table. “She saved my life.”
Josh picked a tumbler up, took a long swig of the cool drink, and tried to think of another way to get at Cheryl. The woman was unbending in her love for Sarah, even more rigid in her support. He set the glass back on the table, obviously missing the coaster because Cheryl pushed it at him with a nasty glare. He quickly remedied the problem.
“I know you think Sarah—”
She didn’t even let him finish the thought. “You’re just like Ross. You don’t believe.”
Believe? In what? In God? After what happened to Miranda, God and I aren’t speaking. Pushing his own emotional baggage aside, he focused on his story. “You really think you’re cured?”
The enthusiastic nod caused a few strands of hair to fall across her forehead. Cheryl combed them back into place with her fingers.
“But there isn’t a cure for lupus,” Josh argued. “It goes into remission, but—”
“I know my illness, Josh. I know it a hell of a lot better than you do. I was diagnosed ten years ago. I had weeks, even months that went by without symptoms. But this time is different. The antibodies are gone,” she said emphatically, obviously believing that statement should have been enough to convince him.
