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“Oh, right. She couldn’t keep him here, she can’t get him back, and she can’t get him to give her any money. What makes you think she can handle anything at all?” The contempt in the young voice bit deep. “Next thing I know, he’ll be kicking my door down.” Kelsey stared at the door with a mixture of fear and despair. And, Mary Rose felt sure, even a bit of hope.
“No, he won’t kick your door down. I’ll give your mom some backup. You stay put.”
By the time she got to the top of the staircase, L.T.’s loud voice filled the house. “I’ll see my kids any damn time I please. Like right now.” He stomped out of the living room with Kate following, but stopped when he saw Mary Rose blocking his way up the stairs. He made a visible effort to recover his temper. “Hey, there, Mary Rose. I didn’t know you were here. That your Porsche outside? Nice car.”
A few times in the past, she’d thought he might be trying to flirt with her, but had refused to believe her sister’s husband would be so dishonorable. Now she believed it. “Hello, L.T. Are you on your way out? Don’t let me keep you.”
L.T.’s hulking frame was as intimidating as his loud voice. At Mary Rose’s words, his face, an older version of his son’s, hardened. “I’m going to see Trace and Kelsey, first.”
“Neither of them wants to talk to you, L.T. Why don’t you let things cool off for a couple of days, then give them a call?”
He looked at Kate, then at Mary Rose again. “You can’t keep me away from my kids. They’re not even hers, for God’s sake.”
Kate gasped. Mary Rose tightened her hands into fists. “You’ve got one minute to get out of here, L.T. Then we’re calling the police.”
“This is my house. I make the payments. You can’t kick me out.”
“Watch me.” Mary Rose turned and started back up the steps, to the phone in the upstairs hallway. L.T. stood his ground on the first floor as she picked up the phone and punched 911.
“I’d like to report an intruder,” she said to the operator. “The address is—”
With a snarled curse, L.T. whipped around and headed toward the front door. He slammed it hard behind him; the pictures on either side of the door frame jumped off their hooks and crashed to the floor.
On shaking knees, Mary Rose walked to the stairs and sat down on the top step. “Well, that was interesting.” She took in a deep, shuddering breath. “What else could possibly go wrong today?”
THE PHONE RANG at eleven-fifteen that night. Mary Rose was sitting up with Kate, watching TV reruns and waiting for the kids to arrive home at eleven-thirty, as expected.
But as Kate listened to the voice on the phone, as her eyes widened and her face paled, Mary Rose knew that the quiet night was about to take a turn for the worse.
“What? What’s wrong?” She got to her feet as Kate fumbled to replace the phone onto its cradle.
For an endless moment, Kate sat motionless, staring straight ahead without saying anything at all. Then she looked at Mary Rose, her eyes blank with shock.
“Kelsey and Trace are at the police station,” she said finally. “They’ve been arrested.”
CHAPTER FOUR
IN ALL HER LIFE, Mary Rose had never been inside the New Skye police station. The newness of the building surprised her, until Kate explained that this office had replaced the sixty-year-old municipal center only five years ago. Television dramas had conditioned her to expect small, dark—even dirty—rooms. But this large, open area was flooded with fluorescent light, painted a clean light gray, and could have been any ordinary business reception area.
Something else Mary Rose hadn’t expected was the crowd of people occupying that bright space. Everywhere she looked, teenagers slumped on the chairs and against the walls. At least one adult flanked each child, and everyone seemed to be avoiding meeting everyone else’s eyes. At a counter running the length of the room, police officers on the inside talked to parents on the outside, with a fairly high level of tension evident in all parties. No one was happy with this situation…whatever it was. Kelsey and Trace were nowhere in sight.
Kate gazed helplessly at the chaos, twisting her hands together. “What are we supposed to do?”
“What did the officer who called say?”
“To check in with the sergeant.”
“Which one is that?”
“The one with the longest line,” a short, tanned man standing near them volunteered. He had a firm grasp on the arm of a sleepy-looking girl about Kelsey’s age. “Hey, Kate. I’m gonna give Les Hamilton hell when I get hold of him. What was he thinking, going off and leaving his kid at home to party? Did you know there wouldn’t be any adults there tonight?”
Kate shook her head. Mary Rose thought back to the conversation as Kelsey and Trace left the house early that evening. Had Kate asked if there would be parents at home? Or had she just assumed? Surely she would be smarter than that…unless she didn’t want to know, didn’t want to face the conflict involved in dealing with all the facts.
She took hold of Kate’s arm. “Let’s go stand in the longest line.”
After thirty minutes of watching parents argue with police and scold adolescents, their turn came to speak with the sergeant. Kate took a deep breath. “I—I’m looking for Kelsey and Trace LaRue.”
The sergeant flipped through papers. “Right. Drunk driving—”
“Driving!”
“Vandalism, consuming alcohol while underage and possession of a counterfeit license.” He glared at Kate. “You got a couple of real delinquents on your hands.”
She gripped her hands together on top of the counter. “What kind of vandalism?”
“Mailboxes. Pulled over half a dozen boxes in the Burning Tree subdivision. Lucky one of the neighbors was awake and called the cops.”
“What are you going to do to them?”
“That’s up to the judge.”
“They’re going to have a trial?”
Glancing up from his papers, the sergeant must have seen how close to the breaking point the woman he was talking to had come. “A hearing,” he said more gently. “In a day or two. All I need right now is for you to sign them out, take them home and keep them there. You are the legal guardian, right?”
“Yes, of course.” She had adopted both Trace and Kelsey soon after her marriage to L.T. Kate put her wavering signature on the lines the sergeant indicated. “They won’t get into any more trouble.”
“Right.” Skepticism weighted the one word. With a nod, he dismissed them, handing the papers off to another officer standing at his back.
In a few minutes the heavy door in the rear of the room swung open. Kelsey stumbled out, dazed and blinking. “Kate? Aunt M?”
Kate took hold of the girl’s shoulders, gazing at her in the unforgiving fluorescent light. “Are you okay?”
Kelsey pushed her hair out of her eyes. “Uh…I guess so…”
“Come on, Kelsey.” Mary Rose took the girl’s limp hand. “We’ll go get the car. You and Trace can meet us in front of the station,” she told Kate, who looked nearly as dazed as her intoxicated daughter did.
Outside, the warm April night was scented with new grass and rain…and a hint of whiskey from Kelsey’s direction. Mary Rose didn’t pause to appreciate the atmosphere. Walking fast, she pulled the girl along behind her as she strode down the sidewalk. She didn’t know about Kate, but she was mad enough to spit.
With the doors shut, she twisted around in the driver’s seat of the Volvo to face her niece in the back. “What the hell are you trying to accomplish? Doesn’t your family have its share of problems already?”
Kelsey drew up her knees and curled into a ball. “I’m gonna be sick.”
“I hope so.” Mary Rose turned to the steering wheel and started the engine. “I hope you’re sick as a dog.”
Trace and Kate walked out of the police station as Mary Rose pulled the Volvo to the curb. Mother and son got into the car without a word. The five-minute drive up The Hill and to the LaRue house passed in total silence.
Once inside, the kids started up the stairs to their rooms. Mary Rose opened her mouth to protest but, thankfully, Kate beat her to it.
“Not so fast. We are going to talk about this. Both of you come into the living room.” Kate’s voice was harder than Mary Rose had ever heard it.
And that steely tone achieved the desired effect. Trace and Kelsey retraced their steps down the stairs, then went to sit side by side on the love seat, facing their stepmother as she stood in front of the fireplace. Mary Rose retreated to the kitchen to start a pot of coffee. Against her inclinations, she closed the door to the dining room to give them privacy, so the voices—mostly Kate’s, but sometimes the kids’ as well—came to her as wordless mumbles.
More than half an hour passed before footsteps thumped on the staircase once again, announcing that the kids had gone upstairs. A moment later, Kate struggled past the heavy dining-room door and wilted into a chair at the kitchen table.
Mary Rose put a mug of sweet, milky coffee in front of her sister. “Was it very bad?”
“Very.” Kate hid her face in her hands. “I ought to be stern and strong…but they’re so terribly hurt already. How can I punish them when they’re in such pain?”
That question didn’t have an answer. “Did they have reasons? Excuses?”
Straightening her shoulders, Kate dropped her hands to curl her long, slender fingers around the mug. “Something to the effect that Trace’s friends dared him to knock down the mailboxes and Kelsey didn’t think she should let the boys take a car since none of them has a license.”
“And she does?”
“Her learner’s permit.”
“What about the drinking?”
“Kelsey swears that she only had a couple of beers. She didn’t realize how even that would affect her, because she’d never tried it before.”
Damn. “Kate, that’s not true.”
“What do you mean?”
“When I saw her Thursday at the soccer game, Kelsey had been drinking.”
“At school?” Her eyes widened in horror. “How do you know?”
“I could smell whiskey when she hugged me.”
“Whiskey. And you didn’t tell me?”
“I was hoping I was wrong.”
“Oh, dear God.” Kate put down her mug and stared into it blankly. “What am I going to do?”
Mary Rose put a hand on the soft, brown hair. “Katie, honey, I’m not sure. But we’ll figure out something.”
After a couple of minutes, Kate sighed and straightened up. “The reality is that they’re begging for their father to notice what’s going on. To come back home and take care of them. And all that will happen is that he’ll yell at them—and at me—without changing the situation in the least.”
“Would you take him back…if he asked?”
Kate squeezed her eyes shut. “I think I would have to.” Tears crept out from underneath her lashes. “I don’t know what to pray for anymore. Whether to pray that L.T. comes home, for Trace’s and Kelsey’s sakes. Or…or to pray that he stays gone. For mine.”
Mary Rose leaned over to put her arms around her sister. And she wondered whether there was even one man on the entire planet worth the suffering he inevitably caused.
SUNDAY DINNER was a command performance for the Mitchell family. Pete and his brothers were expected to appear in time for the 11:00 a.m. service at Third Baptist Church and then to show up at the front door of the house they’d grown up in not more than thirty minutes after the closing hymn. Fortunately, their mother’s way with oven-fried chicken and angel biscuits made the effort more than worthwhile.
“I took delivery on some engine parts this week shipped by your company.” Pete handed the mashed potatoes to his older brother, a driver for one of the national courier services. “The box was beat up all to pieces. What’s with you guys these days? Playing dropkick with the merchandise in your free time?”
Rick plopped a mound of potatoes next to the chicken on his plate. “What free time? I’m working overtime every night just to get the stuff out there. Talk to the guys at the airport. They’re the ones who mangle the shipments. They put in their scheduled hours, watching the clock instead of their work, then head on home.”
“So few people understand the meaning of responsibility these days.” Denise Mitchell got up to refill her sons’ iced tea glasses. “If the work can’t be done in the time they’re required to be at the job, they just don’t finish. The younger teachers are especially guilty. That bell rings at three o’clock, they’re walking out the door, without even taking papers home to grade.”
Still shaking her head, she went back to her seat at the head of the table. “And the way some parents send their children to school is shameful. I had a boy in just yesterday running a temperature of one hundred and two. He said he’d been sick all night but his mama made him come to school anyway.”
Pete grinned. “Did you call her and give her a piece of your mind?”
“I did. But she couldn’t leave her job, she said.” Denise sniffed in disbelief. “That poor little boy lay on a cot in my clinic until after two o’clock when she finally got there. I’m still thinking about calling Child Protective Services. We’ll be lucky if a flu epidemic doesn’t strike the whole school.”
“She might be a single mom.” Pete’s oldest brother, Jerry, sat across the table. “Maybe she couldn’t stay home because she’d lose her job and that’s the only income the family has. Some women have tough choices like that to make.”
Their mother sat up even straighter in her chair. “I had those choices to make, if you’ll remember. After your dad died, I didn’t have anybody helping me raise you three, with money or anything else. Yet I never sent you to school sick.”
Jerry gave her an apologetic smile. “But not every woman is supermom. You’ve got special powers.”
“Sometimes even two parents aren’t enough to keep kids out of trouble,” Rick said. “I heard at church this morning that the cops raided a big party last night, arrested the whole bunch.”
Pete looked up from his plate. “Were they fighting? I swear, if any of the REWARDS kids were involved, I’m gonna take some skin off their hides.”
“Nah, this was the right side of the tracks, up on The Hill.” As opposed to the “wrong side,” Pete understood, where the kids in his rehabilitation program came from. “The beautiful people’s kids were drinking, getting crazy. Some of them went out cruising, got picked up for driving drunk. There were some private mailboxes knocked down, cars vandalized. The cops found grass in the house. Er…marijuana,” he corrected himself with a glance at their mom’s frown.
Jerry shook his head. “Makes you question what the people with all that money have in their heads for brains, that they can’t raise their kids right, keep ’em out of trouble.”
Pete wondered if Kelsey and Trace had been at the party. He could imagine how upset Mary Rose would be if her niece and nephew were arrested. She’d been worried about them yesterday, obviously caring about the trouble they were having with their parents’ divorce. Years ago, he’d been surprised at how real she was, how easy for a guy from the other side of town to tell his dreams to. To live his dreams with.
Not. Maybe if they’d been left alone, if the baby had lived, if they’d had a chance to work on building a marriage…
Regret stabbed him, stronger than anything he’d felt in a long time. Having Mary Rose in town was beginning to look like a recipe for the kind of remembering he really didn’t like to do.
“Earth to Pete.” A booted toe kicked his foot under the table. “Pass the gravy.”
He looked blankly at Jerry. “What?”
“Gravy, man. You deaf?”
Pete reached for the gravy boat. “Nah.”
Dumb, maybe. He thought about Mary Rose in her pink shirt and tight jeans, and sighed silently.
Really, really dumb.
STARING OUT her window on Sunday afternoon, Kelsey watched her father slam the door to his SUV and stride up the front walk. Seeing him two days in a row had to be a recent record.
She’d begged Kate not to call him, but that had been a waste of breath. At least he’d left the Bimbo at home. And that was the only good thing she could say about the afternoon ahead of them all.
The bell didn’t ring, but she heard the front door slam shut. He must’ve walked in without even knocking.
