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He had almost reached her when something hard smacked Hally right between the shoulder blades at the same time as her legs got tangled up with someone else’s. She lost her footing and her breath simultaneously. She stumbled and fell to her knees, and the sea of humanity closed in around her. She tried to get back on her feet. Couldn’t. Couldn’t get up, couldn’t breathe. Feet stepped on her, bumped her. She screamed.
“Halloran! Halloran McKenzie!”
Hally could hear Mike Parker’s voice, but blackness was closing in. She was being smothered, trampled. Help!
“Oh, God. There you are.” Strong hands hauled Hally to her feet, supported her as she swayed, gasping for air. “Are you all right?”
Hally blinked back the fog clouding her vision. Her ears rang. Mike Parker’s worried face wove in and out in a dizzying pattern. She choked back a wave of nausea and dug her nails into his sleeves. “I’m f-fine…”
“I doubt it,” she saw as much as heard Mike say before he half dragged, half carried her to the edge of the crowd. Like a distant observer she was aware of him wiping dirt off her face and smoothing down her clothes. His ungainly hands were incredibly gentle.
The moment that registered, Hally stepped away from him with a choked, “Thanks.”
Mike’s hands dropped to his sides, closed into fists. “What’re you doing here?” His face was gray. “You could’ve been killed.”
“Yes, well.” Gradually the world slid back into focus and Hally was able to meet Mike’s bleak, searching gaze. She ran a shaky hand through her short crop of curls. She cleared her throat.
“C-Corinne?” she croaked.
If possible, Mike’s face grew grayer still. “All I know is that she’s here. Somewhere…”
“I was afraid of that.”
For just an instant they stared into each other’s eyes and recognized an emotional connectedness that neither would have consciously welcomed or acknowledged. It was gone with the flick of a lash as Hally heard the frantic call of her name.
“Ms. McKenzie! Ms. McKenzie!”
She looked around and spotted another woman in the thick of things. She was waving her hands and bobbing up and down like a cork in the sea some fifteen feet away. Hally recognized her as the parent of one of her former, as well as present students.
“Mrs. Undser!”
“Have you seen Susan?” the woman shouted as the jostling crowd dragged her in a direction away from Hally and Mike.
Hally shook her head, hard. “No. But I’ll keep an eye out for her, okay?”
The woman’s answering nod was distracted. She was fighting against the current of humanity just as Hally had been.
“Look.” Mike’s fingers bit into Hally’s arm and reclaimed her attention. “Over there. Corinne.”
Hally swiveled her head in the direction he pointed. Sure enough, Corinne Parker’s spiky bleached hair surfaced for a moment in the sea of restlessly milling youngsters the police had cordoned off.
“Come on.” Grabbing Hally’s hand, Mike shoved toward the line of patrolmen with aggressive purpose.
Hally used her own free arm and hand to help him clear a path. “They’re herding her into that police van over there!” she yelled, needlessly, since Mike could certainly see what was happening, too.
“Officer.” They had reached the armored human wall around the kids. “Please,” Mike implored the nearest policeman. “I’ve got to get through. That’s my daughter over there. She’s only fourteen, an innocent bystander. I know she didn’t do anything.”
Except steal from me.
“Move along, sir,” the beleaguered lawman said curtly.
“But she didn’t do anything!” Mike repeated with angry exasperation. “If you’ll just let me go and get her…”
“I’m telling you only once more,” the officer bellowed. “Move along. They’re all innocent to hear them tell it.”
The officer glared at Mike, brandishing his nightstick. “Move now. Get”
“Come on, Mike.” Hally tugged on Mike’s arm to end the glaring contest she knew Mike had no chance of winning. The policeman held all the cards.
“Where are they taking the kids?” she asked the patrolman.
“Downtown.”
“Come on.” Hally pulled the fuming and reluctant-tocapitulate Mike forcibly away.
“There’s nothing you can accomplish here,” she told him across her shoulder. “But at least you can be at the other end to bail her out. Where’s your car?”
“Don’t have it,” Mike said grimly.
Hally frowned at him. “Then how…”
“Got a ride from a neighbor.” Mike clenched his teeth, rage consuming him. Damn that stiff-necked policeman. And damn Pam Swigert for getting Corinne into this mess in the first place. He didn’t care that it wasn’t entirely fair to blame the woman, any more than he cared to admit that this stranger his daughter had become would have found a way to get here, no matter what. He needed to blame someone—anyone.
And for the moment he was too overwrought to concede that the only one he should be blaming was himself.
“Where is he?” Hally asked, meaning the neighbor.
“She,” Mike absently corrected, frowning as he looked around. He had only just become aware that Pam had become separated from him somewhere along the line. “I don’t know. She’s a redhead…”
He scanned the crowd, concerned now for his neighbor’s well-being in spite of his anger. What if Pamela had fallen and been trampled, like Halloran McKenzie had nearly been? This was no place for anyone alone, least of all a woman.
“Is that her?” Hally pointed, already moving that way.
Mike followed. “Yes.” Alarm slammed into him. Pam was surrounded by several other women. She was crying. Black rivulets ran down her cheeks. Her always perfectly coiffed hair looked like a swarm of birds had gotten tangled up in it. She was obviously in great distress. “Pamela!”
He surged toward her, Hally in tow. “For God’s sake, what happened?” He let go of Hally to take hold of and support his distraught neighbor instead.
“Some kids beat on her pretty good,” one of the other women said when Pam just wailed and buried her face against Mike’s chest.
“Take me home,” she cried, blindly reaching out with one hand. To Mike’s shock and surprise, Latisha was there to take it. Corinne’s socalled friend.
Rage overcame him once more. “Why aren’t you with Cory?” he shouted at the hapless girl who, he only then noticed, was sobbing and as disheveled as her mother.
“W-we g-got se-separated and…and….”
“Never mind,” Mike said tiredly, his anger gone as abruptly as it had been aroused. It was all such a mess, such total madness. And there was nothing to be gained by yelling and carrying on.
“Halloran…” Guiding Pamela and her daughter out of the melee, he turned to Hally. “Look, I’ve got to drive them home. Could you…I mean, I know it’s an imposition, but could…”
“I go to the police station and find Corinne?” Hally finished for him when he hesitated. And as everything inside her yelled, No, no, no, she heard herself say, “Sure. Though you realize I won’t be able to spring her.”
“I know. I’ll get there myself just as quickly as I can. And, Halloran—” He gripped Hally’s shoulder and stopped her as, with a quick nod, she started to move away to go to her car. “Thanks.”
“Sure,” Hally said, averting her eyes because the weary gratitude in his was making her feel like a phony. The last thing she wanted to do was to go to that police station. She moved away from Mike’s touch, thinking, How do I get myself into these things?
It smelled of dust, sweat and unwashed humanity. People were everywhere. Some clean, some not so. Some drunk. All of them unhappy to be there, even the police officers on duty, it seemed to Mike. Certainly they had long since given up on cordiality or even professional courtesy.
Tempers were short on both sides of the counter.
As promised, Hally was there, waiting for him. She had ascertained that the van carrying the adolescent miscreants had arrived and that the kids were being held in one large cell at the back of the building.
Irate parents were demanding the release of their offspring, Mike included. Harried officers were wrestling with the paperwork that would allow them to let go of their unwanted guests in the back, and thus clear the station of the throng of outraged citizens in the front.
Conversation between Mike and Hally was sparse as they waited for Corinne to be escorted out. At odd moments throughout the drive home with Pam, on the subsequent drive in his own car over to the station, and even during his dealings with the law, Mike would recall that he wasn’t alone in this fight for and with his daughter, and he’d experience a sense of wonder that left him puzzled and discomfited. And not a little scared.
Scared because Halloran McKenzie was the first woman since Becky who’d stirred in him a desire to know her better. A whole lot better.
Which, of course, simply could not be. He had enough on his plate without adding the complications of a romantic fling. If he knew what was good for him, he’d best get things back on a strictly professional footing right away.
“Ms. McKenzie.” Taking a deep breath, he slanted her a strained smile. “I don’t know how to thank you.”
“Then don’t,” Hally said. She was tired and also a bit put off by the waves of reserve now emanating from this brooding man like chilled air from an open refrigerator. She spoke curtly. “I’m heading home, but I expect to see Corinne in my office a half hour before class tomorrow morning.”
“I’ll see to it,” Mike promised, uncomfortably aware that he had affronted her, but in no condition, emotionally, to try to rectify the situation even if he wanted to. Which he didn’t.
The woman was his daughter’s teacher and assigned counselor. It was in the latter capacity that she had rushed to the stadium, looking to help. It had not been him personally she had aided out there, or even here at the station—it was the parent of one of her charges.
As she spoke to him, her face, smudged with dirt and lined with fatigue, was stern. And her tone was cool and professional.
“As we agreed,” she said, “I’d like you to pick Corinne up from school as well as drive her to school for the next several days, just to let her know we’re working in concert and that tabs are being kept. Please understand, however, that my interest can, of necessity, not go beyond her performance at school. I’ve got nine other students to counsel and I’d be a nervous wreck if I got personally involved in their home situations beyond what pertains to their studies. You do see that?”
“Absolutely,” Mike said, telling himself that was exactly what he wanted from her and no more. “Our family problems have nothing to do with you.”
“Well, at least not directly. So—” Hally shoved back her hair and met his eyes “—I’ll say good-night then.”
“G’night.” Mike half raised his hand as she backed away from him toward the exit. “Thanks again.”
Out on the sidewalk Hally congratulated herself on having made her position clear. Having done her good deed for the day, she told herself, she could now get on with her life. Future contact with Mike Parker would be minimal, confined to her office and school hours.
Bone-weary and longing for a bath, she stuck the key in the driver’s side door of her car. Turning it, her gaze slid down and sideways, past the front wheel to the pavement. Only to snap right back to the front tire with a gasp of dismay. It was flat. The darned tire was flat!
What next? Momentarily overcome by what was definitely the last straw, Hally let her forehead drop to the roof of the car.
What have I done to deserve this? she questioned whatever unkind fate had decreed she shouldn’t go home just yet. I’m tired, I’m hungry….
“Ms. McKenzie?”
Hally’s head jerked up. She took a deep breath and slowly turned around. In front of her, looking concerned, stood Mike Parker. And next to him, managing to look both truculent and defiant, stood Corinne.
“What’s the matter?” Mike asked, frowning. “What happened?”
As Hally wordlessly pointed; her gaze remained on her student. “Are you all right, Corinne?”
The girl gave a careless shrug and looked away, lips set in a stubborn line. But something had flickered in her eyes before she had averted them, and now she visibly swallowed.
She’s not as tough as she wants us to believe, Hally thought.
And knew with a kind of sinking feeling that all the rhetoric she had spouted earlier to Mike and herself about not getting personally involved had likely been just that—rhetoric. Looking at the girl, involvement seemed somehow inevitable.
As it usually had been in at least one case, with at least one student, every year for as long as Hally had been teaching.
Maybe it was because she could have used a sympathetic counselor herself when she was young and lost and so terribly at odds with the world. Her mother, dear friend that she since had become, had at the time been too miserable in her crumbling marriage herself to have been much support to her bewildered and unhappy younger daughter.
Whatever, some kids simply struck a chord; kids who needed understanding and support above and beyond the job description. Corinne Parker was one of those kids.
And it had nothing to do with the girl’s father.
To underscore that, Hally replied brusquely to Mike’s offer of help. “You get your child home, Mr. Parker. I’ve changed tires before, thank you very much.”
Ignoring his taken-aback expression, she bid both of the Parkers good-night and went to get the jack, wrench and spare tire out of her trunk.
Only to be elbowed aside, and not very gently. “I’d appreciate it, Ms. McKenzie,” Mike said without making a secret of the fact that it cost him to approach her after her outright rebuff, “if you’d have a word with Cory while I tend to this. She refuses to speak to me.
“And, yes…” He grimly forestalled the protest he was sure Hally was about to make. “I do realize that my request exceeds the boundaries you established, but—”
“I wasn’t going to refuse,” Hally interrupted, not bothering to argue any longer with him about the tire he was wrestling out of the trunk. “If you’ll hand me your keys and point out which car is yours, Corinne and I will go sit in it.”
“It’s the Buick,” Mike said, handing her the keys. “Seems like I owe you thanks all over again.”
“No, you don’t,” Hally said. “I haven’t done anything yet.”
She walked away, but she did hear Mike mutter, “That’s where you’re wrong.”
Not sure what to make of that, she touched the girl’s slumped shoulder, making her jump. “Come on, Corinne. Let’s go sit in your dad’s car.”
“While he fixes your tire?”
“That’s right.”
“I thought you knew how to do that yourself?” the girl muttered sullenly, keeping her eyes on the ground as she shuffled along at Hally’s light prod in the back.
“I do,” Hally said calmly. Sullen lippiness was something she could handle. Most kids resorted to that as their first line of defense. “But I wanted to talk to you.”
“You mean, he wanted you to talk to me,” Corinne sneered with a baleful glance at her father, hunkered down by the front wheel of the VW Bug.
“Yes, he did.” Hally unlocked the door of the latemodel Buick that Mike had indicated was his. It was her policy to be strictly honest with her students. No games, no subterfuge, no secret pact with their parents. And she expected complete honesty from them in return.
“Get in.” Sliding in behind the wheel, she reached over and unlocked the passenger door.
