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A few minutes later, the downtown section of Waverly came into view, with its three-layer-cake of a courthouse, complete with a frilly little cupola that held a clock tower. He made the block around the town center and continued along the main road lined with recently rebuilt mom-and-pop style shops, past his future sister-in-law Kari’s bakery and Mr. Hiram Sullivan’s jewelry store. The pocket park’s interactive fountain was off, drained of water to protect it against the unusual deep freeze they’d had the past few nights, and, save for a few brave pansies that had weathered the cold, the space looked flat and empty against the crisp January blue sky.
Andrew turned his truck out of the more picturesque downtown area to some newer government buildings that had been built in the 1970s. They were squat and ugly and, to Andrew, like most folks in Waverly, a crime against architecture. He scanned the parking lot in front of the tallest one, a three-story brown brick that still managed to look short.
Yep, Dutch’s motorcycle was parked in his usual slot. How a guy as smart as Dutch could ride a motorcycle to work on a day as cold as this boggled the mind. Andrew slammed the truck door and hurried into the warmth of the building.
Dutch’s assistant waved him on in, a testament more to the fact that she knew they were buddies outside the office than to him being available. The two of them had played travel ball together for years in the youth and high school leagues, before Dutch had parlayed his considerable talent at batting into a baseball scholarship.
“Hey, Monroe!” Dutch flashed their old sign for a fastball as Andrew came through his office door. It had been Dutch, a catcher a couple of years older than him, who’d made Andrew a better pitcher than he should have been. “What’s hanging? You here about the county-city softball tourney? I’m in, man. I am definitely ready for ball.”
“With Daniel on the team, I’ll probably be warming the bench. He’s still got some life in that arm of his.”
“That old dog?” Dutch grinned. “You can take him. I’ve caught for both of you, and sure, he was good when he was young, but he’s nearly forty now.”
Thirty-eight or not, Andrew’s older brother, Daniel, was probably better at pitching than Andrew would ever be. After all, Daniel had given up a good shot at the major leagues to come back and follow in their dad’s footsteps when their dad, the fire chief, was killed in an arson fire years before. Now Daniel was the chief.
Andrew didn’t waste time arguing baseball. He dropped down into the stackable office chair that was de rigueur for most of the county offices. “I had something else I wanted to know. Have you heard about any lawsuits against the department? Or the county?”
Dutch’s easy smile faded. He leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his neck. “What kind of lawsuits?”
This was the part of Dutch that Andrew didn’t know as well, the lawyer side. Already Andrew could see his friend running the angles. Something about law school had turned Dutch into a more calculating guy than Andrew had known as a kid. Or maybe that cynicism had always been there and law school had brought it out.
“Um, well, you remember that big fire in October? The one where the girl got burned?”
“Yeah. The one where you went all cowboy and went back in without being checked out. Believe you me, I reamed out Daniel and the captain on the scene that day. Could have been a nightmare worker’s-comp claim if you’d gotten hurt. But you’re not suing, are you? Nah, didn’t think so. Lemme see, the house was a total loss and the landlord was livid beyond belief. He’s not suing us, either. Not that I know of.”
“What about the girl? Katelyn Blair?”
“I don’t know of any lawsuit that’s come down the pike from that. No records have been requested, and they’d better have let me know if any ambulance chasers have been sniffing around. Why?” Dutch sat up and drilled him with the same intensity he’d had during their state championship game, when Andrew had a runner on second and had allowed a walk to first.
If Dutch hadn’t heard of any lawsuit... But Mallory had said, “You know about the lawsuit, don’t you?”
Andrew started outlining the situation, realizing when he had to backtrack several times to get to the real beginning that it was more complicated than he had admitted to himself. Dutch held up a hand.
“Whoa. Let me call Daniel.” Dutch hit a speed dial on his phone and propped himself up on the desk, his elbow planted firmly on a pile of manila folders.
Andrew couldn’t forestall a groan. He hated having his big brother dragged into this, because Daniel would go all boss man on him, not just boss man in the fire-chief sense but boss man as self-appointed head of the family.
Sure enough, Daniel was glowering when he came through the door a few minutes later. He moved a box of files from another chair in the office and plopped the chair down alongside Andrew’s.
“Now, what’s the five-alarm emergency that I had to zip over here for?” he asked Andrew. “Especially when you could have told me whatever it was at supper last night.”
“Hey, it wasn’t me— Dutch thought—”
“Dutch knew he needed to get the facts,” Dutch interrupted. “And I wanted to hear Daniel’s input. So. Proceed.” Their friend leaned back, his expression as intent and calculating as before.
Andrew began again. The false starts had given him some rehearsal and he managed to get the story told in a more efficient, concise way. He held his breath as he waited for Daniel’s reaction.
“You don’t know of any lawsuit?” Daniel asked Dutch. “Nothing’s been filed?”
Dutch shook his head. “Zip. I take it you didn’t know about Andrew’s big idea here to have a potential plaintiff do therapy at your sister’s place?”
“Hey!” Andrew sat forward. “I had no idea that sister of hers was planning on suing! I was trying to help Katelyn. What? Am I supposed to say, ‘Uh, no, you might sue us so you can’t even think about having Maegan do your therapy?’ That doesn’t make a dab of sense.”
“He’s got a point,” Daniel said. “I mean, it’s a cock-eyed situation now, but at the time, he was— Well, heck, I wouldn’t have thought anything of it if he had mentioned it to me. Maegan’s excellent at what she does, and I would have felt it unethical to recommend someone else when they would have been my second choice. Besides. Maybe this Mallory Blair won’t sue.”
Dutch held up a finger. “Ah, but that’s why I’m the county’s in-house counsel, because unlike so many, I operate from the standpoint of defensive pessimism. She has mentioned the possibility of a lawsuit as if it were a done deal—ergo, there is a lawsuit. And that means complications. Maegan could be called to testify against the county—against your department, Daniel, and against you and Eric in particular, Andrew. My legal recommendation? If I were you, I’d suggest that this might prove to be a conflict of interest and you should help her find another rehab facility.”
Andrew swore inwardly at the thought that he’d dragged Maegan in the middle of this mess with Mallory Blair. If the woman were the litigious sort, she’d as likely sue Happy Acres as she would the county.
The idea of cutting Katelyn loose rankled him. And it wasn’t only Katelyn’s enthusiastic response this morning to seeing Happy Acres for the first time. No, he thought back to the night he’d first met Mallory, to the single tear that had trickled down her cheek when she’d confessed that she had no family.
The two girls were alone. Mallory had lost her dad, just like Andrew had, but she hadn’t had a family like he’d been blessed with to help her through it. Mallory Blair couldn’t be all bad—a tad obsessed with money and appearance, maybe, but Katelyn had told him that her big sister had raised her, and Katelyn had turned out okay, right?
Katelyn...who wouldn’t have been so badly injured if he’d only called it in a half minute sooner.
He pushed the thought away. “No. I’m not going to ask Maegan to do that. Katelyn doesn’t deserve that—she deserves the best possible treatment, and Daniel’s right— she’ll get it here. If she’s got any shot at all at walking again, it’s going to be with Maegan. And you know, Daniel’s right about another thing. I’ll bet all Mallory wants is for her sister to be happy and healthy, and once she sees what all Maegan can do, the idea of a lawsuit will fade.”
Dutch rolled his eyes. “Such Pollyanna attitudes. Whistle right by that churchyard, why don’t you? Daniel? You want to set your little brother straight?”
Daniel scratched his chin and stretched out his long legs. His poker face was much better than Andrew’s had ever been, and for a long moment, Andrew waited for his decision. “I can see your point, Dutch. It will be a mess if she does sue. Plus, you’ve got more experience with these things than either of us. Maybe being a lawyer means you’re like a hammer. Everything you see, well, it’s gotta be a nail.”
Dutch shrugged. “Even a broken watch is right twice a day.”
Daniel cocked an eyebrow. “In that analogy, are you the broken watch or are we?” He didn’t wait for Dutch. “I think we can thread the needle here with a little watchful waiting. You keep your ear to the ground for any signs of a lawsuit, and maybe check out the well-heeled Ms. Blair for any past litigation. And meanwhile, we can let Maegan do what she does best—make patients better. Besides, if it did come to a lawsuit, we did everything by the book that day. We followed protocol, and my guys—even my little squirt of a brother here—were bona fide heroes, and they have the commendations to prove it.” Daniel rose to his feet and clapped a hand on Andrew’s shoulder. “Bottom line is, Mallory Blair wouldn’t have a sister at all if it hadn’t been for Andrew.”
Unexpected pleasure rushed through Andrew at Daniel’s rare compliment. The city had indeed awarded Eric, Chase Jackson and Andrew commendations for bravery following the fire. At the time, it had kind of embarrassed Andrew, and he figured it was mostly because Eric had been hurt, and he and Jackson had only managed to get Katelyn out.
Daniel’s praise? That meant something—something that helped take the sting out of any accusing glare Mallory Blair might shoot his way.
CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_0677fb99-879a-5bad-a608-4aaf5958bdff)
FRANTICALLY MALLORY DUG through yet another box. Nope, no pots and pans, even though it was labeled clearly with the word Kitchen scrawled in her hand. She must have mixed it up with this box of sheets and towels in her hurry to get everything out the door before the landlord charged her another month’s rent.
“I’d help you if I could—” Katelyn grunted with effort as she tried to shove another stack of cartons over to maneuver her wheelchair through the clutter of moving boxes.
At the sound, Mallory stopped and looked up. “Don’t! You’ll knock those over and hurt yourself!”
“Mal...” Katelyn sighed. “Forget it. Let’s order a five-dollar pizza. I saw a take-out place as we drove through town. Just tonight, can we please, please, please not scrimp?”
For a moment, Mallory was so tempted. She, too, had seen the pizza place, and the last tenants had thoughtfully left a fridge magnet with the number on it. There was the phone... One call, and someone would be winging his way over with a hot, cheesy pizza that Mallory didn’t have to lift a finger to get.
Reality came crashing down. “Katelyn... I don’t have five dollars.” The confession humiliated her.
“What? C’mon. We’re not that broke. Are we?” Surprise and disbelief flooded Katelyn’s eyes...and when Mallory didn’t deny it, alarm quickly followed. “Are we?” she insisted.
“Yeah. We are. I’m between jobs, sweetie. I won’t get paid for another two weeks, and I had to use our savings for the first and last months’ deposit.”
“Well...what about your slush fund?”
Mallory couldn’t help but smile. Her “slush fund” was an emergency twenty she had tucked behind her driver’s license. “I used it to pay Kyle for the gas to move us down here.”
“Oh, man, if you used your slush fund, we are broke.”
“Well—we’re not totally broke, but I have to have gas money to get you back and forth to therapy and me to work. If worse comes to worst, I can ride your bike or even walk. It’s only a couple of miles from here to downtown.”
“A couple of miles! That’s an hour’s walk! And not even you could bike in heels. No, Mallory, you’re not going to walk. We’ll... Man. I so did want a pizza.”
“Yeah. I can taste the pepperoni. I have some flour and yeast, and we have that block of mozz. And I scored a couple of cans of tomato paste on sale. I think I’ve still got it—somewhere...” Mallory surveyed the sea of boxes. “We’ll have pizza, Katelyn. Maybe not pepperoni, but we’ll have pizza.”
Katelyn made a sudden choking sound, and Mallory realized she was trying not to cry. Mallory weaved her way back through the boxes and knelt down beside her sister. “What? Are you hurting? I can get your meds.”
Katelyn screwed up her fists and scrubbed at her eyes. “I hate this. I hate it. I can’t even help you look for the blasted tomato paste. This is all my fault. If I hadn’t been so stupid, I wouldn’t have gotten hurt—”
“No. No, honey. It’s not your fault. The house burning down wasn’t your fault. You being left there—that wasn’t your fault, either—” Was it Andrew Monroe’s? Would it make it easier somehow to blame someone for the circumstances of their life?
Yeah. Yeah, it would.
“Can I— Is there any way I can lie down for a while? I’m sorry, Mallory, but I’m so tired...”
Katelyn did look tired. Her earlier energy seemed gone, and now dark circles ringed her lower lids and her pink cheeks had faded back to chalky white, with her freckles standing out in stark contrast. “Sure. The bed’s the one thing we can actually get to.”
Mallory helped her sister to her cramped bedroom, felt her back ache even at Katelyn’s slight weight as she assisted her out of the wheelchair and onto the bed. Katelyn was already drifting off as Mallory pulled the covers up to her chin—over those poor scarred legs and feet.
Mallory felt her own throat close up and she choked back tears as she watched Katelyn settle into sleep. The facility had warned her that Katelyn still had nightmares and that her sleep “wasn’t of good quality,” as the discharge planners had put it. Mallory wasn’t surprised that her sister was tuckered out by seven o’clock.
Rest. And a settled, stable home life, away from medicinal smells and beeping monitors and nurses that said, “This may hurt a little,” when they really meant it would be agony. Yeah, that was what Katelyn needed.
Mallory sighed. She had an apartment to settle and arrange, and a first day on the job tomorrow. Katelyn needed that, too.
By eight, Mallory had discovered that the tomato paste and other canned goods weren’t in any of the boxes labeled Kitchen, and that her usual organizational skills must have taken a leave of absence when she’d been packing up.
Still, she’d made some progress. The pots and pans were found and liberated, the glasses unpacked.
The last one in the box, a big brown iced-tea tumbler, she set carefully down on the dinette table and examined for nicks or cracks. With a sigh of relief, she realized it had come through the move unscathed. It had been her dad’s favorite glass, much to her mom’s despair, as it hadn’t matched anything else in their kitchen.
Neither Mallory nor Katelyn drank anything out of it. It stayed in the cupboard with the other glasses, a reminder of all the times Mallory had toted a tall glass of iced tea out to her dad’s garage workshop.
With a gentle finger, she skimmed the smooth brown surface—it had been some leftover of the 1970s that he’d found for a quarter at a garage sale. Touching it felt as if she was touching him, that he was a breath away, ready to wrap her in his arms for a reassuring bear hug and a promise that things would get better.
The loud, unfamiliar brring of the doorbell startled her out of her reverie. The rental manager? A neighbor?
Mallory wended her way through the maze of cartons to the door. This apartment complex hadn’t appeared too friendly—it was a low-income subsidized complex where people seemed suspicious of newcomers. She’d chosen it in spite of the atmosphere, because it had a stackable washer and dryer, and it was handicap accessible.
Maybe she’d been wrong. Maybe there were neighbors out there who cared enough to introduce themselves.
She looked through the peephole and took a step back.
There, on the tiny stoop, stood Andrew Monroe.
And he was holding a take-out pizza carton.
* * *
ANDREW WAS DEBATING between leaving the pizza on the porch and ringing the doorbell for a third time when finally the door swung open.
The Mallory Blair it revealed looked nothing like the one he’d seen before. Gone was the polished wardrobe, and in its place a faded T-shirt and jeans. Her hair was pulled back in a neat ponytail, save for one strand of auburn silk that had escaped across her cheek. The biggest change was her glasses—the dark rims framed her intense green eyes and made her look like some glamorous scientist in a television commercial.
“Hi,” she got out. The awkwardness was apparent. “I— How did you—”
“Katelyn’s address on her chart. I honestly thought—” he glanced around at the other low brick duplexes. “I thought maybe you’d written down the address wrong. It didn’t seem to fit with...uh, what you’d live in.”
Did her chin jut out a bit? Yeah, it did.
“This was handicap accessible. And it’s just temporary,” she cut him off in a stiff voice.
He shifted the pizza to his other hand. “Well, uh, it occurred to me that maybe, what with moving in and all, you guys could do with a pizza.”
Okay, so he was a rat and he was actually using the pizza as a pretext for spying on her, which was exactly what Dutch had advised against. In fact, the lawyer’s last words that morning had been “Stay away from Mallory Blair. Far, far away, understand? The less you have to do with her, the better.”
Apparently, though, Andrew couldn’t have picked a better thing to bait Mallory with. The way she was regarding that pizza... Man, her mouth was practically watering. She seemed to be of two minds as to whether she should accept his Trojan horse, but one mind was definitely winning.
“Well, come on in, but please excuse the mess. And Katelyn is asleep, if you’ve come to see her.”
Andrew followed her in. “No, no, it was you—” He broke off and pretended to stub his toe on a carton to cover up his nearly blurted-out confession. This spy business was for the birds.
“What? Are you okay?” She had already bent down and appeared ready to whip off his steel-toed work boot to inspect for damage.
“Yeah, but I hope the same goes for whatever’s in the box.”
Mallory glanced at the label, which proclaimed it to be Mallory’s Shoes. “Oh, yeah, it should be fine. Well—if I marked it right, that is. Apparently I labeled more than a few things wrong, but my old landlord was insisting that I move out before the next due date or pay a full month’s rent. I asked if I could pay for a few extra days—”
She broke off as she entered the tiny kitchen, as if she were suddenly aware of what she was saying and to whom. To fill the silence, Andrew supplied, “No dice, huh? Maybe he had other folks wanting to move in?”
Mallory shrugged. “Maybe. I got us out just in time. What’s a few mislabeled boxes, right?”
“The pizza okay on the table?” He went to move a big ugly brown glass, but Mallory leaped to intercept him as if the thing was a priceless antique.
She cradled it against her chest, her cheeks pink with embarrassment. “Uh...it was my dad’s. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to insult you. It’s only... When we had to sell everything...after... Well, there wasn’t much left, which was just as well, because we didn’t have much space. So...that’s my inheritance. My dad’s favorite iced-tea glass.”
Something about the way she held it so protectively moved Andrew. He cleared his throat, looked away. “Crazy, isn’t it? The things we hold on to? For me, it’s my dad’s reading glasses. He’d started needing them right before he died, and, well... I still have them. Sometimes...sometimes I take them out and put them on and try to see the world like he saw it. Silly, huh?”
“No,” she said in a rush, full of energy and force. “No, it’s not. Not when it’s the only thing you’ve got left to hold on to.”
Now her mouth curved into a rueful grin. “I do have something we can actually use to drink out of, so let me put this away. Will ice water be okay?”
Andrew kicked himself for not thinking to bring a liter of cola. “Uh, I wasn’t planning on staying— I just was dropping this—”
“No, I insist. Do, please, have a seat. Uh—but, you’ll have to move that box—”
