“Nope.”
“What if they get broken?”
“I won't break them.”
“Not on purpose. What if you fall by accident, and they break?”
He thought that over and pulled off the glasses, holding them out to Connor. “You hold them.”
“Why don't you just bring them back to the house?”
And stay there,
he refrained from adding.
“What if I fall by accident?”
Connor held out his hand. “All right, give them to me.” He dropped them in his shirt pocket.
“Now can I help?” Toby asked for the second time.
It would not, Connor knew, be the last. That was something else he had learned about the kid. He was persistent. Make that downright stubborn. Only Gaby seemed to have the knack of short-circuiting his determination.
“I appreciate the offer, but this is sort of a one-man job.”
“What's a one-man job?”
Evidently he had a lot more to learn about kids. “A job it takes only one man to do,” he explained. Heading off what was certain to come next, he added, “And that man is me.”
“Oh.” Silence. A couple of days ago he would have assumed that put an end to the matter. Now he knew better. He was braced for Toby to regroup and try again.
“Are you really a wolf?” he asked instead.
Connor reached for a rag and wiped away a streak of grease from the boat's fiberglass hull. “A wolf? Who told you that?”
“My mommy. She said that's your nickname.”
“She's right, it is.”
“I don't have a nickname.”
“No?”
“Nope. Just Toby. Can I call you Wolf?”
Connor smiled as he adjusted a wire leading to the starter. “Sure. Why not?”
A minute passed. “Wolf?”
“What is it?”
“Do you have a hero's chest?”
Connor froze, thinking he couldn't have heard that right, at the same time certain he had, and with no idea at all what the hell “a hero's chest” might be.
“Do I have a what?” he asked, turning so he could see Toby as he replied so he would be sure he got it straight this time.
“A hero's chest.”
“What's a hero's chest?” he asked cautiously and against the urging of what passed for his better judgment.
“It's like this.” Before Connor knew what he intended, Toby had lifted the Boston Celtics T-shirt he wore over his bathing suit and exposed his chest from waist to neck.
His skin was pale, his ribs tiny ripples beneath the surface, a pretty ordinary five-year-old's chest except for the three-by-seven-inch patch of wrinkled and raised, bright pink flesh bisecting it.
As scars went, Connor bad seen much worse. Hell, he had much worse. It was the kid's courage that got to him. It was etched on his face as he stood there, exhibiting the single most massive imperfection on his young body to a virtual stranger named Wolf, of all things, a man who had been only curt, if not downright unfriendly to him since they got there. It was that stoic display of courage that sucked the air from Connor's lungs.
“See it?” Toby asked him finally, as if he might have somehow missed the scar that dominated the small chest.
“I see it, Toby.”
He let his T-shirt drop. “That's a hero's chest,” he said proudly.
“Who told you that?”
“My mommy.”
“I see. Did she also tell you that I have a...” The words stuck in his throat. “A hero's chest?”
Toby shook his head. “Nope. I just knew all by myself.”
Connor's gaze narrowed. “How?”
“âCause you don't like to take your shirt off, not even if it gets wet or it's hot and 'cause you don't want to go swimming.” His expression was so earnest Connor found it hard not to flinch from it as he added, “Sometimes I don't want to go swimming, too. Like when there's kids around who make fun of me and laugh.”
“Does that happen a lot? Kids making fun of you because of the scar on your chest?”
“Sometimes,” Toby replied, very matter-of-fact. “Sometimes they just look. Robby Peters wanted to touch it once.”
“Did you let him?”
“For a quarter.”
A smile flickered across Connor's lips. “I guess that makes you feel pretty bad when kids laugh.”
“Sometimes. Not too much anymore, though. Not since Mommy told me about the hero's chest.”
Connor put aside the pliers he was holding and moved to lean against the boat, close to where Toby was standing. “Do you think you could tell me about it?”
“Yes. A hero's chest makes you special, âcause it means you did the job that had to get done and you didn't care who was going to laugh or make fun of you for it. I'm special because I let them fix my heart and didn't even cry. Not a lot, anyway. And Mommy said anyone brave enough to do that is a hero, and I shouldn't listen to anybody who laughs or makes fun of me. 'Cause I have a hero's chest.”
“Your mother is a real smart lady.”
“I know.” Toby moved to lean on the boat beside him, stretching to prop his feet on the same rock as Connor's, folding his arms the way Connor's were folded. “So, do you? Have a hero's chest, I mean?”
“I wouldn't call it...” Connor paused. “That is, I never thought of it quite that way.” Toby studied him in silence, as if still waiting for a straight answer. Connor sighed. “Yeah, I guess you could say I do.”
“Did they have to fix your heart, too?”
“No. My heart was okay. I was burned.”
“In a fire?”
“Sort of. There was an explosion and then there was a fire, and that's how my chest got burned.”
“How did you get away from the fire?”
Connor could feel his muscles tensing, his spine becoming like a bowstring, pulling everything inside him too tight. “I crawled.”
Toby waited.
“You see, the ceiling came crashing down,” he said, not quite believing he was talking about it or why. “It landed so that I was on one side of the mess, near the door, and my friend was on the other side of it, trapped. I tried to get to him, to help him, but every time I moved, it just kept coming and coming, right down on top of us, until finally I couldn't see him anymore.”
It was something he'd never told anyone about that day, the truth. Not the special federal investigators or the state cops or the reporters who badgered him for exclusive accounts of what had happened. Especially not the reporters. He'd known how they would crank it up to sell papers, calling him a hero for trying to save Joel when all that mattered was that he had failed.
“My daddy was in a 'splosion, too,” Toby said and Connor's heart stopped beating for a second. “He died.”
“I know he did, Toby.”
“Was my daddy your friend? The one you tried to help?”
There was a long silence while Connor struggled to make the muscles in his throat work the way he wanted them to. Fortunately silence didn't seem to make Toby uneasy the way it did some folks.
“Yeah,” he said at last. “Your daddy was my friend, Toby.”
Connor kept his eyes on the water and didn't see it coming, so he was startled at the unfamiliar feel of a child's soft, small hand slipping inside of his.
“If you want to go swimming,” Toby told him, “I'll go with you.”
An unspoken message burned brightly in his eyes.
I won't let you be alone,
it seemed to say.
I won't laugh at you.
It broke Connor's heart and put it back together again in the few seconds it took him to find his voice. The kid could teach him a lot about guts and about facing up to your fears. Hell, thought Connor, he just did.
“You know, all of a sudden I do feel like a swim.” Grinning, he yanked Toby away from the boat. “Let's do it, partner.”
Chapter 12
F
rom where she sat on the deck, Gaby watched in disbelief as Connor and Toby walked hand in hand toward the lake. Joel's son and his best friend.
It was a sight she had never thought she'd see. At first because she had no desire to have Toby spend time with Connor. Then, during these past few days, because Connor himself seemed to be going out of his way to keep a safe distance between the two of them.
She had been sitting there sketching while Toby played with his dinosaurs in the sand near the bottom of the deck steps. She had recently taken on a project that was going to give her an opportunity to restore a damaged stained-glass window and also create a new fanlight to be installed above it. The. new window had to have the same feel as the old, and though she'd been toying with design possibilities for several weeks, she had yet to put anything on paper. This bizarre vacation seemed like the perfect time to get started.
She'd looked up from her sketching a while ago and had seen Toby wandering down toward the dock where Connor spent nearly every waking minute working on that damn boat. An avoidance technique, she was certain. She almost went running after him, but then decided to finish her sketch first.
It wouldn't kill Connor to pay a little attention to Toby, who was so obviously in awe of him. It might even be good for him. Perhaps it would also help influence him to change his mind about taking a chance on them. Heaven knew, she had no idea how to make that happen.
The next time she glanced up, the two of them were leaning against the boat, side by side. She grinned at the way Toby had mimicked Connor's stance. He even had the casual slant of the shoulders right. Oh, yeah, Connor definitely had himself a one-man fan club. Certain that by now Toby must be driving him crazy with questions, she started to go to his rescue. That's when she saw Toby reach out and take Connor's hand. She winced, waiting for Connor to brush him off. To her amazement, however, Connor let him. A minute later they started walking together toward the water, hand in hand.
“Well, will wonders never cease?” Gaby murmured out loud, feeling as if she was witnessing a minor miracle.
She settled back in her chair, holding her sketch pad as a decoy as she continued to observe them. She was half-afraid that if Connor looked up and saw her watching, the moment would be lost.
They stopped on the hard-packed sand at the water's edge and faced each other. Gaby caught her bottom lip between her teeth as she saw Connor unbuttoning his shirt, talking to Toby the whole time. He kicked off his sneakers, unzipped his jeans and dropped them to reveal his bathing suit underneath. The jeans were kicked aside, too. Then together the two. of them pulled off their shirts, and Toby once more stuck out his hand and Connor reached and took it.
Her eyes filled and her lungs ached as the breath she'd been holding escaped in a giant rush of relief. She had been worried, she realized, aware as she was of all the subtle complications the action she'd witnessed held for both the man she loved and her son. Aware of all the ways they could each be hurt. Now, along with relief came a special kind of joy. Much greater than anything she could feel on her own behalf, it washed through her, giving her the sense that in just those few short moments the world had been washed clean. Her world, at least, the world she shared with Toby and longed to share with Connor, as well.
Her gaze followed their movements as they headed for deeper water. Deeper than where she would have allowed Toby to venture. She resisted the urge to call to them that they had gone out far enough. She trusted Connor with Toby, trusted him to look after her child as if he were his own. To her astonishment, she realized that she already trusted him around Toby even more than she had Adam. It was hard to define the difference. What she felt with Connor was the kind of trust that comes from someplace deep in the heart, the kind that can't be forced or coerced or faked. If she'd had any doubts that what she felt for him was real or that it was love, they were gone now.
She watched as they engaged in a wild splashing contest, something Toby loved because he didn't get to do it at the club pool where Adam was a member. He splashed hard for a little kid, and Gaby, his usual opponent, always let him win. Connor, she noted, did not. Another guy thing, she decided. Toby still ended up laughing, a sound so sweet and welcome it made her laugh, too, with sheer happiness.
After the splashing they got down to business, with Connor demonstrating to Toby how to put his face underwater while he swam, something he refused to even attempt with her coaching him. Naturally he didn't refuse Connor. In an amazingly short time he had mastered the feat and evidently felt comfortable enough to allow Connor to swing him in the air and toss him.
Gaby sprang from her chair before he hit the water and was leaning over the railing before he came up for air. Be careful. The warning was always at the tip of her tongue, instinctive and necessary in her opinion because of all Toby had been through. Be careful, she would warn whenever he rode his bike or played ball or wanted to go to his friend's house. Be careful of falling and getting out of breath and... of the wind in your face. She smiled ruefully and let the warning go unspoken. Just please be careful, she prayed.
The sound of a phone ringing reached her as she crossed the deck to her chair. She paused and listened. The commonplace sound struck her as decidedly out of place there, as startling as the nightly chorus of owls would be back home. She knew that Connor had brought along a high-powered police cellular phone that he used to check in several times a day, but this was the first it had rung to signal an incoming call.
She spun toward the lake to shout to Connor, then changed her mind. They were having too much fun to disturb. Instead, she ran inside and up the stairs toward Connor's room. If the call was urgent, she would get him. If not, she'd take a message.
The phone was in a case on the table by his bed. She grabbed the receiver. “Hello?” Static. She pulled up the antenna. “Hello?”
A pause. Then a deep voice asked, “Who is this, please?”
“This is Gabrielle Flanders.”
“Mrs. Flanders, State Police Captain Marino here. Where's Wolf?”
“He's...” She glanced out the window to look at Connor, where he was once again working on Toby's swimming technique, then turned away. “He can't come to the phone right now. He told me to take a message for him.”
Captain Marino seemed to hesitate. “All right,” he said finally, “since this involves you I might as well fill you in on what's happening. The officer we've had working on the computer finished early this morning. Your late husband's secretary helped. Seems she used to type some nonfirm-related material for him on a fairly regular basis, but she didn't come forward at first out of loyalty. She didn't want anything to taint his memory.”
Gaby smiled affectionately. Good old Lynn, she thought, still looking out for Joel even now.
“How was she able to help?” she asked.
“She was familiar with the documents as they originally existed. Once she realized no one was checking into anything improper your husband might have done, she spoke up and offered to help piece together whatever we came up with.”
“What did you come up with?” Gaby asked, anxiously winding the phone cord around her finger.
“Enough to provide motive for the explosion that killed your husband.”
“Are you saying it wasn't someone trying to get back at Connor, the way we first thought? That it had to do with the books Joel kept for the restaurant? That Adam was involved
?
”
Marino was silent for a few seconds even after she finished firing questions at him.
“Listen, Mrs. Flanders,” he said finally, “I understand that you and Adam Ressler have plans to get married?”
“Not any longer,” she replied. “My plans have changed.”
“Yeah, that's what Wolf told me, too. All right, here's the thing. Wolf's hunch was right on the money. Ressler is using the Black Wolf to launder money for a bigâI mean big and uglyâdrug cartel out of some hole-in-the-wall country south of the border... I'm talking south of the Colombian border.”
“Drugs,” she whispered, sinking to sit on the edge of the bed as her knees turned to jelly. “I can't believe it.”
Marino snorted on the other end of the line. “You will when you see the pile of facts and figures we're putting together here... most of it thanks to your late husband. He'd evidently been tracking this situation and documenting everything for quite a while before he made a move to confront Ressler about it and...well, you know the rest.”
“Yes. I know.”
She was still struggling to come to terms with everything that Adam's involvement in this meant, the betrayal and the lies to Joel and to her. He was actually going to marry her, she thought, feeling a wave of nausea she had to press her knuckles to her lips to squelch. All his kindness and concern over the past two years was suddenly thrown into a new light. Of course he'd hung around her. He had good reason to cover his tracks by appearing to be the loyal friend. He probably also needed to secure his control of the Black Wolf against any future threats of exposure, and marrying her was the surest way to do that. A small cry of anguish escaped her.
“Mrs. Flanders, are you all right?” Marino asked.
She nodded, then realized he couldn't see her. “Yes,” she said. “I'm fine. Just a little bit...shaken up.”
“Understandable,” he said gruffly. “You just sit yourself down and take it easy. We're going to get these guys, Mrs. Flanders, you can count on it.”
“These guys.” She shuddered. “You mean Adam isn't the only... of course he isn't,” she said before she'd even finished the question, never mind waiting for an answer. “There have to be others.”
“There are. And we've got a good line on who those others are. I'll save the details for Wolf. Tell him to call me as soon as possible. Tell him we'll be bringing Ressler in this afternoon for questioning. Something tells me he won't be a hard nut to crack. Wolf might want to be here to see it.”
“I'll tell him right away.”
“Besides, I want you all back here, just to be on the safe side.”
Her heart thudded in her chest. “You don't thinkâ”
“Mrs. Flanders,” he cut in, “I always think the worst. It's my job. I'll just feel better with you and your son back home instead of out there in the middle of nowhere. We can post a guard outside your place if we think it necessary.”
“No,” she said quickly. “I don't want my son to know about all this, at least not yet.”
“Trust me, Mrs. Flanders. Discreet is my middle name. Tell Wolf to call. No, just tell him to get his butt back here. Better yet, tell him I'm going to see who I can shake loose to go up there and fetch you and your boy. That will speed things up by letting Wolf come straight here to headquarters.”
“I'll tell him,” she promised again.
“Good.”
He hung up.
Gaby sat on the bed with the receiver gripped to her chest until it began emitting a high-pitched sound. She lowered the antenna, leaned forward and dumped it back into the case.
With her palms pressed together, she brought her hands up and held them in front of her face, wrestling with the aftershocks of the truth Marino had just dumped on her.
Outside, Toby squealed with delight.
Gaby's hands fell to her sides. Toby. She stood. She had to tell Connor what was going on. She had to get to Toby. She hurried to the door, reaching it just as someone rounded it from the hallway outside.
She gave a sharp cry of surprise, then went weak.
“Adam.”
“Hello, Gabrielle.”
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Outside, Connor paused in the act of tossing Toby over his shoulder one more time. The kid was tireless.
“Did you hear that?” he asked.
“What?” Toby countered.
“A noise, like a shout. I thought it came from the house.” He listened for a moment and heard nothing. Gaby had been sitting on the deck just a minute ago. She must have gone inside for something, he told himself. If she wasn't back in a while, he'd get out and check on her.
“I guess it was nothing,” he told Toby, lifting him higher. “Or maybe just an owl.”
“Why do owls hoot?”
Connor pretended not to hear.
“One, two,” he counted, swinging Toby carefully. “Ready, set, three.”
He let him go, and Toby gave his usual squeal of pleasure as he hit the water. Connor figured it would take him a few seconds to come up, then about thirty more to catch his breath and shake the water from his eyes. That meant he had less than a minute to come up with an answer to why owls hoot.
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“Adam,” Gaby said again, her dry mouth making it hard to breathe, much less speak. “How did...what are you doing here?”