“Fuck you” was her only answer.
He grinned. “You want to hear the bad news yet, Molly?”
And here Molly thought he'd forgotten it. “Sure. I've just about had all the fun I'm gonna have tonight. Tell me the bad news.”
“Well, we found out about Lewis.”
“Uh-huh.”
“We just don't know where he is.”
Â
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The city hall press conference wasn't the worst part of the news that night. The worst part was the film somebody had shot of Molly giving Kathy a leg over Sam's backyard fence to escape the press. The inference was made, of course, that she had something to hide. The result was that the effort to talk to her redoubled, and her house was summarily surrounded. Not only that, but as she sat in her back room trying to ignore the assault outside, her phone rang.
“We have touchdown!” came the voice of one of the death investigators on her answering machine. Molly sank into her couch like a drowning victim. “The tabloids have hit town.”
“ ⦠in an effort to find out why Ms. Burke should be receiving such gruesome gifts,” Donna Kirkland continued with barely concealed delight on the TV, “the police have been looking into her background. Sources close to the investigation admit that Ms. Burke has a history of problems stemming back as far as her service as a nurse in Vietnam.”
Molly took one look at the avid delight in the newsanchor's eyes and knew there was no way of ever getting her boxes closed again and tucked back into the attic. Not only would all her friends know her past, but the entire country, courtesy of Donna and her source, whom Molly would some day cheerfully throttle.
Added to that, it was just about time for Molly to make another run out into the gauntlet to get Patrick from work. God, what she'd give for one good night's sleep and a name nobody knew.
“Next up,” Donna was saying with that bright plastic smile of hers, “the final end to a congressional standoff on the budget.”
The phone rang, just as it had been doing all evening. Molly let the
answering machine handle itâuntil she heard her brother Martin's voice yelling at her from seven thousand miles away.
“Where have you been?” Molly demanded without preamble when she grabbed the phone.
“In China,” he reminded her acerbicly. “I think I told you that. What the hell's going on there, Molly? We saw on CNN tonight some mention of a ⦠serial killer or something?”
Great. Not only the country. The world. No wonder Molly hated technology. “That's why I've been trying to get in touch with you, Martin. It's just not safe for Patrick to be here anymore. I'm being stormed by the press, I'm stuck in a pretty bizarre investigation, and I've had death threats.”
“You'd better not have let anything happen to that house, Molly,” her brother warned.
Molly was damn near struck dumb. Sliding onto the family room couch, she laid her head back and closed her eyes. She couldn't face all that Picasso rage and anguish while she dealt with her brother.
“Thanks for the filial concern, Martin,” she snapped. “Your next question, of course, was going to be, âMy God, Molly, is Patrick safe?'”
That got her a couple seconds of static. “Well, of course it was. But you would have said something right away ⦔
“Nice try. I've been calling you because I have to send him home, Martin. I know I promised to keep him, but he just shouldn't be in the middle of this. He's not safe here. Maybe when things settle downâ”
“Uh, I'm afraid that's not possible.”
Molly stopped. Opened her eyes. Communed with Picasso's furious woman. “Why?”
“Well, with Patrick out of town, and the mission here dragging on, well, we just figured ⦔
And Molly thought her brother couldn't have upset her more. “My God,” she breathed. “You had Sean come to China.”
“I'm really sorry, Molly,” he apologized at light speed. “If we'd known, but well, you know, with the boys gone, we gave Juanita time off. The house is closed till New Year's.”
Molly closed her eyes again, mostly to help suppress the rage. She
counted. She struggled past the wash of red that stained the edges of her vision. She prayed. She came close to sobbing with the struggle against the obscenities that choked her.
She'd been battling with a serial killer. She'd been matching wits with a bomber. She'd been balancing her job, her nephew, and her sanity on a pinhead. And it was her brother who was going to shove her over the edge.
“I know you'll understand, Molly,” he was saying. “You know how easily stressed Mary Ellen can be, and well, this last year with Patrick, she's been ⦠well, it's just better this way. At least until we can get him to military school.”
Molly hit critical mass.
“You self-serving, sanctimonious, sack of shit,” she breathed. “You piece of toxic waste crapped into a diplomatic pouch! Youâ”
She got no further, because her brother simply hung up on her. Like that was going to settle things. “You worthless excuse for a human being,” she whispered, finally washing her hands of him. Of all of them. Of all of them except for Patrick, to whom she'd have to explain this.
“I see the parents have run true to form,” he said in that atonal voice of his.
Molly jumped off the couch as if she'd been hit by a live wire. Lounging in the doorway, Patrick didn't so much as smile.
“Patrick! I was just coming to get you from work.”
She got a shrug. “No need. I was on the track team. High hurdles are my specialties.” He must have seen Molly's unconscious reaction, because his expression grew cold. “Sam asked me not to talk to them. So far, that's been a more compelling motive than embarrassing the parents. I do, though, see the undeniable attraction of communicating with the old man via CNN.” Lifting himself away from the wall, he shook his head. “So the brilliant Sean is in China, is he? Good. Sean loathes Chinese food.”
Molly took a step forward. “Patrickâ”
It was all there in her voice, all that fury and betrayal and anxiety that swirled like acid.
Patrick was having none of it. “It's actually not a problem,” he said indifferently, hands shoved in khaki pockets. “I'd much rather have the
house to myself for a few weeks. Juanita's cooking sucks, and Sean is forever waving his achievements in my face.”
“You can't go back there.”
“I can't stay here,” he retorted, neatly throwing her challenge back at her. He looked so much older than he should. Looked less betrayed than Molly felt. Maybe he'd played this scene more times than Molly had, which said something else about her esteemed brother and his twitchy wife.
“What I was hoping,” Molly said, sucking in a calming breath, “was that you'd stay with Sam. I can't be around all the time to protect him from those assholes out on the lawn, not to mention whatever the hell this bomb business is, and he won't go anywhere to be safe. Would you?” she asked. “For Sam?”
Patrick's expression never changed. His shoulders never eased as he made a show of thinking about it. “For Sam? Yeah. For him I guess I would.”
Molly nodded. She felt suddenly so distant from him, so useless, as if in the last few days while she'd been tap dancing to keep ahead of disaster, she'd missed some vital chance to keep him from slipping away from her. So they stood before each other, cold and silent, and only one of them caring.
“Would you like something to eat?” she asked.
His smile was even older. “Always the answer, huh?”
She shrugged. “Better than drugs. Cheaper, anyway.” Molly had taken a couple of steps toward him when she recognized a very familiar scent. “Patrick, your restaurant doesn't serve mesquite grill. What is that?”
He stepped back a bit, as if afraid she'd reach out to him. “Nothing. We had a small fire tonight in the restaurant ⦔
“Oh, my God,” Molly breathed, distressed all over again. “That's where the fire truck was going. Are you okay? Was anybody hurt?”
She did reach out. He flinched away as if she were contaminated. “No. It was more smoke and excitement than anything. I won't be going into work for a few days, though.”
Pulling her head back, Molly turned for the kitchen. “Well, no kidding ⦔
Fire. Arson. Criminal records.
Molly faltered to a sick halt, Rhett's voice all but sounding in her ear. It looked as if she was going to have to talk to Patrick about Lewis sooner than she'd thought.
“Patrick,” she said, turning carefully. “You struck up a friendship with Lewis down at the morgue.”
Patrick went pretty quiet. “Who objects? You or the great protector of the rice tariffs?”
Close up she could see that his eyebrows had been singed a little. His face was flushed and his hands were sooty. Molly didn't want to think how close it could have been. She didn't even want to think of how hard she was trying to protect him from the unimaginable, when it could well be the capricious that hurt him.
“No,” she disagreed, “it's not that I object. I mean ⦠well, you were being nice and all. It's just that ⦠well, you haven't talked to him lately, have you?”
“No. Why? He in trouble?”
Well, there was a question for the sages. “I don't know. I just know that the police need to talk to him, and they can't find him. It seems he put a fake address on his employment form.”
And damn if Patrick didn't smile. “That's because he was homeless when he got the job. He told me. He didn't want people to know he was living in a box.”
Molly all but held her breath. “Do you know where he lives now?”
For a minute she really wasn't sure whether he'd help. He seemed suddenly so closed off, his beautiful hazel eyes cold and wary. Molly wanted to appeal to his altruistic side, but after what he'd heard this evening, she wasn't sure he'd respond to it. There was only so much kicking a kid could take without wanting to kick back, just to know he could.
“I think he lives down in a flat on Michigan somewhere.”
Michigan. No more than four blocks east of Grand. Great. Molly nodded and walked on into the kitchen. She'd have to call the police, but she didn't have to do it right now. Right now she had to remind her nephew that there was at least one person who gave a damn about him. She just wished she knew how to do it without screwing up. Molly had the unnerving feeling she was running out of chances.
“Oh, one other thing with Sam,” she said, stopping again. “He really depends on you, ya know. Could you make sure Little Allen doesn't get into that house again?”
“Sam finally figured out the little
pisher
's been stealing his food money?”
Molly almost grinned at the unconscious Yiddish. “Yeah. It's killing him. He likes the little
pisher
.”
Finally, briefly, she got a smile and felt a little better.
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Rarely had Molly been more glad to be scheduled to work. It was the only thing that prevented her from spending her day down in the records morgue of St. Roch's Hospital. The search warrant for the records search came through at noon, by which time Rhett had let Molly know he was at her disposal whenever she could meet him at the hospital, where they had to hand-search charts too old to be in the computer. Molly, meanwhile, spent a near-quiet morning getting Patrick settled into Sam's and doing her best to ignore the tide of press that threatened to trample her beautiful lawn.
When she heard ex-husband-number-two, Peter Perkins, on her answering machine, she headed down to Jay's International Foods on South Grand in search of a crack in the closed walls of the Vietnamese community. Hooking a basket over her arm, she strolled down aisles packed with lemongrass, a hundred kinds of rice, a dozen kinds of soy sauce, couscous, and falafel, and she listened to the lilt of a dozen different languages. When she heard Vietnamese, she spoke up, diffident and polite, to ask questions. She spent over two hours there, talking about food and health and animals and, occasionally, children. She learned nothing, she bought fifty dollars' worth of spices she'd never use, and then stopped for Chinese takeout.
From there she headed straight into work where she could hide away in Sasha's office until her shift started.
“Well, if it isn't the notorious âNecro-nurse,'” Sasha greeted her.
“Please tell me you didn't make that up,” Molly begged, never taking her eyes off the screen of Sasha's computer as her supervisor divested herself of coat and scarf.
“How dare you? It was in the
Star
. Front page. I'm collecting all the tabs for your scrapbook. You don't have to thank me.”