Molly took in the classic black Irish good looks decked out in about a
thousand dollars' worth of slate-gray Armani and sighed. She knew she'd reached her nadir twenty minutes ago. And yet, she kept sliding.
Frank Patterson was one of the most handsome men she'd ever seen. Tyrone Power with better cheekbones. Mel Gibson, only taller. She'd met him eighteen months earlier over a deposition, and had been tormented by him ever since. And even before he told her why he'd shown up on her porch at two in the morning, he made her want to laugh and swear at the same time. Just like always.
“Go home, Frank,” she admonished. “It's late, and I'm not in the mood.”
Frank just smiled that crooked pirate smile that made Molly so mad and other women so weak at the knees. “Come on, Mol. I know you're working. There are police in your driveway. Besides, it's never too late for you. You don't sleep. I just figured that you might be interested in some ⦠whoa, mother! How'd he know I was about to make an objectionable offer?”
Molly turned to see Dee looming in the doorway behind her. “You okay?” he asked.
She laughed. “Oh, sure. This is just another thorn in my side.”
“He like to write notes?”
“He's still learning how to spell.”
Dee just nodded and turned away. Out on her porch, Frank hadn't moved. “Notes?” he asked. “You get another one?”
Molly found herself still wanting to smile. “Something like that. Are you really here for some reason, or is it just to annoy me, Frank?”
Frank flashed another totally unrepentant grin. “I wowed the Midwest Bar Association conference with my talk on maintaining a client base in the age of the Internet, and was going to share my triumph with you ⦠along with a chocolate shake?”
Damn him. He more than anyone knew how to hit her where she lived. Molly took one look at the Steak n Shake bag he lifted and groaned. Real milk, real ice cream. Real decadence.
“Oh, for God's sake get in here. Dee'll probably want to grill you, anyway.”
Frank stepped in, holding the bag out in front of him like a bribe. Molly made an ungracious grab for it and turned back for the kitchen.
“What happened to you?” he asked behind her.
That almost brought Molly to a halt. Leave it to Frank to be the first one tonight to notice the line of staples over her left ear and the limp from her very tender hip. Still turned where he couldn't see her reaction, she allowed a half grin.
“Workmen's comp.”
He brightened considerably. “Wanna sue?”
Frank wasn't just a normal thorn in Molly's side. Frank was a lawyer. Frank was, in fact, the lawyer who had successfully brought suit against not only Molly's former employer and one of its physicians for malpractice, but Molly as well. A classic case of medical cluster fuck in which Molly had been caught between an incompetent physician and a suddenly dead patient. She'd be paying the rest of her life for the privilege of knowing Frank Patterson.
Which made Molly wonder each time she'd allowed Frank in her door in the last six months, why she hadn't drop-kicked him across the street yet.
But right now the notes, the bone, and most of all, the Steak n Shake bag, were distracting her. Which was probably why she kept letting him past her guard. Or it could have been the fact that like her, Frank had survived Nam, although he'd done it on JAG duty. Or maybe it was the three kids he was raising alone. She liked them even better than her dog. She certainly liked them better than Frank.
“There aren't a whole lot of hospitals left in town who'll hire me, Frank,” she said, leading him through the house. “And I'm not about to reduce the pool even more by suing one of them for letting a crazy woman into the ED.”
“Come on, Mol. You know they were at fault. Surely there should have been a warning notice somewhere. Something like âPatients may be hazardous to your health.' In Spanish, maybe.”
“There is,” she said, grinning. “It's called Abnormal Psych, and you take it junior year of training.”
“Just trying to help, Molly.”
“Thanks anyway, Frank.”
“Well, thank heavens you let me in,” he mused, catching sight of the group in the kitchen. “Otherwise you might have been overcome by all the levity.”
Dee was just settling himself back down alongside Patrick, who was
trying to take surreptitious peeks inside the white box. Magnum took one look at Frank and wagged like Lassie.
Molly scowled at her eighty-pound puppy. “Traitor.”
Frank laughed and bent down in his good Armani to nuggie the dog.
“Who's he?” Patrick demanded.
Frank looked up. “Who's
he
?” he echoed.
“Molly's my aunt,” Patrick offered with some disdain.
That brought Frank all the way upright. “Why, St. Molly. You have a family. And here I thought you'd sprung full-armored from the skull of Florence Nightingale.”
Molly barely stopped slurping. “Shut up, Frank.”
Frank gave Patrick one of his patented “between boys” smiles. “She adores me. I saved her life, you know.”
Patrick straightened, his interest caught. “No. I didn't.”
“Wrong verb, Frank,” Molly interrupted. “The one you want is âruined. ' You
ruined
my life.”
“Oh, you love me and you know it, St. Molly.”
Dee raised a hand. “If you don't mind ⦠.”
Molly decided that she didn't want to try sitting again. It was too achy getting up and down. So she leaned against the counter, sipping at her shake and almost forgiving Frank for being Frank. Which happened every time he brought her junk food.
“Did I hear you say you knew about the notes?” Dee asked Frank.
He nodded congenially. “Yeah. Obviously somebody not as enchanted by Molly's gracious nature as the rest of us.”
Damn it. That made her grin again. “I'm not gracious, Frank. I'm stupid. If I weren't, I wouldn't keep letting you in the door.”
“Wouldn't know anything about bones, would you?” Dee asked.
“Bones?” Frank leaned against the sink and shrugged. “Beyond the âthighbone connected to the knee bone'? Not much.”
“You had to mention thighbone,” Molly muttered.
“You like to paint things?” Dee asked.
Frank actually looked appalled. “Paint? Me?”
“Hearts and crosses and things? Gold paint?”
Frank lifted an elegant eyebrow. “You looking for somebody to decorate for the prom, or is there a question in all this?”
“He wants to know if you've been painting bones and flinging them over my fence, Frank,” Molly told him. “Please say yes. That would get everybody out the door and put you someplace where they can actually control you.”
Frank, being Frank, was delighted by the insult. “Decorated bones? Hot damn. I knew if I hung around long enough you'd dig up some more excitement for me.”
“More excitement?” Patrick demanded. “What do you mean?”
“St. Molly here just loves a controversy. Don't you, Molly?”
“I do, Frank. Especially if it can put me at opposite ends of an argument with you.”
“She's famous in St. Louis,” Frank continued. “Probably the most notorious death investigator in the country. Good Golly Miss Molly, they call her.”
“Death investigator?” Patrick swiveled his attention toward Molly. “You're a death investigator? Like a coroner or something? How come we didn't know that?”
“Well, that's the secret to your aunt Molly,” Frank confided. “She only gives bits and pieces of herself to everybody she knows. Then I guess she expects us all to get together at some kind of friend and family reunion in the park and construct the whole picture ourselves.”
“Is that right?” Dee asked.
Molly groaned. Not only was this getting way too complicated for two in the morning, she'd run out of shake. “Don't listen to him, Dee. Don't even make eye contact. You don't know how dangerous he is to your sanity ⦠not to mention your wallet.”
“Which is why I wouldn't threaten Molly,” Frank informed Dee equably. “It would be anticlimactic. I've already sued her.”
Dee stared.
Patrick whistled. “You
sued
my aunt Molly?”
Molly was sure she didn't like the avid look in Patrick's eyes, or the answering triumph in Frank's. Two peas in a pod. Just what she needed. She was about to ask Dee to arrest them both just to give her some peace when his radio crackled to life. Molly was an old enough hand that she could interpret the mumbles.
“Go on,” she said, waving him away. “You have another call. Unless
the detectives are Jekyll and Hyde, you don't need to be here when I talk to them. And they're going to be the ones to take the bone and the notes.”
Dee scowled at both Frank and Patrick. “You sure?”
Molly grinned. “Honey, I can handle those two in my sleep. And you know I'm not going to compromise possible evidence. Go on.”
After admonishing Frank to leave the evidence untouched, Molly showed the shambling cop out her front door. And then for a minute or two, she just stood there watching him amble off her porch.
The clouds had settled low outside, so that they swept by in ragged file. A breeze lifted the rain into a mist that haloed the streetlamps and glistened in the grass. Traffic was sporadic out on the through streets, and off in the distance, a dog barked.
It was quiet. Soothing. Molly damn near walked out the door right behind Dee and kept on going. Responsibility waited back inside her kitchen. Trouble. Danger. And she hadn't even really considered yet what that damn bone could mean.
This just wasn't the time of year to be surprised with a full-grown child. Not one so perilously poised on the brink of adulthood. Certainly not one with all that distress tucked away behind those great hazel eyes of his.
Molly was a sucker for kids. But even more, Molly was terrified of kids.
And she'd been tossed one just like a bone over the backyard fence.
Â
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It took ten minutes to wake up the Burke housekeeper in Alexandria, Virginia. It took another tortuous twenty minutes of Molly's fractured Spanish and Juanita's noisy tears to ascertain that Patrick was safely found with his aunt Molly, that his parents hadn't been apprised of his disappearance, and that his younger brother Sean was safely home in bed where he belonged.
By the time Molly hung up, her head was pounding as badly as her butt. Patrick didn't so much as lift his head from where it was cradled in his arms. Million-dollar suit coat unbuttoned and thousand-dollar tie pulled, Frank sat on a chair that was tilted against the wall, a beer in hand and Magnum's head in his lap.
The single Fifth District detective who ended up arriving, a short, squat woman Molly didn't know or particularly like, had already come and
gone with bone, notes, and disinterest firmly in hand. It was only left to see what to do with Molly's surprise guest before she could collapse up-stairs.
Molly considered her nephew and battled twin instincts to comfort and chastise. “You could have said something, Patrick.”
“About what?” he demanded, head lifting. “My being kicked out of school? You were a little preoccupied, Aunt Molly. I couldn't tell you that without telling you why, and once you get the words âI was expelled from school' out, people tend to stop listening.”
She didn't relax her posture, as if that could protect her from further surprise. “So, try me.”
Patrick was picking at his sleeves, throwing off little shrugs as if they were accusations. “It wasn't my fault.”
“Not exactly original, Patrick.”
He threw off a couple more halfhearted shrugs. “They blamed it on me because I was in the library right before it happened. But it was two other guys, and nobody'd believe me when I told them. I swear, Aunt Molly. I didn't do it!”
“And that would be?”
His eyes dipped again, like signal flags. “Set the fire.”
“Ah.”
He faced her again with a glare of outrage. “See what I mean? You don't believe me either.”
“I don't know you well enough to believe you, Patrick. Especially considering the fact that the first time I saw you in six years you had a purloined Rembrandt sketch in one hand and a priceless jade carving in the other.”
“You picked the best stuff right away, I see,” Frank acknowledged. “Good instincts.”