Kerry shook her head. “No. Nothing except trees, snow, and a couple of buried cars.”
“No, ma’am, it’s not about something you might have seen.”
The policeman flipped open a pad and checked his information.
“Do you know a man by the name of Kyle Evans?”
It was the last thing any of them expected. “Why, yes,” Cynthia replied slowly. “He…well, at least until yesterday, he worked on my…late husband’s staff.” She fell silent. “Has something happened to him?”
“I’m afraid so, ma’am. He was driving down the highway last night and apparently passed out at the wheel. His car ran off the road and hit a tree.” The officer hesitated. “He’s dead, ma’am.”
Kerry blinked, absorbing the news with a wild mixture of emotions. She took a deep breath and released it slowly, knowing that as a human and a Christian, she should feel some sort of sor-row for the passing of another mortal.
She didn’t.
Oh, well.
Kerry looked up at Dar, who had an interested, speculative look on her face. “What are you thinking?” she whispered.
“Poetic justice,” Dar answered succinctly. “And, gee…now your father will have someone to talk to down there.”
Kerry winced.
“Sorry. You asked,” Dar murmured. “I’m not going to pretend to be even slightly sorry that bastard’s dead. I only hope he didn’t ruin the tree.”
“My goodness,” Cynthia had been saying. “I can’t…I hardly know what to say.” She shook her head. “What time did the accident occur? He left here just about midnight, I believe.”
The officer nodded. “About one a.m., ma’am. Do you have any idea what he’d been doing between the time he left and then?
Only takes about a ten minute drive to get where he was.”
“I haven’t a mortal clue,” Cynthia answered, stunned. “He gathered his things and left in quite a hurry. I’m afraid he was quite upset. I had just released him and the rest of my late husband’s staff from employ.”
“Ah,” the officer grunted, writing that down. “Was he a drinker?”
“I have no idea. Certainly in social situations. I never had any reason to believe it was more frequent than that.” Cynthia looked at Kerry, a touch helplessly. “Did you think so, Kerrison?”
Kyle, A drunk?
“No.” Kerry shook her head as the policeman looked at her. “I haven’t lived here for over a year, but Kyle was employed by my father for many years prior to that. I never
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thought he drank, or in fact, did drugs or anything like that.” She paused thoughtfully. “In fact, he was a health freak.”
The officer nodded again. “That seems right, ma’am. His car had a lot of equipment in it, and gym clothes.” He closed his book.
“Well, I’m sorry to have to pass that information along to you, Mrs. Stuart. I realize it’s lousy timing.” He settled his hat back onto his head. “You confirmed when he left here, that’s all I really needed. We’ll try to backtrack now and see where he went first.”
“Officer,” Dar said, “it seems like a lot of investigating over a car accident.”
The man eyed her shrewdly. “We like to be sure, ma’am, especially when it’s a former employee of a government family.
We just want to make sure everything’s what it seems to be.” He touched the hat brim. “Mrs. Stuart, Ms. Stuart, ma’am.”
His footsteps sounded loud on the parquet floor, and the door opening and closing echoed softly in the silence that he left behind him.
“Well,” Cynthia said, “what a shock.”
“Mm,” Kerry agreed. “Yeah…Oh my God, I wonder if Brian knows?”
Cynthia gasped softly. “Oh! We should call him at once.” She got up and hurried from the room, leaving them behind without so much as another single word.
Kerry sighed and leaned against Dar. “Wow.”
“Yeah.” Dar’s voice was quiet. “You okay now?”
Kerry considered that. “Yeah. I feel better, kinda. I think I was wanting to get that out of my system for a while.” She paused. “What I said to my mother, I mean.”
“Mm.”
“Let’s go home.”
“You mean it this time?” Dar gave her an affectionate look.
“You’re not teasing me?”
“Let’s go.” Kerry stood up and offered Dar her hand. “Let’s get Mom and Dad and get the hell out of here. But we have to make one stop before the airport.”
Dar followed her out of the room, their hands still clasped.
“Where’s that?” she asked, as they walked across to the dining room.
“Dairy Queen,” Kerry replied firmly.
KERRY TOOK HER hot fudge sundae and sat down at the bench table, her eyes flicking around the interior that called up memories of high school and summer. Most people didn’t go for ice cream in winter, though there was a scattering of other people 184
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in the store, but that was one of the nice things about living in the tropics, it was almost always summer. Always ice cream season.
Kerry dug herself up a spoonful of vanilla ice cream and put it in her mouth. “You know, it’s hard to believe.”
“What is?” Ceci was maneuvering around a banana split.
“That they sell decent ice cream here? I always thought so. We went to Carvel when we could.”
“Kyle.”
Dar had her arms folded on the table, and she was sucking a thick chocolate milkshake through a somewhat uncooperative straw. She paused in her efforts and looked across the table at Kerry. “Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.”
Kerry twirled a bit of hot fudge on the end of her spoon. “I really want to be horrified that someone died, and you know, I just can’t.” She glanced furtively at her in-laws. “I can’t pretend I’m not glad that happened to him.”
“Why should you?” Ceci asked.
“Why should I pretend?” Kerry poked her ice cream.
“Because it’s polite, and I was raised to be polite. It’s not nice to gloat over the fact that someone you hated is dead.”
An awkward bit of silence followed. After it had gone on a while, Dar cleared her throat and patted Kerry’s hand. “I’m glad he’s dead. And I’m glad I wasn’t raised politely, because it feels good to be glad he’s dead.”
Ceci snorted softly.
“No offense,” Dar added hastily.
“That feller done wrong by you, kumquat,” Andy pro-nounced, not looking up from his dish of completely vanilla ice cream. “Don’t you feel bad about him being dead.” He glanced up. “I sure do not.”
Kerry glanced up at him, noting the faint smile around the edges of his mouth. “Yeah, I know,” she murmured, suddenly unsure. Her eyes shifted to Dar, who blinked and studied her hands, an expression on her face that Kerry had come to know as the one that meant she’d done something she wasn’t sure Kerry was going to like.
“Andy’s right.” Ceci broke the moment. “You’ve got nothing to feel bad about, Kerry. The man was a jerk, and his jerkiness caught up to him last night. He was probably frothing at the mouth so badly it got in his eyes and made him veer off the road.
Poetic justice.”
Poetic justice.
Kerry pondered that term. As far as she knew, she was the only poet at the table. Finally, all she could do was shrug, and make a mental note to talk to Dar later about that look of hers, though she suspected she knew what was behind it.
Ah.
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Maybe I’ll just let it go.
“Mm.” She took a spoonful of ice cream and put it in her mouth, then almost choked on the spoon when her name was called from behind her. She turned to see a willowy blond woman obviously heading right for her.
She had about six seconds to figure out who the woman was.
Kerry found her early schooling coming in desperately handy as she flipped through names and faces the way her father had taught all of them, searching for this one.
College? No. Church? No. Debating club? No.
“Well, Kerrison! I’m just amazed to see you here.” The woman arrived next to the table, her lips twitching into a brief, false smile. “Or maybe not.”
“Hello, Corinne.” Kerry returned the smile. “How wonderful to see you after all these years.” Her eyes slipped past Corinne.
“Do you work here?” She spotted a man in what appeared to be a supervisor’s uniform behind her.
“Work?” Corinne chuckled. “My husband owns the store. I’m just here picking something up for him. Oh, by the way, I’m sorry about your father.”
“Thank you.” Kerry replied.
“You’re staying in town?” Corinne’s eyes darted briefly to Kerry’s table companions. “I thought you’d be on your way to the funeral. Or, well, I thought
you
would, at any rate.”
Bitch.
Kerry leaned one arm on the back of the bench seat, aware of Dar stirring restlessly across from her. “No, we’re on our way to the airport. And please forgive my manners. Corinne, this is my partner Dar Roberts, and her parents Andrew and Cecilia.”
She looked at Dar. “This is Corinne…” She glanced back at the blonde. “What is it now?”
“Henderson.” Corinne gave the rest of the table a brief nod and frosty smile. “Well, I’m sure you can’t wait to get on your way. It was certainly nice to see you. I’m sure we won’t have the pleasure often and everyone,” her smile turned sickly sweet, “has been asking about you.” She lifted a hand, turned, and went back to her table.
Kerry felt Ceci move, then before her eyes, a brown blob flew through the air and splatted against Corinne’s back.
Corinne turned, startled, as Kerry whirled and faced forward, her eyes nearly popping out of her head. “Did you just do what I think you just did?” she hissed at Ceci.
“Sure.” Ceci licked her spoon with relish. “Damn good aim, if I say so myself.”
Dar wrapped her lips around her straw and put on an innocent look as she met Corinne’s staring eyes. Next to her, Andrew 186
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merely sniffed and took another bite of his pristine and fudge free ice cream.
Kerry covered her eyes with one hand. “What is it about people around me that encourages food fights? Corinne is going to lose her mind.”
“What mind?” Dar asked at the same time as Ceci snorted.
“You know, Kerry, you really should consider giving up Christianity,” Ceci said. “All that guilt, all that angst. Go pagan.
We just enjoy our mischief and die happy.”
Dar grinned as she watched the confused Corinne try to look over her own shoulder at her back, then apparently decide she’d been imagining it all as she slipped into her expensive silk lined leather jacket. She accepted the gloves the manager handed to her, then left, shaking her head, after glancing back at Kerry and finding nothing apparently amiss.
“Old friend?” Dar asked.
Kerry peeked from between her fingers. “Is she gone?”
Dar nodded.
Kerry put her hand down and picked up her spoon. “No, she was never a friend. She was someone I went to high school with who was convinced everything I had, everything I got, was because of my father and not because I earned it.”
“Ah.”
“Sometimes I believed that,” Kerry added softly. “I think everyone did.”
“Well, I’m sure everyone doesn’t think your father bought Dar for you,” Ceci remarked practically. “Way out of his price league, for one thing.”
“Hey!” her offspring protested.
Kerry smiled at that and relaxed. “No, I’m sure they don’t.”
She thought back to past times. “I’m sure they don’t. I’m sure I don’t care what they think, either.”
She was sure, wasn’t she?
KERRY HAD NEVER been so glad to get on a damn airplane.
She settled into her seat with a long, relieved sigh and put her head against the leather headrest, closing her eyes and willing the plane up and gone. Dar took the seat next to her, and Kerry found herself mildly resenting the fact that they were in first class, where there were those stupid console arms between the seats.
She wanted to get rid of hers and curl up in Dar’s arms for a nap.
She regarded the lighting controls with a feeling of mild embarrassment at the thought, reminding herself that she was a grown up who had long ago left the need for a teddy bear and security blanket behind her. Hadn’t she?
Kerry kept her eyes closed as the flight attendant came by and listened as Dar’s low burr ordered them both drinks. Maybe it was just the whole situation finally getting to be too much. She sighed, wishing they were already home, wanting the normality of that back around her.
Even going back to work would be very welcome. Kerry opened one eye and peered at Dar. “What ever happened with that UPS?” She hadn’t gotten paged again on it, so she figured Dar had done something or other to clear the issue.
Dar looked up from her Skymall magazine. “I threatened to cut off the cable feed to the city, and they got the replacement unit out in six hours. Hey, look, new toys. Want one?” Her long finger pointed at a page.
Kerry goggled at her. “Could you really do that?”
“Buy you a new toy? Sure,” Dar replied, then grinned. “Cut off their cable? We manage their head end facility, so yeah, if I wanted to get down and dirty enough, I could.” She dug into her pocket and removed her cell phone. “Now, do you like red or onyx?”
Kerry peered at the magazine. “Oo.” She pulled it closer. “A Swiss army knife for nerds? Does it have a…Oh, good grief, it 188
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does. How cool.” She glanced up at Dar. “We should get these as Christmas gifts for Mark’s staff.”
Dar considered that. “Mm. Something they can actually use instead of a box of chocolates and a gift certificate to Wal-Mart?
Though, those are both useful. Sort of.” She waited for the cell phone to be answered, then crisply ordered a case of the knives in each color, sending the order taker into a mini ecstasy of delight.
“We should brand them and use them as pitch gimmicks, too.
Maybe if José’s really good, I’ll let him look at mine.”
“Why don’t you just get him one?” Kerry asked, flipping through the magazine with interest.
“It has sharp implements on it. I don’t want to be liable if he cuts his fingers off. Mariana would kill me,” Dar muttered as she completed her purchase and closed the phone. “See anything else you like?”
“Mm.” Kerry eyes wandered off the page and up to Dar.