Dead Even - Mariah Stewart [69]
“Hopefully before our plane takes off. I don’t relish going up in this. So. Are you ordering lunch?”
“Ham and cheese on whole wheat. Lettuce and tomato.” He reached for his wallet.
“I’ve got it,” she told him as she started for the door. “It’s the least I can do, since you insist on picking me up in the morning and driving me home at night.”
“Gotta keep you among the living, Cahill.”
“There’s a man in a van who is watching my house twenty-four hours each day now. I doubt I need an escort back and forth to the office.”
“Tell it to the boss.” He tilted his head in the direction of John Mancini’s office. “Besides, it gives us a chance to go over what we’re finding in the files.”
“Ha. All we went over on the ride in this morning was Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon.”
“A classic, in the best sense of the word.”
“Yesterday, it was The Wall. Tuesday, it was . . . what was that, anyway?”
“The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Very sixties, very psychedelic.”
“Yeah, well, it was a little too sixties for me. I’ve heard enough psychedelic rock to last a lifetime, thank you very much.”
“What can I say? I just got the CD player in the car fixed. I haven’t been able to play Floyd in . . .” He glanced to see the look on her face. “Oh. It’s the Mad Marlow thing, isn’t it?”
“There are some people who never left the sixties, Fletcher. My mother is one of them.”
“Stuck in a time warp?”
“World’s oldest living hippie.”
“She looked pretty straight when I met her. So did your stepfather.”
“Roger is an insurance salesman.” She laughed and shook her head. “My mother waited twenty-five years for my father to come back and marry her, then turned around and married an insurance salesman.”
“Hey, easy on the insurance salesmen. My favorite uncle sells insurance.”
“Not that there’s anything wrong with it. It’s just that, well, look at Jack.” Miranda shook her head. “He’s a crazy man. I saw an interview with him on television a few years back. He has seven children by five different women in different parts of the world, one of whom, by the way, is reported to be a princess in some small, obscure European country.”
“Hey, you’re related to royalty.” He tried to make light of it.
“No. I have Portia. I have my mother. Roger. That’s it.”
“Aren’t you even curious about—”
“No.” Her blue eyes darkened to cobalt. “Not about any of it. Not about Jack or his life, not about his kids or his music. He’s never been involved in our lives, and he doesn’t exist in mine.”
“Those photos I saw the other day, he looked like he was pretty involved then.”
“I think we were a novelty to him back then. After all,” she said dryly, “we were his first offspring. He did support us financially when we were growing up, but he’s never been a father to us. And we could have used one, since our mother wasn’t much of a mother. I find his attempts to get in touch with us now little more than an annoyance.”
“How did the two of you grow up to be what you are?” he wondered aloud.
“How could we have been any different? When you grow up fending for yourself, you get strong because you have to be. Your instincts about people grow sharp because they have to be. And you trust the law because you never learned to trust anything else.”
“You’re really something else, Cahill.”
His phone rang, and she pointed to it. “Answer it,” she said, and left his cubicle.
“So, have you thought about what you might want for your reward?” Genna slowed her stride as she and Julianne approached the drugstore. Her heart was beating like crazy. She’d been in more dangerous situations, surely, but she could count on the fingers of one hand the number that had held such personally high stakes. She’d gotten Julianne out of the Valley of the Angels. Could she get her out of Linden?
“I don’t know.” The girl shook her blonde head.
“Well, Eileen got a sketchpad, and Caroline picked out a journal. Maybe something along those lines?” Genna opened the door to the store and held it until the girl stepped inside.
“I’m afraid I’m not