The Perfect Husband - Lisa Gardner [43]
“Who, me?”
“I assume you had a childhood, unless that stork story’s true after all.”
The question caught her off guard. She wasn’t used to anyone asking about herself. “I did Girl Scouts,” she answered finally. “I didn’t have hobbies or things like that. I worked after school. My parents owned a general store with a small deli. Cheese, fudge, gourmet foods. It was a lot of work.”
“Working-class parents?” Marion asked. “New England, right? You have a northern accent.” She was obviously taking mental notes.
“Down, girl,” J.T. said lightly. He offered Tess a crooked grin. “Forgive Marion. Unlike you, we never worked as children—our father did the smart thing and married money. Now Marion is hell bent on overcoming this stigma by turning into a workaholic. We can’t take her anywhere anymore. She’s liable to arrest the host for income tax evasion.”
“One of us had to have follow-through. You certainly don’t.” Marion stubbed out her cigarette and reached for another. She said to Tess, “You want to know a little bit about your hero? Well, let me tell you.”
“Uh-oh,” J.T. said.
“J.T. at seventeen. He’s into orienteering. Do you know what orienteering is?”
Tess shook her head. Tension swept over the table. J.T. hadn’t moved, but his expression was tighter. Lines had appeared at the corners of his mouth. Marion leaned forward and plunged on.
“Orienteering is a sport from Scandinavia, developed during one of the world wars. Basically you’re turned loose with a detailed topographic map of an area and thirteen controls—”
“Flags,” J.T. supplied.
“Flags to find. You have a compass, you have a map, and you have three hours to find however many flags you can find.
“It can be brutal. The courses are rated for difficulty and the truly advanced ones—the red and blue courses—aren’t even forest trails, they’re just flags left in the forest. You get to plow through the underbrush, hike up mountains, cross teeming rivers. People get lost. People get injured. You have to know what you’re doing.”
“I knew what I was doing,” J.T. said. “I made it back.”
“Barely!” Marion returned her attention to Tess. “So here’s J.T., seventeen years old and already arrogant. You think he’s insufferable now? You should’ve known him then.”
“I was a saint.”
“Get over it. These competitions, class A meets, are a big deal. You compete by age group and prizes are given out. Our father always dominated the blue course, the hardest level. He always won first prize. Then we have J.T. He’s still too young for the blue course. He’s seventeen and the toughest course for him is the red, and he’s good. Everyone thinks he’ll win it and everyone’s talking about how the father will take blue and the son will take red. The colonel’s already choosing the spots on the mantel.”
Her jaw set, her gaze hardened. “Morning of the meet. Morning of the meet. Does J.T. register for his category in the red course? No. He registers for blue. A seventeen-year-old kid registering for blue.”
“I’d already done red,” J.T. said. “I wanted something new.”
“You would’ve won!”
“Trophy’s nothing but cheap metal that gathers dust.”
“So what happened?” Tess demanded to know.
“Einstein here,” Marion supplied in a low growl, “goes running off in his orienteering suit. Three hours later he’s nowhere to be found. Two hours after that they’re arranging the search parties, when all of sudden from the underbrush comes this huge commotion. Thrashing and cursing and swearing. Mothers are running to cover ears of their children, and lo and behold, it’s J.T. Half of his face scratched off, both of his hands mutilated, and his ankle in a twig brace. He’d fallen off the side of a hill.”
“It happens.”
“It wouldn’t have if you’d stuck to red!”
“It did. And I made it back.” He turned to Tess with a wicked grin. “Walked two miles on a broken ankle. How’s that for cojones?”
“More like stupidity,” Marion muttered.
“The colonel was impressed.” J.T.’s voice was deceptively innocent, but Marion flinched. “That was the kind of thing Daddy liked,” J.T. continued, his eyes