The Widow - Carla Neggers [107]
“Oh, Dad. I’m so sorry.” Linc was too exhausted to cry. “He was your brother.”
“He hated us.”
“None of us knew,” Grace said quietly. “We all loved him.”
“We loved the man he wanted us to believe he was.”
Grace said quietly, “Chris was the happiest man I’ve ever seen in those last days with Abigail. If I could ever dare to be so happy…”
“Dare it, Grace. Dare everything to be that happy.”
Linc could see the shock on his sister’s face at their father’s words.
When Linc drifted off again, he was aware of his father stretched out on the floor next to him, and his sister sitting across the room with her little pot of chamomile tea.
Mattie didn’t expect to see Doyle standing over his hospital bed when he woke up in a haze of painkillers and God knew what else the doctors had pumped into him. He was still on an IV. He tried to sit up. “Abigail? Linc? Are they all right?”
“They’re okay,” Doyle said, gruff as ever. “You got banged up the most. A couple broken ribs. About eight million bruises. You didn’t puncture a lung, though. No internal injuries.”
“I deserved to die.”
“Well, you didn’t. Now you have to figure out what comes next.”
“I can’t drink.”
Doyle nodded. “But you know it’s really about not drinking.” He seemed awkward. “I talked to Katie this morning. We’ll have to see what the prosecutors decide to do with you, but if you’re not in jail, you can have the spare bedroom until you’re back on your feet. One drop of alcohol, and you’re out. And you’re never to be there alone with the boys.”
“Doyle, I don’t deserve—”
“It’s not about what you deserve, Mattie. Katie and I can and want to do this for you. We’re not trying to save you. We know we can’t. Only you can save yourself.”
“When I was in the water,” he whispered. “BeforeAbigail. Chris was there. He kept me going. I had to stay alive to tell people about Ellis. I could hear his voice. I swear, Doyle. He was there, telling me…I had this one last chance….”
If Doyle believed him, he’d never say. “You’ve got a long road ahead of you, Mattie Young. Katie and I can walk some of it with you, but if you stumble—if you screw up—you’re on your own.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Just say thank you.”
“Thank you.”
Sean and Ian Alden squatted in front of a tide pool down on the rocks by Owen’s house. He sat on the deck with Doyle, watching the boys hold periwinkles up to their ears.
“You ever hear a periwinkle sing?” Doyle asked. “Because I never have. Katie says she hears them all the time.”
Owen lifted his feet onto the deck rail. “I can’t say I’ve spent a lot of time listening to periwinkles.”
“You would if you lived out here on this rock year-round.” Doyle grinned, and it was good to see. Forty-eight hours after Ellis Cooper’s death, nothing was back to normal. “Something to be said for it, don’t you think?” His grin broadened. “You’d go out of your damn mind.”
“I’ll be up here regularly once the field academy starts.”
“Rappelling off cliffs. Hauling trainees up and down mountains. Diving off boats. You won’t be listening to periwinkles sing.”
“Sometimes, maybe.”
“Katie’s excited about being director. You should hear her.” Doyle leaned back in his deck chair. “It’s good. I’m happy for her. For us.”
Owen shifted his gaze from the boys up the headland toward Abigail’s house on the rocks. The media had descended in a whir, keeping Doyle’s officers busy. Special Agents Capozza and Steele had kept vigil on Abigail’s house during the worst of it. John March called his daughter from Washington. He’d wait and see her when the frenzy had died down. By last night, most of the media had departed.
Doyle nodded in the direction of her house. “Her cop buddies from Boston are there. Bob O’Reilly and that other one—Scoop Wisdom. Have you seen him? Hell. He looks like he could dig Ellis up and shoot him again just to be sure he’s dead. Abigail says he’s got cats, though.”
“Cats?”
“She thinks anyone who has a cat can’t be all that mean. I told her she should look up all the murder cases involving weird cat people. Of course, she knows there are