When the Wind Blows - James Patterson [41]
That caught me off guard. I hadn’t thought about him that way, married, or any way, really. An Italian mother? You don’t knowathing about me, he’d said.
“My wife died,” Kit told me then.
“I’m sorry.” I really was. He’d already touched me with the idea of alternating nights cooking with her. David would never have done that.
“Yeah. It was almost four years ago.” I could see the pain etched on his face. He had loved her. It was obvious.
“What happened, Kit? You mind if we talk about it?”
“No. I’m fine now,” he said and forced a smile. “Occasionally, I even like to play the martyr.”
“Ouch. You’re tough on yourself, huh?”
“I guess. It was a small plane crash.” His voice was so low I could barely hear him. It was as if he were talking to himself. “My wife. My two little boys.” He let out a sigh, and as I watched in stunned silence, he almost lost it.
The cabin was so silent that the sputtering chicken and the stiff breeze against brittle windowpanes sounded explosive. I wanted to hug him, to make some kind of human contact, to make the terrible hurt and sadness leave his blue eyes.
“I was supposed to drive everybody to Nantucket. A family vacation, long overdue, much deserved by them. Then I had to work. I was deeply involved in my, uh, career. They took a plane up there without me.” His face sagged. “The plane went down between Rhode Island and Nantucket. It was the ninth of August in ninety-four.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
Now I felt so guilty about everything, right from the first time I’d ever seen him. I had been all wrong about Kit Harrison and it made me feel bad.
Chapter 42
KIT REFUSED to dwell much in the past; and for one night at least, so did I. We had some good, honest laughs, and talked easily for the next hour and a half. I liked his company, the breadth of things he knew about: Cosífan tutte, rockabilly, raising children, professional hockey, fiction, nonfiction, antiquities, and so on and so forth.
His personal history was pretty interesting, too. He told me just enough to whet my appetite. His father was Irish and had been a bus driver in Boston; his mom was Italian, a former nurse at Children’s Hospital. Mike and Maria were still alive and well, living in Vero Beach, Florida, these days. He had four brothers, “all of them smarter and better-looking than me.” He had attended Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts, on an academic scholarship. Then NYU Law “on a prayer.” Then came the FBI. Kit was an FBI agent, on vacation in Colorado.
I did get the sense, though, that he was holding back a few things, but maybe I was wrong, and besides, why should Kit feel obliged to tell me everything about himself just because we were suddenly on speaking terms.
“Let’s go for a moonlit ride,” I said after we had finished our dinner, which was as good as that at many a pricey restaurant in Denver. Truth was, I didn’t feel like going home quite yet. “You mentioned having a drink over in Clayton. Let’s go there tonight. I’m buying.”
He thought it was a good idea, so we took Kit’s Jeep over to Villa Vittoria. It’s a pretty good Italian place with a cozy bar, where jaded locals and even more jaded tourists seem to get along in relative harmony.
That particular weeknight, one of the older waiters was playing the piano and singing, if you could call it that. I knew Angelo and he was a sweet man, a very good headwaiter, but he was an embarrassingly bad singer. He was an uncle of the owner, which sort of explained why they let him sing on slow weeknights.
Kit and I sat at the bar, as far away from Angelo as possible. We tried to talk over the excruciating crooning, but he was miked, so it was impossible. We finally began to laugh, careful that Angelo didn’t know his singing had given us giggling fits.
“He’s dying up there,” I whispered. “I feel so sorry for him.”
“He’s sure clearing out the bar fast. I’ve never seen live entertainment have quite this effect before,” Kit said. Then he stood up from his barstool. “Hold the fort. I’ll be right back.”
I watched with building curiosity as Kit walked