want to talk to Cathy?”
“Sure. You be good, now. Mind Maria.”
Maria Alvarez had been a godsend. She was older than he’d been looking for, but she had become the grandmother the kids had never had. Despite her references, when he’d first hired her, Sean had thought about setting up one of those home-surveillance cameras. It had quickly become apparent by the way the children responded to her that wouldn’t be necessary.
“Hey, Uncle Sean.”
“Hey, Princess. How are you?”
“Fine. How are you?”
Where Ryan was withdrawn, Cathy was the proverbial chatterbox. She never met a stranger, something that occasionally gave him nightmares, too. Only, her radar seemed pretty good in detecting the good guys from the bad.
The same thing you thought about Makaela.
“Missing you guys. Wishing I was home,” he said aloud. That was the truth. There was no need to prevaricate.
“Maria and I are making a fruitcake.”
Visions of the brick-shaped, perennial butt of holiday jokes flashed through his mind. “Yeah? Sounds good.”
“My job is measuring out the fruit.”
As far as Sean was concerned, the word fruit when used in conjunction with fruitcake was a misnomer. The artificially colored bits of red-and-green gunk it usually contained bore no resemblance to the real stuff.
“Your grandma used to make fruitcakes.”
The memory was just suddenly there in his head. Unexpected. And unwanted.
“Really? Cool. Did Mama help?”
“Yeah,” he said, fighting the rush of memories that had accompanied the first. “Yeah, she did.”
That was the problem with allowing any of them in. It opened the door to the rest. The ones he had fully intended never to think about again. Another reason the interview Jenna Kincaid had given had bothered him.
“We’ll save you a piece, but you have to promise that you’ll be home in time for Christmas.”
He swallowed, fighting two sets of emotions. Determined to give in to neither.
“I can’t promise that, Princess. I told you.”
“But you’ll try, won’t you? Ryan really wants you to be here. He needs you to. He’s started all that stuff about wanting a puppy again.”
“I know. He told me. You keep talking to him, okay? Make him understand that…That now just isn’t the best time for something like that.”
“I will. He’s just a baby.”
The gulf between Cathy’s seven-going-on-thirty maturity and Ryan’s immature four-almost-five seemed immeasurably wide. At least it was better than it had been three years ago when family services had handed the kids off to him.
He’d had no idea what to say to a four-year-old who had just lost her mother in the most brutal way imaginable. And no clue in hell what to do with a two-year-old.
That initial panic had, in the intervening years, given way to more normal concerns like whether or not he was providing all the right things for them. Child-care issues. Keeping up with vaccinations and checkups. Just getting them to bed at a reasonable hour sometimes seemed Herculean.
At least it had before he’d found Maria. And if it all worked out here…
He destroyed the thought, realizing how far from those concerns the one he was currently embarked upon was. How foreign to his problems with childcare.
“Gotta go,” he said, glancing at his watch again.
It was already four-thirty. With traffic, making it to Jenna Kincaid’s office before five would be a close-run thing. And it would mean doing without dinner again.
“But you’ll think about it, won’t you?” Cathy said, bringing his attention back.
“The puppy?”
“No, I know we can’t have a dog. Getting home before Christmas. You’ll try, won’t you?”
“I told you the last time. It just depends on how things go down here.”
“In Birmingham.”
“That’s right.”
“That’s where that killer is, right?”
The question caught at Sean’s gut, twisting it. He hesitated, wondering if someone could possibly have said something to the little girl about those deaths here.
“Who told you that?”
“I saw it on the news. Maria turned it off, but they said ‘Birmingham.’ I’m pretty sure.”
“And it worried you?”
“Yeah. A little.”
“Nothing’s going to happen to me, Princess. You can quit worrying about that.”
There was silence on the other end. It lasted long enough that he felt that same squeeze of dread in his belly.
“You hear me, Princess. I’m taking care of business down here, and then I’ll be home. I swear to you.”
“Okay.”
“You take care of your brother. And save some of that cake for me.”
“Okay.”
The usually bubbly voice was still subdued. Sean closed his eyes, trying to find words that would comfort a child whose world had already been destroyed once.
“Have I ever lied to you?” he demanded.
“No,” she said softly. “At least I don’t think so.”
“What does that mean?”
“Is it him?”
“What him?”
The question was too harsh. He’d guarded them against everything he could possibly think of and still she’d somehow learned what had happened.
“The man who killed Mama.”
There was no way he could deal with this. Not from this distance. Not over the phone.
“I don’t know.”
“But you think so. That’s why you went down there, isn’t it?”
“I thought I could help the cops.”
“Because of what you know about Mama?”
