a dedication to his job unlike anyone she’d ever met. These medals told her that as absolutely as if they could talk. If he had had one or two medals—sure, that would have told her he was a brave and capable soldier. But there had to be more than ten of these colorful bars pinned to his uniform. She counted them quickly with her finger. Ten…eleven. Eleven medals surely meant that Frisco had gone above and beyond the call of duty time after time.
She turned, and in the new light of her discovery, his bedroom had an entirely different look to it. Instead of being the room of a someone who didn’t care enough to add any personal touches, it became the room of a man who’d never taken the time to have a life outside of his dangerous career.
Even the whiskey bottle looked different. It looked far more sad and desperate than ever before.
And the room wasn’t entirely devoid of personal items. There was a book on the floor next to the bed. It was a collection of short stories by J. D. Salinger. Salinger. Who would’ve thought…?
“Mia?”
Natasha was calling her from the living room door.
Mia turned off the light on her way out of Frisco’s room. “I’m here, hon, but your uncle’s not,” she said, coming into the living room.
“He’s not?” Tasha scrambled to her feet to get out of the way of the opening screen door.
“What do you say we go next door and see about that bubble-bath soap of mine?” Mia continued, shutting the heavy wooden door to unit 2C tightly behind her. “I’ll write a note for your uncle so that he knows you’re at my place when he gets back.”
She’d call Thomas, too. If he was home, he might be willing to go out looking for the Navy lieutenant, to tell him Natasha was safe.
“Let’s go right into the bathroom,” Mia told Tasha as she opened her screen door and unlocked the dead bolt to her condo. “We’ll pop you directly into the tub, okay?”
Natasha hung back, her eyes very wide in her mud-streaked face. “Is Frisco gonna be mad at me?”
Mia gazed at the little girl. “Would you blame him very much if he was?”
Tasha’s face fell as she shook her head, her lips stretching into that unmistakable shape children’s mouths made when they were about to cry. “He was asleep.”
“Just because he’s sleeping doesn’t mean you can break his rules,” Mia told her.
“I was gonna come home before he woke up….”
Aha. Mia suddenly understood. Natasha’s mother had frequently slept off her alcoholic binges until well past noon, unknowing and perhaps even uncaring of her daughter’s private explorations. It was tantamount to neglect, and obviously Tasha expected the same treatment from Frisco.
Something was going to have to change.
“If I were you,” Mia advised her, “I’d be good and ready to say I’m sorry the moment Frisco gets home.”
FRISCO SAW THE note on his door from down in the courtyard. It was a pink piece of paper taped to the outside of the screen, and it lifted in the first stirrings of a late-morning breeze. He hurried up the stairs, ignoring the pain in his knee, and pulled the note from the door.
“Found Natasha,” it said in clean, bold printing. Thank God. He closed his eyes briefly, grateful beyond belief. He’d searched the beach for nearly an hour, terrified his niece had broken his rule and gone down to the ocean again. Hell, if she would break his rule about leaving the condo, she could just as well have broken his rule about never swimming alone.
He’d run into a lifeguard who’d told him he’d heard a rumor that a kid’s body had washed up on the beach early in the morning. Frisco’s heart had damn near stopped beating. He’d waited for nearly forty-five minutes at a pay phone, trying to get through to the shore patrol, trying to find out if the rumor was true.
It turned out that the body that had washed up in the surf had been that of a baby seal. And with that relief had come the knowledge that he’d wasted precious time. And the search had started again.
Frisco opened his eyes and found he had crumpled the pink paper. He smoothed it out to read the rest. “Found Natasha. We’re at my place. Mia.”
Mia Summerton. Saving the day again.
Leaning on his cane, he went toward Mia’s door, catching his reflection in his living room window. His hair was standing straight up, and he looked as if he were hiding from the sunlight behind his dark sunglasses. His T-shirt looked slept in, and his shorts were slept in. He looked like hell and he felt worse. His head had been pounding from the moment he’d stumbled out into the living room and found that Natasha was gone again. No, strike that. His head had been pounding from the moment he’d opened his eyes. It had risen to a nearly unbearable level when he’d discovered Tash was AWOL. It was still just shy of intolerable.
He rang the doorbell anyway, well aware that in addition to the not-so-pretty picture he made, he didn’t smell too damn good, either. His shirt reeked of a distillery. He hadn’t been too picky when he snatched it off the floor of his room this morning on his way out the door to search for Tash. Just his luck, he’d grabbed the one he’d used to mop up a spilled glass of whiskey last night.
The door swung open, and Mia Summerton stood there, looking like something out of a sailor’s fantasy. She was wearing running shorts that redefined the word short, and a midriff-baring athletic top that redefined the word lust. Her hair was back in a single braid, and still damp from perspiration.
“She’s here, she’s safe,” Mia said in way of greeting. “She’s in the tub, getting cleaned up.”
“Where did you find her?” His throat felt dry and his voice came out raspy and harsh.
Mia looked back into her condo unit and raised her voice. “How you doing in there, Tasha?”
“Fine,” came a cheery reply.
She opened the screen door and stepped outside. “Harris Avenue,” she told Frisco. “She was over on Harris Avenue, playing in the dirt at that construction site—”
“Dammit! What the hell does she think she’s doing? She’s five years old! She shouldn’t be walking around by herself or—God!—playing on a construction site!” Frisco ran one hand down his face, fighting to control his flare of anger. “I know that yelling at the kid’s not going to help….” He forced himself to lower his voice, to take a deep breath and try to release all of the frustration and anger and worry of the past several hours. “I don’t know what to do,” he admitted. “She blatantly disobeyed my orders.”
“That’s not the way she sees it,” Mia told him.
“The rule was for her to tell me when she went outside. The rule was to stay in the courtyard.”
“In her opinion, all bets are off if Mom—or Uncle Frisco—can’t drag themselves out of bed in the morning.” Mia fixed him with her level gaze. Her eyes were more green than brown in the bright morning sun. “She told me she thought she’d be back before you even woke up.”
“A rule is a rule,” Frisco started.
“Yeah,
