Dead Certain (18 page)

He’d expected her to move away, push him away, and when she didn’t, when she raised her arms to wrap them around his neck, he kissed her again, mesmerized by the way she felt in his arms and the way her mouth felt against his. She seemed to melt into him, every bit of her.

“I’ve been wanting to do that since the first time I saw you there in your shop,” he heard himself say.

“What stopped you?”

“Well, the thought that maybe you were capable of cold-blooded murder . . . I don’t know, that kind of thing has always been a real turnoff for me.”

She smiled in the darkness, and he bent his head to kiss her again, his tongue tracing the outline of her mouth.

“And I saw myself maybe having to slip handcuffs on these pretty wrists and dragging your admirable butt off to my jail. Now, I realize that some men like that whole bondage thing, but to tell you the truth, I’ve put too many women into cuffs to get off on it. And just thinking about you in one of those ugly orange jumpsuits . . .”

“Can’t blame you there.” She shook her head. “I can’t think of anyone who looks good in orange.”

“Well, there you go then.” He leaned back against the doorway and pulled her with him. He was all set to kiss her again, when she asked, “Did you really believe, in your heart, that I’d killed Derek?”

“My heart has no place in a homicide investigation. The only thing that matters is the evidence.” He rested his chin on the top of her head.

“Haven’t you ever been tempted to say the hell with it and let your heart sneak in a comment or two?”

“No.” He looked at her as if she were speaking an unfamiliar language. “No. That’s not why you wear the badge.”

“Why do you wear the badge?”

He looked surprised by the question. “Because it’s the only thing I know how to do.” He took her hand and led her to the door, which he unlocked and opened.

“You got out of school and set out immediately to become a cop?” Amanda dropped her purse onto the counter.

“I joined the army right out of high school and just went from there.” He walked through the downstairs to the front door, where he checked to make sure that the lock was still set. On his way back to the kitchen, he turned on a lamp in the hallway.

“Why the army?”

“I got out of foster care a month before my eighteenth birthday. My foster parents had made it pretty clear they expected me out the door after I graduated from high school. So I enlisted. Two weeks after graduation, I left for basic.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It all worked out for me. It’s been okay. More than okay. I liked the army, liked the structure of it, liked that every man there started out on a level playing field. It didn’t matter who you were or where you came from. The only thing that put you out ahead of the others—or behind them—was your own actions. It was all in your hands. For the first time in my life, I was on equal footing with everyone else. I could sink to the bottom, or I could rise to the top. And that’s just what I did. I rose above. After I’d gone as far as I could go, I left.”

“You went right into law enforcement?”

“I had a buddy who had gotten out a few months before me. He had gone home to the small West Virginia town he’d grown up in and became a cop. They had an opening for another rookie. I applied. My record in the service was good.” He shrugged. “It all worked out.”

“And then you came here.”

“Greer tell you any of this?” He raised a suspicious eyebrow.

“Just that she’d found you and wanted you to come here when the chief’s job opened up.”

“Greer does not know how to tell half a story.”

“She did tell me she’d been looking for you for years.”

“Then she told you about how our mother dumped us on our grandmother, and how when our grandmother died, social services sent us on our way through the system. Unfortunately, the system could only place pretty kids who were well mannered and who never caused trouble.”

“She told me you two were separated, yes.”

“Then you know the whole story.”

“I doubt I do.”

“Just as well. Not a very pretty one.” His eyes went hollow.

“It must have been wonderful to be reunited with Greer again, though. After all those years.”

“I didn’t remember her. Not really. I remembered her absence more than her presence. Remembered what it felt like after we’d been sent to different places. Remembered waking up in the night and wondering if I’d dreamed her, because it had been so long since I’d seen her face.”

“How old were you then?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know, pretty young. Four, maybe five.”

“When did they stop?”

“The dreams? About six months ago.”

“That’s when you—” The words
when you came here to Broeder
stuck in her throat.

“Yes.”

“That’s a long time to hurt,” she said softly. “A long time to be sad.”

“You’re thinking of Ramona,” he said flatly. “Well, don’t. She didn’t even know about us when she was a kid. So she never missed us.”

He didn’t want to talk about this anymore. He wanted to kiss Amanda.

“Are you afraid you’ll get to know her—maybe even like her—and then she’ll disappear?”

“I just don’t have time right now for more people who will complicate my life.”

“Oh. I see.” She nodded slowly. “People that you care about, who care about you, complicate your life. Has Greer complicated your life?”

“You’re kidding, right? Greer has done everything she can to take over my life.”

“And another sister—if you had one—might try to do the same. Put her two cents in.”

“Probably.” His eyes narrowed. “Some women just can’t help themselves.”

“Ha ha. I’m going to pretend that you didn’t say that. And I’m not going to let you bait me into walking away from you so that you don’t have to deal with me. Nice try, though.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it.”

He laughed and reached for her.

“Well, I have to say that I like you a lot more when you’re not trying to lock me up.” She slid into his arms, her eyes and mouth inviting his kiss. “I like you a lot more just like this.”

“Ummmm,” he said, leaning down to meet her lips halfway.

The sound of the front door opening startled them both.

“Sean?” Greer called from the front of the house.

He sighed into Amanda’s hair and reluctantly moved from her to the doorway. “In the kitchen.”

“Is Amanda with you?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m here, Greer.” Amanda stepped into the hall.

Greer stopped, looking puzzled.

“What is it?” Sean asked.

“It must be my imagination.” Greer shook her head as if to clear it, and took off her wet sweater. “Believe how fast this storm came up? It’s teeming out there now. Terrible.”

“What was your imagination?” Sean took a towel from the drawer and handed it to his sister.

“Oh, thank you, honey. I am soaked to the skin and chilled right through.” She draped the towel around her neck as she went toward the patio, holding out the dripping sweater.

“What was your imagination, Greer?” Sean repeated.

“Amanda, honey, check and see if there is any water in that teakettle? I could use a nice hot cup of tea.”

“Greer, I asked you—”

“Oh, I’m sure it was nothing.” She waved her hand absently. “I mean, Amanda is here, so it couldn’t have been.”

“Greer.” Sean closed his eyes and counted to ten.

“When I pulled up, it looked like someone—a woman—was running up the drive, but since Amanda is here and no one in their right mind would be out in this . . .” She draped the sweater over the back of a chair. “I’m sure it was just a shadow from all that lightning. I’m sure that was it.”

Sean and Amanda exchanged a long look.

He pushed past Greer and opened the door leading out to the yard.

“Sean, where are you . . .” Greer shook her head and turned back to Amanda. “I shouldn’t have said anything. Now he’s going to run around the neighborhood in this storm, get soaking wet, and come down with pneumonia.”

She went to the door and called out into the dark. “Sean? Come back in here.” She stood at the door and scanned the yard each time lightning flashed.

Finally she came back inside, shaking her head. “Cops. He’s not going to be satisfied until he’s gone through every yard on the street.”

The teakettle began to whistle.

“I know I need some nice hot tea right now, and I’m sure Sean will, too, by the time he’s done scouting the neighborhood for prowlers.” Greer dried her arms with the towel. “Amanda, would you get three mugs down?”

“Better make that four,” Sean told her as he came back inside, ushering a shrouded figure. “We have company.”

CHAPTER
NINETEEN

“Want to tell me what you were doing hiding in the garage?” Sean turned the wet shrouded figure around.

“In case you hadn’t noticed, it was pouring buckets out there.” Ramona pulled down the hood of her rain jacket and shook out a mass of wet red curls. Her gaze went from Sean to the two women, who stood speechless nearby.

“Ramona, honey, why didn’t you just knock on the door?” Greer asked.

“There weren’t any lights on when I got here, so I just assumed no one was at home.”

“So you decided to break into the garage.” Sean nodded. “Sure. That makes sense.”

“I hadn’t planned on . . . well, on anything. I just wanted to see . . . Oh, hi.” She seemed to notice Amanda for the first time. “We met at the diner earlier.”

“We did,” Amanda said, then smiled weakly. “Nice to see you again.”

Ramona laughed. “I’ll bet.”

“I want to know what you’re doing here.” Sean reached for the roll of paper towels and tore off a few sheets to dry his arms and face.

“I could use a few of those paper towels, too.” Ramona put her hand out for the roll, which Sean passed to her. She dried her face, then rolled the paper towel into a tight ball. “Greer, I was in the area, and I wanted . . . I wanted to see the house, that’s all.”

“I don’t think I belong here. I really shouldn’t be part of this.” Amanda backed toward the door. “So if you’ll all excuse me, I’m going to turn in.”

“I’ll see you in the morning,” Sean said as if nothing extraordinary was going on. “Try to get some sleep tonight.”

“Look, I just wanted to see where you lived. And once I saw how cute the house was, I just wanted to see it a little closer. I parked the car and got out and was just going to walk up the drive a little, but then it started pouring buckets and I ran for the first cover I could find, which happened to be the garage. I thought the storm would blow over real fast the way they do sometimes when they come on all of a sudden like this one did. I figured I’d be here and gone and no one would even know. But then you all came home in the interim. Look, I didn’t mean to upset anyone.” She looked at Sean, then at Greer. “I’m so sorry.”

“Well, honey, you don’t have to apologize. You haven’t done anything wrong.” Greer turned on Sean. “You’re making too much out of this, Sean. She has every right to stop here if she wants to. I don’t understand what your problem is.”

“I think you—we—need to take this just a little slower, that’s all.”

“Sean thinks I’m probably the daughter of some
other
Veronica Mercer who was born on the first of May in 1948 and who just happens to have the same social security number that your mother had,” Ramona said.

“It’s a possibility.” Sean nodded. “We don’t know anything about you—”

“And I didn’t know anything about you, either, mister, when I pulled into that little town down there in West Virginia to look for you, did I?” Greer’s temper was starting to flare. She turned to Ramona. “Tell him. Tell him what you told me. Show him the pictures.”

Ramona opened her bag and slid open the zipper on an inside pocket. She took out a battered plastic sandwich bag in which several photographs lay trapped. She opened it and laid the first one on the table.

“This was my mother.” She looked directly at Sean. “She look familiar to you?”

Sean studied the photo for a long time, then looked up at Greer questioningly.

“This is the same picture you showed me,” Sean said. “Did you give her a copy?”

“No. That’s hers. She brought it with her to show me, the first time we met.” Greer smiled at Ramona. “I brought the same picture to show her.”

“Couldn’t she have found them . . . ?” Sean asked, his protest sounding silly and weak, even to himself.

Ramona demanded, “To what end, Mr. Chief of Police? What reason could I possibly have to pretend to be this woman’s daughter?” She tapped an angry finger on the photo. “What would I have to gain? Speeding tickets fixed for life? There is nothing that you have that I want, okay? Nothing that you can do for me. Except maybe help me to understand who I am, and why she . . . why . . .”

“Why she gave you away?” Greer spoke the words Ramona wasn’t able to say.

“I was barely five. She gave me these”—Ramona picked up the bag of photos—“and dressed me up and took me to someplace. . . . I don’t remember much except that there was an elevator and it had mirrors in it. I remember thinking how pretty Mommy looked. She wore a new dress that day, and so did I. We got off the elevator and there were nice red carpets on the floor. We went into a room that had a long table in it. There was a man in there, he sat at the head of the table and he smiled when we came in.”

Ramona squeezed her eyes tightly shut, wanting to remember every detail so she could tell the others, but not wanting to remember because it hurt so much to look back.

She opened her eyes, determined to see it through.

“He told me what a pretty little girl I was. How pretty my red hair was. My mother made me sit and color while she signed some papers, and then he gave her something that she put into her pocketbook. She stood up and I did, too. I thought it was time to leave. But she told me I had to stay. Then she told me I had to be a very, very good girl, and if I was, that good things would happen for me. But if I was bad, something very bad would happen.”

“And she left you there,” Greer whispered, ashen, as if reliving the scene with Ramona.

“Yes.” Ramona nodded. “She left me there. And a few minutes later, a man and a woman came into the room. They were all smiling and made such a big fuss over me. . . .”

“Your new parents,” Greer said softly.

“Yes. My new parents. They were so excited.” Ramona swallowed hard. “The first thing they said to me was how they’d wanted a little girl just like me, one with red hair, for a long, long, time, and that they were so happy they’d waited for me.”

“Were they . . . ?” Greer struggled with the words.

“Oh, they were wonderful,” Ramona assured her. “I couldn’t have had a nicer family. They gave me everything. But there was always that . . .”

“That hole inside you,” Greer whispered. “That knowing that you weren’t good enough to keep. That somehow you just weren’t . . .”

“Yes.”

Ramona slid another photo across the table. Greer picked it up and stared at it before passing it to Sean.

“My mother gave me that before she took me to the office that day. She said that was my big sister and brother.” Ramona looked directly at Greer. “Only she called you Sasha, not Greer.”

“My adoptive parents named me Greer. Before that, my name was Susan. Everyone called me Sasha.”

“What do you think, Sean, should we do DNA testing?” Ramona’s jaw set stonily. “Would that prove to you that I am your sister? Half sister, at the very least.”

Sean appeared to be at a loss for words.

Ramona reached for the photos. Greer covered her hand with her own. “No, don’t leave in anger.”

“I’m sorry, Greer. I need to get home. I told the babysitter I’d be back before ten.”

Sean found his voice. “You have children?”

“A boy and a girl.”

“Where do you live?”

“In East Hilton.”

“Are you married?”

“Divorced.”

“Do you work? Do you—” Sean shook his head. “I don’t even know where to start.”

“Start by saying that you believe I could be who I say I am.” Ramona’s eyes pleaded. “We can go on from there.”

Greer looked back at the photo. “I have this picture, too. It was taken on Grandma Michaels’s front porch.”

“That’s what it says on the back.” Ramona flipped the photo over and read the tidy handwriting.
“Sasha and Sean on Mom’s front porch.”

“Makes you wonder about her, doesn’t it?” Greer shook her head slowly. “Why she had the three of us, if she was going to give us away . . .”

“Yeah, well, all these years, I thought it was just me. That maybe she kept the two of you in some secret place, and just got rid of me because I was . . .”

Unable to finish the sentence, Ramona pulled the hood of her raincoat up around her face, preparing to go out into the storm again. “I need to go,” she said in a shaky voice as she moved quickly toward the door.

“Don’t you dare.” Greer got up from the table. “Don’t you even try to run away from us.”

She wrapped her arms around the young woman and held her for just a minute as Ramona’s shoulders began to shake and she wept silently.

“Now, you don’t have to do that, hear? It’s going to be all right. It will be. We will work this all out, the three of us, and everything will be fine.”

Ramona nodded and whispered, “Thank you.”

“Oh, thank you, darlin’.” Greer gave her a hug. “Thank you.”

Ramona nodded and opened the door. With a look back at Sean, she stepped through it.

“Now, you be real careful going home.” Greer followed her outside. “And you call me in the morning, and we’ll talk, okay, honey?”

When Ramona had disappeared down the driveway, Greer turned to Sean, her eyes wet, and said, “I understand that you are a skeptic by nature, Sean. But you could have been a little kinder.”

“I didn’t know if she was telling the truth.” He shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

“Why would she make up a story like that, about going to that office and being handed over like that? It’s not like we’re the heirs to some big family fortune.” Greer came behind him and put her arms around his shoulders. “I guess you were too young back then, but I remember like it was yesterday what it felt like to be taken away from that house—Grandma’s house—and away from you, to be put in with strangers. Everything changed, Sean. Even my name. I kept waiting for them to bring you. I felt sure that if I was really good, that they’d let you come, too. I waited and waited. . . .”

Her tears rolled down the back of his neck, but he sat, still as a stone.

“I missed you every day. And every night, when I said my bedtime prayers, the only thing I ever prayed for was to be with my little brother again.” She sniffed and searched her pockets for a tissue. “When I found you, it was the sweetest day of my life. So I know exactly what Ramona means when she says she has a hole inside her. I’ve had it all my life.” She blew her nose and stuffed the tissue back into her pocket. “I suspect you do, too.” She gave his shoulders a gentle squeeze. “Only difference between you and me is that I want that hole inside filled up. You seem to be content to let it stay empty.”

She gave him one last pat on the back, then turned off the outside lights. “It doesn’t have to be that way, Sean. But of course, it’s your choice.”

She tossed the tissue into the wastebasket on her way out of the room, leaving her brother alone in the quiet kitchen.

The room was nearly dark, the neon under-the-counter lights the only ones left on. Amanda stood in the doorway, studying the silhouette that sat motionless at the table.

“Are you all right?” she asked. “Sean?”

He nodded. “I’m fine.”

“So fine that you’re sitting here in the dark at two in the morning?” She ventured closer.

“Why aren’t you asleep?” He ignored her question.

“I could ask you the same thing.” She paused at the stove. “I thought I’d make a cup of tea, maybe it would help me sleep. Want one?”

“No, thanks.”

“Yeah, me either.” She came closer.

He watched her cross the room. When she got to his chair, she moved his arm aside and sat on his lap. He couldn’t help but smile.

“So. Want to talk about it?” She poked him gently in the chest.

“I wouldn’t know where to start.”

“Start with Ramona.”

“I believe her.” He leaned back away from her.

“And that bothers you because . . . ?” She gestured for him to continue.

“I don’t know.”

Amanda ran her hand over his head, stroking him, as one might a child who needed comforting. He leaned back and closed his eyes, relaxing for the first time in days.

“She was adopted, too. Given away by her—our—mother.”

The clock over the back door ticked softly.

“What would make a woman do that? Give away her children like that?” His eyes were still closed. “Ramona talked about being taken to an office. She described what sounded like a conference room, probably in a lawyers’ office. She said the man there gave her mother something in an envelope and then her mother left.”

“You think she got money from the adoptive parents.”

“Yeah.” His jaw tightened.

His arm drifted to her back and kneaded her shoulder gently.

“Greer said something about having a hole inside and wanting it filled up. I’ve lived with that same emptiness for as long as I can remember. I never knew it could be filled,” he said softly.

“It must have been so hard on you as a little boy. Being separated from Greer.”

“When Ramona said that her mother called the girl in the photograph Sasha, I knew she was legit. Just hearing the name brought it all back. I’d forgotten it, but hearing her say it, I remembered. Remembered being there in my grandmother’s house and being so scared the day they took her in the ambulance. And then people came—strangers—and took my sister and me away. I don’t remember where we went or who was there; I only remember being afraid. And then my sister wasn’t there anymore. And I don’t really remember too much for a while after that. Just a lot of faces and confusion and not knowing what was going on. Nothing specific, you understand, just a feeling of confusion all the time, through that whole time in my life. I didn’t have the words for it then.”

“You were a very frightened little boy. All alone . . .”

“I’m afraid it didn’t bring out the best in me. I wasn’t a very pleasant child.”

“I don’t think anyone could blame you, Sean.”

“But everyone did. And with good reason. I mean, I was a really obnoxious kid. No matter where they placed me, no matter how nice the people tried to be, I wanted no part of anyone. I broke things, got into fights, was overly aggressive, and as I recall, had quite the colorful vocabulary in those days. No one wanted to keep me for very long.” He shook his head, remembering the child he had been. “I made sure of that.”