Embers (5 page)

Uncle Bill, however, wasn't interested in everyone else's day; he was interested in the new man at the table. Uncle Bill had money — he'd sold his hardware store at the peak of the boom in ‘87 — and as a result he tended to respect other people who had money. He wanted to know how much respect Tom Wyler deserved.

"
So
.
Whatsit you do for a living, Mr. Wyler?"

Tom Wyler disliked being asked that question so much that he usually did what most cops do: hung around people who already knew the answer to it — other cops.

But he wasn't among his own kind now. He was at the table of an odd bunch who seemed to enjoy picking on one another almost as much as they enjoyed eating. The Waltons, they were not. And yet they weren't mean. He'd experienced mean, up close and personal, like the time his third foster father threw a coffee cup across the table, opening an inch-long gash on his forehead. Wyler still had the scar to remind him of his nightmare youth.

"I work on the
Chicago
police force," Wyler said as vaguely as he could.

Allie chimed in with, "He was even on the cover of
Newsweek!"

"Well, now, that sounds interestin'. What exactly do you do?"

"I'm in
…
ah
...
homicide."
Dammit.

"Homicide!"

The usual electric current rippled through his audience.

"A homicide officer in
Chicago
.
Well,
now," mused Bill Atwells. "‘Course, the idea of needin' a man — much less a team — just for trackin' down murderers is a little hard to fathom. Worst thing
we've
had lately was a break-in at the day-care center; stole three hundred fifty dollars in bake-sale proceeds. Shocked us all. But
homicide;
well, now. That's different." He sat back in his chair with his arms folded across his beefy chest and nodded. "Ayuh."

Terry gave Wyler a skeptical look from under half-lowered lids. "You don't look like a homicide cop," he said as he pulled absently on Coughdrop's ear. "What's your rank?"

"Lieutenant."

"Let's see your badge."

"Whist!"
warned his mother. "You're far too bold, child."

"Comfort, don't scold him," said Allie, laughing. "This is the most the boy's said since I've been home. Anyway, Terry's right," she said, turning to Wyler with a smile that kicked his hormones into overdrive. "You
don't
look like a detective. Tell us something really scary. Tell us about a serial killer."

"Allie, there is a time, and there is a place."

It came from her older sister. Wyler had noticed during dinner that Meg Hazard was acting more like a mother than a sister to Allie. But it was obvious, at least to him, that Allegra Atwells had no interest whatever in being mothered anymore.
That
ship clearly had sailed.

"Something really scary
...
" Wyler repeated, stalling for time.

He could tell them that the severed head they'd found in the sixth district did end up matching the body they'd found in the fourth. Or he could tell them about the minister raking the leaves of his front lawn who was gunned down in a drive-by shooting intended for his neighbor. Or, he could tell them about the little girl's face, little Cindy's face, with a bullet hole in it.

"I'm afraid
all
homicides are scary," he said tersely.

But Timmy, for one, seemed eager to show how up-to-date he was. "Mostly shootings, right? Nowadays everything's guns," he said sagely, pressing his fork into the last of his crumbs.

"Is that how you got hurt?" asked his twin brother Terry, narrowing his steel-blue eyes. "You were shot?"

"That's a long story," Wyler said, deliberately laying his napkin on the table and pushing his chair back. "But it's not tonight's story."

Christ,
he thought.
They're like a bunch of trial lawyers.

"Okay, boys, now that you've guaranteed we'll never have Mr. Wyler as a paying guest
...
" Meg said, throwing him a wry, sympathetic smile. "How about you clean up these  —"

"I
remember
that dollhouse!" Everett Atwells shouted, emerging from a very private revery.

He'd said little during the meal; Wyler had a hunch that Everett Atwells liked having his older, louder brother there, taking charge. But now
Everett
's mild manner and vague expression were transformed: he was like a kid who'd remembered, finally, where he'd left his slingshot.

"Ma used to tell us about a dollhouse when she came home at night, that it was a magical place where sprites and fairies lived. Bill? You remember?"

His older brother shook his head. "Nope. But then, I wasn't the one pinin' away for Ma every day like an abandoned puppy. And you not a kid, either. What were you, fifteen, when Ma —?"

Everett
hardly heard him. He was somewhere else, another time, another place. The sudden flashback to the summer of '47 was clearly a gift, and he was overjoyed to have it.

"I remember now!" he said with rising excitement. "Ma said the dollhouse had a nursery just like the real one in Eagle's Nest. And there was a nursemaid doll just like her, only the doll's uniform was longer than the fashion then, and Ma said — yes, I remember this! — she said the fella who was repairing the dollhouse actually shortened the dress to match the hemlines of ' 47."

A beatific smile lit up his face, as though he'd made a quick stop in heaven. "God almighty, Bill! How can you not remember?"

The twins exchanged looks, and then Terry snorted and said, "A grown man, playing with doll clothes? What is he, a pervert or somethin'?"

Comfort Atwells sucked in her breath.
"Not
another word, Terrence Atwells. Leave the table this instant. The rest of your pie can stay right where it is.
What
kind of talk!"

Timmy got shooed away next and screamed bloody murder over it. "What'd
I
do? I didn't do anything! Can I at least have the rest of his pie?
Ma-an
...
"

That left the grownups, if you counted Allie as a grownup. And Wyler was doing exactly that. The whole Atwells family was interesting to him, the way any cohesive group was interesting, whether they were cops on a squad or kids in preschool.

But Allegra Atwells! She was mesmerizing. No question, she was every man's fantasy. Violet eyes; full lips; hair the color of a gleaming clarinet
...
no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't take his eyes off her.

****

From across the table, Meg Hazard watched Tom Wyler with a mix of amusement and pity. Lieutenant Wyler had fallen into The Trance. She knew it, and everyone else at the table knew it. Like everyone else, Meg could just be nice and ignore it.

Or not.

"Well, Mr. Wyler," she said, following the direction of his gaze. "You look like you're ready for bed."

The detective flushed and said with obvious irony, "You seem to've read me like a book, Mrs. Hazard."

Like that was so hard.
"We don't stand much on ceremony around here, Mr. Wyler," she said, letting him off the hook. "So if you want to pack it in for the evening — feel free."

She added a wry smile. "I think you'll find most everything you want in your room, except an extra blanket. Don't let this heat wave fool you; our nights get cool. I'll bring you a spare."

"Don't bother, Meg; I'll get the blanket," Allie volunteered, jumping up from the table.

"No, you won't, Allie-cat," Everett Atwells said with a benign and fatherly smile. "Meg's been running you ragged ever since you got here. You're having a nice cup of tea with me in the parlor; you can catch me up on all your news. Trouble with our Meg is, she forgets there's more to life than work."

"Silly me," said Meg, rolling her eyes at Allie. "Whatever was I thinking? Comfort — great meal, as usual."

Everyone agreed and then everyone took off: Everett Atwells, with his newfound daughter; Lloyd, for a rendezvous with the furnace; Comfort, with a stack of dirty dishes; and Meg, with the limping detective at her side. Only Uncle Bill stayed behind, with his Dutch Master cigar and his bottle of Canadian Club, ruminating. They let him be; it was his way.

"I seem to have made myself pretty obvious back there," Wyler said when he and Meg were alone in the upstairs hall.

"Everybody does; we're used to it."

"She's very beautiful."

"Yes."

"How old is she, anyway?" the detective ventured as they stopped to pull a blanket from a linen closet in the hall.

"Allie? Oh, she looks twenty-five, but don't let that fool you; she's really seventy-two."

He laughed — a musing, pleasant laugh.

It was nothing new, this relentless cross-examination about her younger sister. Even so, Meg was a little disappointed in Tom Wyler. She'd have thought a
Chicago
homicide detective would be less
...
impressionable, somehow.

"And she's still not married?"

"Nope. No one wants her."

"What?"

"That's another joke." Meg looked him in the eye and smiled. Really, men could be so pathetic. "Actually, Allie does have fewer boyfriends than you'd think; a lot of them are intimidated by her looks. Well, here's your blanket, and here's your room — holler if there's anything your heart desires."

Again, the suggestion was innocent enough; but it brought the telltale flush back to his neck.

My, oh, my, he really
did
take a hit,
Meg thought, oddly dismayed.

"Look, ah
...
Meg
...
I want you to know I'm grateful for the room. I know it's an intrusion."

"Not at all," she lied. "What's another body, more or less?"

His mouth curved upward in a dark smile. "Funny — I hear that line all the time in my work."

Suddenly Meg remembered what he did for a living and wanted him out of the house. It was instinctive with her, like turning off the television if the twins were watching and the news was violent.

"Good night, then," she said abruptly.

Meg spent the rest of the evening answering inquiries and working up the numbers for the Inn Between's quarterly tax return. She kept one ear cocked to the hall, listening for strange footsteps, but the only sounds were the clicks and whirs of the calculator on her battered oak desk. The family was on its best behavior; the halls were unnaturally quiet. It was a school night, so the chances were good that Timmy was doing homework, and excellent that Terry was playing Nintendo. Comfort had retired to her room with her needlework; through the plaster walls Meg could hear the soft strains of a Barry Manilow tape.

There was no sign of Lloyd, which probably meant that the furnace was resisting his amateur's efforts to make it hum. Meg would've liked to go down and see what was what, but she didn't want to give Allie, trapped in a tête-a-tête with their father, the chance to escape. Allie was best off where she was.

Bleary-eyed by eleven, Meg changed into cotton pajamas and was brushing her teeth with cold water in the bathroom down the hall when she heard Allie say softly, "No, no, go back to sleep."

Meg popped into the hall. "Go back to sleep
who?"
she asked her sister.

Allie, smiling, shook her head and held an index finger to her lips, then continued on to Meg's bedroom. By the time Meg caught up to her, Allie was peeling away her blue jeans and tossing them on a wicker chair alongside the iron bed that Meg had brought back with her after her husband's death.

"Tom was out like a light," Allie explained, pulling a man's white T-shirt over her head to sleep in. She blew a kiss to the cover of
Newsweek
that she'd tacked on the wall facing the bed. "Poor thing."

"For Pete's sake, what were you doing in there anyway?" Meg could not keep the annoyance out of her voice.

"Meg,"
her sister said, picking up on it at once. "I was just checking on him. He
is
hurt."

"Hurt, schmurt. You can't go barging into a stranger's room. He's a cop. He might've had a gun."

"He does have a gun. Hanging in a holster on the bedpost."

"Oh,
great."

"What's the big deal? It's not as though we haven't all seen guns."

Meg was fuming. "It's one thing to have a hunting gun stored under lock and key, and another to have a pistol hanging fifteen feet away from where a potential juvenile delinquent is sleeping. Have you ever heard the term 'attractive nuisance'?"

Allie, stretching her locked arms in front of her, let out an enormous yawn. "You're making way too much of this, Meg," she said, pulling back the quilt and getting tiredly into bed. "God, I'm exhausted. This dollhouse thing has really set Dad off. We just went all through The Formative Years: 1942 — 1947.
You
should've been there, not me; you care so much more about ancient history. Who gets the wall?"