For the Love of Jazz (5 page)

His eyes, so dark and unreadable, met hers. “I’ve never had another friend like him. Not a day goes by that I don’t think of him.” The simple cotton button-down shirt stretched tight across his shoulders as he jammed his hands in his pockets. “Not a day goes by that I don’t wish I could undo that night.”

Tears burning her eyes, she turned her head. A lump in her throat made speech nearly impossible. “Jazz, I don’t have anything that I can say to you that will change things. I can’t offer you absolution. But I don’t hate you, and I’ve never wished you ill.”

Without another word, she left.

* * *

Little Annie, all grown up. And damn, but did she grow up nice. He hadn’t recognized her, not that it was too surprising. It had been more than fifteen years. And she was already a doctor—Jazz did the math in his head and figured she’d probably graduated early. Not too surprising. Annie had skipped second and sixth grade, and that was before Jazz disappeared from her life.

No telling how many grades she’d skipped in high school, or how fast she’d managed to get through college. Briarwood was a small town and their school system wasn’t equipped to handle kids as smart as Anne-Marie had been. So instead of accelerated classes, Annie skipped grades. Alex had been like that too, although Jazz suspected Annie pushed harder. Would explain why she skipped grades as easy as some kids could skip stones, and why Alex had only skipped the fourth grade.

As he drove down the two-lane highway, Jazz realized coming home was going to be harder than he had thought. It might have been easier if Anne-Marie had looked at him with hatred instead of sadness. Hatred was so much easier to deal with than disappointment.

“She was pretty, wasn’t she, Daddy?”

Glancing in the mirror, he smiled at Mariah’s reflection. She sat in the patterned, pink booster seat with her favorite pink T-shirt splattered with blood and probably some ketchup from the hotdog she was chowing down on. “Not as pretty as you are,” he told her and he meant it sincerely. Thick spiral curls tumbled down her back, around her face, curls the color of midnight. That inky black came him from him but the curls came from Sheri. Her eyes were bluer than cornflowers and her skin was all ivory and peach. Those eyes and her complexion were another gift from her mother. Jazz’s skin was swarthy and dark and it had nothing to do with time spent out the sun.

His pretty little girl looked like a china doll. How something that beautiful had come from one brief, rowdy affair with a friend of his high-class editor was beyond his comprehension.

Giggling, Mariah said, “You always say that.”

“And I always mean it.”

“Am I gonna be ugly now?” she asked mournfully.

Muffling a chuckle, Jazz told her, “Honey, you could bump your head two hundred and sixty two times and never be ugly.”

“’Kay,” she said, a yawn stretching her mouth wide. “Miss Jackie gave me a sucker. And she said Dr. Anne is the best.”

“I bet she is,” he said absently.

“Is she gonna be my doctor now?”

“I dunno. Maybe,” he said, stalling. He wasn’t so certain how Annie would feel about that, though. She wasn’t going to want to take care of the child of her brother’s killer. Not even sweet Saint Anne-Marie.

“Is that what y’all were talking about?”

Glancing down the highway, he moved into the opposite lane to pass around a slow-moving farm truck. “She was telling me how to take care of your pretty little head.” Jazz didn’t see how a parent could be a parent without telling little white lies from time to time.

“I hope she is my doctor. She smells nice.” Her voice was getting slower and softer, and in the rearview, he saw her eyes drooping closed.
And lucky me
, he thought wryly.
I have the pleasure of waking her up every couple of hours now.
He’d willingly wake up every two hours for the next ten years to make sure she was okay, but it was going to make for one long-assed night.

Jazz was faintly surprised that toddlers and preschoolers could even suffer head injuries. Their heads seemed rock hard. At least, Mariah’s did.

Passing by the bright lights of the Shell station, he flicked on his turn signal and took the turn that led to their new house. Bought outright, with money he had hoarded over the years. It was going to require a lot of work to make the house look the way he wanted. Built at the turn of the last century, it needed a new roof, needed new paint inside and out, and the wraparound porch was going to have to be completely redone. Not to mention the plumbing was outdated, and probably the wiring. It needed work and it was going to take time and a lot of money.

As fate would have it, Jazz now had plenty of both.

Jazz had always planned to come home, home to Briarwood, to face his past. He wasn’t going to fail on those plans, even if the local townsfolk decided they didn’t want him around.

He just hadn’t expected his reckoning to come so soon. He hadn’t expected to come back for a few years yet. He had wanted to settle himself a bit more, maybe have another baby with Sheri. But then her headaches had started, severe ones that nearly blinded her. By the time she had gone to the doctor about them, the tumor had grown to monstrous proportions. Surgery was out of the question and the chemo had failed. Within months, Sheri was dead, leaving Jazz alone with a three-year-old. Jazz and Mariah were the benefactors of a surprisingly large life insurance policy, along with a college fund Sheri had started.

Two years after she’d gone, Jazz woke up one morning and found himself staring at the condo they’d shared and he realized he hated it. He hadn’t liked it much when they picked it out, but it was close to the city and although Jazz could work from home, Sheri couldn’t. He looked around at the stark, sterile rooms and realized without Sheri there, the place felt empty.

It wasn’t a good place to raise a little girl. So here they were, the owners of a ramshackle, falling-down excuse of a house that needed more work than a ghost town needed ghosts. With a sigh, he pulled into the rutted excuse of a driveway. The driveway needed work, too. But first, the house.

Oh, man, the house. What in the hell had he been thinking? Even if he didn’t have to worry about the roof, the wiring, the painting or the porch, there were still the bathrooms, the carpet and the basement—oh man, he didn’t even want to think about the basement. Walls had to come down in some places and go up in others, and the kitchen was totally outdated.

In the faint moonlight, he studied the century-old farmhouse. Yeah, it was going to take a long time and a lot of sweat to make this place work. But, once he got going, it would be a sweet reprieve over the way he’d spent the past few years. When he wasn’t chasing after Mariah and being both Mom and Dad, he was trapped in front of a computer, facing his nemesis, Vance Marrone.

Vance Marrone, ace detective, lady’s man and general jackass, was the creation of Jazz McNeil’s mind, and his own worst enemy. Man, he hated Vance, hated writing about him, hated making money off of him. It hadn’t been so bad when he first started, plunking out that first story while recovering in a VA hospital when a training op had ended badly. Badly as in him nearly losing his leg and having to spend three weeks in the hospital and six months in rehab.

Back then, Vance had kept Jazz sane, but he made the big mistake of sending the book off to an agent. She sold it almost instantly, landing him his first modest advance. The second book hit a little better and each one garnered more and more readers and he ended up signing more and more contracts. By the fifth book, he was tired of Vance Marrone, but he still had four more books to fulfill his contract.

He would have been done with those five years ago and he had plans to write something else, but then—well, life happened. Sheri happened. The baby came along and then Sheri got sick. All the money in the world wouldn’t have been able to save her, but he’d tried anyway, agreeing to five more books. Sad thing was by the time he got the first part of the advance, Sheri was already dead.

He was now on the last book of that contract and he suspected it wasn’t going to go over well. Jazz was going to kill Marrone off. Maybe then he’d have some peace and quiet and could write something worthwhile. He even had a contract—a smaller house, one that focused on sci fi and fantasy. They couldn’t pay him anywhere close to the advances he’d gotten used to but he could write the story he wanted to write, instead of what he had to write. Every new Marrone book seemed to take longer and longer to write and he spent hours each in day in front of the computer, obsessing over a character he hated and not focusing as much as he’d like on the one important person in his life.

Now that he didn’t have to worry so much about the money, he was going to take the time to write the book he wanted, take more time to be the father he wanted to be to his little girl and work on the big old farmhouse, making it into a home for her.

With a sigh, he shut off the engine and climbed out of the Escalade. He slung Mariah’s bag over his shoulder and released her from her booster seat.

“Are we home, Daddy?” she asked sleepily, rubbing at one eye with a closed fist.

“Yeah, honey. We’re home. Your head okay?”

“Uh-huh. I’m sleepy, though.”

“Going to bed right now, girl,” he promised, shifting her to his right arm so he could dig out his keys. The door creaked loudly as he pushed it open, and that jumped to the top of his list of things to fix tomorrow. That and the leaking faucets in the kitchen and bathroom.

“Where are my jammies?” she asked.

“On your bed, where we left them this morning.”

“Are they dirty?”

“Not until tomorrow. We’ll go find some place to wash them then,” he told her, rolling his eyes. He couldn’t have had a messy child. No, he had a little lady from her head to her size six feet. She might spill stuff all over her clothes but the minute she did, they had to come off and clean clothes put on. Added up to a lot of laundry. Which was why getting a washer and dryer was one of the next things on the list tomorrow.

“What ’bout my bath?”

Sniffing loudly at her neck, like a puppy, Jazz announced, “Smell good to me. We’ll take a bath in the morning, okay?”

She nodded sleepily again. “’Kay. I’m sleepy, Daddy.”

She was out before he even got her buttoned into her Scooby Doo pajamas.

Resigning himself to another sleepless night, he headed for the makeshift office he had in the little alcove at the end of the hall. Might as well get some work done. As the computer booted, he jogged downstairs and started some coffee. Pausing in the doorway of the kitchen, one hand curled around the cup, he surveyed the mess spread out before him.

What in the hell are you doing here
?

It wasn’t the first time he had asked himself that. Jazz doubted it would be the last and he still didn’t know the answer. He only knew the night sixteen years earlier haunted him, the lack of memories of that night haunted him. He needed some answers.

He prayed that in trying to find them, he wouldn’t cause Desmond and Anne-Marie any more pain.

* * *

“Daddy?”

Desmond laid down the medical journal he had been studying as he looked up to smile at his only child. It only took one look for his smile to fade. “You do look terribly serious standing there, Anne-Marie,” he mused, studying his daughter. Her eyes were dark and turbulent. “What’s the matter, honey?”

“Jazz is back.”

Jazz.

Immediately, Desmond could see the boy Alex had befriended, tall for his age, sulky, defiant, with anger burning in those dark eyes. It had been sixteen years since he’d last seen Jasper McNeil. How many times had he thought of that boy over the years?

“Is he now?” he murmured, leaning back in his chair, folding his hands over a belly he kept flat with rigorous exercise. It wouldn’t do for a cardiologist not to be fit. He had people drive from all over the south to see him and he took that responsibility seriously. If he was going to lecture them on the benefits of a heart-healthy diet, then he could also follow his own advice.

If he snuck some doughnuts every now and then, a cigar here and there, well, every man was entitled to a few vices.

“Is he really?” he murmured, thoughtfully tugging at his lower lip.

Knowing he was not asking for confirmation, she remained silent, seating herself in the leather wing chair by the window. She studied her neatly trimmed and buffed nails, the small capable hands that had tended Mariah McNeil’s head wound the night before.

“You’ve seen him?”

“Last night. He has a daughter now,” she responded, explaining how he had come to the office after hours—and how Shelly how forgotten, again, to lock up when she left.

“Anne-Marie, I know that you’re feeling sentimental towards Shelly, her being your momma’s cousin and all, but don’t you think that you’ve made a few too many allowances for her?” he asked absently, while his mind turned over the fact that the boy wasn’t a boy any longer. No, now he was a father, apparently a good one, or Anne-Marie would have made that clear already. “You really do need to hire a temp until Marti gets back.”

“Marti’s due back this week. I can do three more days.”

Still pondering how he felt about Jazz, he said, “I imagine you can—but remember, next time, it is okay to tell family
no
.”

She grimaced. “Oh, I’ve learned my lesson.” She didn’t pry or mention Jazz again—that was his little girl. She knew him well—as she should. She was just like him. They’d talk about something when they were ready and not a moment before.

Jazz, however, might be an exception. Desmond certainly wasn’t ready to talk about his son’s best friend yet, and he didn’t know that Anne-Marie was either.

“So he’s come home,” he mused, shaking his head. “How does he look?”

Thinking back, Anne-Marie finally answered, “Tired. Haunted.” Gorgeous, she added mentally. She rose, then, wandered over to the window, running one finger over the polished pane of glass, smudging it. “I don’t hate him, Daddy. I never thought I did, but I always wondered how I’d feel if I saw him again.”