Impervious (City of Eldrich Book 1) (4 page)

Chapter 6

M
eaghan was lying
on her side on the settee, injured foot at an awkward angle on the ottoman. She pushed herself up. Groggy and disoriented, she looked around the yard. The dark forest of her dream was gone.

She fumbled for her cell phone on the floor boards under the settee. It was almost four. She’d been asleep for over an hour. That dream, what the hell was that? She recognized the hollow grief she hadn’t felt in years. For her mother. Waking felt like losing her all over again.

Meaghan shivered. The porch, now heavily shaded, was chilly without the early June sunshine. She stood up and tried putting some weight on her foot. Experimenting, she discovered she could walk on her heel, avoiding the rest of the foot, without too much pain.

She limped into the house. She stopped in the hallway bathroom, patted her nap-disheveled hair back into some semblance of its normal shape, and went to find her family.

Matthew and Russ sat at the kitchen table. Matthew worked on some kind of puzzle while Russ read a cookbook.

“Hi, Daddy,” Meaghan said, squeezing his shoulder. An unfamiliar wave of tenderness broke over her as she looked at him.

“I did my homework,” he said with pride. “All done, Becky, take a look.”

“Dad, that’s Meaghan,” Russ said, not looking up from his cookbook. “We see Becky tomorrow. At the hospital.”

Matthew sighed and looked up at her. “I don’t know what’s happening anymore.”

Meaghan leaned her cheek on top of his head. “I don’t know what’s happening most of the time anymore either.”

Matthew smiled up at her. “Becky’s never met Meaghan.”

Russ shook his head and put down the book. “No, Dad. She hasn’t. Maybe Meaghan can go to the hospital with us tomorrow.”

Matthew nodded, then sat up straighter. “Car in the driveway.” He jumped up with a spryness belying his age and headed for the front door.

Russ sighed. “Half the time he can’t hear you even if you shout in his ear, but he always knows when someone drives up. It’s like Duke and the fridge door.”

Duke had been their childhood dog. A scruffy German Shepherd mix, by age twelve Duke was stone deaf, except for the refrigerator door. He could be sound asleep upstairs under a bed, but if someone opened the fridge even a crack to peek in, Duke came running.

Russ got up to follow Matthew to the front door. “It’s probably Jamie. He said he’d stop by with some stuff for you to read when I told him you’d jammed your toe and wouldn’t be by for a few days.”

“Jamie?” Meaghan asked, in shock. “Jamie Smith, my
deputy?
Oh crap, Russ. Look at me.”

“Relax. You look fine. It’s Eldrich, not Manhattan. Nobody expects you to be all dolled up.”

Meaghan scowled. “I’d settle for bathed.”

Russ dismissed her with a wave of his hand. The doorbell rang. Russ trotted out to help Matthew with the front door.

Meaghan hobbled after him. So much for a professional first impression.

She knew Matthew had known Jamie since he was a boy. It was Matthew who encouraged him to go to law school and Matthew who gave him his first legal job clerking part-time in the solicitor’s office.

After several hours of relatively normal behavior, even if he still didn’t recognize his daughter, Matthew got weird again. She had a moment to register Jamie—tall, young, athletic build, wearing khakis and a black golf shirt, shy smile— standing in the hallway. Nervous to meet his new boss, she thought.

Then Matthew swept into a deep bow in front of him and said something in a language Meaghan had never heard before. He straightened up and smiled. “Welcome.”

Jamie blushed. “Matthew, it’s me. It’s Jamie.”

“I know who you are, Jamie. Your father is well?” Matthew accented Jamie’s name oddly, making it sound something like “szhumay.”

Meaghan gave Jamie a sympathetic smile while Russ came to the rescue. “Dad, it’s Jamie. Your old law clerk. He works for Meaghan now.”

“Russ, don’t interrupt,” Matthew said. “I’ve known the prince since he was a boy.” Matthew bowed again. “I am, as always, at your service.”

Jamie’s nervous grin smoothed into a deeper smile. He bowed his head. “For which I am always grateful, my friend.” He spoke in a slow, rich voice. He glanced up at Meaghan and winked. His eyes were dark indigo blue. If he were twenty years older, I’d be in trouble, Meaghan thought. Too young for her tastes, thank God, but a honey, no doubt about it.

Satisfied by this response, Matthew patted Jamie’s arm with a smile. “I’ll leave you kids to talk shop.” He ambled back to the kitchen.

Jamie took a couple steps toward Meaghan and held out his hand. “You must be Meaghan. I’m Jamie Smith. Welcome to Eldrich.”

Meaghan shook his hand. “I never thought of playing along. All day long he’s thought I’m somebody else. This morning he thought I was a witch. At least you get to be royalty.”

Russ coughed. Jamie stiffened for a moment, then shrugged. “It seems to make him happy.”

Again, she had the quick intuition of a lie—some shared information her brother and this young man didn’t want her to know. Too much stress, she thought. It’s making me nutty.

Russ served them lemonade and a plate of cookies, and left them alone in the living room. Jamie had brought her a copy of the city ordinance book along with some other documents—budgets, memos, a city organization chart. He had the Pennsylvania Code on a flash drive until she could access the online version at city hall.

Meaghan needed to get better acquainted with the specifics of Pennsylvania law, but it was familiar stuff after all the years she’d spent working in local government. With just over five thousand residents, Eldrich was small enough to keep the politicians from getting into expensive trouble. Shallow pockets meant less of a fiscal safety cushion, but also limited the range of bad ideas available to elected officials. A $100,000 boondoggle was much easier to clean up than a multimillion dollar one.

As if reading her thoughts, Jamie said, “Eldrich is kind of sleepy. Must seem like Mayberry after Phoenix. It’s not a badly run town, but things have slipped a bit since Matthew left.”

Meaghan shook her head with a smile. “I never actually worked for Phoenix itself. I worked for a couple of smaller cities and the county.”

“But it’s basically all one big city, right?”

“Yeah, sort of, I guess. Not as self-contained as Eldrich.”

Jamie chuckled. “Not as dinky, you mean.”

“Ouch. Am I that transparent?”

Jamie smile widened, his eyes crinkling. It was a freer happier expression than the nervous grin in the hallway or the smile he’d given Matthew. In that moment, she could see the boy he had once been. It was extraordinarily disarming.

He must be magic with a jury, Meaghan thought. What’s he doing in Eldrich handling municipal slip and falls?

“No,” he said. “You aren’t transparent at all, but I remember how I felt coming back here after law school in Philadelphia.”

“Which school?”

“Temple. Not in a great part of town so it was even a bigger shock to come back to Eldrich.”

Meaghan smiled. “Well, I’d be lying if said I wasn’t suffering Internet withdrawal and all the trees didn’t freak me out a little.”

Jamie leaned forward, now serious. “It’s hard to see your dad like this.”

It wasn’t a question for her, she realized, but a statement about Jamie.

“You’ve known Matthew since you were a kid?”

He nodded. “It was a bad time. We had to leave . . .” A moment’s hesitation. “We had to leave the place we lived really fast and got here with nothing. Matthew helped us get on our feet.”

“How old were you?”

“I was twelve.”

“And you’ve lived in Eldrich since?”

He sat back. “Not the whole time. I went to Mansfield University for undergrad. It’s real close so I got back to Eldrich on weekends a lot. And then the three years in Philly.”

“But you came back.”

“I did. I feel at home here. It’s safe. My wife had some culture shock at first. But she’s good with it now.

If he’d known Matthew for what must be almost twenty years, Meaghan calculated, then he must know something of their turbulent history. Best to deal with it right away.

“I guess you know Matthew and I haven’t been very close over the years.”

Jamie’s face flushed. “Uh, yeah . . .” He stopped, embarrassed.

Now it was Meaghan’s turn to blush. “I’m sorry. I put you on the spot there. It’s just . . .”

Just what? It would help to clear the air if she had to work with this kid every day. But beneath the pragmatism, she realized, lay jealousy, coiled like a snake. Jamie had found Matthew in his life at about the same age Meaghan had lost him.

She continued. “I know you’ve been closer to him than I have. I figure it’s better to deal with that upfront than tiptoe around it.”

Jamie nodded. “I get that.” He looked away from her. “I don’t . . . my father and I . . .” He met her gaze again. “I understand how things go wrong. And it’s none of my business anyway.” He smiled again, but it was restrained, sad even. “But you’re here now.”

He looked so woeful for a moment that Meaghan felt a pang of . . . maternal instinct? Like I’d know what that felt like, she thought. “I’m here now.”

The conversation was more casual after that. Less about work, more personal details, but easy. Two people getting to know each other.

His wife was named Patrice. He had two small children. His daughter, called Liddy, short for Elizabeth, was four and his son, Ben, was not quite two. With pride, he pulled out his cell phone and showed her some photos. Patrice was petite and lovely, with a determined set to her jaw. Liddy had wild curly red hair and Ben had his father’s blue eyes.

They lived in a pre-war Tudor cottage—another storybook house, Meaghan thought—in the newer part of town, within walking distance of city hall. Patrice worked as a nurse at the local clinic. By Eldrich standards, they were doing well. They didn’t need Patrice’s paycheck to get by, but Jamie said she loved her job and it kept her from going small-town bonkers.

In spite of herself, Meaghan’s cynical heart warmed. Jamie was a good man, with a good head on his shoulders, who loved his wife and his kids. He liked to fly fish and play softball. He was a normal, well-adjusted, all-American guy. With a wonderful little family. In a wonderful little town that was his refuge from whatever domestic nightmare he’d grown up in. His hasty arrival in Eldrich and his stammering references to his father suggested a troubled start in life.

And it hit her. The war. What her mother—what her
subconscious
, Meaghan corrected herself—had been trying to tell her. Did she hear somewhere through the years that her father was working with refugees? Given his age, maybe Jamie was a refugee? From somewhere like Bosnia or Kosovo? One of the countries in the post-Yugoslavian mess? The timeline fit.

That had to be it. She had found a highly dramatic way to put some disconnected bits of memory about Matthew and Jamie together. That meant her dream was not an omen of incipient dementia. She breathed an internal sigh of relief. Her mother delivering it and telling her to give her father a break was nothing more than familial guilt for not having been a better daughter.

Jamie’s English was flawless American and his name sure didn’t sound eastern European. But dropping the accent and picking up a quintessentially western name—honestly, James Smith? He might as well be named John Doe. Both acts fit a traumatized kid fleeing an ugly civil war and a messed-up family life.

He didn’t mention any other family and Meaghan knew well enough not to ask. She’d ask Russ for the details over dinner.

Jamie looked at his watch. “It’s after five. Gotta pick up the kids from day care.” He handed Meaghan a business card with his cell number and told her to call him if she needed anything, asked her to give his best to Russ and Matthew, and hurried out the door. She hobbled over to the window to watch him go. He got into a minivan—of course, Meaghan thought, I bet it’s full of stale Cheerios, broken toys, and softball equipment—backed with care out of the driveway and drove down Holly Lane.

Well, good for him, she thought. To get out of whatever post-Soviet hellhole he’d been born into and build himself a nice little life here in Eldrich. The perfect little American dream. Somebody ought to have one. She was glad it was him.