Kilander nodded but didn’t speak.
“Chris… how many people do you think know about Diaz?”
“Well,” Kilander said, “if a young uniformed deputy knows, what does that suggest to you?”
Oh, God. The first raindrops were starting to fall, nearly as light as mist. “Everyone,” I said.
Kilander moved a little closer. “The young man who said that to you is a cretin,” he said. “Sarah, other people will come to the same conclusion I have about you. Their instinct will tell them so; your conduct will, too. And when Diaz’s investigation comes up short, your career will recover.”
I took a steadying breath. “Thanks,” I said. “I mean that.”
Only Liam was up when I reached the Hennessy house that night, studying late over a cup of decaffeinated coffee. I declined his offer to brew some for me. Instead we talked for a moment or two about Shakespeare; Othello, in particular, which he was writing a paper on.
Just before I left him, I asked, “Did anything happen today? Anything strange, or uncomfortable?”
Liam caught the trend of my question. “You mean, with Aidan?” he said. “No.”
“After he’s been gone so long, and everything that’s happened, are you comfortable having him here?” I pursued.
“It’s different now, having him back,” Liam said slowly. “Uncomfortable? No.” He paused, as if thinking, but his next words were quite simple. “I mean, he belongs here. He’s our brother.”
24
For the next few days, I stayed close to the Hennessy kids, spending nights at their home. What surprised me was how easily they accepted my presence. I’d forgotten what it was like to be a teenager, how easily any adult in your life becomes Authority. Parents, teachers, principals, coaches: kids so easily ceded their privacy to them, and apparently, to the Hennessy kids, I was one such figure.
They went about their lives, and in what seemed good spirits, too. A week from Friday was the last day of school outright for Donal; Colm, Liam, and Marlinchen had one more week of final exams after that at their high school. In their activity, their chatter in the mornings before school, I heard both their anxiety about impending tests and their exhilaration at the prospect of freedom to come.
It was Aidan, though, whom I paid closest attention to. After his first night back, exhausted and disheveled from the road, he’d metamorphosed into someone who looked strikingly different. Once washed, his hair was as gold as Marlinchen’s, and hung perfectly straight in a ponytail. In fact, if I’d been seeing him for the first time, that’s what I would have noticed about him, the clean straight lines, like a kinetic sculpture, from the blond hair to the long legs. I never saw him without his hair pulled back in a ponytail, or without his necklace of tigereyes on a leather cord riding against the collar of his T-shirt.
The oldest Hennessy did nothing that troubled me; he also did nothing that particularly reassured me. He was unusually quiet for a teenage boy of his size; I rarely heard him enter a room, or leave it. He sneaked cigarettes sometimes behind the freestanding garage; other times I’d see him smoking under the magnolia tree. Once or twice I saw him looking at me, but what he was thinking, I couldn’t tell. The second time I said, “What?” but he merely shook his head and said, “Nothing.”
On the job, my week was equally uneventful. The stocking-mask bandits knocked over their fourth business, this time a liquor store in St. Paul. I didn’t have to do any investigating, but I got a heads-up call from a St. Paul detective, and I faxed my notes on the prior cases over to him.
Saturday dawned hot, and was expected to break temperature records. I slept until we were well into the heat, when there was a knock at the door and Marlinchen stuck her head in.
“Are you hungry?” she said. “We’re making waffles downstairs,” she said.
“I could eat,” I said.
Marlinchen nodded. “I wanted to ask you for a favor, later in the day.”
I rolled onto my side. “You want to ask later, or the favor is for later?” I asked.
“Dad’s getting a lot better,” she said, ignoring my teasing, “and I wanted to take everyone to see him. In the hospital.”
“Everyone?” I said. “You guys won’t all fit in my car.”
“I know,” Marlinchen said, “but there’s Dad’s ride.”
The Suburban in the garage. I shook my head. “No,” I said. “I shouldn’t be driving your father’s SUV.”
“It’ll be okay,” she said. “It’s insured through the end of August.”
“Well, if it’s insured,” I said.
Marlinchen, missing the sarcasm, seemed happy. She came to sit on the end of the bed.
“It probably needs to be started up anyway,” I said, “or pretty soon you won’t be able to.” I thought of Cicero, the van he told me about that he sent the neighbor boys down to start up, and that thought led to another. “Hey,” I said, “what’s the story with the BMW out in the detached garage?”
“Oh, that,” she said. “It was Mom and Dad’s a long time ago. It stopped running, and Dad put it away. He said he was going to fix it up someday, but he never did. I guess it has sentimental value. He absolutely will not sell it.”
“He was going to fix it up?” I said. “I thought your father was worthless with tools.”
Marlinchen looked rueful. “He is,” she said. “But you know guys and their cars. It’s a love thing.” She extended a hand to me. “Anyway, get up, lazybones. The guys are downstairs burning all the waffles.”
I let her pull me up. “Tell you what,” I said. “I’ll go to the hospital, but you can do the driving honors. You need to keep practicing.”
Typically, she hedged. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never driven the Suburban before.”
“You’d never driven my Nova before, either,” I pointed out. “There’s a first time for everything.”
“He’s made a lot of progress in his physical therapy. Speech, not as much.”
Freddy, the serene male nurse I remembered from my first visit to the convalescent hospital, was leading us back to a visiting room in the rehab facility.
“He can hear you fine, so don’t talk too loud. But it’s best if you keep your statements open-ended and don’t ask him any questions he’d feel obligated to try to answer. We’re keeping the pressure off.”
The visiting room was pleasantly crowded with green plants and lit by wide glass windows. Near them, in a padded rocking chair with a quad cane at his side, was Hugh Hennessy.
Only Marlinchen seemed truly comfortable in this environment. She entered first, the rest of us following her. Freddy pulled up a chair by Hugh’s rocker; Marlinchen stood on its other side. Colm, Liam, and Donal took a nearby couch, and Aidan and I stood, just beside the couch.
Moments earlier, in the parking lot of the hospital, the twins had shared a quick, quiet conversation.
“You can stay out here,” Marlinchen had told Aidan. She was holding a potted ivy grown along a frame in the shape of a heart; we’d stopped for it on the way over. “Everyone will understand.”
The same thing had occurred to me; I’d thought it odd that the son who called his father Hugh was intent on accompanying his sister and brothers on this charitable visit.
“It’s okay,” Aidan said. “I’ll go in.”
“Are you sure?” Marlinchen said, wanting, as always, to avoid unpleasantness of any kind.
“I’m not afraid to see him, Linch,” Aidan said, and the note of iron did a lot to explain his determination to be here, not to shy away from the man who’d exiled him years ago.
“That’s not what I meant,” she’d said, looking down, sunlight flashing off one of her earrings. But they’d discussed it no further.