Kit, too, mourned that photograph's loss. "What was the picture like? How did she look? Did she seem happy?"
Margo seemed to come back from someplace even farther away than Kit had been. She studied him for a long moment. "You're still in love with her. Aren't you?"
Kit managed a pained smile. "Does it show?"
"Well, you're crying..."
"Am I?" He swiped at his cheeks. "Damn..."
Margo dug in a pocket and held out his hanky. She'd laundered it somewhere. "Here."
Kit managed a shaky laugh. "Thanks, imp. You've rescued my reputation as an unflappable time scout."
She started to say something, then stopped.
"What? Whatever it is, say it. Or ask it."
Margo frowned. "It's nothing much. just... Everything I ever heard or read ...Mom used to say you grew up a dirt-poor Georgia boy, had to scrap and fight for everything you had I used to think about that, sometimes. It made me proud, knowing you'd made it, but ...I always thought..."
"You thought I ran out on Sarah van Wyyck? Because she stood in the way of my plans?"
She flushed, but her silence answered the question.
"I loved your grandmother very much, Margo. But sometimes even when people love one another, they have different dreams, different goals. Your grandmother's life and mine...it didn't work. Probably never would have worked. But I still loved her, even when she left me."
Margo's eyes widened. "She left you?"
Kit cleared his throat. "At the risk of sounding like my granddaughter, mind if we talk about something else?"
Margo blinked. Then she said, "I guess we all have stuff it hurts too much to talk about, huh?"
"Yeah. I guess we do."
She gave him a funny little smile. "Did you ever go back to Georgia?"
"No. I didn't really see much point. You plan on going back someday? To Minnesota?"
Her face hardened. "Yeah. I do. But not for very long."
"Unfinished business?"
She sniffed. "Something like that." She shook herself slightly. "Anyway, that's about it for my life's history. I had a twin brother, but he was killed in the big quakes caused by The Accident. That's when my folks left California and moved to Minnesota. I don't really remember it. I was just a baby." She shrugged. "I grew up, left home, came here. The rest isn't worth telling."
Kit thought it would have been, but didn't want to press the issue. He'd already learned more than he'd dared hope. A daughter, a grandson both lost to him and a granddaughter who didn't like snow and thought tabloids were stupid and was the kind of person who'd go back and settle old scores. Or maybe debts. Just what sort of unfinished business did she have and with whom? She was hardly old enough to have made the kind of enemies Kit had occasionally made. An affair of the heart, maybe, despite her protestations that she hadn't been jilted. A man didn't have to jilt a girl to make her want to come back and settle affairs. Sometimes all he had to do was fail to notice. Or fail to act. Or maybe it was simply that she needed to repay someone who'd helped her buy that ticket to New York. Or...
Maybe someday she'd trust him enough to tell the rest.
Kit spotted Malcolm heading their way from Residential, an honest-to-goodness picnic basket slung over one arm, and decided to let his granddaughter have her picnic without Grandpa hanging around. "Well, here comes your lunch date. I guess I'd better tackle that paperwork. Just do the fish a favor and don't flip Malcolm into the pond between the sandwiches and the desserts?"
The sparkle came back to Margo's eyes. "Okay. Although after what Sven did to me, I don't think I could flip a soda straw into the fish pond,"
Kit rumpled her hair affectionately. "Good. Proves you're doing it right. See you at dinner, imp."
Her smile brightened his whole mood. "Okay."
Kit returned Malcolm's wave, then headed back up to his office. Very deliberately, Kit switched the camera view on one particular video screen, leaving his grandkid her privacy. Besides, with Malcolm Moore as chaperon he didn't really have anything to worry about. Kit chuckled, recalling the full-blown panic in Skeeter Jackson's eyes when he'd cornered that worthy and made matters crystal clear, then settled down to the bills in a better frame of mind than he'd enjoyed in days.
Two days into Margo's weapons training, Kit started getting bad news. First came the altercation on Commons when a drunken tourist accosted her. She flipped him straight into a fishpond, almost as though deliberately recalling his advice not to toss Malcolm into one. Bull Morgan had not been amused when the drunken idiot turned out to be a billionaire who threatened to sue. Fortunately, Margo had plenty of witnesses for Kit to counter-threaten with sexual assault charges. The billionaire had slunk away down time on his tour, muttering into his expensively manicured beard.
Kit told Margo, "Next time, try not to dislocate shoulders or drown importunate perverts. Nothing excuses his behavior, but there's such a thing as overreaction.."
She had sulked for hours. He supposed he couldn't blame her. Frankly, if he'd been there, the jerk might've suffered more than a wrenched shoulder and a publicly humiliating dunking into a goldfish pond. But as a scout in training, she had to learn self-control and alternative methods of extricating herself from sticky situations.
Then he checked in with Ann and Sven.
"She has the attention span of a two-year-old," Ann Vinh Mulhaney complained. "Either she doesn't want to learn or she's afraid of the guns."
"She wants to learn, all right," Kit said grimly. "But she wouldn't admit to fear of a live cobra in her shower stall if she thought I'd halt her training over it."
Ann frowned. "That's not good."
"I know."
Kit ran a hand through his hair. After their heart-to-heart by the fishpond, Kit knew it would be doubly-triply-difficult if he had to tell Margo her dreams weren't going to come true. His heart was still in his throat just thinking about letting her scout. He didn't know what he'd do if he lost her, too. But he wanted as much as any other grandfather on the planet to make his grandchild happy. If he had to tell her two days into training that it was hopeless ...
"Is there any hope?"
The tiny firearms instructor hesitated. "Well ...maybe. Her hand is, very steady and she has a good eye. When she's actually shooting, she scores well. But she won't apply herself to the learning. Has she been doing her homework?"
Kit frowned. "Homework? Not unless she's doing it in the library. She drags in like a half-dead cat, gulps supper, then collapses for the night. I didn't think it was possible to wear out an eighteen-year-old."
Ann didn't smile. "She needs to study. She keeps forgetting basics, like working the pump on the pump shotgun. Then she gets angry with herself when it won't function like a semiautomatic. The double-action revolver isn't a problem, but the self-loading pistols ..." Ann just shuddered. "I haven't even tried historical firearms yet. I don't dare."
"Great. I'll start working her on basic firearms mechanical actions while she eats."
"Good She needs it."
The story was much the same from Sven. The stocky martial arts instructor saw him coming from across the weapons range, clearly considered ducking out the nearest exit, then visibly braced himself.
"That bad?" Kit asked without preamble.
"Kit," Sven growled, "you got a big problem in that kid."
"You don't need to tell me that. All I get these days is trouble. Let me guess. She won't apply herself to the learning."
"Oh, no," Sven shook his shaggy head "She's nuts to absorb the stuff, fast as I can teach her. And she's good, for a novice. Problem is, her attitude stinks."
"What about her attitude?" Kit asked tiredly. "In a thousand words or less."
Sven's evil grin came and went. "Rough, is it? Teenagers. If they weren't so cute, we'd drown 'em."