A Bad Day for Mercy (25 page)

Chapter Twenty-one

As Stella drove toward town, she thought about Alana’s insistence that Natalya was a scheming, demanding, greedy opportunist. Was that possible? Could she have been hoodwinked so thoroughly? Stella didn’t think so, but it was true that she wanted to like Chip’s sweetheart. It was more than that: After a lifetime of being a ne’er-do-well, Chip was finally showing signs of maturity, even settling down, something that would make Gracellen happy—and was that enough for Stella to overlook serious flaws in his choices?

Anyway, even if Natalya was operating on some whole other level of motivations and goals—hell, even if she was a murderer—Stella just couldn’t get her mind around the idea that she was the trashy gold digger that Alana made her out to be. Stella hated to think ill of any wronged woman, but Alana was just plain bitter, a spinster whose own man had run for the hills, who’d let both her home and her looks go—and who lost the one man who was still dear to her, her brother, to another woman.

So that left Stella squarely on the fence, right where she was before, about Natalya’s potential guilt or innocence.

On the subject of Alana herself Stella was no more certain. Oh, she was convinced that Alana hadn’t taken the insurance policy out herself, but was there some other way she could benefit financially from his death? A will, perhaps, that left her his house, maybe savings, investments? She’d have to have Chrissy get on that.

Alana was certainly an angry woman, but she would have been more likely to kill Natalya than the brother she seemed to genuinely love. Which brought Stella right back around to square one.

By the time she was halfway back to Smythe, it was afternoon, and her hunger pangs would not be put off any longer. She pulled over at the CheeseHaus, a barnlike structure on the side of the road.
WATCH US MAKE IT!
was painted on the side of the building. Stella suspected there was little on offer that was likely to enhance her training for the half marathon. She wondered what her training plan was for today—she vaguely remembered she’d given herself a light schedule for her birthday, probably stretches and a short jog around the neighborhood. Meaning that yesterday was probably a killer, a nine-miler, and tomorrow would be the same.

Instead she was getting ready to eat a cheddar sampler, and she hadn’t worked out in days. Which was okay if you were twenty. Or even thirty-five, like Camellia Edwards, who was probably tackling her own training today with her usual zeal, in one of her coordinated spandex outfits that showed off her tight little physique. Instead, Stella was fifty-one, and every day she didn’t train would be three or four to get back her lost momentum.

The thought didn’t cheer her. If she didn’t wrap this whole Wisconsin situation up quick, she might wreck her chances for the half marathon entirely. Not to mention Goat might lose enthusiasm for his promise to take her out to dinner for her birthday.

Okay. Stella took a deep breath and marched herself up to the counter. “I’ll have the
small
sampler,” she said wistfully, “and a Diet Coke.”

While she waited, she reviewed her problems. First, if she didn’t figure out who killed Benton, Chip might end up being blamed for it, and his splotchy record, while speckled with mostly victimless crimes, would not endear him to any potential jury who might be asked if he had what it took to off his girlfriend’s husband.

Then there was the possibility that Natalya really had killed Benton. Stella had a slightly different outlook than most people when it came to abused women taking the law into their own hands and ending the cycle in a decisive fashion, and not only because she herself had done it. She’d seen the damage that abuse could do, not just to the bodies of the wives and girlfriends who got smacked around but to their hearts and minds—damage that might not be apparent to the casual onlooker but would shape the rest of their lives. So there were certainly circumstances in which a woman was justified in killing.

The problem was that nothing Natalya or Chip or Alana or Topher had said had given Stella the idea that Benton was abusive enough to warrant killing. He sounded like a schmuck, it was true; and Stella certainly didn’t like the sounds of his belittling and controlling Natalya, nor did she think it was his place to hire out any nipping and tucking that she herself did not think of first.

If a woman came to Stella with tales of a marriage to such a man, Stella would consider taking the case—but with the understanding that what she was being hired to do was adjust an attitude, not end a life. Stella never killed for work, of course, but she did have a variety of more extreme measures that she saved for the worst offenders, including those that generally resulted in hospital time and vows to leave the state and stay gone.

Benton didn’t qualify for that sort of handling. So if Natalya had killed him, that was the sort of error of judgment, an overkill of an extreme nature, that would lessen the woman in Stella’s eyes, to put it mildly. She wouldn’t intervene and try to get Natalya arrested or punished—that was outside of her purview—but she couldn’t stand idly by and watch her nephew pledge his life to such a woman.

Stella’s ethics were clouded and complicated, but they still had a “right” side and a “wrong” side. She figured it was no different from anyone else—say, the Missouri state supreme court—who was called upon to walk that line every day.

There was yet a third problem. If Chip managed to stay unprosecuted, and Natalya ended up being innocent, that still left the problem of Luke. He was temporarily out of the way, down in Prosper nailing up siding with Dale Savage, but there was no way to safely bring him back here to Smythe or, given the way the Chicago and Detroit gangs were infiltrating the rural northern Midwest, probably anywhere in Wisconsin.

Even if Luke turned out to be the best tradesman apprentice in the world, and she could find someone in Prosper willing to take on a hired hand, there was still the issue of his age. Until he was eighteen, he legally needed to be housed and educated and fed and his own residence status pursued. Plus it wasn’t right to separate him from his mama, and despite her confusing tangle of issues and feelings around Natalya, Stella would lay odds she felt exactly the same way.

Of course … there was one neat way to tie up the last situation. One that helped out just about everyone involved, even if it would take a little convincing to make them see it that way. Stella thought about the idea from all angles as she nibbled her way through the pile of cheese slices and wedges and curds, washing them down with a second serving of Diet Coke.

She thought some more while she washed up in the spacious ladies’ room, nodding and smiling at her fellow travelers, satisfied folks whose own tummies were full of cheese, and who were going on their way laden down with bricks and slabs and wheels of Wisconsin’s finest.

By the time Stella was back in the little Subaru, letting it idle so it could cough out all the crud that had built up in its engine while she was having lunch, she figured that the idea was worth pursuing, at least in a very preliminary fashion.

She dialed Gracellen’s number.

“Stellie!” Her sister answered halfway through the first ring. “I’ve been wanting to call you all day but I figured I better leave the line open. I know how you are, always coming at things from eight directions at once.”

Stella didn’t correct her, but Gracie had come surprisingly close to the truth. “Well, I’ve made a few calls, trying to see what I could do,” she said carefully. Having shielded her sister and brother-in-law from some of the dicier revelations about their son so far, she would hate to accidentally spill the beans now.

“You’ve already done so much! Just letting us know that Chip is all right and that he’s on the right path—well, you just don’t even know the world of good you’ve done. Chess is out there on the rider mower right now. He’s practically bouncing off the walls he’s so happy. He wants to go out to his favorite restaurant tonight. Stella, he hasn’t wanted to go there for just ages, not since our anniversary … we always have a few glasses of wine and then we come home and get naughty.”

“Gracie!” Stella, who ordinarily was not particularly shy about the idea of folks enjoying their carnal sides, did not in the least care to hear about her sister’s.

“Oh, relax,” Gracie said happily. “Our family could use a little good news, what with Chester Senior so upset about the business and the economy and so forth.”

“Well … that’s kind of what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“It is?”

“Yeah. See, I’ve been thinking … I mean, I still need to look into a few odds and ends about … immigration law and whatnot, but if it does end up where Natalya gets her residence status and she’s free to be with Chip—I mean, you know, once things get sorted out with her divorce and all—”

Stella forced herself to stop and take a steadying breath. Outside the car in the next parking space over, a couple were wrestling a large golden wheel of cheddar into their trunk, the husband with one hand clapped to his foam cheese-head hat to keep it from blowing off his head.

“Oh, I do hope Chip doesn’t rush into anything foolish,” Gracellen interrupted. “Now that he’s just getting the rest of his life sorted out, he doesn’t need a woman complicating it.”

“Well, see, I think you might be a little late for that. I mean Chip really seems to love her. And Luke? What a great kid, you’re going to love him.”

As the silence stretched out between them and Stella imagined that Gracellen was trying to come to terms with the idea of an unwanted stepgrandson, Stella realized that she actually meant what she’d just said—Luke
was
a great kid, or at least had the potential to be, if someone or more likely several someones took a firm hand and set out to show him how things are supposed to work in this country. The Golden Rule, for instance—she doubted they ever got around to teaching that in Russian grade school. That would be a good place to start. Then they could move on to the Pledge of Allegiance, the whole liberty and justice for all thing, and capitalism and helping out your neighbor just for the sheer pleasure of doing the right thing. Heck, Todd had all kinds of hellion tendencies that had been tempered by his mother and Stella and his teachers—if they could calm his savage spirit, why, they could do the same for Luke’s.

Thinking of Todd pretty much sealed the deal. “I’ve been thinking—I mean, like I say, if the citizenship thing gets lined up—that maybe Chip and Natalya and Luke should come out and live with you guys, and Chip could take over the warehouse job.”

This time the silence was distinctly shocked. That was a sister for you—you could sense the quality of her silences, could read between the lines of conversations as easily as if she were holding up a large-print book and you were wearing your cheater specs.

“We aren’t exactly set up for guests,” Gracellen finally said. “I mean we’d love to have Chip, of course, and maybe that would be a good idea, a sort of reentry into society arrangement, almost like a halfway house—”

“You live in fucking six thousand square feet!” Stella exclaimed. “You got what, six bedrooms and four baths? Four garage stalls? Hell, you could take in an entire displaced village and hardly notice.”

“Well, it’s not only the space issue, though. I mean, Chess and I are set in our ways, it’s been just the two of us ever since we got together—”

“Well, maybe that’s part of the problem,” Stella said. “I mean, you guys—and I don’t blame you, Gracie, please don’t think that’s what I’m saying—you never had Chip living with you. I know Ilona would have made it tough, but that boy could have used a dad. You know I think Chess is a fine man, and he’s done a lot to repair what’s gone undone and unsaid between them, but you don’t want that to repeat a generation, now do you? Not when you could do something about it—”

“But Luke isn’t Chip’s son!”

“Not yet he’s not, but those two are talking about marriage and the boy doesn’t have a father figure, I don’t think anyone even knows who the father is, and even if they did, he’s all the way on the other side of the world.”

“You can’t ask Chess to take in a boy that’s no blood relation to him—”

“Gracellen Carol Collier!” Stella barked out her sister’s full name for the second time in two days and realized only after the syllables hung in the air that she sounded
exactly
like her mother, who reserved their full names for when she was very, very disappointed in her girls. “I mean, Papadakis. Whatever. You should be ashamed of yourself. You know darn well that blood ain’t the only thing that ties family.”

This time the silence was even longer. Finally, Gracie sighed, a long pained exhalation that Stella could hear very well over the phone, and one that signaled that she’d won. “I don’t have any
idea
what we’d even
do
with a little boy,” she grumbled.

“He ain’t all that little,” Stella pointed out, realizing she’d never got around to telling her sister much about Luke. “He’ll be in his senior year of high school in the fall. You wouldn’t even have him under your roof all that long, he’s practically grown.”

“You don’t say. But wouldn’t that make his mom kinda older than—”

“How about putting him to work on Chester Senior’s house, for a start,” Stella interrupted hastily. “You yourself said he’s got to unload that place and move to somewhere smaller, somewhere more manageable now that he’s old. You get Luke to fix it up and put it on the market, that would keep him busy all summer.”

“And then he’d start up at school? Does he speak proper English?”

“Oh my yes, probably better than most of the kids in the senior class.”

Stella willed Gracie to come around with all her might. Luke had the potential to blossom, she was convinced of it, and cute girls and fast food and civics class and football games would certainly help. A lot could happen in a year. With a passel of concerned adults on his case, among them a father figure and grandfather figure and even a great-grandfather figure—and the occasional visit from Stella, if necessary—they might be able to keep him away from the lure of the wrong road.