Acts of Mercy (28 page)

“Who is she?” Tom put his newspaper down.

“She was Fiona O’Neill. Remember? Little Nora on
McGuire, Boston PD?
You used to watch it all the time when it was on.”

“Oh, yeah.” Tom nodded. “It’s still on cable. That was Sam’s Fiona …?” He turned to look at his brother, who still appeared dumbstruck. “Sam? You look like you didn’t know, either.”

Sam shook his head. “Completely blindsided me. I had no idea. She never mentioned it.”

He walked from the room and went upstairs, where he called her number.

“You’ve reached Special Agent Fiona Summers. Please leave a message …”

Damn.

“Fiona, it’s Sam. I know your secret. I don’t give a crap about any of that. Just call me and let me know when you’ll be back so I can be there when your plane lands.” He paused, then added, “I’m sorry for your loss. I hope you’re okay.” Another pause while he debated whether or not to tell her about Drew. He decided against it. She looked as if she’d had enough for a few days. There’d be no avoiding it once she returned, but for now, he skipped it. “Anyway, call me when you get this. Please.”

T
he call came at seven the following evening, just as they were finishing dinner.

“It’s Fiona,” she said, as if he wouldn’t recognize her voice. “I’m on my way back.”

“Where and when?” he asked.

“I’m being dropped off in Brightcliffe. We looked at the map, and that appears to be the closest airport to Blackstone. If it’s too far, I can—”

“No, no, it’s not a problem. What time does your plane land?”

“A little after two in the morning. I’m sorry, it’s such an odd time, but the offer was made and I hated to turn it down and then try to get a commercial flight.” She paused. “Did you know there are no direct commercial flights into Nebraska from here? Not even into Omaha.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’ll be there.”

“Thank you, Sam. I’ll see you soon.”

Sam waited to hear her hang up before he did, and then slipped the phone back into his pants pocket. He walked outside and looked around at the vehicles in the yard, then went back into the kitchen where Kitty
was feeding the agents in shifts. She was an accomplished cook who wouldn’t hear of them driving in to town to eat.

“Luke,” Sam motioned to him from the doorway. “Could I speak with you for a minute?”

“Sure.” Luke excused himself from the table where he’d just finished eating, and followed Sam out to the back porch. “What’s up?”

“I need to use your car,” Sam told him.

“Sure. Where are we going?”

“
We
aren’t going anywhere.
I’m
going to pick up Fiona.”

“No can do, bud.” Luke shook his head. “I’m here to keep an eye on you. There’s no going off the reservation.”

“First of all, I agreed to have you guys here to keep an eye on my family. I can take care of myself, but I can’t watch everyone else at the same time. That’s why you’re here. Look, I won’t be leaving until after midnight, and I’m only going to be driving for an hour.” Well, it would be closer to two, but what was the difference? “Fiona is on her way back. I told her I’d pick her up at the airport.”

“Sam, what if this guy’s watching the house? He follows you? Game over.”

“Even if he’s watching the house—which I doubt, since everyone has to sleep at some point—he won’t know it’s me driving the car. The windows are tinted. I’ll even let you loan me your spiffy jacket with FBI on the back. He won’t know who’s behind the wheel, so he’d have no reason to follow me.”

Sam sensed that Luke was softening, so he added,
“Fiona and I have some things we need to talk about. I’d do it for you, Luke.”

“Are you carrying?” Luke asked.

“Not at this moment, but I have my Glock upstairs. It’ll make the ride with me.”

Luke took the keys from his pocket and handed them over. “If anything happens …”

“Nothing will. I’ll be back before anyone knows I’m gone.”

“If you’re not here when I get up tomorrow morning, I’m putting out an APB. And I’m telling Mancini you stole the keys.”

“Fair enough.” Sam pocketed the keys and slapped Luke on the back. “Thanks, buddy. Let’s go back in and see if Kitty is serving dessert yet. She makes one mean peach cobbler …”

The drive through the Nebraska countryside was dark but fast. The road ahead was practically a straight line through farm fields that seemed to stretch on forever. The night sky was clear and the stars as bright as he remembered. There was no other place he’d been where they’d shone more brilliantly. A very rare wave of something that was not quite homesickness washed over him. It wasn’t that he was sorry he’d left, or that he wanted to stay, he told himself, but it was good to be back, if only for a little while. He hadn’t had much of a home these past few years—only a small apartment he moved to after he moved out of the house he and Carly had shared—and he hadn’t been aware of how much he missed that feeling of warmth and acceptance and genuine
affection he found when he came back to the farm, to his family. It had been comforting, and it had been a while since he’d had much comfort from any quarter.

There were no cars on the road at so late an hour, and with the company of late-night talk radio, Sam breezed along the highway at a fast clip. He remembered how, as a young driver, he’d traveled this empty stretch of road in his dad’s pickup, feeling like the only life-form on an alien planet. Somewhere in the dark there were night creatures on the prowl, but from behind the wheel of that old Ford truck on a starry night, a guy might feel as if he’d landed where no man had gone before, as the expression went.

From time to time he looked in his rearview mirror to see if anyone was coming up behind him, but no one did.

Far up ahead he could see faint lights, and he knew he was nearing the airstrip. He was early, so he slowed down, changed the station from the endless chatter about the upcoming Nebraska football season and by how many points they could be expected to best each opponent, and searched for some music. He’d been hoping for some soft rock, but settled for country, and knew he was lucky to find anything at this hour of the night.

He passed the tall cyclone fence that surrounded the small airport and took a left into the parking lot. There was a sprawling one-story concrete-block building between the lot and the runway, and one door that had a light over it, so he went inside, where he found a closed ticket desk and a couple of vending machines. The clock over the door leading to the runway was eight minutes fast, according to his watch,
so he searched his pockets for change for the soda machine and dropped the coins in. A can landed with a thud that reverberated through the empty room, attracting the attention of the night watchman, who came out of a side room to see who had invaded his space. He and Sam made small talk until they saw the lights from an approaching plane. Sam stood in the window and watched the small craft land effortlessly. Moments later, the plane’s door opened, and steps appeared. Fiona had a bag over her shoulder and another in her hands. She was wearing a white shirt and a black linen skirt that looked as if she’d slept in it.

Sam tossed his soda can into a trash container and went out to meet her halfway across the tarmac. He put out one hand to take her bag.

“I have it,” she said. “But thanks.”

“How was your flight?”

“Very nice.” She seemed to be deliberately keeping about a foot between them. Sam wasn’t sure why, but he let her have the space.

She turned back to the plane, and watched the steps retract, the door close, and the plane ready to take off again. She stood in silence till it had taxied down the runway, taken flight, and disappeared into the night sky.

“Whose plane, if I might ask?”

“It was Hugh’s. His son, Matt, offered to fly me back here on his way to Chicago. It was the quickest way, so I said yes.” She smiled weakly. “Of course, his wife and kids were on the flight as well, and I’d forgotten just how loud a bunch of teenagers could be. Still, it beat hanging out at LAX by a country mile.”

The security guard waved and called out, “Night,
folks” as they passed through the building, and Sam returned the wave.

“It’s so quiet out here,” Fiona whispered, as if afraid to break the silence.

“Nothing around for miles,” he noted. “Well, there is Brightcliffe, about a mile and a half through that pasture.” He pointed across the road. “But they rolled up the sidewalks hours ago.”

He unlocked the car and put her things in the trunk.

“Did you come by yourself?” She frowned. “Why didn’t someone come with you?”

“No need. No one followed me, I can guarantee that. The road between here and Blackstone is straight and flat. There’s nowhere to hide if you’re trying to tail someone. I didn’t see but maybe one or two cars on the way out here, and they were both headed in the opposite direction.”

“I didn’t mean for you to take any risks, Sam.”

“I haven’t.”

Then, to change the subject, he asked, “Are you hungry?”

“Not so much.”

“I don’t know why I asked that.” He rubbed his hand over his face. “There’s nothing around for miles except the vending machines inside, but the offerings looked pretty stale to me.”

“Really, I’m fine.” Fiona buckled her seat belt.

“We’ll be back at the farm soon. There’s lots of stuff there to dig into.”

He started the car and drove out of the lot and onto the highway. Within seconds he was up to what he considered traveling speed. He sat back, trying to think of something to say to her.

Before he could come up with anything that he didn’t think sounded lame, Fiona said, “I’m sorry that I left like that. I should have explained, but I was blindsided when I got the call about Hugh.”

He looked across the console and met her eyes. “Well, I’m sorry, too. I’m sorry that your friend died.”

“He was more than just a friend, Sam. He was the father I needed but didn’t have.”

“I thought your parents were still alive.”

“They are, but they never treated me as if I were their child.” She stared out the window for a moment. “I’m guessing you saw some of the coverage of Hugh’s funeral, that you saw me there. You were probably a little surprised.”

“Everyone saw you there, and yeah, everyone was surprised, to say the least. Me, in particular. A little background right about now might be nice.”

“I’m not sure where to start.”

“Try where the story begins.”

“My parents started me in commercials when I was six months old. They found it could be quite lucrative—I was a pretty baby and apparently quite animated—so my mother quit her job to take me to auditions and shoots. I got an agent and she got me a lot of work. When I got a little older, everyone thought I should be on TV. I got lucky, got picked up for a couple of walk-on scenes, then a couple of small speaking parts. Right about then, my mother decided she’d be a better agent than the one I had—the one who’d gotten me all the work—so she fired her. From then on, my mother, as my agent, and my dad, as my manager, controlled my career. When I was four, I auditioned
for the part of the lead’s daughter on a new show called
McGuire, Boston PD
. I got the part. Much to everyone’s surprise, the show lasted for nine seasons.”

“It shouldn’t have been too much of a surprise,” he said. “It was a damned good show. Drama with the right touch of humor.”

“You’ve seen it, then.”

“When it first ran, yeah, I did. I never connected you with little Nora McGuire, though.”

“No reason you should have. They thought Nora should be this angelic-looking little girl, so they dyed my dark hair blond. As soon as I could, I went back to my natural color.” She was staring out the window again. “Anyway, my parents were the stage parents from hell. They were totally into the Hollywood TV scene. By the time I was nine or ten, I just wanted out. I was going through a very self-conscious stage, and I didn’t want to do it anymore. But when I told my mother I wanted to quit, she went nuts. Went on and on about how I had an obligation to my family, that if I quit I’d be taking the roof from over their heads, and how could I do that to my little brother and sister, not to mention to my parents, who had given up their lives so that I could follow my dream of being a TV star.”

“Was it?” Sam asked. “Your dream?”

“When I first started, it was fun. I can’t deny that. Everyone paid a lot of attention to me, made a big fuss over me. But after a while, it became suffocating. I couldn’t go anywhere without people approaching me. I had no friends because I was either studying or on the set most of the day. I became very shy around
kids my own age because I didn’t know any. I didn’t know how to interact with other children. So it all got old very quickly. It didn’t take long for me to figure out that it wasn’t my dream I was following, it was my mom’s. She liked the spotlight, liked being Nora McGuire’s mother.”

“Sounds like they were getting a lot more out of it than you were.”

“You have no idea, Sam,” she told him. “I grew to hate the whole thing. The only real friend I had was Hugh Davenport, my TV dad. When I got upset, he was the one who calmed me down. When I was depressed, he talked me through it. When I needed help with my homework, he worked with me between scenes. He was the one who gave me advice, he was the one I turned to when I needed someone to talk to. After a time, our TV roles sort of slipped into our real lives. He was more of a dad to me than my real dad ever was. Sometimes he took me home to be with his kids and do things with them—he had three sons and two daughters. He and his wife were the parents I needed, the parents I’d wished my mom and dad would be. There was so much warmth in their home, and never any in my own.”

She smiled in the darkness. “Hugh understood what I was going through because he’d been a child star, too. He saw my parents pushing me into roles I didn’t want—I made a movie every year after the TV season ended. He saw how lonely I was, and he even tried to talk to my folks, but they just got pissed off at him. Anyway, by the time I was about seven, I decided I wanted to be just like him. I wanted to be a
cop, just like the one he played on TV. I never wanted to be anything else.”