Maggy's Child (50 page)

Maggy obediently backed away, both hands on the pistol now, holding it steady. Her feet were braced apart to keep her balance as the boat continued to surge forward with no one at the wheel. Her finger stayed curled around the trigger. Her eyes never left Ham as he got slowly to his feet and turned around, facing her. The deck beneath her feet was slippery with blood, Lyle’s and the other man’s.

All she had to do was squeeze just a little tighter on the trigger, and Ham’s blood would wash the deck, too.

Staring at him over the motionless bodies, she remembered the night he had raped her in excruciating detail. She saw that he remembered it too. He licked his lips, and his eyes were wide with fear.

All she had to do was squeeze.…

A bright light caught her in its beam.

“Coast Guard!” came a stern voice. “Everybody freeze!”

Maggy glanced around to see a large white boat bearing down on them. The light shone directly into her face because the
Iris
and the Coast Guard vessel were approximately the same height.

“Magdalena!” Another voice came over the loudspeaker. “I see you and the kid, but where’s Nicky?”

It was Link.

“Cavalry to the rescue,” Nick said dryly, struggling to his feet. Ham, apparently realizing that the game was over, seemed to slump.

“Yo, little brother!” Link greeted Nick. Seconds later an armed, uniformed Coast Guardsman leaped onto the
Iris’
s deck.

Maggy lowered the pistol and glanced around for David. He came running, wrapping his arms around her waist.

They were safe.

T
here days later, Maggy rode with her son up the elevator that would take them to Nick’s sixth-floor hospital room. It was around four o’clock in the afternoon, a Wednesday, and she had just picked him up from school. He had a wrapped present that he had made for Nick that day in school in his hands. Maggy had no idea what it was, and he would only shake his head when she asked.

Everyone said, and she agreed, that he had come through the horror remarkably well. He had already started the process of mourning for the father he had loved when Lyle had first “died” weeks before. Sunday night’s tragic violence had not taken his father from him again: the man who had died on the deck of the
Iris
was not the man he had loved.

Maggy had tried to explain how Lyle’s mind had grown ill; she told David it had to have been ill for him to have committed, and planned to commit, the crimes he had. But she didn’t really understand herself, so she gave it up and called in a professional counselor to talk with David. After one session, the counselor pronounced David a “remarkably resilient child.” He suggested that David continue to visit him regularly for a while, but the counselor did not expect that he would have any problems. David seemed to adapt well to changing circumstances, he said.

She had told David the truth about his parentage. He
had heard Ham’s remark about Lyle’s being obsessed with “a kid who’s not even yours” as well as everybody else on the boat that night had.

“Was what Uncle Ham said true? Wasn’t Dad my father?” David had asked her on the way home from the police station, where they had all been taken to give statements about the events of the night.

Exhausted, drained, and worried about Nick, who had been conveyed straight to a hospital for surgery to remove the bullet that had lodged just beneath his right shoulder blade, Maggy had listened to the question and felt her stomach clench.

She had hesitated, her eyes troubled as they met his. Poor child, he looked as wiped out as she felt. His auburn hair stood up all over his head, his face was pale, and faint dark circles lodged beneath his eyes. He was still wearing the Batman pajamas under a blanket a kind policeman had given him to wrap around himself, and his feet were bare.

If nothing else, last night had proved that her precious boy was no longer entirely a child. He had asked, and he deserved the truth.

“No, Dad wasn’t your father. Not your biological father, anyway.”

He absorbed that. “But you’re my mother. My real—I mean, biological—mother.” His glance at her was just a little anxious.

Maggy nodded, emotion clogging her throat. He needed only to look in a mirror to be assured of that.

“Nick’s my biological father, isn’t he?”

Maggy’s eyes widened on her son’s face. Sometimes his perceptive abilities floored her.

“It didn’t take a genius to figure it out,” David said calmly, correctly interpreting her expression. “He is, isn’t he?”

“David …” Maggy began, then answered simply, “yes.”

“Does he know?”

“Yes. Yes, he knows.”

“I thought so. He’s been looking at me kind of weird, when he thought I didn’t see.”

“He loves you,” Maggy said helplessly. She was not prepared for this, had not had time to think out what she needed to say. Somehow she had to help her son understand …

“It’s okay, Mom,” David said, patting her hand. “I don’t mind. You made a mistake when you were young, and all that.”

“You,” Maggy said fiercely, wrapping her arms around him and holding him close, “were never a mistake. Never.”

She had told Nick that David knew, of course, the very same day. But neither David nor Nick had addressed the matter to the other directly. Of course, hospital visits tended to be short and rather artificial, anyway. Nick would be released on Friday, and then they would all of them just have to take it from there.

But with no prompting from her, David had brought Nick a present. Maggy took that as a positive sign.

As soon as they stepped off the elevator, Maggy heard Link’s booming voice. David heard it too and pleased her by quickening his step. He liked Link.

“Here’s the
real
hero,” Link proclaimed as David walked into the room. “We were already on the river when his Mayday came over the radio, but we had no idea where to look.”

Maggy watched David beam with pride as she smiled a greeting at Link and
Tia
Gloria, who had been released from the same hospital only two days before and now was back as a visitor, bearing a big bouquet of daffodils for the invalid. Crossing to Nick, Maggy dropped a casual kiss on his bristly cheek and turned to look at Link.

“What I want to know is, why were you on the river in the first place? How could you have known that anything was going on?”

Tia
Gloria said, “That was my doing. That night, I kept getting a bad feeling every time I thought about you. It was so strong that I tried to call you at Windermere at two o’clock in the morning. The phone rang and rang, but no one answered. I knew you were supposed to be there, with David and Nick. I
knew
something was wrong. So I got a message to Link.”

Link picked up where she left off. “I drove over to Windermere, found the doors open, the lights on, and the house empty. I jumped back in my car and drove down to the dock and saw that Magdalena’s little boat was gone. I knew you must be on the river somewhere. So I called the Coast Guard, and they picked me up. We were just starting the search when David’s Mayday came through.”

“I have one question,” Maggy said, eyes twinkling as she looked at
Tia
Gloria. “Are you telling us that you sent, and Link received, a
psychic
message?”

“My dear,”
Tia
Gloria responded, looking down her nose at Maggy, “when the matter is truly urgent, I use the telephone.”

Everybody laughed. Then Link clapped Nick on the knee and said, “Gotta go, little brother. Some of us have to work for a living, you know.”

“Tell Adams I’ll be back—in a month or so,” Nick said with a grin.

“I’ll tell him.” Link departed with a wave and an answering grin.

“I have to go too,”
Tia
Gloria said, having deposited her flowers on a sunny windowsill. “If you don’t object, my dear, I think I’ll run over to Windermere later this afternoon and collect Horatio. He must be badly stressed from all the excitement. He’ll start to lose feathers, you know.”

“Magdalena doesn’t object at all,” Nick replied for her in a fervent tone that made Maggy and David glance at each other and grin.

When
Tia
Gloria had left, David looked rather shyly at Nick. Nick smiled at him.

“What’s that?” he asked, indicating the parcel in David’s hand.

“I brought you a present,” David said and held it out to him.

David moved closer to the bed as Nick unwrapped the gift with due care. Maggy watched his face, and Nick’s.

When the paper came off, there was a silence so profound that Maggy glanced down to see just what kind of gift David had made. It was a pencil sketch of David, Maggy, and Nick standing arm in arm on the front porch of the farmhouse. They were smiling, obviously happy, obviously a family.

“Thank you, David,” Nick said softly, and the look in his eyes as he smiled at his son brought a lump to Maggy’s throat. Briefly she remembered David’s hopeful painting of her and himself and Lyle in the rose garden. The pictures were strikingly similar in type: the happy family, the pastoral setting, the spilling sunshine.

The primary difference was that Maggy could make the wish expressed in this one come true.

She closed her eyes against the tears that suddenly threatened, and sent a tiny prayer winging skyward:

Thank you, Saint Jude
.

This book is dedicated to:

My newest nephew, Stuart Blake;
the three men in my life—
Doug, Peter and Chris; and Saint Jude

Dell books by Karen Robards

GHOST MOON

THE MIDNIGHT HOUR

SEA FIRE

ISLAND FLAME

THE SENATOR’S WIFE

FORBIDDEN LOVE

HEARTBREAKER

HUNTER’S MOON

WALKING AFTER MIDNIGHT

MAGGY’S CHILD

ONE SUMMER

NOBODY’S ANGEL

THIS SIDE OF HEAVEN

Karen Robards is the author of twenty-three books. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky, with her husband, their three sons, and a sizable menagerie.

Read on for an excerpt from

THE LAST VICTIM

by Karen Robards

Published by Ballantine Books

CHAPTER ONE

If Charlie Stone hadn’t drunk the Kool-Aid, she would have died.

But in the random way the world sometimes works, the seventeen-year-old did drink several big tumblers full of Goofy Grape generously mixed with vodka, courtesy of her new best friend Holly Palmer. As a result, she just happened to be in the utilitarian bathroom off the Palmers’ basement rec room, hugging the porcelain throne when the first scream penetrated her consciousness.

Even muffled by floors and walls and who knew what else, it was loud and shrill and urgent enough to penetrate the haze of misery she was lost in.

“Holly?” Charlie called, lifting her head, which felt like it weighed a ton and pounded unmercifully.

No answer.

Okay, her voice was weak. Probably Holly hadn’t heard her. Probably the scream was nothing, Holly’s little brothers fighting or something. Seeing that it was around two a.m., though, shouldn’t the eleven- and thirteen-year-olds have been asleep? Charlie had no idea: she knew nothing about tweenie boys. God, she should have followed her instinct and just said no to the booze. But as the new girl in Hampton High School’s senior class, Charlie hadn’t felt like she was in a position to refuse. From the first day of school, when they’d found out they were sharing a locker, sweet, popular Holly had taken Charlie under her wing, introduced her around. For that, Charlie was grateful. The veteran of seven high schools in just over three years, Charlie knew from bitter experience that there were a lot more mean girls out there than nice ones.

A late August Friday night in this small North Carolina beach town meant the movies. Four of them had gone together. The other two had moms who were reliable about picking their daughters up after. When Charlie’s mom hadn’t shown (typical), Holly had invited her to spend the night. They’d wound up sneaking out to meet Holly’s boyfriend, Garrett—a total hottie, who had to work till midnight, which was past Holly’s curfew—and go for a ride in his car. Since he’d had a friend with him—James, not quite as hot as Garrett, but
still—
it had actually worked out pretty well, except for the whole toxic Kool-Aid thing.

They’d driven to the shore, plopped down in the sand, and shared the concoction Garrett had mixed for them while they talked and watched the waves.