Never Too Late (16 page)

Ah. Here it was. What they had traveled three thousand miles to learn. His heart pounding, he leaned forward. “Stole her back? How did you do that?”

She ignored his question, her eyes focused on Kate with such a fierce look of concentration Hunter wondered if somehow they were finally beginning to unwind the gauzy layers of memory. Maybe this damaged woman with her vague eyes and her worn-out body was beginning to reconcile the child to the woman.

Brenda stared at Kate for a long time, her dark eyes intense, then a radiant smile burst out, broken tooth and all. “Chocolate pudding is my favorite. What’s yours?”

Kate’s gaze shifted to his and the anguish in her eyes cut his heart to shreds. She swallowed hard a few times then mustered a grim facsimile of a smile. “Um, I like rice pudding. And tapioca.”

Brenda rocked with sudden sharp laughter, one pale hand clapped over her mouth to contain her glee. “Ew. Tapioca tastes like fish eggs. I only like chocolate and banana.”

Hunter broke in before she wandered off again about pudding. “You said you found Kate again,” he said, trying to draw her back. “Where did you find her?”

Brenda didn’t seem to mind his efforts to shepherd her through the conversation. She smoothed a finger over the construction-paper portrait, that hard, used-up face gentling a little. “They hid her from me but I always looked for her. You can’t take a baby from her mama. It’s wrong. Don’t you think it’s wrong?”

Hunter couldn’t think how to answer that so he just nodded.

“Me, too. I looked and looked for her and one day I was driving my car and there she was. My little girl. My Katie.” Her voice took on a defiant edge. “She was mine and they shouldn’t have taken her so I took her back and we ran away where the bad people couldn’t find us.”

“But they did, didn’t they?” Kate spoke up, her voice rough, strained. “She was taken away from you again, wasn’t she? And this time you didn’t want her back.”

The sly defiance on Brenda’s features just as quickly turned to anger. Her face suddenly turned an alarming puce and her thin, nearly concave chest started heaving violently. “Go away. I don’t want you here. Go away! Where’s my pudding? Where’s Jane? I want my pudding!”

By the end she was nearly shouting, flailing her arms around violently, and Kate rose and laid a gentle hand on Brenda’s arms.

“Okay. Okay,” she murmured in a slow, nonthreatening voice she undoubtedly used with children in her medical practice. “We’ll get you some pudding.”

She had reached for Brenda’s bony hand and it took Hunter a few moments to realize Kate was taking the woman’s pulse.

“I think it’s best if you rest now while we buzz for Jane, all right?”

Somehow Kate seemed to stow away her own distress at dredging up this painful past. Her voice was brisk, professional, but still calming. “Let’s get you back into your bed now.”

Hunter had never been very comfortable with strong emotion. The Judge certainly hadn’t encouraged it in his only son. Bradshaw men were strong, stoic, invincible. They certainly weren’t supposed to throw temper tantrums or—God forbid—shed tears about anything.

Hunter had made a conscious decision to follow his father’s somewhat bloodless example rather than the wild pendulum of his mother’s mood swings. Angela Bradshaw had enough strong emotions for all of them, with bitter, angry episodes or bone-deep depression followed with jarring, dizzying speed by frenetic gaiety.

Her bipolar disease had made his childhood unpredictable and precarious and he had never been sure when he came home from school whether she would smother him with kisses when he walked through the door or screech and yell at him for some infraction or other.

His father’s way was safer. He had learned that even before the bitter humiliation of his arrest. In jail, he had done everything he could to shut off whatever stray emotions might flicker through him at odd moments. He couldn’t afford to feel in prison, to show any sign of weakness, of fear or anger or bitterness. So he had shown nothing. Had become nothing.

But as he watched Kate carefully tuck in this woman who had brought her nothing but pain—who had stolen her from a happy, healthy home life and thrust her into a dark and terrifying world he could only imagine—all those emotions he had suppressed for so long rose up in his throat and threatened to choke him.

He was appalled at the burn of tears behind his eyes at her gentleness. He blinked them away, grateful Kate was too busy tending to Brenda to see the telltale sheen of moisture.

How could she do it? he wondered. Show compassion and kindness to the catalyst of her pain?

A nurse responded quickly to Kate’s page. The infamous Jane of the extra pudding, she noted by her name tag. She was blond and round, in hospital scrubs printed with grinning cats.

“What’s this now?” the nurse asked as she helped her transfer Brenda from the chair to the bed.

Though she wanted nothing more than to run out, away from this sterile room and this wild, tangled rush of emotions, Kate forced herself to focus on Brenda’s physical symptoms.

“I’m afraid our visit has agitated her. I was concerned about her color and her pulse rate is nearly one-fifty.”

“Oh dear. We can’t have that now, can we?”

Kate watched the nurse tuck in the blankets, then pick up the crayon drawing Brenda had been showing them from the floor where she had dropped it in her frenzy.

She slipped it through Brenda’s curled fingers and Kate was startled to see the silly, childlike crayon drawing seemed to have some kind of calming effect on Brenda.

Not sure how to identify the odd emotion tugging at her insides, Kate watched her clutch it like a talisman.

The nurse’s voice was calm, soothing. “Take a nap now and when you wake up, you’ll feel better, just in time for lunch.”

Brenda nodded, obediently closing her eyes like a child expecting a birthday surprise when she opened them.

Kate didn’t expect her to sleep but their visit must have sapped her energy reserves, obviously low. A moment later her breathing slowed and her thin chest began to rise and fall slowly.

The nurse waited until she slept, then picked up Brenda’s chart off the end of the bed and made a few notations.

“How often does she have these episodes?” Kate asked.

The nurse’s gentle demeanor with her patient turned cool as she surveyed them. “I’m afraid federal privacy regulations prevent me from talking to you about her condition.”

“I know all about HPAA. I’m a doctor.”

“Not
her
doctor.”

Kate drew a breath into lungs that felt tight and achy. “No,” she agreed. “But I also know you can speak with immediate family. I’m her…”

She faltered, not quite knowing how to complete the sentence. “My name is Kate Spencer,” she finally said. “But I legally changed it to that when I was eighteen. Before that, my name was Katie Golightly.”

The nurse’s eyes widened with shock, her arms going slack. “Oh my word! You’re Katie! She talks about you all the time. I thought you were dead!”

Emotions crowded Kate, too many for her to handle at once. She pushed them all away for now. “No. I’m very much alive.”

“And a doctor! She never said a word.”

“Can you tell me about her condition? I know she had a TBI a few years ago but that doesn’t account for all her symptoms.”

Jane fidgeted with the chart but not before Kate saw evasiveness war with compassion. “Perhaps you should talk to her doctor. I’m sure Dr. Singh would have no problem with you studying her charts. He should be in this afternoon.”

“I won’t be here that long. We’re just passing through.”

That information apparently didn’t sit well with the nurse. Her amazed expression gave way to disapproval. “I see.”

She didn’t. She couldn’t possibly. How could this stranger understand the layers and layers of emotions here when Kate herself couldn’t comprehend them?

She decided to try a different tack. “One of the first things Brenda talked about when we arrived is how you’re her favorite nurse. She said you give her extra pudding.”

Jane’s sudden coldness eased enough for her to smile a little. “It’s just a little thing but it makes her happy. She does like her pudding.”

“Please. You seem like a kind woman. All I’m asking is for a little information.”

The nurse studied the drawing clutched in Brenda’s hands then looked at Kate again. “She has cancer. Non-Hodgkins lymphoma.”

She digested this and its implications. “AIDS?”

Jane’s slow nod confirmed what Kate had already begun to suspect. Non-Hodgkins lymphoma, though it can appear in the regular population, had a greatly increased frequency in people infected with the AIDS virus.

She supposed she wasn’t really surprised by the grim diagnosis. Brenda’s lifestyle as a drug user and sometime prostitute made her a prime candidate to acquire the virus.

“Full blown,” the nurse said, her brisk voice a contrast to the sadness in her eyes. “She’s already had pneumococcal pneumonia twice this year. The cancer seems to be in remission for now but as I’m sure you know, it’s very hard to control in AIDS patients. She could relapse any time. I’m very sorry to have to tell you this way.”

Kate studied the wasted frame sleeping on the bed, suddenly awash with sorrow and regret for this woman who had lived such a hard life. What had led her down this road? she wondered, slightly ashamed of herself for never bothering to find out.

She knew very little about Brenda’s history. Those weren’t the kinds of questions a child asks a mother, especially one as unstable as Brenda, and as a teenager, she had been too angry and bitter at her for not letting the Spencers adopt her that it never would have occurred to her to dig into her past.

“Look, I’m going to give you my cell number and my pager number in Utah. Will you put it in her chart and have someone contact me when…when her condition changes?”

Jane looked at her for a moment, then to Kate’s surprise she reached out and squeezed her fingers. “I will.”

She bustled out of the room, leaving Kate and Hunter alone.

“Do you want to wait until Brenda wakes up and talk to her again?” Hunter asked after she left.

Kate touched the frail hand holding a crayon drawing, then lifted her gaze. “No. I don’t want to upset her again. There’s nothing for me here.”

No answers to find and no one to blame.

Chapter 14

S
he was shutting him out, building walls around herself more effectively than all the concertina wire in the world.

Hunter’s hands gripped the steering wheel as his Grand Cherokee rattled over yet another of Henry Flagler’s bridges. Water surrounded them on both sides, stretching out as far as the eye could see. There might as well have been an ocean between him and Kate too, he thought.

She sat beside him, her face as composed and serene as a burial mask, but he knew damn well it was all an act. He had seen her eyes when they walked out of that nursing home, had seen the raw emotions in those lovely blue depths.

But somehow through the past hour she found a way to hide it all away while they picked Belle up from their cottage, checked out and headed through the merry holiday traffic away from Key West toward Miami.

Until they were on the road, she had kept up a steady stream of cheerful, light conversation. Every time he tried to draw the conversation back to Brenda and their interview with her, Kate either answered him with a monosyllable or ignored his question altogether, deliberately changing the subject.

She was shutting him out and he couldn’t do a damn thing about it. Worse, he didn’t have the first clue how to handle the hurt pulsing through him that she wouldn’t let him reach her, even after all they had shared these last few days.

“You know, you can’t keep doing this forever,” he said suddenly.

He couldn’t read her eyes behind her sunglasses but he saw one thin eyebrow arch above the curve of tortoiseshell plastic. “Keep doing what?”

“This game of duck and run. You’ll have to talk about it sometime.”

She leaned her head against the seat. “I know. But not yet. Please, Hunter.”

How could he ignore that entreaty in her voice? He had certainly had plenty of experience burying his emotions down deep. If she wasn’t ready to talk about what had happened with Brenda Golightly earlier, he wouldn’t badger her.

“I don’t remember when I’ve ever been so tired,” Kate said as the tires spun along the raised highway. Would it bother you if I try to sleep for a while?”

“Of course not,” he said, uncomfortable with the guilt pinching at him. Neither of them had slept much the last two nights. He couldn’t seem to get enough of her—all she had to do was smile and he wanted her, with a fierce hunger that didn’t ease even in the warm, peaceful aftermath of their love-making.

They would steal small slices of sleep but most of their nights—and days—had been spent in each other’s arms.

Now Kate would barely look him in the eye, at least not without the buffer of her sunglasses. He tried not to feel hurt when she curled up on the seat, her back to him, but it sure as hell felt like a rejection.

Ignoring the sting and the deeper sense of loss at the apparent end to the closeness they had shared, he fiddled with the radio until he found something classical and relaxing.

“That’s nice,” she murmured with a soft smile over her shoulder. “Thank you. I don’t need long. Wake me in an hour or so, would you?”

He didn’t expect her to sleep. More likely she would feign sleep to prevent him from badgering her more about Brenda.

After a few miles with the gentle music and the low hum of the tires as her lullaby, soon Kate’s breathing slowed and those slender knotted shoulders relaxed.

Good, he thought. She needed the rest. No matter what kind of bright, cheerful face she tried to put on it, he knew the visit to the nursing home had been draining for her.

He exhaled slowly. It hadn’t exactly been a piece of cake for him either. Even the reading of the verdict in his trial hadn’t seemed as stressful as the morning they had just endured, maybe because by the time the jury had rendered its verdict, Hunter had already resigned himself that conviction would be inevitable.

The case against him had been a strong one and public sentiment had run high that he was guilty.

What had they learned from Brenda Golightly? Kate would probably say nothing they didn’t already know but in the past few hours Hunter’s subconscious—the part of his brain that used to always be working a case even when he wasn’t aware of it—had been busy formulating a theory.

From what little she said, he would bet his new SUV that she had given birth to a child named Katie Golightly around the same time Charlotte McKinnon had been born to Sam and Lynn McKinnon. Perhaps in Nevada, perhaps somewhere else. Kate had a birth certificate that showed her as being born to Brenda and an unnamed father so presumably a Katie Golightly once existed somewhere.

Judging by what Brenda had said, he surmised that the child had been taken away from her.

She was mine and they shouldn’t have taken her so I took her back and we ran away where the bad people couldn’t find us. That’s what she had said.

He would talk to Gage McKinnon about following the paper trail to see if a child was removed from her custody in Nevada in the months prior to Charlotte McKinnon’s kidnapping.

All this was speculation, but judging by the woman’s history of substance abuse and borderline mental illness, he could guess she was probably high that fateful summer day when she happened to drive through the McKinnons’ Las Vegas neighborhood.

She must have seen Charlotte playing in her yard. In a drug-induced psychosis, it would have been easy for her to convince herself the child was Katie Golightly, that she was only taking back what was hers.

Would this information give Kate any solace? He doubted it. But at least she might be able to reach some kind of understanding, a peace of sorts. Despite her problems, Brenda had obviously loved her daughter and grieved for her loss enough to try to take her back.

He shifted his gaze from the road for a moment to Kate’s curved back. He had wanted so much to help her, to ease her tumult, and his failure gnawed at him.

Maybe if he could have helped her, some of his own sense of inadequacy would have dissipated a little. He had spent his time behind bars living each moment with the sobering knowledge that for all his skills as a detective, he had been powerless against the fates that conspired to put him on death row. This morning had been a grim reminder that for all his freedom now there were sometimes circumstances in life he couldn’t control.

He couldn’t control his feelings for Kate. Despite his better judgment—and his best effort—he had fallen in love with her, for all the good it did him. He planned to keep that little nugget of information to himself.

The last thing she needed right now was another snarl in an already tangled life.

She was having a tough enough time coming to terms with her past. He wouldn’t complicate things even more for her. With all she had on her plate, she didn’t need a bitter ex-con with a hazy future stepping up to clutter her life, too.

As he drove north, he couldn’t help feeling like he was leaving behind warmth and sunshine and heading back into the cold.

She dreamed she was three years old again, her chubby legs planted on a wide grassy field, with the sun bright in her eyes and the world brimming with joy.

She couldn’t decide what to do first, somersault across the field or twirl around, arms out and her frilly pink skirt flying high, until she was so dizzy she fell over in a heap.

She started to clap her hands with glee, then she realized instead of arms and hands she had thick braided ropes at the end of her shoulders that she could only wave helplessly.

Suddenly she found herself surrounded by all the players in the drama of her life. The McKinnons—Sam, Lynn and much younger version of Gage and Wyatt—stood on one side while on the other were Maryanne and Tom Spencer, along with her two best friends from junior high school and Mr. Moffat, her high school science teacher, of all people.

A whistle blew somewhere and an instant later Kate felt a tug on her rope-arms and found herself in the middle of a deadly serious battle of tug-of-war. Her shoulders were nearly dislocated as both teams did their best to pull her to their side.

She cried out for them to stop but no one seemed to be paying the slightest bit of attention to her. Neither side seemed to be gaining an advantage but their efforts were fierce.

At last, when she wasn’t sure she could stand another moment, a woman with dirty blonde hair and a missing front tooth wheeled out onto the grassy field.

Right there in the middle of the game she picked up Kate, rope arms and all, piled her onto her lap and rolled off the field away from all the players, with Kate screaming and crying out for her to stop….

“Kate? Everything okay?”

The deep voice intruded into her nightmare and Kate woke with a start, the coppery taste of blood in her mouth. It took her a few seconds to realize she must have bitten her lip in her sleep.

She was disoriented for a moment, trapped there in that odd, surreal place between sleep and consciousness.

“You were dreaming. Must have been a doozy. You were crying out.”

She found Hunter watching her, his eyes solemn and concerned, and his lean, familiar features calmed her.

Right. They were in his SUV again, heading northwest, back to Utah and the McKinnons, where she belonged.

“I’m all right now,” she said, dabbing her lip with a tissue from the console.

“What were you dreaming?”

“Nothing. I don’t remember.” She ignored her qualm over the lie. “Where are we?”

“A ways past Fort Myers,” Hunter replied. “We should be in St. Petersburg by dinnertime.”

She straightened. “St. Petersburg?”

“I told you we could stop in and visit the Spencers while we’re in Florida. Give you a chance to drop off those presents you bought them in Key West. We can even stay for a day or two if you’d like.”

To her horror, hot tears burned her eyes. How could such a hard, unrelenting man have these astonishing bouts of kindness? She blinked back her tears, knowing they would only embarrass them both. “Thank you, Hunter.”

He shrugged off her gratitude, as he had been doing all week whenever she tried to tell him how much his help meant to her.

“I’d like to meet them anyway,” he said, his voice gruff. “They sound like remarkable people.”

Suddenly she was aware of a deep hunger to see her foster parents, to wrap her arms around Tom’s comfortable bulk and find center again in Maryanne’s calm, eternally serene expression. It suddenly seemed like exactly the place she needed to be.

“They are wonderful. You’ll like them and I know they’ll like you.”

“Prison record and all?”

She narrowed her gaze at him. “You don’t have a record. It was expunged.”

“Right.” He gave that self-mocking smile she hated, the one she realized she hadn’t seen for a while. “Too bad I can’t expunge the last three years so easily.”

She hadn’t heard that grim note to his voice for several days either. Its return left her inexpressibly sad. She had hoped he was moving past his anger at what had happened to him.

“If we’ve made it past this far, I must have been sleeping for hours,” she murmured. “Through Miami and Ft. Lauderdale and Alligator Alley. You should have woke me.”

“You needed the rest.”

She hadn’t been getting much sleep the last few nights. The reason why sat next to her in the driver’s seat, just a hint of afternoon shadow stubbling his jaw. He looked big and powerful and incredibly sexy, even with the hardness in his eyes.

She hadn’t
wanted
to sleep much the last few nights, not when she was exactly where she needed to be, wrapped in his arms.

She had a fierce sudden desire to be there again, to feel him around her and inside her again, and wondered with a pang if she would ever have the chance.

A muscle flexed in his jaw suddenly and she wondered if could somehow guess the direction of her thoughts. Color soaked her cheeks and she pretended extreme interest in the passing scenery.

“Do you feel better?” Hunter asked at her silence.

She thought of that terrible dream, the horrible sensation that she was being torn apart.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Physically, yes.”

She didn’t add that emotionally her psyche felt as battered and bloody as the gang members she treated after a nasty street fight.

Maybe she didn’t need to share that information with him. The way he looked at her, his eyes fathomless and dark, she thought maybe he already knew.

After nearly a week on the road, Hunter likely knew her better than anyone else in the world. She found it an alarming realization, especially as she wasn’t even sure she knew herself anymore.

“I should probably stop for gas soon,” he said.

“I imagine Belle could use a good run.”

“Yeah, probably.” He took the next exit where a cluster of gas stations squatted in the sun.

“Do me a favor, will you?”

She looked at him quizzically.

“Try not to get into trouble while we’re here. No more adventures. No pregnant women ready to pop, no blind men who need a lift to Memphis, no drunk college boys looking for a little action. Let’s just make this a simple pit stop, okay?”

She laughed a little, as she realized he had intended. “I’ll do my best. Although I’ll remind you I had nothing to do with the college boys. That was all you, detective.”

As if their time together in Key West had altered their established pattern, this time Kate insisted on pumping the gas so that Hunter could exercise Belle.

“You’ve been driving the whole time I slept so you deserve a little rest,” she told him firmly.

After a small argument, Hunter finally ceded defeat and grabbed Belle’s leash and a ball then headed toward a grassy field next to the filling station.

Kate finished filling the tank, then wandered over to watch them. This was another of those moments she would store in her memory bank. The pure joy of a gleeful dog and her master at play.

How many more moments like this would she have? In a few days they would be home and would go their separate ways. She would still see him, she had no doubt of that. His sister was her best friend so it was inevitable that the paths of their respective lives would intersect again but nothing would be the same.