The Shadow of Your Smile (6 page)

Eli had never been a man for emotion. Sure, when Kyle slipped into the doctor’s hands, a bubble of warmth filled his chest, and likewise with the births of Kelsey and Kirby.

And of course, nothing could describe the way Kelsey’s death destroyed him, turned everything in his life gray and bleak. Other men—men who didn’t have an occupation built around the lousy choices of others—might have starting hiding a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in the glove compartment or the desk drawer. He’d had his work to help him forget, and besides, a cop knew how to control his emotions.

But he’d never wanted to hit anything, lash out, hurt someone like he did when he heard Noelle scream. Not a high-pitched sound of fear, but one wrenched from deep inside, places only he knew now, places she’d forgotten.

And then, the sobs. Deep and heartbreaking, they snuck out into the hallway as he stared at his two lost sons.

They lingered in the hall, not sure what to do.

He’d made a mistake bringing Kirby into the room with him. He’d thought, maybe, that seeing her son would jolt Noelle out of any residual amnesia.

Instead, it jolted Kirby into a blank stare as he listened to his mother cry.

“Kirby—”

He held up a hand, met his father’s eyes, shook his head.

“I thought she would remember us when she saw you.”

“You should have let me tell her about Kelsey. She’d remember her daughter,” Kirby said.

“Oh, that’s a great idea,” Eli said, his voice low. An elderly man, tall and gaunt, held a bouquet of flowers, a tiny boy trotting along behind as he shuffled past them down the hall. “Tell her about how she had a daughter, and then what, tell her how that daughter was murdered? You don’t think that might do more damage?”

He shouldn’t use that tone on his seventeen-year-old son—he knew it even as the boy flinched. But the kid had to grow up, face the truth.

Compassion only made people weak. It tore down defenses and made them too trusting. Vulnerable.

Sometimes it even destroyed lives.

“No, we’re not telling your mother about Kelsey. Not until she remembers herself.”

“And when might that be, Dad?” Kyle, now coming to life from where he’d wandered down the hall. “Never? What, are we supposed to just wipe Kelsey out of her life?”

“I don’t know, okay?” Eli’s voice thundered, and he cranked it back down to something he recognized. “I think you’re jumping to conclusions here, Kyle. The doctor doesn’t know how long this might—”

“My own mother didn’t know me. She thought she was in college, Dad.
College
. In her brain, she’s
my age
.” He held up his hands as if trying to push the thought away. “This can’t be happening.”

Eli thought he might be turning away but—

“You know, I don’t blame her brain for shutting down. For forgetting us. I mean, who wants to remember the last three years? Or more? If I could, I’d wipe it away too.” Kyle’s voice echoed down the hall.

“Really, Kyle? You’d forget everything?” Kirby’s voice shook. “You’d want to wake up thinking Kelsey was still here? Only to be told she’d died?”

Eli hiked a hand around Kirby’s neck and drew him down the hall with more force than necessary. “Do you suppose we could refrain from yelling? Because I’m not sure if she heard
everything
 yet.”

Kyle followed them. “She’s still crying in there, Dad. I don’t think she’s really listening to three strangers argue about her.”

“Kyle—”

He seemed brewing for a fight, something more than frustration on his face even as he shoved his hands into his pockets, turned away from them.

“I just think that if we talk about Kelsey, it’s going to raise questions that your mother can’t hear the answers to until she’s more emotionally stable. We
will
tell her. But only when she’s ready.”

Except the fact was, it was only devastating if she could actually remember Kelsey in the first place. To Noelle, they were strangers—unkempt, angry, unruly strangers.

She wouldn’t even allow him in the room to see her in her hospital gown.

Oh, she’d love the next part . . . when they discharged her and she had nowhere to go but home with him.

Eli ran a hand down his face, then opened his eyes to see Kyle before him, his own eyes red-rimmed.

“What?” Eli said, his lack of sleep in his tone.

“I just think that maybe you could have stopped this. You should have gone with her to Duluth. Should have been there, instead of her, during the robbery.
Protected
her like a husband should.” Kyle’s low voice slid through him like a knife.

Eli drew a breath. “Fine. Yes, I should have gone with her. But I didn’t even know she was going!”

“And that alone should tell you something.”

“What was she doing here, anyway?” This from Kirby, his voice very small.

“I don’t know.” Eli glanced at him, his heart wringing. “Shopping, probably. Does it matter? We can’t turn back time.”

“Mom has. She’s turned it all the way back to before she knew any of us.” Kirby wiped his eye with the meat of his hand. A curse word emerged, something Eli had never heard him use. He didn’t chastise his son.

“She’ll come back to us. We have to believe it.”

“Why?” Now Kyle rounded on him. “Why should we listen to you? You never came back after Kelsey died.”

“What are you talking about, Kyle? I never left your mother.”

“You didn’t move out. You just moved down to the den.” Kyle stared at him. “No wonder Mom wants to forget you.
I
wanted to forget you.”

Eli couldn’t help it. Something inside him just snapped, something angry and frustrated and—

He slapped Kyle across the face.

Kyle jerked, gasped.

Kirby stepped back, shock—or maybe fear—in his eyes.

Kyle wore an expression Eli didn’t recognize.

He barely braced himself before Kyle tackled him. Around the waist, like he’d been taught in Husky football, and slamming Eli into the ground. Eli hit the ground like an old man, the impact jarring through his bones, his head. But he rebounded like a cop, ramming his elbow into Kyle’s jaw, feeling sick as the kid rolled off him.

He’d never hit his children.

Eli scooted back on the floor, held up his hands. “Kyle! Knock it off.”

Blood dribbled down the corner of Kyle’s mouth. His eyes burned through Eli, his voice rife with vitriol. “You make me sick. First Kelsey and now Mom. She might have forgotten us, but
you
forgot us first.
You
lost this family, Dad.
You
blew it. You know, Emma was right—there’s nothing to go back to in Deep Haven. Nothing but scars. Nothing but pain. Thanks for that.”

Then Kyle got up and strode past Eli.

Kirby had a hand over his face, his shoulders shaking.

Eli dropped his head into his hands, wishing that he, too, could find the courage to weep.

Especially since he feared that every word Kyle spoke might be painfully, brutally correct.

Kirby finally sat down beside him. Eli felt his son’s hand on his shoulder, and the gesture made him shake.

“What do we do now, Dad?” he whispered.

Eli sighed. “I guess we take this woman home and try to help her get her life back.”

Kyle’s mother had nearly lost her life beneath a three-way blinking stoplight, in front of a used-car dealership, a dry cleaner, and a coffee shop that shared strip mall space with a gift shop specializing in slippers and candles.

Her SUV sat, still parked, in front of Mocha Moose, buried under a crusty layer of snow.

Kyle stared at the yellow-taped doors of the crime scene and wanted to retch. He’d peeked inside the locked doors. The place still betrayed the chaos of the burglary—a cash register with the drawer open, the candies on the front counter spilled, some of them littering the floor. He’d called the Duluth Police Department, and one of the assistant deputies agreed to meet him here at the scene.

A courtesy to his father, whom he’d had to mention to get any face time with the investigators.

Kyle’s jaw hurt. The bleeding had stopped somewhere between Duluth and here, but the incident replayed in his mind like a slap—shock, then a flash flood of anger, indignation, shame, all spurting out of him.

He’d tackled his father to the ground. Wanted to hit him, to put his fist in his face in an explosion of fury, of desperation. Anything to expel the roil of hurt inside. The thought now caught him up, sent a tremble through him.

He almost wanted to thank his old man for the elbow shot in the jaw. It probably saved them from an all-out brawl in the middle of the hallway.

Yeah, like his mother needed to see
that
. Not that it would jolt her memory—sure, Kyle and his father had rounded on each other a few times during his growing-up years, but his father had never, not once, hit him.

And he’d never, in all of his teenage angst, considered turning on his dad.

Even when his father had left them at Kelsey’s graveside, the rain sloughing mud onto her casket.

Even when Eli started sleeping at his office, on a little cot he shoved next to his file cabinets.

Even when he bought himself the Taj Mahal of fish houses to hide inside.

Even that day when Kirby called, his voice shaking, saying Dad had come home, emptied out Kelsey’s room, and gotten rid of everything, while their mother watched, knees drawn up as she sat on the floor of the living room, her eyes haunting all of them.

Not long after, Kyle had transferred to Alexandria, where he started the program in law enforcement. It simply made sense. Someone had to protect his family.

Still, it wrecked him just a little for his dad when his mother looked at her husband and didn’t know him.

Or didn’t want to.

“Are you Kyle?”

The voice startled him; he hadn’t heard the officer drive up. Kyle turned and met his hand. “Yes, thanks for meeting me. Kyle Hueston. I’m with the Deep Haven sheriff’s office. I was hoping you could walk me through the scene here.”

“Marc Wrenshall.” Wearing a pair of brown pants, his weapon under an insulated black jacket, and his dark hair shorn tight to his head, he had gray eyes that seemed, if not old, at least seasoned. The deputy nodded. “I’m sorry about your mother. Your father and I had a couple cases we worked on a few years ago. How is she?”

Kyle followed him to the door. “She’s . . . still recovering.”

“I’ll be glad when we can get a statement from her, sort out what happened.” He unlocked the door. Despite the chill and the embedded smells of coffee and woodsmoke, the tinny, rancid odor of blood tinged the room.

“What do you know?”

“Not much. After your mother alerted the truck driver, he stopped, called 911. We didn’t know about the burglary until later, when our deputies were doing a sweep of the area to find out what happened.” He moved around the counter. “We’ve already checked the room for prints, but there’s just too many. A cold day like yesterday . . . before the storm hit, this place saw a lot of traffic.” He pointed to the back room, where an office door lay open.

The room had already been cleaned, the scent of chemicals rising from it making his eyes water. Kyle put a hand over his nose.

“Forensics has taken samples. They found skin under the victim’s fingernails and a welt across her face as if she’d been hit with more than a fist. There seemed to have been a struggle, and from the blood spatter and her wounds, it appeared she’d been shot from close range.” He indicated where the blood had hit the walls, the papers on the desk, the window.

“Who was the victim?”

“Cassie Mitchell. Senior over at Harbor City High.”

Kyle couldn’t speak. Today, a family grieved over their lost futures.

“We did find something odd.” Marc backed out of the room, pointed to a painted outline on the floor. “A fishing knife. Could be the perp’s—we found it on the floor next to the cash register. Maybe he dropped it when your mom took off.”

“You know for certain she was here?”

“She left her purse, and her coffee, in the bathroom.”

“She saw it.”

“Could be. We’d sure like to talk to her.”

Kyle stood behind the counter, running the scenario through his mind. His mother had left coffee in the bathroom. So she had already ordered, already waited for her drink. Had the man come in after her? Or before? Was it a spontaneous or a planned robbery?

“Does the coroner have a report back on the kind of weapon used?”

Marc shook his head. “We’re going door-to-door today, doing some interviews. We’ll call you if anything turns up.”

“What about the log? Did anyone call in anything . . . suspicious? Out of the ordinary?”

“I went through the calls this morning. A couple cars in the ditch in the storm, a dog on the loose, but nothing that might shed some light on what happened.”

Kyle moved to the bathroom. The door stood ajar and he flipped on the lights. He turned, tried to see the crime through his mother’s eyes.

She had stood here, watched someone holding up the clerk. A high school student, no older than Kelsey.

No wonder she tried to save her.

He reached up, held on to the doorframe. Let the tremor that went through him pass.

“What if she opened this door, saw them—maybe ran for help?”

Marc nodded. “But why didn’t he go after her or even shoot her?”

“We’re right next to the highway. Maybe he didn’t have time.”

“There was about ten feet of visibility. No one would have seen him, or even heard, the shot over the wind.”

Kyle came out to stand by the counter. Surveyed the scene. “Why didn’t she go for her car? There were hardly any vehicles on the road.”

“We found her keys outside by her vehicle. It’s possible she tried, and he dragged her back inside.”

Kyle stared out the window, the thought of some man’s hands on his mother, dragging her inside, nearly killing her . . . He took a few long breaths—in, out.

Randomness. He hated every bit of it, how in a second, a person’s life could be dismantled. How plans and hopes and dreams died on the tile floor of coffee shops and convenience stores. How it inflicted wounds not just on the victim or the family, but on entire communities.

It simply wasn’t right that a forty-six-year-old woman could drive into a strip mall coffee shop and lose her life. Or at least, most of it.

Kyle was sick to death of randomness. Of injustice.

Marc stood by the other door. “We’ll find him.”

Kyle nodded.
No, I’ll find him.