Father Of The Brat (10 page)

She jerked her glasses from her face and once again covered her eyes with her hands. “I had a rough day,” she said softly.

“What happened?”

Clearly striving for nonchalance and unconcern, Maddy sounded neither when she replied, “Oh, you know. The usual. I left the house without my briefcase, spilled coffee on my favorite shirt, got into a truly spectacular traffic snarl on the Schuylkill, and missed out on a raise because some stupid bureaucrat decided the state’s already spending too much money to keep its children safe.”

She paused, picked up her glasses, wiped them off with a paper napkin, then settled them back in place. “Oh, yeah. And some kid whose case had finally made it to the top of my workload was beaten to death by his father before I could get around to investigating the complaint.”

Carver had been about to finish the last of his hamburger when Maddy’s words hit home. His hand stopped halfway to his mouth, and he looked up to find that she was absolutely serious about what she had said.

“What?” he asked, even though he had heard her perfectly.

Her gaze dropped to her hands again. “I never even met him, Carver. All I know is that his name was Kevin Conner, that his P.E. teacher had reported some suspicious
marks on his legs and arms, and that I let him down. He’s dead because of me. Because I was too busy doing other things to make a fifteen minute call at his house.”

Immediately, Carver dropped the remains of his burger onto his plate and reached for Maddy’s hand. As soon as he clasped it in his own, however, she jerked it away.

“All I had to do,” she said, her voice scarcely above a whisper, “was drive by for a quick interview. I have good instincts, you know? I can usually tell if a situation is potentially dangerous. I’ve almost always been right about stuff like that. If I’d only-”

Her voice broke off on a sniffle, and Carver could see that she was once again fighting tears. Her shoulders were rigid, and her eyes red and puffy and filled to nearly overflowing. The image of her sitting there, unmoving, silent, coming apart at the seams, roused something inside him he’d never felt before. Carver suddenly felt helpless for the first time in his life. He didn’t know what to do, what to say, to keep Maddy from crying. And for some reason, he felt like crying himself.

“Maddy,” he finally said, “you know you’re not responsible for that boy’s death. It’s not like you were too busy because you were out playing tennis, for God’s sake. It’s because you were trying to keep track of a million other kids who might be in danger.”

“Fifteen minutes,” she repeated. “That’s all it would have taken. Dammit, why do people have to do this kind of crap to each other? Why?”

She swiped savagely at her eyes then, and Carver began to feel as if he, too, were coming apart at the seams. He got up and moved to the opposite side of the booth, draping his arm across Maddy’s shoulder to pull her close, tucking her head into the hollow of his throat.

“He was only seven years old,” she whispered hoarsely. “Seven freaking years old. What kind of person beats a seven-year-old kid to death?”

“I don’t know,” Carver told her honestly.

“What’s worse is that this isn’t the first time something like this has happened. I had a case a few years ago where a two-year-old girl was killed by her parents before we could get to her. Just about every social worker at the Welfare Office has had the same kind of experience at least once. It’s horrible, Carver. I don’t understand any of it.”

He hugged her closer and wished he knew what to say.

“I always thought I could make a difference, you know?” she continued. “Back in college, I was so sure that once I got out there into the big, wide world, I’d be able to wreak some changes for the better. I thought I could fix whatever was wrong. I thought people where inherently good. I thought…” She inhaled a long, shuddering breath and released it slowly. “I thought I could make a difference,” she repeated as she swiped at her eyes again.

Carver eased his hold on her somewhat, setting her away from him only far enough for him to look her in the eye. “I don’t know what to say, Maddy. I wish I did, but I don’t.”

She reached for another napkin and blew her nose indelicately into the rough paper. “How about ‘I told you so’?”

“What?”

She rubbed her nose fiercely with the napkin, leaving it as red and swollen as her eyes. “I can’t believe it’s been three weeks since we met again, and you have yet to gloat and wallow in self-righteousness.”

He was genuinely perplexed. “What would I have to gloat about?”

She gaped at him in obvious disbelief. “About how right you were back in high school.”

But her clarification helped him not at all. “Right? About what?”

“About everything,” she told him. “About the world being a truly horrible place populated by people who don’t give a damn about anything or have any desire to make it a better place. About politicians who are more interested in keeping their jobs and their hands in someone else’s pocket than they are about making sure their constituents have
everything they need. About the insurmountable violence, and ignorance, and hatred and indifference.

“You were right all along, Carver. There’s absolutely no hope for this planet. There never was, and there never will be. I can only imagine how you must laugh yourself to sleep at night at the memory of how little Maddy Saunders was stupid enough to think otherwise. It must be great fun for you to see me now.”

Way back in the cobwebbed corners of his mind, Carver could remember uttering those words to Maddy almost verbatim. They’d been sitting across from each other at lunch, and she had been talking about some plan she had for the future—a plan that would give jobs to everyone, end hunger and poverty completely and make the world a vast Utopia. He recalled now that he had laughed hysterically in her face as she voiced the particulars of her plan, assuring her it would never work because of the aforementioned violence, ignorance, hatred and indifference that no one, not even Maddy, would ever be able to overcome. He remembered now that he had told her someday she’d see how stupidly naive she was being, and that he wished he could be there to witness her fall. He had thought it would be great fun to watch Maddy Saunders eat her words.

Who would have thought he would get his wish? And who would have thought he would be so sickened by what he had thought would be a wonderfully entertaining show?

He found himself ready to utter the words that would contradict everything Maddy was saying. But how could he contradict her when she was simply putting voice to everything he believed himself?

“Let’s get out of here,” he finally said. “We’ll hit the church on 86th, and if Rachel isn’t there, we’ll go home and wait for her. She has to come back eventually, right?”

Maddy seemed confused by the sudden change of subject, but she nodded wordlessly and let Carver help her out of the booth. She appeared not to notice as he tossed a handful of bills onto the table to cover the cost of their meal—and then some. Nor did she appear to pay much attention
when he shrugged into his jacket and held up her coat for her. She seemed to simply move by automation, slipping her arms into her coat sleeves, walking slowly toward the diner’s exit and out into the chilly night air.

All Carver could do was watch helplessly as Maddy tried to come to terms with the intolerable realization that one woman simply wasn’t enough to change the workings of a nasty, despicable world. And he couldn’t help but wonder why he wasn’t taking more delight in the knowledge that he’d been right all along.

A
n hour later, Carver fell into a slump on the floor of his living room and settled his head back against the sofa cushion. Without seeing, he stared at the ceiling and wondered where Rachel could have gone. She hadn’t been at the church on 86th. And none of the kids who had made it there to spend a night out of the cold had seen any sign of her. Evidently, his daughter had simply disappeared from the face of the planet. Either that, he thought, or she was lying dead in a ditch somewhere. Never before had such a cliché seemed all too possible a reality.

At this point, Carver was literally worried sick about her. His stomach was clenched tighter than a rock, his head felt as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to it, and there was a knot of tension in his neck he wasn’t sure would ever loosen. He was certain he had aged ten years in ten hours. Ever since Rachel’s arrival in his life, he had begun to feel like a very old man.

The streets of Philadelphia at this time of night weren’t safe for anyone—not for a six-foot, 180-pound investigative
reporter who’d called the city home for two decades, not for a hard-bitten social worker who’d seen it all in some of the roughest neighborhoods there were, and certainly not for some twelve-year-old girl who didn’t even know her way around. Anything,
anything
could be happening to Rachel. Carver was beginning to wish like hell that he’d never met Abby Stillman thirteen years ago.

“I’m sure she’s fine,” Maddy said, as if she’d been reading his thoughts. She tossed her coat onto the sofa and dropped to the floor to sit beside him. “She lived in a pretty rough neighborhood herself in L.A. Philadelphia couldn’t possibly be much worse.” She drew her legs toward herself, folded her arms over them, rested her chin on her knees and sighed. “Rachel’s a smart kid, Carver. She’s not the kind to go looking for trouble.”

He uttered a derisive chuckle and covered his eyes with his hands, then sighed. “That’s what you think. She’s been nothing but trouble since she arrived.”

“Only because she wants to make sure you notice her. That’s exactly what her disappearance tonight is all about. She’s just trying to get your attention.”

“It’s working.”

Maddy smiled in spite of her concern. She took off her glasses, tossed them casually onto the coffee table and rubbed her eyes. “She’ll be fine, Carver. Any time now, she’ll come breezing through the front door and want to know what all the fuss is about. Then she’ll read you the riot act for caring about her and remind you that she can take care of herself. Then you can ground her for a week.”

He looked at the front door, as if willing the scene she described to take place. “I can try to ground her, you mean. Something tells me Rachel’s going to be a little reluctant to comply. In case you haven’t noticed, she’s a wild kid. She does crazy stuff.”

“Kids are always wild,” Maddy told him. “Always. Even you and I did some crazy stuff when we were kids.”

“That’s certainly true in my case, but I can’t remember a single time when Maddy Saunders did anything that strayed from the path of righteousness.”

She looked away as she said, “Oh, I can remember at least one incident when I did something totally irrational and completely uncalled for. And I’ve been paying for it ever since.”

Carver eyed her dubiously. “What could you have possibly ever done that wasn’t on the up and up?”

She hesitated for only a moment before responding, “I kissed you back that night.”

Maddy didn’t know why she brought up the subject of that ill-fated kiss out of the blue like that. Somehow, the words just tumbled from her mouth as if she hadn’t been able to keep them in. For some reason, her relationship with Carver tonight felt like it did in the old days. Their frantic and fruitless search for Rachel had roused an unspoken intimacy between them that was as unexpected and unexplainable as the one they had shared in high school. She just felt close to him right now. And as a result, she couldn’t help but recall that one brief instance when the two of them had actually seemed to care for each other.

Nevertheless, she halfway expected him to reply with a puzzled “What night?” She was certain that he had long ago forgotten what had been for her one of the most momentous events of her life. Maddy was about to elaborate, to try to jog his memory, even went so far as to steel herself against the riotous laughter that would no doubt erupt when—and if—he remembered that kiss. She even reached for her glasses, ready to put her mask back in place.

Then she heard him say softly, “Yeah, you did kiss me back, didn’t you? I guess that was kind of crazy.”

She stayed her hand short of making contact with her glasses, then risked a glance over at him, trying not to squint. In spite of her nearsightedness, she could tell he was looking at her in a way he had never looked at her before. The way a man looks at a woman when he wants to get
closer than he probably should. But he said nothing more, only watched and waited for her to go on.

“Crazy for me?” she asked, barely able to voice the question. “Or crazy for you?”

He turned and scooted himself back a little, and her heart nearly stopped beating, so stung was she by his withdrawal. Then he lifted his hand to her face, curving his palm over her jaw before strumming his fingertips over her lips. A burst of white-hot fire licked at her insides, burning her to her very core. Seemingly without controlling any of it herself, Maddy felt her eyelids flutter closed, felt her lips part, felt the breath leave her lungs in a quick rush of air.

And when Carver said nothing to explain his actions, she had to ask him, “Why…why did you kiss me that night?”

She opened her eyes to find him gazing at her mouth, his own lips parted in what she could only liken to desire. He shook his head slowly. “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “I still wonder about that myself. That night you just looked so…so vulnerable, so beautiful, there in the dim light backstage.”

She chuckled, striving for a carefree tone of voice that would alleviate the tension that had erupted between them. But carefree was the last thing she felt. “Yeah, I guess the light would have to be pretty dim for me to look beautiful, wouldn’t it?”

He shook his head slowly and skimmed his fingers over her lips again. “No, that’s not what I meant. I always thought you were beautiful in high school, Maddy.”

This time her laughter came out clearly strained. “Oh, right. I bet.”

“I did. Maybe I didn’t realize it twenty years ago, but these days I’m beginning to understand a lot about how I felt back then. And I think you’re beautiful now, too,” he added with a smile. “Even if you are too skinny.”

Her skin was so soft, Carver thought as he dropped his finger to touch the pulse beating erratically just below her jaw. As soft as it had been that night twenty years ago. He remembered thinking how incongruous it had seemed back
then—such soft skin on such a prickly girl. Her hair, too, had been soft and silky then, something else he’d always thought was an enigma about his adolescent nemesis. Until the night he’d kissed her. And then he’d discovered that Maddy Saunders was soft all over. Just as he had that night two decades ago, he brushed his fingers up over her jaw and threaded them through her hair.

Still soft. Still silky. Still Maddy.

Maybe she hadn’t changed so much after all. The realization made Carver feel good. Too good, he decided. Suddenly, her presence, her closeness, was giving him all kinds of silly, adolescent ideas.

“That night of the senior play…” he said, keeping his voice as quiet a whisper as his fingers. “I don’t know why I kissed you that night. For some reason, it just seemed like the thing to do. Kind of like…”

Instead of completing his statement, he simply shook his head slowly in silent denial of what he was thinking. It wasn’t that he wanted to refute the waking realization of the depths of his feelings for Maddy. It was more because he was afraid of the reception he might get from the woman who still confounded his emotions.

“Kind of like what?” she asked him, begging him to put words to the rest of his thought. Her own voice had dropped to a pitch so soft, he almost had to strain to hear her.

Hesitantly, and with much uncertainty, he leaned forward, closing the distance between the two of them until scarcely a wisp of air separated them. He still wasn’t sure what he was planning to do. Then he heard himself say softly, “Kind of like now.”

He watched as she drew in an unsteady breath, but never saw her exhale it. “What do you mean?” she asked.

Instead of answering her, Carver bent his head toward Maddy’s, then touched his lips to hers. He had thought he was only going to kiss her as he had that night backstage twenty years ago. He had thought he was only going to brush his mouth lightly over hers and be done with it. But the moment he felt her melting into him—just as she had so
long ago—he knew this kiss wasn’t going to be like the one before. Back then he’d had fear on his side—a raw, uncertain adolescent’s fear of his own reaction that the eighteenyear-old boy hadn’t understood. Back then, Carver’s fear had been what made him back away from Maddy.

This time, however, his fear evaporated to be replaced by desire—a raw, hungry man’s desire for a woman he’d never quite forgotten. The moment his lips touched hers, he suddenly remembered that he hadn’t wanted to stop kissing Maddy twenty years ago. He’d had to force himself to pull out of the embrace and act like it had been nothing at all. He sure as hell wasn’t going to make the same mistake now.

He slanted his mouth over hers more fully then, lifting his hands to tangle his fingers in her hair, angling his body so that he could pull her more eagerly into his arms. Maddy clung to him, returning his kisses with a ferocity to rival his own, bunching his sweatshirt in her fists as if she intended to rip the heavy fabric right down the middle. For a long time they tried to consume each other, each taking turns dominating the embrace, until finally, in a searing second of sanity, Maddy pushed Carver away.

Several moments passed before she trusted herself to speak without revealing the tumultuousness of her feelings. All she could do was press the back of her hand to her lips, uncertain whether she was trying to scrub away the sensation of his mouth on hers or preserve the feeling forever. Finally, when she could no longer tolerate the silence burning up the air between them, she whispered, “Don’t do this to me again, Carver. Please.”

He looked puzzled, even hurt. “Do what?”

“Don’t kiss me and then laugh at me, and then walk away as if you’d done nothing more than nod a greeting. Don’t make me feel foolish again. And don’t make me wonder for the rest of my life what it might have been like if things had been different between the two of us.”

“Different in what way?”

She hesitated before speaking, the uncertain seventeenyear-old girl that still dwelled within her moving to the
forefront of her brain. After a moment, she forced herself to say, “Different the way it would have been if maybe you had liked me. If maybe you had…had wanted me back then as much as I wanted you.”

His expression would have been the same if she had just poked him in the eye with a big stick. “You…you wanted me back then?” he sputtered.

She chuckled a little nervously. “Oh, yeah. I wanted you. Maybe I didn’t recognize lust back then when I felt it, but… Trust me—I know it now. And the reason I could never get along with you in high school had nothing to do with our differences of opinion.”

Carver smiled at her then. Not the swaggering, arrogant smile of a man who was cocksure of his effect on women— a man who might have winked salaciously and told Maddy he’d known it all along—but a smile of pure, unadulterated delight. Instead of winking and voicing his certainty of her feelings, Carver brushed his bent knuckles lightly over Maddy’s cheek and said warily, “Really? You…you really did have a crush on me?”

She nodded helplessly. “Yeah. And you know what’s really crazy?”

He shook his head. “Tell me.”

“For some reason, I’ve never quite been able to get over it.”

His smile broadened, and he scooted closer. “That’s amazing, Maddy. Because the truth of the matter is, as crazy as it sounds, I had a pretty wild crush on you back then, too. I just didn’t think you’d ever let me get close enough to do anything about it.”

She laughed. “Back then, I probably wouldn’t have.”

He moved closer still, cupping his warm palm over her nape, pulling her forward until her forehead touched his. His gaze never left hers as he asked, “What would you do now?”

Maddy lifted her hand to Carver’s lower lip, skimming the pad of her index finger over the soft contours of his mouth. His eyes fluttered shut, and he expelled a little sound,
something primitive and masculine and, oh, so intriguing. This time Maddy was the one to lean forward, her tongue tracing the path that her finger had just forged. She tasted the remnants of coffee, the lingering traces of cigarette smoke, and something else that was uniquely Carver. And suddenly, she wanted to taste more.

Before she had the chance to do so, however, he joined her in the kiss, propelling himself toward her with such zeal, that Maddy felt herself reeling backward and Carver coming in for a landing atop her. With a pair of muffled “oofs,” they found themselves sprawled on the floor between the sofa and the coffee table, everything in the world forgotten except for a plethora of twenty-year-old adolescent hormones that had never quite been quelled.

“This is crazy, you know,” she said, clamping her arms together behind his neck, still unable to subdue the fear that he might try to pull away from her again. “We have no more business doing this now than we did twenty years ago.”

He smiled, then dipped his head to hers and placed a soft, butterfly kiss at her temple. “Says who?”

Says me,
she wanted to tell him. Even if Carver wasn’t thinking straight at the moment—and she was certain that was the case, that his response to her now was only a result of his being overwrought with worry about his daughter— Maddy was. She was probably thinking straighter now than she ever had before. And she knew what the two of them were doing was insane.