Jezebel's Blues (33 page)

“Oh.” Made sense. “Okay. Is there anything else we should do for her?”

Joleen shook her head sadly. “She’ll just sleep for a while, and then she’ll be better. It’s only malaria.”

He chuckled. Only malaria, indeed. “Well, then, how about if you and I go in the kitchen and find us something to eat?” Kids he could handle. “I’m hungry. How about you?”

She shrugged. “Okay.”

* * *

When Winona opened her eyes, still adrift in the confusion malaria put upon her brain, she couldn’t remember where she was. A smell of grilled cheese and coffee wafted on the air, so it wasn’t Africa. No, no. She was home now. Of course. The cushioning layers of fabric below her body were far too fine to be anywhere but in America.

Home. She let her eyes drift around the dim room. An open doorway showed a darkening sky and a horizon she didn’t immediately recognize. She closed her eyes and let the dizzying fever cocoon her, carry her away—

She jerked awake. “Joleen!” she cried out, remembering. Her sudden movement sent her sprawling a foot or two to the floor, and started strange ripples of dizziness through her head. Too confused to get up, she covered her face with her hand and tried to gather the various instructions for her body parts to move her to a standing position.

But then there was someone nearby, talking in a deep, lilting voice, and gentle hands moved on her upper arms. She lifted her head.

Malaria often twisted her vision, so it was no surprise to see the shimmering lights around the face that was so close to hers. Nor was she surprised to find the face itself almost dreamlike in its perfection. It was the sort of face Winona’s fevers were inclined to produce—dark, dominated by cleanly cut cheekbones and beautiful, cocoa-colored eyes with light deep within them. Long, long hair, the color of pecans, fell over his shoulder as he tried to help her up. A lock of hair touched her mouth and she dizzily lifted a hand to it, unsure whether she was dreaming. The hair was cool and coarse and heavy, a vividly sensual impression.

He was
real
.

Terror jumped in her chest. “Joleen!” She had meant to cry out the word, but it came from her throat as a croak.

“Joleen is fine,” he said. “She’s okay. Rest now.”

Winona nodded heavily, and had to close her eyes against the shivery arcs of light. Somehow she found herself again lying down. Gentle hands—his hands?—settled a blanket over her. She thought she felt a lingering hand against her ear, but couldn’t be sure.

The fever carried her away.

* * *

“Was that my sister?” Joleen asked, coming into the room.

Daniel straightened, nodding. “She wasn’t really awake.”

“It’s good she woke up a little, though.”

“Is it?”

“Yeah.”

The kid still wore her baseball cap and the painfully ugly glasses. She carried her milk with her into the room, obviously feeling more comfortable as she wandered over by his computer desk.

“You like computers?” he asked.

She shrugged. “I guess. I’ve never seen one this fancy, though.”

“It’s what I do for a living.”

“Make computers?”

“Software.” He was actually supposed to be working now. A major project was due in two weeks, and he was a long way from finished. “Maybe I’ll let you mess around on it in the morning if you want.”

“That’s okay.” She moved away carefully, her face blank. “I know adults have to use them to work.”

He frowned. “Do your parents use computers for work?”

The tiniest flicker of something crossed her schooled face.

“Nope. They died.” As if she’d said no more than she lived in Ohio, she wandered toward the bookshelves. “You have any reading books?”

Daniel grinned. “Reading books?” He picked up the comb he’d been using when Winona had scared him with her shout. A faint, sensual memory of her fingers twining in his loose hair flashed over his vision. Firmly he rewove his braid and fastened it.

“You know, like novels,” Joleen said, tilting her head to read titles.

“Some.” He stood and pointed out the various sections of the bookshelves. They were organized according to the Dewey decimal system. He hadn’t gone quite so far as to put numbers on the volumes, but only because he’d lacked the time for all his projects. “Fiction is over here. It’s alphabetized, so if you take a book, please put it back where you found it.”

The girl paused, looking up at him with a startled expression. “You alphabetize your books?” she asked, biting her lip. “All of them?”

He gave her a rueful smile. “Yep. I hate not knowing where something is.”

“Oh, so do I,” she said fervently.

It was the first real emotion he’d heard from her.

“I used to have all my drawers at home labeled.”

“Is that right?” He smiled. “I guess I don’t have to worry about you messing up my system, then, do I?”

“No, Mr. Lynch.”

He shifted. “Listen, Joleen, I have to work tonight. You can read anything up there, and I also have a bunch of movies in the basement.”

“Movies?” She brightened. “You have movies?”

“Bunch of ‘em.” Television reception at the ranch, unless you had a satellite dish, was next to nothing. “Nothing fancy, but it’s a pretty good TV and VCR. You know how to work a VCR?”

She nodded.

“All right, then. I’ll get you some blankets and you can sleep down there. If you get hungry, you don’t have to ask me—just go into the kitchen and get something. I kind of forget things when I’m working.”

“I understand.”

Something about her fragile maturity tugged at him. This was a child who’d been too much on her own. “Are you okay? Do you need anything?”

“No, thank you,” she said, her blank expression firmly in place. “How do I get downstairs?”

Daniel showed her the door to the basement and flipped on the light, then watched her go down. “Remember,” he said, “you want anything, just come get it. There’s Kool-Aid and fruit and chips. Just help yourself.”

“Thank you,” she said politely from the bottom of the stairs. “I’m fine.”

Daniel nodded. But she wasn’t fine. He could see that easily enough. Poor little waif.

Back in the living room, his gaze fell on the snapshot he’d framed from Luke and Jessie’s wedding. Luke, Jessie and Giselle, a family at last. It reminded him forcefully just why he couldn’t afford to let his emotions get caught up in the needs of lost little Joleen.

His heart had been shredded quite enough for one lifetime.

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(Excerpt)

by
Barbara Samuel

Prologue

September

H
e stepped into the bright, hot day with a sense of numbness, looking first to the mountains, dark blue on the horizon, then to the sky, a clear turquoise painted with streaks of feathery white. A wind, warm and scented with pine, danced over open fields to brush his face with light, playful buffets.

On his body were civilian clothes—jeans and a clean cotton shirt. His sister had brought him his boots and a good leather belt. His hair, freshly cut, lifted over his forehead in the free wind.

For a long moment, he simply stood at the threshold of his new life, unable to quite believe all that had happened in the past week. As he stood there, a butterfly flittered through the air—bright yellow with spots of blue.

His numbness burst, like the chrysalis that had once held the butterfly, and from the deadness surged a thrust of pure joy. He turned to the man next to him and grinned.

“You never did belong here,” his friend said. “Go on, now. Don’t look back. Remember what happened to Lot’s wife.”

“Thanks,” he said simply, and took the first long steps into a future he’d never dreamed he would own.

One

B
y the time Maggie Henderson and her photographer arrived at the scene of the protest late Wednesday afternoon, a crowd had gathered. Maggie glanced at the heavy clouds hanging low over Cheyenne Mountain and turned to her photographer. “Rain would be the best thing that could happen this afternoon,” she said.

“I’ll second that,” Sharon McConnell agreed, tossing one of a plethora of braids out of her eye.

“Come on,” Maggie said as she pushed through a throng of black-leather-jacketed teens toward the center of the demonstration.

In front of a record store, a handful of teenagers dressed in pressed skirts and slacks marched in a slow circle, carrying placards protesting a rock band. From somewhere in the crowd, a portable radio blasted the music of the band, adding to the general chaos of shouts and chants.

Maggie couldn’t take notes in the jostling crowd, so she committed it all to memory—the noise and taunts and clashing cultures of the two groups. Suddenly, the crowd parted a fraction and Maggie caught sight of a slender, blond girl seated on the hood of a car. She looked a little scared, Maggie thought, in spite of her black jacket studded with metal and her swinging skull earrings.

Maggie grabbed Sharon’s arm. Shouting to be heard, she said, “Get as much as you can. I’ve got to go kill my daughter.”

Sharon’s dark eyes widened in sympathy as she nodded. Maggie headed through the crowd toward Samantha, unintentionally pushing in her haste to get to the fifteen-year-old trying so hard to be grown-up. These kids were all at least a year or two older than Sam, Maggie fumed. She had no idea what she was getting into.

“Hey, watch it, lady,” protested a girl in a striped tube top.

Maggie ignored her. The chants and noise were growing louder, and a kind of rocking motion rippled through the mass of teenagers. Distantly she heard the sound of sirens. Maggie caught a glimpse of Samantha jumping down from the hood of the car, before the crowd shifted again. Maggie was flung against the body of a boy, who shoved her roughly back. She staggered. The unmistakable sound of shattering glass sent a split second of silence over the crowd. Then all hell broke loose.

As the bodies around her surged and pushed and roared, Maggie looked desperately for Samantha. She could see nothing but the black-and-silver jackets, jeans and flying hair. Someone screamed. The sirens arrived at the scene.

Maggie ducked flying fists, moving back as far as she could, intent now on saving herself from the unparalleled rage of teens who believed themselves wronged. A whisper of cool air touched her face, indicating a break in the hot press of bodies. She turned to flee.

An elbow, a knee, a fist—something unmoving and hard smashed into her left temple. Maggie staggered backward, clutching automatically at her head. She blinked hard and tried to stay on her feet.

The reporter in her knew that falling under the running crowd would be instant death. In spite of the stars shining with silver light in her eyes, she knew she had to keep her wits in whatever shape she could manage.

It wasn’t much. She stumbled, carried along in the flow of the crowd, and collapsed on the curb, blood streaming into her eye. Head wounds bleed a lot, she told herself, praying she wouldn’t need stitches.

“Maggie!” Sharon knelt next to her.

“Am I gonna make deadline?” Maggie asked weakly.

“Forget deadline—can you stand up?”

“I think so.” With Sharon’s help, she made it to her feet, pressing her palm hard to the wound. “I’m going to strangle a certain young woman as soon as I get home.”

“You won’t have to wait,” said a soft, contrite voice at her side.

Maggie reached out and grabbed Samantha to her. One of the skull earrings bit into her jaw, and she smelled the strawberry scent of Sam’s shampoo. Relief flooded through her.

“Come on,” Sharon said. “Let’s get you to the hospital.”

* * *

Later, as she held a fresh ice pack to the wound marring her eyebrow, Maggie thought the entire afternoon would make a wonderful letter to her brother, Galen, in New Mexico. He would love the absurdity of the three dozen calls she’d made to the newsroom of the small weekly newspaper she owned and edited, frantically trying to make sure that the paper would get to the printer in time for distribution tomorrow afternoon. He would laugh at her descriptions of the lecture Samantha had received about the dangers of not exercising proper judgment in the selection of companions, a speech Maggie had delivered with an ice pack pressed to her blackening eye.

She swallowed a mouthful of cold beer and kicked the front porch swing into a little rocking motion. The May night was incredibly warm for a Colorado spring. Maggie breathed in the gentle breeze, fragrant with the odor of new grass, and felt its recuperative powers spread through her shoulders and down her spine.

Samantha, looking a great deal more like herself in a ponytail and a pink cotton sweat suit, appeared at the screen door. “Do you need anything, Mom? I’m about to go to bed.”

“‘Mom’?” Maggie echoed. “You’ve been calling me Maggie for weeks.”

Sam had the grace to look ashamed. “I know. I’m sorry. But you really are my only mother, aren’t you?”

“You know I am. I’ll see you in the morning, okay?”

“Good night.”

“‘Night, Sam,” Maggie answered gently.

She took another long swallow of beer. Sam would be sixteen soon. At the end of her first year in high school, she was beginning to ask difficult questions of herself, Maggie and the world around her—a normal, healthy step, but one complicated in Sam’s case by a search for identity.

Given the girl’s tangled parentage, the search was no surprise.

Sam’s mother, a photographer, had been killed in a bomb blast in Belfast when Samantha was nearly four. Maggie had met and married Paul Henderson, also a photographer, when Sam was five, becoming the only mother Sam had really known. Five years later, an amicable but imperative divorce had split Maggie and Paul. Since Paul traveled widely in his career, the decision that Samantha would live with Maggie had been a sensible one.

For the most part, the arrangement had worked out well. Even Sam’s present search for roots was not unexpected.

From the open door of the other half of the semidetached building came the sound of quiet blues. Maggie swung slowly in time to the sound of the mournful saxophone. At least her new neighbor wasn’t like the last ones, she thought, two single girls who had played their music until two or three in the morning, entertained friends constantly and even sunbathed in the backyard with their boombox at full blast. Although she had liked the girls, their noise had become a serious problem. Maggie hadn’t been sorry when they’d moved the week before.