Thicker Than Water (7 page)

She sat there, the car at a cockeyed angle on the shoulder,
watching the deer bound merrily away into the woods, and she thought how right her daughter was about her driving skills. Damn deer anyway. Thank God she hadn't wrecked Dawnie's sixteenth-birthday present or she would never have heard the end of it, even though her insurance would have covered the damage.

She told herself it didn't matter. She hadn't wrecked the Jeep, or hit the deer or anything else. She hadn't been hurt, and she supposed that might have turned out differently if Sean hadn't reminded her to buckle up. Though she would be damned before she admitted that to him.

Pulling herself together, she pushed down the clutch, restarted the engine, pulled back onto the pavement and drove slowly the rest of the way home, her full attention on the road the entire time. She pulled the Jeep into the garage, closed the door and crept into the house as quietly as she could. She checked all the locks, shut off all the lights. God, it was 3:30 a.m. She had to get up again in a little more than three hours.

She tiptoed up the stairs and paused outside her daughter's bedroom door to peek inside. Dawn was lying in the bed, exactly the way she had been before. She hadn't so much as moved in her sleep.

What had at first seemed reassuring changed in an instant as Julie stared in at the bed and realized what she was seeing.

She pushed the door open further and stepped inside. “Dawn?”

Dawn said nothing. Julie moved closer to the bed, reached down to touch Dawn's shoulder. “Dawnie?”

Still nothing. She pulled the covers back.

Pillows lay beneath them, lined up to resemble the form
of a sleeping sixteen-year-old covered in blankets. Lifting her head, Julie saw the curtains floating on a breeze coming in through the open window.

“Oh my God,” Julie whispered. “Dawn!”

D
awn crouched in the bushes on the front lawn as the Jeep's headlights shone on the slowly rising garage door. The Jeep rolled inside. Dawn's mother got out of the car in a pair of old jeans and a sweatshirt, half her hair hanging loose from what looked like a haphazard pony tail. The garage door lowered slowly.

“Was that your mom?” Kayla asked in an overly loud whisper.

“Yeah.”

“Why's she driving your Jeep?”

Dawn shrugged. “Left her car keys someplace today and had to catch a ride home with, uh…a friend, I guess.”

“Good thing we left the party early.”

“Not early enough.” Dawn rubbed her arms, the possibility of getting caught adding to the chill of the crisp October
night air. Wondering where her mom had been in the wee hours of the morning gave her an even deeper chill. She'd overheard part of a phone call earlier tonight, before her mom had left for her first late-night meeting or whatever. Dawn had picked up the upstairs extension and heard her mother say, “You won't quit until you destroy me utterly, will you, Harry?” and a man reply, “Not utterly, Jewel. I don't want to kill the golden goose, you know.” Her mother's reply to that had been, “Fine, eleven, then.” And then she'd hung up the phone.

Dawn knew her mother had secrets. She'd always had secrets, things that Dawn knew were best not asked about. She didn't ask about her father, for instance. Julie would only say they'd both been teens, and that he'd been killed in a car accident before Julie had even realized she was pregnant. His family were devoutly religious, and telling them of Dawn's existence would only have added to their pain. To push for more information only wound up with one or both of them getting angry, the same result that came of asking too many questions about Julie's side of the family.

Dawn often thought she was probably adopted. It would explain her mom's secrets, and it would explain how Julie could be so dark that she must have Latin blood, while Dawn herself was as pale as a daisy. She was going to ask about it someday, but privately she thought it wasn't half as important as Julie seemed to think it was. It wouldn't change anything.

Dawn loved her mother, secrets and all. But this was the first time she'd had this sickening feeling that one of her mom's secrets might be dangerous, or that she might be in trouble because of them.

“Where do you suppose she went?” Kayla asked softly.

Dawn shook herself out of her thoughts, focused on the present situation and shrugged. “There was probably breaking news somewhere,” she lied. She knew better, though. Her mom didn't go out to cover breaking news in jeans and a sweatshirt. It was a running joke how fast she could make herself ready to go on the air. Five minutes with a makeup mirror and a compact would be plenty, in a pinch.

“You'd better get back in there, Dawnie, before she realizes you're gone.”

Dawn saw her bedroom light come on and swallowed hard. “Too late,” she said, her heart falling to somewhere in the region of her stomach. “You might as well go home. There's no sense in both of us getting caught. Your dad would kill you.”

Kayla nodded. “My dad's a cop, and he's not as good a snoop as your mother is.” She sighed. “Call me in the morning,” she said, then she ran off into the darkness.

Dawn squared her shoulders and walked toward the house. She thought about going around to the back and climbing in through her bedroom window but decided against it. It would only make her mother angrier. Instead she went to the front door and used her spare key to let herself in.

Before she'd even closed and locked the door behind her, her mother's steps came rapidly down the stairs. “Dawnie?”

“Yeah, it's me, Mom.”

Julie appeared in the foyer, then lunged at Dawn and wrapped her in a fierce bear hug that squeezed the breath from her lungs. “My God, I was so worried,” she said, her voice quivering with relief and love.

Then, just as suddenly, she released Dawn from the mamma-bear-hug and stepped back to stare at her. The motherly relief in her eyes faded fast, and her voice took on a firmer, sharper tone. “Just where have you been, young lady?”

Dawn took a breath, lifted her chin. Her mother detested lies above all things, which was kind of ironic, considering, Dawn thought a little rebelliously. Still, she knew it would be best to just get the truth out and face the music. “Okay,” she said. “I snuck out. I'm sorry. It was wrong, and it'll never happen again.”

“Snuck out where? And with whom?”

Heaven help the sixteen-year-old with a reporter for a mom, she thought. Julie Jones didn't know how to accept anything less than who, what, where, when, why and how from anyone. Especially her own kid.

“Come on, Mom, it was a mistake. I'm sixteen. I'm not a little kid anymore, and I said I was sorry.”

“Dawn.”
There was that warning tone in her voice, the one Dawn knew not to mess with.

“All right,” she said with a heavy sigh. “If you must know every detail, there was a party on the lakeshore, down by the landing. A bunch of kids, a little bonfire, a boom box and a pile of CDs. I left after you went to bed and walked down there with a friend. A
female
friend, but I'm not going to tell you which one, because if I do, you'll call her mom and get
her
into trouble, too. Consider it protecting a source.”

Her mother lifted her perfectly shaped eyebrows and gave two slow blinks of her pretty brown eyes that told Dawn she was treading on thin ice. “Was there alcohol at this party?”

“Not at first. About an hour ago a carload of kids from
F. M. high showed up with a couple of cases. Things started getting a little crazy, so my friend and I decided to leave.”

“It was Kayla Matthews, wasn't it?”

Dawn didn't answer. “I didn't drink, Mom. Smell.” She blew toward her mother's face.

Her mother actually took her up on the offer and sniffed her breath, then seemed only slightly relieved. “What else? Were there drugs?”

Dawn licked her lips, lowered her eyes. “I thought I caught a whiff of weed just before we took off, but I didn't see it.”

“I see.”

“Mom, it was just harmless fun. I didn't do anything wrong. I mean, aside from the sneaking out without asking.” She lifted her head, thinking fast. “Besides, you snuck out tonight, too. In my Jeep.”

Her mother's eyes widened just enough to tell Dawn she wasn't supposed to know about her little midnight run. “Dawnie, you were on foot, in the dark, without me even knowing you'd left. Suppose, on your way down to that party, you and Kayla had encountered a predator?”

“I never said Kayla was with me!” Her mom didn't even pause.

“Suppose some fiftysomething pervert with a taste for teenage girls had happened by? Would there have been any harm then? My God, I wouldn't even have known you were missing until morning!”

“Oh, come on, you knew I was missing the second you came home from wherever you were tonight. You don't miss a thing. Besides, I wasn't alone, and nothing happened.”

“Don't you even
watch
the news I have to read every night, Dawnie? Don't you realize what kind of risk you were tak
ing?” Sighing, shaking her head, she turned and walked back into the living room, reaching for the telephone.

Dawn raced after her. “What are you doing? Who are you calling?”

“The police, of course.”

“Mom, you can't!”

She paused in dialing, the phone in her hand. “Dawnie, how am I going to feel if I go in to work tomorrow and someone hands me some copy about a carload of Fayetteville-Manlius students who crashed on their way home from a party? You said yourself they brought beer. Did they have a designated driver?”

Dawn swallowed the lie that leaped to her throat, lowered her head, shook it slowly. “No. They were all drinking.”

“Then may be a patrol car will get there before they leave, and maybe they'll get home alive tonight.” She finished dialing.

Dawn sighed hard enough to make her mother fully aware of her feelings about this, then stalked through to the stairs and up them.

“We're not finished here, Dawn. You're grounded. Two weeks. No arguments.”

“Whatever,” Dawn muttered. God, everyone was going to know who had ratted them out. She and Kayla were the only two who'd left the party early. She closed her bedroom door with a bang and flopped facefirst onto her bed. She would be the most hated junior in Cazenovia High School tomorrow.

It wasn't fair. Her mom was keeping secrets, too. Big ones. But it was okay for
her
to sneak around and hide things. Just not for Dawn. It was such a double standard.

She punched her pillow, buried her face in it and wished for a solution.

A pebble hit her window. Then another. She scrambled off the bed, yanked the curtains wide and stared through the open window. Kayla stood on the back lawn, in the spill of light from her bedroom. “I thought you went home.”

Kayla rubbed her arms, glanced behind her. “Something creeped me out. You get in trouble?”

“Yeah, some.”

“Grounded?”

“Two weeks.”

“Bummer.”

The bushes that formed the boundary between the neat back lawn and the untamed field that sloped downhill to the lake shore moved, as if something were creeping through them. Dawn frowned, and Kayla turned her head quickly. There was nothing there. Just the wind, Dawn thought. “My mom's on the phone, narc-ing out the party.”

Kayla shivered. “I should go back down to the landing and tell everyone before I head home.”

“I wouldn't. She might just call your mom next. I didn't say your name, but she's not stupid.”

Again the bushes moved. This time Dawn swore she saw a shape, a dark shadow, moving with them. Someone was out there, watching.

“Jesus, Kayla, get in here!”

Kayla moved a few steps closer to the house. “I gotta get home. My parents will kill me if they go to check my room and find me gone.”

The shadow moved again, looking so much like a dark, menacing human shape this time that Dawn opened her mouth to scream.

But before the sound escaped, there was a sudden, brighter
pool of light flooding the back lawn, and the shadow vanished in its glow. A second later, Dawn realized the light was coming from her own house's open back door when she heard her mother say, “You might as well come on in, Kayla.”

Kayla grimaced but hurried inside, seeming almost as relieved as she was upset at being caught. Dawn went downstairs to do damage control, telling herself all the way that she probably hadn't seen a damn thing, other than maybe a stray deer or a nightbird. Her mother's paranoid tendencies were finally starting to rub off on her.

* * *

Every person in the newsroom looked up when Julie burst in the next morning, ten minutes late.

Bryan, her assistant, who'd been on her heels from the front entrance all the way to the newsroom, talking all the way, finally managed to thrust the cup of coffee he was carrying into her hands.

“Rough night?” the news director, Allan Westcott asked.

“No sleep. Did you get my fax?”

“Yeah. It came in at 5:00 a.m.” Westcott shuffled the pages in front of him. “Your report says the body was discovered around midnight?”

She nodded.

“So why the delay?”

She had to say something, and admitting that she'd been out rifling through the dead man's apartment in the wee hours was out of the question, nor were Dawn's antics any of the man's business. By the time she'd phoned the police about the party, called Kayla's parents, lectured the girls while awaiting Mr. and Mrs. Matthewses' arrival, seen Kayla safely off, double-checked the locks and gotten Dawn back into
bed, it had been four-thirty. She'd barely had time to type up the details, reread them to be sure she hadn't included anything she wasn't supposed to know and fax the report to the station.

There'd been no point in trying to sleep by then.

“Julie?”

She blinked and sipped her coffee. Perfect, just enough cream and sugar. Bryan was learning fast. “Yes,” she finally answered. “Rough night. Long, rough, sleepless night. Have the police released the identity of the victim yet?” She took another sip, trying to hide her nerves as she hoped the cops hadn't mentioned her missing car keys or her behavior at the crime scene to her boss.

“No. We've been checking every half hour. I, uh, I understand Sean MacKenzie was on the scene with you last night.”

Julie felt her eyes widen but hid her surprise behind a bright smile. “Which makes it even more vital that we stay on this. I couldn't bear to have that snake in the grass scoop me.”

Westcott cleared his throat and glanced at the producer, who was chewing her lower lip. Other glances were being exchanged around the table.