Waiting for Magic (29 page)

“She starts, she moves, she seems to feel the thrill of
life along her keel,” Drew drawled. Then she softened. “Come on, hon.” She put an arm around Kee’s shoulders. “It’s pasta night. Jane’s made her tiramisu for dessert.”

*****

There was much whispering in the dining room as Kee and Drew came down the stairs.

“Shush,” her mother said,
sotto voce
. “No deviations.”

The smells were heavenly. Kee could identify each spice that had gone into her mother’s justly famous ragu sauce that cooked for three hours on the stove. She could smell the coffee and the cream in Jane’s dessert, the chocolate shavings on top, and the lemon in the salad dressing.

“Keelan, just in time,” her father said cheerfully as she came into the room. “I was just sending the salad around.”

Everybody else made a show of talking as though they’d been in the middle of some conversation. Kee saw some eyes go a little round. She must look a sight. She glanced down. Still wearing the t-shirt and her work shirt covered with splashes of paint. Not normally dinner attire, but nobody said anything.

“Sit by me,” Tammy said, pointing to one of the three empty chairs at the gigantic, old Spanish-looking table.

“Who’d want to sit next to you with that cat on your lap?” Lanyon muttered.

“Tammy,” her mother admonished, looking under the table. “How many times…?”

“I know. I know,” Tammy groused. “He’s still growing, though.” She sh
ooed the very black cat with huge chartreuse eyes off her lap. “He’s always hungry.”

“He’s five,” Lanyon objected. “He’s not a kitten.”

Kee didn’t say anything about the equally black long-haired Belgian sheepdog lying quietly at Tammy’s feet, strategically positioned for falling crumbs. Her mother must have seen Lancelot. But her mother had a soft heart. She wouldn’t say anything and Lanyon hadn’t noticed.

Kee sat at the table, being as still as she could. Conversation swirled around her. Tammy, on one side, put a helping of Italian salad on her plate, and Tris, on her other side, heaped spaghetti and meatballs next to it.

“Enough?” he asked helpfully. “There’s more.”

“She could maybe get through that in a week,” Maggie observed on Tris’s other side as she tucked a napkin into Jesse’s striped t-shirt. He sat in a booster chair Tris had made him. It looked like miniature version of one of Tris’s Ducati bikes, red metal with lots of chrome.

Tris blushed. “Just wanted to make sure you’re getting enough to eat,” he muttered.

Ah. Mr. Nakamura must have spilled the beans that she hadn’t been eating. “I’m good,” she mur
mured. Not true, of course.

“
What was with that wave this morning?” Kemble asked. He had a “determined to act normal” look about him. “I thought it was an earthquake.”

Kee tasted her salad and was positively shocked. It tasted
wonderful.
Not just really good, but maybe the most delicious food she’d ever eaten. She’d heard the expression “made your taste buds sing.” But hers were singing
La Traviata
. She schooled her face into stone. The last thing she wanted was questions.

“Channel 7 says it was really weird,” Tammy announced around a mouthful of spaghetti.

“Did they have an expert on to say that?” Lanyon asked innocently. Then he went into the voice of a newscaster. “Now, here’s Edwin Rollins, MD, PhD, J.D, etc., etc., of NASA and the Weather Service to give us his expert opinion about the wave. Dr. Rollins? ‘It was really weird.’ ” This last in a whiney voice. Then he went back to resonant. “Thank you, Doctor.”

Tris let out a laugh, Maggie and Jane giggled. Jesse shouted in laughter just because everybody else was laughing. Even Kee had to smile.

“No, Mr. Smart Alec,” Tammy pouted. “They
said
that no one had ever heard of an isolated wave like that. It didn’t hit anywhere but the peninsula. It was maybe thirty feet.”

“No wonder it felt like an earthquake,” her father said.

The spaghetti sauce! She’d had her mother’s ragu a hundred times, but it had never tasted like
this
. She noticed that Kemble was looking at his plate with a strange intensity, like he didn’t trust himself to look anywhere else.

“We’re lucky we didn’t get wet,” her mother said.

“Wetter,” Tammy muttered. “Will it ever quit raining?”

The talk washed around the table, creating little tide pools when two or three people started side conversations. Jesse finished and tore off to where he was building something with Legos out by the TV.

“Michael, Miles says Bondurant got the maximum sentence,” her father announced.

“Good,” Michael said, his brow darkening. “Guys like that.…”

“Incest is unforgivable,” her father agreed.

Kee’s heart stopped. She felt the color draining from her face. Thank God Devin wasn’t here. She blinked, glancing around the table. Kemble looked stricken too. Did that mean…?

“How is the girl doing?” her mother asked.

“She’s got a good foster situation,” Michael said, around the last of his spaghetti. “And she’s in therapy.”

“You know, maybe I could help out in cases like that,” Maggie said.

“Maggie, that’s a great idea.” Her mother smiled at Maggie.

Tris squeezed Maggie’s arm, looking proud. “You’d be good at that, darlin’.”

Jane delivered a dessert plate of tiramisu to Kemble. He looked dazed.
He knows.
Of course he knew. He was in the room next door. Oh, God, and Devin hadn’t held his hand over her mouth the last time. Kee felt herself flushing eight shades of crimson. Had he told anyone? She glanced around. He was the only one with that expression. His eyes flicked up to her. Dear God, there was sympathy there. He knew everything then. Sure. He must have seen Devin’s power at the river. He knew Devin didn’t love her. And he knew she’d given in to her lust last night and seduced her brother..

She froze in her seat and stared at her plate, afraid to meet anyone’s eyes, lest she shatter and start to cry or scream.

The rest of the family drifted away. Maggie and Tris volunteered to clear the table and load the dishwashers.

“I’m taking off too. I have some film to develop,” Jane apologized, standing.

“I wish you’d let me build you a darkroom,” Kee’s father said. “State of the art, I promise.”

Her father didn’t realize that saying that made it even less likely that Jane would agree to his largesse. Kee kept her eyes riveted on the plate, but he probably had the “Captain of Industry” look where his jaw seemed to get stronger. “Well, I’m going to build a darkroom in the old root cellar. And then if you don’t use it, maybe someone else will. Or maybe it will go to waste, but I’ll have done just as I pleased.”

Jane blushed. “You’re … you’re just too kind to me, Brian.”

“Nonsense,” her father huffed. “A woman tells me I can’t build a darkroom and I just rise to the challenge.” Kee chanced a glance to see him ruin his act by giving a little secret smile at his victory.

Kee’s mother was smiling too. “Drive safely, Jane,” she said.

Kemble got up and peered out the dining room windows. “It’s raining pretty hard. Want me to drive you?”

Jane chuckled. “It’s all of two miles. I’ll be fine.” She went to get her coat from the foyer closet, leaving Kemble with his hands in his pockets. He was about to drift off to his office, when Kee saw Drew beckon to him.

“Dear, I’m so glad you came down,” her mother said, scooting over into Tammy’s empty chair. Her father headed for the office wing and his after-dinner emails. The television went on in the family room.
Treasure Hunter
was ritual for Lanyon and Tammy ever since Drew first saw Michael on the show.

“Sorry I worried you,” Kee muttered.

“Do you want to talk?” Her mother put her hand over Kee’s.

“No,” she said, too loudly. She managed to take a breath. “I’m fine. Really. I was just, you know, upset by the whole river thing.”

Her mother’s gaze was
waaaay
too penetrating. Her mother sat back in her chair. “The road is hard sometimes, honey. But you have to follow the road.”

Uh
-oh.
Her mother was getting all wise on her. Not a good sign. “Uh, yeah. I’ll remember that.”

Her mother sighed and shook her head, a wry smile curving her lips. “I’m so comforted by that statement.” She stood briskly. “Okay, why don’t you go in and spend some quality time with your younger siblings?”

Kee sighed. “Watching
Treasure Hunter
?”

“Absolutely. And following that, if I remember my schedule, is
Dancing With the Stars
. Or is it
Idol
? No matter. You’ll have to play referee with the remote. And just keep an eye on Jesse until Maggie gets done.”

“That ought to keep me occupied.”

“That’s the plan,” her mother said blithely and went over to help Maggie and Tris.

Kee sighed
again.

Uh-oh. Devin was on the move up the drive. She sucked in a breath. He must be leaving with Jane. Edwards and crew would stop him. He was family. Even though they didn’t know he had a power, they’d still stop him.

Not if he was in the trunk of her car. Where he’d been waiting all through dinner. It all became so clear. Why he’d been out by the garages, why he hadn’t moved.

He was unprotected. Anybody could snatch him, hurt him. Danger lurked outside the gates of the Breakers, as they all now knew.

What the hell was he up to? Anger boiled up, taking her by surprise. Was he going to see S.G. for a little of what he really wanted after he’d taken pity on Kee last night?

To hell with him.

The bond between them stretched. She swallowed. Maybe he just wanted to spend the night at Jane’s house. Maybe he was afraid she’d jump him again tonight. She wanted to die. But at least no one knew he was out there. It was okay.

Except for the feeling inside her that was starting to be positively painful.

*****

Kemble stood with Drew outside Kee’s studio up on the third-floor corner.

“I don’t know if we should do this,” he said.

“Of course we should do this,” Drew said briskly. “You should have seen her try to keep me from seeing even a sliver of what was in there. She’s been in there for four days.”

Actually, not all the time
. Kemble thought. She’d also been down with a bottle of tequila in her brother’s room having shrieking, thumping sex. “So?”

“So, something is seriously wrong with our Keelan, big brother. And we have a duty to find out what it is.”

He did not want Drew to know what it was. “And you think we have to invade her privacy like this?”

“It’s a start,” Drew said, obviously exasperated. “How else can we help her?”

Kemble felt all at sea here. Keelan did need help. She’d looked horrible at dinner, even before Senior had started in on the incest thing. What she’d done with Devin was obviously eating her up. But he was pretty sure she didn’t want help. God, what did he know? He ran his hand through his hair. His father would know what to do. The Parents held the family together through any crisis. Kemble had no clue. Except that he couldn’t tell his parents what had happened.

But Drew thought she did know what to do. So he’d go with her intuition. She wouldn’t find anything except paintings in Keelan’s studio, anyway.

“Okay. Let’s go in,” he said, grabbing the knob. “It’s locked.”

“Of
course
it’s locked. We’ll have to break in.”