Whiskey Island (18 page)

She opened her mouth to tell him the corned beef was already gone, that next month he ought to time his act a little more closely. But suddenly she didn’t have the heart to spar with him. She was just so glad to have Jon sitting there, this boy-turned-man who had been privy to more of her hopes and dreams than any lover she’d taken.

And certainly more than her husband.

“You’re in luck.” For the sheer hell of it, she hoped her eyes were dancing. “There’s one plate left. It’s yours.”

He cocked his head and studied her for a moment. “You were saving it for yourself, weren’t you?”

“How do you do that?”

“You can’t hide anything from me, Case. Bring it in and we’ll split it.”

“Will you be here? If I walk into the kitchen, warm it up and come back out, will you still be waiting?”

“I’ll be here. I wait well.”

They shared the corned beef and talked about old friends and favorite haunts. Most of the lunch crowd departed, and they moved to a table in the corner, where they shared a piece of apple pie.

“So tell me about your job,” Casey said. “When did you turn into the caped crusader? First a cop and now a D.A.”

“A few minutes ago I was the Invisible Man.”

“Aliases galore.”

He pushed the last of the pie toward her. “I have an overdeveloped sense of right and wrong. What can I tell you?”

“Jon, under the bad boy exterior, you were absolutely brilliant. I thought you’d be a nuclear physicist or a brain surgeon.”

“People interest me more than atoms, people whose brains are fine just the way they are.”

“And that’s why you were a cop and now a prosecutor? Because people interest you? Or because you’re interested in putting people in jail?”

“I’m interested in putting criminals in jail so good people can continue to live their lives.” He lounged in his chair, one arm thrown carelessly over the back. He had the long, rangy limbs of a cowboy, but he had filled out over the years. His chest and shoulders were broader. Even his hands were wider than she remembered.

“What drew you in that direction?”

“You don’t think I just drifted that way for lack of someplace better?”

“Of course not.”

“The benefits of a long-term friendship.” He smiled at her, that warm and surprisingly potent smile.

She raised an eyebrow. “A long-term friendship with a long-term break in the middle.”

“One afternoon I was walking down a San Francisco street in broad daylight and two guys jumped me. Like an idiot, I fought back. By the time they’d finished, I had no watch, no wallet and no heartbeat.”

She gasped. “Jon!”

He held up a hand. “I hardly remember it. Head trauma has its silver lining. Somebody who’d seen the whole thing screamed for help. There was a doctor in the crowd, and he did CPR until the ambulance arrived. It’s not a bad city, it wasn’t a bad neighborhood. It was just bad luck on my part.”

“It was bad people.”

“It took some time to recover. I dropped out of school for a semester and took it easy. If I pushed myself too hard, I had setbacks, so I was forced to relax. I’d always worked so hard at everything, and that was the first time in my life that I’d simply sat and thought.”

“And you thought maybe you should get even with these guys and become a cop?”

“I thought about a lot of things, and one of them was how many people this happened to, and how badly in need of change our social systems are.”

“Please don’t tell me that suddenly you’re a right-wing, moral-majority, build-more-prisons, capital-punishment-for-car-thieves kind of guy.”

“No, but I’m not a his-mommy-forgot-to-change-his-diapers-so-it’s-not-his-fault-he’s-a-serial-killer kind of guy, either. There aren’t any easy answers. But I decided the good answers come from good people. And I figured I qualify.”

Casey knew about life-altering experiences. Intimately. She could understand how Jon had come to his decision.

She finished the last bite of pie. “I’ll bet you’re good at what you do. And fair. I’ll bet you’re fair. You were always so reasonable. It used to drive me crazy.”

“That’s because you were a hothead who never thought anything through and despised anybody who pointed it out to you.”

“Except you. I never despised you.”

“No, I was your listening ear.” He rested his arm on the table, his fingers open, as if they were there to thread through hers. “And I’m listening now.”

“There’s nothing much to tell.”

“I think there is. The smartest woman I know is divorced and tending bar in the family saloon she ran away from. What’s going on?”

She shook her head, not even sure where to start.

“Tell me about the divorce.”

“Well, that’s the least of it. Stan was one of my so-called losers, only he was well disguised. Megan met him once and saw right through him. Even Peggy did. But I was blind to anything except his wavy hair and penthouse apartment.”

“How long were you married?”

“A year. The first week went well. It was all downhill from there. Stan thought we had an understanding, that I was a party girl who wouldn’t care if he kept a few gals on the side and played games with the IRS so he could take home a bigger bite of his company’s profits.”

“Sounds painful.”

As a matter of fact, when the marriage dissolved Casey had felt little, other than relief. After the real Stan began to emerge, she had only continued the marriage so that no one could accuse her of having a short attention span. And in her own way, she had tried.

She had, after all, left Stan with all his body parts.

“The painful part was realizing I make lousy decisions,” she admitted. “It made me realize how many I’ve made along the way, including leaving this place. But losing Stan was like losing an abscessed tooth. I just wished I’d noticed the first signs of decay.”

“Ouch.”

“I’m not pining over him. Just so you know.”

“So Elvis wasn’t a way to bolster your morale?”

“
Earl
was just a guy I met that night. Nothing more.”

“Okay, that was the easy part.”

She placed her hand over her heart and fluttered her lashes. “My soul has been purged.”

“Why are you working here? Does Megan need you that badly?”

“Megan could manage fine without me. Did, in fact, for a number of years.”

“Why did she have to? Why did you disappear?”

“I wanted to see the world.”

“I bet there’s more to the story.”

“Didn’t Megan fill you in on it when you were washing dishes the other day?”

“I don’t think Megan wants to talk about it.”

“You were at my homecoming celebration. You mean not one of my relatives would talk?”

“Do they know?”

She really wasn’t sure. No one had actually brought up the reason for her disappearance. Now she wondered if Megan had kept their fight a secret.

“You don’t have to tell me,” he said. “I don’t have the right to pry.”

Something about the way he said it made her think he wished that weren’t so. She was already surprised by the level of intimacy between them. In a way, it was as if they’d never been apart, but that wasn’t quite true. Because this Jon was a very different man than the boy she had known.

And suddenly she
did
want to tell him. It was a dirty little secret, one she and Megan had carefully not confronted in detail since she’d returned. She realized it would be nice to stop pretending the rift had never happened.

“It’s pretty simple, really.” She leaned back. “I wanted Megan to sell the saloon. After all the work she’d done to keep it in the family, I wanted her to sell it, divide the money among us and let us all get on with our lives.”

He didn’t look shocked. “I can see why you’d feel that way. There were some pretty unhappy memories attached to this building.”

“Really? It sounds supremely selfish, even to me. But I was sick of watching Megan sacrifice herself, and I hated this place. Maybe I still do, I don’t know. Megan wanted to keep running Whiskey Island and put me through college on the little she was clearing. I wanted to see the world, have a life. I wanted her to have one, too. I didn’t want her taking care of me anymore.”

“She didn’t see things the same way?”

“Of course not. This place is her life! It flows through her bloodstream. Take away the Whiskey Island Saloon and her heart will stop beating, or at least that’s what she thinks. She did everything to keep it for us. She quit school, she worked night and day. And I didn’t even want it!”

He was silent.

Casey took a deep breath. “So I left. I decided it was my life, and I’d live it the way I wanted. One afternoon I met some people who were traveling south, and I went with them. It was as simple as that.”

“You didn’t tell her?”

“I didn’t. I knew she’d talk me out of it. And I didn’t want her making my decisions anymore.”

“You didn’t tell me, either.”

She’d been staring at the table; now she looked up and smiled wanly. “Jon, I couldn’t tell
you
I was leaving. I was too ashamed. I knew how many people I was going to hurt, but I did it anyway, because I just couldn’t breathe here. I knew I was screwing up, and I didn’t even care. I just had to get out.”

“And now you’re back.”

She shrugged. “It was time to come home.”

“Why?”

Casey was just trying to figure out how to tell that story quickly—and selectively—when she saw Peggy motioning from the other side of the room. She was standing by the pay phone, the receiver in her hands.

Casey got to her feet before she thought better of it. “Looks like I’ve got a phone call. Will you take a rain check?”

He stood, too. “Not for long.”

She glanced at him, and his eyes held hers. “What does that mean?”

“Our friendship was one big rain check, Case. I was always waiting until you got around to me. I don’t intend to continue.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t you?”

“You were my best friend. How was that a rain check? We spent hours together. I never ignored you.”

“You know where I live, and you probably have my telephone number. Call me if you want to finish this.”

“What do you mean, I know where you live?”

“I saw you drive by my house Friday night. How’d you track me down?”

She didn’t deny it. What was the point of playing games with a cop turned lawyer? “I got your address from a friend of Peggy’s who works in your office building. But I didn’t get your phone number.”

“Then next time you’re driving by, park and come in.”

“Why?”

“You’ll have to tell me. Thanks for the corned beef and the pie. I still think the food here’s the best in Cleveland.”

He warmed her with one brief smile, then he was gone.

She was staring at the door when Peggy joined her. “Whoever it was hung up.”

Casey had nearly forgotten that Peggy had summoned her. “I’m sorry. Were they asking for me in particular? Or was it just one of Megan’s suppliers?”

Peggy shrugged. “As a matter of fact, it was a man, and he didn’t ask for anyone in particular. But he was asking questions I wasn’t sure how to answer.”

Casey was only half listening. “About the saloon?”

“More or less. He asked for someone named Al, then he wanted to know who this number was registered to, if this was a private residence or a business, my full name and what connection I had to it, that sort of thing.”

Peggy had Casey’s complete attention now. She flashed through a million possibilities, sorting them in order of most to least likely.

The worst possibility was that someone had traced a call she’d made last night. She’d purposely made it from the saloon pay phone instead of the private number upstairs or her cell phone. But she had felt the call was safe enough to make from inside the saloon. Now she wished she had gone to a pay phone somewhere out of the neighborhood.

“It was probably a wrong number,” she said at last. “That probably happens pretty frequently. Either that or someone lunching here gave out the number.”

“Well, it rang a few times before I picked up. People barely glanced toward the phone when I answered it, so I don’t think anyone was expecting a call. And there’s hardly anybody left, besides.”

Casey looked around and saw it was true. She had been so immersed in her conversation with Jon that she hadn’t noticed the last of the crowd disappearing. “Maybe somebody was expecting a call and left before it came in.”

“Then I wonder why the person on the other end just didn’t explain who he was? He seemed more intent on pinning me down, and as Uncle Frank always says, I guess he got my Irish up.”

“Maybe it was somebody’s bookie, and he wasn’t expecting a woman’s voice.” Casey smiled reassuringly. “Look, it might have been a sales call. You know the way telemarketers try to establish some sort of a personal link before they launch into their sales pitch?” She paused. “So what exactly did you tell him?”

“I told him this was a pay phone in a bar, that we probably have half a dozen customers named Al and the phone’s in use at least a hundred times a day, so I couldn’t be any help tracking anybody down for him. When he kept after me, I called you.”

Even though it was unlikely that someone had traced last night’s call to the saloon, Peggy’s story was perfect. If someone
had
traced Casey’s call, he would probably assume she had dropped by the saloon to make it, leaving afterward. And since her identity was unknown, finding her on that bit of information would be next to impossible.

The number she had called was brand-new, and many people had worked to be sure that line wasn’t tapped. She could call Grace, but was that best? On the basis of one unexplained call? Ashley was doing well in her class and adjusting to life at Whiskey Island. In the long run, what was healthiest for the little girl?

“I’m glad you didn’t tell this guy more than that,” Casey said. “If you get another call, just turn it right over to me. I’ll find out what he’s after.”

“Well, I’m sorry I interrupted your talk with Jon. I like him, don’t you?”

“Most of the time.”

“He reminds me of Stan.”