On Mother's Day (Great Expectations #1) Page 3

  If that was it, he could sympathize; he wasn’t into them, either. The last birthday party he’d been involved with was Jenny Lipton’s sixteenth when he was seventeen. He’d gotten her the wrong present, had worn the wrong clothes and hadn’t stayed glued to her side like she’d wanted. Rescuing her from that jerk that had been hitting on her had been a hell of a lot easier than everything that had followed.

  Then there’d been Louisa Turner when he’d been in the army. Seven months pregnant, she’d been dumped by her recruit boyfriend. Alex had found her living hand-to-mouth and had steered her through the proper channels to get help only to have her dump him and return to her old boyfriend at the first chance. But there’d been no birthday there.

  Or with Karen Lipinski about five years back. He’d still been a cop then and she’d had her purse snatched. Nothing major, but still a trauma. She’d leaned on him through the aftermath and for a while after that. But then he’d reached the end of his fuse when one more perp had walked because the rules had been more important than justice and he’d traded in his uniform for his P.I. license. He wouldn’t be busting the bad guys as a P.I., but justice would be within reach. He could keep some woman and her kids from being cheated in a divorce settlement. He could find some deadbeat who’d walked out on a debt. He could find a possible donor to help save a kid’s life. Karen hadn’t shared his excitement, though, and had gone. It hadn’t been him she’d been leaning on, but what he’d been.

  “Go straight down this street,” Fiona said, bringing him back to the present with a thud. “Then take a right at the light. We’re not far from Clements Woods. I thought we could go down and walk along the lake.”

  “Okay.” He’d sworn off relationships after Karen, finally coming to accept that some people didn’t belong in relationships, and he was one of them.

  He followed Fiona’s directions through town and eventually came to the entrance to a county park. A gravel drive wove through trees, after a time leading them into a small parking lot ringed by logs. Down a slope ahead of them, through the budding branches of the trees, he could see the bright glints of sunlight on water. No one else seemed to be around.

  “Quiet here,” he noted.

  “Not too much happening in early April,” she said. “Winters, the whole world comes here to go cross-country skiing. Summers, it’s packed with day campers. My sisters and I went to day camp here when we were kids.”

  They got out of his car and followed a path down to the lake. The day had been pleasant, warm almost, but it was damp and chilly here amid the trees. Alex was tempted to pull his suit coat closer around him, but Fiona in her lightweight jacket seemed unbothered, so he’d be damned if he’d show he was.

  “I went to a summer camp once,” he said.

  “This remind you of it?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “Mine was at a field house in the city.” He thought that sounded almost pitiful and hurried on. “It was good fun, just not woodsy.”

  “Ah.”

  They’d come to the edge of the lake and it was slightly warmer here. She turned to walk across a narrow beach and he trailed after her. They’d only gone a few yards beyond the beach, along a less worn path, when he noticed two swans gliding toward them across the glittering water.

  “There’re swans here?”

  “Yep.” She pulled a bag from her purse that turned out to have bread crusts in it. “Want some?”

  He frowned at her and then at the huge birds bearing down on them. “You think those measly little pieces are going to pacify those beasts?”

  She just laughed and it sounded almost as if the woods had come alive. “They’re tame,” she said, then turned to the birds who were now just a few feet offshore. “Hi, Romeo. Hi, Juliet. How’re you guys doing?”

  “Romeo and Juliet?” He didn’t like his reaction to her laughter. Clients never touched him and she was less than that’. He forced joviality into his voice. “Are they star-crossed teenage lovers?”

  She tossed a piece of bread to each of them. “I don’t know about star-crossed, but they aren’t teenagers,” she said. “They were here twenty years ago when my sisters and I came to camp. Swans mate for life. And they can live into their thirties and even forties.”

  “Jeez. Thirty years.” He thought of his mother’s frequent and short-lived marriages. “That’s longer than most of the marriages I’ve seen.”

  But Fiona didn’t laugh. She just tossed another piece of bread to each swan. “Isn’t that sad? That real faithfulness and loyalty can only be found among animals?”

  It was indeed, but he just let the question hang in the air until it fell silently into the water. This whole situation was making him uneasy. Fiona was making him uneasy. It should have been a simple job—find her and bring her to Chicago. Yet it was feeling anything but.

  She tossed the last crusts to the swans, then sat down on a fallen log to stare out over the water. Alex felt somehow that the silence was more than just silence. He sat down at Fiona’s side. There was a peacefulness here that began to ease the knots in his soul.

  “What’s her name?” she asked suddenly, and turned toward him. “My daughter, I mean.”

  The question wasn’t exactly hard, but it started a battle brewing in his brain. Anonymously, that was how the Andrewses wanted this whole thing to be handled. They wanted Fiona to come to save the girl’s life, but they didn’t want to admit she had any rights. But, hell, it wasn’t like she couldn’t find out the kid’s name on her own. Or that it would hurt anything if she knew.

  “Kate,” he said. “I don’t know if that’s short for anything.”

  She nodded and looked away. “Has she been sick long?”

  “I don’t know. I guess she’s been getting worse lately.” He was sorry he’d started this whole thing—not because he didn’t want to answer these questions, but because he didn’t know the answers. And under that calm, quiet exterior, Fiona must have real fears that needed calming. “They said that she’s got a real curable kind of leukemia, though.”

  “With the right donor,” Fiona added.

  He nodded. “Yeah. With the right donor.”

  The silence came back but he had to stretch to find the peacefulness. The damp in the air must have pushed it away.

  “Isn’t it nice here?” she asked. “I’ve been coming here to think for years.”

  “Oh, yeah?” He did his best thinking while stuck in traffic.

  “I used to think there was magic here, somehow,” she said. “Good things seemed to happen right after I’d leave. Like the time I got a new bike or got asked to my prom. I even found one of my cats abandoned up in the parking lot.”

  “It’s your lucky place, huh?”

  She shrugged. “It seems pretty silly, now that there’s a real problem needing fixing.” She got to her feet as the swans were turning to glide away as regally as they had come. “Either I can help Kate or I can’t. Nothing here is going to change that.”

  He got to his feet also. “My mother believes in magic,” he said. It was what she was always looking for in her relationships. He doubted she ever found it, though.

  “Maybe magic’s just hoping for something so much, you make it come true,” she said.

  “Maybe.”

  She started back toward the car, then stopped at the water’s edge. “Look, a swan feather.”

  She seemed more excited about it than seemed reasonable. “Must be molting season,” he said.

  She was too busy getting a stick to push the feather to the shore to respond. Once it was close, she reached down to pick it up, shaking it slightly to get the water off it.

  “It’ll bring me luck,” she said and put it in her pocket.

  They traveled back to the apartment in silence. He was relieved to leave the park. Their conversation there had been getting just a bit unnerving. Although Fiona didn’t seem all that glad to be getting back to her “surprise” party. Why didn’t she just put a stop to them if she didn’t l
ike them?

  But then there was a lot he didn’t know about families. His mother had gone through four husbands before he was sixteen and two since then. A couple of them had brought kids along—maybe part of the guy’s appeal, since his mother had been warned not to have more kids after Alex had been born—but none of them had ever been together long enough to get past the annoyance stage.

  The street in front of Fiona’s apartment was filled with cars and they had to park over in the next block.

  “Looks like somebody’s having a party,” he said, as they walked back to her place.

  “Ha-ha,” she murmured.

  Fiona’s family certainly did things up right. Quiet reigned in the building until she opened her apartment door, then the whole world exploded into sound. People were yelling “Happy Birthday!” streamers filled the air, and little kids were blowing horns. Fiona smiled bravely through the whole thing. She didn’t become flustered until the initial wave of noise died down.

  “Hey, look!” somebody yelled. “Fiona brought a date.”

  “Nice-looking fella.”

  “Maybe he’s one of those mail-order dates.”

  “Yeah, I hear you can get anything from a catalog these days.”

  “All right, that’s enough.” Fiona held her hands up and had turned on her sternest schoolmarm tone. “This is Alex Rhinehart from Chicago.”

  Everyone quieted down for a moment and Fiona gave the explanation she had given Samantha. It was fairly obvious that nobody in this group knew about her child.

  As Fiona came to the end of the story, the noise started up again. Maybe a little more subdued, but partying nonetheless and it pulled her into the flow. Alex drifted toward a quiet side of the living room.

  His first impression of Fiona’s apartment had been of quiet comfort and now, left to his own devices, he could see that he was right. Everything seemed to fit together—the inviting pillows on the sofa, the occasional shelf of figurines in among her books, even the family pictures on the wall.

  Maybe once this thing was over he should hire her to redo his place. He didn’t know if it needed a woman’s touch, but he did know his touch hadn’t done anything positive to it. He picked up a glass swan from a shelf.

  “That’s Aunt Fiona’s.”

  “Yeah, you drop it and you’re dead meat.”

  He slowly put the figurine back before turning to look at a group of kids watching him. “Hi, guys,” he said.

  “We ain’t all guys,” the bigger of the girls said.

  “I’m sorry,” Alex replied. “Hi, guys and gals.”

  They stared unblinkingly at him.

  “Is that better?” he asked.

  They continued staring.

  Alex cleared his throat. “Those glass swans are real pretty.”

  “She got them ‘cause she rescued a real live swan,” the bigger girl, apparently a spokesperson, said.

  “Oh, yeah?” He looked at the figurines again. “Who gave them to her, the Royal Order of Swans?”

  They reverted to their unblinking stare. Alex didn’t know much about little kids but, from what he could see with this group, they didn’t have much of a sense of humor.

  “You know,” he said. “Like maybe the king swan had them made and—”

  “Swans can’t make things.”

  “Okay.” Alex nodded. “So they bought them at the glassthing store.”

  “Swans don’t got no money.”

  Their frowns were starting to deepen and Alex wondered if kids became dangerous when irritated. “All right,” he said. “So how did Fiona rescue this swan?”

  “The swan was stuck in the water.”

  “No, it was stuck in some garbage.”

  “But the garbage was in the water, so that makes it stuck in the water.”

  “Aunt Cassie and Aunt Sam helped.”

  “They cut it loose.”

  “And Aunt Sam says that because of it, they’re going to be lucky in love.”

  Alex blinked at the solemn little faces surrounding him. Lucky in love? He knew that Fiona was single. And judging from the reception he got from her relatives, there wasn’t a whole passel of leading men pursuing her.

  He was also single but quite happy with that. Maybe being lucky in love meant that you weren’t caught in a suffocating relationship.

  “Hey.” Alex pointed toward the pictures on the wall. “Who are all these people?”

  The bigger girl pointed to a photo of a couple standing next to a car. “Those are Aunt Fiona’s other mom and dad.”

  Other mom and dad?

  “And this is Grandma Scott.”

  “That’s Aunt Cassie and Auntie Sam when they were little.”

  They were racing ahead, pointing out pictures and throwing names at him. Alex stopped trying to keep it all straight. They skipped one picture, though—an old one that looked like a reproduction of a newspaper photo. “Who’s this old guy?”

  “Aunt Fiona’s great-great-grandfather.”

  “Not great ‘cause he was swell.”

  “No, great like really, really old.”

  “What’s so great about being old?”

  The last question brought quiet to the group as they all pondered the pros and cons of growing old. But Samantha took that moment to announce the lasagna was out of the oven, causing the kids to charge toward the kitchen.

  Once he was alone again, Alex turned to study the picture. The man looked familiar. Alex moved closer and found a name in tiny letters beneath the picture—Horace Waldo Fogarty. Good Lord. He was Fiona’s ancestor?

  Horace Fogarty had been a well-known newspaper editor at the turn of the century and one of Alex’s guiding lights once he discovered Fogarty’s works while in high school. His major thesis was that a man’s honesty defined his worth, not how much money he had or to whom he was born. Alex even had a signed copy of one of his editorials in his autograph collection.

  And to think he now knew a relative of the great man.

  Although he wasn’t sure that Fogarty would have agreed with Fiona’s keeping her pregnancy a secret.

  “They reminded me of a swarm of army ants,” Alex said.

  “Army ants?” Fiona closed her suitcase and looked up, desperately struggling to close the latch and put her mind in order. It was more than four hours since Alex had appeared at her door, turning her life upside down. The shock was only starting to wear off. “Who?”

  “Your family,” he replied. “They swoop in, set things up, and party hardy. Then they clean up and disappear. Unless you were here yourself, you’d never guess that only minutes ago, a gang of people had occupied these premises.”

  “They’re quite efficient,” Fiona said as she wiped her palms on her jeans and looked around the room. She could feel Alex’s eyes on her but that was just one more thing bombarding her. At the moment she wished she were a little mouse with a hidey-hole to run to.

  “Nervous?”

  She nodded.

  “I’ve never been a donor,” he said. “But as I understand it, the procedure isn’t too bad.”

  Fiona gave him a quick glance, a half smile twisting her face, before she turned away. “I haven’t seen her in ten years.”

  There was a long pause before Alex spoke. “She won’t know who you are.”

  “But I’ll know who she is,” she replied, so quietly that she almost didn’t hear herself.

  If she was a basket case now, how would she be once she got to Chicago? Once she was in the same room with her daughter and the adoptive parents? But was it right to consider the girl her daughter?

  No. Her only two babies were right here—Elvis and Prissy. They were the only ones she had a right to love and to spoil. She went to the cabinet and took out a small handful of cat treats, leaving a few in each of the cat dishes. Sam would come by and feed them, and even play with them. For all Fiona knew, they wouldn’t miss her at all. She hadn’t let a whole lot get attached to her.

  “Take your bags, ma’am?
My bellhop uniform is at the cleaners,” Alex said. “But my lifting muscles are just fine.”

  Fiona shook her head. “I can’t go yet. I need to check on somebody first. I look after some of my neighbors. They’re old and there are no relatives that live close by.”

  “Oh.”

  “Sam and Cassie will look in on them while I’m gone,” Fiona said. “And Mrs. Callan and Mr. Kaminsky will be fine. But I want to look in on Mrs. Torcini before I go. She. gets confused easily and I want to tell her about the arrangement myself.”

  “Okay,” Alex replied.

  Fiona let him take her arm as they exited her apartment. Not that it meant anything—they both knew it didn’t—but it was nice nonetheless. She pressed her neighbor’s buzzer.

  “She doesn’t hear too well,” Fiona explained, turning away from the door.

  “Hello.”

  Fiona almost jumped through the roof. Her neighbor always spoke loudly.

  “Hello, Mrs. Torcini,” Fiona said. “I just came by to tell you that I’d be gone for a little while.”

  The elderly woman’s hair was as white as newly fallen snow, but her eyes were black as coal. She stood there staring at Alex. Fiona hoped that the old dear understood her.

  “Samantha and Cassie will drop in and see how you are.”

  “You’re getting married?”

  Fiona looked at Alex, whose face now wore a crooked grin, and then back to Mrs. Torcini. “No!” she shouted. “We’re not getting married.”

  “You’re going to live together?”

  Fiona found herself sputtering, unable to utter anything that made sense.

  “Young people do that a lot nowadays. I don’t know why.” The old woman shook her head. “It’s like a pair of shoes. You wanna buy a pair of shoes after someone else’s worn them?”

  “We’re just going to Chicago.” Fiona, her cheeks burning, felt her agitation grow as she tried to get some eye contact with her neighbor, who was still checking Alex out. “He’s driving me.”