Listen to the Child

Emma grabbed her mother’s arm and turned her around so that she stared directly into Emma’s eyes. “Mom, will you be all right by yourself?”

“I think I can just about handle it, thank you.”

“You going to Granddad’s for dinner?”

“I can probably manage to microwave something all by my very own self.” But she smiled to show she was kidding.

“Oh, Mother,” Emma said. “Come on, Daddy. Can we go to the park?”

“Yeah, well, about that…” He pointedly turned away so that Kit couldn’t read his lips. She could, however, see Emma’s face and the look of resignation that came over it.

“Jimmy, playing video games while you sleep on the sofa is not much fun for a child. Couldn’t you do something Emma wants to do for a change?”

He turned back to face her. This time he didn’t smile. “Hey, she’s my kid too, okay? You don’t run my life any longer, okay?”

Kit bit down a reply. Not in front of Emma. “When will you be back? Emma has school tomorrow.”

“Yeah, I do remember about school. Eight, maybe nine.”

“Try seven, maybe eight. She has to be in bed by nine.”

He didn’t say anything else as he herded Emma out the door and into the front seat of his yellow Mustang.

Kit leaned on the door. The psychologists said that divorced parents weren’t supposed to let the child hear them snap at one another or say nasty things about each other. They were especially not to fight over the child. Kit tried hard.

Emma was too smart. When Kit and Jimmy had finally put an end to a marriage that both had known—almost from the start—was a mistake, Emma had been devastated. She’d been Daddy’s girl. Jimmy could do no wrong. The breakup was all Kit’s fault.

Kit knew that the divorce rate for cops was higher than for the rest of the population, but when she and Jimmy met at the police academy and married soon after they graduated, she’d never expected to become a part of that statistic. Now she wasn’t even a cop any longer—just a pensioned-off ex-cop. Jimmy would probably ride a squad car until he retired. That had been part of the problem—she’d had too much ambition to suit Jimmy, while he hadn’t had nearly enough to suit her.

Now Emma had endured two years of Jimmy’s canceled visits and his endless succession of empty-headed girlfriends. They either treated Emma like an interloper or fawned all over her to get close to her father. Just when she’d get used to one girlfriend, the girl would disappear to be replaced by a clone. There were so many that Kit had stopped asking their names, merely calling all of them “New Girl.”

Kit was having a harder and harder time convincing Em to spend Sunday afternoons and alternate Friday nights and Saturdays with her father. Jimmy kept promising that they’d go to see the latest movies, then reneging when New Girl preferred to see something R-rated that was unsuitable for Emma.

Occasionally, he simply got in a baby-sitter and left. At first Emma had refused to admit she’d been left with the sitter. Finally, however, she’d confessed in a welter of tears.

It was far worse, though, when Jimmy dumped Emma at his mother’s Germantown condo for the day. Kit carefully avoided saying anything negative about Mrs. Lockhart to Emma, even if there were times she had to bite her tongue. Jimmy’s mother didn’t keep to the same rules.

Mrs. Lockhart had never liked Kit. Not that she would have liked any woman who married her son. She’d been civil to Kit until the divorce. After Kit threw Jimmy out, Mrs. Lockhart switched from kid gloves to brass knuckles. And used Emma as her punching bag.

Kit remembered the Saturday afternoon when Emma came home from her grandmother’s with her eyes red from crying, slammed the door on her father and announced, “I won’t go to Meemomma’s ever, ever again.”

Since the scene took place shortly before Kit’s accident, she could hear the frustration and fury in her daughter’s voice. It had taken an hour of cajoling for Kit to get the whole story about the afternoon. By that time she was even angrier than Emma.

“All she does is bad-mouth you, Mom.” Emma switched to a Mississippi Delta twang that was such a good imitation of Mrs. Lockhart that Kit was startled. “If your momma took care of her family like a decent woman, your daddy would still be living at home instead of that puny little apartment. I told Jimmy when he said he was gonna marry her, I said, ‘She’s a mean ’un, you mark my words. Never cook you a decent meal or iron your shirts or keep a halfway decent house.’”

Kit had to laugh in spite of her anger. “Don’t you ever let her hear you do her that way, Emma Lockhart. Don’t let your daddy hear you, either.” She wrapped her arms around her daughter and pulled the child into her lap. She could hear Emma’s sniffles against her shoulder. “I don’t care what she says about me, Emma, but you shouldn’t have to listen to that stuff.” She smoothed her daughter’s hair. “She loves you, sweetheart, and she loves your daddy. She’s unhappy, is all.” What Kit actually wanted to say was that the woman was a harpy. “I’ll tell your dad she upset you.”

“No, Mom, you can’t! He’ll just get mad at me for telling. She goes on and on about how Daddy’s perfect, and you’re some kind of monster who goes around shooting people. She says you spent all his money and now he’s poor because he has to pay child support when you already make more than he does. She says I’d be better off living with her. I don’t want to live with her, Mom! I’d die. Where she lives smells like old people, and she hates cats.”

“Don’t you worry about that, baby. I wouldn’t let you live anywhere but with me.” Besides, Jimmy never wanted custody of you. She could never tell Emma that.

Emma touched her mother’s cheek in that way that melted Kit’s heart. It generally got her everything from a new doll to an ice-cream cone before dinner. “You can tell Daddy I don’t have to go back there ever again, right, Mom?”

Kit wished that were possible, but Jimmy would never agree, and once Emma was out of her sight and under his care, he could drop her anywhere he wanted. All she could do was talk to him and tell him that Mrs. Lockhart was making Emma unhappy. If he held true to form, he’d talk to his mother, but it wouldn’t change her behavior for more than one visit. Kit cuddled Emma and rocked her as she had when she was a baby. She ought to feel some sympathy for Mrs. Lockhart. She’d had a hard life. She’d had Jimmy when she was well into her forties in some unpronounceable Delta town in Mississippi.

Apparently, Jimmy’s father had spent his days over coffee at the local diner and his nights playing poker and drinking illegal booze with his farmer buddies. His wife had not only worked the farm pretty much by herself, she’d canned, sewed and baked biscuits from scratch three times a day.

Her experience should have made her applaud Kit’s desire to become a police officer and not be dependent on her husband. Instead, she resented anything Kit did that didn’t involve pampering Jimmy. Kit cursed the day Mrs. Lockhart had rented out the Mississippi farm and moved to a retirement condo in Germantown.

“Daddy keeps saying he’s going to take Meemomma and me down to the farm in Mississippi so I can ride a horse. He says he wants me to see where he grew up.” She sighed. “’Course, he never does.”

Until Kit’s accident, Emma had used the sudden and unexplained onslaught of stomachaches or even extra homework to keep from going with her father. Since Kit’s accident, she’d tried to use “looking after Mom” as an excuse.

Of course, Jimmy blamed Kit when Emma didn’t want to stay with him. He would never admit that after so many broken promises, a child like Emma would simply stop asking to be disappointed.

Kit knew Jimmy loved Emma, but she didn’t fit into his lifestyle.

He didn’t seem to realize that all too soon she’d be a teenager and then an adult, and he would no longer fit into her life.

Kit hadn’t wanted to ask him about his support check this afternoon. It was two weeks late. Before, when Kit had been making good money with the police department, the money hadn’t mattered so much. Now, even with her disability pension, she had to watch every penny. Jimmy’s check could at least buy Emma a new pair of Nikes from time to time.

Pushing herself away from the front door, she went to the kitchen. She opened the refrigerator and reached for a beer, then stopped and took a diet soda instead. Her mother was right. She didn’t have a problem with alcohol now, but boredom could very well lead to a major one if she didn’t watch herself. Besides, she really didn’t like the taste of beer.

Drink in hand, she walked from the kitchen to the den, where she turned on the television and stretched out in the recliner. She had closed captions on a number of channels, but there never seemed to be anything she wanted to watch. She tried to practice lipreading, but the faces were too often turned away or backlit.

So how to spend the afternoon? Running? Didn’t appeal to her. Besides, it was probably going to rain again any minute.

Riding her bicycle? Without Kev in the basket to warn her about traffic, she was asking for trouble.

The flower beds in the backyard badly needed to be cleaned up and weeded for spring, but she couldn’t get up any enthusiasm for that, either.

She needed a job, dammit! A job that she went to and worked at and then came home and rested from. A job that paid actual money and gave her actual satisfaction. She’d never been a stay-at-home housewife and mother.

What was she going to do with the rest of her life? Live on her pension? Sure, if she wanted to sweat every bill. She’d never wanted to be anything but a policewoman from the time she was five years old.

When the single thing that defines you as a person is taken from you, who the hell are you?

CHAPTER THREE

MONDAY MORNING Mac met Mark Scott walking down the hall of the clinic with his little black-and-white mutt at his heels.

“Morning.” Mac bent down and scratched Nasdaq’s ears while the little dog wagged its whole body. “I need to talk to you. Ten o’clock.”

“Okay,” Mark said, looking at Mac suspiciously. “Please don’t tell me you’ve discovered the newest piece of equipment to make you the perfect surgeon and it only costs two million bucks. I get enough of that from my beloved wife.”

“Sarah simply believes in buying the best for our clients,” Mac said with a perfectly straight face.

Mark rolled his eyes. “She’d been after me to buy the best from the first day she walked into this place. She made my life a living hell until I gave her what she wanted.” He grinned. “I got payback, though. She’s not only made me the perfect wife, she’s given me the perfect daughter. Not a bad trade-off for an ultrasound and a laser. So what do you want?”

As business manager of Creature Comfort as well as vice president of Buchanan Industries, Mark split his time between his cubbyhole in what had once been a storage room at Creature Comfort and a palatial office on the top floor of Buchanan Towers. Since Coy Buchanan—Rick Hazard’s father-in-law—had bankrolled Creature Comfort in the beginning, it was only right that Mark keep an eye on the clinic’s bottom line. However, clinic revenue had increased so much in recent months that he was around less and less these days.

“I do not want equipment.” Mac looked down at Nasdaq. “And put that dog on a diet.” He turned his back on Mark and walked toward his office.

He met Nancy coming out of his office with a sheaf of files in her hand.

“Oh, there you are,” she said, and thrust the files at him.

“And I’m supposed to do what with all this?”

“That’s a leading question, Doctor. Drink the coffee I just put on your desk and read them. You’re spaying a couple of cats at nine.”

“Great,” he muttered. Spaying cats, neutering dogs, stitching up gashes and pinning broken bones of animals whose owners let them loose in traffic. Was that all his life had become? He’d wanted to make a real difference. At least Sarah and Eleanor got to work on a variety of animals. The only time Mac saw the inside of a horse was when one of them needed his help, which, given their levels of proficiency, they seldom did. He badly needed a new challenge.

Maybe he should do what Liz Carlyle was doing—go back to school for a year and pick up an additional specialty.

He had a specialty, blast it. He was the best damn veterinary surgeon in the South—possibly the United States.

Yet he spent his nights watching television and his days spaying cats.

Maybe he should sign on for a tour of duty at one of the big African parks—they always needed vets. He could certainly afford six months of little or no money. Ngorongoro, maybe, or Kruger.

His partner, Rick, would have a heart attack if Mac even suggested a six-month leave of absence. He had responsibilities to the clinic.

“Your kitties are waiting for you,” Nancy said from the door.

“Shaved and prepped?”

“No, Doctor, I thought I’d leave all the prep work to you,” Nancy said with a sniff. “Of course they’re prepped. Come on, get your rear end in gear. You’ve got a full schedule, as you might know if you’d bothered to read what I left you.”

“Someday I’m going to fire you!” he called after her.

“One can but hope.”

He grinned. Anytime he started feeling sorry for himself, Nancy brought him up short. No matter how he snapped and snarled occasionally, he was doing the thing God had put him on this earth for, and doing it well.

Nancy, on the other hand, had been an up-and-coming professional Grand Prix show jumper on the verge of the big time—long-listed for the Olympics. Then the degeneration in her cervical vertebrae progressed so far and so fast that riding became agony for her.

Three operations had relieved most of the pain, but she could never ride again. She seldom talked about her neck, and when she did, she joked about it. But every time a horse came into the clinic, whether it was a small pony or that Percheron mare with the foal, she would go back to the stalls on her lunch hour to pet and hug it. Her eyes were always suspiciously red afterward.

Mac and Nancy worked steadily, and as usual, once he was immersed in surgery, he lost track of everything except the creature in front of him.

He didn’t hear the door to the surgery swing open behind him. “Thought you said ten o’clock,” Mark Scott said.

“Damn!” Mac looked over his shoulder. “Give me five minutes.”

“Go on, Doctor,” Nancy said. “I can close for you.”

He nodded and stripped off his gloves and mask as he followed Mark into his office.

“Okay, what do you want money for?”

“Marriage has made you suspicious,” Mac said as he slumped into the chair across from Mark. “How’s the kid, by the way?”

“Since Sarah’s been bringing her to work, you probably see more of her than I do.” Mark’s lean face split into a smile that could only be described as beatific. “Smartest child ever born, and the prettiest, which you’d know if you ever bothered to play with her.”

“Can we change the subject? I have a proposition for you.”

Mark rubbed his hand over his hair. “What is it?”

“I want to hire two more vet techs—one surgical and one nonsurgical.”

“We have Nancy for small animals and Jack for large animals.”

“They take vacations and get the flu. They are human, in case you haven’t noticed.”

“Sure, but I never imagined you did. We job out when we need extra help. There are plenty of people out there looking to work with animals for zilch money, which is what we pay.”

“I’m aware of that,” Mac said. “I want somebody I can train from the ground up to do what I want done in the way I want it. Nancy reads my mind. I need someone else who can do the same thing.”

“The woman’s tougher than I thought if she can stand to probe into that mind of yours.”

“I want to start advertising today, put the word out among the other clinics for somebody who has some experience and wants more—somebody willing to do the scut work.”

Mark sighed. “Okay, let me run the numbers. If they work out, you got it.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that. I’d appreciate your starting with a part-timer until I’m certain the practice can bear the freight of a full-time surgical trainee. Maybe Alva Jean or Nancy knows somebody who’d be interested.”

Mac stood up. “I’ll ask. Now, Nancy needs me back to remove a steel pin from a Labrador’s hip. It’s starting to push through the skin and cause an abscess.”

“Thank you for that pretty picture. Come see us sometime. I’ll tell Sarah to bug you.”

“Yeah, right.”

He worked straight through lunch, which meant Nancy did too. At four o’clock she watched him finish off the final suture in the ear of a Border collie that had misjudged the distance between his ear and the horn of the ram he was herding. The ear had been nearly torn off and was bleeding profusely when the farmer carried him in.

Now the owner came out of the waiting room twisting his John Deere cap in his hands. “He gonna be all right?”

“Fine,” Mac said. “He’s groggy, but you can take him home. He’s had antibiotics and I’ll give you some more. The sutures should dissolve in ten days or so.”

“Poor old Ben.”

“He’s not old—I’d say under two,” Mac said.

“Little over a year. No, I meant this might set him back a tad when he faces down his next ram. You have never seen a more embarrassed dog than ole Ben was when that ram tossed him ass over teakettle down the pasture.”

“Well, we saved the ear, so he won’t bear the scars of his encounter.”

“Thanks, Doc. Wouldn’t think of running livestock without my dogs. I’m too old, too lame, and they’re a damn sight smarter than I am.”

As Mac turned to go back to his office he came face-to-face with Kit Lockhart. The wind had tossed her hair, and the sunlight from the west-facing window turned her eyes to emeralds.

Coming this close to her had a visceral impact on him that unnerved him.

“Can I take Kev home?” she asked.

He stepped back from her and composed his face. “Haven’t had a chance to check him out today, but I would have heard if there was a problem,” he said, speaking slowly and letting the sun fall on his face. “Come on back.”

He noticed she held a harness with a bright orange pad that said Working Dog on it. A much smaller version of the gear he’d seen used on Seeing Eye and helper dogs.

She caught his eye. “Kevlar’s on duty all the time,” she said. “The harness is for his protection so people don’t distract him in public.”

“Does it work?”

She grinned. “Almost never. Everybody still wants to pet him.”

As he started back toward the kennel, Mabel Halliburton called out to him, “Dr. Mac? When you have a minute I need to ask you something.”

He nodded.

Kevlar had been moved from ICU to the regular recovery kennel area in the next room. He opened Kevlar’s cage and picked him up, carefully avoiding the incision along his flank. He set him down on the examining table in the center of the room, and reached for a thermometer.

Kit stood silently while he checked the dog over. Kevlar whimpered a little when Mac touched his incision, but the chart indicated that all Kevlar’s kidney tests were normal.

“No fever,” Mac said. He had raised his head to look at Kit when he spoke. “He needs to stay quiet for a while, and he probably won’t feel like doing much running around for some time.”

“When should I bring him back here?”

He wanted to tell her tomorrow—just so he could see her again. But that was stupid and juvenile. Besides, she’d never fall for it. He heard himself saying, “You’re on my way home. I’ll be happy to check him out in two or three days. I’ll give you a call…” He felt his face flame.

She laughed. “Just come by. If the Jeep’s in the driveway, I’m home. What symptoms should I worry about with Kev?”

“Worry about a sudden rise in temperature, inability to urinate, whimpering…never mind that one—Emma can tell you if he cries. If he does, get in touch with me immediately.”

“Can I use a regular thermometer?”

“Right. But tie a string around the end of it before you insert it. You don’t want it to get lost. Normal for a dog is about a hundred and one. You should worry about general malaise. I’ll send you home with a bag of special dog food, but you can get it cheaper at your local pet store.”

“One thing, Doctor. I know this is going to cost a fortune. I really hate to ask, but is there any way I can space out the payments over time? Or even do some work here at the clinic to help pay my bill? I’m strong as an ox and I’m not afraid of hard work. And I’m really good with computers.”

Now her face was the one that was flaming. He could tell she hated asking him. The Saturday surgery and the aftercare would add up to a hefty sum. She was probably on disability if her accident was work-related. Maybe she was hanging on with welfare and ADC.

He realized he had no idea what she did or how she had been hurt.

“Don’t worry about it. We’ll work something out.”

Nancy came toward them. “Little guy going home with you? Big’s going to hate that. He’s fond of him.”

“Big’s fond of everything that walks, flies or swims.”

Nancy touched Kit’s arm so that Kit looked at her. “I overheard what you two were saying.”

Kit sighed. “Money’s pretty tight. I’ll pay my bill, I promise, but sometimes I can’t pay all at once. I wish I could get a part-time job, but I really don’t even know where to look. I have to pick Emma up at school unless I make arrangements. It’s not easy finding a job where I don’t have to hear. I can’t clerk in a convenience store or anything.”

“What do you do all day now?” Nancy asked.

Kit’s blush intensified. She had that clear, pure redheaded skin that showed the movement of every corpuscle. “I…get my daughter off to school, and pick her up, do housewifely things and exercise and shop.”

“You’re probably getting bored.”

“Getting bored? I’ve been bored out of my mind for the last three months. I can only take so much daytime television, even with closed captioning. And I never did learn to knit.”

Mac realized he’d been cut out of the conversation completely. Kit could concentrate on only one person at a time. He felt annoyed that Nancy had butted in until he heard what Nancy had to say next.

“You said you could use a computer?” she asked.

“I type about a hundred words a minute, actually. You have no idea how much paperwork I had to fill out before my accident.”

“Impressive speed.”

“But anybody can use a computer.”

“Not Dr. Mac,” Nancy said. “He’s a dinosaur.”

Both women looked at him with pity. He made a face at them and pulled Kevlar closer.

“So how would you feel about scrubbing cages and mopping floors?” Nancy continued.

“Since when have you been the Creature Comfort human resources manager?” Mac asked.

“You’ve been muttering about hiring a part-timer. And Mabel’s been telling everybody for a month that if she doesn’t get somebody to take the computer work off her hands she’s going to quit.”

“When did she say that?”

“Oh, about every day. But you veterinary types never listen to us peons.” She turned to Kit again. “You could come in after you take your daughter to school, and leave in the afternoons in time to pick her up. You’ll probably start by scrubbing cages or taking the animals for walks. We never know from one day to the next what we’ll be doing. Are you physically all right? Except for the hearing, I mean?”

“Absolutely.” Kit’s face lit. “But could I bring Kev?”

“Don’t see why not. He doesn’t fight with other dogs, does he?”

“No, and he loves cats. He lives with one.”

Nancy turned to Mac. “Well, how about it, Doctor?”

“We’ll have to discuss it at the staff meeting tomorrow morning,” he said, although he knew in his heart he would press to have Kit hired. It had nothing to do with the fact that she stirred his blood. She was a woman who needed a hand up. Maybe it was time to be Mr. Nice Guy. It would certainly make a change.