Thicker Than Water

“Oh my God,” Julie whispered. “Dawn!”

Chapter Four

Dawn 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 taking?” 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.

“What?” Julie asked, looking from one face to the next. “What’s going on?”

No one looked her in the eye, until Allan shrugged and cleared his throat. “Sit down, Julie. Drink your coffee.”

Frowning, suddenly very worried, she sat. There was a folder in front of her customary chair. She pretended to look through it, while knowing, deep in her gut, that she was about to be fired. They knew about her walking into that crime scene last night. The cops had told—or more likely that rat bastard Sean MacKenzie…

…whose face was smiling up at her from an eight-by-ten glossy. It sat inside the folder, opposite his professional bio.

Lifting her head slowly, she speared Allan Westcott with a look that should have set his hair on fire. “You didn’t—you wouldn’t…”

The door opened, and a man walked in. She felt him before she even turned to look at him, standing there, looking fresh and handsome and smug. “Hope I’m not so late I get fired on my first day,” he said. Then he met her eyes. “Morning, partner.”

She rose slowly from her chair, not smiling, not speaking, not quite able to process anything she was seeing.

Allan Westcott cleared his throat. “Julie, meet your new coanchor.”

Sean, still smiling, extended a hand. She took it automatically, without even thinking, and he pulled her close, as if to give her a friendly embrace, and whispered close to her ear, “Breathe, Jones, before your head explodes.”

Then he released her. She turned around and sank into her chair, feeling as if someone had just hit her with a stun gun.

“Welcome to WSNY, Sean.” Allan had come around the table now and was pumping MacKenzie’s hand as if they were best friends.

“When did all this happen?” Julie asked. “I haven’t even tested with him. I thought we had another two weeks before we had to decide who would replace Jim.” She blinked and shot a glance at MacKenzie. “I didn’t even know you’d sent an audition tape.”

“Julie,” Westcott said, “I know this comes as a surprise, and I wanted more time to break it to you. The truth is, Sean’s the best man we’ve interviewed for the job. We’d planned to see a few more applicants before making any decisions, but since you and he were both on the scene of the murder last night, we thought it best to move fast.”

“I didn’t give them much of a choice, Jones,” MacKenzie said quickly. “If they hadn’t hired me, I’d have taken the story elsewhere.”

Bryan vacated his seat beside Julie, pulling it out for Sean and waving him into it. MacKenzie took it.

“You blackmailed yourself into a job,” she interpreted.

Sean shrugged. “At least now I won’t scoop you.”

She blinked at him. “They call you at the last minute with a job offer based solely on their desire to stop your show from scooping ours, and you accept?”

He shrugged. “Actually, I called them. They made an offer only an idiot would have turned down.”

She was certain her eyes must have been flashing fire by then. “What about your radio show?”

“I’ve been trying to land this job for a month, Jones. It’s not like I didn’t plan ahead, just in case hell froze over, and I got it.” MacKenzie smiled at her. “The radio station’s playing a taped show today. I’m under contract for ten more shows, which translates to another two weeks, but I can make arrangements to go in and tape the new stuff when I’m not busy here. Don’t worry, Jones, I’ll have plenty of time to work with you on this.”

She looked from him to Allan, who was still standing. The look he returned told her this was a done deal. Not to argue. So she didn’t, not right then, anyway. Allan returned to his seat and started with the daily briefing. She sat there, using the stoic face she had to put on when reading news that made her want to cry, barely hearing him, glad that Bryan was there rapidly taking notes so she could catch up later.

Finally the meeting ended, and she got up, went to her office, turned to close the door behind her—and bumped it against the body that stood there, blocking the way.

“We should probably talk,” MacKenzie said. He pushed the door wider, waltzed inside as if he owned the place and then closed it behind him. As he did, she saw a crowd of co-workers looking on curiously, but they all scattered as soon as they saw her looking.

Then the door was closed, and it was just the two of them.

“You have an office.” He sounded impressed. “I figured a cubicle in the newsroom.”

She shrugged. “You figured right, up until two months ago. This was Jim’s office. He was a legend, you know. There’s a street named after him. He’d been here twenty years. He rated an office of his own.”

“So…when he retired?”

“I asked for it and got it.” She shrugged. “I was as surprised as anyone when they said yes. You wanna take notes on this or…?”

“Photographic memory,” he said, tapping his skull with a forefinger. She would have preferred a sledgehammer.

“So why are you in here?”

He pursed his lips. “Up until last night, I didn’t really think I had a chance in hell of landing this job. I’d have given you a heads-up when I first applied, if I had. Thought you ought to know that.”

She didn’t think a reply was called for, so she didn’t give one.

“Hell, I applied here ten years ago, as a photojournalist. That’s how I started, you know. Behind the camera. But then I got ambitious. You know I applied for your spot, three years ago, same time you did. I wasn’t ‘on air’ material, they said. Besides, they wanted a woman.” He pursed his lips. “Funny thing is, I haven’t changed a thing. Not my style, not my look. The only difference is that now my radio show is a hit. My name is known as well as yours is, and I’m your polar opposite. To be honest, I think we could be dynamite together.”

She blinked, not missing the double entendre. “On the air, you mean.”

“Of course. What else would I mean?” Then he smiled slowly. “Oh, that. Gee, Jones, you don’t waste any time, do you?”

She rolled her eyes.

“Don’t panic, Jones. I probably won’t last a week.”

“Why not?”

He smiled, holding his arms out to his sides. “Look at me. Your boss was right the first time. I’m not anchor material.”

She did look at him. He was wearing faded jeans that looked sinfully good on him, a khaki polo shirt with a Syracuse Orangemen logo patch on one side of the chest, a baseball cap and an olive drab jacket that looked like army surplus. He hadn’t shaved this morning, so there was a sexy whisper of prickly stubble on his face. He did look more like one of the photojournalists than an on-air reporter—and she had already known that was where he’d started, behind the camera, not in front of it.

He was right. He didn’t look like an anchor. What the hell could Allan have been thinking, hiring him for an on-air spot?

“I figured you’d blackball me if you could,” he said finally.

It made her realize that she’d been looking him over pretty thoroughly for several seconds now, and that he was fully aware of it. Maybe even enjoying it.

“I would have, if I’d had a clue they were even thinking of hiring you,” she said. Then she sighed and moved behind her desk, sinking into her chair, hugging her coffee mug between her hands, even though it was nearly empty. “Might still try it, though I think Allan’s mind is made up.”

He sat down in one of the chairs in front of her desk, pulling it closer as he did. “Assuming they don’t fire me in short order, I meant what I said before. I think we could make this work for both of us.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. And look, if it’s last night that has you worried, you can relax. I’m not going to say anything about your little snafu at that crime scene. I’m not out to get you fired.”

She lifted her brows. “Why not? Wouldn’t that give you the anchor seat all to yourself?”

He probed her eyes with his. “Don’t trust me as far as you can throw me, do you, Jones?”

“Less than that, even.”

His jaw tightened. “Okay, we’ll put this on terms you might believe. I want to succeed.”

“So?”

“So every marketing study out there shows that viewers prefer news shows with male-female coanchors. Your boss was right about that when he hired you as Jim’s partner three years ago. If I get you fired, they’ll just hire someone else. I already know you’re good. And for some inexplicable reason, you’re popular. The viewers love you. The fact that your ratings have dropped since Jim retired isn’t because of you, it’s because he’s gone. The other shows have coanchors, and they’re picking up your audience because of it.”

She lifted her chin. “My ratings haven’t dropped that much.”

“You were number one in Central N. Y. Now you’re number three.”

“The difference between one and three is only a few points.”

“The difference between one and three is the difference between winning and being the second runner-up, kid. WSNY wants that number one slot. And now that I’m on board, we’re going to give it to them.”

She lowered her head, shook it. “Maybe I’ll just quit.”

He pursed his lips. “No, you won’t. That would be unprofessional, and you might be a whole lot of things, Jones, but you are not unprofessional.”

She pursed her lips.

“Why do you hate me so much, anyway?”

“I don’t hate you, MacKenzie. I couldn’t care less about you. Don’t flatter yourself by taking it personally. I’d feel the same way about anyone who was after my job.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Prove it.”

“How?”

“Name one other journalist who went up against you for that anchor chair three years ago. Just one.”

She frowned, looking around the room as she searched her memory for names and found none. MacKenzie drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair, glanced at his watch, whistled an uneven tune.

“Well?”

“That doesn’t prove anything.”

“Proves one thing,” he said, getting to his feet. “Proves it is personal. Hell, Jones, if I didn’t know better, I’d say you’re working so hard to hate me just to hide what you really feel.”

“Oh, please. This I’ve gotta hear. What does your warped little imagination tell you I really feel?”

He smiled at her. “You want me.”

She stared at him for a long moment—at his smoky gray eyes and full lips. And she said, “You’re right. I do want you—in so many ways.”

“Yeah?” He looked surprised, and maybe a little bit turned on. “God, tell me more.”

She began counting on her fingers. “I want you drawn, quartered, gelded without anesthetic, beheaded and spit-roasted. But for now, I just want you out of my office.”

His smile didn’t disguise the look of relief that flooded him. “Damn, I’m gonna love working here,” he said, and he turned, whistling off-key, and walked with a spring in his step out of her office.

But not, she feared, out of her life.

Chapter Five

When Sean returned to the newsroom, he noticed three things. First, the early-morning bustle of the place had slowed to a hum. Reporters were making calls from their partition-separated desks, and several had already left to cover stories. Second, his office door was marked for him by the handful of foil balloons tied to the knob. It was just past the newsroom on the right. An office hadn’t been part of the initial offer, but he’d insisted on one as part of the deal, then been surprised that WSNY had agreed readily to that and everything else he’d asked for. Jones would probably be livid when she found out.