Sweet Justice

Dutch shrugged. “Even a broken watch is right twice a day.”

Daniel cocked an eyebrow. “In that analogy, are you the broken watch or are we?” He didn’t wait for Dutch. “I think we can thread the needle here with a little watchful waiting. You keep your ear to the ground for any signs of a lawsuit, and maybe check out the well-heeled Ms. Blair for any past litigation. And meanwhile, we can let Maegan do what she does best—make patients better. Besides, if it did come to a lawsuit, we did everything by the book that day. We followed protocol, and my guys—even my little squirt of a brother here—were bona fide heroes, and they have the commendations to prove it.” Daniel rose to his feet and clapped a hand on Andrew’s shoulder. “Bottom line is, Mallory Blair wouldn’t have a sister at all if it hadn’t been for Andrew.”

Unexpected pleasure rushed through Andrew at Daniel’s rare compliment. The city had indeed awarded Eric, Chase Jackson and Andrew commendations for bravery following the fire. At the time, it had kind of embarrassed Andrew, and he figured it was mostly because Eric had been hurt, and he and Jackson had only managed to get Katelyn out.

Daniel’s praise? That meant something—something that helped take the sting out of any accusing glare Mallory Blair might shoot his way.

CHAPTER SIX

FRANTICALLY MALLORY DUG through yet another box. Nope, no pots and pans, even though it was labeled clearly with the word Kitchen scrawled in her hand. She must have mixed it up with this box of sheets and towels in her hurry to get everything out the door before the landlord charged her another month’s rent.

“I’d help you if I could—” Katelyn grunted with effort as she tried to shove another stack of cartons over to maneuver her wheelchair through the clutter of moving boxes.

At the sound, Mallory stopped and looked up. “Don’t! You’ll knock those over and hurt yourself!”

“Mal...” Katelyn sighed. “Forget it. Let’s order a five-dollar pizza. I saw a take-out place as we drove through town. Just tonight, can we please, please, please not scrimp?”

For a moment, Mallory was so tempted. She, too, had seen the pizza place, and the last tenants had thoughtfully left a fridge magnet with the number on it. There was the phone... One call, and someone would be winging his way over with a hot, cheesy pizza that Mallory didn’t have to lift a finger to get.

Reality came crashing down. “Katelyn... I don’t have five dollars.” The confession humiliated her.

“What? C’mon. We’re not that broke. Are we?” Surprise and disbelief flooded Katelyn’s eyes...and when Mallory didn’t deny it, alarm quickly followed. “Are we?” she insisted.

“Yeah. We are. I’m between jobs, sweetie. I won’t get paid for another two weeks, and I had to use our savings for the first and last months’ deposit.”

“Well...what about your slush fund?”

Mallory couldn’t help but smile. Her “slush fund” was an emergency twenty she had tucked behind her driver’s license. “I used it to pay Kyle for the gas to move us down here.”

“Oh, man, if you used your slush fund, we are broke.”

“Well—we’re not totally broke, but I have to have gas money to get you back and forth to therapy and me to work. If worse comes to worst, I can ride your bike or even walk. It’s only a couple of miles from here to downtown.”

“A couple of miles! That’s an hour’s walk! And not even you could bike in heels. No, Mallory, you’re not going to walk. We’ll... Man. I so did want a pizza.”

“Yeah. I can taste the pepperoni. I have some flour and yeast, and we have that block of mozz. And I scored a couple of cans of tomato paste on sale. I think I’ve still got it—somewhere...” Mallory surveyed the sea of boxes. “We’ll have pizza, Katelyn. Maybe not pepperoni, but we’ll have pizza.”

Katelyn made a sudden choking sound, and Mallory realized she was trying not to cry. Mallory weaved her way back through the boxes and knelt down beside her sister. “What? Are you hurting? I can get your meds.”

Katelyn screwed up her fists and scrubbed at her eyes. “I hate this. I hate it. I can’t even help you look for the blasted tomato paste. This is all my fault. If I hadn’t been so stupid, I wouldn’t have gotten hurt—”

“No. No, honey. It’s not your fault. The house burning down wasn’t your fault. You being left there—that wasn’t your fault, either—” Was it Andrew Monroe’s? Would it make it easier somehow to blame someone for the circumstances of their life?

Yeah. Yeah, it would.

“Can I— Is there any way I can lie down for a while? I’m sorry, Mallory, but I’m so tired...”

Katelyn did look tired. Her earlier energy seemed gone, and now dark circles ringed her lower lids and her pink cheeks had faded back to chalky white, with her freckles standing out in stark contrast. “Sure. The bed’s the one thing we can actually get to.”

Mallory helped her sister to her cramped bedroom, felt her back ache even at Katelyn’s slight weight as she assisted her out of the wheelchair and onto the bed. Katelyn was already drifting off as Mallory pulled the covers up to her chin—over those poor scarred legs and feet.

Mallory felt her own throat close up and she choked back tears as she watched Katelyn settle into sleep. The facility had warned her that Katelyn still had nightmares and that her sleep “wasn’t of good quality,” as the discharge planners had put it. Mallory wasn’t surprised that her sister was tuckered out by seven o’clock.

Rest. And a settled, stable home life, away from medicinal smells and beeping monitors and nurses that said, “This may hurt a little,” when they really meant it would be agony. Yeah, that was what Katelyn needed.

Mallory sighed. She had an apartment to settle and arrange, and a first day on the job tomorrow. Katelyn needed that, too.

By eight, Mallory had discovered that the tomato paste and other canned goods weren’t in any of the boxes labeled Kitchen, and that her usual organizational skills must have taken a leave of absence when she’d been packing up.

Still, she’d made some progress. The pots and pans were found and liberated, the glasses unpacked.

The last one in the box, a big brown iced-tea tumbler, she set carefully down on the dinette table and examined for nicks or cracks. With a sigh of relief, she realized it had come through the move unscathed. It had been her dad’s favorite glass, much to her mom’s despair, as it hadn’t matched anything else in their kitchen.

Neither Mallory nor Katelyn drank anything out of it. It stayed in the cupboard with the other glasses, a reminder of all the times Mallory had toted a tall glass of iced tea out to her dad’s garage workshop.

With a gentle finger, she skimmed the smooth brown surface—it had been some leftover of the 1970s that he’d found for a quarter at a garage sale. Touching it felt as if she was touching him, that he was a breath away, ready to wrap her in his arms for a reassuring bear hug and a promise that things would get better.

The loud, unfamiliar brring of the doorbell startled her out of her reverie. The rental manager? A neighbor?

Mallory wended her way through the maze of cartons to the door. This apartment complex hadn’t appeared too friendly—it was a low-income subsidized complex where people seemed suspicious of newcomers. She’d chosen it in spite of the atmosphere, because it had a stackable washer and dryer, and it was handicap accessible.

Maybe she’d been wrong. Maybe there were neighbors out there who cared enough to introduce themselves.

She looked through the peephole and took a step back.

There, on the tiny stoop, stood Andrew Monroe.

And he was holding a take-out pizza carton.

* * *

ANDREW WAS DEBATING between leaving the pizza on the porch and ringing the doorbell for a third time when finally the door swung open.

The Mallory Blair it revealed looked nothing like the one he’d seen before. Gone was the polished wardrobe, and in its place a faded T-shirt and jeans. Her hair was pulled back in a neat ponytail, save for one strand of auburn silk that had escaped across her cheek. The biggest change was her glasses—the dark rims framed her intense green eyes and made her look like some glamorous scientist in a television commercial.

“Hi,” she got out. The awkwardness was apparent. “I— How did you—”

“Katelyn’s address on her chart. I honestly thought—” he glanced around at the other low brick duplexes. “I thought maybe you’d written down the address wrong. It didn’t seem to fit with...uh, what you’d live in.”

Did her chin jut out a bit? Yeah, it did.

“This was handicap accessible. And it’s just temporary,” she cut him off in a stiff voice.

He shifted the pizza to his other hand. “Well, uh, it occurred to me that maybe, what with moving in and all, you guys could do with a pizza.”

Okay, so he was a rat and he was actually using the pizza as a pretext for spying on her, which was exactly what Dutch had advised against. In fact, the lawyer’s last words that morning had been “Stay away from Mallory Blair. Far, far away, understand? The less you have to do with her, the better.”

Apparently, though, Andrew couldn’t have picked a better thing to bait Mallory with. The way she was regarding that pizza... Man, her mouth was practically watering. She seemed to be of two minds as to whether she should accept his Trojan horse, but one mind was definitely winning.

“Well, come on in, but please excuse the mess. And Katelyn is asleep, if you’ve come to see her.”

Andrew followed her in. “No, no, it was you—” He broke off and pretended to stub his toe on a carton to cover up his nearly blurted-out confession. This spy business was for the birds.

“What? Are you okay?” She had already bent down and appeared ready to whip off his steel-toed work boot to inspect for damage.

“Yeah, but I hope the same goes for whatever’s in the box.”

Mallory glanced at the label, which proclaimed it to be Mallory’s Shoes. “Oh, yeah, it should be fine. Well—if I marked it right, that is. Apparently I labeled more than a few things wrong, but my old landlord was insisting that I move out before the next due date or pay a full month’s rent. I asked if I could pay for a few extra days—”

She broke off as she entered the tiny kitchen, as if she were suddenly aware of what she was saying and to whom. To fill the silence, Andrew supplied, “No dice, huh? Maybe he had other folks wanting to move in?”

Mallory shrugged. “Maybe. I got us out just in time. What’s a few mislabeled boxes, right?”

“The pizza okay on the table?” He went to move a big ugly brown glass, but Mallory leaped to intercept him as if the thing was a priceless antique.

She cradled it against her chest, her cheeks pink with embarrassment. “Uh...it was my dad’s. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to insult you. It’s only... When we had to sell everything...after... Well, there wasn’t much left, which was just as well, because we didn’t have much space. So...that’s my inheritance. My dad’s favorite iced-tea glass.”

Something about the way she held it so protectively moved Andrew. He cleared his throat, looked away. “Crazy, isn’t it? The things we hold on to? For me, it’s my dad’s reading glasses. He’d started needing them right before he died, and, well... I still have them. Sometimes...sometimes I take them out and put them on and try to see the world like he saw it. Silly, huh?”

“No,” she said in a rush, full of energy and force. “No, it’s not. Not when it’s the only thing you’ve got left to hold on to.”

Now her mouth curved into a rueful grin. “I do have something we can actually use to drink out of, so let me put this away. Will ice water be okay?”

Andrew kicked himself for not thinking to bring a liter of cola. “Uh, I wasn’t planning on staying— I just was dropping this—”

“No, I insist. Do, please, have a seat. Uh—but, you’ll have to move that box—”

“No worries.” He smiled and waved her away. “You get that ice water, and I’ll clear the chairs for us.”

After she set two more reasonably sized drinking glasses—dainty stemmed water goblets—on the table along with a couple of ornately decorated china plates, he noticed that she quickly folded cloth napkins into an elegant restaurant-style. “Wow,” he commented. “Fancy, aren’t we?”

“Well, of course, in honor of your generosity, only cloth napkins will do.”

“Not even Ma brings out the cloth napkins much anymore,” Andrew commented. “And she’s a stickler for things like that. I’m impressed that you’ve been able to find the china and the napkins in all your boxes.”

“That’s about all I’ve been able to find, that and the pots and pans. I thought I’d gotten things down to the bare basics after our last move, but apparently not. And I even held a yard sale before this move.”

“You move a lot, then?” Duh, that was smooth, Monroe, he thought to himself. To prevent himself from saying anything else, he took a bite of the pizza—still warm, despite the drive and the wait outside for her to answer the door.

Mallory must have been starving, because her pizza slice was history, and she was reaching for another. “This is good! I should wake Katelyn up...”

“If she’s asleep, maybe she needs rest more than food. Maegan said she worked her pretty hard today.”

“Your sister...” Mallory’s eyes filled. “She’s wonderful. So patient and thorough. I wish we could have had a therapist like her at the rehab facility. I’m sure Katelyn would have already been walking if we had.”

“Maegan is good, and I’m not saying that because she’s my sister. Katelyn’s in excellent hands, Mallory.”

“I—I can tell.” Mallory put the second slice of pizza down on her plate and fiddled with her napkin. “She’s so good at motivating Katelyn, and that’s not always an easy task.”

Andrew was surprised at Mallory’s comment. “That’s...well, your sister seems pretty driven to me. She seems to want to get better and to be willing to put the work and effort in.”

Mallory took a bite of the pizza, chewed it thoughtfully, and only after she’d washed it down with a swallow of city water did she answer, “Yes, and no. She has great intentions. She gets started with a bang, but...she’s not... I wish she would stick with things, you know? Finish things.” She trailed off and seemed lost in thought for a few minutes. And then, abruptly, she answered the question he’d posed a few minutes earlier.

“I only move when I have to. You know, if the rent goes up at the lease renewal. Try squeezing all the things that came from a house into an apartment. Or even a quarter of the things. After every move, I want to sell everything down to a Zen-like bareness. Then I think, ‘Gee, I might need that...or what if I miss that?’ I sound like a hoarder, don’t I?”

Andrew laughed. “You sound like Ma. She has a use for everything. She even saves old toilet-tissue cores so that she can use them to make seed pots for starting our tomatoes early.”

“Really? Toilet-tissue cores? How does she do that?”

“You cut the tube in half and then cut flaps into the end of the tube, and then—”

“It folds like a little box! Neat! That’s smart!”

Maybe he’d misread Mallory. In her jeans and T-shirt, she seemed more like the girl he should aim for—not the type of glamour girl he had a weakness for.

But she had said lawsuit, and Dutch was convinced that such a word was seldom uttered in vain. And the two of them were sitting here eating pizza off fine china plates and cloth napkins...and she couldn’t seem to part with an entire box of shoes despite her quest for, what had she called it? Zen-like bareness?

So...who was the real Mallory Blair?

And why was he so intrigued by the apparent contradiction? Hadn’t Dutch warned him to stay far, far away?

CHAPTER SEVEN

ANOTHER HARD LOOK at her finances the next morning had caused Mallory to leave the car and its precious half tank of gas parked at the apartment in favor of Katelyn’s old rusty bike. She carefully rolled her work clothes and stowed them along with her heels into a backpack Katelyn had discarded some years before.

Thank goodness Katelyn could manage on her own for a few hours. She debated waking her sister before she left, but decided against it. Better to let miffed little sisters lie—and Katelyn had certainly been miffed with her the night before.

She had awoken about a half hour after Andrew Monroe had made a sudden departure, as abrupt and unexpected as his arrival had been. “Why didn’t you wake me?” Katelyn had said churlishly as she’d gobbled up her share of the reheated pizza. “Maybe I wanted to see him, too!”

She had accused Mallory of running off Andrew because she didn’t like him—which hadn’t been fair. Mallory hadn’t chased off Andrew. He’d just...gone, before she even had a real chance to wake Katelyn. It was as if a light switch had been flicked. One minute they had been eating pizza together, and the next, whoosh! Suddenly, the man had headed out the door as though he was responding to a fire.

Maybe it was because of the nap, or maybe because missing Andrew had amped up Katelyn, but whatever the reason, she hadn’t been able to go back to sleep before midnight. She’d watched sullenly while Mallory had slowly continued to get the apartment’s contents out of boxes and into some semblance of order. Mallory knew that eventually her little sister would come out of her blue funk, but it bugged her that the Monroes—both Maegan and Andrew—could have such an impact on Katelyn’s mood.

No, for now, she’d let Katelyn catch up on her sleep. She didn’t have therapy until late this afternoon, after Mallory completed her first day on the job. She left a note and Katelyn’s lunch to be warmed up in the microwave, stowed her own lunch, a PB&J, in her backpack along with a thermos of water and her work clothes and then struck out.

The morning air was frigid but the biking warmed her up fairly quickly. Mallory wasn’t a practiced cyclist, but she’d done this before when funds were tight. She only wished that the helmet she’d scored at a yard sale wasn’t so aggressively princessy. Katelyn had laughed at it when Mallory had brought it home, saying it had so many sparkles and bling that it looked like a unicorn had sneezed on it.

As Mallory rode into the downtown area, her spirits rose. She liked this little town with its cheerful awnings and bricked sidewalks. She could imagine kids playing in the fountain in the summer, and the whole place seemed alive and vibrant and inviting with its mom-and-pop-style businesses. It wasn’t like the dying downtown back in the city—there, for years, the center of town had slowly spiraled into pawn shops and adult-video stores, and only now were the locals finally fighting back.

She’d spied a deserted farmer’s market pavilion as well on her way in, and that gave her hope for cheap vegetables later on. Cheap was good, as broke as they were, and Katelyn needed good food to help her regain her strength—not junky food like Andrew Monroe’s pizza, despite how tasty it had been.

And free and impeccably timed. Don’t forget that. I should write him a thank-you note.

It still bugged her that he’d left so abruptly. Had it been something she’d said? Something she hadn’t? He’d disappeared as suddenly earlier that same morning, nowhere to be found after she’d talked over Katelyn’s evaluation with Maegan. It had to be about the lawsuit.

The lawsuit.

She was still of two minds about that. When an old coworker had visited the hospital and urged her to talk to an attorney, Mallory hadn’t wanted to even think about it. Katelyn had been still fighting for her life, and something about suing anybody at that point seemed almost guaranteed to jinx her progress.

Her coworker had insisted, even to the point of bringing an attorney that she knew to see Mallory in the hospital.

Chad had sat down with her, put her at ease right away. “You’re not taking anything from anybody,” he’d pointed out. “They took something from you. They took Katelyn’s health away, now, didn’t they? Shouldn’t they pay the medical bills?”

And so she’d allowed him to look into things. He’d been enthusiastic about the merits of the case—a fireman admitting that he’d left a poor helpless teenager in a burning building? Surely any jury would award them the medical expenses and give them a little money to help recompense Mallory for the days she’d had to be away from work to stay with Katelyn.

Those medical bills... Every single day in the ICU was another ten grand, and it went on and on, setback after setback. Mallory had only been able to afford the bare-bones catastrophic insurance plan for her and Katelyn, with a deductible that was ten thousand dollars, and her coinsurance after that was 40 percent of the negotiated rates of service, until an out-of-pocket max of twenty-five thousand dollars. Already the monthly payments for that deductible and her 40 percent were eating into their tight cash flow, but what else could she do? File bankruptcy? Her parents would have never countenanced that.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.