It Takes a Family

Oh no…

“What did Lea do?” Karis asked with unconcealed dread.

Luke paused in his eating to study her again as if looking for signs of a scam.

Then he said, “She didn’t tell you?”

“I have to figure it was something bad and, no, she didn’t tell me when she did things she knew I wouldn’t approve of. All she said about leaving here was that Abe wanted her back and so she packed up, told you Amy was Abe’s instead of yours to make a clean break, and left you to go with him.”

Luke let out a humorless sort of laugh. “Uh-huh. Well, I don’t know how long she and Abe were planning it, but I had to go to a training session in Billings one day and while I was out of the way, she had Abe pack up her things, Amy’s things and everything of mine that had any value—televisions, my stereo, all the video equipment, an old coin collection—”

“They cleaned you out,” Karis said, getting the picture.

“Abe cleaned out my house and, while he did, Lea went up the hill with a story about how her poor, troubled sister Karis had been arrested for dealing drugs. Apparently Lea turned on the tears and said she was desperate for money to bail you out and retain a lawyer, and since I could only help her with part of the money, could they help, too.”

Karis closed her eyes and shook her head, wishing she wasn’t hearing what she was hearing.

“And they gave it to her,” she concluded.

“By then the Pratts had begun to see her as separate from your father and what he’d done, to think of her as one of the family. I even heard them talk about arranging a way to meet you, too, to bridge the gap between the two factions of Pratts.”

“Lea never said anything about that.”

“I’m sure. Anyway, the Pratts here are good people. They jumped in to help when Lea went to them. Each of them—and there are seven, in case you’d lost count—put in five hundred dollars. They wrote her checks that she took straight to the bank to cash. Then, while she was there, she emptied my accounts—”

“Oh, no…” This time the words actually came out.

“Oh, yes. The folks at the bank were a little uneasy with it, but she gave them the same story she’d told your half brothers and sisters. And when the bank manager tried to reach me to make sure it was okay, I was conveniently in the middle of training where no cell phones were allowed. Since I’d added Lea’s name to my accounts when we got married, she had as much right as I did to access them, so the bank couldn’t stop her from draining them. Then she and Abe hightailed it out of town, leaving me a note on the kitchen table that said Amy wasn’t mine, that they’d left with the man who had fathered her. They were long gone by the time I learned how she’d spent the day. I guess she gets merits for organization and quick work.”

“I’m sorry,” Karis said feebly.

Luke Walker didn’t respond.

“And I’ve never had anything to do with drugs or been arrested or—”

“I know. When I realized what she’d done I did some checking that I regretted not doing earlier. On you both. I saw that you didn’t have any arrests or charges against you. But Lea had an extensive record—drug possession, selling drugs, petty theft, burglary—”

“She had a lot of problems,” Karis said, glancing in Amy’s direction.

The baby was sitting in a high chair that Luke had brought up from the basement and set at the round kitchen table. She was picking up pieces of scrambled egg with her chubby fingers and feeding herself directly from the tray.

Of course she was oblivious to what was being said about her mother, but Karis was uncomfortable getting into too much detail about Lea with Amy in earshot. Irrational though it might have been, it just didn’t seem right.

She tried to make sure the tiny child was distracted by breaking up a slice of toast into small bites and adding that to the eggs before looking at Luke again.

“I’m sorry,” she repeated. “I really am.”

“Did you have something to do with it?”

“No! I’m just sorry that Lea did what she did. To you. To them. To everyone.”

Those blue-green eyes of his were still focused on her and Karis felt like a bug under a microscope. But she opted to ignore it and deal with the other matters at hand.

“I can see why the real Pratts aren’t going to be happy to have me show up after that,” she said. They would likely see her having ownership of their house in an even worse light, if that were possible.

The thought made her all the more loath to go through with her second errand in Northbridge and she realized that, at the very least, she wasn’t going to be able to rush anything to do with the house. She was going to have to find the most diplomatic way of handling it.

But in the meantime she also knew she still had to tell them about their father’s death.

“I really don’t want to go up there now,” she said quietly.

Luke didn’t say anything for a while. He just went on scrutinizing her.

Then, as if his better nature had to prevail whether he liked it or not, he said, “Do you want me to go with you?”

The offer surprised her.

“Would you do that?”

Not happily—if the somber expression on his handsome face was any indication.

But after another moment, he said, “Yeah, I’d do that.”

“It would really help not to have to go alone,” she said, meaning it and appreciating any support when she was feeling so unsure of herself.

“I’ll call first. Not all of them live in the house anymore, but I’ll make sure they get everyone to be there for this.”

“Thank you,” Karis said with a full measure of her gratitude in her voice.

And while the other Pratts might not have a soft spot for their father, and certainly couldn’t have one for Lea, either, a soft spot in Karis’s heart began to open up at that moment.

For LukeWalker, for the kindness he was showing her.

Even if that kindness was reluctant.

It was late that afternoon before all the Pratts could gather at the house up the street to see Karis.

The snow had stopped falling before dawn and the sun had remained shining through the day, melting what had accumulated on the streets and sidewalks but leaving a white blanket on the grassy areas. The temperature was comfortable, so Karis bundled up Amy and carried the baby with her as she and Luke walked to meet with her half siblings.

Karis didn’t say anything along the way. She was too nervous. But she was still glad to have the big man by her side.

He rang the doorbell when they reached the house and held the screen for her when the door was answered by a large man who was dressed in the same police uniform Luke had had on the night before.

“Hey, Cam,” Luke greeted him.

“Luke,” the other man responded, stepping aside for Karis and Luke to come in but never taking his eyes off Karis. Eyes that were every bit as suspicious of her as Luke’s had been, and no more welcoming.

“This is Karis. Karis, this is Cam.”

“Hi,” Karis said, thinking that in all of the awkward situations she’d found herself in recently, this had to be the worst.

“And is this Amy?” Cam Pratt asked.

Karis hadn’t thought about the fact that this man and the rest of her half siblings already knew Amy from the five weeks after her birth, but that question and the familiarity in his voice brought it home for her.

“That’s Amy,” Luke confirmed when Karis was slow in answering.

Cam nodded, taking a concentrated look at the infant but not making any overtures toward her.

“We’re all in the living room,” he said, leading the way from the vast Victorian-style entry that boasted a pedestal table in the center and a wide staircase rising from just beyond it to curve to the second level.

Luke waited for Karis to follow Cam, bringing up the rear.

The living room was large and, because it was furnished in a country motif, it lacked the formality of the entry. It was warm and welcoming, unlike the faces of the other people in the room.

“Hi,” Karis said quietly to everyone.

“Sit down,” one of the two women invited, pointing to the vacant love seat at a right angle to the couch.

Karis did, sitting only on the edge of the cushion and placing Amy on her lap.

It didn’t seem that she should take Amy’s coat completely off as if they were going to stay for a leisurely visit, but it was too warm to keep the baby bundled up. So Karis smoothed the hood back, fluffed Amy’s reddish-brown cap of curls and unzipped the coat, leaving it open but on.

“Is this Amy?” the other woman on the couch asked, echoing her brother’s question.

“It is.” Karis answered without hesitation this time.

She had the sense that had this been fourteen months ago the woman would have tried to hold Amy or play with her. But as it was, everyone kept their distance.

Luke had remained standing beside the love seat rather than sit with Karis and Amy so he made the introductions from there.

“You met Cam at the door,” he began, addressing Karis. “That’s Mara, Neily and Scott on the sofa—”

“I’m Mara,” said the woman who had asked about Amy. “This is Neily,” she added with a glance at the woman who had invited Karis to sit.

Karis said another, “Hi.”

“Boone and Jon are by the fireplace,” Luke continued. “Taylor is in the chair. Boone, Taylor and Jon are the triplets—in case you didn’t notice that they look almost exactly alike.”

Karis nodded.

“And this is Karis,” Luke finished unnecessarily.

No one seemed to know what to say, and Karis wasn’t sure whether to merely blurt out what she’d come to tell them or try to find some way to ease into it.

It was Cam who broke the silence before she’d decided. “What can we do for you?”

Clearly they were all leery of her and her motives for being there, so Karis opted for getting to the point.

“I’m afraid I have some bad news.”

As she said that, she wondered for the first time if they would consider the news bad. Maybe they wouldn’t.

“I needed to tell you all that Dad…”

She stalled. Somehow referring to him like that seemed proprietary and she was afraid his first family would take offense.

“That your dad…”

But he was her father, too, so that was weird.

“Well, your dad and mine…”

No, that wasn’t good, either…

“It’s okay,” Luke said in a calming voice. “Just tell them.”

Grateful to him once more—this time for the steadying influence—Karis swallowed and took his advice. “There was an explosion in Denver six weeks ago. Dad…and Lea…were killed.”

The response of the other Pratts varied, but none were too overt. Some eyebrows rose. Some mouths gaped slightly. Some faces paled. No one appeared unaffected or as if they were glad to hear it, but there weren’t any tears, either.

Again, after a few moments of silent shock, it was Cam who spoke. “What happened?”

Karis took a measured breath and said, “Lea had done something that caused a lot of problems for a lot of people—”

“Isn’t that hard to believe,” Boone, one of the triplets, said sarcastically under his breath.

His tone made Karis even more uncomfortable, but she didn’t show it. She recognized that he had a right to think badly of Lea and thought that maybe she should let them know she was aware of her sister’s misdeeds.

“Luke told me this morning what Lea did the day she left here, so I know none of you think much of her—”

Once more, Karis paused to consider what she was going to say. She didn’t want any of the people in the room to think worse of her sister than they already did. In fact, it suddenly seemed important for them to understand Lea, if only a little.

So rather than rushing into telling them more about the explosion that had taken lives, she said, “I’m sorry for what Lea did to you. I know that probably doesn’t mean much but if you really knew Lea, you’d know how truly messed up she was. She had drug problems from the time she was a teenager. She’d clean up her act for a while and be great—personable and sweet and fun and kind and…”

Karis’s eyes welled up at the memory of her sister. She didn’t want to break down, though, so she fought not to and went on.

“I think that was the Lea you all met. And knew while she was here. While she was pregnant. The clean and sober Lea. The Lea I always hoped would prevail. The trouble was, that just never seemed to happen. She couldn’t stay off the drugs and when she was doing them…” Karis shrugged helplessly. “Well, she wasn’t that same person.”

Karis could see in the expressions of her half siblings that there still wasn’t much sympathy for her sister, so she gave up trying to elicit any and forged ahead.

“Abe—the man Lea left Luke for—” Karis gave Luke an apologetic glance over her shoulder before focusing on everyone else again. “Abe had his own drug problems, but when they got back to Denver they both swore they were staying clean. For Amy’s sake. I believed them and, from everything I saw, they actually were sober until about a month before the explosion. I’d gotten Lea a job and she had been coming to work every day, not doing anything that alarmed me.” Although Karis knew now that she’d been naive. “But that month before, Abe lost his job,” she said. “And that must have been when things started to break down again.”

Karis didn’t want to get into much about how the general breakdown had affected her own situation, so she cut to the chase.

“Like I said, Lea had done something that affected a lot of people and Dad went looking for her. I say looking for her because when he went to where she and Abe had been living, he found out they’d been evicted a week earlier—which I didn’t know, either, but it made sense because Lea had asked if Amy could stay with me for a few days right around the same time. Luckily Amy was still with me when Dad found Lea and Abe.”

Karis hadn’t realized it, but she’d been hugging Amy and apparently her grip on the baby was too tight, because Amy began to squirm.

Karis loosened her hold and kissed the crown of Amy’s head as compensation.

Then she went on. “Dad found Lea and Abe living in a mobile home out in the middle of nowhere. Lea, Abe and another man. But they weren’t only living in the trailer, they were also making methamphetamine there, to use themselves and to sell on the street. When Dad showed up, the other man went outside rather than be in the middle of a family fight. He could hear and see what was going on inside, though, and according to him, Dad and Lea argued and then Abe got into it, too. It became physical—”

Amy was getting antsy and Karis took a cracker from a sandwich bag she had in her pocket and gave it to the baby.

She took a deep breath and continued. “I don’t know anything about the setup of a meth lab, but apparently it’s volatile and dangerous. In the struggle between Dad and Abe, something happened that caused the explosion. The man outside was thrown and hurt, but he lived to tell what happened. Dad, Lea and Abe were all killed.”

Another moment’s silence fell and Karis let her final statement stand alone.

Then, as if he were doing an interrogation, Cam said, “And you say this all happened six weeks ago?”

“Yes.”

“But you’re just now getting around to letting us know?” Cam said.

“There were so many complications and problems that I was left with,” Karis said, still not wanting to get into everything at the moment. “I’m sorry, but I didn’t think you should be told over the telephone by someone you’d never even met. I thought you all deserved to hear it in person, but this is the first I could get away.”

“Was there a funeral?” Mara asked quietly but also with a note of insult that there might have been and they hadn’t been invited.

“No,” Karis was quick to tell her. “This isn’t pretty and I’m sorry to have to say it, but the explosion caused an inferno in the trailer. There were no remains—”

“That’s a little convenient,” Cam said under his breath.

Obviously he thought she was trying to pull something.

But before Karis could respond, Luke said, “I called the Denver police for verification. She’s telling the truth about the explosion and about the aftermath. Because the trailer was far from any fire station—or anything else for that matter—by the time the explosion and fire were called in and firefighters arrived, there was nothing but ash and the injured man to tell the story. Forensics sifted through the rubble and found enough in the way of gold tooth fillings, some other dental work, and a few bone fragments, to confirm that your father and Lea were killed.”

“So there wasn’t anything to bury,” Neily concluded with a grimace.

“And I couldn’t arrange a memorial service,” Karis said. “There just wasn’t…a way,” she finished, faltering to keep from saying there hadn’t been money for any kind of service, along with the fact that she’d been left in such a predicament that she hadn’t been able to do anything but try to dig out of it.

Then, again thinking of their feelings, she said, “Of course, if you want to have something—”

“Is that why you’re here?” Cam asked, cutting her off. “So we’ll do something or give you the money to do something?”

He definitely thought she had an angle.

“No,” Karis said. “I only meant that if it would make you all feel better to have some sort of service—”

“It’s tough to mourn somebody you didn’t know,” another of the triplets—Taylor—said.

Karis nodded again. “I didn’t really think you’d want to have any kind of memorial or anything. I just thought you all should know what had happened.”

“That’s the only thing you came for?” Cam asked. “Just to tell us?”

Karis didn’t want to lie to them and then, in a day or two, let them know that wasn’t the only thing she’d come for, that she also owned their house and needed to use it to get herself the rest of the way out of the trouble Lea had left her in. But she also knew this was not the time to get into the other reason she’d come to Northbridge. So rather than give a direct answer, she decided it was best to get in and get out. She’d gotten in, told them the first half of what she’d come to tell them, and now it was time to get out before she actually did say anything more.

“I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news,” she said, letting no answer be her answer as she pulled Amy’s hood up and rezipped the baby’s coat. “And after what Lea did here, I don’t blame you for being suspicious. But now that you know what happened, I’ll leave you to…digest it, I guess. Again, I’m sorry,” she added as she stood.

She was going to have that be the end of it. Then it struck her that she didn’t want to leave them thinking what they—particularly Cam—seemed to think of her.

She paused and said, “I know you all probably won’t believe this, but Lea and I were always different. Very different. Not that I didn’t love her, because I did. Even when I hated what she was doing, I still loved her and the person she was when she wasn’t on drugs. But among people who knew us both, no one would ever put me in the same category as my sister, and I’d really appreciate it if you could find a way to separate us in your minds, too. To maybe reserve judgment a little.”

No one said anything and Karis decided her exit was going to be just as awkward as the rest of the visit, and nothing would change that. She turned to go.

As she did, a cheery Amy swiveled in her arms to look over her shoulder and call, “Bye-see-ya-guys.”

A small ripple of involuntary laughter came in response.

Even Karis couldn’t help smiling.

But since none of the other Pratts said anything to halt their retreat, Karis took Amy back into the entryway and out the front door.

Bolstered more than he could know by the fact that Luke Walker had come with her.

Chapter Four

“Going somewhere?”

Karis considered it just her luck for Luke to drive up at the very minute she was attempting to break into her own car.

“I was hoping I’d left a door unlocked so I could pop the trunk from the inside,” she said truthfully.

His only response was to roll up his window and go the rest of the way to the driveway.

He’d been called into work for an impromptu meeting when they’d arrived back at his house after visiting the Pratts that afternoon. He’d left Karis alone with Amy and with no clue when he’d return.

Not only had he scrambled eggs for their breakfast, he’d also made sandwiches for them all for lunch—again with Karis making it clear that he didn’t need to provide her meals and him ignoring it. But the dinner hour had come and gone, and since she didn’t feel comfortable raiding his cupboards or refrigerator, she’d dug into the food supplies she’d packed with Amy’s things and fixed the baby an individual serving of macaroni and cheese and opened a toddler-size jar of plums.

Karis hadn’t eaten anything then, but that had been over two hours ago and as it drew near eight o’clock she was hungry herself. And, in response to the stress of the day, she was also craving chocolate like crazy. Which was why she’d decided to see if she could get into her own stockpile of foodstuff in the trunk.

Once he’d parked, Luke got out of his SUV and joined her where she waited on the sidewalk beside her car.

“You need something out of the trunk?” he said.

“Food.”

“You have food in the trunk?”

“Some canned goods, some crackers and peanut butter, some stuff I could microwave at a convenience store.” And chocolate.

“Field rations for living in your car?”

“Yes.”

He held up a fast-food bag she hadn’t noticed. “How about burgers instead?”

“How about burgers first and then a chocolate bar?” she countered enticingly, nodding toward the sedan.

“You only have twelve dollars to your name, you were going to sleep in your car and eat out of your trunk, but you brought chocolate?”

“That’s my addiction,” she confessed.

He shook his head as if the idea was lost on him. But he reached into his jean pocket, produced her keys and opened the trunk.

Karis wasted no time dragging the box of food to the front and retrieving the bag of miniature chocolate bars she’d hoped she could make last longer than full-size bars it would have been impossible to eat only portions of. Then it occurred to her that if she didn’t want to eat her host’s food, she needed her own and she picked up the box.

“Is the whole thing full of chocolate?” he asked.

“No, but I feel funny eating your food.”

“We’ll trade food for services, if it’ll make you feel better. Just bring your chocolate and leave your field rations.”

Services?

She didn’t know much about the man but she knew he wasn’t alluding to sexual services. So why did she have sex on the brain the minute he’d said that?

She curbed it in a hurry, replaced the box in the trunk and, as he closed it, said, “What kind of services?”

“Tomorrow we’ll hit the store, and I’ll buy some groceries. You can cook and do the cleanup. Can you cook?”

“Pretty well, actually.”

“Great. It’s not my favorite thing. And maybe vacuum or dust or something, too.”

As long as she didn’t have to clean his bathroom, that seemed like a fair trade.

“Deal,” she said, even though he was already headed for the house and hadn’t waited for her agreement.

Karis followed him, watching the play of bodacious butt behind denim and again she had to pull her thoughts into line.

What am I doing? she asked herself, wondering if her subconscious was on a quest for another kind of stress relief.

“I bought Amy a burger, too,” Luke said, as she closed the door and he took off his coat to hang on the hall tree.

Karis had to work at recalling what he was talking about.

Amy…

Burgers…

“Too late,” she answered when she’d put two and two together. “Amy ate, had a bath and is sound asleep.”