Finding Happily-Ever-After Page 3

  “You don’t?” he asked incredulously.

  Joel shook his head. “No.”

  “Well, I just happen to have a portable game console in my purse,” Jewel announced. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Culhane looking at her quizzically as she took it out. “It’s something I use while I’m doing surveillance.” Which happened a lot more frequently than she was happy about. She never liked being inert for long. “That can be deadly dull and playing with this keeps my mind sharp.”

  She could see that Culhane looked skeptical, but she didn’t bother explaining that the console also supported brain teasers and ways to test IQ skills. She wasn’t trying to justify having one to him, she just wanted to explain why she had one in her possession.

  Joel was looking at her uncertainly. She surrendered the video game player to him. “Okay, now why don’t you take that into the family room?” Jewel suggested. “That way, you can play without having us disturb your concentration.”

  Joel gave her a look that told her he saw through the ruse, but played along anyway.

  “I take it that you sent Joel a game console,” she asked Chris the moment his nephew was out of earshot.

  “I sent my sister money to buy him one,” he corrected, then looked at her, slightly mystified. “How did you know?”

  She laughed softly. “It wasn’t hard to put the pieces together.” When he still looked at her doubtfully, she added, “Mostly that surprised look on your face gave it away.”

  “You looked surprised, too,” he pointed out.

  She didn’t argue. “Moderately so because all the kids I know or have dealt with eat, sleep and breathe video games. You, on the other hand, looked as if something that you took to be a given had just turned out to be wrong. There’s a difference.”

  “Obviously,” he commented, then shifted so that he could scrutinize her a little more closely. She was sharp, he’d give her that. Or maybe she was just good at coming off that way. “That’s a pretty good card trick.”

  He was testing her, Jewel thought, maybe trying to see if she were quick to take offense. He was going to be disappointed.

  “I don’t do card tricks,” she countered with an easy smile. “I’m a student of human nature. And I get straight A’s most of the time.”

  She paused for a moment, trying to read him. There were a lot of signals coming off the man. Anger, grief, confusion. All of which were completely understandable, she thought.

  Jewel wondered which would win out in the end. Or was this all going on as he tried to come to grips with what had just happened? It had to have changed the dynamics of his world.

  “So, do I have the job?” she asked. “Or do you want to reserve judgment on that until you check out my references?” She nodded toward the folder she’d handed him earlier.

  He waved away the second part of her words. He was going on his instincts. Besides, he was in no mood to have to conduct interviews. “You’ve got the job.”

  “All right, about the terms—”

  Again he waved his hand. “Mrs. Parnell already told me your rates.”

  “Oh, she did?” She tried very hard not to sound annoyed. Her mother had no business quoting her going rates. Since when did her mother even know what her rates were?

  He nodded. “She said they were reasonable—and if I didn’t think so, to call her and she’d handle it. She said the two of you have a close working relationship. I take it you’ve done a lot of work for her?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” Jewel allowed. “She’s my mother.” He looked somewhat surprised. “Does that make a difference?” she asked.

  He thought a moment, then shook his head. “No.”

  “All right, since that’s out of the way, I’m going to need as much information as you can give me.”

  “About Ray?” he asked.

  “About everything,” she specified. She thought she saw him clam up. Privacy issues? “Your sister, your missing ex-brother-in-law, your nephew. The first thing I’m going to do is contact the local papers to run that obituary tomorrow. For that, I’m going to need her full name, her date of birth, if there are any other surviving siblings—”

  “No.”

  “Or children—”

  “No.”

  The piece was going to be short and sweet, she thought. Didn’t matter, she’d find a way to dress it up a little.

  Jewel took out a digital recorder from her purse. Placing it on the coffee table, she switched it on. “Okay, I don’t want you to hold anything back. Tell me everything that comes to your mind when you think of your sister.”

  The device began recording. It had nothing to work with but silence.

  Chapter Three

  Jewel raised her eyes. He didn’t look like a man who was trying to sort out his thoughts. He looked more like a man who was resigned to remaining silent.

  “The recorder works better if it has something to record,” she told him gently. “Though it might happen someday in the future, right now, technology hasn’t advanced enough so that machines can record a person’s thoughts.”

  This was hard on him. Anger had merged with a porcupine-edged sense of guilt. Would she be alive today if he’d insisted on continuing to come around? If he’d made Rita see a doctor…

  Chris blew out a breath. “I don’t know what to say,” he admitted.

  What was it about the sight of a digital recorder that made so many people, even talkative ones, freeze? Jewel wondered.

  “This isn’t going to make it into any archives or be preserved for posterity,” she promised him. “It’s just to help me remember what you said. Again,” she prompted gently, “the key word here is said.” She gave him a starting-off point. “Did you ever actually meet Joel’s father?”

  Did she think he could amass this kind of animosity through hearsay alone? “Oh, yeah. I met him.”

  The way he said it told her that he’d disapproved of his sister’s husband right from the very beginning. But she still asked her question anyway. “What was your first impression?”

  He shrugged, struggling to keep the emotion out of his voice. “For Rita’s sake, I wanted to like him. But I saw that he was loser, as well as a user. I knew that somewhere down the line, Rita was going to regret getting involved with him and—”

  “Hold that thought,” Jewel requested. Much as she really hated doing it—she had a feeling that it was going to be hard to get Culhane started again—she held her hand up to temporarily stop him from continuing.

  Jewel felt rather than saw that the boy had drifted back into the room. Turning, she saw him standing in the doorway, holding the portable video game player in his hands. His attention wasn’t riveted on the screen, it was on them.

  This wasn’t anything a boy should hear about his father, Jewel thought. At least, not at this age. Five was very young to have your illusions crushed, no matter how mature you seemed.

  Beckoning the boy closer, she smiled at him and asked, “Is there something wrong, Joel?”

  The boy crossed to her, holding out the unit she’d given him. He looked chagrinned as he admitted, “I don’t know how.”

  Was it the game that was stumping him? Or was there something else? Was he just casting about for an excuse to come back in? “Don’t know how to what?” she asked him kindly.

  Joel sighed, thrusting the unit into her hands. It obviously embarrassed him to admit this. “To play with this.”

  “Don’t any of your friends have one of these?” He shook his head. Though she’d asked the question, Jewel found that a little difficult to believe. Did he hang out with Amish kids? “They don’t have one of these?” she repeated to make sure she understood what he was telling her.

  “No,” Joel said in a small voice. “I don’t have any friends.”

  That hadn’t occurred to her. He was too young to be a loner. “What about at school? Nobody there that you talk to or like to hang out with?”

  There was a blank expression on his face. �
�I don’t go to school.”

  This time, it was Chris who was caught off guard by what Joel said. He looked at his nephew, stunned. If anyone belonged in a school, to have his potential maximized, it was Joel. “You’re kidding.”

  “Mama said I needed to stay home with her,” Joel told him matter-of-factly. “She said she needed me to help her with things.”

  “What kind of things?” Chris wanted to know. Just how badly had their lives disintegrated? Again he upbraided himself for letting things go the way they had. Why hadn’t he made it a point to force Rita to mend fences so that he see for himself what was going on in her life?

  The small shoulders moved up and down beneath the washed-out T-shirt. “Breakfast. Lunch. She said she liked the way I washed the clothes,” he volunteered, obviously clinging to the offhanded praise.

  Jewel could see that the revelation affected Culhane. He was probably struggling with the guilt that all this dredged up. Momentarily putting her interview with him on hold, Jewel shut off the recorder, made eye contact with the boy and patted the place next to her.

  “Come sit by me, Joel,” she coaxed. Dutifully, he did as he was told, looking somehow even smaller as he sat beside her. “I’m sure your mother really liked having you around and that you were a great help to her, but you do need to go to school. It’s important that you learn things, like how to read and—”

  “I know how to read,” Joel interrupted.

  “You do?” She doubted if the boy was capable of lying. “Did your mama teach you?”

  Again, Joel shook his head, looking very solemn. “Alakazam taught me,” he told her.

  The name sounded like something a child would make up, Chris thought. Was he talking about some imaginary friend? “Who?”

  Still maintaining eye contact with Joel, Jewel responded to Culhane’s question. “That’s the name of a character on a public broadcasting station program. It’s one of those shows that’s geared to help kids learn basic things, like reading, and adding and subtracting simple numbers. I have a feeling that your sister might have relied on the TV to act as a babysitter for Joel. Thank God for programs like that,” she added, smiling at the boy.

  Jewel glanced in Chris’s direction. “You’re going to need to enroll him in school,” she told him. The unexpected news brought a frown to his lips. He probably hadn’t a clue about things like registration, she thought. Handsome as hell, the man made her think of the absentminded academic. “Your wife handles these kinds of things?” she guessed.

  The question seemed to come out of the blue and threw him for a moment. “What? No. I don’t have a wife,” he added.

  “I see.” Of course he wasn’t married. For a second, she’d forgotten that her mother was the one who had brought them together. It would have been the first thing Cecilia Parnell would have ascertained before she started the wheels turning. “Would you like me to help you get him registered?” she asked. The moment the offer was on the table, Culhane looked incredibly relieved. It was all she could do not to laugh at his expression. “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  Joel fidgeted beside her. When she looked at him, he appeared far from happy. “What’s wrong, honey?” she asked the boy.

  “Do I have to go?” he asked sorrowfully.

  Rather than impress upon him that it was the law, Jewel tried to make it sound like something that he could look forward to.

  “You’ll like going to school,” she promised. “You get to play games and meet other kids your own age. You’ll make friends,” she promised.

  But he didn’t look so sure. Joel’s apprehensive expression remained. “What if they don’t like me?”

  She looked at him as if that were just not possible. “What’s not to like?” she asked incredulously. Jewel grinned broadly at him, refraining from tousling his very silky dark hair. “You’re a cool guy,” she declared. Then, inclining her head as if she was about to share something exclusive, she said, “Let me let you in on a secret. You just talk to them about things they’re interested in and they’ll like you.”

  His eyes widened just a little. “Really?”

  In an exaggerated motion, she crossed her heart. “Really. I have it on the best authority.” And then Jewel nodded at the portable video game player he was still holding in his hands. “Would you like me to show you how to play that?”

  The shy expression was back, as was the small, uncertain voice. “Yes, please.”

  “Love those manners,” she commented, then raised her eyes to Chris. “You don’t mind, do you? This’ll only take a minute.” And then she added with another grin, “No extra charge.”

  It hadn’t occurred to Chris to even worry about the cost. He felt far too out of his element with everything else that was going on to worry about being charged for the extra time it might take to show his nephew how to use a video game player.

  He urged her on with an absolving wave of his hand. “Go ahead.”

  She turned her attention back to the boy. “You heard the man. Let’s get to it. Now, you have to hold it like this.” Jewel demonstrated what she meant, then took Joel’s small fingers and arranged them on either side of the game player.

  Getting the dexterity part under control took longer than she’d expected, but once that was mastered, Joel caught on very quickly. She had a feeling he would. She had him playing the game in no time, conquering aliens with subdued relish.

  Once he was entrenched in the game, rather than send the boy back to the family room to play, Jewel decided that it might be a better idea not to distract him. She motioned for Chris to adjourn to the kitchen with her. That way, they could keep an eye on Joel and she could still conduct the rest of the interview. If she were going to find Ray Johnson, she needed as much information as Culhane could possibly give her.

  Sitting down at the table for two, the recorder once again in position, Jewel turned it on for the second time and said, “Now, where were we?”

  Instead of trying to recall what he’d said to her, Chris commented, “You’re pretty good at this, aren’t you?”

  “Tracking people down? Actually, I am,” she told him. Not that she’d had all that many missing persons cases, but the few that she’d had, she’d successfully located.

  To her surprise, Chris shook his head. “No, I mean talking to kids.”

  “Oh.”

  She looked over toward the living room. His nephew was sitting on the sofa, his small face screwed up with concentration as he worked his way from one level to the next with, whether he realized it or not, amazing speed.

  Jewel shrugged off his observation carelessly. “They’re just short people,” she told him. “And I still remember being a kid,” she confessed. She had an all-encompassing empathy that served her well in her line of work. “Besides, your nephew seems extremely bright. I think if you have him tested, you’ll probably find that he’s very gifted. Possibly even a genius.”

  Chris glanced over toward the boy. “I really hope not,” he said with feeling.

  She didn’t quite follow. She would have thought that someone like him, a college professor, would have been thrilled.

  “Why not?” she asked, curious. “Taking tests is a lot easier when you’re gifted. Cuts down on hours and hours of cramming,” she added, remembering all-night study sessions that still didn’t yield the results she’d hoped for. While she had a mind like a sponge when it came to certain things, studying dry subject matter had never come easily to her.

  He was still looking at the boy. “If you happen to be different in any way, people tend to think of you as being strange.”

  Jewel studied Culhane for a long moment. “Speaking from experience?” she finally guessed.

  This wasn’t why he was hiring her. He didn’t want her delving into his life, he just wanted her to find the boy’s father. “What kind of information did you say you needed?”

  She saw the “No Trespassing” sign being posted as clearly as if he had pounded it into the ground right in
front of her. But if that was the way he wanted it, that was fine with her. She was curious, but it wasn’t terminal and besides, everyone deserved to keep his privacy intact.

  She checked the recorder to make sure it was on. “Tell me anything you can remember about your sister’s husband. Let’s start with where he worked. Do you remember the address?”

  “He didn’t work,” Chris corrected her. “At least, not during the years he was with Rita.”

  She was familiar with the type. “Did he ever hold down a job?”

  Chris nodded. That was how the whole thing began. “He used to work in a garage. Rita crashed her car and her insurance company sent her to this repair shop they had a contract with for an estimate. That’s how she met Ray. He was the one who worked on her car. He got fired a couple of weeks after that.” He frowned, remembering. “She thought it was romantic.”

  “Romantic?” Jewel echoed. She didn’t see the connection. Getting fired seemed like it was anything but romantic.

  Chris nodded. “He was fired for blowing off his job to hang out with her. She was nineteen and very young for her age.”

  Unlike her son, Jewel thought. “And that’s the extent of Ray’s work history?”

  Chris shrugged. He knew it wasn’t much to go on and it frustrated him. But then, if there’d been a wealth of information, he would have been able to locate Ray himself. “As far as I know.”

  “Would you happen to remember the name of the garage?” she asked, mentally crossing her fingers.

  “No, but I do remember that it was on Fairview and Carson. I dropped her off to pick up her car.” He should have done it for her, he thought. If he had gone in her place, then all of this might have never happened and Rita would still be around.

  Even if the boy wouldn’t have been.

  Jotting down the information, Jewel nodded. “That’s a start. Do you have a photograph of Ray?” she asked hopefully. “I noticed that there weren’t any photographs around.”