Finding Happily-Ever-After Read online

  Startled, his thoughts came to a skidding halt. Since when did he think like that? Was losing his sister and realizing that his only earthly ties now resided in a five-year-old boy—a five-year-old boy he was trying to hand over to someone else—responsible for throwing him off this way?

  Or was it something else?

  At thirty-two, most people didn’t think about mortality, but he did.

  Now.

  Was it just the need to leave behind a footprint, however faint, to prove that he had passed through this life? He didn’t think that way normally, but there was nothing really normal about the past week he’d been through.

  She was waiting for him to answer. Chris could see it by the way she was looking at him. “No, thanks.”

  Jewel wasn’t ready to give up just yet. “More coffee then?” she offered.

  He could always drink more coffee. There were days when he started working at seven in the morning and didn’t come home until after ten at night. Those were the days that he literally ran on coffee. It kept him going.

  “Sounds good,” he agreed.

  She paused for a moment, studying him before going for the aforementioned coffee.

  Something was quite obviously on her mind. It stirred his curiosity. “What?”

  “Do you pay some kind of tariff if you use more than a few words in any given sentence?” she asked.

  He’d never employed a plethora of words—unless it was on a paper he was writing. But then physics begged for the usage of more words to make concepts clear.

  “Why use twelve words when you can get your meaning across with two?” he countered.

  “Oh, I don’t know.” She sat down opposite him again, nursing her own cup of coffee. “Some people call it having a conversation. Adding a little bit of light and shading makes it more interesting for most people.” But, obviously, not for you.

  He looked at her over the rim of his cup. “You take care of that for both of us,” he pointed out.

  She didn’t dispute that she’d never felt the need to be brief. “Granted, but it’s nice to have someone else in the conversation.”

  There was amusement in his eyes as he promised, “I’ll work on it.”

  She grinned at him. Baby steps were still steps. “That’s all I ask.”

  Chris took in a deep breath. He supposed that there was no point in putting off the inevitable. He was going to find out sooner or later and he’d always believed in sooner rather than later. This had been a departure for him.

  But now it was over. So, as he sipped his coffee, Chris braced himself for what she’d initially come to tell him. “You said that aside from wanting to bring over breakfast, you had some news.”

  She’d almost forgotten. There was something about being around this strong, silent man that turned her into someone with the mental acuity of a dandelion in the wind. “In a manner of speaking.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed that Joel had once again cleaned his plate and was now listening to her intently.

  “In a manner of speaking,” Chris repeated. “I don’t follow.”

  “Well, I don’t really know if you can call it news,” she explained, “if you have nothing new to add.”

  Two and two came together very quickly. “Ray’s old boss hasn’t heard from him,” he guessed.

  It had taken her two hours of talking and following the man around his shop as he worked to get that non-information out of Bud Redkin. She nodded. “That about covers it.”

  “You think he’s telling the truth?”

  The question surprised her. Most people would have assumed that they were being told the truth. In her case, after the interview with Redkin, she’d checked the man out to see if he had any priors or if there had been any complaints lodged against him or his place of business. In both cases, the answer was no.

  Which led her to her conclusion. “Yes, I think he was telling the truth. Redkin has nothing to gain by lying.”

  She was the expert, Chris thought. Part of him was disappointed with the outcome. The thing that gave him pause was that part of him wasn’t disappointed. What was that about?

  “So that’s it?” he asked.

  She couldn’t gauge by his expression or tone if Chris was upset that she was unable to find Ray. But since Joel was within earshot, she refrained from asking. She didn’t want the five-year-old coming away with the wrong impression. Genius or not, he still had feelings.

  So she focused on business and reminded Chris what she’d said yesterday. “No, I still have other options to pursue.”

  She hadn’t elaborated on that, he recalled. “Like what?”

  She didn’t like to talk about things until they were done, but she supposed that he did have the right to ask—and know. After all, he was paying for her services. “Like if Ray Johnson collected a paycheck any time since he left your sister, he might have filed a tax return.” But she was taking nothing for granted. Even so-called law-abiding citizens sometimes “neglected” to file if they were getting paid off the books. And from what she’d gleaned from both Chris and Ray’s old boss, Ray Johnson was not exactly a model citizen.

  “What if he did?” Chris asked, for once taking a positive view. “The IRS isn’t exactly known for their great penchant for sharing information.”

  Jewel took another sip of coffee and smiled over the rim. “There are ways” was all she said.

  He found the mysterious smile on her face completely beguiling and stirring. He could feel its effects all the way down in his gut.

  Maybe he was going off the deep end.

  “What kind of ways?” he wanted to know, doing what he could to refocus his attention on why he’d hired her in the first place.

  Jewel was shaking her head, her hair brushing along her shoulders. “Trust me,” she counseled. “You’re better off not knowing.”

  He interpreted her words the only way he could. “I don’t want you getting caught doing something illegal on my account, Jewel.”

  “Don’t worry.” Instead of reassuring him that what she had in mind wasn’t illegal, she just made him a promise. “I won’t get caught.”

  She’d misunderstood, he thought. “No, I didn’t mean—”

  But Jewel started to laugh. “You have got to lighten up, Chris,” she insisted, then smiled at him as she touched his shoulder. “Don’t worry, this isn’t anything that has a prison sentence attached to it.” She still didn’t want to get too specific. The less he knew, the less of a liability he was. “I’m just bending a few rules, not breaking any.”

  He didn’t know if she was being honest with him, but he did know when to leave well enough alone. Not because he didn’t want to be a co-conspirator or because he was such a straight arrow—there’d been a time when he wasn’t. But if he knew what she was up to, he might feel obligated to stop her, and he had a feeling that Jewel Parnell was not a woman who was easily stopped. He’d rather not have that confrontation if he could possibly avoid it.

  Jewel supposed he deserved a crumb more than he was getting. So she offered it to him. “I know a guy who owes me a favor and he knows a guy… Let’s just leave it at that.”

  But she had raised another question in his mind, a question he wouldn’t have normally wondered about. But for some reason he did when it came to Jewel.

  “What kind of a favor?” he asked her.

  She gave him just the bare bones. She had never been one to brag. “His sister was kidnapped in lieu of payment for some drugs. I made things happen to get her back.”

  Chris looked at her for a long, pregnant moment. Maybe he didn’t socialize all that much, but he knew that most people would have turned that into a half an hour story, emphasizing their part in it and magnifying all their deeds. But Jewel just seemed to shrug it off.

  Was that modesty?

  Or was it something else?

  “Now who’s economizing on words?” Chris asked her.

  Jewel responded with a grin. “Maybe your in
fluence is rubbing off on me,” she told him.

  When she turned to say something to Joel since she’d left the boy out of the conversation, she suddenly realized that he was no longer in the room. That was really odd, she thought. She hadn’t heard him leave. And why would he leave? Every other time she’d interacted with Chris, Joel had stayed close by.

  “Where’s Joel?” she asked Chris. Maybe he had noticed the boy wandering off.

  Anything Chris might have said in response to the question was drowned out by the sudden, heart-wrenching wail they heard coming from the rear of the house.

  Jewel was on her feet instantly.

  The cry had come from Joel.

  Chapter Nine

  With Joel’s distraught cry ringing in his ears, Chris rushed to his nephew’s room, getting there just ahead of Jewel.

  At the very least, he expected to find Joel lying on the floor, hurt and bleeding, a victim of some kind of bizarre accident. But, at first glance, there didn’t seem to be anything out of order in the room. No books on the ground, covering him, no chair that had toppled backward with Joel as its occupant.

  Instead, his nephew was standing in front of his small, secondhand bookcase, sobbing as if he were never going to be able to stop.

  Though Chris was the first one to run into the room, it was Jewel who was the first to get to the boy. Dropping to her knees, she quickly looked him over to find the cause for this heartbreaking display of grief. Not finding any obvious injuries, she put her hands on Joel’s heaving shoulders and asked, “Honey, what’s wrong? What is it? Please tell me.”

  Joel couldn’t answer her at first. The sobs were all but choking him. He was crying as if his heart had been shattered into a million tiny pieces.

  Her hands still on his shoulders, Jewel quickly scanned the room, looking for clues. It crossed her mind that Joel might be having a delayed reaction to his mother’s death. But what had triggered it?

  “Is it about your mother, Joel?” Her voice was kind, coaxing.

  Still trying to catch his breath, the boy could only point to the bookcase.

  Jewel felt helpless and frustrated. Had Joel seen a photograph or something else that he associated exclusively with his mother? Was that what had brought on this uncontrollable flood of tears?

  “What is it, honey? I don’t see—”

  And then, the second she said it, she did. She saw what had reduced the little boy to tears. Saw what had served as a catalyst.

  In the middle of the books, knickknacks and things that only a little boy’s imagination could turn into treasures, she saw a dingy-looking fishbowl. There was a crack on the side of the glass, near the top. But that had no bearing on its function as a home for the bowl’s occupant. Or, more accurately, former occupant. For the turtle who had obviously been living there appeared to be dead.

  There was no movement, no struggling on the turtle’s part. He was on his back, and his tiny feet were still.

  Very gingerly, aware that Chris was watching her every move, Jewel reached into the bowl and extracted the turtle. She brushed a fingertip across his head, but there was no reaction. No attempt to bite her or to even pull his head into his shell. She had no idea what a turtle was supposed to feel like, but the one in her hand was room temperature. And very, very dead.

  She laid him back down and turned to Joel. “I’m sorry, Joel. He’s gone.”

  “He was my friend,” the boy said in between hiccupping sobs.

  Watching this, Chris was utterly stunned. “You’re crying over a turtle?” he asked incredulously. “Seriously?”

  Jewel could see what was coming. Making a quick decision, she said, “Excuse us for a second, Joel. I have to talk to your uncle.”

  With that, she took hold of Chris’s arm and firmly pulled him into the hall. She could feel him staring at her in surprise, but she didn’t want to take a chance on further hurting Joel’s feelings. She understood what was going on, even if Joel didn’t, and she needed to explain it to Chris. Things were not what they seemed.

  “He didn’t blink during the funeral,” Chris said. “His mother’s funeral. There wasn’t a single tear before, during or after. Not one tear,” he emphasized, holding up his finger. “And now, just because that stupid reptile croaks, Joel’s crying as if his whole world is caving in on him.”

  He couldn’t understand. Maybe Rita hadn’t been the world’s greatest mother. Maybe her name wasn’t even in the top-qualifying one million. But how could Joel be crying for a turtle when he hadn’t cried for his own mother? “It is caving in on him,” she assured Chris. “Now, be quiet and stop talking.”

  His eyes widened in disbelief. She was telling him to be quiet? Had the whole world just gone crazy?

  “It’s displacement,” she informed him, her voice steely even though she was whispering. “Joel didn’t cry after his mother died because being in restrained control of his emotions was the way he’d been taught to behave all his life. He has been the man of the house for as long as he could remember. He didn’t have time for tears, for feeling sorry for himself. He had to take care of his mother.

  “And when his mother died, he behaved as stoically as he always had, internalizing his grief. But the turtle was his pet. When he was playing with the turtle, he was just a normal little boy. A normal little boy with vulnerable feelings. When he walked into the room and found the turtle dead, that brave little soldier he was projecting just crumbled. Don’t let this scene fool you. Joel’s not just crying over losing his turtle, he’s crying over everything. But predominantly, he’s crying over losing his mother.”

  Chris considered what Jewel had just said. He supposed it was plausible. It wasn’t as if he’d never heard of displacement. He just didn’t associate that kind of multilayered response with a five-year-old.

  “This PI license you have,” he asked, a touch of sarcasm hiding his concern, “does it come with a degree in psychology?”

  Jewel smiled at him. He understood. “I minored in it,” she told him. She didn’t know if he realized that she was serious. “But it doesn’t take a degree to connect the dots.” Belatedly, she realized that she was still holding on to Chris’s arm. With a twinge of self-consciousness, she released it, then turned around and walked back into Joel’s room.

  “Joel, would you like to have a funeral service for—” It suddenly occurred to Jewel that she didn’t know what to call the expired turtle. “I’m sorry, what was your turtle’s name?”

  Joel wiped the dampness from his cheeks with the back of his wrist. “Mr. Turtle.”

  “Very neat and succinct,” she said with an approving nod. “Would you like to have a funeral service for Mr. Turtle?”

  His eyes darted toward the fishbowl, then back up at her. “Can I do that?”

  She draped her arm around Joel’s shoulders. “Of course you can. We can put Mr. Turtle in a shoe box—or wrap him up in a handkerchief the way they used to do in biblical times,” she amended when she saw the disheartened look in the boy’s eyes at the mention of a shoe box. Apparently, there weren’t any to be had. One glance at the worn sneakers he was wearing told her that shoes hadn’t been a priority for his late mother.

  “They wrapped up people in handkerchiefs?” Joel asked, confused.

  “They called them shrouds. They were big, white cloths, but for the sake of argument, you could say that they were made out of the same kind of material that handkerchiefs are these days.” She looked over his head toward Chris. “I’m sure your uncle can donate a handkerchief to the cause so that we can bury Mr. Turtle in the backyard.”

  The idea of a funeral for a turtle had sounded rather absurd to him, but Chris told himself he wasn’t going to say anything. Until she mentioned the word bury. Leaning into her, Chris whispered, “Do you have any idea how hard the soil is around here? It’s like trying to dig into clay. Not exactly easy.”

  She wasn’t about to be put off. Joel needed this kind of closure. Needed to feel as if he were in control of s
omething.

  “But you have muscles,” she told Chris with a smile. She patted one of his biceps to reinforce her statement. “You’ll manage.”

  Joel dried off the last of his tears, wiping away a trail that had made it all the way down to his chin, and ventured an almost hopeful smile in Jewel’s direction. “Can we do it now?”

  “Absolutely. All we need is a handkerchief and a shovel.” She turned toward Chris, intending to collect the former. “Can you help us out here, Uncle Chris?”

  Chris suppressed a sigh. He still thought that this was going a bit far, but if it helped the boy deal with his grief, displaced or not, he supposed he could go along with it.

  Handing over his handkerchief, he said, “I’ll go see if there’s a shovel in the garage,” and walked out of his nephew’s bedroom.

  In the end, Jewel prevailed upon Chris to go to the hardware store to buy a shovel. There wasn’t one in the garage, and digging in the claylike soil with a spoon—the only thing in the house that came close to any kind of digging implement—would take much too long.

  An hour later, armed with a shovel and a handkerchief, preparations for the funeral service got underway. Chris dug a small hole, swallowing a few choice words as he went about the chore.

  For Joel’s sake, Jewel saw to it that the ensuing service was conducted with all the solemnity of a real funeral. That included having a few well-chosen words said over the tiny, handkerchief-wrapped form that was now lying in repose in the shallow hole in the backyard.

  She had Joel go first, and then she followed, giving the deceased pet his proper due as best she could. “We won’t think of this as an end, Mr. Turtle, because it isn’t. It’s just the beginning. The beginning of a brand-new adventure. You’ve gone on to a place where there’s always enough to eat and everyone gets along with everyone else. Rest well, Mr. Turtle. You’ve earned it.”

  She saw Joel gratefully smiling at her and she knew she’d struck the right notes.

  Concluding her eulogy, she turned to Chris. When he made no move to say anything, she coaxed, “Your turn.”