A Time To Forgive

“No,” Connor said. His mother could barely take care of herself, let alone a granddaughter. His father, re-married and living in Richmond, was only a slightly better choice. All his energy went to his second wife and their young son.

“Then where am I going to stay?” Jaye asked.

He looked around at the interior of his pricey three-story town house, which a maid cleaned twice a week until it sparkled. It was no place for a child, and he was a poor choice for a guardian.

He worked upwards of sixty hours a week at a high-powered brokerage firm in Washington, D.C., where he was so well regarded he’d recently been fielding offers from Wall Street. The rest of his waking hours, he spent at the gym or on the bar and restaurant scene with his girlfriend, Isabel Pennington, who’d been making noises about moving in with him.

He didn’t know anything about raising a child, especially one he wouldn’t have recognized as his niece until a few hours ago.

Though, for the moment, there was no other option. He was it.

He swallowed the lump of trepidation in his throat and strived to make himself sound self-assured. “I already told you that I’m going to take care of you. So you’ll stay here. With me.”

Jaye’s mouth flattened in a mutinous line, then she hopped down from the stool and shoved it so hard that it overturned. Without another look at him, she ran out of the kitchen and up the stairs to the guest room where she’d slept the night before.

Connor dragged a hand through the hair on his throbbing head. He made snap decisions involving tens of thousands of dollars every day, but he was lost in how to deal with a nine-year-old child. Should he follow her? Explain that he wanted her with him but had grave doubts about his ability to care for her?

“Diana, how could you do this?” he asked aloud.

The hell of it was that Connor didn’t blame Diana for abandoning her daughter. He blamed Drew Galloway.

Galloway hadn’t been in direct contact with anyone in the Smith family other than J.D., but the knife he’d thrust into J.D.’s chest had ripped the family apart. It had certainly precipitated Diana’s tailspin.

The hate that always simmered beneath the surface of Connor’s skin boiled up, nearly singeing him. Even though Galloway had been in prison for almost ten years, the killer was still leaving a trail of victims in his wake. The latest was the discarded little girl who pretended she didn’t want to cry.

Connor tamped down the surging hatred. He needed to focus on Jaye, not on Galloway. It was mid-February, more than halfway through the school year. He’d have to figure out which was the nearest elementary school and find out how to get Jaye enrolled. More immediately, he needed to visit the grocery store so the refrigerator contained something healthier than leftover pizza and beer.

Deciding to give Jaye time to get used to being stuck with him, he walked to the table and righted the chair she’d overturned.

He’d have a much tougher time righting the wrong that had been done to Jaye.

He had a fleeting thought of the teenage girl and the sobbing woman who had sat behind Drew Galloway that dark day in the Laurel County Courthouse.

Had Galloway’s family suffered even a fraction of the pain and the ramifications as Connor’s family?

Somehow, Connor didn’t think so.

ABBY REED WAS GOOD at spotting troubled children.

She should be. She’d lived with one for fifteen years until he’d been sent away for murder to the maximum-security Maryland Correctional Adjustment Center.

She’d had nearly ten years to come to terms with what her only sibling had done, but still couldn’t accept that he was a cold-blooded killer. In her gut she knew there was more to what had happened that night than had come to light.

Her heart bled for the boy who’d died and the people who’d loved him, but the Drew who used to read her bedtime stories while their single mother worked two jobs hadn’t been evil. He’d been a kid in trouble.

After the murder, hardly anybody in the small Maryland town of Bentonsville had agreed with that assessment.

Her mother had moved their family of three from inner-city Baltimore to Bentonsville two years before the boy’s death in a failed attempt to get Drew away from the potential to do wrong. After Drew was convicted, sentiment against him had run so high and so hot that Abby and her mother had had to move again.

They’d gone to Wheaton, a suburb of Washington, D.C., that was only fifty miles from Bentonsville but lacking in the acres of unspoiled countryside that had made the little town such a beautiful place to live. The trade-off, though, had been worth it.

Nobody directed hateful looks at them or pointed and whispered behind their backs.

Nobody recognized Abby as the frightened fifteen-year-old half sister of the boy who’d been labeled a murderer.

Nobody maintained that the sister of a convicted killer shouldn’t be hired to teach in the Montgomery County public-school system.

Abby had secured the job after graduating from Towson University with a major in music and minor in education. She spent the bulk of her time running the orchestra program at Blue Moon Middle School, but once a week taught a beginning class for fourth-and fifth-graders at the neighboring elementary school.

Montgomery County, with the nation’s capital on its southernmost border, was among the nation’s richest. The students Abby taught were largely the carefree children of privilege.

The fourth-grader in her strings class at Blue Moon Elementary was not happy-go-lucky. She wasn’t in the deep, dark trouble that Abby’s brother Drew had found himself immersed in, but trouble nonetheless.

Abby heard a new story about the girl every week. She’d splattered paint on the wall in art class, refused to participate in PE and wrote pithy sayings on classroom blackboards like School Stinks, Down With Learning and Reading Is Wrong. Considering she’d arrived at Blue Moon just four weeks before, it was quite a résumé.

Two weeks ago, she’d noticed the girl standing at the door to Abby’s classroom wearing a wistful expression. Abby had impulsively offered to work it out so she could take the class, even though in reality it was much too late to enroll.

After finding all the music stands overturned on the girl’s first day, Abby feared she was in for a long couple of months.

But then the girl had taken her violin from the case and followed Abby’s simple directions about how to coax sound from it. The violin had sung, the girl had been enchanted and Abby’s problems with the difficult child had been over.

Until today when she’d turned in a forged permission slip to hear an ensemble of National Symphony Orchestra musicians perform at the Kennedy Center.

She stood in front of Abby in the empty classroom, looking adorable in her pink Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirt and designer jeans. Abby handed her the permission slip.

“I know your father didn’t sign this so don’t bother telling me he did,” Abby stated.

The child looked down at her feet, which were encased in brand-name tennis shoes. Her eyes were filled with unshed tears when she gazed back up at Abby. “Am I in trouble?”

Sympathy rose in Abby like the Potomac River after a rainy season. The girl had recently confided that she’d come to live with her father after her mother had died. It wasn’t any wonder she wreaked so much havoc at school.

“You’re only in trouble if you don’t tell me why you forged the signature.”

“Because I really want to go on the field trip,” she said in a plaintive voice, sniffling not so delicately.

“Did your father say why he wouldn’t sign it?”

She nodded. “He says I don’t deserve to go because I’m bad.”

Abby bit down hard so she wouldn’t call the girl’s father-come-lately a cuss word. The nerve of the man. She supposed she should give him some credit for taking in his daughter after her mother’s death, but he shouldn’t have shirked his responsibilities in the first place.

“You’re not bad. You’ve done some things that are wrong. But you’re a good girl with a good heart. Don’t let anyone tell you differently.”

The girl blinked back tears, not inspiring much hope that Abby’s message had gotten through. “He doesn’t understand how much I want to hear the symphony, Miss Reed.”

Abby understood. Of all the students she’d taught in the four years since she’d worked in Montgomery County schools, this one loved music the most.

The child reminded Abby of her own young self. During the darkest times of her childhood, Abby had turned to the violin and let the music lift her soul. The music could fill a similar void in this child if only her hardheaded jerk of a father would let it.