Deadly Gamble

I nodded, certain I’d break down and cry if I tried to say anything. I picked up my purse, leaving the bakery bag on the window sill, where I’d set it earlier, and dashed for the door.

I ran smack into Uncle Clive in the corridor, and he steadied me by placing avuncular hands on my shoulders.

“Mary Josephine,” he said, as if he couldn’t believe it was really me.

I bit my lower lip, speechless. I hadn’t seen the man since I was five, and I probably wouldn’t have recognized him at all if he hadn’t been a state senator, making regular appearances on TV and in every major newspaper in Arizona. He looked harmless, even friendly, but he was one of the people Lillian had wanted to avoid, all those years ago. She’d been scared to death, for herself and me, which was why she’d snatched me from the front yard of my foster home. At least, that was her account of what happened—I didn’t remember any of it.

“Let’s have some coffee and talk,” Uncle Clive said quietly.

I was twenty-eight years old, a self-supporting adult, not a kid. I’d been married and divorced. I’d read The Damn Fool’s Guide to Self-Defense for Women.

There was nothing to be afraid of.

And, besides, I was curious as hell.

Uncle Clive was my mother’s older brother. He’d been around when the killings took place, and he could fill in a lot of gaps in my memory, bring me up to speed on my half brother, Geoff, who’d gone to prison at sixteen for second-degree murder.

“Okay,” I said.

CHAPTER 2

The cafeteria at Sunset Villa wasn’t much, so we walked, my long-lost uncle and I, to a nearby Starbucks, with outside tables and misters to cool the customers. Even in April, it’s warm in Phoenix.

I didn’t think I could choke down anything—the whole scenario was an excuse to talk, after all—but Clive bought us both a cup of classic roast. Except for a few university students bent over textbooks and one doughy guy with piercings and vampire teeth—a poet or a serial killer or both—we had the place to ourselves.

“I can’t believe it’s you,” Clive said, as he joined me under the shade of a green-and-white striped umbrella, setting down our cups. His black metal chair, which matched the black metal table, scraped on the patio stones as he drew it back to sit.

I didn’t answer. After twenty-three years, I didn’t know where to start.

It wasn’t that there was too much to say. It was that there wasn’t too much.

Tentatively, my mother’s big brother and only living sibling touched the back of my hand. “It’s okay,” he said, and his voice was so gentle that tears smarted, like acid, behind my eyeballs. “I used to carry you on my shoulders. Help you find Easter eggs. Do you remember?”

I shook my head. Nebulous memories were teasing the far borders of my mind, but I couldn’t seem to corner any of them long enough to take hold.

“We looked everywhere for you.” He spoke quietly, but a muscle bunched in his jaw as he took a sip of his coffee. “My God, it was bad enough, what happened to Evie and Ron, but when you went missing on top of it—”

Evie and Ron Mayhugh. My parents. My work-frazzled, distracted, waitress mother. My moody, chronically unemployed father. For a moment, I could see them clearly in my mind’s eye. It was an image I’d longed for, wracked my brains for, during many a sleepless night, and now, suddenly, there it was, a vivid little tableau branded on the inside of my forehead.

“How did you find Lillian?” I asked. The air seemed to pulse around both of us, as though charged, and there was a slow, dull thudding in my ears.

For a nanosecond, Clive looked confused. Of course, I thought. He’d known Lillian as Doris Blanchard. He made the leap quickly, though, and something eased in his face.

“By accident,” Clive Larimer answered. “Just a fluke, really.” He gave a sigh of benevolent resignation, and his eyes were warm and kind as he looked at me, studying my features, maybe searching for a resemblance to his murdered sister. “It’s ironic, really. The day you disappeared, the police put out an all-points bulletin. After a few weeks, the FBI got involved. The case was featured on 60 Minutes. Beyond an occasional sighting, nothing. And then a friend of mine happens to recognize Doris—Lillian—while visiting her sister at the nursing home. I walk in, thinking I’m crazy to still be hoping after all these years that I’ll find out anything, and there you are.”

“How did you know who I was?”

He smiled. “You look like your mother,” he said.

Well, that answered one question. I found it curiously comforting, even though I had no aspirations to be anything like the woman I barely remembered.

“What happened, Mary Jo?” he asked, after a long pause.

Mary Jo. It was odd, hearing the name. Familiar as it was, like the words of a ditty learned in childhood, it made me feel like an impostor, or maybe an eavesdropper. Anybody but Mary Jo.

“What happened?” I echoed. Was he asking about the murder or the years afterward, when Lillian and I and, later, Greer, lived like the proverbial gypsies?

“You were there, and then you were gone.”

I wondered how much to tell him. On the one hand, he was my uncle. He might have given me away at my wedding to Nick, ill-advised as it was to marry the jerk, if Lillian hadn’t snatched me. I might have had a father figure in my life. On the other hand, Lillian must not have trusted him, back in the day, or she wouldn’t have grabbed me up and hit the road. And she’d seemed startled, even scared, when he appeared in the doorway of her room at Sunset Villa.

I shrugged, picked up my coffee, set it down again, untasted. Some of it sloshed over the rim of the cup and burned my fingers. I almost welcomed the pain, because it jarred me out of the muddle of surprise that had fogged my thinking and limited my vocabulary from the moment the thought formed in my mind: This is my uncle.

“It wasn’t a bad life,” I said. “Lillian took good care of me. We…traveled a lot, but I thought it was fun.” Except, of course, for the times when I’d just settled into a new school, made some friends, gotten myself another library card and then had to go on the run again, usually in the middle of the night.

“Catch me up,” Clive urged, after another extended silence. “What do you do for a living? Are you married? Do you have kids?”

I bit my lower lip. Clive Larimer was a state senator, with a socially connected wife named Barbara and four big-toothed, impossibly blond, Harvard-educated children. I’d Googled him whenever I got into one of my Norman Rockwellian moods and turned nostalgic. I figured when I answered his questions, he’d think the apple didn’t fall far from the tree, that I was as shiftless as my dad and as co-dependent as my mom, and I wished I could whip out pictures of two-point-two munchkins, a dog and a successful husband, and refer circumspectly to my part-time job as a rocket scientist.

“I work at home,” I said instead. “Medical billing and coding. Doctors like to outsource that stuff these days.” Feeling stupid, I blushed, but then plunged on. Telling the truth is good for you, Tucker had taunted me, not so long ago, during one of our screaming fights. You ought to give it a try sometime. “No kids. I was married for a couple of years, then divorced.”

The truth, I told Tucker silently, is overrated.

My uncle’s face reflected a calm, intense interest as he listened.

I left out the part about seeing Nick’s ghost, of course, and I didn’t get around to mentioning that I lived in a rented apartment over a biker bar in Cave Creek, either. I’d save that for when I really wanted to make a major impression. Show him my stack of dog-eared, highlighted Damn Fool’s Guides, too, and tell him how I’d educated myself on every subject from psychic pet communication to private investigation. Who needed Harvard?

“So that’s about it,” I said, letting the words dwindle to a sigh.

Uncle Clive settled back in his chair, tented his fingers together over his chest. “You must have a few questions yourself,” he remarked.

Hell, yes, I had questions.

The first one, which I didn’t voice, was: What ever happened to that no-good, scum-sucking, parent-murdering brother of mine? Correction, Geoff was a half brother—but the whole topic congealed in my throat, like some gelatinous mass, and the words my brain framed were slithering along, flattened against the side walls, trying to squeeze past it.

I’d run a hundred Googles on Geoff if I’d run one, after finding his last name in the newspaper archives. I didn’t remember it, for reasons already stated, and Lillian had always clammed up whenever I raised the subject. Geoff Waters, born to my mother by her first husband, had gone to a juvenile detention facility in California after confessing to shooting Dad in the back of the head and Mom through the throat. At twenty-one, he’d been released and his record expunged. It galled me a little—and scared me a lot—to know that he was out there somewhere, lily-white as far as the law was concerned. Going on just as if nothing had happened.

“Geoff,” I finally managed. “Where do you suppose he is now?”

I hadn’t realized Clive was tense until he visibly relaxed. “Who knows?” he replied, followed by an unspoken, Who cares?

“He killed my cat,” I said. The words just came out, without my consciously forming them.

What cat?

Clive leaned forward slightly in his metal chair. His bushy brows lowered a little, and his eyes narrowed.

I blushed again, rubbed my right temple with my fingertips. “I don’t know why I said that,” I admitted, flustered. “I don’t remember owning a cat.”