LITMIR.BIZ

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him toward the jail entrance. “So what have you been doing all these years, and where have you been doing it?”

      What have you been doing? Patrick used to ask Declan and Ian, among other relatives, when they showed up after an absence. Time was the answer so often that it became a family joke.

      One fifteen-month stint in prison had taken all the humor from it for Sean.

      “Working on cars.” Being able to give a respectable answer sent a kind of relief through him. “Mostly for people who buy cars like mine and don’t have the time or the skills to restore them.” Honest work, even if his boss wasn’t.

      “I’m not surprised. You’ve always had the magic touch. And where?”

      Sean walked through the glass door Ty held open. “Norfolk.” Just inside, he stopped. An air-conditioning vent in the ceiling nearby blew cold air onto the back of his neck—the reason a shiver was doing its damnedest to break loose. Not nerves. “Tell me, Ty. How much trouble is Maggie in?”

      As Ty’s face went somber again, Sean could see traces of his grandfather in him. “A lot. This is the third time she’s been caught making meth at home with the kids. You know she’s got kids?”

      Sean nodded.

      “She loves Dahlia and Daisy as much as she can, but...she’s an addict, Sean, and a bad one. She’s got to get straight before she kills herself, for the kids’ sake if nothing else.”

      His gut knotting, Sean stared at the wall behind the check-in desk. He figured pretty much his entire generation of Holigans had experimented with at least marijuana, but he didn’t know of any who’d gotten addicted. Like their father and grandfather and their fathers before them, most Holigans preferred a good Irish whiskey to feed the soul, enliven an evening and dull the pain.

      “You ready?”

      Though he wanted to run away like a scared kid, he nodded and followed Ty to the desk. Within ten minutes, he was in a communal visiting room filled with round fiberglass tables with four stools of matching orange attached. They reminded him of playground seating, somewhere between child-and comfortable adult-size, with no back support to lean against. They were bolted to the floor so they couldn’t be used as a weapon and seemed pretty indestructible. A box of ragged toys occupied one corner, and signs warning against physical contact of any sort hung on the institutional-green walls.

      It was depressing as hell.

      He was standing at one of the barred windows overlooking the alley when the door opened and Maggie shuffled in. The fact that she was here, finally in a room with him after so many years, shocked him. Her appearance really shocked him.

      Her hair had been bleached blond at some point in the recent past and hung, greasy and tangled, to her shoulders, the strands about equal parts blue-black and dingy yellowish-white. She was fourteen years older, a few inches taller and thin, emaciated, looking more like a scarecrow than the girl he remembered. She didn’t lift her feet when she walked, and she had a bad case of the shakes, like a kid on a major caffeine high—or a meth head on an involuntary withdrawal.

      People who knew him, other than maybe Craig and Ty, would scoff at the thought, but his heart broke just looking at her.

      Her gaze darted around the otherwise-empty room, skimming across him a couple of times before finally settling. “Look at this.” She turned to include the guard standing impassively at the door in her words. “My big brother, Sean, finally come home. You know, me and Declan’s kids had bets going for a while that you were dead somewhere. Guess I win.”

      Part of him wanted to step forward and wrap his arms around her and cuddle her the way he used to when bad dreams woke her in the night. The other part of him recoiled from the idea. “Hey, Maggie.”

      “What brings you back here?”

      “You.”

      “Took you long enough. I’ve been here more than three weeks.”

      “I just found out yesterday.”

      She shuffled to the nearest table and plopped down on one stool, making the entire thing tilt. “Well, if you hadn’t run off and pretended the rest of us didn’t exist, you would’ve known sooner.” Picking at a sore on her arm, she asked, “You gonna get me out of here?”

      “I—” Sean was at a loss for words. Craig hadn’t said anything about bailing her out, and he hadn’t given it a thought. If he did pay her bond, he could take her home, talk to her in private, have unlimited time to persuade her of the best action to take.

      Or maybe run away with her.

      Though if he took her home, Craig and his thugs would know where to find her. They could take care of her at their convenience, and him, too, and maybe Daisy and Dahlia. Surely she was safer in jail. Yeah, they could reach her there, but it would have to be harder inside than out.

      And if he took her home, he would have to duct tape her wrist to his. She’d been an expert at sneaking out when she was thirteen. Twenty-eight and in need of a high, she would disappear the first chance she got. He’d be on the hook for the money and for her escape.

      “I don’t have that kind of money,” he lied. “Sorry, Maggie.”

      Anger knotted her thin little face. “What the hell you been doing all these years?”

      “I work on cars.”

      “Of course.” She rolled her eyes. “You always did love them stupid cars more than any of us. So if you’re not gonna bail me out, what the hell are you doing here?”

      “I—I want to help you.” Help you get out of this life, help you stay alive, help you clean up... Though she didn’t look much interested in getting clean at the moment.

      For a time she stared at him, then a ghost of the grin he remembered so well touched her mouth. “If you want to help me, go to Marian at Triple A Bonds and buy her goodwill with ten thousand bucks. That’s ten percent of my bail. Otherwise, I’ll take care of myself, Johnny boy, like I’ve been doing ever since you took off.”

      Johnny. Only family had ever called him by the American version of his Irish name. Hearing it stung.

      As she stood, hitching up her too-big pants, and walked away, he blurted out, “Maggie, I saw Daisy this morning.”

      That stopped her a foot or so from the door. Slowly she turned, gave him a flat look, then said, “Yeah. Well. She’s five years old. If you hadn’t run off, you could’ve seen her a lot of times.” Dismissing him, she turned back to the guard. “Come on, bubba, get me outta here.”

      After the door closed behind him, Sean exhaled heavily. “That went well.”

      Oh, yeah, this trip to Hell was going to be all kinds of fun.

       Chapter 3

      Hanging by a Thread, Sophy’s quilt shop, opened at 10:00 a.m. six days a week. Business was good enough that she could hire Saturday help—Rachel, just graduated from high school last spring—but weekdays were generally hers alone.

      Hers and Daisy’s.

      Sophy turned the Closed sign to Open, switched on lights all around the shop, stowed her purse in the storeroom and booted up the computer before giving her attention to Daisy. If only she were the older of the two girls, the morning would have gone so much more easily. Daisy thought school was a grand adventure: other kids, toys, books, play, classroom pets. She wanted to go.

      Dahlia didn’t.

      She’d never been away from her sister. She was so much more suspicious of strangers and so much more aware of her family’s place. She didn’t trust anyone but her mother and Daisy—and Sophy wasn’t sure about Maggie. Her job had always been to look out for Daisy, to make sure she didn’t talk to anyone or

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