LITMIR.BIZ

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His hat was tilted drunkenly on one ear, tied around his neck like a noose. She untied it and pulled it off. He was safe. Safe. She drank in that special B.J. scent of his and swallowed the lump in her throat.

      “Me scay-o-ed,” he said, shivering in her arms.

      “Me too, baby.” She kissed his now-wet crown and held him close. Tears burned the back of her eyes at the thought of losing him. “But you’re okay now. Mommy’s here. Everything will be all right!” She walked to the gatepost, pressed in a code on the electronic keypad, and, as the gates swung open, the first cop car—an old Cadillac with a light mounted on the dash—roared up the hill, stopping at an odd angle on the street, blocking the drive. The second car, a marked cruiser, found a spot on the crowded street. A fire truck and EMT vehicle were right behind, working their way up the snakelike narrow road.

      “The cavalry,” Cissy said to her son, though she had a bad feeling about the boatlike first vehicle. It brought back memories she didn’t want to recall, recollections of another bad time in her life ten years earlier, the horrific events that had landed her mother in prison.

      When the first cop rolled out of the driver’s side of the Caddy, her heart sank. He didn’t have to flash his badge or utter his name. She knew him because Detective Anthony Paterno had been in charge of the investigation that sent her mother to prison. His hound-dog face sported a few more lines, and his thick hair was more shot with gray, but otherwise he, like his car, had changed little.

      “You’re Cissy,” he said.

      “Yeah. This is my son, B.J., er, Bryan Jack. Come on. This way.” She glanced past Paterno to the paramedics. “Maybe there’s a chance Gran can be revived,” she said, hope blooming in her heart, though she was pretty certain it was too late. Holding B.J. as if she thought she might lose him again, she half-ran up the brick walk to the front door. Paterno and his partner, a tall, mannish-looking woman with simple glasses and a short haircut, were on her heels, the paramedics and firefighters a step behind.

      “Stay here,” Paterno said, motioning to a bench on the porch while his partner, who introduced herself as Janet Quinn, stepped through the open doorway. “Jesus, what happened?”

      “I don’t know. I wasn’t here when she fell…. Oh God.” Swallowing hard, Cissy cradled B.J. close to her body while rocking back and forth.

      “Mama sad,” B.J. said, and she nodded.

      “Very.”

      “Mama cry?”

      “Oh, maybe.” She smiled through her tears and kissed his head. Shielding her son from the open doorway, she didn’t try to look inside to the foyer. She’d seen enough.

      Two EMTs, hauling equipment, rushed past her.

      “Careful. This could be a crime scene,” Paterno said as they entered.

      “We got it, Detective,” the female EMT said. “Back off. Let us work. Oh hell…she’s already gone.”

      All of Cissy’s hope died.

      “Nothing left to do but bag and tag her,” the second EMT said so emotionlessly Cissy caught her breath. This was her grandmother, for God’s sake! Not just some unknown, unclaimed, unloved body! The woman they were talking about was Eugenia Cahill, a short, sharp, sassy woman who had run corporations, played competitive bridge, and sat on the boards of…Oh God, what did it matter what boards she’d sat on? She was gone.

      “No sign of forced entry,” Quinn said. “We’re checking to see if robbery was a motive.”

      Still on the porch, Cissy turned away from the drama inside. The whole scene was surreal, and Cissy, holding her son, watching rain drizzling down from the night sky, realized for the first time that she’d never see her grandmother alive again. She blinked back a fresh spate of tears. Theirs hadn’t been a loving relationship, in fact they’d had more than their share of knock-down, drag-out fights when she’d been a teenager living here, but she’d loved Eugenia, and, aside from an uncle and aunt now in Oregon, and another uncle in an institution, Eugenia was the only family she had left. Certainly her closest relative, besides James, her half-brother.

      Except for Marla. Remember her? Your mother? The damned escaped convict. You have to count her.

      And what about Jack?

      She didn’t want to think about her louse of a husband right now. Daring another look inside, she saw one of the EMTs shake his head. Cissy swallowed hard. She’d known from the second she’d seen Eugenia that the old woman was dead, but it hit so much harder when her suspicions were confirmed.

      Paterno walked back outside. “Your grandmother—”

      “I know.” She was shaking inside, but managed to keep some sort of calm. Her mind was racing in a zillion directions, but she tried to focus on the detective with his sober face and dark eyes. “But why…I mean, you’re with homicide, I thought. Why did you come so soon?” Before he could answer, she understood. “Oh, I get it. This has to do with my mother, doesn’t it?”

      “We’d like to find her.”

      She shivered when she thought about Marla Amhurst Cahill as a free woman. Though Cissy didn’t want to jump to conclusions, it seemed damned coincidental that her grandmother had fallen down the stairs within a few days of Marla’s escape.

      Her mother, if nothing else, was clever. Sly. But it would have been just plain stupid to return here. The police had been staked out on the street near the gates…. Or had they? Her grandmother had complained about them yesterday, but where were they tonight?

      A cold feeling settled in the pit of her stomach.

      “So, what took you so long to get here? I figured that someone was staking out the house. Gran had said a couple of detectives were parked on the street.”

      “There was a car,” he admitted. “But the officers got called away.”

      “Called away?”

      “A reported shooting just down the street.”

      “At the same time that my grandmother fell down the stairs?” she asked, disbelieving. A coincidence? Her grandmother dies soon after Marla escapes, and while it’s all happening, the officers assigned to watch the house are suddenly jerked away? “Did they catch the shooter?”

      Paterno’s long face didn’t give up a clue. “Not yet.”

      “You mean, it just happened?”

      “About an hour ago.”

      “An hour.” Her heart knocked as the coincidences kept stacking up. “Gran hasn’t been dead long. She was…was,” Cissy’s voice cracked. “She was still warm when I searched for a pulse….”

      “How did you get in?”

      “I have my own key,” Cissy explained dully. It was difficult to process.

      Paterno looked at B.J. “Why don’t you wait in the car? Where it’s dry and warm. We might have a few more questions and in the meantime the house is going to be considered a crime scene.”

      “She fell down the stairs. Where’s the crime?” But Cissy already understood what he was suggesting, and the thought, that her mother might somehow be involved, turned her stomach. This couldn’t be happening. And yet here she was, standing on rubber legs, feeling almost as if she were having an out-of-body experience.

      “Was anyone else home with her?” Paterno asked, ushering her from the front porch.

      Feeling the rain run down her neck, Cissy made her way back to the car. “No…I mean, I don’t think so.” As they reached the Acura, B.J. whimpered in her arms, and she whispered into his little ear, “It’s okay, honey. Ssshhh.”

      Paterno opened the driver’s side door, and the pent-up aroma of tomatoes, oregano, and garlic greeted her. She slid the seat back, then, with her child on her lap, sat behind the wheel

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