Good. Winnie’s car was gone. J.T. loosened his death grip on the steering wheel as he pulled into his driveway. For a week they’d uttered civil hellos and goodbyes. For a week she’d offered unasked-for advice about baby care. He and Gina had done just fine on their own, as far as he could tell. Still she harped about the baby not being dressed warmly enough—or too warmly. They’d had a huge argument over how he was supposed to sleep—on his back or stomach. Winnie hadn’t believed that putting babies to bed on their backs lowered the number of deaths from SIDS, not until J.T. produced proof.
“Well, in my day we put them on their tummies,” she’d said in a huff.
“I’m sure in your day you gave birth in the fields then went right back to tilling,” he’d muttered, prompting Gina to choke on a laugh and Winnie to eye him sourly.
The past few days she’d stayed for dinner, too, so he’d had to put up with her for an hour that he could’ve spent in more agreeable company, with Gina. She’d seemed happy, truly happy, this past week. He had to give credit to Winnie for letting her nap each day. And maybe having another woman there was a comfort that he couldn’t provide. He only knew that she smiled a lot more.
He took a minute to greet his turncoat dog in the kitchen before going in search of Gina. He found her in the rocking chair, feeding the baby, who made noises so loud J.T. could hear them from across the room.
“Hi,” she said softly, her face lighting up.
She looked so perfect, so serene. Joey’s fist thumped her breast, his fingers opening and closing. One bare foot stuck out of the blanket and flexed up and down. He must have just started eating, because he was obviously wide awake.
J.T.’s heart did a slow somersault. Feelings he’d been fighting surfaced fast, a painful lack of oxygen squeezing him from inside. Maybe he could take a chance. Maybe in this town he watched over he could have a future with her. With them. He couldn’t give her more children, but she might be willing to settle for the one.
Eric’s child… No. Gina’s child.
His jaw clenched. And Eric’s mother—part of the package.
Plus, all those things he could never tell them about Eric. But keeping secrets was something he was good at.
“What’s wrong?” Gina asked. “Why are you frowning?”
He shut down his thoughts. Tonight was for them. He walked across the room, cupped her face, tipped her head back and kissed her thoroughly before pulling away an inch or so. “Hi, back,” he said.
“Well.”
Offering the baby his finger to hold, he propped his fist against her breast and kissed his downy head, then his tiny, bouncing foot.
“I guess you’re glad to see us,” Gina said.
“More than I can say.” Without pulling his finger free, he slid the ottoman closer and sat. “Did Winnie go home?”
“Don’t look so hopeful. No. She was invited to attend the Women’s Club meeting tonight.”
“She doesn’t strike me as a ‘club’ type of woman.”
“Actually, she was active in several organizations before she quit to care for me.”
“No job?”
“Her husband left her well-off. Although I think it would be nice if she’d either get a job or get busy with her groups again. She’s only forty-nine. The social outlet would be good for her.”
The babe fidgeted, lost the nipple, then howled until he found it again.
“Such an impatient little piggy,” Gina said, smiling.
“How about you, Gina? Did your husband leave you well-off?”
She didn’t look at him. “His insurance did.”
“So you won’t have to work?”
“Not unless I want to.”
“What about college? As I recall you had a full scholarship to USC. You wanted to be an elementary school teacher.”
“My scholarship was for soccer. Can’t do that anymore.”
“Do you want to go back to college?”
“Someday. For now my job is right here in my arms. It’s a luxury a lot of women would envy.”
“You probably envy a lot of women what they have, too.” A husband, a home.
She looked out the window.
“How was your day?” she asked after a while, switching the baby to the other side and pulling her bra flap over her breast.
Their hands bumped as he hooked it, trying to be matter-of-fact, but not succeeding, not inwardly, anyway. “My day was interesting.”
“I-in what way?”
He’d shaken her up a little. Good. “I got a call from the county sheriff. I told you we have a mutual aid agreement, right? And with the other police and fire districts nearby, too.”
“I remember.”
“Well, there was a bank robbery in Alta Tierra, which is a dinky little town about thirty miles south of here. The sheriff didn’t really think the suspect would head higher into the mountains, but every department was put on alert. Sure enough, about noon he comes into town. Pulls up to Barney Cochran’s gas pump. Now, Barney’s a go-getter, you see. Some traveler comes through, he’s going to make sure that oil and water gets checked. Air in the tires. The works.”
J.T. stretched out the story, and his legs. “I called it in, then took my time making my way over there, not wanting to draw attention to myself. My first priority was to keep Barney from getting caught in a cross fire, but I also knew that Barney wouldn’t let this guy loose anytime soon. I figured he’d be sent off to Belle’s for lunch and told to come back in half an hour. The guy would find his car gassed, watered, aired and washed, no charge except for the gas, which is already hiked up for our convenience of getting gas here. That’s Barney.”
Gina was smiling. He sat a little looser, enjoying having an everyday conversation with her.
“Needless to say, the suspect was in a bit of a hurry. They get into an argument when Barney reaches into the car and pops the hood latch to check the oil. The guy goes ballistic. He rams the hood back down, grabs some bills out of his pockets—a couple of hundreds, by the way—and tosses them at Barney. By the time he’s climbed into his car, Barney’s got the hose turned on to give the car a quick wash, whether he likes it or not.” He laughed. “The driver’s window was open. Guy got drenched. When I got him out of his car, he was a human icicle. Funniest thing I’d seen in ages.”
Her eyes sparkled. “You really love this job, don’t you?”
He fingered the hem of her blouse, lifted it to his nose. Flowers. Gina. “I make a difference in Lost and Found.”
“You didn’t make a difference in L.A.?”
“Not like I do here.”
“You said once before that you became a cop for a reason.”
It was his turn to stare out the window. Would talking about it end the nightmares for good this time?
From beside her and under the baby’s blanket, she pulled out a picture frame, holding it toward him. “Who’s this?”
She’d taken the decision out of his hands. A part of him was relieved. “Where’d you get that?”
“I did laundry today. I was putting yours away in your dresser when I saw it. If this is you as a teenager, I think I’m glad I didn’t know you then. He looks like the kind of guy women would do anything for.”
J.T. lifted it, cradling the frame in his hands. “He was.”
“Was?”
“My brother, Mark. He died fifteen years ago.”
She laid a hand along his face, but he didn’t take his gaze from the picture.
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t even know you had a brother.”
“He still talks to me.”
She barely hesitated. “What does he say?”
J.T. set the picture on the end table beside her, taking his time, choosing his words. “He thinks I’m too noble.”
“What do you think?”
“He’s probably right. But I am what I am.”
“You were close?”
“You can’t get much closer. Identical twins. Mirror twins, to be specific.”
Gina glanced at the photo again. Yes, she could see it now, not just a resemblance but a duplication. Erase fifteen years and it would be J.T.—except for the mischievous expression. “How did he die?”
He rubbed his face. When he pulled his hands away, he looked a decade older. “The official term is suicide by cop. It was on our twentieth birthday.”
Her stomach clenched. Why did some people choose important days to kill themselves and other people hang on somehow until a holiday had passed?
“I hardly know what to say, J.T. I can’t begin to imagine it.” The baby had stopped nursing and was deep into sleep. She shifted him to rub his back, but she wished she could hold the man sitting in front of her, to soothe him as easily as Joey.
“Mark had always been different. Difficult. From early on he had no control over his impulses. After years of medical evaluations he was finally diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Manic-depressive, most people call it. As a child he would eat until he was sick, because he never knew when he was full. He hardly slept. The older he got, the less he slept. He’d wander the house at night, all night. Would wake me up to talk, and he’d go on and on and on. He was incredibly talented artistically, and would paint for seventy-two hours straight sometimes, creating horrifying, vivid scenes, each one more macabre than the next. Then he’d come down from the manic state and sleep for a long time.”
“The watercolors in your bedroom—did he paint those?”
He nodded. “You wouldn’t know it was the same person. During his letdown after a wild episode he would do these beautiful seascapes, in watercolors instead of oils.” He patted Joey’s back, as if needing the connection. “Women flocked to him from the time he was twelve. He was charming and flirtatious and very mature for his age. If he wanted something, he could figure out a way to get it, and if charm didn’t work, insistence did. You have to understand he had no self-control. That was his tragedy.”
J.T. pushed himself up and prowled the room. Gina ached for him.
“The experts know more about it now, that it’s a chemical imbalance. And in his case he’d started experimenting with drugs, which only worsened his condition. He was finally accurately diagnosed when he was eighteen, relatively young. Usually the worst of the symptoms are just starting to appear about then. And when he took the only medication that ever worked for him, lithium, he seemed almost normal. But he hated taking it. Said it blunted his creativity. I know this sounds crazy, but I could hear his thoughts sometimes. I knew when he was putting on a show. Sometimes I could talk him down mentally, but often he was beyond even my reach.”
He leaned his hands against the mantel, his body stiff. “He unraveled. That’s about the only way I can describe it. He bought a gun. Then he taunted a cop, threatening him until the cop had to shoot to save himself.”
His voice went deathly quiet. “I knew the moment the bullet struck him. I knew the second he died. The noise in my head stopped so suddenly I thought I’d gone deaf.”
God. Oh, God. She laid the baby on the sofa and went to the man, insinuating herself between him and the hearth, holding him as hard as she could, crying for his poor, sad brother. Crying for the devastated man left behind to keep living, one half of a whole. The sane twin. The duty-driven twin. The one who always put everyone else’s needs ahead of his.
Finally he wrapped his arms around her, taking comfort. “I don’t have any tears left for him.”
“Is that why you became a cop?”
“I figured I could identify the ones with mental illness. I knew the signs better than most.” He tucked her closer. “I didn’t want it to happen to anyone else. Not if I could stop it.”
The phone rang, the sound so jarring they jumped apart. He turned away before she got to judge whether talking to her had helped at all.
His conversation was brief, ending with, “I’ll be right there.”
“Old John,” he said over his shoulder, his strides long and hurried. “He’s drunk and getting mean. I’ll be back.”
It would probably take an act of Congress to get him to talk about it again, Gina thought, watching his car speed off. And she wanted to ask him about a time when another man was shot by a cop—by him. Eric had told her about it. She’d almost forgotten, because it had happened just a couple of weeks before the accident. J.T. had put in his resignation soon after.
Not a coincidence, Gina decided. Not at all. He’d become a cop for a reason. He’d failed, at least in his mind. The man he’d shot had at least left a note behind.
But knowing J.T., she could see how it would make him quit. And knowing him, too, she could see why he’d moved on to another police job, but one where he could get to know everyone personally, to identify problems and solve them before they became too tangled.
To give his brother’s death meaning.
Okay. She would listen if he wanted to talk, but she wouldn’t bring it up again. He deserved to bury what he could.
At least she knew what he was fighting.