“—and she’ll probably come across one in her life.”
“No guns,” Parker said emphatically. “I will not expose my daughter to firearms. She’s a child.”
Shaw didn’t mention the age he’d been when his first lesson occurred.
Icily she said, “And I’d appreciate it if you’d keep them out of sight when she’s around.”
“If I can.”
She stared at the lake for a moment, as that subject was put to rest.
But then it was time for another to surface.
Colter Shaw said to Parker, “Tell me.”
“What?”
“I need to know.”
Parker looked at him briefly, then back to the lake. “What do you mean?”
“I need to know why. The truth about what’s going on. I’ve heard a couple of reasons why he’s coming for you. But I haven’t heard anything fromyou. If we’re going to control this, keep you and your daughter safe, I need to know why.”
Another duck glided over the mirrored surface and touched down, sending a V of ripples toward the distant shores. They traveled far.
Allison Parker stared at the idyllic image for a moment. She was absolutely frozen in place. Then: “Let’s go inside.”
64
Why are you doing this to me...?
She and this curious man, this adventurer, were in the living room of the cabin. The scent was of must and some pungent cleanser.
Allison Parker found herself touching her cheek yet again. As for the ridge from the break, her doctor was wrong. It was as prominent and sharp as a knife blade.
Was she really going to tell this man, a stranger, the truth?
He’d clearly already guessed something. He was tough and blunt but those qualities weren’t inconsistent with smart and perceptive.
But there was something beyond just his likely familiarity of domestic battling from his reward business that encouraged her to go ahead. It was the quality of his listening. When she spoke, or Hannah spoke, or Frank Villaine spoke, Colter listened. He wasn’t waiting for a moment to jump in with a comment about himself or offer unnecessary advice. The speaker was the center of his universe.
Now he waited, leaning back against the fireplace and watching Hannah dig in the kitchen for the cooking implements that would be their ADT alarm.
Speaking softly, Parker said, “Jon and I were good for years. Oh, how I loved him. He was smart. He was funny. Hard to believe now, but he was. He never smiled much but he’d get off some hilarious one-liners. A good father. He helped Hannah with her schoolwork. He used most of his vacation time for parental leave with her, when I had to work.
“Ah, but then the drinking. When we met, were first married, he didn’t drink much, but when he had more than one or two, he went into a different place. There were two of him. And the drinking Jon would get mad. Not just your pissed-off mad. It was in a different dimension.”
The pale seahorse, with its smile or sneer or sensuous gaze, rose into her thoughts.
Allison Parker didn’t bother to tell herself: Do. Not. Think. About. It.
Shaw said, “Jekyll and Hyde?”
A nod. “It came from his father. Being emotionally changed by liquor, I mean. A therapist told me about that. Mood can be passed down. But his dad, he got laid off from a factory on Manufacturers Row and started drinking in earnest. Drank himself to sleep almost every night until the end. But whenhedrank he mellowed out. Without the booze Harold was a prick, short-tempered, violent. Jon told me the family used to get him drunk so he’d stop insulting people and embarrassing them, whipping Jon and hitting his wife. Jon got the gene in reverse, I guess you could say.”
The coming narrative was as complicated as it was difficult to speak of, but she’d recited it to herself so often, like a journeyman Shakespearean actor, she knew the tale cold. “About three years ago, he was in the field with his partner. He was working a big corruption case. He gets a call that there’ve been shots fired in a house a block from them. This father’s gone on meth and threatening his family and shooting up the place. Jon and Danny were the only ones around. They suit up with body armor and go in.”
She found her throat thick. She could picture the incident clearly, as if she herself had been there.