First Family (Sean King & Michelle Maxwell 4)

CHAPTER 67

MICHELLE PUT THE SUV in park and climbed out. Her shoes touched hardened dirt and she looked up at the old house with the dying tree, the rotting tire swing, the skeleton truck up on blocks in the back.

She glanced across the street. At the house where an old lady named Hazel Rose had once lived. Her house had been meticulous, the yard the same. Now the structure was beyond saving; a bare few inches from giving one last heave and falling down for good. Yet someone was living there. Toys were strewn across the front yard. She could see laundry flapping in the breeze on the line in the side yard. It was still a depressing scene. Her past was eroding away before her eyes, like sludge off a mountaintop.

Hazel Rose had always been kind to Michelle. Even when the little girl stopped going over there for the tea parties she gave for neighborhood kids. Why that memory had slipped into her mind just now, Michelle didn’t know. She turned back to the house, knowing what she had to do, even if she didn’t want to do it.

Michelle’s hunch had been right. Her father’s car was parked in front of hers. The front door to the farmhouse was open. She walked past his car and then by the stunted remains of the rose hedge.

That’s what it was, she now recalled. A rose hedge. Why had that popped into her head? And then she remembered the lilies on her mother’s coffin and telling Sean that her mom preferred roses. And she had felt a pain in her hand, like a thorn had pricked her. But there was no thorn, because there were no roses. Just like now. No roses.

She walked on, wondering what she would say to him.

She didn’t have long to think.

“I’m up here,” his voice called out to her. She gazed up, using her hand to shield her eyes against the sun. He was standing at an open window on the second floor.

She stepped over the fallen screen door and walked inside a house she had called home for a brief time when she was a child. In a way she felt like she was traveling back in time. With each step she was growing younger, less confident, and less competent. All her years of living, her experiences in college, in the Secret Service, as Sean’s partner, were dissolving away. She was six years old again, dragging a battered plastic baseball bat around, looking for someone to play with.

She eyed the old stairs. She had slid down them on flattened cardboard when she was a kid. Something her mother didn’t really like, but she remembered her father laughing and catching her as she hurtled down.

“My youngest son,” he sometimes called her because she had been such a fearless tomboy.

She headed up. Her father met her on the landing.

“I thought you might come here,” he said.

“Why?”

“Unfinished business, maybe.”

She opened the door to her old room, walked over to the window, and sat on the edge of the sill, her back to the filthy glass panes.

Her father leaned up against the wall and put his hands in his pockets, idly stabbing the scuffed wooden floor with his shoe. “Do you remember much about this place?” he asked, his gaze fixed on his shoe.

“I remembered the rose hedge when I was walking up to the house. You planted that for an anniversary, didn’t you?”

“No, your mother’s birthday.”

“And somebody chopped it all down one night.”

“Yes, they did.”

Michelle turned to look out the window. “Never found out who.”

“I miss her. I really miss her.”

She turned back to find her father watching her. “I know. I’ve never seen you cry like you did the other morning.”

“I was crying because I almost lost you, baby.”

This answer surprised Michelle and then she wondered why it had.

“I know that Mom loved you, Dad. Even if she… if she didn’t always show it exactly the right way.”

“Let’s go outside, getting sort of stuffy in here.”

They walked along the perimeter of the backyard. “Your mother and I were high school sweethearts. She waited for me while I was in Vietnam. We got married. Then the kids started coming.”