Dear Santa Part 6

She'd run away and ended up here in Albany, where she'd kept herself furiously busy with work ever since. That combination of running, hiding and hard work had a.s.sured her safety, at least from additional heartachea"till today.

Despite the progress she had made on her emotional front, still sometimes she could be a.s.saulted by an almost overwhelming sense of loss. When that happened, she'd become acquainted yet again with what she thought of as her soft center, a place like a pool filled with sadness. She never knew in advance which experiences or a.s.sociations might send her plummeting back to the sorrow of Daniel's death.

Otherwise, she would have avoided those circ.u.mstances as surely as a gun-shy soldier avoids battle. Otherwise, she would have run from Ten Broeck Street and never set foot on Tooley Pennebaker's stoop that afternoon.

If forced to guess at the cause of her sadness today, she'd have to choose one of two things. The sight of the police car was one possibility. A police car with its dome light flashing an eerie, rotating glow, first red then white, had accompanied her last ambulance ride with Daniel to the hospital. He was beyond the help of hospitals by then, or sirens or flashing lights.

Another possible trigger for today's flashback to devastation could be the similar devastation she'd seen through Tooley Pennebaker's window. The living room and its contents had obviously been threadbare even before someone went in there and started tossing furniture around. Many of those poor pieces were broken now, and Katherine couldn't help but imagine what hardship that might cause for Coyote, Sprite and their aunt. Katherine had never known much material want in her life, but she was no stranger to bleakness. What she'd glimpsed through that window this afternoon was bleak almost beyond her capacity to bear.

Katherine shook her head and sighed. A couple of kids with pleading eyes living one rundown tenement apartment away from homelessness, and a man who drove hot cars and wore black leather. She couldn't have come up with three people more likely to put her already wrung-out heart through a wringer again if she'd ordered them from central casting.

Katherine pulled herself out of the hunch she'd slid into against the dusty car. She adjusted her scarf and pushed the escaped bits of hair back under her cap. She resolved that from now on she'd be wise as well as smart and keep her heart to herself, where it belonged. The husky voice at her elbow interrupted her second repet.i.tion of that resolution. "What's going On over there? Do you know?"

The woman at Katherine's side was only about five feet tall, but she was very solidly built. She was scowling as if she wanted to punch somebody. Katherine hoped that somebody wouldn't be her.

"You with them?" the woman asked, gesturing toward Vic and the policeman on the opposite side of the street. "Yes."

Katherine resisted the impulse to clarify that she was with the Arbor Hill Center contingent of the official gathering across the way, not the police. She understood that the police weren't likely to be very popular in this neighborhood.

"What's your business here?" the woman asked.

"I'd have to know who you are before I answer that." The woman looked Katherine up and down. She wished she couldn't feel against her cheek the corkscrews of hair that had popped out yet again from beneath her cap in a way that she knew made her look about fourteen years old.

"Who are you to be asking who I am?" was the woman's response.

"My name is Katherine Fairchild. I'm from the Arbor Hill Children's Center."

Katherine wished she could back away. Though she was several inches taller, she couldn't help feeling that the force of this woman's personality towered over her. Until, suddenly, her entire demeanor appeared to change. A wide smile broke across her face, and the angry flatness in her eyes came suddenly alive.

"That's the place my Coyote hangs out in sometimes," she said.

"He's told me there's good people works over there."

"You're talking about Coyote Bellaway?"

"Could there be more than one kid with a name like Coyote?"

Katherine was bewildered.

"Are you Tooley Penne-baker?" she blurted.

"That's my name. Call me Tooley." She extended a mittened hand toward Katherine's gloved one.

Katherine accepted the handshake and found herself caught in a grip as commanding as she might have known it would be.

"You're Coyote and Sprite's aunt? Their mother's sister?"

The woman hesitated, then finally admitted, "Not so's you could tell it by looking at me." Her skin was the color of deep, rich chocolate, as dark as Coyote and Sprite were pale. She sighed.

"I expect Coyote's been telling that one about me being his blood kin."

"That's exactly the one he's been telling," she said. Tooley gave Katherine a penetrating look.

"I care about those poor children as strong as if they were my blood, that's for sure. And their ailing mama, too. She and me go way back."

She shook her head. The expression on her broad face made clear how sad she considered the story of the Bella-way children and their mother.

"Are you going to let him keep on telling it?" she asked.

"Do you mean, am I going to report that you're not a blood relative of Coyote and Sprite?"

"Mmm-hmm. That's just what I mean?"

Katherine hesitated.

"You know what the welfare will do when they find out; don't you?"

Ms. Pennebaker asked.

"They'll clamp those two sweet children into foster care faster than you can sa), Jackie Robinson. They most likely won't keep them together, either. Coyote could handle that okay. He probably could handle about anything. How Sprite would take it though, I don't know, and that precious girl's already missing her mama so bad it ought to make you cry your heart out."

Katherine would have preferred another answer to the one she must eventually and inevitably give.

"I won't be the only' one making that decision," she said.

"That's what they call pa.s.sing the buck, honey." Katherine didn't deny that. She didn't say anything. Instead, she started across the street with Tooley Pennebaker bustling right behind her.

Vic SAW the two women approaching and swore silently. Under most circ.u.mstances, he'd have been pleased by the prospect of Katherine Fairchild joining him, standing by his side, maybe gazing up at him with those eyes that reminded him of a blue-gray mist just before sunrise. Even now, he felt a rumble in his chest at the sight of her.

He hadn't experienced that particular sensation, at least not so he remembered it, since high school. He wished that realization came happily to him. Instead, he found himself suddenly more disgruntled than ever.

"I still want to know what you've really got to do with this scene,"

the young cop was saying.

Vic's sigh stretched out long enough to make his exasperation unmistakable.

"I've been through that with you twice already," he said.

"How many times do you have to hear it?"

"Till my gut stops warning me you're not telling everything you know."

I couldn't give a d.a.m.n less about your gut, Vic would have liked to shout.

He could feel his face redden from the strain of repressing that outburst. The kid flatfoot was tight, of course, but he'd have been guessing all the same. He looked as if he might have been on the force about a week and a half, or not anywhere near long enough anyway to have acquired the instincts he was crediting himself with.

He'd heard Vic's name before around the station house, his last name in particular. That was the only special insight this rookie had going for him. Anybody on the local force, or in the police departments from any number of area towns and counties for that matter, could have come-to the same conclusion just by heating Maltese. What Vic had happening to him here was a roust, plain and simple. He'd been through this same routine, or some variation of it, so many times he scarcely paid attention anymore. Except that, on those other occasions when one of Albany's finesta"or Schenectady's or Troy's or whoever'sa"decided to get his jollies from giving Vic a hard time, Katherine hadn't been on hand to witness it.

"Why don't you just come clean, Maltese?" the cop was asking.

"Why don't you just cut me some slack?" Vic hissed back at him from between gritted teeth, once again restraining himself from adding "jerk" or "squirt" or any of the many slurs he would have thought suited this rookie to aT.

"Vic, is something wrong here?"

Katherine was at his elbow now, and she sounded sincerely concerned.

He turned quickly toward her.

"Nothing," he said, more sharply than he'd meant to do.

She backed off a step. He could tell from the way she was studying his face that it must still wear the scowl he'd intended for the pain-in-the-neck policeman. Vic did his best to relax.

"Everything's under control here," he lied.

"Why don't you go back to the car and wait for me?"

The breath from those words was still white on the frigid air when he realized he shouldn't have said them.

"I don't think so," she answered in a tone that rivalled the weather for coldness.

"I just meant that you'd be warmer in the car, and nothing much is going on here."

So much for Vic's lame attempt to cover the mistake of suggesting that Katherine, a professional at least as fully accredited as himself, shouldn't be as much involved in this case as he was.

Arrogance might have seemed like the right att.i.tude to use with her last night, but he'd changed his minda"or maybe some other part of himselfa"about her since then.

"There's someone you need to meet," she said, still with enough chill in her voice to frost his heart.

Vic glanced at the short, hefty black woman at Katherine's side. He thought about mentioning that this might not be the best time for introductions. He decided it had to be an even worse time to question Katherine's judgment. Her facial expression was now about as dark as he'd imagined his own to be a couple of minutes ago.

"This is Tooley Pennebaker," she said indicating the woman next to her.

Vic understood that Katherine had his mind running haywire at the moment. Plus, he was rattled by the very upsetting fact of how strong an effect she had on him. Still, something even beyond that confusion made him aware that her last statement wasn't right somehow.

"You know," Katherine went on.

"The Bellamy children' s aunt."

The still-wet-behind-the-ears police officer had been watching this exchange with obvious interest.

"What children would those be, miss?" he chimed in now.

"A boy and girl we work with at the Arbor Hill Children's Center, Officer," Katherine said, and favored him with a smile so dazzling and sweet that Vic could see the rookie blush straight through the peach fuzz he probably called five-o'clock shadow.

"Do either of those kids have a record of vandalism?" the rookie managed to ask without his voice-cracking as Vic half expected it to do.

"Oh, no," Katherine said, even more sweetly.

"These are very young children." She held out her gloved hand to ill.u.s.trate a height much shorter than Coyote's, or Sprite's either, for that matter.

"Way too young to be involved in anything like that."

Vic had to bite back a smile of his own, though not quite what you'd call a sweet one. The woman was smooth as silk. She could lie like a trooper and get away with it, too. That angel face of hers, complete with a halo of blond mist around it, did the trick for her. He couldn't help wondering i i if he'd be as susceptible himself as the rookie was sure to ; be.

"Good. Then they probably had nothing to do with toss- i ing the apartment in this building," the young policeman said in a tone as cooperative as it had been the opposite when he was talking to Vic.

Katherine had charmed the rookie into submission just the way Vic had figured she would. In the meantime, Too- ley Pennebaker didn't look to Vic like she was in the least bit charmed. "What're you talkin' about?" she cried out, grabbing a hunk of the rookie's coat sleeve.

"Which apartment you sayin' got tossed around here?" "That one on the front right, ma'am." The rookie pointed. II, "No.t" Tooley wailed.

"That's my place." This woman, who up till now had appeared to be very substantial, even formidable, all but crumpled on the spot. Katherine wrapped her arm around the much broader woman.

"It's not so bad," Katherine said.

"Just things tossed around, as far as I could see."

"You saw this happen?" the police officer asked.

"No, no. Nothing like that," Katherine a.s.sured him. "Tll explain in a minute." The cop would never have taken that kind of delaying tactic from Vic. Katherine was apparently a different story as far as this officer was concerned. The rookie nodded and waited, just as she'd requested him to do. Meanwhile, her companion was pulling away in the direction of the apartment she'd said was hers. Katherine held fast to the larger woman's waist and moved along with her up onto-the stoop. Tooley fumbled in her coat pocket and pulled out a set of keys. She rattled through them a couple of times, visibly confused and shaken, then finally selected one and opened the front door to the building. Vic watched as Katherine followed Ms. Pennebaker into the entryway hall.

"Is it really that woman's place that got ransacked?" the rookie asked. A shriek from inside the building answered the young cop's question for him.

"Yeah," Vic replied anyway.

"I'd say it's her place, all right."

"The kids she was talking about they live here too?"

"The kids live here too," Vic affirmed.

He knew, for Coyote and Sprite's sake, he had to keep this cop from nosing too deep into what was going on here. "Where are those kids?" the rookie asked.

Vic was listening to the cop with new attentiveness now. Vic took note especially of how curiously the rookie was watching the door to Tooley Pennebaker's building. The less he figured out about what was actually happening to the Bellaway family, whatever that might be, the better the children were likely to end up. That's how Vic saw it, anyway. He'd learned a long time ago, when he was still not much more than a child himself, that it paid to keep family business in the family.

"They're over at the center working on setting up for the Christmas pageant," Vic said, lying yet again and takin ga chance that the rookie wouldn't check the story. "They didn't have anything to do with this."

"Who do you think did have something to do with this?"

The rookie sounded like he was thinking Vic was mixed up in the break-in somehow.

Vic shrugged.

"A street punk looking for goods to sell would be my guess."

"In this dump?"

Vic shrugged again to hide how much he agreed with the cop's a.s.sessment. The likelihood of this rundown building, or the even more rundown Pennebaker apartment, holding anything very salable was slim to none.