“I’m glad you came down,” Josh said. “I was going to come up.”
“To lecture me about school again?”
“No. Just to talk.”
Bryan shot him a skeptical look. Then he dropped the remote and leaned back. “Why not? There’s nothing better to do.”
“Beth predicted you’d get bored out here in short order.”
Bryan nodded. “I’ve listened to every music file I’ve ever downloaded, ten times each.”
“What would make it better?” Joshua asked.
His son looked surprised. “An Internet connection would help. My laptop’s set up for cable, but Maude says there’s no cable here.”
“Done. I’ll get on it tomorrow.”
“Really?”
Josh flinched inwardly. Had he been so self-absorbed that his son was surprised he would want to do something nice for him? “Sure. I’ll find out what the local dial-up service is and get you signed up. I’ll have to clear it with Maude first—it’s her phone.”
“I should have wireless.”
“We’re not going to be here that long, Bry. Dial-up will do.”
Bryan nodded. “Where is Maude, anyway? Gone to bed?”
“Out at the movies with her next-door neighbor.”
“Frankie the cop?”
“Frankie Parker.” Josh smiled. “I know, a police chief named Frankie doesn’t inspire much confidence.”
Bryan looked at him more closely. “You’re…different today.”
“How so?”
“I don’t know. Less tense. More laid-back.”
Josh nodded. “It’s a laid-back kind of a town. Hell, I don’t know, Bryan, maybe I’ve needed to take some time off for a while now. Or maybe it’s…that I’ve been sitting behind a desk too long. You know, when Kevin and I first started our own private security business, we did all the work ourselves.”
“Bodyguards-R-Us,” Bryan quipped.
“Yeah. Now, I don’t know. We’ve got three offices, dozens of men working for us, high-profile clients, and it’s all about paperwork.”
“It’s not fun anymore,” Bryan said.
Josh looked him in the eye. “You know what? You’re right. You nailed it. It’s not fun anymore.”
Bryan nodded. “So quit.”
“It’s not that simple, Bryan.”
“Sure it is. You don’t like what you’re doing, so stop doing it.”
Josh sighed, sensed himself getting impatient with Bryan, and Bryan getting impatient with him, and decided to change the subject. “How’d the tutoring go?”
“Fine.” Bryan reached to the coffee table for a magazine and began flipping pages. It was a copy of Vermont Dairy Monthly—a field full of fat cows on the cover.
“Any sign of that brown car lurking around?” Joshua asked.
“Nope, not that I saw.”
Josh sat down on the sofa beside his son. “Meant to tell you, that was a good call this morning. Spotting the strange car, telling me about it.”
Bryan shrugged, but at least he looked up from the magazine he wasn’t really reading. “I wasn’t sure whether to say something in front of Beth or not. It made her nervous, didn’t it?”
“Seemed to.”
“Guess she has reason to be.”
Josh nodded. “Yeah. I wanted to talk to you about that.”
“About what?”
“About me. About…Beth Slocum. And why I reacted the way I did when I first saw her.”
Bryan lifted his brows. They disappeared beneath the shock of brown hair that slanted across his forehead. “I thought that was none of my business.”
“You said that, Bry. I didn’t. I just…had to make sure she was who I thought she was before I said anything.”
“And now you’re sure?”
“Yeah.” Josh took a breath, telling himself that Beth’s advice had sounded great at the time. Carrying it out was another matter. “This goes back a ways, so bear with me. Before you were born, I worked for the ATF. It was one of the things that came between your mother and me. She hated it.”
“I know all about that.”
Josh blinked. “You do?”
“Yeah. Mom told me.” Bryan set his magazine back on the coffee table.
Josh nodded. “Okay. But she probably didn’t tell you why I was fired from that job. There was a cult leader, keeping underage kids, mostly girls, on a fenced compound, with armed guards and dogs. He was dealing drugs and stockpiling weapons, and no one was sure the girls who were there were free to leave.”
“The Young Believers,” Bryan said.
Josh lost his entire train of thought. “You know about them, too?”
“Sure I know. Mom told me about the raid that went bad. She told me about the girl you accidentally shot, how you lost your job over it. And she told me never to bring it up with you. She said it was the worst time of your life and probably the main reason you two broke up. She said the guilt ruined you.”
Josh just sat there for a moment, absorbing his son’s words. “I had no idea she’d told you all that.”
Bryan tipped his head to one side. “Doesn’t mean I don’t want to hear your version of it. Besides, what does all that have to do with Beth Slocum?”
“Everything,” Joshua said softly. He looked his son in the eyes. “It turns out she’s the girl I shot.”
Bryan bobbed his head forward, eyes widening. “But I thought the girl you shot was dead.”
“So did everyone else. Nearly everyone, I mean. For all these years, I believed it. When I went to see her in the hospital after the raid, she was in a coma. They told me she wouldn’t live, and the way she looked, I had no trouble believing it. She was…hell, she was your age.”
“And they let you think you’d killed her? I can’t believe no one ever told you. You recognized her when we first saw her, didn’t you?”
“I did. It had been a while—she was eighteen years younger and at death’s door when I last saw her, after all. But yeah, it’s not like that face hasn’t haunted me ever since. I just couldn’t believe it could really be her.”
Bryan nodded slowly, his eyes holding his father’s, almost probing them. “That’s what’s different, then.”
Josh looked at him, unsure what his son meant.
“The guilt you’ve been carrying around, Dad. Jeez, finding out you didn’t kill her after all must have been like having a lead weight taken off your shoulders.”
He nodded slowly. “You know, that’s probably it.” Then he frowned. “You ought to look into a future as a shrink, you know that?”
“Doesn’t take a shrink to nail that one.” He paused, studying his father’s face so closely that Josh wondered what his son saw there. Then he said, “Tell me the rest, Dad.”
He really wanted to know, Josh realized. He organized his thoughts and continued