He felt himself tense. There was a definite edge to that question. What the hell did it matter what she thought? he asked himself. It wasn’t as if she was some selfless dogooder. In his opinion, any psychic reader was just playing off the hopes, dreams and pain of others.
“Actually, at the moment, I’ve taken on a case for a dollar,” he told her. She looked up at him, clearly curious, so to get off that subject, he quickly asked, “So what was the story between you and Amelia?”
“She rescued me,” Kendall told him.
“From what?”
“When I was sixteen, my folks were killed in an automobile accident,” she said, her tone matter-of-fact. “They left nothing. I mean nothing. They were musicians, more in love with playing than making a living. I didn’t blame them—they did well enough, and we had a nice little house close to Rampart Street. I was put in foster care. I met Amelia when she hosted some of us kids out at the plantation for a field trip. She heard about what had happened. I actually ended up moving in with Vinnie’s folks, but they had a hard enough time making ends meet without me there, so Amelia helped them feed another mouth. I started spending weekends with her, helping her with the house—she still had a caretaker and a maid back then, but she always found something interesting for me to do. I managed to get a scholarship to Loyola, and once I was out of school, I started working. Nothing exciting, just a job to pay the bills. When the shop on Royal came up for lease, Amelia and I took a plunge together, because she liked my idea for what to do with it. So she took out a small mortgage to give me some start-up capital, and thank God, I was able to pay it back quickly. I believed I could make a go of it, and Amelia believed in me. So you can understand why, when she got sick, I was determined to help her.”
A simple enough story, he thought. Too simple, maybe, given that a lot more had certainly happened over the ten or twelve years since her parents had died.
“What about your family?” she asked, staring straight at him.
Her eyes were like emeralds, he thought. Emeralds glittering with amber lights. The flame of the candle on the table was reflected in them, constantly changing the color.
“Similar story, actually,” he said. “My parents died my senior year of high school. My mother caught a flu they couldn’t stop, and I think the pain of losing her made my dad’s heart give out. They left enough for me to hang on to the house until we could all graduate. Zachary was just a sophomore at the time, and Jeremy was a junior. I figured the only chance we really had was for me to join the navy, so I did. I could go to college while my brothers finished high school, then do my basic training after. A legal aide attorney helped get me custody of Jeremy and Zach until they reached eighteen themselves.”
“Very admirable,” she told him.
He shook his head. “The two of them picked up the pieces. They learned to cook and clean, and they both got into local bands that made money playing for weddings, graduations, that kind of thing. When I got out of the service, I studied graphics first. I almost started into architecture. But I’d been on a few covert missions in the service, so when Jeremy went into criminology, and then Zach, I found myself following. The next thing I knew, there was an FBI guy trying to recruit me, and I was intrigued. Jeremy wound up becoming a police diver, and Zachary headed down to the Miami area to work forensics.” He shrugged. “I guess you can only go so long in that line of work before you have to make a change. You just hit a breaking point.”
She looked at him. “And yours was?” she asked softly.
“My breaking point wasn’t professional,” he said.
“Your wife?”
He never talked about Serena. Never. And he didn’t want to start talking about her now.
Maybe not talking was worse.
“Car accident,” he said briefly.
He was startled when he felt her hand on his. Warm. And her eyes startled him even more. There was an empathy in them that touched him as no other attempt to comfort him had done before.
He was tempted to jerk his hand away. The feeling of warmth was too gentle. Lulling. It was the kind of thing that could take him off guard.
“Well, we’re a pair, aren’t we?” he said abruptly.
“Not that bad,” she told him, pulling her hand back and flushing slightly, telling him that she had never meant to touch him. “Vinnie is like a brother to me. Mason is the world’s greatest employee as well as a friend. I’m from here, so I have a lot of good friends, really. But…”
“But now you’ve lost Amelia. Followed by a good kick in the face—my brothers and me.”
She laughed. “I honestly don’t dislike you for that.”
“So why do you dislike me?”
“Well, you walk around like a thundercloud, and you’re…you’re rude.”
“Ouch.”
“It’s all right. You’re kind of like a neighbor’s cranky dog. After a while you get accustomed to the growling.”
“That makes me feel so much better,” he assured her. They were both smiling. It was almost an awkward moment.
“Another personal question,” he said.