Chris smelled the melting chocolate in her mouth, watched her swallow with exaggerated pleasure. Alex Morse is batshit, he told himself.
Thora looked into his eyes, then took his hand and cupped her breast with it.
"You up for a second round? We can raise the odds by two hundred million or so."
He felt like an astronaut cut loose from his spacecraft, drifting steadily away from everything familiar.
Who could live like this? he wondered.
Second-guessing every move in my own house?
He closed his eyes and kissed Thora with desperate fervor.
Alex's heart leaped when she saw the little red icon turn green, indicating that Jamie had logged on to MSN. She'd been checking for the past three hours, playing Spider Solitaire and waiting for Jamie's icon to light up.
A new screen like a small TV appeared within her main screen, but the TV was blank. Then an image of Jamie sitting at his desk in his room at Bill Fennell's house flashed up.
The immediacy of the webcam was overwhelming at first. It truly was like being in the same room with the person you were talking to. You could see every emotion in their eyes, every movement of their face.
Tonight Jamie was wearing an Atlanta Braves T-shirt and the yellow baseball cap of his Dixie Youth team. His eyes weren't looking at her, but at his monitor, so that he could watch her image projected from his screen. She knew that she looked the same to him, since she was staring at his image and not the camera mounted atop her screen.
"Hey, Aunt Alex," he said. "Sorry I'm late."
She smiled genuinely for the first time all day. "It's okay. You know I'll be here whenever you log on. What you been doing, bub?"
Jamie smiled. "I had a baseball game."
"How did it go?"
"They killed us."
"I'm sorry. How did you do?"
"I got a double."
Alex yelped and applauded. "That's great!" Jamie's smile vanished.
"But I struck out twice." "That's okay. Even the pros strike out."
"Twice in one game?"
"Sure they do. I once saw Hank Aaron strike out three times in one game." This was a lie, but a harmless one. Hank Aaron was about the only player whose name she knew, and him only because of her father.
"Who's Hank Aaron?" Jamie asked.
"He hit more home runs than Babe Ruth." "Oh. I thought that was Barry Bonds."
Alex shrugged. "It doesn't matter. You got a double, that's what matters. What else has been going on?" Jamie sighed like a fifty-year-old man.
"I don't know."
"Yes, you do. Come on."
"I think she's over here right now."
"Missy?" Missy Hammond was Bill's mistress. Jamie nodded.
Anger flooded through Alex; she tasted copper in her mouth.
"Why do you think that? Did you see her?"
"No." Jamie glanced behind him, at his bedroom door. "Dad thinks I'm asleep now. He came in to check, and I had the lights off. After a few minutes, I heard the back door. I thought he might be leaving, so I sneaked out to the rail. I didn't see anything, but after a while I heard somebody laughing. It sounded exactly like her."
Alex didn't know what to say. "I'm sorry, Jamie. Let's talk about something else."
The boy hung his head. "That's easy for you to say. Why don't you just come get me? Dad wants to be with her, not me. I'm not sleepy at all."
"I can't just come get you. We talked about that. But your father wants you, Jamie." Alex wasn't sure whether this was true. "He wants both of you."
The boy shook his head. "After the game, all Dad talked about was my strikeouts. And what else I did wrong. Nothing about my double."
Alex put on a smile and nodded as though she understood. "I think a lot of dads are like that. Your granddad did that when I played softball."
Jamie looked surprised. "Really?"
"Oh, yeah. He didn't hesitate to tell me what I did wrong."
This wasn't quite true. Jim Morse could give constructive criticism, but he knew how to do it without making you feel bad. And most of what Alex remembered from being ten years old was unconditional praise.
"Your dad's just trying to help you improve," she added.
"I guess. I don't like it, though." Jamie reached down, then lifted a heavy book onto his desk.
"I was supposed to do my homework earlier, but I didn't feel like it. Can I do it now?"
"Sure."
"Will you stay on while I do it?" Alex smiled.
"You know I will."
Now Jamie was grinning. They had done this many times since Grace's death. While Jamie read his assignment, Alex sat watching him, her mind roving back through the past. For some reason her father was in her mind tonight.
Jim Morse had loved his grandson more than anything else in the world, and that might have included his own daughters.
When Grace and Alex were young, Jim had been building a business, and despite putting real effort into being a father, he had seen them mostly in passing. But with Jamie, he'd had endless hours to spend with the boy. Jim had taught him to hunt and fish, to water- ski, to fly kites, and not just to throw a baseball but to pitch one for real.
Jamie Fennell could throw a curveball when he was eight years old. Jim had spent all this time with Jamie despite the fact that Jim and Bill Fennell did not get along. In Alex's eyes, her father had proved his manhood for all time by compromising as much as was required to keep close contact with his grandson.
One thing Alex knew in her bones, though: if her father had been alive to hear Grace's deathbed accusation of murder, the events of the past weeks would have unfolded differently. That very night, Bill Fennell would have been hauled into an empty room, slammed against a wall, and made to cough up all the sediment at the bottom of his soul.
Had that treatment not proved sufficient to dredge up the truth, Bill would have been taken on an involuntary boat ride with Jim Morse, Will Kilmer, and some of the other ex-cops who worked for their detective agency. One way or another, Bill would have spilled all he knew about Grace's death.
And Jamie would not be living in Bill's ugly mansion on the edge of the Ross Barnett Reservoir in Jackson. If the courts didn't save Jamie, his grandfather would have taken him somewhere safe to be raised by people who loved him. And Alex would have gone with them. She wouldn't have thought twice about it.
None of that had happened, of course. Because like his daughter Grace, Jim Morse was dead.
Alex had studied all the eyewitness accounts, but none of them ever dovetailed exactly—unlike the accounts of her own act of lunacy at the bank, when Broadbent was killed.
Everybody had seen exactly the same thing on that day.
But with her father's death it was different. At age sixty, Jim had walked into a dry cleaner's late on a Friday afternoon.
He normally used the drive-through window, but that day he chose to go inside. Two female clerks stood behind the counter. A young black man wearing a three-piece suit was waiting in the store, but he was no customer. The real customers were lying flat on their stomachs behind the counter, beside a grocery bag filled with cash from the register.
Jim didn't know that when he walked in, but Alex figured it had taken him about six seconds to realize something was wrong. No one was going to bluff Jim Morse out of a robbery in progress, no matter how old he was.
The girls behind the counter were so scared they could hardly speak when Jim walked up to the counter and started a monologue about the weather: how warm the fall had been, and how it used to snow once or twice a year in Mississippi, but nowadays almost never.
One clerk saw Jim glance behind the counter without moving his head, but the other didn't. What she did see was Jim take his wife's clothes from the hanging rod and turn to leave the store.
As he passed the waiting "customer," Jim flattened him with a savage blow to the throat. The clerk was shocked that "an old gray-haired dude" had attacked a muscular man in his early twenties.
No one who knew Jim Morse was surprised. He'd often carried a gun after retirement, but he hadn't on that day, not for a short run to the cleaner's.