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“You got to put a kid in a car seat. It’s the law.”
“You a cop?”
She cocked her head. “Her seat’s in Mabel. The Winnebago. Sandy called it Mabel.”
“Didn’t your mother have a car?”
“The dealer took it back a couple of months before she died, so she drove Mabel.”
“Swell.” He wasn’t going to ask how she’d come into possession of a battered motor home. Instead, he tried to figure out how he was supposed to get a teenager, a baby, and a car seat in his two-passenger Mercedes. Only one answer. He wasn’t.
“Give me the keys.”
He could see her trying to figure out if she could get away with mouthing off again, then wisely concluding she couldn’t.
Keys in hand, he went outside to get acquainted with Mabel. On the way, he picked up the cell phone from his Mercedes, along with the newspaper he hadn’t found a chance to read.
> He needed to duck to get into the motor home, which was roomy, but not roomy enough for six feet six. He settled behind the wheel and put in a call to a doctor pal of his in Pittsburgh for the name of a nearby lab and the necessary authorization. While he was on hold, he picked up the newspaper.
Like most journalists, he was a news junkie, but nothing unusual caught his attention. There’d been an earthquake in China, a car bombing in the Middle East, budget squabbles in Congress, more trouble in the Balkans. Toward the bottom of the page was a picture of Cornelia Case with another sick baby in her arms.
Although he’d never been much of a Cornelia watcher, she seemed thinner in every recent photograph. The First Lady had terrific blue eyes, but they’d started to appear too big for her face, and nice eyes couldn’t make up for the fact that there didn’t seem to be a real woman behind them, just an extremely smart politician programmed by her father.
When he’d been at Byline, they’d done a couple of puff pieces on Cornelia—her hairdresser, her taste in fashion, how she honored her husband’s memory—bullshit stuff. Still, he felt sorry for her. Having a husband assassinated would put a crimp in anybody’s happy face.
He frowned at the memory of his year in tabloid television. Before then, he’d been a print journalist, one of the most highly regarded reporters in Chicago, but he’d thrown away his reputation to make a pile of money he’d soon discovered he had little interest in spending. Now all he wanted out of life was to wipe the tarnish off his name.
Mat’s idols weren’t Ivy League journalists, but guys who’d used two fingers to punch out hard-hitting stories on old Remington typewriters. Men as rough around the edges as he was. There had been nothing flashy about his work when he was writing for the Chicago Standard. He’d used short words and simple sentences to describe the people he met and what they cared about. Readers had known they could count on him to shoot straight. Now he was on a quest to prove that was true again.
Quest. The word had an archaic quality to it. A quest was the province of a holy knight, not a steeltown roughneck who’d let himself forget what was important in life.
His old boss at the Standard had said Mat could return to his former job, but the offer had been begrudging, and Mat refused to go back with his hat in his hands. Now he was driving around the country searching for something to take with him. Wherever he stopped—big town or small—he picked up a paper, talked to people, and nosed around. Even though he hadn’t found it, he knew exactly what he was looking for—the seeds of a story big enough to give him back his reputation.
He’d just finished his calls when the door swung open and Winona climbed into the motor home with the baby, who was barefoot and dressed in a yellow romper with lambs on it. She had a peace sign tattooed on one chubby ankle.
“Sandy had her baby tattooed?”
Winona gave him a look that said he was too dumb to live. “It’s a rub-on. Don’t you know anything?”
His sisters were grown up by the time the tattoo craze had started, thank God. “I knew it was a rub-on,” he lied. “I just don’t think you should put something like that on a baby.”
“She likes it. She thinks it makes her look cool.” Winona carefully placed the baby in the car seat, fastened the straps, then plopped down in the seat next to him.
After a couple of tries, the engine sputtered to life. He shook his head in disgust. “This thing is a piece of crap.”
“No shit.” She propped her feet, which were clad in thick-soled sandals, onto the dash.
He glanced into Mabel’s side mirror and backed out. “You know, don’t you, that I’m not really your father.”
“Like I’d want you.”
So much for the worry he’d been harboring that she might have built up some kind of sentimental fantasy about him. As he made his way down the street, he realized he didn’t know either her real name or the baby’s. He’d seen copies of their birth certificates but hadn’t looked any farther than the lines that had his own name written on them. She probably wouldn’t appreciate it if he called her Winona. “What’s your name?”
There was a long pause while she thought about it. “Natasha.”
He almost laughed. For three months his sister Sharon had tried to make everybody call her Silver. “Yeah, right.”
“That’s what I want to be called,” she snapped.
