Faith was looking at him again. She tucked one of her long legs up under her-the same way she’d also sat on the couch at home when they were kids-and turned to face him fully. Her eyes, solid green and just as angry at times as their father’s, locked onto him. “You drank those three bottles of Harp I had in the fridge this morning.”
Sean twirled the whiskey bottle in his hand. “Yeah. It was a long drive in from Tucson.”
“You finish off that whole bottle right there, straight, by yourself?”
Sean thumped the bottle on the coffee table, then checked to make sure he hadn’t scratched it. It was good wood, and he didn’t want to nick it. “You got something to say, sister, say it.”
“How did you get to be ‘on leave’ from ICE? How could you just pick up and leave and come to Oklahoma to do a freelance job?”
Sean blinked. So his sister had shifted into full interrogation mode. “Hey, two can play that game. What’s your job? ‘Special projects’? Come on, you can do better than that.”
They stared at each other for a long moment.
“So we both have our little secrets,” Sean finally said. “Big deal.”
Faith leaned over and tapped the whiskey bottle with a fingernail. “Your secrets have anything to do with this?”
“What?”
“You having any trouble with this, Sean?”
Sean made a snorting sound. “ ‘Any good Irish cop worth his salt likes a good drink now and again,’ ” he quoted.
“Yeah, and you see where it got Seamus, too.”
Sean shifted on the couch. “He was due to retire anyway.”
“Bullshit,” Faith said. “He could have worked another ten years. They let him retire so he could keep his pension and it wouldn’t tarnish all the commendations he got while he was on the force.”
“What’s your point, Faith?”
Faith folded her hands together and squeezed. Sean saw her knuckles turn white. This was what she had done since she was a teenager when she was talking about something intense. She’d stopped biting her fingernails at sixteen, but then started doing this trick of squeezing her hands together so hard that they hurt.
“Say it,” Sean said.
“We have a family history,” Faith said. “And you’ve been in a really stressful job situation, with the switch to DHS these last couple of years. I guess…I guess I just want to know you’re not losing control.”
Shit, Sean thought. Shit, shit, shit. We don’t see each other for three years, but still she reads me like a cheap paperback, just like when we were kids. Faith could always close herself up, but me…I’m an open book to her.
Sean flexed his own hands, just to make sure they weren’t shaking. Then he very carefully took Faith’s smaller hands in his, and pried her fingers apart. “You should quit doing that,” he said. “One of these days you’ll break your own fingers.”
Faith didn’t smile.
Sean cleared his throat. “Don’t worry about me. Yeah, I’ve been through a lot. Yeah, I like a good drink now and again. It helps smooth out the hard edges. I’ve seen some stuff down along the border…”
Faith nodded. “I know. I’ve seen some stuff these last couple of years myself.”
Sean let go of her hands. Suddenly it felt awkward, the old Kelly family reluctance toward physical affection. “I bet you have.”
Faith stood up. “What next? You want to do some sightseeing tomorrow, or what?”
“Maybe,” Sean said. “You set your own hours or what?”
“More or less. Right now I’m just finishing up paperwork on this latest project. Sometimes I have to pick up and go at a moment’s notice, so when I’m just hanging out in town doing office work, I’m pretty laid-back on the hours.”
“And your boss likes this?”
“My boss is in another time zone. As long as things go the way they’re supposed to, and as long as he can reach me at any time, he doesn’t care if I’m not in the office nine-to-five.”
“Nice work if you can get it,” Sean said with a smile.
“Sometimes,” Faith said, not smiling.
Sean’s smile faded. He thought of something that had happened when he and Faith were nine and eight, respectively. Sean had wanted a new bicycle desperately, but their father was still just making a patrol officer’s salary and they couldn’t afford it. So Sean-who never believed anything his father said about money-put his old bicycle under the wheels of his dad’s car, and the next morning his father backed over it, destroying the bike and the tire of the car as well. Sean blamed it on one of the neighborhood kids. Joe Kelly, in his wrath-he never believed anything Sean said either-had turned to Faith, as he often did. Sean had teased Faith mercilessly in those days, daring her to tell even the tiniest of white lies, saying she was physically incapable of lying. He had begged her with his eyes not to tell the old man, but she looked straight at Sean and said, “He did it, Dad. I saw him. Sean did it.”
Joe Kelly had beaten Sean’s butt so hard that Sean was sore for ten days. Faith had watched the beating in silence, tears streaming down her face. And Sean never got another bicycle, ever. Sean hated Faith for a long time, with the kind of hate only adolescents are capable of managing. But then some things happened with Faith and she was away from the rest of the family for a while, and when she came back, Sean didn’t hate her so much anymore. The incident haunted him for years, and when they were both in college, he’d called her one night and brought it up again.
“I never should have put that bike there, Faith. I put you in the position of wanting you to lie to protect me, and the old man put you in the position of having to rat on me. We were both wrong, Dad and I. You held on to the truth, as much as it hurt.”
Sean looked at his sister now, framed in the lamplight of the messy living room. They were both a long way from what they used to be. Looking at her, thinking of how she evaded any specifics about her job, Sean thought that Faith had probably finally learned how to lie, and that it was tearing her up inside. The thought saddened him.
He nodded at her. “Yeah, we’ll sightsee tomorrow,” he finally said. “I’ve got some more work to do on this thing, but it’ll be tomorrow night.”
“Okay,” Faith said. “I’m going to go to bed, I think. There’s a bunch of junk in the spare bedroom, but that couch folds out. There are pillows and sheets and stuff in the hall closet.”
“I’ll find it,” Sean said.
She looked at him again. Her eyes flickered over the empty whiskey bottle. “Good night,” she said.
Sean puttered around the living room for an hour or so after Faith went to bed. He straightened a few things, then stopped himself, realizing Faith would probably be annoyed with him for doing it. He stopped at her bookshelf, reading spines. Mostly nonfiction volumes on unsolved crimes-same old Faith. But there was one hardcover, something called The Secret Six. Curious, Sean pulled it out. It seemed to be about John Brown and the Civil War. When did Faith get interested in Civil War history?
Sean thumbed a few pages. The book was by a man named Edward J. Renehan Jr., and appeared to be about wealthy Northern abolitionists who helped John Brown, who went so far as to bankroll his operation leading up to the raid on Harper’s Ferry. Boring, Sean thought. He’d never been one for history books. Just before he put it back, his eye caught some handwriting on the title page.
My dear Officer Kelly, Until we meet again, I leave you this reminder of our time together. The note was signed: Isaac Smith. Who the hell was Isaac Smith? Sean shook his head. His baby sister had her secrets, all right. Of course, if she really was in Department Thirty, as he suspected, secrets were her business. The idea depressed him even further. He wished he had another pint of Jack, but didn’t want to go back out in the rain. He put the book back on the shelf.