The Third Mrs. Mitchell. Lynnette Kent

of his dessert. “You ate all the icing, jerk.”

      “That’s the best part.” He lit a cigarette for each of them, passing hers over as he went to open the windows. “Was that Auntie M coming upstairs?”

      Kelsey drew in a deep lungful of smoke. “Had to be. Grandmother wouldn’t be so quiet.”

      “I wish she’d stay out of our business.”

      “M?”

      “Gran. Drives me crazy, the way she’s always giving me orders. How’d we get such a witch for a grandmother, anyway?”

      “I take great comfort from the fact that she’s not really ours.” Kate had married their dad when Trace was a baby, after their real mother had disappeared. So the Bowdreys weren’t actually their grandparents at all, not by blood anyway.

      “That’s right. We turn eighteen, we never have to see her again.”

      “Hell of a long time to wait.”

      “Tell me about it.”

      They smoked together in peace for a few minutes. Trace’s room was at the back corner of the house above the screened porch, with windows on two walls and big trees blocking the outside view. Kate had let him paint the walls and ceiling black and put up wildly colored posters—not rock groups, but totally weird computer-generated artwork. Some of the posters glowed in the dark; Trace’s room was an eerie place to be with the lights out.

      “I got Janine’s ID finished,” he said, rummaging through the papers piled deep beside his computer desk. “Looks good to me.”

      He handed over a North Carolina driver’s license with a picture of her friend Janine Belks, currently a sophomore in high school, but recorded on the license as age twenty-two. Kelsey nodded. “You’ve got those holograms down cold. I don’t think the guys at the license bureau could tell the difference.”

      “Just be sure you get the money before you give it to her, okay? I don’t like getting ripped off.”

      “No problem.” Another long silence flowed past. “There’s a party Saturday night. Gray Hamilton’s folks are going up to Chapel Hill for the soccer game. He’s got the house to himself.” She blew a smoke ring, then grinned. “And a hundred of his closest friends.”

      Trace shook his head. “Boring.”

      “I suppose you can do better? Like playing computer games with Ren and Stimpy?”

      He gave her the finger for calling his best friends by the names of cartoon freaks. “Beats getting trashed and passing out on the floor with a bunch of drunks tripping over you.”

      “Gray’s house has twelve bedrooms. I plan on passing out on a bed in one of those.” Taking one last, long drag, Kelsey dropped the butt of her cigarette into a soda can on the windowsill. A tiny sizzle and a wisp of smoke proclaimed its demise. “Dad’s supposed to pick us up Saturday morning for breakfast.”

      Her brother’s response was vulgar and totally appropriate.

      “He’ll be pissed if you don’t show up again.”

      “Am I supposed to care?”

      “No.” Kelsey sighed. “But I have no intention of enduring another meal with him and the Bimbo by myself. And if neither of us goes, he’ll stand downstairs and yell at Kate for an hour. She doesn’t deserve that.”

      Trace stared at the poster plastered on the ceiling above his bed, the landscape on some planet out of a heroin addict’s nightmare. “I hate her.” Kelsey knew he meant the Bimbo, the secretary their dad would bring to breakfast. Not Kate. Kate was all the mother he’d ever had.

      She gave him the only reason that might work. “If we cooperate, maybe he’ll think about coming home.”

      He cocked an eye in her direction. “Bullshit.”

      “Maybe not.”

      “I’ll think about it.”

      That would have to do. “’Night.” She crossed to the door, listening for sounds of someone out in the hallway.

      “Kelse?”

      “Yeah?”

      “What’s wrong with us? What else does he want?”

      Kelsey rested her head against the panel and closed her eyes. “God only knows.” With a deep breath, she opened the door, stepped out and closed it behind her. “And She’s not telling.”

      ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON, Mary Rose nosed Kate’s Volvo into a long line of equally sensible, passenger-safe vehicles and waited her turn to pick up Kelsey and Trace from school. She had to smile, thinking of herself as a car-pool driver. If she and Pete had stayed married—if their baby had been born—this might have been a daily routine in her life. That little boy would have been ten this year. There might have been brothers and sisters…

      She shook her head, squeezing her eyes shut against the futile, irrational urge to cry. What in the world was she thinking? Why had that long-ago tragedy suddenly reared its head?

      Because of Pete, of course. Seeing him again had undone ten years’ worth of forgetting and resurrected a pain she really couldn’t afford to relive. Except for Trace and Kelsey, children played no part in her present and future plans. There were real advantages to a life without kids, and she enjoyed as many as came her way.

      The car behind her beeped its horn, and she realized the line had moved up. Easing closer to the van ahead of her, she scanned the groups of kids hanging around outside the school building, hoping to spot Trace and Kelsey among them. Even after she reached the head of the queue, though, the LaRue kids were nowhere to be seen. When minutes passed and her passengers didn’t show, the security guard told her to move on. Mary Rose tried to protest, but the woman in the bright orange vest simply shook her head and waved with both arms in a gesture that said, clearly, “Get out of the way.”

      Two additional trips through the line later, Trace and Kelsey still hadn’t appeared. Muttering a few choice words, Mary Rose drove to the student parking lot—nearly empty now—and left the Volvo there. She had no idea where in the building Trace and Kelsey might be. But when she found them…

      The nearest entrance was one of the doors on the back of the gymnasium. Rounding the corner, Mary Rose stopped short at the sight of what looked to be battle lines drawn up in the narrow asphalt alley between the high gym walls and the chain-link fence marking the edge of school property. Seven or eight Hispanic boys on one side taunted the three white kids who stood backed up against that fence. The gibes were in English, but there were extra comments in Spanish, with mocking laughter and lewd gestures. After a moment, she realized that one of the outnumbered boys wore the brilliant yellow, long-sleeved T-shirt she’d seen just this morning in the car on the way to school. Trace.

      She started to call out, just as the fight exploded. One of Trace’s friends charged the other group and was sent sprawling on his back on the asphalt. When Trace bent to give him a hand up, he got a kick in the backside that sent him down on his face. And then there was a jumble of bodies, the sick sound of fists pounding against flesh, curses in English and Spanish.

      Mary Rose headed back the way she had come, intending to summon help, but found the principal already running toward her, with Kelsey and another girl behind him. The sound of a siren in the distance heralded the approach of more assistance. For a dreadful second, she wondered if Pete would respond to the call, then decided with relief that the highway patrol would let the local police handle this kind of incident.

      “Break it up! You hear me? Get back!” A big, heavy man, Mr. Floyd waded into the fight without any apparent concern for his own safety, jerking kids apart by the shirt collars. In another minute the police car arrived; between them, the three men separated the combatants and ended the fight.

      “What’s this all about?” Mr. Floyd stared down at Trace and each of the other boys. “Who started it?”

      But