Uncle Sarge. Bonnie Gardner

closed behind them, Jennifer drew in a deep breath. What was she doing here with a man she hardly knew, visiting a sister he hadn’t seen in years? She didn’t belong here. She didn’t want to be here.

      But when she glanced at Rich and caught his grim expression in the mirrored walls of the elevator, she knew she had to stay. She might have entered into this venture as a detective, but now she was emotionally involved. If not with Rich, at least with the case.

      She had to know how it turned out. She had to know if there was a happy ending.

      The elevator stopped at the appropriate floor with a gentle jerk, and the doors seemed to take forever to open. Finally, they stepped out and into a wide area that branched into three halls. “Left, the receptionist said.” Jennifer urged him through a set of swinging doors and toward the nurses’ station beyond. She didn’t know why, but she could tell that Rich’s state of anxiety had to do with more than just worry for his sister.

      A pretty, young woman looked up and smiled. “Are you Sergeant Larsen?”

      “Who to—? How…?” He wore the expression of a boy caught with his fingers in the cookie jar, and Jennifer loved the way it softened his hard face.

      “A Mrs. Benton called and said you were on your way,” the nurse said, putting down a chart and coming around the desk. “She wanted to be certain your visit wouldn’t be too much of a shock.”

      “A shock?”

      Jennifer hadn’t thought of that, and Rich hadn’t been thinking clearly at all. It hadn’t occurred to her that this visit might be upsetting to Sherry. “Will she be able to handle seeing her brother?”

      “It’s probably the best medicine she could have other than having her children come see her, but you know the rules about children on the wards.” She gestured toward some chairs in a small waiting area.

      “I’d rather go see my sister,” Rich said, holding his ground.

      “And so you shall,” the nurse said. “But I have to prepare you for what you’re going to see.”

      “Prepare me? Is there more I don’t know?” Rich sat in the indicated chair though he looked like he wanted to get up and run.

      The nurse sat across from him, her knees almost touching his. “No. I just want to assure you that your sister will probably make a complete recovery. She’s not in that much pain, though she’s obviously sad.” The nurse placed a hand over Rich’s, and Jennifer felt a slight finger of jealousy stab at her, but she shook that notion away. She barely knew the man.

      “Your sister is wearing a rather complicated apparatus called a halo. It looks frightening, but it’s serving to stabilize her neck, and it’s actually relieving her of pain, rather than causing it.” She described it, then waited for Rich’s response.

      “I don’t care if she’s in plaster from head to toe. It’s been a long time, and I just want to see my sister.”

      “Then, let’s go.” The nurse rose and gestured toward a corridor behind the nurses’ station.

      Jennifer squeezed Rich’s hand. “I’ll just stay here. This is your reunion. I don’t know your sister.” She wouldn’t tell him that she was a coward, that she was afraid of the intense emotions this moment was about to bring.

      “No. Come with me. Wait out in the hall, or something. Just be nearby in case I need backup.”

      As much as Jennifer didn’t want to go, the panic in Rich’s eyes told her she had to.

      Rich followed the nurse down the corridor feeling as though his feet were encased in concrete. He wanted to see Sherry, yet he dreaded what he might find. He’d had more than his share of shocks today.

      “Wait here,” the nurse said as they reached a door. There was a nameplate of sorts: a strip of masking tape with Connolly scrawled on it with a red marker. They waited outside for what seemed like the longest moment of his life while the nurse went in.

      “Richie?”

      It sounded like Sherry. Only softer, huskier. The lump returned with vengeance, and Rich’s eyes burned. Had the change in the timbre of her voice come from her injuries or the passage of time?

      The nurse beckoned, and Rich stepped inside.

      “Richie. It is you,” a pale apparition inside an Erector set project of braces and stainless steel said. She looked as if she were being tortured by something from the Spanish Inquisition, but the smile on her face was angelic. She reached through a maze of tubes and wires toward him.

      “It’s me. In the flesh,” he said, taking her hand. That lump made it damned hard to talk.

      “And so much more flesh than the last time I saw you,” Sherry said. “I guess they feed you pretty well in the air force.”

      “They did. Now I feed myself. And I work out.” As if two hours of hard PT every day would qualify as a workout. It was more like the Olympic Decathlon with the Bataan Death March combined.

      “You look wonderful.” Sherry smiled ruefully. “Don’t feel you have to compliment me in return. I know what I must look like.” She let go of him and waved, encumbered with tubes from a nearby intravenous setup, toward the halo apparatus. “I promise, I’m not into body piercing,” she said, indicating the brace that appeared to be anchored directly into her skull.

      “You look damned good to me. I didn’t think I’d ever see you ag—” He stopped, his throat too constricted to go on.

      “I’m so sorry, Richie. It was so stupid of me to leave the Parkers after I graduated and not tell anybody where I was. I was so upset about you going overseas and leaving me behind, I wasn’t thinking clearly. At the time, I really thought you didn’t want to be bothered with me.”

      “You know that wasn’t why I couldn’t take you. I explained it.” Rich’s throat was still tight, his voice husky, but he swallowed and went on. “I was just an airman. We had to have orders just to pi—” Remembering where he was, he stopped.

      “I know that now.” She paused, her welcoming smile gone, replaced by one more melancholy. One that matched the dull blue of her eyes. “Mike explained it all to me.”

      Rich sucked in a deep breath. He had hoped they could avoid the topic of her husband. He wasn’t sure he knew what to say to a woman who’d been hurt and bereaved all at the same time. Even if she was his sister. “I’m sorry….” It seemed so inadequate, but he didn’t know what else to say.

      “I wish you could have known him,” Sherry said, her eyes misty, her voice thick. “He was the best thing that ever happened to me.” She paused. “Him and the kids.” She reached through the apparatus and wiped at her eyes.

      “Yeah.” Rich didn’t know what else to say. His eyes burned like crazy and for a moment his world looked as though he were seeing it through rippled glass. He swallowed. He was supposed to be strong for Sherry.

      He rubbed at his stinging eyes with the back of his hand and looked away. When his vision finally cleared and the lump in his throat shrank from baseball to golf-ball size, he looked back. Sherry was looking at something on the tray table at the side of her bed and making no effort to disguise her streaming eyes.

      “This is a picture of us,” she said, her voice watery and thin. “We took it at Easter. It was one of the rare moments we were all dressed up at the same time.”

      Rich followed the direction of her gaze and focused on the framed picture of a happy family. The lump in his throat swelled once more. It was past tense. Sherry’s husband would never pose with them again.

      “Sometimes it doesn’t seem real,” Sherry said, her voice cracking. “But at night I get snatches of memory. I hear the rain. I feel the moisture on my face. I see Mike lying so impossibly still.” She sniffed back more tears. “I remember the policeman muttering to his partner about the guy being a goner.