Risking It All. Beverly Bird

4

      An almost tomblike silence fell over the room in her wake. Aidan wondered about that and any implications it might have as he finally—really—looked around the room.

      He cleaned up the table—his mother had taught him well—and tossed the lady lawyer’s drink down the sink behind the bar. He wiped up the little dewy rings it had left on the table and threw out the empty bottle of Jameson’s. Then he decided to help himself to another bottle of whiskey. It was paid for, after all. And sometimes a man had just cause.

      He eschewed the cola this time because even though the Jameson’s was gone, the other brand the hotel stocked was a really good bottle. He carried it with him to the door on the right side of the room and looked inside. The bedroom was pretty much everything he had expected. There was a king-size bed done up in hunter-green satin and more pillows than a guy alone would ever need. Hell, Aidan thought, he could bring a whole harem in here and there would be room and pillows to spare.

      The thought barely made him crack a grin and he was generally pretty amused by his own humor. That disturbed him, so he opened the bottle of whiskey and swigged from it as he crossed to the bathroom.

      “My, my, my.” He touched the white terry-cloth robes hung in a small closet. “I’ve got Dan Lutz’s bathrobe, the philandering old goat.” But Dan probably had one thing tonight that he didn’t have, Aidan realized—a warm body to wear the smaller robe.

      Where the hell was his mind going? He hadn’t thought in terms like this in six long months.

      He glanced at the sunken whirlpool tub and that brought more clever female images to mind, not a one of them involving a blonde like Kat, and that made him knock back more whiskey. There was a bidet. The contraptions had always made him seriously wonder about Frenchmen. But the room also had a real honest-to-God American toilet and a shower, in case one didn’t feel like going buoyant in a tub full of hot bubbles. Or, he thought, in the event that a man was staying here alone.

      “Okay, that’s enough of that,” he said aloud.

      Aidan left the bathroom. He crossed the bedroom quickly as though images of a woman who wasn’t blond by a long shot were chasing him. He went back to the big center room and stared at the telephone on an end table by one of the sofas. And that was when he admitted to himself why he was swilling still more whiskey, why he was touring his accommodations as if he actually gave a damn about them, why he was amusing himself with tantalizing thoughts of a brunette barracuda, though admittedly, she did rattle nicely. But all of that, he knew, was his way of putting off the inevitable.

      Calling Ma.

      Aidan capped the whiskey bottle again and put it down solidly on the table. He sat on the sofa, sprawling his legs out in front of him, and reached for the telephone, pulling it onto his lap. Then he bought more time trying to figure out what number he ought to push first to get an outside line.

      He stalled by calling his own answering machine to retrieve messages. There were nine of them. That was bad. He hadn’t had nine messages waiting for him at any one time since he was seventeen and the darling of Bishop Eustace High School.

      The first was from Shanna, his sister and the mother of Joe and Mickey who had been with him at the basketball court when this nightmare had started. “Oh, my God!” she cried. Then again, for good measure, “Oh, my God! What happened? Where are you?”

      A click, and the machine rolled on to message number two. Shanna again.

      “Duh. I just answered my own question. You’re probably still at the police station. I’d better call Ma.”

      “No, no,” Aidan said aloud, as though she could hear him, as though he could stop it. “Don’t do that.”

      Too late. Message number three. Ma.

      “Aidan Jack.”

      Aidan winced.

      “Aidan Jack, your sister just called me with the most horrible tale. Please call home.”

      Click. Message Four. His dad.

      “Hey, buddy, call in. Ma’s upset.”

      With due cause, Aidan thought, and he grimaced again.

      Another four messages came in, one more from Ma, one from Shea, his youngest sister, one from Fox Whittington wondering if everything had turned out okay and asking if there was anything more he could do to help. And one from Jack Aidan, his older brother. Ma hadn’t been real amused when she’d had two kids within twelve months of each other. She said she’d been too worn out to be creative with names. Aidan believed that because, several kids later, she had come up with Shea.

      Aidan got up from the sofa. He grabbed the whiskey bottle again and uncapped it.

      “I’m thirty-four years old,” he said aloud. All the same, he was a good Irish boy. And he needed to call his mother. Because, unless he badly missed his guess, she was either throwing up from worry by now or she was making his dad’s life a duck-now-or-go-to-hell experience by throwing things. Finola threw things. Rarely, but when she was really, really stoked, it happened.

      Aidan had always figured she had a right to that idiosyncrasy. She’d come to this country at sixteen, pregnant and alone except for a man she’d been married to for a mere seven months. She’d dug in, she’d survived, and she’d raised seven kids on a very short shoestring. She’d stayed married to the best, most honest man Aidan knew in a society that took marriage lightly. So if she got pissed off occasionally when life conspired against her and a pan or an iron took flight, well, so be it.

      He was all out of procrastinating excuses, Aidan realized. He punched his parents’ number into the phone.

      Finola answered on the first ring, which told him something. She hadn’t been throwing up. She’d been throwing—period. “Aidan? Aidan Jack? Where are you?”

      “Enjoying nicer accommodations than one might expect under the circumstances,” he replied blithely.

      “You’re not home.”

      His heart cramped. “No.”

      “What happened? It’s that woman, isn’t it?”

      “Which one?”

      His father had picked up the extension. Aidan heard Daniel McKenna choke on a laugh. Finola, however, was not amused.

      “The blonde,” his mother said flatly.

      “Many good women are blond.” And some scary ones were brunette, Aidan thought.

      “I will not play games with you, Aidan Jack. Tell me what you need me to do.”