Self-Defense by Jonathan Kellerman Page B

finally agreed to try dinner.”
    “Was Lucy going to be there, too?”
    “No, he didn’t want her to be—protecting
her, I guess. It was a trial balloon. The deal was that if it worked out, we’d
get her involved... he was pretty nervous about the whole thing. Still, I was
surprised when he stood me up.”
    “Have you heard from him since?”
    “No. I tried him a couple times from here,
no answer.” He looked at his watch. “Maybe I should try again.”
    There was a pay phone up the hall. He
called, waited, and came back shaking his head.
    “Poor kid,” he said, looking at the door
to Lucy’s room. “Puck said she’d been through some kind of rough jury duty and
was pretty freaked out, but I had no idea she was this... vulnerable.”
    He buttoned his jacket. Tight around the
waist. “Too many business dinners,” he said, smiling ruefully. “Not that I
imagine she’s had it easy. Did she tell you who our father is?”
    I nodded.
    He said, “I don’t know if she’s had any
contact with him, but if she has, I’d be willing to bet that’s at least part of
her stress.”
    “Why’s that?”
    “The man’s a total and complete
sonofabitch.”
    “Have you had contact with him?”
    “No way. He lives here—up in Topanga
Canyon, big spread. But that’s a call I’ll never make.” Unbuttoning his jacket.
“When I first started in the business, I used to have fantasies of his going
bankrupt and me buying his land up cheap.” Smile. “I’ve been in counseling
myself—got divorced last year.”
    “What happened twenty years ago?”
    “Pardon?”
    “You said the last time you saw Lucy was
twenty years ago.”
    “Oh. Yeah, twenty, twenty-one, something
like that.” He squinted and scratched the side of his nose. “I was nine, so it
was twenty-one. It was the summer my mother decided to go to Europe to take
painting lessons—she was an artist. She drove us—my sister Jo and me—down to
L.A. and dropped us off at Sanctum. That’s the name of his place in Topanga.”
    “I’ve heard of it—a writer’s retreat.”
    “Yeah. Anyway, here she is, dumping us on
him, no advance notice. He was about as happy as getting a boil lanced, but
what could he do, kick us out?”
    “And Lucy was there too?”
    “Lucy and Puck. They came up a couple of
weeks after we did. Tiny little kids, we didn’t know who they were; our mother
had never told us they even existed, only that he’d left her for another woman.
As it turned out, their mom had died a few years before, and the aunt
who had taken care of them had gotten married and dumped them. ”
    “How old were they?”
    “Let’s see, if I was nine, Puck would have
had to be... five. So Lucy was four. We looked at them as babies, had nothing
to do with them. Tell the truth, we resented them—our mother was always
bad-mouthing their mother for stealing him away.”
    “Who took care of them?”
    “A nanny or some kind of baby-sitter. I
remember that because they got to sleep with her in the main house while Jo and
I had to stay in a little cabin and basically fend for ourselves. But that was
okay. We ran around, did whatever we wanted.”
    “Twenty-one years ago,” I said. “That must
have been right after Sanctum opened.”
    “It had just opened,” he said. “I remember
they had this big party for the opening, and we were forced to stay in our
cabin. Along with plates of food. Tons more spread out on these long white
banquet tables, leftovers for weeks. I used to sneak into the kitchen and swipe
pastries. I gained ten pounds—that was the beginning of my weight problem.”
    People shouting or maybe they’re laughing...
and lights like fireflies.
    Another glance at his watch. “Well,” he
said, “good to meet you. If there’s anything I can do—”
    He turned to leave.
    “How long will you be in L.A.?”
    “I was supposed to fly back tonight. Do
you think—is there a chance Lucy would want to meet me?”
    “Hard to say, right now. She’s