Working Stiff

“Pick something else.” He finally reached the estate’s gates, which silently opened for them, and they hit the open road. She could sense his frustration in the way he edged the accelerator up past legal speed.

“Oh, no, you already warned me off of one topic. Liam said your family got its money the old-fashioned way.”

“By oppressing others? Yes, there was a lot of opportunity for that around the early industrial age, and they took full advantage. Great-Granddad was a rival of Rockefeller for a while, only he lacked the civic responsibility. It’s not a glamorous story, Bryn.”

“It is to someone whose biggest family celebrity was a cousin who made it to the second round of American Idol. Nobody’s ever going to mention the Davises in the same breath as the Rockefellers.”

“That’s almost certainly a good thing.”

She laughed. “And you really don’t have a clue what it’s like to grow up poor, McCallister.”

“I know what it’s like to grow up—” He stopped himself, shook his head, and said, “Let’s not talk about this.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s not germane to the problems you face.”

“I didn’t think you wanted to talk about my problems. What with all the secrets.”

To her surprise, he laughed. It was a strange, almost humorless little laugh, but closer than she’d ever heard from him. “You can be infuriatingly right; did anyone ever tell you that?”

“I can safely say it’s not a problem that’s really bothered me so far in my life.”

“All right then,” he said. There were crinkles at the corners of his eyes, and a ghost of a smile on his lips. “You tell me about your family.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No.”

“You probably know everything about all of them.”

“I know facts. Tell me what they’re actually like.”

So she did, as the miles hummed by under the tires: Annie, her sweet but financially incompetent sister; her brother Tate’s current deployment to Afghanistan; her older sister Grace, the know-it-all, working as a department manager at Wal-Mart, but with embarrassing secrets; George, the asshole Bryn never spoke to, who was still the apple of her mother’s eye because he ran his own business; and, last, Kyle. “But you know about Kyle,” she said.

“Do I?”

She sighed. “He’s serving fifteen years for armed robbery. Don’t tell me you don’t know about my big brother. I barely know him, though. He took off when he was fifteen years old, and I was just a kid. He was smart, though. Smarter than George, for sure. He got in with bad people after he left home.”

“Isn’t this where you tell me he’s not a bad guy?”

“No. As far as I know, he’s a hard-ass Aryan Brotherhood member. It’d be stupid to say he’s not a bad guy.”

McCallister let that lie for a moment before he said, “What about Sharon?”

“What about her?”

“You didn’t tell me about her.”

“I didn’t really know her, either.” That was a lie, though; Bryn remembered Sharon well. Sharon was pretty, with flowing red-blond hair, a teasing laugh, big lovely eyes. “She was a lot older than I was.”

“You refer to her in past tense, you know.”

“I know. She’s dead. I mean, the family party line is that she’s missing, but she’s been missing for a long time, and you know the odds on that. If a pretty eighteen-year-old girl with no history of behavior issues goes missing …”

McCallister nodded slowly. “Still, she could be out there somewhere.”

“If she is, she’s got no interest in contacting any of us. Not even Mom, and they were close right up until the day she walked out of our lives.” Bryn took in a deep breath. “No. She’s dead. Whether it was an accident or murder, she’s lying out there somewhere, waiting to be found. I know it, and so do you.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. It sounded like he meant it.

“Then it’s your turn,” she said. “I’ve been talking for more than an hour, spilling my entire family history. What about you?”

“Bryn—”

“I’m not asking for classified secrets. Just tell me about your family.”

He didn’t want to—she could see it—but he finally said, “Nothing much to tell. Rich people are remarkably boring; they’re either big philanthropists, like my mother, or self-absorbed, like my father. Either way, the effect was the same. They didn’t spend much time at home. I had more in common with my tutors and nannies than I did with my parents.” He shrugged. “I’m not trying to be poor-little-rich-boy about it. It’s what it was. My mother was a good person; she just felt that the family’s responsibility was to do good with what we had, so she was always out at fundraisers, contributing to causes, attending charity events. She was beautiful, and I think she would have made a ruthless businesswoman if she’d been required to do that. She wasn’t.”

“And your father?”

Patrick just shrugged and said nothing, but she saw the skin tighten at the corners of his eyes. Not a smile this time—something else. Something darker.

“Liam said your brother’s name was Jamie.”

“That’s right.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“And what happened?” Nothing. He might have been a mannequin, for all the emotional response he gave to that. “Oh, come on. I spilled about everything, including Grace’s secret adoption. I went all talk-show about it. And you won’t even give me more than his name?”

McCallister said, “What made you go into the funeral business?”

“Oh, no, you’re going to tell me something. No changing the channel. Was he older or younger?”

“Older,” McCallister finally said, after what seemed like a pretty fierce internal argument. “Two years older.”

“Did you get along?”

“I was the younger brother of a filthy rich family. The surplus child. No, we didn’t get along.” From the way McCallister’s hands tightened on the steering wheel, then deliberately relaxed, that was putting it mildly. “Jamie died. That’s all the story you’re going to get.”

“And you were disinherited.” He didn’t bother to answer that one at all. Silence fell, deep and uncomfortable, and Bryn finally sighed and said, “When I was in Iraq, I saw a lot of death. Not just our people, but the Iraqis, too. I didn’t mind helping gather bodies after a bombing; some couldn’t handle it, but I could. It felt like something I could do to restore some kind of dignity to them. So when I came back, I thought … I thought it might be a good thing to do for a living. There’s something honorable about it. Something real.”

McCallister looked over at her, nodded, and said, “I was in the military, too. I can kill, but gathering bodies— that always bothered me. It takes a special kind of strength to devote yourself to that.”

“True believers,” she said, and smiled.

“What?”

“Something one of my instructors said. Two kinds of people in the funeral business: true believers and freaks. I guess I’m a true believer, after all. Except that what you did to me does make me a bit of a freak, I suppose.”

“Different kind of freak, perhaps, than what he was referring to.”

“Yeah. Fast Freddy was the kind he was talking about. Me, I’m … life-challenged.”

“I think that could apply to any of us, Bryn.” McCallister downshifted, and the car slowed for him to make a turn onto the interstate. “We’ve got another hour, if you’d like to take a nap. Mr. French has already beaten you to it.”