Shooting Starr

needed watching out for.”

“Yeah,” C.J. said, “but you never had to deal with somebody blind before.”

“Phoo. Granny Calhoun was mostly blind, there at the end.”

“Granny was old, didn’t do much but sit in her rocker. Caitlyn is-”

He broke it off, and his mother prompted, “Caitlyn is…?”

But he didn’t know what it was he wanted to say, so he snapped, “Well, she sure ain’t old.”

He waited for her to scold him for saying ain’t, but she just looked at him and after a while she set down her buttermilk glass and said, “I know who she is, son. I’ve seen the news, read the papers. I know she’s President Brown’s niece. I know she’s the one you told me about that hijacked you last spring.”

C.J. scowled at the glass he was turning round and round on the placemat in front of him and cleared his throat a couple of times. “So,” he finally said, “if you know all about her, how come you’re still willing to take her in?

His mother took a sip of buttermilk. “I said I know who she is. Didn’t say I knew all about her. The question is, do you?”

He lifted his eyes and studied her face long and hard, but for once in his life he couldn’t figure out what she was trying to say. After a minute or two she rose, picked up her glass and carried it to the sink. She took a plate out of the cupboard and picked up a pie server, and while she was cutting him a big slice of squash pie and topping it with a spoonful of whipped cream, she said with her back to him, “You know the fact she’s kin to the president doesn’t carry much weight with me. Any more than the fact that she hijacked you and your rig at the point of a gun.” She whipped around to face him and pointed at him with the pie server, and her look was the one that could put the fear of God in a guilty man’s heart. “Not that I approve of what she did, mind you. You told me she said she did it because she believed she didn’t have any other choice, that she feared for that woman and her little girl’s lives. Calvin James, tell me the truth, now. Do you believe her?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, looking her straight in the eyes. “I didn’t then, but I do now. That’s why-”

She shook her head, stopping him there. “The newspeople can’t seem to make up their minds whether she’s a hero for refusing to tell the judge what she did with the child and going to jail to protect her, or a misguided do- gooder keeping a little girl from her daddy. I want to know what you believe.”

He leaned back in his chair and gazed at his mother with narrowed and burning eyes. He thought he knew, now, what she was angling for. The one thing that really counted in Betty Starr’s estimation of a person’s worthiness. “Momma,” he said with gravel in his voice, “what you’re wantin’ to know is, what’s in her heart. Is she a good person? Does she have a good heart…?”

“Well, does she?”

He nodded. “Yes, ma’am, I believe she does.”

“Well, then.” She plunked the pie down in front of him and turned back to the sink. “That’s good enough for me.”

C.J. let his breath out like a steam valve letting go. “It’s just real important nobody knows about her being here.”

His mother faced him again, leaning against the sink and smiling wryly. “That’s going to be a little bit difficult, isn’t it? The way people come and go around here-your brothers and sisters, the grandkids-it’s like Grand Central Station.” Said his momma, who’d never been north of the state of Virginia in her life. “We can’t exactly keep a beautiful young woman hidden away in the attic, like one of those romantic suspense novels.”

C.J. grinned, thinking that his mother could surprise him now and then. “It’s not going to be for all that long, Momma. Just a few days…a couple of weeks…just while she gets her feet under her and some strength back.” And her eyesight?

And, he thought, while the FBI guys are working out a plan to nail Vasily.

“Anyway, with Sammi June and J.J. just startin’ a new semester of college, they’re not going to be getting much time off until Thanksgiving break, probably, and Jimmy Joe and Mirabella off in Florida with the little kids for two weeks, that takes care of the closest ones. Jake and Eve are already in on it, and Charly and Troy-”

“‘In on it…’ Just what is it we’re all ‘in on,’ Calvin James? Who are we hiding her away from? They’ve been saying on the news they think it was somebody with a grudge against the local authorities up there in South Carolina that fired those shots, and it was just bad luck those poor women got in the way.” His mother paused while her eyes took on a narrow, considering look. “But that’s not true, is it? You and Jake-and that means the FBI-think it was that billionaire, the little girl’s father. Isn’t that right? You think he had his wife killed and that he’s going to come after Caitlyn. That’s why all the secrecy. Oh, my lands…” She leaned against the sink, fanning herself.

Ashamed of himself for all the trouble he was dumping in her lap, C.J. rubbed his eyes and said unhappily, “Momma, I wish I could tell you more, but I promised Jake-”

She made that swatting motion again. “We’ll handle things as they come, don’t worry about that.” She leveled The Look at him again, the one he was sure could see inside his brain. “What I want to know is, what’s all this got to do with you?”

He shifted in his chair and squinted guiltily at her. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, you don’t just offer up your family’s home to shelter a notorious stranger without good reason.”

C.J. snorted. “I’d think it was pretty obvious why-”

“And by good reason I don’t mean because there’s somebody maybe trying to shoot her. The FBI is more than capable of stashing away people where nobody, not even billionaires, can find them, and I’m sure they’d’ve done just fine without your help.” Her eyes narrowed even more. “But you didn’t want that, did you? You wanted that girl where you could keep an eye on her-you personally.” After a little pause to let him squirm some more, she asked softly, “So what is it about her, Calvin James? What does this girl mean to you?”

He knew from sad experience it wasn’t going to do him any good to lie, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t hem and haw and try and beat around the bush as long as possible. He stretched back in his chair and rubbed a hand over his face and finally settled on “It’s complicated, Ma.”

Typically she came to her own conclusion, and as usual, managed to hit the nail on the head without any help from him. “You feel responsible for her. For what happened to her.”

He agreed defensively, “Well, yeah, I do. People keep telling me I shouldn’t, but they’re wrong.” He gave his mother a hard, fierce look, but inside his head he was seeing himself standing in the yellow glare of a yard lamp with the racket of a springtime night all around him, and Caitlyn’s silvery eyes pleading with him. “The simple fact is, she asked me to do something for her and I said no. Instead, I turned her in to the police. And I don’t care how right-minded it seemed at the time, if I hadn’t done that, none of what happened would have happened. A woman wouldn’t be dead, she wouldn’t be-”

“Son-” Gentle now, his mother pulled out the chair closest to him and sat in it. “You can’t go back and undo it. No matter what you do, you can’t unfire that gun.” She reached to touch his hand, but he wasn’t in a mood to be comforted.

“No, I can’t.” He snatched his hand away and felt wretched and mean for doing it. “But I intend to do what I can to make it up to her. Set things right.”

“How are you going to do that? You can’t give her back her eyesight.”

He was too angry with her to answer. Because, of course, he knew she was right.

She studied him for a while in a sad, faintly amused way that irritated him even more, then said softly, “I expect by making it up to her you mean you’d like to do something big enough and good enough to cancel out the wrong you think you’ve done her. What you want is to be her hero.”

He snorted. “I’m no hero.” No, his inner self said, but you want to be. You want to be a superhero and make the world turn the wrong way around, make time turn backward and give you another chance to save the woman you…

“Son, you’re not a superhero,” his mother said, in the uncanny way she sometimes had of seeing inside his mind. She rose up out of her chair and snatched his empty plate and milk glass out from under him, then stabbed at him with a spare finger. “You just remember that, when this-this Vasily fellow comes looking for that girl of yours, you hear me, Calvin James? Your body won’t stop bullets.”

Caitlyn woke to her perpetual darkness and, wide-eyed and listening, sought to understand what it was about