Wintergreen

his hips. A full head taller than she was, R. A. Baker had a belly to rival Santa’s, but nothing of the cheerful temperament. Brown hair bushed around his ears below a bald patch on his crown; mud-brown eyes were set close together in thick, sluggish features. Normally. At the moment, his face was florid with rage, and his eyes were almost obsidian.

“That damn kid of yours put a rock through the picture window in my living room!”

“I believe you’re mistaken,” Lorna said stiffly.

“The hell I am. I saw him, first thing this morning. I would have called the police then, except that I had to get to work. I should have called the police-”

“To begin with, Johnny didn’t do any such thing. And if he had accidentally-”

“This was no accident, lady. And don’t tell me it wasn’t your kid. I saw that towhead of his, and I saw the brown coat-”

“Thousands of children have brown coats-”

“You get that kid of yours, and you get him now!”

Lorna pulled herself up to her full five feet five. The man did a fair job of looking totally intimidating, and she hated bullies. “Take a hike,” she said succinctly.

His jaw dropped an inch and a half, and his cheeks turned purple. “You want me to go ahead and call the police, I sure as hell will,” he said furiously. “I was willing to settle for having you pay for the window, and maybe give that hooligan of yours a good talking-to-”

“Hooligan!” He’d be lucky if he left the house alive.

“Misha.” Matthew’s hands clamped on her bristling shoulders from behind. She whirled into him, so outraged there were tears in her eyes. “This man-” she began furiously.

“Just tell me.”

She tried, with Beer Belly interrupting every third word. If Johnny had accidently broken a window, he would have told her. Since he hadn’t told her, she knew he hadn’t done it. Johnny would never sneak into a neighbor’s fenced-in yard, certainly not in the wee hours of the morning…

“And I heard you had plenty of trouble with the kid before,” the neighbor slipped in.

“Not that kind of trouble. And as for your false accusations, this- ” she motioned furiously to Matthew “-is my attorney. So before you-”

“Misha.” Matthew’s hand went to the small of her back and tugged hard at the waistband of her pants, his knuckles pressing intimately into her spine. His message, so privately delivered, could hardly fail to get through. She gathered that he wanted silence, and glanced up at him. Almost imperceptibly, he motioned toward the kitchen door, and her eyes focused on a white-faced Johnny, staring at her with sick, guilty eyes. Her heart crashed five hundred lonely feet.

“How much will it cost for a new picture window?” Matthew flatly addressed the neighbor.

“Six hundred dollars.”

Lorna blanched. “But…” she started hollowly.

“Misha.” Matthew turned back to the man, and released his grip on Lorna, pulling a business card from his shirt and handing it to Baker. “You have insurance?”

“Sure I got insurance. But that’s not the point-”

“No,” Matthew agreed bluntly, “it isn’t. But then neither is coming over to vent your temper on someone half your size. I hope if felt good, because you’re all through now.” Matthew opened the door, not wasting any polite smiles.

“You listen here-”

“Your window will be taken care of. If you have any further problems, call the telephone number on my card. I believe we’re all through talking,” Matthew said pleasantly.

The other man opened his mouth and then closed it again. “Look. I have every right to be angry.”

“You have every right to be angry because your window was broken, but you have no right to be angry at the boy’s mother or to take it out on her.”

“If he was my kid-”

Matthew closed the door before Baker finished the sentence. Lorna was standing in white-faced silence, staring at his rigid features. She could easily read the contempt in his dark eyes, and she knew it was for her big- stomached neighbor. But was some of it for her as well? For a woman he simply assumed had been an adulteress; for a woman who raised a towhead who broke windows? Not how she wanted to represent herself. Nor, undoubtedly, had Matthew planned, when he invited her for a romantic interlude in Quebec, to be bogged down with the decidedly unromantic details of her life. He’d taken the man on for her, but she had a sick feeling in her stomach, and she dropped her eyes, feeling defensive and shaken up.

“Sit down, Misha.”

His voice came out quiet and gentle, but she shook her head. “Where did Johnny go?”

“I’ll take care of Johnny.”

She shook her head again more firmly. “Of course you won’t. I’ll take care of-”

“Sit down.”

Since her knees were caving in, she had little choice. The cushion of the chair was like a haven; she leaned back, closed her eyes and took deep breaths. She hated men who could walk into a situation and immediately take control of it.

Matthew was gone a long time. Then, suddenly, he was bending over her, his long arms straddling her chair, his eyes unreadable as he bent to press a swift, hard kiss on her temple. When he straightened up, she studied him. He was wearing a very strange expression, a wry glimmer in his eyes, a crooked slash to his mouth, a pervasive stiffness. “Baker was lucky he just called Johnny a hooligan. Anything worse and he’d probably have been on the floor with a concussion. Not that you have any violent tendencies where loyalty to your son is concerned, Misha.”

She couldn’t smile. “Johnny deliberately broke that window?”

She had a glass of brandy in her hands before he answered her. He hadn’t poured any for himself. But then, it was cherry brandy, a gift from Freda a long time ago, and perfectly dreadful. Still, she took a sip as he leaned back against the fireplace.

“He broke it deliberately,” Matthew said. “Planned it all just like a hardened criminal.”

She gulped down a second swallow. It was that or cry.

“Baker bought his wife a little pup a few weeks ago. Apparently the animal wasn’t trained, and messed up in the house. Johnny saw the man beat the pup. It didn’t die, just wouldn’t eat or take water or leave its doghouse for three days. Your son watched. The wife came home from work one day and took the pup away. Johnny’s determined to believe that she gave it away. The boy was trying to pay Baker back.”

Lorna listened in shock. “But he never told me.”

“You would have believed him, Misha. But he figured no one else would take the word of a kid over a grown-up. And even if they did, no one was going to punish Baker for his cruelty.”

Lorna took another sip.

“Misha, stop crying:”

She stared into the last of the red liquid in her glass. “Johnny has this thing about justice. But he can’t simply take the law into his own hands and destroy people’s property. I thought he knew better. I would never have guessed him capable of…of vandalism-”

She glanced up at his very sober profile, his wicked dark eyes. Just slightly, she relaxed. “Don’t tell me you would have done the same thing as a kid,” she accused.

“He saw a pretty little puppy crippled, all because of one man’s cruelty. The dog was helpless, Misha.”

And Johnny was a Whitaker, whose justice came from the heart. Still, she remembered the dreadful window that was going to cost her six hundred dollars. “I understand,” she admitted unhappily, “but he has to see that violence isn’t the way to right an injustice.”

“Give him credit for having so much courage at nine years old. For being willing to commit himself to what he believes is right.”

She set the glass down, folding her arms across her chest. Freda would have told her to land a solid ten on Johnny’s backside and deprive him of his allowance for the rest of his life. Lorna knew that was one of the reasons she had searched out Matthew again; she had known he would understand Johnny. She adored her son and