Father Of The Brat Read Free Page A

disorganized and pressed for time, but at least we care about our kids. And maybe we don’t always get the job done right, but we do our best.”
    She reached behind herself for the doorknob and pulled the door open, but her gaze never left his. “I’ve been assigned to your case, Mr. Venner, and I’m going to do my best to make sure that you and your daughter get situated properly. If you need counseling, I’ll arrange it. If you need financial assistance, I’ll see what I can do. If you need help getting her enrolled in school, I’ll take care of it.”
    “And if I need the services of a lawyer to prove this is all just a scam?” he asked pointedly.
    “Then you’re on your own. Although I do have legal counsel at my disposal, I’ll only notify them if you don’t show up at the airport tomorrow or if you conveniently decide to leave town. Like I said, I’ll do what I can for you and the girl. Because as far as I’m concerned, and as far as the law is concerned, Rachel Stillman is your daughter.”
    He was about to object again when he decided it would probably be fruitless to do so. He knew a good lawyer, one who’d pulled his butt out of a sling on more than one occasion. This Rachel Stillman thing would be a piece of cake for her. Before the kid’s plane hit the runway, Carver would be off the hook.
    He watched M. H. Garrett’s back as she descended the stairs, still rattling his brain trying to remember where he knew her from. He even stepped out into the hallway to lean over the banister, and continued to observe her until her dark head disappeared into the stairwell completely.
    Only when she was safely out of sight did it finally strike Carver in a burst of memory where he had met her. And once he remembered, he immediately recalled what the M.H. stood for. It didn’t stand for Mostly Harmless. It stood for Madelaine Helena. He also recalled that although Maddy was a lot of things, as far as he was concerned, harmless wasn’t one of them.
    Madelaine Garrett settled herself wearily into the driver’s seat of her aged sedan and sighed. She told herself she should be worrying about the outcome of the Stillman case. Or about the outcome of any number of cases assigned to her docket. She told herself she should be studying the ragged city map in her glove compartment to locate the address of the next family she had to visit that day. She told herself she should even be thinking about what she was going to do for lunch, since she hadn’t consumed anything but coffee for more than seven hours. Instead, only one thought meandered through her brain.
    Carver Venner hadn’t remembered her. He hadn’t recognized her at all.
    Uncertain whether she was happy or sad about the realization, she angled the rearview mirror down toward herself and studied her reflection. Had she really changed that much since she had last seen him? Her face was still oval shaped, and her fair skin was still almost too pale. Her eyes were still brown and her hair was still black, albeit significantly touched with gray and considerably shorter than the waist-length tresses she had sported twenty years ago. The glasses she wore now weren’t so very different from those she had worn throughout high school, but these days they were considered fashionable instead of geeky.
    Although she had been a little on the pudgy side as a teenager, she reminded herself. And she had shed all her surplus weight and more while going through her divorce five years ago. She was quite a bit thinner now than she had been as an adolescent—really too thin, she knew—something that made her eyes seem larger and her lips fuller than they had been before, something that more clearly defined what had turned out to be surprisingly stark cheekbones. Maybe that was why Carver hadn’t recognized her, she thought.
    Or maybe he hadn’t recognized her, she pondered further, because she simply wasn’t anything at all like the kid he’d known at Strickler High