Inside Out Read Free Page B

occasionally did.
    “Did Rush have a fever?” he asked, trying to squelch the panic he felt. Since Eleanor's death he knew that he had become overly protective, but he couldn't help it.
    “No fever,” Lydia answered. “I double-checked. But he's been dragging around the last few days. Just sits there listening to the television. I think something happened, but he isn't going to admit it to me. Boy's just like his father. Keeps everything inside where it can make ulcers, heart troubles, strokes, and cancer. I haven't seen you smile in a very long time, Winter Massey. You lighten up and so will he, I bet.”
    “I'm beat, Mama,” he said, “but let me give this smile thing a shot.” He grinned, showing his mother his large even teeth. She swatted his chest and he hugged her. “I promise I'll smile once a day from now on, whether I want to or not, Mama.”
    His watch said it was only ten—he hadn't reset it since Memphis. He pulled the stem and spun the hour hand around. “I'll check in on him.”
    He watched his mother head toward the guest room, her home since his wife's death. He then stuck his head into his son's room, which always seemed to smell like a hamster cage, or how he remembered the cage smelling when the boy had owned one.
    “You awake, Rush?”
    The three-year-old Rhodesian Ridgeback, Nemo, whined loudly. Nemo licked Winter's hand, delighted to see him again. Rush was sitting upright in bed, staring in the direction his father.
    “Nemo heard your car.”
    Winter took a seat on the bed and hugged the boy, who smelled of shampoo and whose cheek was as soft as satin. At almost twelve, Rush was between the age when he wanted to be hugged and when he would be mortally embarrassed by any sign of affection. Nemo lay back down near the bed, his muzzle pressed into the rug, eyes locked on Rush.
    Rush ran his hand over his father's face, the fingertips as light as a butterfly's touch. “You're purely tuckered, Marshal. You get your bad guy this time?”
    “Villain's freshly acquainted with the sound of a jail-cell door slamming shut.”
    “Way to go, man!” The boy raised his palm and Winter slapped it. “Wow, howdy, he never should have gotten himself in your sights, right?”
    “Yep, drawing the attention of this deputy marshal was the biggest mistake of that desperado's ill-spent life.”
    They both laughed.
    In the shadows of the bedroom Winter couldn't see the scar on his son's face. In the light it was a line no thicker than a kite string, which ran from the middle of the right temple, to the edge of the left one. It passed over the eyelids, the bridge of his nose. In the dark, Winter could pretend nothing terrible had happened to his boy. Each time he looked at that scar he experienced that hollow feeling he got as a child when the roller-coaster car he was in topped the first hill.
    The light that had once radiated from his son's beautiful blue eyes—exact duplicates of Eleanor's—had been replaced by spots of white paint expertly applied to the surface of the acrylic replicas. An artist had painted them using, for reference, a color photograph Winter had taken of Rush only weeks before the accident.
    “So, what did you bring me?” Rush asked, his tone businesslike. When he was three, they had started a tradition. Every time Winter was away from home for more than a night he would bring his son a gift. The memento could be a pack of gum or just a seashell. There would always be an entertaining tale about the trinket, the longer the better.
    Winter reached into his pocket for the dark hoop, pushed it over his son's left hand, and squeezed it down to fit his wrist.
    Rush let his fingers investigate it. Since the accident he had learned to feel, smell, taste, and hear what he couldn't see. What he comprehended using these senses was often remarkable to his father—almost as if the boy had psychic abilities. In his occupation, Winter had to be a reader of eyes, muscle twitches, and body language.