He glanced at her as they pulled out of her mother’s yard. “We share the feeling, don’t we, Keely?” he probed. “Your mother is a walking headache.”
She nodded. “She was in high form tonight,” she said wearily. “Drunk and vicious.”
“What was Carly saying to you?”
“That I have to learn to stand up to her,” she said. “Surprising, isn’t it, coming from Mother’s best friend? The two of them make fun of me all the time.”
Clark glanced at her, and he didn’t smile. “She’s right about that. You need to stand up to my brother, too. Boone walks all over people who won’t fight back.”
She shivered. “I’m not taking on your brother,” she said. “He’s scary.”
“Scary? Boone?”
She averted her gaze to the window. “Can’t we talk about something else?”
He was disconcerted by her remark, but he pulled himself together quickly. “Sure! I just heard that the Chinese are launching another probe toward the moon.”
She gave him a wry look.
“You don’t like astronautics,” he murmured. “Okay. Politics?”
She groaned out loud. “I’m so sick of presidential candidates that I’m thinking of moving to someplace where nobody runs for public office.”
“The Amazon jungle comes to mind.”
Her eyes narrowed. “If I went far enough in, I might escape television and the internet.”
“I can see the headlines now,” he said with mock horror. “Local vet technician eaten by jaguar in darkest jungles of South America!”
“No self-respecting jaguar would want to eat a human being,” she retorted. “Especially one who eats anchovies on pizza.”
“I didn’t know you liked anchovies.”
She sighed. “I don’t. But when I was little, I discovered that if I ordered them, my dad would let me have more than two slices of pizza.”
He laughed. “Your father must have been a card.”
“He was.” She smiled reminiscently. “Animals loved him. I’ve seen him feed tigers right out of his hand without ever being bitten. Even snakes liked him.”
“That animal park must have been something else.”
“It was wonderful,” she replied. “We all loved it. But there was a tragic accident, and Dad lost everything.”
“Somebody got eaten?”
“Almost,” she replied, unwilling to say more. “There was a lawsuit.”
“And he lost,” he guessed.
She didn’t correct him. “It destroyed him.”
He frowned. “Did he commit suicide?”
She hesitated. This was Clark. He was her friend. She knew that he’d never tell Boone or even Winnie without asking her first. “He’s not dead,” she said quietly. “I don’t know where he is or what he’s doing. He developed a…a drinking problem.” She couldn’t tell him the whole truth. She glanced at him worriedly. “You won’t tell anybody?”
“Of course not.”
She studied her purse in her lap, turning it restlessly in her hands. “He left me with Mother and took off. That was six years ago, and I haven’t heard a word from him. For all I know, he could be dead.”
