Page 11 of Kiss of Wrath

“Miranda? How are you doing?”

“Fine.” Surviving.

“And the children?”

“Flourishing.” Driving me up the wall.

“Did you get the parole hearing notice?”

“Uh.” Quickly, she shuffled through the pile of unopened mail on the hall table, and there it was. An official-looking envelope with the return address of Ohio State Penitentiary, Youngstown, Ohio. Ripping it open, she read the short notice: “Inmate Roger Jessup is being recommended for parole. As an interested party, if you have any objections, you are welcome to attend the hearing on June 22. Please notify our office by June 15 if you plan to attend.” It was signed by the assistant warden. “Yes, I got the letter, but I can’t possibly go on Monday. Can you go in my place?”

“I could, but, really, I don’t think it would do any good. It was important that you go last year. His first year of incarceration was riddled with bad behavior. Uncontrollable rages. It wasn’t surprising his petition was denied.”

Miranda knew only too well about Roger’s rages. He’d called her unlisted number (how he’d gotten the number, she had no idea) whenever he had access to a prison phone (way too often) and yelled at her about all she had done to him. (Taken his children. Stolen his house. Turned his kids against him. Lied about his abuse. Yada, yada. In his deranged mind, Miranda was responsible for every bad thing in his life, including Cassie’s death.) So it had been imperative that she attend that first parole hearing. The look he’d given her that day had been scary, even with him in cuffs.

“So, what’s different this year?”

“He’s become a model prisoner. Not one single infraction. No rages. No fighting. In fact, he volunteers in the prison ministry. He’s been born again.”

Miranda scoffed at that last. She knew all about prison religion.

“Bottom line, he’s going to be paroled this time whether you protest or not. I suspect he’ll be in a halfway house as early as next week. On probation, of course.”

With a sigh, Miranda said, “I know he’s unhappy about my adopting his children—”

“—and selling the house, although you had every right to do so.”

“And my objecting to his parole last year and my unwillingness to let him speak to his children. Actually, it was the kids that didn’t want to talk to him, but he didn’t believe that.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised to find him petitioning the courts for restoration of parental rights, or at the least visitation.”

“We’ve talked about that before, and I took your advice about hiring Gloria Alvarado, that L.A. lawyer who wrote the book, literally, on fighting tough cases in family court. She’s a shark. She believes that the most Roger could ever get is supervised visitation and that the children can’t be forced to comply if it traumatizes them.”

“I hope she’s right, Miranda,” Bradley said skeptically. “In any case, you know very well, as a psychologist, that men with rage issues can hide their violent tendencies very well until something triggers an explosion. The courts are full of cases where seemingly peace-loving men, and women, go berserk.”

“Are you trying to frighten me?”

“Just be prepared. Hope that he’s changed and is willing to let you raise his children, but take every precaution to make yourselves secure.”

“I put in a high-tech security system around my house. I block any unknown phone numbers. I screen the mail.” Although she hadn’t done a good job with the mail lately, as evidenced by her missing the prison letter. “The only thing I’m missing is a bodyguard.”

“I hope it never comes to that.”

“Well, if it does, maybe I could get a Kevin Costner look-alike,” she joked, referring to the Bodyguard movie.

“Who?”

“Never mind.”

After clicking off, she braced herself and headed for the kitchen, where she could hear the sound of chaos. Unfortunately, the norm since Guadalupe, her Spanish homemaker/babysitter/housekeeper, quit a month ago, presumably to go to graduate school in Mexico City, but Miranda suspected she had gone no farther than two blocks away, getting away from the Hart-Jessup household being her only goal.

Miranda opened the kitchen door and stood, unnoticed at first, as her five nieces and nephews trashed the wonderful stainless-steel kitchen that had been a huge attraction for the house she’d bought two years ago, after selling both her apartment and the house in Cincinnati. The kitchen had been spotless when Miranda had gone to bed late last night. In some delusional lifetime, when Miranda had bought the house, she’d imagined herself having peaceful family meals with the children around that big table. She hadn’t realized what a mess children could make, unintentionally, just by pouring cereal into a bowl or buttering a piece of toast.

With Bradley Allison’s phone call looming in her mind, she stared at the five children. Despite all the problems they caused, and there were plenty, and despite the lack of order they created just by breathing, she loved them unconditionally, something she’d never expected when she’d taken on responsibility for their care two years ago. Her heart constricted at the thought of ever losing them. No way in the world was Roger Jessup going to get his hands on these children again, she vowed.

Maggie, her oldest niece—which was how she thought of the children, although technically they were second cousins—pushed her glasses up on her nose as she slathered peanut butter and jelly on five sandwiches and put them in baggies. She also kept swiping at the hair that kept falling onto her face. Maggie shared Miranda’s unfortunate red hair, and hers was even curlier. Like Annie with her finger in a light socket. Totally unmanageable. One of these days, when Miranda had a free moment, she was going to take the little girl to a hair salon where they would try to find a style that worked for her. At ten years old, Maggie was like a little mother to her younger siblings and had been for several years, helping her own mother, Miranda’s cousin Cassie, while she suffered the end stages of cancer. As indicated by her making sandwiches for them all.

It would be better if the kids just bought their lunches at school, but with the government’s new emphasis on nutrition, they’d all turned up their noses. As the youngest, Linda, had explained, “They want us to eat green flowery things.”