glad to see her, and not only for the usual reason. She gave them a general smile that didn’t linger on him any more than on the boys. “What are you talking about? What kind of kits?”
“We’re talking about what happens to dead people,” Brendan said.
Her gaze flew to Conall’s. He grimaced.
“And…what does this have to do with kits?”
Brendan explained about how raccoons died like people did, and how their bodies helped make berries and stuff like that grow better to feed baby coons. “And they’re called kits. Right, Conall?”
“Right.”
She blinked. “Okay. Um, do you mind if I join you? I might have a cup of coffee.”
He noticed belatedly that she was grubby. She’d been working in the garden, then. Actually, the boys were pretty dirty, too, especially beneath the fingernails. He tilted his head to one side and saw that the knees of their jeans were filthy. So she’d succeeded in putting them to work this morning. No wonder they were desperate for new entertainment.
“Do you know anyone who’s dead?” Brendan asked her.
“Not well,” she admitted. “I mean, my great-aunt died a few years ago, but the funeral wasn’t open-casket.”
They turned aghast looks on her and she hastily explained how sometimes at funeral services the casket was open so mourners could view the body.
After which they’d all murmur that he or she looked so peaceful, Conall thought cynically.
More horror showed on the two young faces.
Lia stood, went around the table and gave each of them a hug. “Your mom would want you to remember her alive. Smiling at you, playing with you. She can keep living in your memories.”
They thought about that as she returned to her chair. She’d obviously plopped down on her butt between rows in the garden. She must have no idea how enticingly the circle of dirt emphasized one of Conall’s favorite parts of her body.
Having thought about their mother alive—or not—the boys turned as one to Conall. “Have you ever seen anyone who’s dead?”
He opened his mouth and then closed it. Lia’s eyes had widened in alarm. He was momentarily distracted by the way they seemed to deepen in color. Sunlight, oddly enough, brought out the brown, making the color rich and warm and earthy. Indoors like this, the green predominated, making him think of the mysterious, green light in old-growth forests.
God.
He dragged his focus back to the subject. He wasn’t enthusiastic about remembering the faces of men he’d shot. They had not looked peaceful when he was done with them. “Yeah,” he admitted. “I have.”
“Did you go to any of their funerals?”
“Once.” He’d been under deep that time, for over a year, with a Central American crime cartel. He hadn’t lost himself, exactly, but by the end he’d been grimly holding on to memories of what life for a normal American was like. He’d needed desperately to think of a man mowing the lawn, the scent of newly cut grass sharp in the air; people texting on their fancy phones as they stood in line at a Starbucks to order a Cinnamon Dolce Frappuccino, kids throwing wadded up paper balls at each other on the school bus. People who weren’t ruthlessly killing to achieve their ends and satisfy their egos. He’d been caught somewhere he shouldn’t have been and had had to knife a man, and, yeah, four days later he attended the solemn church service for that vile excuse for humanity. He hadn’t wasted time contemplating the dearly departed’s soul. Instead, Conall had sat there wondering how much humanity he still clung to.
There was no part of that he wanted to share with two boys who were still grieving a mother who had actually loved them.
“He was Catholic,” he told them. “The priest droned on and on. The service was in Spanish,” he added. Yeah, that was the way to go; throw a bunch of irrelevant details at them and maybe they could talk about what the difference between a Catholic and a Protestant was, or why a priest talked so long, or—
“Did he die because he was sick, like Mom?” asked Walker.
Conall’s eyes met Lia’s again.
No, he died because I stuck a big honking knife blade into his body right beneath his rib cage and then I thrust upward until blood gushed and his eyes went sightless and his knees sagged.
“It was…an accident.” He thought he’d done well in keeping his voice free of any inflection whatsoever, but she heard or saw too much.
“That’s enough talk about death and dying,” she