“Why are you driving this car?” Regan asked.
“I borrowed it,” Aiden said. “It’s a loaner while my car is being serviced. It’s all they had.”
He got behind the wheel, put the key in the ignition, and turned it. The engine sputtered, then died. He tried again. The same thing happened. Then again and again while he pumped the gas pedal.
He felt a hand on his shoulder. When he turned, he saw that Cordie had unhooked her seat belt and was sitting on the edge of the seat watching him. Before he could tell her to put her seat belt back on, she said, “You should stop doing that. You’re probably flooding it.”
“It?” Spencer asked.
“The engine.” Didn’t he know anything? she wondered. “He’s flooding the engine,” she explained slowly so he would understand.
She remembered what her father often said. If he had a dollar for every call he got about a car that wouldn’t start because the driver had flooded the engine, why, he’d have a whole lot of dollars.
Aiden was so surprised by the quiet authority in her voice that it took him a few seconds to react.
“I’m not flooding it,” he said.
She looked him in the eyes and replied, “Yes, you are. If you keep doing that, you’ll have to wait a long time before you can try again, and you know what? You’ll probably flood it again.” She patted his shoulder as though she was trying to console him and added, “It’s because you don’t know what you’re doing. If you want, I could show you.”
Having given her opinion, she scooted back, clicked her seat belt on, and offered her friends some of the fruity snacks she had in her pocket. Within seconds the girls were whispering and giggling. The topic was Halloween and what costumes they were going to wear to school for the party. Regan announced she was going as a scary witch, and Sophie couldn’t quite decide but was leaning toward a ballerina.
“Are you still going to be Cinderella?” Sophie asked Cordie.
Cordie stopped to think for a second and then looked up at Aiden before answering. “I’ve changed my mind,” she answered. “I’m going to be Snow White.”
Ignoring the chatter in the backseat, Aiden asked Spencer if he remembered passing any filling stations on the way to the field.
“I wasn’t looking. Do you know anything about cars?”
“No,” Aiden said. “And neither do you.” He tried to start the engine again a couple of times before giving up. “Damn,” he whispered. “Why in God’s name do they have soccer practice all the way out here?”
“Beats me. One of us should start walking, I guess. It’s probably a couple of miles to the nearest house. I’ll go. I’ll knock on doors until someone lets me use their phone. Unless . . .”
“Unless what?”
Spencer looked over the seat at the girls. “Never mind.”
“Unless what?” Aiden asked.
“Unless we ask the kid,” he whispered.
“You want me to ask a five-year-old how to fix the damn car?” Aiden asked with a hint of sarcasm.
“No,” Spencer said. “I’ll ask her.”
He turned to the girls. “Now, Cordie . . .”
“Her name’s Cordelia, but everyone calls her Cordie.” Regan volunteered that information.
“Cordelia’s a pretty name,” Aiden said.
Cordie hadn’t liked her name, but when he told her it was pretty, she changed her mind in an instant. She decided she wanted everyone to call her Cordelia.
“Did you say you could tell Aiden how to get the car started?” Spencer asked.
“I maybe could,” she said. She sat forward again. “It’s easy. All you have to do is put your foot on the gas pedal and push down. Hold it there. You don’t push up and down like you were doing. Then turn the key on and leave it on. You keep turning it off and on, and that’s wrong. Everything you did was wrong,” she happily informed him. Then she patted him again and added, “Don’t worry, Aiden. The engine will maybe start.”
“Maybe, huh? Okay, I’ll give it a try.” He followed her instructions, smiling inside over the fact that he was listening to a five-year-old, but after several seconds with nothing happening, he started to ease off the pedal.
She shouted in his ear. “No. Wait!”
He kept his foot pressed to the floor, and the engine coughed a couple of times, then gained momentum and came to life.
Aiden turned to look at Cordie and was met with a broad, satisfied grin. He straightened in his seat and put the car in gear. As they pulled away from the soccer fields, he lowered his voice so that only Spencer would hear. “Are we going to admit that a five-year-old—”
Spencer interrupted. “We tell no one.”
In his rearview mirror Aiden could see Sophie and Regan still chattering away, but Cordie was smiling back at him with the clearest blue eyes he had ever seen. He shook his head and laughed. “Who would believe us?”
ONE
Some deathbed confessions are expected, others surprising, but this one . . . well, this one was a real doozy.
It was Andrew Kane’s third heart attack, and he wasn’t going to come back this time. Too much damage had been done to the anterior wall to hope for a recovery. He knew it, and so did his daughter, Cordie, who sat by his side in the critical care unit and prayed for a miracle.
Her father was hooked to a plethora of machines by a series of tubes and IVs. The constant beep from the heart monitor was a comfort to Cordie because it assured her that, even though his eyes were closed and his breathing was shallow, he was still alive. She wouldn’t leave him, not even for a minute, fearing he would take his last breath alone in the cold, sterile environment while machines sounded his passing with wailing alarms.
Cordie’s life had come to a screeching halt at eleven o’clock Friday night when she got the news. She had just arrived home from a charity event at St. Matthew’s High School for Boys, and she was exhausted. Her day had started at six fifteen in the morning when she left her brownstone to go to work. After teaching three chemistry classes and two biology classes, she graded papers during study period, supervised two lab experiments, broke up a fight, and filled in for a math teacher who was home with stomach flu. Then, once the students had been dismissed for the day, she, along with most of the other underpaid teachers, helped transform the gymnasium into a Monte Carlo atmosphere for the annual charity auction. The remainder of the evening was spent serving soft drinks and smiling at donors until her face felt frozen.
She had been teaching at St. Matthew’s for three years while she finished her PhD. The school was located on the edge of Chicago’s South Side, a rough area of the city, to be sure, but thus far she hadn’t had any real trouble. A ten-foot-high wrought iron fence that had been there since the school was built surrounded the property and the parking area, and she had to drive only two blocks from the highway exit to get to it. There was always a guard at the gate. An anonymous benefactor had made a substantial contribution to the school with the condition that there would be a guard on duty at all times, and ever since the principal had hired the highly recommended security firm, the number of slashed tires and smashed windshields had plummeted.
Although her father wouldn’t admit it, Cordie suspected he was the benefactor. When she started working at the school, he became a staunch supporter. He even took over the auto shop classes when the regular instructor quit in the middle of the semester. The boys could be difficult. Most of them were high risk, but her father didn’t have any problem controlling them. He’d grown up in New Jersey and, even now, after all these years living in Chicago, still had a bit of a Jersey accent and a tough-guy facade. He treated the boys with respect, and they responded in kind. His gruff, no-nonsense attitude and his enthusiasm won them over. The fact that he had built a national chain of auto repair shops from the ground up didn’t hurt. In the eyes of his otherwise cynical students, it gave him credibility. While he was teaching the class, attendance was one hundred percent.