Free Reilly 11 - Case of Lies by Perri O'Shaughnessy Page B

changed. It’s not a safe place.”
    “It never was, Mom. That’s why we buy good locks and use ’em.”
     
    That night, as Nina lay in her bed reading, Bob knocked and came in and sat down in the wicker chair. He usually stayed up much later than she did and slept as late as he could in the morning, but he asked her to wake him up if he slept through his alarm.
    “But tomorrow’s Sunday.”
    “The dump takes hazardous stuff on Sundays. We have some things under the house I need to get rid of. Taylor’s garage is full, too. What are you reading?”
    She struggled to remember. “A book about the Big Bang. New theories about what the universe looked like in the first few minutes after the explosion. Speaking of big bangs, is any of the material you have been collecting flammable? Or potentially explosive?”
    “Only a little.”
    “I don’t like the sound of that. Don’t store anything like that under the house!”
    “We charge twenty bucks per house to haul away old motor oil, mostly, Mom. We have all the customers we can manage. We’ll put it in the backyard under a tarp if you want.”
    “Why do you need money, Bob? You have a new bass. You like your skateboard, and you can’t want new clothes after all the shopping we’ve been doing.”
    Bob dropped his eyes to Hitchcock, snoozing on the carpet, and nudged him with his stockinged foot. “I want to take a trip to see my dad.”
    Nina put her fingers to her temple, closed her eyes. “You saw him in Sweden a few months ago.”
    “I need to go again.”
    “You miss him so much?”
    “Well, sure, I miss him, but the thing is, I talked to him a couple of weeks ago. He lost his job with the Stockholm Opera Company and he’s back in Germany. He’s having trouble with his hands.”
    Kurt Scott, Bob’s father, was a concert pianist who had eked out a living touring Europe for most of Bob’s life. He hadn’t known about Bob’s existence until a few years before, because Nina hadn’t wanted him to know. He had left her, waiting for him, with no word, soon after she learned she was pregnant. That day had become a turning point in her life, and she had polished the memory, along with the grief and rage over being abandoned, for so many years, that even when she learned years later that Kurt had left her to save her life, she had not been able to change her feelings from that day. The memory was encysted in her, permanently, it seemed.
    But Bob had no such memories. Since discovering each other, he and Kurt had seen each other several times and developed a close bond that didn’t include her.
    Nine felt a now-familiar tugging at her heart. She didn’t want Bob to leave her. It wasn’t Kurt’s fault that his life was in Europe or Bob’s fault that he wanted to see him again, but she didn’t want Bob to go, even for a few weeks. Her life, her routines, were built around Bob. She knew she feared that one day he might go and live with Kurt. Then what would she do? He was her companion, her fellow traveler.
    All right, tell the truth. She didn’t want to stay alone in the house, not right now.
    She had barely seen Kurt in the years since Bob’s birth. She trusted him with Bob, knew he cared for Bob and had been unfairly deprived of the chance to father him over the years, knew he needed to make up time. But she didn’t see why he had to take Bob away right now, at the start of a new school year, when she had so many plans for them. Okay, she hadn’t made many plans. But she would think some up, right now.
    “Now isn’t a good time,” she said.
    “I’m not asking you for a ticket or anything, Mom. I’ll pay my own way.”
    “I’m thinking we should spend some time poking around the Gold Country on weekends,” Nina said. “Take a car trip up to Idaho to ski. Maybe Uncle Matt and Aunt Andrea and Troy and Brianna would come with us.”
    “Troy and Brianna are in school. Like me. Aunt Andrea’s busy with the new baby and Uncle Matt works