What is wrong with me that I cannot be like all others? Why am I always so grim? Why am I without humor? Why, why, why?
Michael finally arrived. Mordr knew that because he could hear the sound of many wings. Apparently, the archangel had brought a legion with him this time. They better not be expecting breakfast. By the sounds of the morning activities, Lizzie would have breakfast over by now and the kitchen cleaned up. He would like to be there if Mike asked her to prepare an impromptu angelic feast. Mordr almost smiled at that image. Almost.
Soon after, Vikar came to get Mordr.
“I did not mean to upset the children,” Mordr said right off.
“It is all right. The little ones recover fast.”
“I brought them some gifts from the ship store. A kaleidoscope and a microscope.”
“They will be pleased.”
The two brothers sat side by side in silence for a moment.
“What’s with the big hole?” Mordr asked.
“Swimming pool. First, it was going to be a small above-ground pool for the children, but somehow it’s turned into an big-ass, Olympic-size pool for everyone. As if I don’t have enough to do with these castle renovations. Last month, the plumbing backed up and we had to dig up the back courtyard. That’s when Alex got the pool idea.”
Mordr turned to look at Vikar. “Do you do everything she wants?”
“Just about,” Vikar agreed happily. “Oh, by the way, Mike wants to see you in an hour.”
“Me?” Mordr exclaimed. “Me, in particular?” No vangel wanted to be singled out by their heavenly pain-in-the-arse.
“You, in particular.” Vikar arched his brows with amusement. Easy for him to be amused when he was not the one in the archangel’s crosshairs.
Mordr stood wearily.
“You lucky devil, Mordr! I mean, you lucky vangel! Guess where Mike is sending you next?” Vikar asked with barely controlled laughter.
Uh-oh! Mordr did not like the expression on Vikar’s face.
“Well?”
“Sin City.”
“Oh shit! He’s sending me to Hell. What have I done lately to merit such a punishment?”
“Not Hell, you halfbrain.” Vikar was laughing out loud now. “You are going to Las Vegas.”
Where’s Mary Poppins when you need her? . . .
Dr. Miranda Hart was late. Again.
“George?” she said into the speaker on her cell phone that sat on the hall table as she wobbled on one foot, then the other, stepping into a pair of high-heeled pumps. “Can you take my nine a.m. appointment with P. Jack Sloane? I’m running a little late.”
“Again?” She heard George—Dr. George Jensen, her boss at Nevada Psychiatric Services—sigh deeply. “You used to be the first one in the office.”
“Well, I’m cashing in on those credits now.” She glanced into the mirror over the table and cringed. Her curly red hair, a gift from some long-ago Irish ancestor and the bane of her onetime orderly life, was already coming loose from the French knot she’d pinned it into a mere half hour ago.
“Miranda,” George said on a long sigh.
Miranda knew as well as George that canceling appointments with depressed/exuberant/obsessive-compulsive/bipolar emotional wrecks could cause huge crises. It was a professional no-no. In P. Jack’s case, she was not worried, though, and George wouldn’t be, either. P. Jack, a high-stakes baccarat dealer at a Las Vegas casino, had been married and divorced thirteen times, and he was trying to understand through therapy what his core problem was. He had, of course, proposed to her several times.
“I already have another appointment scheduled for that time, Miranda. We’ll have to cancel Mr. Sloane and reschedule for later today. Unless you have other pressing plans, like a peewee badminton game.”
Miranda groaned. It was not like George to be sarcastic. She suspected he was reaching the end of his rope with her. Now was not the time to correct him, and say it was peewee baseball, not badminton. Even as she repinned the loose strands of hair back into place, she argued her case, “Listen, I’ll stay late today. Tell P. Jack I can see him at five, if he’s available.”
George agreed, then added ominously, “Please tell me you completed the monthly records that were supposed to be filed two days ago.”
Miranda glanced over at her briefcase near the front door where she’d dropped it when she came in yesterday. “Of course,” she lied.
No sooner had she ended her call with George than her phone rang again. She would have ignored it and let her answering machine kick in, except that the caller ID said “Bradley Allison, Esq.” with a Cincinnati number. Reluctantly, she answered, “Hello.”
“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.”
br /> “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.”
Miranda assumed she meant broccoli.
Sam, instead of getting ready for school, was demonstrating his new talent, flapping his bent elbows at his side like a chicken, making obscene noises. To an eight-year-old boy, Miranda had come to learn, anything resembling a fart, a belch, or flying snot from a sneeze was considered cool.
His twin, Ben, was on the floor wrestling with his younger brother, Larry. “You killed my tree frog,” Ben accused.
What tree frog? Did we have a frog in this house? Eew!
“It was an accident,” Larry said, squirming out from under Ben and putting a chair between them.
“Why did you put those two crickets in the aquarium?” Ben narrowed his eyes and chased Larry around the table.
Ah, so that’s what the fight is about.
“ ’Cause Johnny Severino tol’ me that frogs eat crickets.”
“Johnny Severino is a retard.”
Oooh! That is not a word we use in this house.
“Is not!”
“Is so! He picks his nose and eats the boogers.”
Eeew!
“So what?” Larry put both hands on his little hips, very brave now that he noticed Miranda had arrived.
“Those big-ass crickets ate my frog.”
Did I just hear an eight-year-old say “big-ass”?
“Frogs are s’posed to eat crickets,” Larry argued. “I looked it up on the Internet.”
“Not crickets big as tree frogs.”
Sam, now over his burst of frog grief, pulled a waffle from the toaster, then put some squirt butter all over the top and on a good portion of the counter as well, with enough syrup to give a small country a sugar rush.
Larry’s twin, Linda, unfazed by the activity around her, slurped up huge spoonfuls of Froot Loops. So much for the organic steel-cut oatmeal Miranda had made early this morning before going upstairs to shower. It was still warming on the stove, probably congealed into concrete.
The dog Ruff, a mostly white mutt the size of a small bear, lay splatted out under the table, also unfazed by the chaos around him. He was waiting for food scraps to drop from the table. There were plenty.
But then Linda glanced up and saw Miranda. “Aunt Mir, Larry got skid marks on his undies again. He hid them in the back of the bathroom closet.”
Larry gasped and cast an icy glare at his twin, then turned to Miranda. “Linda flunked her spelling test.”
Linda was the one looking betrayed now. “I am never, ever speaking to you again.”
Enough was enough! Miranda clapped her hands. “Hey, guys, the bus will be here in ten minutes. Time to get this show on the road.” Usually, Miranda had the gang dressed, backpacked, lunches in order, and out the door waiting on the corner for the bus. Although she employed a house cleaning service, everything else, like meals, had been out of whack since Lupe had gone.
Just then, she noticed that Maggie was weeping silently as she bagged the various sandwiches.
“Honey,” Miranda said, going over and putting an arm around Maggie’s thin shoulders. “What’s the matter?”
“Saturday’s my birthday,” she said on a sob.
“I know that.” Miranda pointed to the calendar on the fridge with a big red heart circling Saturday’s date. “Remember, I asked you if you wanted to have a birthday party, and you said you only wanted family.”
Maggie nodded. She was morbidly shy and had few friends. Another problem Miranda needed to address as soon as she had time to breathe.
“So, what’s the problem, sweetie?”
“Kids who have their birthdays on the weekend get to bring birthday cupcakes in during one of the school days.”
“And your day is today?” Miranda guessed.
Maggie nodded again.
“Did you tell me about this before?” Miranda knew the answer before Maggie could nod yet again. I am such a failure as a mother. “Okay, here’s what we’re gonna do. You go to school, and I’ll go down to Shakey’s Bakery and get some super-scrumptious cupcakes and drop them off before I go to work.” And be even later.
“But everyone will know they’re not homemade.”
Good Lord. Shakey’s cupcakes probably cost three dollars each. Two dozen, about seventy-two dollars. Whereas it would cost only a few dollars to make the whole batch at home. Plus, hers would probably taste like crap. She thought for a moment. “I’ll put them in a Tupperware container.”
Maggie smiled hesitantly. “That would work.”
“Aunt Mir, I can’t find my retainer,” Ben said.
“In the downstairs bathroom on the sink.”
“Aunt Mir, can I have five dollars to sign up for hockey?” Sam asked.
“In the cookie jar.”
“Did you wash my soccer shirt?” Larry was adjusting his massive backpack onto his shoulders.
“In the laundry basket.”
“Can I go to Sally’s house after school?” Linda asked.
“As long as Sally’s mother is there, and you do your homework when you get home.”
Soon an almost miracu
lous silence came over the house as the kids rushed out. Miranda sank down into a chair and put her face on the table. Something sticky hit her forehead. Probably syrup. Under the table, Ruff let out a loud burp.
Miranda would have cried if she had the energy. Something needed to be done. What she needed was a household manager. A babysitter, but much more than that. Someone who could organize her home, do the grocery shopping and cooking, supervise the children, chauffeur the kids to all their various activities, and generally take some of the weight off her shoulders. A wife. I need a wife. No, no, no, that is so sexist. I’m a psychologist, I should know better. What I need is a Mary Poppins, do-everything kind of home helper.
She recalled Bradley Allison’s phone call then with the threat of Roger looming on the horizon, and amended her wish list. What I need is a Mary Poppins, do-everything kind of home helper who is, oh, let’s say, an ex-Marine the size of a bulldozer with special forces fighting skills.
But where could she find such a person?
Three
Mission Impossible it might very well be . . .
Michael the Archangel sat in a wingback chair in the first and biggest of three parlors in the castle, looking around at what he had come to regard as his children. The seven Sigurdsson brothers, who comprised the VIK, the high council of all the vangels, sat in a half circle of chairs, facing him.
Vikings! Was there ever a more boisterous, wild, sin-prone race of men to walk the earth? Who would have predicted that a heavenly being, such as himself, would grow fond of such creatures?
Not that he would ever admit to softening his sentiments toward the miscreants. Devious opportunists that the Vikings were, they would use it against him.
He hoped his fellow archangels never found out. A saint bonding with Vikings? It was embarrassing, really.
The seven brothers were still atoning for their original mortal sins, but being Vikings, they could not help themselves from erring more, which accounted for more and more years being added onto their initial seven-hundred-year penances. In fact, their nervousness now as they waited for him to speak was telling. Not knowing the purpose of this meeting, each was worried, having committed some wrong or other. He would bet his wings that they would be vangels until the end of time.