Page 101 of Silver-Tongued Devil
Dakota had contemplated taking ten minutes to get at least acceptable. Of course she had. But in the end, she’d done as Blake said and come as she was. She couldn’t even have said why. Maybe because she knew their dinner was late already, and maybe because she needed to show them—and him—her unvarnished truth, and know for sure whether that was good enough.
Blake didn’t seem too concerned. He said, “Hey, baby,” kissed her again, then shook Russell’s hand and said, “Thanks for coming. Thanks for bringing my girl.”
Russell looked at him without a smile, and Blake met that hard gaze. “Dakota said she changed her mind,” Russ said at last. “She can always change it back. She deserves a man’s best.”
“Yep,” Blake said. “She does. I already told her so. And when I make a mistake, I fix it, and I don’t make it again.”
Russell nodded. “That’s all right, then.” He hitched up his pants. “Let’s go.”
Blake’s parents weren’t so scary, either. His mom—Margaret—went straight to her knees after she’d said hello to Russell and Dakota, started patting her thigh, and within ten seconds, had Bella on her back getting a belly rub.
“There she goes,” Blake’s father, Elliot, said. He was a tall, slightly stooped man with a shock of white hair, glasses, and a downright courtly manner. “Dogs and children love Margaret. On the other hand, most everybody else does, too. It’s all in the nonverbals.”
“Not everybody,” his round little wife said with a laugh, standing up and dusting off her hands. “You know better, Elliot.”
“Well, yeah,” Blake said. “Crazy people.”
“Stop talking about me and come eat,” Margaret said. “I’m so glad we got you here after all. I’ve been dying to meet both of you. Blake’s told us so much about you.”
Soon enough, Dakota forgot her lack of makeup and her less-than-suitable dress. Blake’s parents had that effect. His mother’s rapid-fire delivery, her lightning changes of subject, combined with his father’s slow, dry interjections.
“Real good food, Margaret,” Russ said at one point, taking another bite of apple cider chicken and mashed potatoes with crispy interjections of sautéed Brussels sprouts. “I’m more along the beans-and-franks-line, so this is a real treat.”
“Oh, that isn’t me,” she said with a laugh. “Elliot cooks. I burn.”
“Could be true,” Elliot said. “It started out of pure desperation. Early on there, I’d think I was getting dinner. Then Miss Margaret here would get a phone call, and I’d be faced with something purely terrible. My Lord, the things she burned. And then Blake came along and took all that feeding. Somebody had to do it, or it wasn’t going to happen.”
“We weren’t expecting a football player,” Margaret said. “Oh, my goodness, we weren’t. We were just so thrilled to get that little boy, and hewaslittle. Undersized. Right skinny, really. His birth mother probably hadn’t been getting enough nutrition, poor thing. But oh, how he grew, and how fast he developed, too. He did everything too early. Rolled over, sat up. Blake didn’t start walking. He startedrunning.At ten months. When he was three, he could dribble a basketball. You’ll think I’m exaggerating, but you never saw a child like him. We knew we had something special on our hands. I should’ve brought the album to show you, Dakota.”
Blake groaned and put a hand over his face. “Mom. Please stop. Dakota doesn’t want to see my baby pictures.”
“No?” Dakota couldn’t help laughing. “And yet I find I do. Itotallydo. Especially if he’s in the bathtub or wearing a ladybug costume for Halloween or something equally humiliating.”
“Not as many pictures as there ought to have been,” Elliot said. “He was usually out of focus. Always running away.”
“It wasn’t a ladybug,” Blake said. “It was a mouse. An extremely manly mouse. And I’m changing the subject. Dakota’s pretty much a prodigy herself, Mom.”
“Oh, I know,” Margaret said. “Blake already showed us your beautiful art.”
“I’ve got an eagle out at the resort that has to be seen to be believed,” Blake said. “I’ll take you out in the morning and show you.”
“How’s everything going with that?” Elliot asked. “Blake told us what happened to you,” he told Dakota. “Terrible thing. I’m glad to hear it’s taken care of now.”
Dakota saw the moment when Blake’s expression changed. “What?” she asked him.
He hesitated, and she said, “Something’s happened.” The cold was right back in the pit of her stomach, and she was clutching her fork too hard. “Tell us.”
He took her hand under the table, and she was glad of it. “I do feel like I need to tell you,” he said. “Just in case, since it was you it happened to before.”
“Of course I need to know,” she said. “Of course you need to tell me.” She didn’t want to hear, and she needed to.
“It’s worrisome,” Blake said. “When we were talking with the sheriff, Dakota suggested that somebody could dump something nasty on the lake bottom under these boulders. The too-high kind of rocks that kids tend to jump off of. She was talking about something spiky, where somebody could jump and get…” He hesitated again. “Impaled.”
His mother made a sound of distress, and Dakota had stiffened. Blake squeezed her hand and said, “Yeah. So you can guess. We didn’t find anything at the time, but I’ve kept them checking, and yesterday, they pulled something up all right. Part of a crib frame. Upside down, legs sticking straight up. One of those legs was sharp, and a couple of the springs were broken off. Looking accidental, but you know it’s not.”
Dakota didn’t say anything. She couldn’t. But Russell did. “Evil. Pure evil.”
His parents looked like they agreed, and Dakota said slowly, “But wait. That’s too coincidental. All right, the broken glass. That was obvious. But this—afterwe’d talked about it?Afteryou’d looked for it?”
