“What other chip?”
Tracy grinned. “The one with the pictures of the test on it, honey.”
Nicholas Schmidt watched his mother walk toward the double doors. She was trying to hold it together, but he could see her shoulders shaking with laughter.
He loved her so much in that moment he could have burst.
DRIVING HOME THROUGH THE familiar Steamboat Springs streets, Tracy laughed for a long time.
Nicky might look like her, but his personality was all his father. Charming, handsome, funny and occasionally deceitful, at eight years old Nicholas Schmidt was a mini Jeff Stevens in every way. Some of the stunts he pulled were quite outrageous. Tracy did her best to disapprove. She was his mother, after all, and the whole reason she’d moved to Colorado was so that Nicholas could grow up to have a different life from the one that she and Jeff used to lead. A better, happier, more honest life. Nicholas must never know the truth about his past, or hers. And yet Tracy couldn’t help but love her son’s mischievous spirit.
I have to direct it, that’s all. Make sure he uses his powers for good.
When Nicholas was three, he scammed a little girl at his preschool out of her lunch money for five days straight. By Friday, the girl’s parents had gotten wise (she was coming home ravenous every afternoon) and the whole sorry story emerged.
“How did you get her to give you the money?” Tracy asked her son gently.
“I told her I would buy her a Beanie Baby. A special one. One that only I knew how to get.”
“I see,” said Tracy. “Why did you do that, honey?”
Nicholas gave his mother a look that seemed to say, Is this a trick question?
“Why did you tell Nora you would buy something for her, if that wasn’t true?” Tracy pressed.
“So I could get the money,” said Nicholas.
His mom really wasn’t on top of her game today, it seemed to Nicholas. Maybe she needed more sleep?
“But that’s dishonest sweetie,” Tracy explained patiently. “You do see that, don’t you? It’s Nora’s money.”
“Not anymore it isn’t!” Nicholas beamed. “Anyway, she’s mean.”
“She is?”
“Real mean. She called Jules ‘fatty’ and said his lunch smelled like poop. It did smell a bit like poop,” he added contemplatively. “But Jules was crying because of her. I gave him half the money.”
Well, thought Tracy. That throws a different light on the matter.
Sadly, the principal of Steamboat Springs’ Sunshine Smile Preschool saw things differently. Nicholas spent the next year finger-painting at home.
Not all of his escapades were quite so altruistic.
There was the time in first grade when he removed the class mice, Vanilla and Chocolate, from their cage and dropped them into his teacher’s purse “to see what would happen.” (What happened was that poor Miss Roderick almost crashed her SUV on an icy stretch of I-90, and her screams could be heard all the way to Boulder.)
Or last year when he skipped school, aged only seven, to go to a hockey game by himself. Spotting a large family group with at least six kids at the stadium, Nicholas slotted himself in among the children and successfully slipped through the turnstiles. The game was almost over by the time a security guard noticed he was actually on his own and called the authorities.
“Do you know how worried everyone was?” a frantic Tracy chastised him afterward. “The school called the police. They thought you’d been abducted. So did I!”
“Because I went to a hockey game? That’s a bit melodramatic, isn’t it?”
“You were supposed to be at school!” Tracy yelled.
“Hockey’s educational.”
“How is hockey educational, Nick?”
“It’s part of the curriculum.”
“Playing it, not watching it. You were playing hooky, not hockey.” Tracy sounded exasperated. “But that’s not the point. The point is you were out in the city on your own. You’re only seven years old!”
“I know.” Nicholas smiled sweetly. “Do you know what our word of the week is? ‘Initiative.’ Don’t you think I have a lot of initiative for my age?”
Raising Nicky was a full-time job. The older he got, the more damage control the job seemed to involve, and he was still only eight, God help her! But Tracy’s son was her life now, and she wouldn’t have traded that job for anything. Nicholas was her world, her center, her moon and stars and sun. And she knew she was the same for him.
Ironically, having a child had done all the things that Jeff had said it would do, all those years ago in London. It had filled the gap left by Tracy’s old life. And it had helped her get over him. The scars from Tracy’s marriage, and Jeff Stevens’s betrayal, would never fully heal. But after nine years they had faded, like the other myriad scars in her life, from her mother’s death, to the misery of jail, to the old friends she’d been forced to lose along the way.
Life is good now, she thought, turning up the winding mountain road that led to her ranch. It was April, and though there was still snow on the ground, it was melting fast. Soon “mud season,” as spring was called in these parts, would be fully under way. Tracy didn’t care. She loved the mountains in all their guises.
She was happy being Mrs. Tracy Schmidt. It wasn’t a role to her anymore. It had become her reality.
It was Gunther Hartog who had taught her that, in order to succeed as a con artist, you had to utterly immerse yourself in the identity you adopted for each job.
“It’s not enough to pretend to be the Countess of Nevermore, or whatever it is. You need to believe that you are that person. You need to become that person. Very few people can do that, Tracy. But you’re one of them.”
Dear Gunther. Tracy missed him.
Her mother used to pay her a similar compliment when she was a girl, although for very different reasons.
“Honestly, child,” Doris Whitney would say, “sometimes I don’t recognize you. You’ve got all the colors of the wind in you.”
To be a chameleon was both a blessing and a curse. But Tracy felt thankful for it today. Without that ability, she would never have made it here, to Steamboat, to a life of safety and contentment with her beloved son.
At long last, Tracy was home.
TRACY WAS CLEARING AWAY the supper dishes late that night when Blake Carter knocked on the door.
“Blake. What are you still doing here? It’s almost eleven.”
“We had a lot of trees felled this afternoon. I’ve been walking the property, checking that the boys did a good job.”
“By moonlight?”
“It wasn’t moonlight when I started,” said Blake. “Besides, I got a flashlight.” He patted his pocket.
“Well, you should get home to bed,” said Tracy, drying her hands on a dish towel. “Or did you want something?”
Blake looked suddenly awkward. “No, not really. I heard Nicholas was in some trouble again at school today, is all.”
Tracy frowned. “News travels fast.”
She wasn’t angry with Blake Carter. Over the years Blake had developed a close bond with Nicholas. The boy needed a positive male role model and Tracy couldn’t have asked for a better one than her ranch manager and friend. But one of the drawbacks of small-town life was small-town gossip.
“What happened?” Blake asked.
Tracy told him. “You should have seen the other mother’s face!” She laughed. “It was priceless. She knew she’d been had but she didn’t know how. They are not a nice family,” she added, breaking off a square of chocolate from the bar on the counter and offering Blake a piece.
“So what consequence is Nicky facing?”
“Consequence?” Tracy looked confused.
“He tried to cheat on his test, and then he lied to you about it,” Blake said sternly. “You don’t think you should punish him for that?”
“I . . . well . . . I didn’t really . . . we talked about it,” Tracy blustered.
Blake Carter’s raised eyebrow spoke a thousand words.
“Oh, come on,” said Tracy. “No harm was done in the end. And this Rock Carter is such a vile boy.”
“That’s not the point,” said Blake, “and you know it. You’re too easy on him, Tracy. You keep this up, he’s gonna be out of control at thirteen.”
AFTER BLAKE LEFT, TRACY crept into Nicholas’s bedroom.
Deep asleep, his dark curls spilling over the pillow and his arms flung wide across the bed, he looked positively angelic.
Tracy thought, Blake’s right. I am too easy on him. But how can I not be? He’s so . . . perfect.
She tried not to think about Jeff Stevens, but this was another impulse beyond her control. Was Jeff sleeping somewhere now too? Was he well and happy? Married to someone else? Was he even alive?