TAKE A SEAT PLEASE, Mrs. Schmidt. Mrs. Carson.”
Principal Barry Jones of Steamboat Springs Elementary School looked at the two mothers seated opposite him and their respective sons. Tracy Schmidt was a knockout. With her slender figure, shining chestnut hair and exquisite green eyes, she looked far younger than her thirty-seven years. Everybody knew that Mrs. Schmidt was a widow, and wealthy, but that was about all they knew. Living way up on that ranch with old Blake Carter, the lady kept to herself and had done so ever since she moved to the town almost a decade ago now. Of course, given her beauty, there were always rumors. Some said Tracy and Blake were an item. Principal Jones found that hard to believe. Others suggested she might be gay, but from where Principal Jones was sitting, she came across a lot more Ellen Barkin than Ellen DeGeneres.
Tracy’s son, Nicholas, sat beside her. He had slightly darker coloring but was equally good looking. Unfortunately he was also the scourge of third grade, in and out of hot water more often than a reusable tea bag.
On the other side of the principal’s desk, their fat arms folded like giant, white sausages, sat Emmeline Carson and her boy, Ryan. Ryan Carson was a promising ice hockey player, popular in class, and a bully. He had a square head and close-set eyes that made him look dumber than he actually was. No mean feat. Ryan’s nickname was “Rock” and it suited him on any number of levels. He also took after his mother. Emmeline Carson had one of those faces that looked oddly flattened, although her forehead bulged unappealingly above it. As if a steamroller had begun the job of running over her head, then thought better of it and reversed.
How Principal Jones wished he were here to reprimand Rock Carson and not Nicholas Schmidt! He certainly knew which mother he’d rather be pleasing.
“Are you gonna kick him out this time?” Mrs. Carson started things off with her usual charm. “My Ryan knows what he saw. The boy’s a cheat.”
“It’s not true, Mom.” Nicholas looked up at Tracy guilelessly. “I’m sure Rock—Ryan—genuinely thought he saw me do it. But he must be mistaken.”
He’s so handsome, Tracy thought adoringly. And such a good liar.
She turned her sweetest smile on Principal Jones. “Perhaps you’d tell me what happened?”
“I’m afraid a number of children witnessed the incident. Ryan was the one to come forward, but it happened during recess. Nicholas was caught at Mrs. Waklowski’s desk, photographing the answers to tomorrow’s math test on his cell. Apparently he was offering to sell the information to classmates, including Ryan here.”
“That’s right,” Ryan piped up. “He wanted ten bucks. Like I’m gonna give him ten bucks for some stupid math answers!”
“I mean, why would you need them?” said Nicholas. “You’re so smart, Rock, you’d have aced the test anyway. Right?”
“Right.” The bully’s eyes narrowed. He suspected he was being mocked, but didn’t fully understand how. “Anyway, the point is, he’s a cheat.”
“As I say, Mrs. Schmidt, it isn’t a case of one kid’s word against another’s. Half the third grade has corroborated Ryan’s story.”
Tracy nodded understandingly. She looked at her son, not sure how, exactly, she was supposed to help him, when she saw a light go on in Nicholas’s eyes.
“Check my phone.”
“Excuse me?” said Principal Jones.
Nicholas reached into his pocket. A few moments later, he slid the offending cell phone across the principal’s desk. “Check it. See if the pictures are on there.”
“That seems sensible to me,” said Tracy.
“Very well.”
The principal switched on the device and fiddled about with it awkwardly. “How, er . . . where would I find pictures on here?”
“I’ll show you,” Nicholas said brightly.
“No. I’ll show you.” Mrs. Carson’s huge white arm shot out across the desk and grabbed the phone. “He’ll probably try and delete ’em.”
Watching her fat fingers slide over the screen was like watching Lennie from Of Mice and Men stroke a mouse.
“Here ya go.” She opened up the media files triumphantly, but her expression of smug satisfaction quickly faded. “Hey, what is this?”
“May I see the pictures?” Tracy asked sweetly. “Well, now, as far as I can see, there’s nothing that looks like a math paper here.” She handed the phone back to Principal Jones.
“He’s deleted ’em already. He’s a liar!” Mrs. Carson was shouting. “Half the class saw those pictures.”
“Any files deleted within the last hour would still be in the deleted items folder. I’m sure Mr. Farley would be happy to check that for you,” Nicholas offered helpfully. Alisdair Farley was the head of the school’s IT department. “But he won’t find any pictures because I never took any. That’s the truth. I was playing Angry Birds. I guess because I was near the teacher’s desk, Rock kinda assumed . . .”
Look at those eyelashes fluttering! thought Tracy, rising from her chair.
“Is that all, Mr. Jones?”
Look at that figure! thought Principal Jones.
“I guess that’s all, Mrs. Schmidt. It must have been a misunderstanding. Thanks for coming in.”
OUTSIDE IN THE CORRIDOR, Nicholas kissed his mother good-bye.
“I’ll see you after school. Glad we got that nonsense straightened out.”
“Uh-huh,” said Tracy. “See you after school. Oh, Nicky?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t forget to bring that other chip in your backpack.”
“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?
If she put her mind to it, Tracy could probably have found out the answers to all these questions. But over the years she’d trained herself not to. Jeff Stevens existed only in her heart and in her memory. She found her mind wandering back to the last job the two of them had done together. It was a diamond heist in Holland, before they were married. A mental picture came back to her of Daniel Cooper, the odd little insurance agent who had doggedly followed them across Europe, but had never been able to pin them to any crime. He’d been watching, the day that Tracy left Amsterdam. She’d actually seen him, seen the crushing disappointment on his face. She remembered feeling sorry for him.
Where was he now?
Where were any of the characters from those long-gone days?
For Tracy, and for Jeff, the scams and heists and capers had become a game. But to Daniel Cooper they’d clearly been more than that. Did we hurt people back then, with the things we did? Tracy wondered. She’d never regretted her old life, but perhaps she should have? As she gazed down lovingly at her sleeping son, it occurred to her that maybe her moral compass was off. Certainly Blake Carter represented goodness and decency and honesty in a way she aspired to, but didn’t really recognize in herself. Or in Nicky.
I must do better.
I must be a better mother, for Nicky’s sake.
Tracy kissed her son good night and went to bed.
