Sidney Sheldon's Chasing Tomorrow (Tracy Whitney #2)(35)

“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.”