Chapter Ten: Birds of a Feather

"No legs."

Jesse glanced up from his inspection of a tempting platter of candied yams to see Amanda gazing pensively in his direction. There was a brief, cool silence, then Jesse countered, a little testily, "Not everyone needs to be tall you know, Amanda. And I happen to think that I'm very well proportioned for my height."

Amanda blinked, then gave him an exasperated stare. "I was talking about the turkey," she pointed out impatiently. "And of course you're – how did I get drawn into this? Your legs are fine. The turkey, on the other hand, has none."

"Oh." Jesse looked mollified, narrowing a stony glare at Steve when he snickered. "Yeah – it looks kind of – sad – doesn't it? Deformed."

"Kind of like one of Dad's charity cases," Steve observed, reaching for a bowl of mashed potatoes. "Maybe he just had to take it under his wing."

Jesse groaned theatrically. "Ouch." He turned the platter this way and that, trying to find the best angle, then shook his head. "Just doesn't look right. I'm glad the kids aren't here – might traumatize them or something."

Steve sipped his water. "Or give them a warped sense of bird anatomy. Anyway, I know how you feel, Jess. I'm a leg man myself." He winked.

Jesse wiggled his eyebrows. "Well, at least it has a really big – "

"Ahem!" Amanda cleared her throat pointedly, turning a quelling, frigid stare on first one, then the other.

Jesse and Steve exchanged lascivious grins before marshalling their faces into innocent, decorous expressions.

Amanda shook her head indulgently, examining a basket of rolls. "I'm surrounded by juveniles," she intoned, with a martyred sigh. "Heaven help me when CJ and Dion reach that age."

"Oh, I think CJ and Dion have already reached their age," Mark assured her, reaching for the bottle of wine. "Or the same developmental stage anyway. Ladies first." He tilted the bottle over Amanda's glass.

Amanda smiled primly. "Thanks, Mark – it's good to know that I'm dining with at least one gentleman."

"Say, who's gonna pass the uh –" Jesse paused, shaking his head at the turkey again. "You know, I've heard of flightless birds, but this is my first experience with a legless bird."

"All right, all right." Mark stood to start serving from the turkey platter. "They wouldn't fit in the roasting pan, so I cut them off."

Jesse whistled. "Harsh."

"That's right," Steve sat back to wait his turn. "You might want to keep close track of all your limbs. If they don't fit at your table setting, he might just decide to lop them off. Those surgeons are ruthless."

"So where are the legs, anyway?" Jesse prodded, reaching for his water. "They just sort of gather themselves up and run away?"

Mark selected some choice pieces of meat and shuffled them onto Amanda's plate. "In a manner of speaking. I took them over to Alisha Morganstern."

"Alisha Morganstern?" Jesse sat up straight in surprise. His water went down the wrong way and he dissolved into a paroxysm of coughing. Steve obligingly reached over to thump him between the shoulder blades. "Alisha Morganstern?" he repeated huskily when he had caught his breath. "I didn't know she – thanks for the help, Steve, but that's enough with the thumping. I didn't even know she was back in town." Jesse shifted his shoulders uncomfortably. "Next time you save my life instead, okay, Amanda? I think this guy about severed my spine."

Steve reached for his own water. "Nice. Next time I'll sit here and watch you turn blue."

"Nothing personal, buddy, but you just don't have a physician's delicate touch." He coughed again to clear his throat. "I think my scapula is shaking hands with my clavicle."

"I could show you a cop's delicate touch - how would that be?"

"Boys."

Steve and Jesse subsided, Steve snagging a roll from the nearby basket and biting it in two, and Jesse surreptitiously picking at the stuffing.

"I'm just surprised, you know?" Jesse explained, popping a morsel into his mouth. "We had a pretty good friendship going until she moved to Maryland. We still keep in touch, or at least I thought we did. I just got an e-mail from her last month, and she didn't mention anything about coming home."

"Why did she move to Maryland?" Amanda accepted her turkey with a smile for Mark.

Jesse shrugged. "To be with her Mom. Her mom moved there after the marriage broke up. Her family was all there and I guess there wasn't really anything holding her here."

"You need family after something like that," Amanda reflected soberly, swatting Jesse's hand automatically away from the stuffing.

Jesse obediently retracted his hand. "Yeah. It was really hard on everybody, I guess. But Alisha's tough, you know? She landed on her feet. Went to Colonial University Law School, did good there, too."

"Really?" Mark raised his brows. "That's her father's Alma Mater."

"Yeah, I know." Jesse gratefully accepted his turkey from Mark and scouted for the gravy. "His, and both his brothers', too. They all played football there. Bert was more than a little proud to have his daughter get her diploma there, I guess."

"Both brothers." Mark paused in forking out Steve's turkey and frowned. "Brothers? I thought there was only Fred."

"Oh. No." Jesse drowned his turkey in a small lake of gravy and searched the table for the potatoes. "There was a third one. I guess nobody talked about him much. I saw a college football picture at Fred's wake and asked Alisha about it. The other brother had been cut out of it, which left just his arm remaining. He was disowned - some kind of trouble - I don't really know a lot about it. I got the feeling Alisha didn't either. I remember when she left for Baltimore, Alisha was really looking forward to meeting her uncle Al, but not long after that, I got an e-mail saying his work had taken him out of the country."

Mark shook his head, passing the plate on to Steve. "Families can be cruel. I can't imagine what any child could do that would be so horrible that you would disown them. Never want to see them again."

"That's right," Jesse nodded solemnly, digging a spoon into the candied yams. "You always manage to look happy to see Steve. That's fatherly love, huh? Hey!" He dropped the spoon as something snapped briskly across the back of his head.

"Oh, I'm sorry, Jess." Steve smiled sweetly. "I thought you were choking again. I must have aimed high."

Jesse made a face at him and turned back to his yams, drizzling a generous portion of syrup over them. "Anyway, has everybody been served? I'm starving."

"There's news," Steve murmured under his breath.

Jesse opened his mouth to retort, but Amanda cut him off, taking Mark's hand on the one side of her in one of her own, and Steve's, on the other side, in the other. "I think it's time we said grace." She gave them her most brilliant and implacable smile. "Mark, would you like to start?"

Jesse closed his eyes in appreciation as he swallowed a mouthful of turkey. "Mark," he said sincerely, "For a mutant bird, that is one tasty turkey."

"Thank you, Jesse." Mark unfolded his own napkin and spread it over his lap. "And it fed two families, in a way. What could be more holiday than that?"

Jesse chewed thoughtfully. "Pumpkin pie, maybe."

"I brought the pie for dessert," Amanda assured him. "If you eat all your vegetables."

"Hey, I like my vegetables," Jesse offered virtuously. He pointed his fork at Steve. "It's that guy you've got to look out for."

"You know, it's a shame the boys couldn't be here, Amanda," Mark smiled as he cut into his own turkey. "I think the two grown boys behave better when they're around."

Amanda chuckled appreciatively, then furrowed her brows. "Didn't Alisha want to join us, Mark? There's no reason for her to eat turkey legs all alone."

"I guess not, honey. Maybe she had other plans. But the turkey legs are actually for Christmas." Mark meticulously arranged his stuffing on top of his sliced turkey. "Her Mom called the other day to make plans for Christmas, and she'd volunteered to work the domestic violence hotline all day." He chuckled. "She innocently asked me if I had any secrets for quick-cooking a turkey, and I decided it would be safer to offer her some of our spare parts. I'd hate to think of Alexis nobly trying to gnaw their way through some flash-fried poultry."

"That was nice of you." Amanda helped herself to some more vegetable casserole. "It would have been awfully hard for her to find someone to cover for her on Christmas Day, and there is no way she would have been able to prepare Christmas Dinner if she was working."

Jesse grinned. "Worse still, she might have tried. Too bad she didn't come today - it would have been nice to see her again. And she's missing a great spread." Jesse cleared a smidgen of space on his plate and balanced yet another roll precariously on the razor's edge of rim. "I've got to give her a call. Catch up."

"That's true - she's lived in California before, must have old friends . . . " Amanda buttered a slice of brown bread. "Is her father still here?"

Jesse stopped chewing. "Oh. No. I thought you knew. Her parents got back together. In Baltimore."

"Oh." Amanda looked surprised. "How unusual. Well, I guess that's a happy ending."

Mark nodded thoughtfully, adding butter to his mashed potatoes. "Yes, it's not uncommon for a shock and a tragedy like that to tear couples apart. Resolving it is harder. And much more unusual. They broke up almost…Steve, how long was it after Fred's death? You must remember."

Steve nodded, his eyes suddenly fixed on his plate. "Yeah. I remember." He was quiet a moment. "It was about six months after Fred's…after Fred died." He stared at the mountain of his mashed potatoes. He remembered the day well, and it always made him feel obscurely guilty. It seemed a shame when you couldn't do for your neighbors what you did all the time for strangers - solve their murders.

He remembered it with perverse clarity, partly because he had been busy doing a little murdering of his own. He had had an idea about using his day off to re-pot some of the plants that lined the patio as a surprise for his Dad. It was a beautiful day, and it was something his father kept meaning to get around to and never quite managed, so the timing had seemed auspicious. But he soon discovered why he never dabbled in that sort of thing. He seemed to possess a definite brown thumb. He stared at the forlorn disaster that represented a now listless looking fuschia plant, drooping pathetically over the lip of its pot, and winced. Or maybe even a black thumb.

Probably because he had been secretly wishing for some sort of distraction to pull him away from his well-intended, but calamitous gardening attempts, something easy like, say, a double murder, he noticed immediately the sound of raised voices next door. He'd hesitated for a moment, wiping his grimy hands on his coveralls, trying to gauge what would be appropriate action in an official capacity and what would be just plain interfering. A particularly loud shouting match, followed by a loud crash, had him resolutely heading to his bedroom for his gun and badge when suddenly as it had started, the noise stopped. He stopped too, watching the house anxiously, then approaching, abandoning the abused fuschia to its fate. He was just about to go through the gate to next door when he saw Bert's car pull out of the driveway. Still poised for action, he saw a distraught Alexis come out onto the deck a few minutes later. He had sagged with relief. Well, everybody seemed to be alive and healthy, anyway. Nobody seemed to need a homicide cop. He returned slowly to the potted plants and grimaced at the sight of them. Well, unless his father wanted to have him arrested for wanton plantslaughter, that is.

All had been quiet for a couple of days, but it had been an uneasy kind of quiet - almost foreboding. Then one afternoon when Bert left, he didn't return. He had never come back.

Steve frowned at his potatoes, poking them with his fork until the little crater of gravy erupted and ran down the sides, like volcano lava. It wasn't that he felt responsible for their marriage breaking up - he knew there was nothing he could have done about that. It was just that…well…it had seemed a shame, is all. He wished that he could have done more.

"Steve."

Steve jerked his head up. His father's tone told him that this was not the first time he had addressed him.

"Careful, buddy," Jesse taunted him around a mouthful. "You snooze, you lose. I just snagged the last cranberry muffin."

Steve gave him a sour look. "Don't you have any food at home?"

Jesse shook his head. "Not like this. Anyway, Mark asked you a question - about the Morgansterns."

Steve met Mark's eyes questioningly, a little embarrassed by his lapse in attention.

Mark eyed him searchingly. "They'd been fighting, hadn't they? Isn't that what you told me?"

Steve nodded. "Yeah. I heard them while I was outside one afternoon. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised - Bert had told me a little while before that that they were having problems. Seems Alexis was spending Fred's insurance money on redecorating the house, and he was pretty hot about it. That money was supposed to help keep the business afloat until they could find someone to manage Fred's clients and get things back in the black." He smiled ruefully. "Was a little more personal information than I wanted, actually." He neatly snatched a slice of banana bread just as Jesse reached for it and smiled smugly at his disgruntled expression.

"Well, I knew there were money problems of some kind…" Mark expertly confiscated the fruit compote before either of them could grab the last of it and offered it to Amanda with a flourish. Amanda accepted it with a gracious smile. "That's why I was so surprised to find out that they hadn't sold the house."

Jesse actually paused his chewing. "They didn't?"

"No. Just rented it. That's why Alisha was able to move in. Oh!" Mark threw down his napkin. "I don't believe it!"

Forks suspended in mid bite.

"Mark?" Amanda questioned curiously.

"Dad?" Steve leaned forward, ready for one of his father's flashes of brilliant insight. "Did you figure something out?"

"We forgot to give a toast!"

There was a chorus of disappointed groans, and Mark clicked his tongue as he topped off their wine glasses. "Now, now, what's a holiday dinner without a toast? Lift your glasses - come on, it won't hurt you to stop chewing for just a second - " he eyed Steve and Jesse dubiously. "Always assuming that you do chew." He waited until everyone had obediently lowered their forks and raised their glasses and smiled, looking from one to the other with a sudden burst of heartfelt affection. "To families, whether related by blood or not," he pledged, "and to holidays, on whatever date we celebrate them."

"Here here."

Four glasses clinked in perfect accord.