Seeking Refuge

by Alana Terry

  “What did she say? ‘Awesome?’”

  “Of course not!” Alexa winked at him. “I believe it was, ‘Really? Cool.’ She almost got me, too.”

  “That’s m’girl.” Darrin paused at the corner. “Which way?”

  “Right there. Whew. There isn’t much of a line. Will you go get a table before they’re all taken? I’ll get your cheesecake. What kind do you like?”

  Darrin assured her he would love whatever she chose, took her coat, and hurried to find a quiet table in the back of the room. Alexa ordered her two favorite slices and stood patiently at the “pick-up” counter. Her eyes roamed the room, wondering if Nolan had made it. A head near the door made her relax. He was coming in—probably when she turned away from the counter.

  The crumpled fabric of her skirt brought a sigh. Not only did it look ridiculous, she might have ruined it. The medieval cut dress had cost her a minor fortune, and one intense play had destroyed it. Feeling foolish, she prayed that her dry cleaner would be able to brush it into some semblance of normalcy.

  As she strolled back to her chair, Nolan stopped her, his hand on her arm. “Ready for this?”

  Alexa nodded. “Let’s do it.”

  “Has he said anything—”

  “Nothing unusual. I can’t imagine,” she whispered.

  “Good. It’s probably nothing at all, but knowing will help.” He smiled at her. “Let’s complete our investigation, shall we?”

  They reached the table, and Alexa made introductions. “Darrin, this is a friend of Wes’. Nolan Burke. Nolan, Darrin Thorpe, a friend from Chicago.”

  She gestured for Nolan to pull up a chair from a nearby table. “We might as well save space for others.”

  “Thanks. They said they’d bring me mine—ran out of the topping.” Nolan leaned back in his chair and asked, “So what brings you to Rockland? I assume you’ve been to something at the RAC?”

  They chatted about the play, the weather, and finally about Darrin’s work with InoSys. “Our system is simple enough to use, but it takes time to update each computer and integrate it with the central server. Most companies prefer us to do it for them, but places like InoSys fly me out for a few days to explain the process to their employees as a sort of ongoing training thing.”

  Alexa hoped she read Nolan’s expression correctly and asked, “What sort of business is InoSys? I’ve never heard of them.”

  “Innovative Systems. It’s basically a think tank for inventions in the medical field.”

  Nolan’s cheesecake arrived, in a box, and he stood. “It was nice to meet you Darrin.” To Alexa he smiled and said, “Tell Wes I’d better get a call next time he’s in town.”

  “If you can get him out of Fairbury. There’s a certain blond neighbor of mine who has developed a bad habit of monopolizing him.”

  Laughing, Nolan waved saying, “I’ll have to be sure to bring that up. Have a great night.”

  Alexa hoped that Nolan’s apparent rush to leave was out of courtesy for their date or was a signal that he saw nothing wrong rather than a mad dash to call out the cavalry. After an awkward moment, Darrin and Alexa said simultaneously, “Would you like to go for another walk?”

  Darrin stood and offered her cloak. They strolled along Metropolitan Avenue, and Alexa couldn’t help but notice the contrast in their appearance. Darrin’s suit gave him an air of sophistication, but in comparison, she looked like Isolde without her Tristan. She slipped her arm through his as they strolled past the park at the Natural History Museum.

  Darrin spoke first. “You didn’t tell me what about Jeremy you think is good for Lorie last night.”

  “He just brings out a fun side of her. She often seems so serious, but with Jeremy, you see an entirely different part of her personality. I wish you could have seen her running from him, hiding, laughing as he carried her into the room and plopped her on the chair. It was hysterical.”

  “She needs that. She doesn’t get much laughter, and now that she’s headed for another hospital stay—”

  “What!” Alexa hadn’t expected this.

  “They finally put her on a donor list.”

  The desire to ask what the illness was nearly overrode her resolve not to ask. “What took them so long?”

  “They say that she is no longer responding to the medication. They didn’t want to do it earlier, because they still don’t know what the true cause is. If something other than the liver is the problem, they will, in their minds anyway, be wasting a liver. Without a new one, though, she won’t make it through many, if any, more of these episodes.”

  The idea of Lorie going through an unknown illness and transplant surgery, and still being no better horrified Alexa. “What does Lorie think of all of it?”

  “She takes one day at a time. She’ll probably tell Jeremy once they hospitalize her. She keeps her medical part of her life very compartmentalized—wears different clothing, reads different books, even listens to different music.”

  “I think I saw that,” Alexa said as she remembered the differences in Lorie from the hospital and Lorie from New Year’s. “I like both sides of her, but it’ll be nice to see who she is when she can blend into one person.” Even as she said it, Alexa knew she probably made no sense to him.

  Darrin nodded, glancing at his watch. “We need to get you back. You still have a drive ahead of you.”

  If his voice hadn’t sounded as regretful as it did, Alexa would have been convinced that she had offended him. For the next block, neither spoke. Darrin took her hand, holding it without a word as they walked. Another block passed—then another. In one of her books, she had described the particular silence they enjoyed—intimate, comfortable, secure, wistful.

  At her car, Alexa finally spoke. “Thank you for taking me. I enjoyed it.”

  Darrin stood beside her car door, waiting for her to settle herself in her seat, close the door, and crack the window. “I should be at the Fairbury Inn tomorrow night after I’m done for the day. They’re sending their computer techs tomorrow, so I think I’ll be able to wind up early. If I call when I get near town, do you think you could give me directions to the B&B?”

  “If you’re getting off early, why don’t you come to my house and have dinner with me. We can watch a movie, or I could challenge you to Scrabble...”

  “I’ll take the movie. I feel a little funny about it, though. You’ve already invited me to lunch...”

  Alexa started the car. “Call me when you see the town square, but don’t make any turns. Go straight and slow. The officers are very strict about the speed limit.”

  “In a town like Fairbury?”

  “What else do they have to do?” She winked and rolled up the window, pulling out of the parking space.

  Darrin watched her drive away, thinking to himself, Find whoever is killing Fairbury’s citizens, for one thing.

  Chapter 29

  JOE LEANED WEARILY against Alexa’s doorjamb. Fighting grief, fear, and anger, he rapped on the door. Nolan Burke sat at the desk, still working on her computer as Alexa opened the door. He sighed. “Can you put on a coat and come out here?”

  Alexa grabbed her shawl, stepped outside, and pointed to his car. “How about we talk in there?”

  Settled in Joe’s cruiser, Alexa gave him an encouraging smile. “So, what’s wrong? Nolan said he doesn’t think Darrin was someone to be concerned about.”

  The last fine string of control snapped. In clipped and carefully measured tones, he ground out, “Did we not tell you not to save anything to your storage thing anymore?”

  “I haven’t. I wrote for hours last night, but I just burned a copy and then deleted it from the laptop.” She frowned. “Why?”

  “Harry Beauford was bludgeoned to death last night as I slept ‘blissfully unaware of the bloodbath—”

  “Joe! How do you know that sentence? I worked for ages on it, and it still sounds ridiculous.”

  His voice shook. “The killer upped the ante this time. He left
the sentence printed on a piece of paper and taped to the front door.”

  “How did he get it? I don’t understand! I didn’t save it to anything but my laptop, and then I deleted it. I don’t know if the storage thing was even online!”

  Joe opened his door. “Then we need to talk to Nolan.”

  As they stepped inside, Alexa seemed to wilt. She hung her shawl and excused herself, closing her bedroom door behind her. While Joe discussed the situation with Nolan, the sounds of weeping slowly filled the house until all the men could hear were deep wracking sobs.

  The men stared at one another. Joe wasn’t sure how to handle a distraught Alexa. Outside the brief moment of hysteria over the coffee and grief when she thought Lorie had died, she’d been solid—sure. Oh, angry, for certain, but this level of emotion seemed out of character.

  Nolan’s voice pierced his thoughts. “How well do you know her?”

  “Not that well—better in the past months than before all this. She was just a resident with a celebrity status that helps the local economy and a gal I sometimes saw at church.”

  “She seems awfully alone.”

  Joe nodded. “She is.”

  “You know her better than I do,” Nolan hedged.

  Sensing where Nolan intended to steer the conversation, he tried to redirect the course. “You know her brother better than I know her.”

  “Her brother isn’t here. If he was, we’d be unnecessary. Besides, aren’t you trained to handle this kind of stuff?”

  His lip twisted. “Not hardly, but you’re right. I guess it’s the cop’s job over the computer dude’s.”

  Joe paused at her door, took a deep breath, and knocked lightly. He could feel Nolan’s unimpressed expression. He knocked again—louder. No answer. He opened her door and found her curled against her headboard, pillow to her face, sobbing. The sounds of weeping were exponentially louder in the room. He glanced at Nolan, but the man had gone back to work—deliberately, concentrated on the screen, definitely ignoring anything else around him—back at work.

  The second, third, fifth, eighth-guesses pummeled him as he lowered himself next to her and pulled the pillow from her clenched fingers. With a lump in his throat and a prayer for wisdom, he wrapped his arms around her. “Shh...”

  Alexa clung to him, sobbing. He held her, stroked her hair, and waited. As she wept, he wondered why she was able to pour out her grief for a man she’d never met, but he hadn’t been able to do more than fight back a string of foul words that taunted him to vocalize them—that and kick a hole in his friend’s apartment wall. The chief would be ticked about that one.

  Sniffling told him she could use a tissue, but despite his frantic glance around him, he couldn’t see a box. She waved her hand at the drawer beside him. Expecting handkerchiefs, Joe was relieved to find a narrow box of Kleenex and passed it to her.

  By the time she regained some composure, Alexa’s eyes puffed, her nose glowed red, and freckles he’d never noticed stood out against the blotchiness. “Can I get you some ice or something?”

  Alexa glared at him. “I know how awful I look. You don’t have to rub it in.”

  Joe backpedaled faster than a Mississippi steamboat. “You’re wearing my favorite green dress. You can’t look awful.”

  The slightest hint of a smile curved the corners of her lips and wrinkled at the edges of her eyes. “Nice save.”

  It took her several minutes to regain her composure. Joe waited, brought several washcloths, but said nothing. Something in her demeanor changed suddenly. Joe sensed it and gave her shoulder a final squeeze before he left the room, closing the door behind him. She followed a few minutes later, traces of tears left on her face and an air of resignation that unsettled Joe. By the look on Nolan’s face, it unsettled him too.

  As Nolan listened to Joe’s explanation of recent events, he nodded. “That saves me time, anyway. He—or I guess it could be a she—probably set up both computers to send information automatically to your storage or your webserver, and then back to him. If he’s smart, it’ll go through a dozen or two proxies so it’s harder to find. Someone who has the knowledge and skill to do this probably was smart enough to do that too. With enough time, however,” Nolan winced as he spoke the next words, “and an insane amount of money to hire experts, we should be able to find him.”

  Alexa shook her head. “What about the FBI. Do they have the kind of resources necessary to do that? I could contact Mark Connors.”

  “Why is that name familiar?” Joe waited impatiently for her to answer when his mind refused to cooperate.

  “Ray Connors’ brother? I told you—”

  “Right. You met Mark because of Ray and you use him for interviews.”

  She shook her head. “Other way around. I used Mark for interviews, and he introduced me to his brother Ray when I needed work done on my mudroom.” She laughed. “I still think Ray is hoping Mark will convince me that the world is evil enough without me writing about it.”

  Joe shrugged. “I’ll make the call.”

  Nolan watched Joe leave before asking, “Would you like me to suspend my work until you know what they want to do?”

  Alexa shook her head. “Any work you do is just that much that they don’t have to. I’m happy to pay for it if it stops this creep.”

  Alexa didn’t have time to change before Darrin arrived. The quiche had five minutes left to bake, a pie cooled on her rack, and a salad sat waiting on the table. The doorbell zinged. Alexa jumped. She rushed to open the door, shivering. “Come on in before you grow icicles—as my grandma said at least once.”

  “At least once?”

  Alexa shrugged. “Not many icicles in the desert.”

  Darrin glanced around him as she hung his coat on a coatrack behind the door. “Your home is exactly what Lorie said it was.”

  “I did take her through a mental tour, I believe.”

  “You didn’t tell her about the placard on the gate—so unobtrusive, yet a delight if you see it.”

  She glanced around the room, trying to follow his eyes and see it from his perspective. “I could offer you a tour. That way if the paparazzi ever do start hounding authors, you could make a few dollars with an Alexa Hartfield exclusive. Can’t you see it? ‘I toured Alexa Hartfield’s home and survived!’”

  The oven beeped, so Alexa waved him down the hall. “You go take your own tour. I’m going to salvage dinner.”

  By the time Darrin entered the kitchen, the quiche cooled on the stove. He bent over, sniffing. “Smells wonderful.”

  Alexa offered him a drink. “So, did you enjoy your tour? Have you found out all my secrets? Will the Quizzer pay a million bucks to hear what you saw in my closets?”

  “Your house suits you so well. That ivory and white room—it suits you. The last one on the left of the hall—it suits the house, and this kitchen. I love that you didn’t update it into the modern idea of a perfect room.

  “That’s exactly what my interior designer was going for! I’ll have to tell her that someone saw it.”

  “You didn’t do this yourself?” Darrin glanced around him.

  Alexa laughed as she carried the quiche to the table and set it on a trivet. “No. I don’t ‘do’ decorating. I don’t do sewing, painting, rearranging, or mending. I do maintenance. I let people who enjoy this kind of thing and are good at it do it.”

  His eyes roamed the room. “You like to cook.” He peered out the backdoor into the mudroom. “This is nice. I should remember to have a counter installed in the new laundry room.”

  “Are you planning to rebuild?”

  “Not on the current lot, no. But I’ll sell it and build or buy outside the city this time.”

  Alexa pointed to her small refrigerator. “Can you grab the salad plates from the freezer?”

  They sat down to enjoy their salad and chatted about Darrin’s ideas for a new home. He asked several decorating questions, but Alexa shook her head. “Sorry. It sounds nice, but I can’t visual
ize things. I never know if I’ll like something until I see it.”

  Over shrimp quiche, they debated opinions on various authors. Alexa tried to be reasonable, but she tossed out her criticisms and compliments without hesitation. Darrin burst out laughing at something she said about Stephen King. “I give up! I can’t predict your likes and dislikes.”

  “Should you? I rarely do.”

  “Well,” Darrin explained, “It’s simpler for me. I either like a book or I don’t. If I’m not hooked by the second or third chapter, I toss it.” He ducked his head as he muttered, “I rarely make it to the third page.”

  She didn’t ask, but as she finished her meal, Alexa knew her face probably screamed the question, “Have you ever closed mine in three pages?” Darrin knew she wanted to know. She could see it in his expression, but not until she carried their plates into the kitchen did he say, “Alexa?”

  “Hmm?”

  “I’ve never been able to put yours down, much less close it early.”

  She carried dessert plates into the living room and set them on the coffee table. She swung the bookshelves away from the wall and punched on a TV hidden in a recess in the wall. On shelves above and below the TV, rows of DVDs offered a wide choice. “Why don’t you pick something while I get us some coffee?”

  By the time she returned, he stood with a DVD in each hand. Wiggling them he asked, “The Scarlet Pimpernel or Return to Me?”

  “That one.” Alexa gestured at the comedy with a jerk of her head before setting the cups on coasters and turning to add a log to her stove. By the time Darrin had the DVD playing, Alexa had curled up with her coffee and pie in her favorite corner of the couch. “I love this movie.”

  “As does Lorie. I’ve never seen it.”

  They watched, laughing at the same lines, smiling at the same charming moments, and rolling their eyes at Charlie’s ridiculous comments. Alexa glanced at Darrin and wondered if there was any hope for a future between them. For the first time in a long time, she thought she’d met a man she could care about—not to mention someone who might be comfortable with her as she was.