by Gayle Wilson
She opened the refrigerator, automatically inventorying its contents. Eggs. A container of milk she wasn’t real sure about. A small, hardening block of cheese. Some assorted condiments and a jar of pickles. An omelet or a cheese sandwich? she debated, fighting the urge to close the door and forget it.
The sound of the doorbell shouldn’t have been unexpected. It had certainly happened often enough before. The police had put someone outside her complex for a few days after Kahler’s death to keep the media in control. When the paper had released her statement, the press had been told that was all she intended to say. After that, the number of reporters awaiting her departures and arrivals had eventually begun to dwindle, but despite the passage of time they hadn’t entirely given up. Even tonight she had walked by a couple, ignoring their questions and the microphone thrust at her face.
She knew she should just ignore the bell, too, but when it rang again, she felt her frustration boil over. Damn it, weren’t they ever going to let it go? The flare of adrenaline sent her storming across the dark living room to slip the chain off and throw open the door.
“Look,” she began, “I’ve told you guys—”
The man standing outside her door was literally the last person she expected to see there, his presence here a scenario she had never imagined in any of her fantasies.
“Hello, Kate,” Thorne Barrington said.
Her heart jolted painfully, and she had to think about taking the next breath, the action no longer involuntary. Her eyes examined every detail of his appearance: dark glasses, a navy polo and worn jeans, the raven’s-wing blackness of his hair, worn much shorter than she had ever seen it, short enough that it didn’t quite hide the reddened line over his temple. The newer scar obscured the small white one she had noticed there before.
“What are you doing here?” she said. It wasn’t what she wanted to say, but it was the logical question. What are you doing showing up on my doorstep after putting me through absolute hell?
“I thought we needed to talk.”
“Talk?” she repeated carefully.
“Do you think I could come in? There are a couple of reporters outside, and I don’t imagine it would do either of us any good if—”
“Okay,” she interrupted, knowing he was right. The bidding would be sky-high for any picture of the two of them together.
When he was inside, she closed the door and led the way across the room to the facing sofa and love seat. She was aware that he took a look around the dark apartment before he sat down. She wondered with a touch of amusement if he were comparing her place to his. She sat down opposite him, the coffee table and the expanse of her small Oriental rug between them.
Neither of them said anything for a moment, the atmosphere growing uncomfortable. Whatever connection had existed between them had obviously disappeared. She found herself wishing he’d take off the glasses, so at least she could see his eyes. And then she remembered why he couldn’t.
“Do you want me to cut off the kitchen light?” she asked.
He glanced toward the lighted kitchen and then back to her, shaking his head.
“It’s all right,” he said, dismissing her concern.
She didn’t have the nght to ask any of the questions she wanted to ask, and apparently he wasn’t ready to reveal whatever it was that he had come here to talk about. The hope that he wanted to do more than talk was beginning to fade in the strain.
“Are you okay?” she asked. For an encore, she mocked herself mentally, she could ask him about the weather.
He looked up from the contemplation of his hands, the dark lensec a barrier to whatever he was thinking.
“I’m fine. Even Greg turned me loose.”
She nodded again.
“I found out some things that I think you ought to know. About Kahler,” he added. “And Jenny.”
She wasn’t sure she wanted to know any more. What she already knew had circled endlessly through her head night after night. Especially Hall Draper’s death.
If Kahler hadn’t fallen in love with her, if she had let him know at once that it wasn’t going to happen for them, would Draper be alive today? Would someone have caught the Tripper before it was time for him to hit again? Was there any way she could have known how screwed up Kahler was? She was a reporter. Where were her instincts? She had always been so sure—
“He came to see her,” Barrington said, breaking into the questions that had tormented her since the night he’d been shot.
“What?”
“Jenny. That night. Before she hanged herself. Kahler came to the jail. He signed the visitor’s log.”
“But he said…” She hesitated, trying to think exactly what he had said. He had given the impression that he hadn’t known about Jenny’s death until he’d found the diaries. And instead…She wasn’t sure exactly what the instead was. “What does that mean? That he got the diaries then?”
“No. That part was apparently true. They were sent to his mother. Jenny’s mother. Maybe he did find them later.”
“But he knew about Jenny’s death.”
“He must have. It happened between the time he left and the next cell check. Since he was the last visitor, he would have been questioned.”
“He came to visit her and when he left, she hanged herself?”
“Within minutes of his departure.”
“But why? Why would she…”
Thorne didn’t answer. The dark lenses were again focused downward toward his hands.
“What in the world could he have said to her?” Kate asked. The question was very soft, rhetorical, because she knew they would never know the answer.
“Whatever it was,” Thorne said, “it was something she couldn’t live with.”
“He caused her death. Whatever he said that night. And he knew that. All those years, he knew it.”
“But he couldn’t accept that guilt.”
“So eventually he decided that other people had to be to blame. You and all the others. He set out to get revenge for something he had done. God, he really was crazy,” she said. “So damn crazy. She killed herself because of whatever he said to her that night, but he couldn’t admit it. So everyone else had to be made to pay for Jenny’s death.”
He nodded.
“Does knowing that make it any easier?” she asked, remembering what he’d told her.
When he looked up, she realized he hadn’t understood.
“To know that you had done nothing to deserve what he did to you? Is it any easier to know that?”
“I put her in that cell, Kate. Just like he said.”
“That was your job. You were supposed to do that.”
“Maybe. But maybe there might have been something…” He shook his head, the movement small and contained. Again he let the silence stretch before he broke it. “It was a sweep. Teenage hookers. Most of them runaways. Jenny Carpenter was picked up with the rest. She looked about sixteen, but she wasn’t, of course, and she had a previous conviction. For possession.” He took a breath, deep enough that the movement was visible in the dimness. “So instead of sending another kid home to her family, I sent her to jail. I knew she wouldn’t be able to make bail…”
His words faded again and the silence was back. A different silence now. Full of cold and darkness, the lonely silence of a cell. The silence that must have remained after the words of her brother had stopped echoing through the darkness.
“There was something about her…” Thorne said softly. “Something in her eyes. Lost. Alone. She was the most alone person I’d ever met.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Kate whispered.
“You asked me once if there was anything about my life that I regretted.”
Like Hall Draper, and like Kahler, Thorne, too, had been haunted by Jenny Carpenter.
“It wasn’t your fault,” she said again.
“But he was right. We all played a part. He was right at least about that.”
“No,” she denied
. “Not even about that.”
His mouth moved, the muscles tightening briefly, and then he nodded. “Thank you,” he said.
She was aware that the ghost of the dark-haired child who had been Jenny Carpenter had not been laid to rest, but she didn’t know what else to tell him.
They were quiet again for a long time until finally he said, “I kept thinking that you might…”
He let the sentence fade, and he looked back down at his hands. He held them both palm upward in his lap, the right one on top. She knew that mutilated hand would always be a reminder of how one man’s insanity had forever changed his life.
“That I might what?”
“I thought you might come to the hospital,” he said. He was looking at her now, but she couldn’t read his expression because of the glasses.
“I came to the hospital,” she said. “How the hell can you think I wouldn’t come? They wouldn’t let me in. Your friend Sandifer. All of them.”
“I never knew you’d come, Kate.”
“I was just another blood-sucking vampire of a reporter. They made it pretty obvious I wasn’t welcome, so eventually I quit beating my head against that brick wall.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Yeah. Me, too. It would have been nice to know whether you were…” She stopped because she couldn’t say out loud the horrors she had imagined, all the things she had known could result from a head injury. “Whether you were all right.”
“I’m all right”
“Okay,” she said.
Why was this so hard? The last thing she remembered saying to Thorne Barrington was to beg him to make love to her, and now they couldn’t even carry on a conversation.
“I guess I’d better go,” he said finally. “I just wanted to tell you about Jenny. I thought it might make you feel better about Kahler’s death.”
He stood up, and she was aware again of how big he was. She stood also and followed him to the door. He had simply come to tell her about Jenny. It seemed there was nothing left of whatever had been between them before. Violence and death were barriers too hard to overcome, and all those deaths, especially Jenny’s, and even Byron Kahler’s, lay between them now.
They stood together by the door, as awkward as she and Kahler had once been. She didn’t want to open it. Despite the strain, despite the awkwardness that seemed to be all that was left, she was reluctant to let him leave.
“Thanks for coming,” she said.
“What are you crying for?” He raised his hand and brushed the tear off her cheek with the pad of his thumb. “There’s nothing to cry about.”
She hadn’t even realized she’d been crying. Embarrassed, she rubbed at the place he’d touched with her fingertips.
“Why the hell didn’t you call me? You could have let me know you were okay.”
That had slipped out, just like the tears, past her control. She hated crying women. About as much as she figured he’d hate a nagging one. He had given her no right to question what he did. They had made no commitment. Except it had felt as if they had. A whole lot of commitment.
“For a while…” He began and then he hesitated. “I wasn’t in any condition to make my own decisions. I didn’t understand why you weren’t there. I knew I wanted you there.”
“I tried,” she said.
He smiled at her tone. “Greg probably did what he thought was best. He read your press release. Maybe he thought…” Again he hesitated
“That I shouldn’t have told them anything? That I had only made it worse?”
“Maybe.”
She shook her head, knowing that wasn’t true. The security Sandifer had imposed around Thorne Barrington had ensured that the press would come after her. Her statement had been necessary, and she knew it. He should have known it. That was the way things were done.
“The fact that none of you guys would talk to them made it worse. I was the only one left. They would never have given up without something.”
“I’m sorry you had to go through that,” he said.
“And later? You could have called me later.”
Why didn’t she just tell him everything? she thought in disgust. Go ahead and confess the sleepless nights she’d spent worrying about him, her inability to work, the tears. Lay it all out there for him to smile at the next time he thought about her and her stupid obsession.
“There were some things I was learning to deal with,” he said.
“What kind of things?” she asked, a small flutter of fear in her stomach.
“I haven’t had another migraine. Not since that night.”
She waited a moment, trying to think what that meant, what his tone meant. “And that’s bad?” she asked, shaking her head. “You sound like that’s bad.”
He smiled at her, and his hand lifted to brush away another tear. “It probably means that they were right, that the headaches were…” He stopped and she could hear the breath he drew.
“Emotional,” she said, finally understanding what he was thinking.
He nodded again.
“Do you think I care?” she asked. “Even if that were true, do you think I would care?”
“I think I would.”
“Okay,” she said. “You care. I don’t. I’m glad they’re gone.”
He didn’t say anything, and she reached up to put her fingers against the slash of the scar. He didn’t avoid her touch.
“Maybe this had something to do with the headaches going away. Maybe it…rearranged whatever had been damaged before.”
He laughed, and she smiled at the sound.
“It’s a reasonable explanation to me,” she said. “Are you telling me no one else thinks so?”
“Greg said it’s possible.”
“But you decided not to believe him because…”
He shook his head, the glasses again a barrier to reading his eyes. It didn’t matter because she knew, of course, what he was thinking. He had already told her—that even the possibility that the bombing had affected him psychologically somehow made him something less than he had thought he was.
She knew the kind of person he was—the kind who would run toward a madman pointing a gun at him because she was in danger. And she didn’t understand why the other would even matter.
“Is this some macho kind of crap?” she asked “You get a bomb that blows off half your hand and damages your eyes and cracks your skull, and you think it’s not supposed to make any kind of impact on your life?”
“Kate,” he said.
“Is that what you think? You been reading your own press? You think you’re a hero, Barrington? Is that what this is? You think you’re different from the rest of us?”
“I don’t think that—”
“That bastard put a little confetti in my bed, and I didn’t sleep for a week. Does that make me a coward?”
“Of course not, but—”
“I think you’re bright enough to figure this out. You’re supposed to be so damn brilliant. Figure it out,” she ordered.
“Kate.”
“Don’t ‘Kate’ me. Don’t talk to me like I’m some kind of hysterical child. You don’t have migraines anymore, and we should be celebrating, and instead we’re standing here yelling at each other.”
“I’m not yelling,” he said.
“You go to hell, Thorne Barrington. You go back to that damn mausoleum where you holed up for three years and you hide in the dark. I don’t give a damn if you do. If you think I give a damn, then you can just…”
“I wasn’t hiding,” he said.
“Yeah?” she said, derisively. “Except you can’t have it both ways. And I don’t care if you were. It doesn’t matter. Why don’t you understand that? I’m no bargain, Barrington. I’ll probably not ever be able to hear a backfire without being scared spitless. Some nights I sleep with the lights on. Does that mean you don’t want to sleep with me?”
“No,” he said.
The single syllable took her breath. S
he didn’t know how his voice could be so different, but whatever had been there the night Kahler had interrupted them was back.
“It doesn’t?” she asked, her mouth suddenly dry.
“No.”
“Then I guess that means you do.”
“I told you a long time ago I want to make love to you.”
She nodded.
“Nothing’s changed about the way I feel.”
She nodded again. And then she said it out loud. “Nothing’s changed about how I feel about you either.”
She didn’t make a conscious decision to step into his arms, but they closed around her when she did. Closed and held her tightly enough to put to rest any doubts she might have had about whether he wanted her there. It felt so good being held. So good to be safe. She hadn’t known until she was here that this was the only thing that would truly ever make her feel safe again—being held in Thorne Barrington’s arms.
SHE WISHED she had cut the lights off in her bedroom. It was so bright, stark as daylight—not like the welcoming, moontouched darkness of his that night. It hadn’t been difficult then to undress, to expose her body for him. He had asked her and she had wanted to.
She stopped at the foot of the bed and turned around to find him still standing in the doorway, leaning against the frame. As she watched, he reached up and removed the dark glasses. He folded them and held them in his hand. His eyes were as dark as she had remembered. His gaze intense. Waiting Too polite maybe to make the first move. She smiled at that thought.
His head tilted, questioning the smile.
“If the headaches are gone, why did you wear those?” she asked.
“Hiding from the guys outside, I guess.”
She nodded. “It must have worked.”
“And maybe because I’m not convinced the other is over.”
“Maybe we ought to cut off the lights,” she suggested.
He didn’t say anything for a moment. “I’d rather leave them on,” he said finally. “If you don’t mind, of course.”