by Jami Alden
“We’re not doing anything until I know you’re somewhere they can’t find you,” was exactly how he put it. It was enough to give her a little rush of pleasure, amidst all the chaos.
Finally they pulled into his driveway. “Aren’t you worried they’ll follow us here?” she asked as she picked her way across the gravel drive and followed him up the two stairs that led to his wood porch.
He set her bag down beside him, keyed in the code for his alarm, and answered without looking. “I would have seen a tail, and no one but my family knows I live here.”
She cocked an eyebrow and looked around. “Who exactly do you think is going to come looking for you?”
His massive shoulders shrugged. “You never know. But count yourself lucky you get to stay here with me instead of in one of the piece of shit safe houses.”
Danny’s cell phone rang before she could reply
She drank in the small house’s cabin-like interior, even as she told herself she had no business caring what Danny’s house looked like, how he lived, or what clues it might give about the man he’d become.
She was no expert, but the heavy leather furniture, massive flat screen TV, and walls bare of any other sort of decoration screamed confirmed bachelor. She told herself firmly she was not happy or relieved in any way, and wandered over to a built-in bookcase crammed full of books, heavy on spy thrillers and military history.
Immediately off the front room was a small eat-in kitchen with a simple pine table and two chairs. A mountain of mail was piled on the table. Caroline flexed her fingers, fighting the urge to straighten and sort.
As Danny paced the sitting room, speaking in grim monosyllables to the caller, Caroline looked past him down a short, dark hallway. One that undoubtedly led to bedrooms.
Danny’s bedroom.
Don’t go there.
But of course she did. There, and back to the motel last night, and all the things she said and did. Things she couldn’t seem to keep herself from doing when she spent too much time alone with Danny Taggart.
She swallowed hard. Evidence. They were going to go over the information they found in James’s safe. That was the priority, not the sharp ache that was forming between her thighs.
At this rate, it would be over so fast, it’s not like it would be much of a delay—
“They identified Emily’s body.”
Danny’s words had the effect of a cold shower.
“And Derek has an eye witness up in La Honda who says she remembers a man who looked like James coming into her store shortly before Anne disappeared. And she remembers seeing him get into a car with a young woman who looked like Emily.”
The cold shower had turned into an icy deluge. Caroline’s heart seized in her chest and her stomach churned as she struggled to process the truth, even as her brain tried to reject the explanation.
James had killed Danny’s mother, and Emily Parrish along with her.
It shouldn’t have been so shocking. All evidence had pointed in that direction.
But somehow, even as they’d gone further down that path, Caroline had hoped there was another explanation. “Someone else was involved, someone else who doesn’t want the truth to come out,” she scrambled, grasping at straws.
Danny nodded, grim. She knew exactly what he was thinking. Sure, someone else had been involved. Someone who killed James to keep the secrets safe. Someone who would kill her to keep her from finding out the truth.
But in the end, her husband had been there. Through a twisted game of fate, Caroline had inadvertently ended up married to Anne Taggart’s murderer.
How could she have been married to James for a decade and have not seen, have had no clue that he was capable of something like that? Was James so very skilled at deception? Or had Caroline been so eager for security that she didn’t bother to ever really get to know the man who was her husband?
It was like a crazy Greek tragedy, playing out in her own life.
“Danny, I’m so sorry,” she said, feeling helpless, stupid for being unable to think of anything else to say.
“Don’t.” The single, cold syllable stopped her short, as did the glacial look in his gray eyes. Caroline, already chilled from riding around in the dead of winter in a windowless car, felt icy fingers creep into her very bones.
He was going to tell her to fuck off, to get out. She could see it in the hard set of his shoulders and muscle throbbing in his jaw. She’d been shut out by Danny enough in the past to know the signs. Back then, she knew how to deal with it, knew how to wheedle and charm him back from his black moods, his cold silences.
Now she didn’t have a leg to stand on. She was still the enemy, had been when she showed up at Anne’s memorial service. Was even more so now.
Contrary to her panicked musings, Danny wordlessly pulled out his laptop and turned it on. Caroline took a risk and sat on the leather sofa next to him. She made sure to leave plenty of space between them.
“Let’s see what’s on this flash drive,” he said, his voice remarkably steady for a man sitting next to the wife of the man who had probably murdered his mother.
Caroline took a deep breath. She was spiraling out of control. She couldn’t let herself do that again, not with him. She was the queen of capable, the master of keeping it together when the shit went down.
She could not hit one of her walls now.
She focused on the screen of Danny’s laptop, taking a second to admire his desktop picture of the eastern Sierras in all their flinty, snowcapped majesty. Danny slipped in the flash drive and clicked on the icon to open the drive. The file names were all gibberish as far as Caroline could tell. He clicked open one and was prompted for a password.
Her fingers clenched in frustration. “How are we going to figure out the password?”
“Don’t worry. There’s always a back door.” Danny closed the dialog box and executed a few quick keystrokes.
Suddenly the screen went blue. Danny yelled, “No, no, son of a bitch,” at his computer. His fingers flew across the keyboard, but nothing happened. The screen stayed that same flat, annoying, royal blue, an unmistakable sign to any PC user that he or she was royally screwed.
She watched helplessly as Danny thumped at the keyboard a few more times. He tried to restart, only to be greeted by that same blue screen.
“Goddammit,” Danny said viciously. “Fucking cyber booby trap!”
“What, like a virus or something?”
He nodded. “When I didn’t enter the password it fried my hard drive.”
“What are we going to do now?” Her voice was getting that annoyingly frantic tone, but she couldn’t make herself calm down. Out of nowhere it seemed they’d been given the key to James’s murder, only to be tripped up by his cyber-terrorism.
Danny made a sound of disgust and closed his laptop. “I’ll have Toni take a look. That’s what I should have done in the first place.”
He pushed up from the sofa and walked the few steps to the kitchen. Caroline watched in disbelief as he pulled out two bottles of beer and silently offered her one.
“What are you doing? Why aren’t you calling her?” she said, ignoring the beer.
Danny closed the refrigerator and ran a hand through his hair. “I’m not calling because it’s after eleven, she’s probably in bed, and we could both use some rest. There’s nothing on that drive that can’t wait until tomorrow.”
“Someone trashed my house and tried to kill me for what’s on that disk drive.”
Danny dug a bottle opener out of a drawer, flipped off the cap, and took a deep drink of his beer before he replied. “As long as you’re here with me, you’ll be safe. Come on Caroline, it’s late, we’re both exhausted, and we’ll be able to deal with all of this a hell of a lot better after a decent meal and a good night’s sleep.”
He turned his back and started rummaging through his pantry. He seriously wasn’t going to call Toni. He was actually pulling steaks out of his refrigerator and seasoning
them like the key to her future wasn’t sitting on the coffee table three feet away.
She stomped over to the kitchen table where she’d left her purse and pulled out her phone. “What’s Toni’s number? I’ll call her myself.”
“I’m not giving you the number.” A cast iron grill pan hit the cooktop with a metallic thud.
“You’re seriously going to just eat steak and drink beer and not do anything to find out what’s on that flash drive?”
“That’s the plan.”
A red haze covered her vision as something inside her snapped. Without conscious thought her phone flew from her hand and smacked him in the back of his head.
He turned without flinching and pinned her with a steely glare. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“You’re a selfish dickhead, that’s what’s wrong with me. It’s always all about you, isn’t it, Danny? Whatever you say goes, your way or the highway. I should have seen this coming. You’re not even going to help me, are you?” She couldn’t stop the words from spilling out of her mouth. She couldn’t hold herself together any longer. She was sick of feeling powerless, sick of watching her life careen out of control while she was helpless to do anything about it. She wanted answers, now, once and for all, and Danny was willfully withholding them because he wanted to drink his beer and eat his goddamn steak. “You probably never had any intention of helping me, did you?” She heard her voice raise an octave, knew she was verging on hysteria, but couldn’t make herself calm down as all of her fear, tension, and old, festering anger came roaring out. Helpless to stop the words from pouring out of her, she lashed out at Danny. “You just wanted to you use me for the information I had, and now that you know what happened to your mother, you’re going to leave me to fend for myself, just like you always did.”
She knew her accusations were unfair, irrational, but she couldn’t escape the gut-wrenching fear that he was going to stop helping her. As scared as she was, she couldn’t blame him. She’d married his mother’s murderer, for God’s sake. Lived in his house. Slept in his bed. So what if she’d had no idea. In Danny’s world, black was black and white was white. There was no room in his world for forgiveness or redemption.
The spatula in his hand hit the floor with a clatter. “Me? Leave you to fend for yourself? Funny, I remember it being the other way around.”
“Yeah, well, you would. But then you only ever see your side of things anyway.”
“Really? Enlighten me. Because from where I was standing, there was only one side. I came home for a few days of leave and you dumped me for no reason.”
“You didn’t call, and you went out and got drunk—” her voice cracked. She didn’t want to rehash the past. None of it should matter, not after all this time. But the pain of that night slashed at her, as fresh and raw as it had been in the moment she realized it was over between the two of them.
He rolled his eyes and threw up his hands. “I needed to blow off some steam before I saw you. Are we seriously going to rehash this right now? ‘Cause unless you have some new explanation for why you went mental and overreacted, I don’t want to hear it.” He paused, scratched his chin as though in deep thought. “Scratch that. On second thought, even if you do have a new explanation, I don’t want to hear that either. I’m just glad the needy psycho bitch you were so good at hiding reared her head before I was dumb enough to marry you.”
Caroline staggered back as though she’d been slapped. She’d had a pretty good idea what he thought of her, but somehow having him say it out loud hit her like a ton of bricks. After everything she’d done for him, all she’d given him, the way she’d stood up to him and stood by him through all the ways he tried to push her away.
Needy psycho bitch.
That was the one line descriptor she got in the story of Danny Taggart’s life.
“I had a miscarriage,” she spat out, before she had even a second to weigh the impact of finally launching that grenade after holding on to it for twelve long years.
He froze, then shook his head, blinking like he hadn’t heard her right. “I thought you said James had a vasectomy.”
“It wasn’t James’s, Danny. A month after I came home from visiting you in Fort Bragg, I found out I was pregnant.”
She could practically hear his thoughts careening through his head as he remembered their lust filled weekend in that cheap hotel room.
His lips moved but no sound came out, and for the first time since she’d seen him again at the memorial service, Danny Taggart actually looked unsure of himself. He leaned against the counter and took a deep drink of his beer. “Why didn’t you tell me you were pregnant?” he said the last word almost hesitantly.
“When? During the one five minute phone conversation we had after I found out?”
His dark eyelashes cast shadows on his cheeks as he broke their stare.
“Or how about after you were deployed for three months,” she continued, “when I had no idea where you were and if you were ever coming back?” And knowing that when he did come back, he’d be even more closed off than before. It would take her weeks, months, to chip away at his defenses and get him to let her back in. By then he’d be deployed again, and they’d have to start all over.
But she would have dealt with that, would have dealt with almost anything to be with him. Because she loved him, and she loved the baby growing inside her.
Tears stung her eyes and she angrily wiped them away. “I was going to tell you in person when you came out to visit. And then when I had the miscarriage…it,” was awful, and scary and left me feeling like someone had sucked the joy out of me. “It wasn’t something I wanted to drop on you over the phone.”
She waited for him to say something. Offer an excuse for his behavior, both that night and the months before. Hell, maybe even offer an apology for her loss.
Their loss.
But he didn’t say anything, just stared silently, his gray eyes flat and lifeless, his mouth pulled in a tight, grim line.
The silence was awful, and soon words came spilling out to fill it. “After your mom disappeared it was like everything was a test. You wanted to see how hard you could push me, always making me prove that I wouldn’t crack like she did.” Caroline thought about what they’d discovered in the past few days and gave a short, humorless laugh. “Like you thought she did. And I took it. I took all of it because I loved you, and I thought I was strong enough to change you back into the person I fell in love with.” She thought he flinched, a subtle tightening of his muscles, but it happened so fast she must have been imagining it.
He drained the last of his beer and wordlessly opened another.
“You want to know the really stupid thing? After I left you that morning, I kept thinking you would come after me. I’d always been the one to smooth things over after a fight, make everything okay again, but I thought maybe if you realized you were going to lose me forever you’d care enough to come after me.” The pain in her chest was so fierce she was surprised her shirt wasn’t soaked with blood. She shouldn’t be talking about this. And it shouldn’t hurt this much anymore. His continued silence only made it more severe. She lashed out, wanting to find some hidden chink in his armor. “But I guess you were glad to rid yourself of the needy psycho bitch before I could do to you what your mom did to your dad. Oh, wait, I guess you were wrong about her too.”
She searched his face for any reaction and got none. A brick wall had come down around him, hard and impervious.
What was she expecting? That suddenly Danny would see her side of the story and beg her forgiveness?
Would she give in if he did?
Luckily it didn’t look like she’d have to answer that question because Danny had turned away without a word to stare out the window over the kitchen sink.
Unable to bear being in the same room with him, Caroline retrieved her suitcase and retreated to the spare bedroom to try to stem the bitter flow of blood that came from picking old wounds.
&nbs
p; Stop her. Grab her. Hold her. Tell her you’re sorry. Tell her if you only knew, if she’d told you. Stop her. Grab her.
Danny couldn’t make his body obey his brain’s frantic orders as he watched Caroline disappear down the short, dark hallway. He felt like he’d been hit by a Taser, Caroline’s revelation so jolting it left him paralyzed, unable to move or speak.
Pregnant. She’d been pregnant. With his baby. Their baby. And she’d lost it. Alone.
Jesus.
He wanted to scream and cry and smash things, but all he could do was sink to to the floor as his legs buckled underneath him.
Wrong. Fuck. He was so wrong about so many things.
So many choices he’d made based on things that weren’t true. And he’d been so convinced he was right. Thought he knew the score everywhere, all the time. Because of his mom’s disappearance, he’d let himself believe that any woman, anywhere, could up and leave her husband and children.
Caroline was right. He’d tested her. Pushed hard to see what she’d put up with. Even though she’d stuck by him and pulled him through one of the hardest times in his life, he didn’t trust she’d be around for the long haul. And even though he was just a kid, he’d known, deep in his gut, that Caroline was the one for the the long haul. But that didn’t stop him from trying to push her away, to test her mettle to see if she could really hack it.
He’d let it be known that he was doing what he wanted with his life, and she could either come along for the ride or get off the train. Despite her misgivings about him joining the Army Rangers, and later the Special Forces, she’d stuck by him then, too.
Jesus, he was such a jackass.
A baby.
Blood roared in his ears and the wood paneled walls of his house seemed to close in on him. He staggered to his feet and lurched for the door, needing an escape, knowing there was none. He couldn’t get away from Caroline and leave her unprotected.
And he sure as shit couldn’t escape from his own mistakes.
He burst out the sliding glass door to his deck. He looked out at the redwood forest, haloed in silver by the light of the nearly full moon. Through the trees he could make out the lights of the valley below, and beyond that the bay and the hills across the water.