Shayla swiftly brought the woman’s attention back to the problem at hand. “Fiona’s father actually refused…?”
“Flatly,” Mrs. S said. “He barely let me speak. No, he would not talk to anyone. As far as he was concerned, Fiona was done here, and that was that. So I told him you knew Fiona’s last name, of course. Fiona Fiera, and that I couldn’t stop you from calling him—Charles Fiera of Sacramento—if you looked him up.” She exhaled her disdain. “Some people! I think he thought you were Susan what’s-her-name’s—the aunt’s—downstairs neighbor. Calling about additional damages from the fire.”
“What exactly happened?” Shayla asked. “This fire. Was anyone hurt?”
“I don’t think so,” Mrs. S said. “A cat. Who lived downstairs. But not badly. She needed oxygen from one of the firefighters. The photo of that’s gone viral.” She smiled and her face transformed so completely that her pale blue eyes even sparkled. “So adorable.”
“Oh, my God, I think I saw that on Instagram,” Shay said. “But I can’t remember exactly when, was it…?”
“Friday,” Mrs. Sullivan reported as the cat lover retreated and the warrior woman’s battle mask slipped back into place. “Fiona was pulled out of class by the police.”
“Because they thought she’d set it…?” Shay glanced at Peter, who was quite possibly grinding his teeth into nubs at that news, no doubt from imagining that his daughter’s best friend was, indeed, an arsonist.
“The aunt seemed to think so on Friday,” Mrs. S reported. “There was quite a bit of screaming and accusations. Right in this office.”
“That must’ve been awful,” Shay said. “Was Maddie there?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Maybe lurking out in the hall?”
“Well, I don’t know that for sure,” the woman admitted, moving to the computer and accessing its keyboard. “But I’ll check her schedule. It was in the middle of third period and…No, she was in English with Ms. Reinberg. That’s on the other end of the building, so it’s very unlikely, even if she left to go to the bathroom, that she would’ve come all the way down here.”
“But it’s not impossible,” Peter pointed out.
“Frank’s in Maddie’s English class,” Shayla told him. “I can check to see if he remembers if she left the room on Friday.”
“Thanks,” he said.
“Actually,” Shay said, “it may have been more traumatic for Maddie if she didn’t know what happened—if her friend just vanished. If Fiona just stopped answering her phone, and didn’t respond to Facebook messages.”
Shayla didn’t know the details of Lisa’s accident, but it didn’t take much to imagine the news of her death reaching Maddie in a similar way, with initial silence, and a growing sense of dread.
Peter met her gaze, his blue eyes sharp. She knew that he was thinking, too, about all of those seemingly coded Facebook messages from Maddie to Fiona, the final one in all caps.
Where are you? Are you dead, too? Harry said, hitting the subtext on the head.
“Fiona’s aunt,” Peter said, turning back to Mrs. Sullivan. “She’s local—or at least she was, before the fire. Do you still have—”
Mrs. S was already tapping on the computer keyboard, and she interrupted before he could ask. “She was cut from the same unpleasant cloth as the father. I mean, yes. I have her work and various home phone numbers right here—” she pointed at the screen “—but I wouldn’t be shocked if, when I called her, she also refused to talk to you.” She looked from Peter to Shayla, widening her eyes substantially. “Oh! But if you’ll excuse me for just a few minutes, I realize I forgot to start the pot of coffee in the back room. I must do that immediately.” And with that, she turned abruptly on her sensible heels and disappeared through the door to the back, this time closing it firmly behind her.
Shay looked at Peter. “Was that the invitation to break the rules that I thought it was?”
“Yeah.” Peter nodded.
She smiled. “Go, Mrs. S!”
But the little half-door built into the room-long counter was securely locked—and it was designed so that students couldn’t simply reach over from this side and unlock it.
Peter put his hat down and was about to push himself up and over the barrier so he could look at the contact info Mrs. S had left up on the computer monitor for them to see, but Shay stopped him.
“Let me,” she said. “I’m a civilian. Let’s not get you into trouble.”
“I don’t mind trouble,” he said.
“Yeah, yeah.” She waved him off, kicking off her sandals. “Navy SEAL. Middle name’s trouble, I got it. Still. Let’s not tempt fate. Give me a boost.” She made a classic foothold by interlocking her fingers as example, and when he did the same, she stepped into his hands and he lifted her effortlessly up so that her butt was on the counter. She swung her legs over and slipped down, and…There was the info they needed, right on the screen. “Susan Smith—oh, God, yes, with that name, she’d’ve been hard to track—Mrs. S, you are an angel.” She rattled off the phone numbers—home, work plus extension, and cell—as Peter put them right into his phone. “Ooh, as long as we’re here…” A simple downward scroll revealed info—separate no doubt because of divorce—for both Fiona’s father and mother, and Shayla read that to Peter, too. Phone numbers and addresses in—bingo!—Sacramento.
It was easier to get back over the counter from this end, since there was a desk-level surface that she could climb onto with her knees before squatting and getting her bottom up onto the counter. She swung her legs back over.
And then Peter was there to catch her—not that she needed or expected him to do that. In fact, he made her dismount awkward, because she ended up doing a full-length slide down the entire front of his body. His extremely solid uniform-clad body.
Like that wasn’t distracting.
She landed with her toes on the ground, with her hands braced on his shoulders. His hands were on her hips as he still held her tightly, his face mere centimeters from hers.
Up close, those eyes were crazy beautiful—the blue was streaked with white and black and even gold.
Up close, the lines on his golden-tanned face—from wisdom and laughter and spending too much time unprotected in the sun—were even more attractive.
He’s not as young as you pretend that he is.
Yeah, she could see that from this proximity.
Shayla knew that this was a moment. They were having a moment, or maybe she was having a moment, and he was having something else entirely—something weird and embarrassing and awkward. Whatever it was, time suspended and hung as he didn’t let her go and she, likewise, didn’t pull away. But he also didn’t lower his head to do something like, oh, say, kiss her. In fact, he didn’t freaking move.
So kiss him!
Peter’s pretty eyes flickered down to her mouth and then back, because, God, she’d obviously just looked hard at his mouth. And now she was the one who was flashing hot and cold with weirdness and awkward embarrassment, but she still couldn’t pull away.
It’s up to you. He’s too much of an officer and a gentleman.
Or maybe not. Maybe Peter just didn’t want to kiss her. She was, after all, the neighbor—they were friends. Help-him-write-deeply-personal-stories-about-his-teenaged-love-affair-with-his-daughter’s-mother kind of friends. Not touch-the-roof-of-his-mouth-with-her-tongue friends.
KISS HIM!
“No,” Shayla said forcefully in response to Harry’s head-filling demand—except, whoops, she’d just shouted in Peter’s startled face.
He, of course, immediately let her go with a quick “Jesus, sorry, I’m so sorry!”
“No, no! I didn’t mean you! I wasn’t talking to—shit!” she countered quickly, but in scrambling away from him, she stepped on her sandal exactly the wrong way. “Oh, God!” It was reminiscent of a Lego to the bare arch in the dark of night—a full ten on the parental agony WTF scale. This was compounded by the fact that she’
d just released the crazy krakens in a verbal geyser that couldn’t be easily explained. That no I just shouted in your face was in response to my invisible friend. Yeah, that was going to go over well.
She completed her current circus act by tripping on her other sandal, and would’ve gone down to the floor if Peter hadn’t lunged to catch her again. She grabbed for him, too, her hands now on the warmth of his skin—deliciously smooth over the hard steel of those insane muscles—as she tightly held on to him just above his elbows and below his shirtsleeves.
And then, because she was an idiot, she opened her mouth and blurted out the words he’d said to her in the truck: “Nice arms.”
It was supposed to be funny or clever or maybe both funny and clever, but nope. And yes, now they were definitely both sharing the exact same type of moment—the weird, embarrassed, awkward kind.
“Yeah, wow, um,” Peter said as he made sure she was steady before he let her go.
Shay’s mind was blank—solidly, stupidly blank—save for the sounds of Harry’s deep sigh and eye roll.
Say something, Harry then urged.
“Did you know that some people can actually taste words?” Shay asked Peter.
Not that. Harry started to laugh his despair.
“No, seriously,” she said, straightening her clothes—her shirt had pulled up a bit, kind of the way Captain Kirk’s did in his classic Trek uniform. The actor, William Shatner, had learned to compensate for the low-budget design by grabbing the bottom hem and giving an authoritative tug downward, and it had become an iconic gesture of decisiveness and command. She now did the same. See? Totally in control. Except for the sound of Harry’s laughter echoing madly inside of her head.
Peter, meanwhile, was looking a tad confused.
“One of my characters had really bad migraines,” she told him, “but I don’t get ’em, I’m lucky, right? Anyway, I went onto one of those medical symptom–checker websites to do a little research and while I was surfing around, I saw that one of the things on their general symptoms list was Can you taste words? And ever since then, I’ve used that as a personal benchmark. How’m I doing? Great, because you know what? Things might be bad, but I’m still not tasting words.”
Peter laughed as Harry finally stopped.
But before Shayla could segue into an explanation of how she wasn’t crazy, she was just a writer, and sometimes writers talked to the fictional character who resided in their heads, Mrs. Sullivan chose that moment to re-emerge from the back room.
“Sorry about that,” the woman announced. She eyed Peter’s cover, which he’d set on the counter next to the folder, and Shay knew that she, too—like all women of a certain age—itched to embrace her inner Debra Winger and try it on. “Is there anything else I can help you with today?”
Peter moved the picture of Fiona to reveal the photo of the two young men from the parking garage. “Do you know either of these men?” He pointed. “This one’s Daryl Middleton; the other we only know by his nickname. Dingo.”
Shay cleared her throat to ask, “Is it possible they were former students?”
Mrs. S took the photo and looked closely. “Daryl Middleton, no. That’s a family name I would’ve remembered.” She glanced up. “I’m a bit of an Anglophile.”
“I know that that probably wasn’t a non sequitur,” Peter said. “But…”
“Prince William’s wife’s name is Kate Middleton,” Shay murmured.
“Ah. What about Dingo?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” Mrs. S said, but she didn’t sound convinced. “I’m sorry, it’s hard to tell. Add a few years, plus the facial hair…That boy-to-man change can be extreme. But if you can leave the photo, I’ll ask around the teachers’ lounge.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Izzy was sad.
He’d pretended not to be as he’d dropped Eden and their giant extended family off at the airport. He’d actually rented a passenger van to do it, because traveling with a baby was a logistical nightmare, requiring almost as much gear as was needed for a seven-man SEAL team.
That gear plus the five traveling humans of varying sizes—Eden, her brother Dan who was also Izzy’s SEAL teammate, Dan’s wife Jenn and their super-baby Colin, plus Eden and Danny’s teenaged brother Ben—wouldn’t fit into an everyday, average vehicle. And the van rental was financially cheaper than hiring a car service, and emotionally cheaper—gods forbid—than waking up at zero-dark-thirty to make two separate airport runs.
Also? Since Izzy had the thing for twenty-four hours, it suddenly occurred to him that he could use it to help Grunge at the low, low price of nearly free. He could pop on up to Palm Springs, and at least start to move all that stuff out of the storage unit and into the officers’ garage.
His plan was to zap Grunge a text—maybe swing past the man’s house and pick up the padlock key—as soon as he got less sad.
I’m sorry you’re not coming, too. Danny had actually said that to Izzy, out loud and clearly enunciated, before he’d followed Jenn and the baby into the airport terminal. And yeah, part of Dan’s sorrow had to do with the fact that a weeklong visit to Jenn’s family back east could be exhausting. But Ben and Eden would be there to help Dan and Jenn—at least they would be when they weren’t off visiting colleges.
Missing that was what made Izzy most sad. He’d wanted to go, too—mostly so he could continue to talk up all the great schools in nearby SoCal.
But one of the biggest problems created by being related through marriage to a teammate was that they couldn’t always take leave at the same time.
And this time, sadly, Izzy had had to stay behind.
This morning, Eden had lingered, holding Izzy close as Dan and Ben humped their luggage into the terminal. She wasn’t fooled by his pretending to not be sad. She’d sweetly kissed him goodbye, and then hugged him again, seductively whispering, “You should stop for pancakes at the Grill on your way home.”
Ah, his woman knew him well.
Blueberry pancakes with real maple syrup, an order of scrambled eggs and bacon, and the Grill’s homemade sourdough toast…
Izzy pulled into the Grill’s driveway. It was still early enough that there were plenty of spaces in the lot, so he prepared to get slightly—just slightly—less sad.
“I got an automated phone system. Fiona’s aunt Susan works in a law office here in San Diego,” Shayla said, her cellphone to her ear as Pete followed her out of the high school and back to his truck. She’d already dialed the woman’s work number, even though it was still too early for most offices to be open. “Discount Family Law. They open at nine. I think we should just show up, have a conversation face-to-face. You know, not call first.”
“That’s smart,” Pete agreed. “Although, I’m wondering if I should fly up to Sacramento.”
“You might want to wait until after we hear from Lindsey,” she reminded him. “If she can give us Dingo’s real name, and maybe even his local address—or even Daryl Middleton’s address…While Fiona’s leaving seems to be the likely catalyst to Maddie’s current crisis, I’m not sure what this girl could tell us that we can’t find out by staying local. I mean, yes, if we come up short with info about Dingo and Daryl…”
Pete opened the door for her and as she climbed in, she gave him one of her looks—but this was one he hadn’t seen before. It was less attitude and more, well, vulnerable for lack of a better word. “You don’t have to do that. I’m capable of opening a door for myself.”
“I know,” he said. “I just, um…want to.”
She was still embarrassed about the weirdness that had happened in the office—that was what he was seeing in her eyes. So he caught her arm—nice arms, oh Jesus, he was an idiot—and even though her skin beneath his fingers was almost unbearably soft and smooth, he made himself hold on until she met his gaze again. At which point, he said, “I’m great at a lot of things—” okay, whoa, back it down there, Bozo “—I’m a SEAL, so I’m highly trained and highly skilled, and f
rankly I’m even more proud of my chops as a BUD/S instructor, but the truth is, I’m a fuckup when it comes to women, Lisa being Exhibit A. I’ve never really had a woman as a friend—” he caught himself again “—one who’s not married or engaged to a teammate, anyway. And you’re really pretty, and you’re funny, and Jesus, you’re smart, and that’s really attractive. And every now and then, I slip and run the pattern—the bar hookup pattern—and stupid things come out of my mouth, or I do something disrespectful, like help you down but then not let go. I just wanted to, well…I apologize. Your friendship means a lot to me, and I don’t want to mess it up.”
She was sitting there, gazing up at him, and for a moment he just lost himself in the dark brown warmth of her eyes, in the full curve of her lips….
Which was exactly what he was trying not to do. He cleared his throat, and forced himself to take a step back instead of leaning even further in, because yeah, he was doing that, too. Shit.
“Well, I happen to be great at a lot of things, too,” Shayla said. It was possible she was mocking his rocky start, but then she added, “I am, after all, a mother of teenagers, and that training’s pretty intense. Maybe not as physically intense as BUD/S. I was curious so I did a little research on that last night. But Quitting is not an option”—she quoted a well-known SEAL motto—“and The only easy day was yesterday absolutely apply.”
And huh. Last night while Pete had Googled her, she’d also been Googling him. Well, maybe not him per se—unlike her, his work tended to be secret, so he didn’t have a website. But she’d clearly been interested enough to seek more info.
“One of the things I’m very good at is being a friend,” she told him. “So relax. I appreciate that you caught yourself—what did you call it? Running the pattern. Nice arms was good subbing in for whatever your animal-brain was reacting to—I won’t bother guessing—because I do have nice strong arms, thanks.” She held them out and her triceps moved. “Not as strong as yours, but strong enough, and trust me, as a woman, I’ll never turn down a compliment about my strength.”
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