SULLIVAN'S MIRACLE

by Lindsey Longford

  “My fault, too, because I’ve known all along it was over, and I didn’t want to face it. I’d look into your eyes, Mags, and I couldn’t find you. I hoped things would return to normal once you got out of the hospital and back on the job, but this is normal now, isn’t it?” He rocked her against him, and Maggie hoped he, too, found solace in the touch.

  She could have lied when she saw his eyes, could have pretended that she’d felt something, but honesty cut cleanly and was, in the long run, kinder. For everything he’d taught her, she owed him, and so she nodded, ending whatever they’d shared.

  “It feels … wrong, Royal.”

  “How can it be wrong, babe? Who are we hurting?” he asked, misunderstanding.

  “Wrong for me.” She knew she couldn’t make him understand the odd sense of falseness that left her unresponsive to his clever touch. “There’s nothing there for me.”

  He rested his chin on top of her head. Close to her heart, his chest rose as he sighed, and his heart slowed to a steady, reassuring beat. “That’s what I was afraid of,” he said, breaking the silence. He stepped back, rolling down his sleeves and fastening them before he looked at her.

  Stooping, he scooped up the gray velvet box. He dropped it and grabbed it again, grinning ruefully. “It was a swell ring, babe. You would have liked it.” He tossed it up and down in the air, finally lobbing it her way. “Why don’t you keep it?”

  Catching the tiny, rounded box with both hands, she couldn’t answer. If anything, she was afraid she’d say too much, too little, and so she clutched the small package in shaking hands and waited. Her eyes filled.

  “Don’t cry, Mags. It’s not the end of the world. I’ll survive. It’s only a ring,” he said, his voice light with amusement, but she’d seen the clumsiness that had earlier betrayed him.

  “I know.” The velvet was soft against her fingers. She handed him the ring box. “But why can’t I feel the way I used to? I want to!”

  That was as much as she could say. If she admitted anything else to him, he’d have her in the department psychologist’s office before she could turn around. She’d be back on sick leave with bills stacking up. She couldn’t afford that. She couldn’t tell Royal about the terrifying shifts in awareness that left her bewildered and anxious. She trusted him, of course she did—he was her partner. But what if she made a mistake by telling him? Torn, she said, meaning it from the bottom of her heart, “I’d give anything for things to be the way they were!”

  “People change,” Royal said. “That’s life, Mags.”

  It was his smile that had her standing on tiptoe and wrapping her arms around him. In spite of everything, Royal could still smile, and that cocky grin touched her. Whatever his feelings were, he’d never been a man to wear them on his sleeve, and he wouldn’t now. She kissed him as he’d said, “For old times’ sake.”

  Brushing his hair lightly, regretfully, she said, “I have feelings for you, Royal. Can’t we still be friends?”

  He laughed. “Friends? Babe, you’re something else. I don’t know if we can be friends. I’ve never had the urge to spend long hours in bed tangled up in the sheets with my friends.” He rubbed the velvet case against her cheek. “We’d have been something, Mags.”

  “Can we still be partners? At least that?” She didn’t want to lose Royal from her life. He shared her past.

  He snapped the lid of the case open and shut. “I guess people don’t die from a broken heart.”

  Maggie touched his hand, closing his fingers around the ring box. “Your heart isn’t broken, Royal,” she said. “Not yours.”

  “No?”

  She straightened his collar and smiled for what they’d shared. “I don’t think so.”

  “You’re probably right.” His answering smile didn’t quite reach his eyes. “You’re asking a lot, though. We’ll see how it goes.” He chucked her lightly on the chin, slipped the jewel box into his jacket and walked to the apartment entrance.

  Following him, she opened the door. Like a long-lost memory, night flowed in and settled around her, hot and still.

  Royal rattled the doorknob and turned. Looking down at her, he grinned and shrugged, his amusement directed at himself. “One for the road, Mags, right?” He pulled her into his arms. Cupping her neck, he kissed her hard on the mouth, regret in the suddenly unpolished movement of his mouth against hers.

  When she opened her eyes, she was alone in the room and her eyes were wet.

  *

  Sullivan had lost track of how long he’d stayed in the live oak-shrouded courtyard staring up at Maggie Webster’s windows.

  He couldn’t escape the impression that he was being set up. Officer Maggie had arrived too soon after Sullivan’s source had promised he could get documents linking county officials with favorable zoning regulations for certain highly placed people. In the south, old ties ran deep and strong. Like the roots of the banyan tree, those ties could erupt unexpectedly and trip the unwary. Still an outsider in Palmaflora after twenty years, he knew how covert the old boys’ network could be.

  No, he didn’t trust Officer Maggie, and seeing her with Royal Gaines outside the newspaper office had strengthened that mistrust. Gaines was literally the police department’s fair-haired boy. His seemingly effortless rise through the ranks had triggered Sullivan’s curiosity more than a year ago, and he’d begun keeping an eye on Royal Gaines.

  Curiosity and an innate cynicism, Sullivan thought as he watched the shadows against Maggie’s drawn shades. Maggie Webster and Royal Gaines. He watched their silhouettes moving soundlessly, merging, separating, merging, and remembered the sharp hunger leaping forth when he’d first seen Maggie Webster.

  Mesmerized by the shadows against the shades, he couldn’t look away. A voyeur to their passion, he wanted Lizzie with an unspeakable longing. Imagining the unheard murmurs, sighs, imagining the unseen touches between Maggie and the golden-haired detective, he was swamped with a loneliness so black and all-consuming that when the shadows separated one last time, breaking the connection that bound them, he hunkered down, his arms around his knees, his fists drumming against the shell driveway.

  He wanted Lizzie in his arms, wanted the sweetness of her hair brushing his eyelids in the night. “Lizzie,” he whispered, rubbing his empty palms against his eyes, his grief as sharp as the night he’d found her still and forever silent in the beach house.

  *

  Chapter 3

  « ^ »

  A long time after Royal left, Maggie poured another glass of iced tea and carried it to the VCR. Slipping an unlabeled tape out of a box, she inserted it into the machine and knelt down on the bare floor close to the television. Tuning to Channel 4, she pressed Play on the VCR remote control.

  She’d studied the tape so often she knew it frame by frame. Tonight she needed to see it again.

  In front of her in grainy, jerky motions, figures moved. Mounted high on a wall, the camera had been an indifferent observer to the tragedy it was recording in black and white.

  In the corner of the screen, one small, blue-jeaned woman in a loose T-shirt stood motionless. Twenty feet away, a tall, stringy-haired man in a rubber mask stood sideways to her. He gestured with a shotgun at the clerk and the two children huddled in front of the counter.

  Cautiously, her curly hair obscuring her face from the camera, the woman edged her right hand into the waistband at the back of her jeans. Pulling out a pistol, she extended it in front of her in a two-handed grip, the gun unwavering on the masked man. “Freeze! Police!” she shouted. At her words, he turned, step one, turned, step two, and fired.

  Maggie peered at the screen.

  Stop. Rewind. Play.

  “Freeze! Police!”

  Stop. Rewind. Play.

  The scene never changed.

  Hit in the chest, the diminutive figure of the woman spun sideways, falling, her dark hair whipping left, right, left, her lips moving, saying something lost in the explosion of shots as she fell endlessly
to the floor.

  On the nineteen-inch screen, Maggie saw herself struggle to her knees, saw herself brace her hands around the gun and fire twice, saw her eyes close as she slid unconscious against a pyramid of cat-food cans tumbling around her.

  During her months of recuperation, she’d watched the tape several times a day. The woman who was herself—the woman with her hair, her face, her body—moved, always in slow motion it seemed, spinning, falling, spinning, with the sound of gunshots loud and real. But no matter how often she’d watched the tape during those long, confusing months, Maggie never lost the sense that the self she saw spinning and falling to the ground was someone she’d known in another lifetime.

  No matter how often she played the scene and heard herself shout, “Freeze! Police!,” the scene was unreal, the memory lost in her consciousness when she’d fallen to the floor, that woman with the gun alien to her.

  Once more she pressed the buttons.

  Stop. Rewind. Play.

  “Freeze! Police!”

  And the woman spun and fell, spun and fell.

  The scene never changed.

  *

  In the dark kitchen of the beach cottage, Sullivan poured the last of the bourbon into the Wedgwood cup. The bottle wobbled as he put it down, then rolled to the edge of the table. He caught it one-handed.

  He’d been drinking steadily over the hours since returning from Maggie Webster’s courtyard, but oblivion eluded him. Rats in a flooding basement, his thoughts scrabbled ferociously to the surface and he drank to muffle their shrieks.

  The liquor stung all the way down. Until tonight, he’d stayed away from liquor. Until tonight, he’d let his thoughts eat at him during the long hours from dusk to dawn. Until today, when Maggie Webster had walked into his life, he’d made it a crazy point of honor of carrying on without anesthesia.

  As unlike Lizzie as two people could be, Maggie Webster had pushed him over the edge. She’d torn the lid off his submerged feelings about Lizzie. In Maggie Webster’s presence, all the heartache of loving Lizzie, of losing her, of never being able to tell her he’d forgiven her the instant he’d walked out of her door, had come boiling up from the volcano of his subconscious and overwhelmed him.

  As Sullivan swished the cup back and forth, it left wet circles on the wooden table. If he still believed in mercy, he would pray for blessed numbness. His Judas brain kept firing images of Lizzie, kept broadcasting sounds he didn’t want to think about. He rubbed his head. Images and sounds shifted, clicked, blurred, while unconsciousness eluded him.

  Under a moonless summer sky, the gulf was a flat, darker shade licking at the beach. Sullivan lifted the cup to his mouth and sipped.

  He’d moved into the beach cottage because Lizzie had left it to him. Breaking his own apartment lease and boxing up his gear, clothes and computer in one afternoon, he’d shut the door behind him and headed for the cottage.

  He’d moved in because it was all he had of her.

  Yet there was no lingering sense of his Lizzie, not in the piles of shell fragments, not in the things she’d touched. Night after night, surrounded by Lizzie’s possessions, wanting her beyond comprehension, he lay awake listening to the rhythms of the tides.

  It was as if she’d never been.

  But he stayed. Drinking from her cup. Rubbing the bits and pieces of sand-smoothed glass she’d collected. Sleeping alone in the bed they’d shared. What sly part of his skeptical, rational mind had let him hope some atom of his Lizzie lingered here in salt-bleached boards and sandy rooms?

  The cottage was as empty as his soul.

  Sullivan got up and went to the cupboard. Even in the dark he found the whiskey and opened it, drinking straight from the bottle.

  Through the open windows, pine trees whispered and murmured in the night wind.

  He wanted to smash the bottle to the floor, wanted to hit his head against the cabinets until he couldn’t think, wanted to howl until his throat was raw.

  Instead, with hands as steady as a surgeon’s, he lifted the bottle again to his lips.

  Air curled around his bare ankles.

  A shadow drifted between the deck and the open kitchen door. In the corner of his eye Sullivan caught the movement and set the bottle on the counter. Glass rattled hollowly against ceramic tile and he edged away from the counter, behind the refrigerator. He flexed his fingers and remained still.

  The rustle of pine trees, the far-off sound of a boat engine and the even hum of the refrigerator motor were all he heard. He’d learned how to survive in six long years as a Navy SEAL, and as he moved quietly through the kitchen in the thick darkness, the shadowy figure might have been an unknown enemy from long ago, swimming toward him through muddy water.

  He inhaled slowly as he cleared his mind of the blending of past and present. He waited patiently, vague curiosity stirring in him as the smell of bourbon and whiskey rose to him from his pores. The edges of his brain were becoming as mushy as jellyfish, but he would have his chance. Against the bomb planted in his car, he’d had nothing but luck. He’d attempted to manufacture an interest in the outcome, but he’d told Maggie Webster the truth. He didn’t give a damn what happened to him.

  Misty, the figure hovered in the dark.

  Salt air and pine trees, a sweetness on the barely moving air.

  “You might as well come in,” Sullivan said, staying in the darker shadows of the kitchen.

  Lightly, lightly, the figure moved toward him.

  The wind bore that faint scent, familiar and piercing, to Sullivan as he waited. Flower-scent, Lizzie fragrance, drifting to him as he heard the heavy thud of his heart over the quiet sound of the gulf unfolding against the beach. Bewildered, he rubbed his eyes, laboring for comprehension.

  Memories and loss. Fragrance he’d known in her hair, on her pillow, on his skin. Clinging to his sanity in an alcohol-induced haze, Sullivan felt his world turn inside out.

  “Lizzie?” he whispered, afraid to move. The scent surrounded him, hung in the air. “Lizzie?” he repeated, reaching her in two strides.

  Waking from an unending nightmare, he touched her and she was real, real, and in his arms. Doubting his senses, he touched her. Satin skin slipping under his fingers. Against his heart she fit as she always had, the touch of her flooding the emptiness in his soul.

  In the darkness he saw her, knew her and was awake at last with her in his arms and the future shining ahead of them.

  “I had such a dream, sweetheart. So crazy,” he whispered, bending to her, shaking as he breathed in the essence of her fragrance. He ran his hands over her, slipping his hands down her slender arms to join his fingers with hers. “You’d never believe how real.” Sullivan pressed her hands to his heart and closed his arms around her in the dreamlike dark. He couldn’t pull her close enough and his heart was thundering so hard he couldn’t hear what she murmured as he kissed her, kissed her, again and again, remembering his dream and its bitterness like salt cast on the fertile earth, destroying everything in his life.

  Her lips were soft and warm. His arms were around her waist, his fingers gripping her shirt, and he was trembling with need, all the need he’d buried in his dream. She was here, chasing away the sad ghost of his dreams. Slicking her hair back, he breathed deeply of her remembered fragrance. She said something as he lifted her hair to his face, but he’d brought all that soft hair to his eyes, his nose, his lips, and he was raising her in his arms, shudders rolling through him. “Ah, Lizzie, I dreamed I’d lost you, that you’d gone and left me behind. You could never be that cruel. I should have known it was only a nightmare, not real.”

  He bent his head to her warm skin—how cold it had been in his dream—and took her lips again. He was frenzied in his need. Lips and skin weren’t close enough, and desperate with hunger, he plunged deeply into the cave of her mouth, seeking her. And as he tasted her, her lips the sweetest honey as they blossomed and opened for him, it still wasn’t close enough.

  And like dark honey h
er voice surrounded him. “Mr. Barnett.”

  She was in his blood, his soul, everywhere. He was holding her—he could feel her heart drumming against his own—but it wasn’t Lizzie’s voice.

  Honey sliding over him, and it wasn’t Lizzie. “Mr. Barnett,” he heard her say again, nothing making sense to him with the sound of Maggie Webster’s voice.

  Sullivan couldn’t let her go. Trapped between waking and dreaming, he was lost. Dreaming. Waking. Like a bull in the pasture tormented past endurance, he shook his head.

  “Lizzie,” he muttered, burying his face once more in Maggie Webster’s thick, springy hair.

  “Mr. Barnett.”

  He couldn’t turn her loose and he couldn’t keep holding her. No, not Lizzie’s voice. Maggie Webster’s husky alto. In a freezing wind, he shook until his teeth chattered, able to understand only that he was pie-eyed, brain-dead drunk and he hadn’t been dreaming after all.

  Cruel, the awakening.

  His eyes shut, he let her slide to the floor. She was smaller than Lizzie, curved where Lizzie had been thin. His palms brushed the sides of her breasts, dropped to the swell of her hips. The top of her head bumped his chest, her hair catching in the bristles of his beard. Sullivan slipped his finger under the strands. Silk coiled around his finger. He pressed a strand against his lips. The silky filaments clung, burned, drifted away as she turned from him.

  “Where’s the light switch, Mr. Barnett?”

  Though he didn’t answer, her shadow moved easily through the room and light exploded in his eyes. He blinked as he looked at her.

  Her face was strained. She one hand against the plastic wall switch. With her other hand she hooked her hair behind her ears.

  Pictures clicked randomly in his head. Storm-cloud hair against one pale cheek. The other reddened by the scrape of his beard. The rose bloom of her lips where he’d kissed her.

  In the grip of an illusion more powerful than reality, he’d marked her with his hunger.

  Sullivan backed away until his shoulders were against the wall. Sliding down, he plunked solidly on the floor, his legs straight out. Grinding his fists into his eyes, he bent his head forward because he couldn’t bear to look at Maggie Webster when all he wanted was Lizzie. He dug his fists into his eyes until stars exploded and he could finally speak. “Officer Maggie.” His voice was rusty.