“So the bad guys got what was coming to them,” Cooper said when I finished my story.
“Thanks to Cara,” I said.
“And now you’re back to your nice, calm education beat?” Cooper wanted to know.
“Not exactly.”
In fact, when Peterson had run out of steam and shown himself out of Rob’s office, Mack Thompson had left as well, saying he and Rob would discuss it all later. I got up to leave, too. Rob called me back.
“Hang on here for a few more minutes, McPhee,” he said. “There’s another matter we still need to discuss while I have you here.”
Oh Lord, I thought, it must finally be time to pay the piper over my growing boredom with the school beat.
Rob closed his office door again behind the departing Thompson and deposited himself in front of me, leaning against his desk, one ankle crossed over the other, both hands in his pockets. He looked down at me over the rims of his reading glasses, a contemplative expression on his face.
“Look,” I said, deciding to bite the bullet, “I know you’re concerned about my coverage of the schools and that I haven’t been—”
“Your stories have been fine,” he cut me off.
“They have?” I asked, my mood improving at the thought that maybe things hadn’t been as bad as I thought.
“I wouldn’t have let them in the paper if they weren’t,” he said, and when I thought about it, I knew that was true.
“But I also know that you’re bored with the schools.”
At that, my spirits sank again.
“So now I want you to help cover cops,” he said.
“What?” I asked, gaping at him. I thought he had lost his mind, or I was losing my hearing.
“We’ve got an opening to cover the Fairfax County Police,” he said. “I’m putting you in it.”
“But, Rob,” I said, still trying to absorb what he had just said, “don’t you want somebody with a track record on the police beat?”
“As far as I’m concerned, you’ve got one,” he answered, his face still serious but the beginnings of a smile reaching his eyes. “The work you did on solving your sister’s murder ought to be track record enough for anybody.”
“But that was one case,” I pointed out. “And the Fairfax police will probably shoot us both if I show up to cover them.”
Rob started to laugh. “You’re probably right about that,” he said. “Detective Peterson will have to be sedated.” He took his hands out of his pockets and crossed them loosely in front of him.
“Listen to me, McPhee,” he went on, switching to serious again. “You can do this. You’ll do it well. I think you’ll even enjoy it. I’ve been watching you. You have the right instincts for it. You ask the right questions. You’ve got the same cynicism and suspicion that makes a good cop. Whatever Peterson thinks about your methods, you did one hell of a job on this story. And you don’t give up.” He paused for a second.
“In fact,” he said, the smile reappearing, “you may be one of the most goddamned stubborn people I have ever known in my entire life.”
“Why, thank you,” I responded, finding myself smiling back. But then I had to get serious again, too. “You’re sure about this?” I asked, because I wasn’t so certain myself.
“I am,” Rob said confidently. “But let’s do it on a trial basis. We’ll give it three months. I’ll keep an eye on your copy, and you just be your usual pain-in-the-ass self.” He smiled broadly. “Whaddaya say?”
What was I going to say? The thought of covering schools one more day suddenly was suffocating. I had not given the possibility of covering the police as my regular job a single minute’s thought. But maybe, I thought, Rob knows me better in some ways than I know myself. The more I thought about it, the better I liked the idea. I knew I had been more focused, more determined, and more interested in tracking down my sister’s killers than in anything I had written about the schools in a year. Of course, I had had a personal interest in the outcome this time. But as I thought about it I wondered if I might not find myself responding the same way to other police stories, to the idea of seeing to it that the other Brants and Barlows out there had to face their consequences as well. I looked back up at Rob. I always had trusted his judgment before. I decided to trust it now.
“Okay,” I told him. “I’ll do it. But Rob?”
“Yeah?”
“Who’s going to tell Peterson?”
Rob laughed again. A lot.
There was one final and even more surprising result from my exposure of the Brants and Barlow and my own near brush with death. I got an unexpected call from Chris Wiley, who asked me to meet him for drinks one Friday night after work.
Reluctantly, I agreed, as much out of curiosity as anything, since I had not heard a peep out of him since the day I had walked out on our lunch.
He was waiting for me for a change, in a bar booth at Houlihan’s, a Springfield restaurant that successfully manages to cater to singles and families at the same time. When I walked up, Chris gave me one of his gorgeous smiles, apparently genuine, and told me he really appreciated my meeting him.
I asked the waitress who had followed me to the booth for a Guinness, that wonderful Irish stout that can stand up without a glass and that tastes as if it were squeezed from the bark of a burned tree. It never fails to raise eyebrows when I order it, apparently not being considered a woman’s drink. Chris had seen me order it before, so he didn’t bat an eye, but he ordered a scotch rocks for himself. From the empty glass in front of him, it would be at least his second one. It made me wonder just what he was fortifying himself to say.
While we waited for the waitress to return with the drinks, Chris asked me about my run-in with Barlow and about Barlow’s and the Brants’ subsequent arrests. I gave him the short version, wondering if he really was interested or was just making conversation until he gathered up his nerve to present me with his real agenda.
“And you’re really okay?” he asked, looking genuinely concerned.
“I’m fine. I was just banged up a little from falling when I was trying to get away. But they didn’t even keep me at the hospital. It was just scrapes and bruises.”
“That must have been pretty scary,” he observed, just as the waitress put our glasses down in front of us.
“It was,” I agreed. “I thought I was dead. If it hadn’t been for the cop who was also following me, unknown to me, I would have been. Barlow missed me with the first shot, but I have no doubt he wouldn’t have missed a second time.”
Chris picked up his glass and took a large swallow. When he put it back down, I could see his facial muscles tighten as he steeled himself to say whatever had brought us here.
“Sutton,” he started, looking at me with those always arresting eyes, “I’m sorry. I’d like to have another chance.”
I was surprised into silence for a moment. I don’t know what I had expected, but it certainly wasn’t this.
“What?” I asked, sounding stupid but trying to buy time to collect my own thoughts.
“I want us to try again,” Chris explained. He glanced down at his drink and then back up at me, as if trying to make himself look me in the eye. “I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this. I’ve missed you, and I hadn’t expected to. When I saw in the paper that that guy tried to shoot you, it made me realize just how much I have missed you and what a jerk I’ve been.” He paused again.
I waited silently for him to continue, wanting to hear every word of this.
“I was really angry at first over what you said at lunch that day,” he admitted ruefully, “but I figured out that it got under my skin so much because it was mostly true. I have been afraid of getting too close to anybody. But after you told me off, and especially after I read what almost happened to you, I had to ask myself a lot of hard questions. The answers I came up with made me see some things about myself that I didn’t like very much. I’d like to try again with you; I promise things will be different this
time.”
He was sincere. And hopeful. And I was going to dash that hope, I realized. In the weeks since our argument, I had faced a lunatic with a gun. Even scarier, I had faced some tough truths about myself and my own fears of getting close. I was realizing that I had made some decisions about what I wanted from life. Things like the satisfaction and renewed interest I was finding in my job on the police beat. Like a real, adult relationship with a man, one built on trust so that we didn’t have to be afraid of each other. But I also had realized that Chris wasn’t that man.
“I’m sorry, Chris,” I said simply. “I can’t go back.”
He looked crestfallen as he comprehended what it was I was saying, that I was turning him down. Finally, after searching my face carefully, he nodded his head but continued to hold on to my hand.
“Are you sure?” he asked.
“Pretty sure,” I told him, reaching out to put my hand over his.
He looked at me. “Yes,” he said finally, “I think you are.”
He gave me a sad smile at that, took back his hand, and raised his glass to drain the last of the scotch.
“Well,” he told me, “it was worth a shot. You were worth a shot.”
“Exactly what Al Barlow said,” I replied.
Chris laughed and got up from the booth. He took a money clip out of his pants pocket and peeled off several bills, which he folded once and put down by his glass.
“Take your time and finish your drink,” he said. “You paid for the salmon salads. This is my treat.” Now I laughed, glad to see that he wasn’t devastated by my rejection of his offer of another chance.
He put the money clip away and picked up his suit jacket, which was folded on the seat beside where he had been sitting. And then he took a step to my side of the booth, put his hand against the seatback behind my head, and leaned toward me.
“Thanks, Sutton,” he said, smiling again. “For everything.” He kissed me, and I knew I would miss that, at least. We had been good together in the physical department.
And then he was gone, and I sat for another half an hour, long after I had finished the Guinness, my head against the seatback and my thoughts wandering a long way away.
Epilogue
Another few weeks later I stood at my living-room window, looking out into the night and watching the string of car headlights on I-395 sparkling in the dark like the stones that lay in the blue velvet jewel case that was open in my hands. My mother’s jewelry finally had been returned to me by the police, who had been holding it as evidence until the Brants and Barlow were convicted and sentenced.
As I studied the necklace and earrings, relieved to have them back in my possession, it was as if I could see my parents again, on the evening of their last anniversary together, my mother glowing happily in the soft light of the living-room lamps as my father stepped behind her to fasten the necklace around her neck. She had leaned against him and reached up to clasp one of his hands. He had bent his head down to kiss the top of hers. Cara and I had watched them from the sofa, the intimacy and intensity of that moment between our parents raising goose bumps on our arms.
Now they were gone, all of them. My mother, my father, my sister. I was alone here, with my memories and my mother’s jewelry.
The diamonds collected the light of the lamps in my own living room and threw it onto the dark blue of the sapphires, which reminded me of some recent but now almost forgotten dream about a man with blue eyes. Gently, I closed the jewelry box’s piano-hinged lid and held the plush velvet softness against my cheek as I looked back to the world outside. I wondered if, somewhere among those rushing cars and the busy lives of the people they carried, there was a real someone to take the loneliness away, someone to fasten my mother’s necklace around my neck and kiss my hair in the lamplight.
Guess you’d better go get your own safe-deposit box to keep those in, my ever-practical little voice said.
No, I told it, holding the box tightly, trying to recall the details of the dream, I think I’ll keep them here.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brenda English has worked in news reporting, communications and publications management, book editing, and media relations. She lives in Florida with her family.
ALSO BY BRENDA ENGLISH
SUTTON McPHEE MYSTERY SERIES
Corruption of Faith
Corruption of Power
Corruption of Justice
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Corruption of Power
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