Off the Leash

by M. L. Buchman

  “If it makes you feel better. What kind of a dress?” She waved at the guards, who grinned back at her.

  Linda blinked. Her thinking hadn’t gone that far. Her last dress had been when she was fourteen for her mom’s swearing-in ceremony as a state representative. She often wondered why such intelligent people as Vermonters kept reelecting her mother, but such things were beyond her.

  “Um, a dressy dress?”

  Dilya rolled her eyes.

  “A dress I can afford.”

  “For a hot date with Chef Andrews?”

  Linda’s guard was down and the gut shot punched straight in.

  “No,” she somehow managed. Where was a medevac bird when she needed one? “Not for that,” Linda struggled to hide her feelings.

  “I like Chef Andrews,” Dilya sounded defensive. So much for pretending it didn’t hurt.

  “I like him, too. It’s not like I’m cheating on him.” Not like that statement would ever have meaning anyway because she’d blown that all to hell just last night.

  “Then what’s the dress for?” Dilya had stopped in the middle of the closed stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue as if she was considering turning around and going back into the White House.

  “I have to go to the reception and dinner tomorrow night in the Residence. I have to blend in.”

  “Ooo! Like undercover?”

  “So much for keeping that a secret.” This kid was going to be the death of her.

  “Excellent! It’s so cool. An agent gone undercover at a Residence reception.”

  Then a brief look crossed Dilya’s face. Dark. Dangerous. This pretty young teen suddenly emanated a barely-contained fury. As she heard her own words, she looked ready to take on the fight herself. She glanced up at Linda.

  “Are you good at what you do?”

  Linda flashed an image of how thoroughly she’d eviscerated Clive, then did her best to set that aside. Too good. She could only nod.

  “Really good? Protect-the-White-House kind of good?”

  Linda considered how to answer that. “I guess I’d better be.”

  Dilya studied her a moment longer, then nodded sharply.

  “Okay then.” Her expression flipped back to being the pretty teen rather than the young woman ready to go to war. No. She remembered Clive’s whispered comment, ‘war orphan.’ Dilya was ready to go back to war. “I’ve gotta get a nice dress too.”

  Linda wondered at the dual personality she’d just witnessed: Dilya’s public persona and the fierce child-warrior beneath.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” Dilya’s expression saddened.

  “Like what?”

  “Like I’m an alien. I never killed anyone. I would have, but my new mom took care of that for me so I didn’t have to.” And she stated it like simple fact.

  “Didn’t have to?”

  “Two men shot my real parents point-blank because we walked into the wrong place at the wrong time. Them I could have killed.” There was no hint of doubt in her voice. “It made her sad, and I get why now. Back then I was too young to understand the price. Still I would have done it—they deserved to die.”

  A tone that Linda instantly recognized as having come from her own mouth just this morning. No such thing as love. If she was so sure, then why did it hurt so much?

  “Okay,” Linda managed a breath, then remembering a long ago promise badly broken, she decided it was time to try trusting again. She held out a pinkie. “I hereby solemnly swear to never look at you funny again—provided you promise the same. No matter how ridiculous either of us is being. And you promise never to make fun of my dog either.”

  Dilya hesitated only a moment before hooking her pinky with Linda’s and nodding with all the solemnity of a Supreme Court Justice.

  “Maybe we should get matching dresses,” Dilya firmly declared the topic closed after shaking their joined pinkies up and down three times.

  “That wouldn’t be very undercover, would it?” Linda did what she could to match the girl’s easy tone. “Besides, I don’t think we wear quite the same styles.” Today Dilya was wearing distressed green jeans that clung tightly to her thin legs, massive black snow boots with all the buckles undone and tinking together with each step like muted sleigh bells, and a heavy red hoodie that asked Is it too late to be good? She looked like a dark-haired elf needing only a Santa hat. “You do know that Christmas was last month?”

  “Duh!”

  Right. Because it was a satiric statement about teens never getting their act together. By a teen who apparently had her act totally together. Linda knew that was a gift she’d never possessed herself.

  “Classy but affordable,” Dilya confirmed and led the way.

  They walked in silence back along G Street.

  “Elegant but will make men’s tongues hang out,” Dilya said suddenly.

  “Dilya!” How old was this girl?

  “What my mom—Kee, my adoptive mom, but she cried the first time I called her Mom and she never cries, so I always give that to her—would call boardroom-street-walker clothes.”

  “Dilya!” This fifteen-year-old was absolutely not fifteen, except perhaps in her sense of humor. Fine. “Get a grip, kid. What on earth makes you think I could pass as either one, even if I wanted to?”

  Dilya stopped right in the middle of the sidewalk and they were nearly plowed under by the hurrying locals. “Hold your hair back in a ponytail and unzip your jacket to here,” Dilya pointed to just between Linda’s breasts.

  She handed Dilya Thor’s leash and did as she was ordered, while the girl inspected her critically.

  Then Dilya turned to a department store window. Linda hadn’t even realized there were department stores here though she’d walked this route every day—except last night of course when she’d been coming from Clive’s apartment.

  A mannequin in the window wore a fire-engine red sheath dress that clung so tightly that she could see the seam joints in the mannequin itself. It ended about half an inch below the mannequin’s crotch. She wore matching red vinyl boots that almost reached the hem, but not quite.

  “Not no, but hell no, Dilya.”

  “Weird,” Dilya continued her inspection between Linda and the dummy.

  “What?”

  “You’re right.”

  “Adults aren’t supposed to ever be right?” Linda remembered that clearly from her childhood, but that was because they never were—which didn’t bode well at the moment.

  “Never, especially not about themselves. Mom acts like she’s still working deals on the streets of East LA even when she’s busy winning FBI sniper competitions. But you’re right. You’re super pretty, but you look too nice to be anything bad.”

  Oh Sweet Christ! The kid was gonna kill her. “Too nice” didn’t describe anything that she was or had done since she was younger than Dilya.

  “I did say look too nice,” her smile had a distinctly diabolical twist to it, stating that she’d easily read Linda’s expression.

  “Dilya, if this is going to work, you’re going to have to promise me two things.”

  “What?”

  “One, stop reading my mind.”

  “No promises.”

  “Two, don’t you dare abandon me in a dress store.”

  Dilya laughed. “Okay. That part’s cool.”

  They worked their way down the street analyzing the window displays together—each one a different statement: business, sexy, dressy, clubby, and something Dilya called athleisure (designed to make the rich look as if they were also sporty and might actually be willing to get their fingers dirty—if it was for the right activity and didn’t muss their hair). When they reached the main entrance, Linda knew one thing for certain: she was even more out of her depth than she’d thought.

  Clive scraped his third batch of batter into the garbage just as Chef Klaus came over to him. The chocolate kitchen had warmers to melt chocolate, but for baking he had to cross over to the main kitchen.

  �
�What was wrong with that one?”

  Not trusting himself to speak in his frustration, Clive handed the chef both a large and a small Pocky stick from his latest test bake.

  Klaus took his time inspecting each element. “The shape is good—even and nicely round. You have the color right.” He bent each one. Both made a crisp snap as he did so. “Good bake.”

  Then he bit on the small one and grimaced. He picked up the larger one and eyed Clive.

  Clive just shook his head. Yes, it was worse. The batter had been fine yesterday. He had no idea what he was doing wrong.

  Chef Klaus dropped the sticks on the pile of goo in the garbage can.

  “When I become stuck, what I do is go and have a walk.”

  Clive didn’t have time to walk it off. The entire day had been wasted and he—

  “Go! Gehst du hier raus! Spazieren gehen! Go away! Walk until whatever mess is in your head is cleared out. Das problem, es ist nicht im recipe. Es ist in dem chef.” Then Klaus turned on his heel and walked away.

  Clive cleared up his space and hung up his apron. The kitchen was already gearing up for tomorrow night’s dinner—a half-dozen chefs scrambling through all of the prep work that could possibly be done in advance. He should be done with the sticks and moving on to the dessert soup. He should have been there hours ago.

  Instead, he stepped out of the kitchen and stood in the Basement Hall that connected the kitchen, his shop, flowers, carpentry, and the one-lane bowling alley that ran outward beneath the center of the North Portico’s steps.

  He couldn’t go outside. He might run into Linda walking the fence line with Thor. He absolutely wasn’t ready to face that. He didn’t know if he’d ever be ready again. His pain and disbelief had turned to the stage of anger and it didn’t feel like bargaining was going to happen any time soon. The grief counselor for his mother’s death had merely been irritating—anyone tried that on him right now and they might find themselves baked into a cake with four-and-twenty lethal piercings by massive pieces of sugar work.

  Walk. Chef Klaus had said to walk and he didn’t want to be caught in the back hall ignoring the chef’s command. So he walked. When he reached a junction, he turned; when he reached stairs, he descended. When he reached others, he ascended.

  All the same to him.

  He wasn’t going anywhere.

  He and Linda weren’t— They definitely weren’t going anywhere. The woman had such a twisted up, demented view of the world that he couldn’t imagine what he’d seen in her in the first place.

  Sure, she was beautiful. Their bodies had a connection that he’d thought was undeniable. And she had an inner drive that was amazing to witness. So many of the women he met only had an inner drive to power. Linda’s was externally focused. She caught bad guys for a living. She—

  Why in all creation was he thinking of her? Done. Gone. And the anger inside him flared back to life. The only thing he could equate it to was his father. Clive had hated having a father who showed up for a week every few months and expected no more than his meals and his beer. He gave back even less before departing again—leaving his wife sadder each time. Nic Andrews had sent home his paychecks. He’d only been cruel through emotional negligence, not intention.

  Okay, maybe not like Linda.

  She’d slashed at him out of—

  Clive stumbled to a halt and looked through the doorway in front of him. Miss Watson sat at her dingy desk, her small lamp illuminating only her knitting except for some reflection which lit up her blue eyes. She peered at him in curiosity.

  She didn’t speak.

  At a loss for what else to do, Clive stepped in and sat down on the teetering stool and looked about the tiny, dim office.

  “What’s with all the books?”

  “I’m a librarian.”

  “A basement librarian?”

  She might have smiled. She might not.

  “Maybe you’re an alien librarian. Is there a tunnel here under the White House that leads to Area 51?”

  “That’s a long way off,” she kept knitting without looking down. He could do that sometimes, when it was a simple pattern and thick yarn. She was doing it on a Fair Isle design, flipping the two yarn colors back and forth with perfect surety.

  “Maybe you have a time-space warp under your desk.” He wouldn’t put it past her. It might explain a few things. “Like in Star Trek, you know.”

  “Yes, I know Star Trek.”

  Clive waited for a while, idly looking at the book titles. Then his eyes traveled up to the only other light in the room. It splashed on the faded and ill-made scarf framed high on the wall.

  “It’s Belgian,” Miss Watson explained without prompting.

  “Not a very good job of it.”

  “It depends on what job you are expecting it to perform.”

  If there was a double-meaning there somewhere, he couldn’t pick it out. “What job did it perform? Certainly not keeping out the cold.”

  “Each five-stitch pairs are five train lines leading into Antwerp that were in view from a particular porch. Two purls were a passenger train, two knits a cargo train, a knit and purl equaled no train. Each group represents ten minutes, each row an hour. The scarf is a chronicle a week long.”

  “And the dropped stitches?” Clive stood to inspect it more closely.

  “Those are the interesting ones. Those are when there was supposed to be a train, but there wasn’t.”

  “Maybe it was running late.”

  “Actually, it was because the Nazis had replaced it with a war train. You are looking at a coded message of Nazi troop movements in and out of Antwerp prior to the Battle of the Scheldt to wrest it from Nazi occupation in September and October 1944.”

  Clive could only blink at it in surprise. “Messages in wool.”

  “Messages in wool,” Miss Watson concurred as she continued knitting.

  “Anything I should know about those socks you’re working on?”

  “Yes,” then she smiled softly for the first time since he’d met her. It made her seem almost human. “My feet get very cold in January.”

  The laugh came out of him, breaking so hard in his throat that it hurt. Again and again until he wasn’t sure if he was laughing or crying. He clapped a hand over his mouth to stop it before the tiny room was filled with the hysterical sound.

  And he could feel the outline of Linda’s fine fingers over his mouth on that first visit to his chocolate shop. Her entire face softening as his chocolate made her “have a moment.”

  That was the woman he had fallen for. But he couldn’t reconcile her with the one who had declared there was no such thing as love. If she’d done it in anger, rage, or sorrow, he could have understood. But her voice had been so cold and emotionless that it was impossible to disbelieve her—cold, hard fact. At least for her.

  “I’m so sorry, Clive.”

  Unable to speak, he kept his hand in place over his mouth despite the disconcerting double image of Linda’s hand resting there as well.

  Miss Watson had put down her knitting and leaned forward into the light so that he could see her face clearly, as if for the first time. She had been, still was, a beautiful woman and the sympathy in her eyes ran deep.

  “I should have seen it when I sat with her last night in Lincoln Square. I must be getting old to have missed it. When I teased her about your early arrival at the White House, she didn’t react at all. But I missed how cold she went.”

  He brushed at his eyes before dropping his hand. “She’s good at that.”

  “She’ll find her way through it.”

  He could only shake his head. “No. You didn’t see her. You didn’t hear what she said.” And again his throat tightened too much to allow further speech.

  The silence stretched as he fought against the tears—a battle he finally won sometime after Miss Watson’s knitting needles began their rhythmic ticking sounds once more.

  “I was in love once.”

  That m
ade him blink in surprise. It was not a possibility he’d ever considered.

  “He was a wondrous man and I used our love to betray him for my country. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

  Then she stopped knitting once more and looked at him with those piercing blue eyes. Any hint of softness was gone. Instead, the scary old lady was back and he didn’t dare move. He even held his breath.

  “It is your job not to give up on her.”

  “But she—” he could only wave his hand helplessly in the direction of his apartment.

  “No!” Miss Watson’s voice shifted from dangerous to fierce. “Had I looked deeper, maybe I could have saved him. Had I asked, perhaps he would have come with me. But now I will never know. You must not make that mistake.”

  “I did ask.”

  “Good! You must not stop doing that.”

  Clive opened his mouth and closed it again. He didn’t know if he dared. Didn’t know if he could take the brutal rejection again.

  He looked again at the scarf. Not what it appeared to be.

  The guns on the walls that barely looked like guns and probably wouldn’t at all if taken apart. The crazy collection of books. Not for reading, but for some other, unknowable purpose. And the woman knitting in the Residence subbasement who was scary, kind, and deeply sad.

  None of it what he would expect. None of it quite what it appeared.

  He thought of the three Lindas.

  The one who gave herself so completely to him…and to her dog. Who hadn’t hesitated to help Dilya train Zackie. She gave so easily.

  Then there was the intense soldier he’d first witnessed doing her mission at the James J. Rowley Training Center and again in Lafayette Square. Focused, competent…lethal.

  And finally the one that he’d only seen once. Getting dressed in front of him as casually as if she was in a locker room. Cold, heartless, frozen to the core. That was the Linda that still made no sense to him. Unless that version wasn’t what it appeared to be.

  The soldier and the sharing woman were undeniable. The heartless automaton—she was the version of Linda who he couldn’t reconcile.

  But how to reach past that persona that he’d wager she still wore like armor at this very moment? He knew, he just knew that there had to be a way. He couldn’t believe that he could fall in love with Linda if her inner essence wasn’t the giving woman rather than the automaton.