Home Before Midnight

by Virginia Kantra

  Born in the same town, they might as well have sprung from different worlds. They were coming into this relationship—not that they had a relationship, exactly—with different expectations. Experience.

  Baggage.

  He had kissed her. Her belly quivered at the memory of his kiss. And her heart stumbled.

  But still, she was way past the age when she could pretend a kiss could make everything better.

  She looked at him, his impassive face and dark, hot eyes, and waited for him to say something.

  “Guns don’t take prints well,” he said. “Anybody smart enough to shoot Ellis and set it up to look like suicide will have wiped the gun anyway.”

  Bailey blinked. “What about . . . um . . .”

  Cops learn to compartmentalize, he had said. Depersonalize. Could she do that?

  “What about the residue tests?” she said. “Won’t those at least prove whether or not Paul fired the gun?”

  “On CSI? Sure. In real life—” Frowning, Steve reached for his cell phone. “I have to take this.”

  “You go right ahead,” she said sweetly. “You want me to go upstairs and play?”

  Oh God, she sounded like her mother.

  He shot her an annoyed look and flipped open his phone. “Burke.”

  His body went utterly, unnaturally still, his face wiped of expression.

  Her stomach pitched. Bad news, she thought.

  “Condition?” His eyes were hard. “All right. We’ll meet you there.”

  Her breathing hitched. We?

  “Not necessary,” Steve said into the cell phone. “She’s with me.”

  Oh, God. Bailey swallowed. “What is it?”

  “No, I’ll handle it. Yeah. Fifteen minutes.”

  He snapped shut the phone.

  “What is it? Was there a—” Oh, God. “Was there an accident?”

  “No. Your mother and Leann are fine.”

  “Then . . .”

  “There was a break-in at your parents’ house,” he said gently.

  “A . . .” She worked moisture into her mouth. “But she wasn’t there, right? You said she was fine.”

  “Your mother and Leann were still out shopping. But—”

  Bailey froze in rejection. “No.”

  She didn’t want to hear. She didn’t want to know. She was a writer. She knew the power of words. As long as he didn’t say it, it couldn’t have happened.

  He said, still in that grave, calm, cop’s voice, “Your father was in the house. They think he came home when the intruder was upstairs.”

  “Is he . . .”

  Steve regarded her, a terrible compassion in his eyes. “He’s at the hospital. Is there someone you can call to watch the kids? I’ll take you there.”

  SIXTEEN

  STEVE hated hospitals.

  Teresa had, too, which made it even more unfair she had ended her life in one. But at the end, she was too ill to resist him.

  He was sorry for that now. Now that it was too late.

  Compared to the chaos of Greater Southeast in D.C., the emergency department at Chapel Hill was almost orderly. The chairs looked more comfortable, too. But on a Saturday afternoon, the waiting area was full of people who couldn’t afford doctors or couldn’t wait for one. Phones rang, stock carts rattled, and babies cried under the invasive hum of the fluorescent lights. A white-faced teen in shin guards turned his face into his mother’s shoulder. An elderly man patted the arm of his mumbling wife, who kept making furtive attempts to stand. The air was sharp with disinfectant, thick with pain and patience and despair.

  Bailey braced in a chair, still in the tank top and exercise pants she must have been wearing when Sherman picked her up this morning. The harsh lighting revealed the lines of strain around her mouth and the fatigue like bruises under her eyes.

  His instinct was to take her in his arms and comfort her.

  But after her first, involuntary protest, Bailey had rallied, calling Leann’s cell phone to break the news to her mother and sister, making arrangements with a neighbor to stay with her sister’s kids and Gabrielle. Making herself useful. Going through the motions, as if efficiency could hold disaster at bay.

  She would have made a good soldier, he thought. Or a cop’s wife.

  She glanced up as he approached from the nurses’ station.

  “He’s conscious,” he reported. “They just let your mother go back to sit with him.”

  “How is he?”

  He gave her the best answer he could. “The nurse says he looks good. They’re waiting to see the doctor now.”

  “Can I see him?”

  “Maybe later. They only let one family member back at a time.”

  “Leann?”

  “As soon as she heard your father was stable, she went home to be with the kids. We probably passed her in the parking garage.”

  “You should go get Gabrielle.”

  And leave Bailey here alone?

  Steve had worried Gabrielle might object to being left in an unfamiliar place. But she heard “hospital” and “father,” and went into Good Child mode.

  “Don’t worry, Dad. We’ll be fine,” she had said before dragging Bryce upstairs for more video games.

  Making herself useful. Going through the motions. Just like Bailey.

  His heart ached for them both.

  “My mom will be back from her trip soon. I’ll stick around until the doctor comes out to talk to you,” he said.

  In case the news was bad.

  Bailey frowned. “But he’s all right, you said.”

  “Yeah.”

  Probably. The triage nurse had thrown around a lot of big words and scary phrases like subdural hematoma and intracranial bleeding. But they didn’t actually know anything until the X ray results came back. How much should he prepare her? What did she need to know?

  “He’s got a headache.”

  “A headache? Or a concussion?”

  Steve shrugged. “He was out for a while.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You lose consciousness, you probably have a concussion.” Probably, his ass. For sure. “Happens to football players all the time.”

  “My father wasn’t playing football,” she said sharply.

  “No,” he admitted.

  “Somebody hit him,” she said, like she was trying to make sense of it, to make what had happened fit the world she knew.

  He knew how she felt. He’d felt that way, too.

  It was his job to find answers, but explanations had failed him when he needed them most.

  It was the sheer ordinariness, the unexpectedness, of tragedy that took your breath away, the accident on the road you drove every day, the bullet that shattered a window and killed the child sleeping in her crib, the cancer discovered during a routine physical appointment, the plane coming out of the clear September sky.

  Random, senseless, unavoidable loss. You couldn’t stop it. All you could do was sort through the wreckage, searching for clues to comfort the survivors.

  “We’ll find whoever’s responsible,” he said.

  Her eyes, her wonderful, expressive eyes, focused on his face. “What happened, exactly?”

  Maybe talking about the case would take her mind off whatever was going on beyond those double doors. Or maybe it would only help him.

  “Near as we can tell, somebody walked through the back door while your father was at work. He left the hardware store about three o’clock. Neighbor heard her dog kicking up a fuss sometime around then, growling and barking. She finally looked out a back window, saw a man running away from the house toward the woods, and called 911. Chief Clegg was right around the corner, so he stopped by to check things out. Found your father’s car in the driveway and the back door unlocked.”

  “The back door is always unlocked,” Bailey said.

  “Sugar, in Stokesville everybody’s back door is always unlocked. Which is probably what the intruder was counting on. Anyway, when nobody ca
me to the door, Clegg let himself in. And found your father on the living room floor.”

  “It couldn’t have been . . . I don’t know.” Her hands rose and fell in her lap. “A stroke? A fall?”

  “Not unless he fell and hit the back of his head with a bedroom lamp.”

  The words lay between them, heavy and stiff as a corpse.

  Bailey exhaled. “Okay, not a fall. So, what happened?”

  “Our best guess is your father came home and surprised the intruder upstairs.”

  “What was he doing upstairs?”

  “Probably looking for cash. Jewelry. Anything small he could turn into a quick fix. Your mother will have to go through the house, see what’s missing.”

  She shook her head. “This is Stokesville, not D.C. We don’t do junkie burglaries.”

  “The whole county has a growing meth problem. And you’ve got gangs moving in from Raleigh and Durham. Of course, it’s possible your father spooked the guy and he ran off without taking anything.”

  “Did Dad see him? Could he identify him?”

  “The chief tried to get a description when your father came to. But he doesn’t remember anything. He was watching TV on the couch when he was struck from behind. He probably didn’t see anything.”

  “Not if ESPN was on,” Bailey said ruefully. “What about the neighbor? What did she see?”

  “Not much from the back. White male, medium build, wearing jeans and a ball cap.”

  “That narrows it down to, what? Half the population of Orange County?”

  “Maybe a third.” Frustration stuck in his throat. “We’ll do our best.”

  Bailey took his hand and squeezed. As if this time his best would be good enough. “I know you will.”

  Surprise held him speechless. She had pretty hands, long fingered, with neat, unpolished nails. He’d indulged a few private, inappropriate thoughts about those hands on his body.

  But Bailey had never before initiated any physical contact between them, never touched him the way a woman does when she wants a man’s attention, never patted his arm or brushed his shoulder or touched her fingertips to his chest to make a point.

  It felt . . . nice.

  He tightened his hand on hers.

  A baby wailed. A nurse called the limping teenager back to an exam bay. Patients walked or were wheeled through the sliding doors. An hour passed, bringing another nurse. A different baby.

  “You must be used to this,” Bailey said.

  “This?” he said cautiously.

  She flapped her free hand at the shifting population of the chairs. “This. The waiting. It sucks.”

  She’d been up almost all night. She must be exhausted. “You want something? Water? A magazine?”

  “No, thank you. Was she sick a long time?”

  I want answers, she’d said. I’ll give you what you want if you give me what I want.

  “Who?” he asked.

  “Your wife. You said she had cancer.”

  He didn’t talk about it.

  “You want a story, I’ll buy you that magazine. Hell of a lot more entertaining.”

  Her gaze was warm and level. “I’m sorry. This must be hard for you.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You probably spent a lot of time in hospitals.”

  She was harder to fool than the grief counselor. Or maybe just harder to shake.

  “Not really. By the time we knew Teresa was sick, it was already too late.”

  “You didn’t have any . . . warning?” Her quiet voice pulled at him, plucking at memories like loose threads in a tapestry.

  “She’d gained a little weight. Lost her appetite. We thought . . . I hoped she might be pregnant. But she kept saying no. So after the second home pregnancy test turned up negative, I finally talked her into seeing a doctor.”

  Bailey squeezed his hand. “And?”

  “She had stage-four epithelial ovarian cancer.” He could say it. He could say the words. “She had the first surgery, for the diagnosis. But after that . . . There are treatments. Chemo. Radiation. More surgeries, to debulk the tumors and clear the blockage of the intestine. But she wouldn’t . . . She didn’t want . . .”

  He stared very hard at the clock on the opposite wall until the numbers blurred.

  “I’m sorry,” Bailey said again, softly. “I didn’t know.”

  “Palliative treatment, they call it. Drain the fluids, to relieve the pressure. Pills, for the pain. We fought about it all the time. I didn’t want her to suffer. I just . . . Christ, I wanted her to live.”

  “Of course you did.”

  “At the end, she couldn’t make decisions herself anymore. I took her to the hospital. Hell, I dragged her to the hospital. Only by then . . .” He drew a harsh breath. “She couldn’t eat. The doctors—they wanted to feed her through a tube. She could live a little longer that way, they said.”

  “Is that what she wanted?”

  “No.” He rubbed his hands over his face. “No.”

  “What did you do?”

  He dropped his hands. “I told them no.” He stared again at the opposite wall, not seeing it, not seeing anything but his wife, begging him with her eyes. “I let her die.”

  He wasn’t asking for pity. He had no right to her sympathy or her understanding. But maybe that wouldn’t matter to her.

  She blinked those big brown eyes at him. Intelligent eyes. Compassionate eyes.

  “That’s crap,” she said.

  His jaw slackened. He clenched it tight. He should never have opened his mouth. “Forget it.”

  But Bailey wasn’t finished with him. “You’re not responsible for your wife’s illness. Or her treatment plan. Or her death.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Maybe you should. Maybe then you could deal with this misplaced sense of guilt instead of brooding about it.”

  Something like panic kindled inside him. He blew it into rage. Anger was cleaner, easier to handle.

  “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  She touched him again, her fingers light on his bare arm, stirring him in ways he thought he was done with. He wanted her touch.

  And he didn’t, because he was sitting here talking about his wife the way he never talked about her to anybody, missing his wife, cheating on his wife by lusting after Bailey.

  “So explain it to me,” she said.

  “You wouldn’t understand. I let Teresa down. I let Gabby down.”

  “You did your best.”

  “It wasn’t enough.”

  He had always been able to protect them. The big, tough cop. The competent male. My hero, Teresa used to tease, watching him slide off his shoulder holster before joining her in bed.

  But he hadn’t protected her, he hadn’t been there for her, when it mattered most. He lost her.

  And he’d lost himself.

  “Miss Wells?” A tall young man in nurse’s scrubs with a single diamond stud in his ear claimed her attention. “You can come back now. Only one of you,” he added when Steve stood with her.

  Steve was in no mood to argue. He flashed his badge instead.

  The nurse looked unimpressed. “Right. Another one. Well, come on. Maybe you can talk your boss into getting out of my worklane.”

  Bailey clasped her hands in front of her. “Has the doctor seen my father yet?”

  The young man smiled. “Seen your father and talked to your mama. They’re both going to be just fine.”

  “When can he go home?”

  “Doctor wants to keep him for observation overnight.” The nurse pushed open the swinging doors, moving like a sprinter in his white athletic shoes. “But his films look good.”

  Fighting off temper, Steve followed them. He was here to provide escort and support, he reminded himself. But he was still stirred up inside. His feelings churned like water released from ice, threatening the detachment he had hidden behind so long.

  In the lane on the other
side, Walt Clegg made his way down the row of curtained beds like a politician working a Fourth of July picnic.