A Rare Chance

by Carla Neggers

  When they reached Haymarket, she got off and transferred to the Blue Line, a rapid-transit line that led out to the airport. Maybe she’d had enough, Cam thought. Maybe she was skipping town.

  Not bloody likely.

  He settled back in his near-empty car, trying to keep his mind clear and not jump ahead of events. That she was headed out to Logan wasn’t a sure thing, but it was close. Why she was doing it would have to wait.

  At the airport stop, two transit cops intercepted him before he got to the exit. He could see Gabriella disappearing up the stairs. “Lady says you’re following her,” one said.

  Cam swore under his breath.

  He informed them who he was, produced ID, and held his temper because they were just doing their jobs, he had been following her, and she’d looked awfully damned innocent in her sneakers and ponytail.

  When he had the officers mollified, he knew he might as well head on home or up to Reading Point and let Pete Darrow have at him.

  Gabriella Starr was long gone, and hell if he’d underestimate her again.

  There was a line at the croissant cart near baggage claim. Gabriella tried to keep her tension and impatience in check, digging in her fanny pack for a couple of dollars so it would seem to any onlookers that she intended just to buy a croissant. Her fingers were stiff and icy. She couldn’t seem to get a decent breath. It wasn’t just Lizzie’s mysterious phone call, it was also Cam Yeager. Giving him the slip had unnerved her and thrilled her and reminded her of the old days with Scag, except she’d traded them for stability and security and didn’t want to go back. Cop turned prosecutor that he was, Cam could never want the same things from life that she did. He’d always be looking for the next adrenaline rush. He liked life right up on the edge.

  “May I help you?”

  She’d barely realized she’d moved forward in the line. She gave the kid behind the cart a faltering smile. He was thin and amiable, probably about eighteen, wearing the croissant chain’s red and white uniform. “My name’s Gabriella Starr. A friend of mine left a locker key with you.”

  “Yeah, right.” He fished into a pocket, withdrawing the key as Gabriella reached for some ID. “It’s okay: She gave me a description of you. You want to order something?”

  Gabriella shook her head but slipped him a five-dollar bill. “Thanks.”

  He grinned. There was no evidence he thought he might be involved in anything more serious than two women exchanging shoes. “My pleasure.”

  She found her way to the lockers. Logan wasn’t crowded, but there were enough people sifting through the wide corridors and baggage claim area that she didn’t feel isolated and thus even more vulnerable.

  What if Pete Darrow had followed her too?

  She inhaled, her mouth and lips dry from tension, and found the locker that matched the key. It opened without any difficulty.

  Inside was a padded packing envelope, the ten-by-sixteen-inch size, previously used, stapled and wrapped every which way with clear packing tape. To get inside, Gabriella would have to tear it apart. A new padded envelope she could replace, but not one previously used.

  Lizzie hadn’t made it easy for her—or anyone—to open her package for a quick peek.

  I’m not marrying Joshua…

  Breathing out, Gabriella removed the package from the locker, tucked it under one arm, shut the locker, and debated what to do next. Return the key? Lizzie hadn’t given her any instructions, whether out of panic or confidence that Gabriella would know what to do she couldn’t guess.

  She returned the key to the locker. It gave her a sense of closure, if only a temporary one.

  When she passed the croissant cart and saw there was no line, she went back up to the kid in red and white. “Excuse me. My friend. Did you happen to notice what airline she was flying?”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t see her ticket.”

  “Did she have any luggage that was tagged?”

  “Nope. She didn’t have any luggage at all. Must have checked it.”

  Gabriella sighed, a sense of despair coming over her. She could see Lizzie’s misting eyes on Saturday morning. She should have pressed her for more information. She should have sought her out instead of waiting for Lizzie to come to her. She should have stopped thinking about her own problems and started thinking about Lizzie’s.

  “Thank you,” she mumbled, then headed out to flag a cab. She didn’t have the energy for public transportation.

  When she arrived back on Marlborough Street, Scag was up in the greenhouse, sitting on his work stool staring out at the multitudes of orchids he had revived, rearranged, and re-invigorated. Gabriella had stuck Lizzie’s package in a giant stone pot on the deck. When the weather warmed up, she planned to plant geraniums and petunias in it, just for their unrepentant brilliance of color, never mind that her father considered them common.

  Her promise to Lizzie, she assumed, included keeping her mouth shut around Scag too. Knowing her father, he’d make her open the package, promise or no promise.

  He barely glanced up when she came into the cool, dark section of the greenhouse. “Scag?”

  “Yeah,” he said, rousing himself with obvious effort. The energy he’d had earlier in the evening had vanished. “You’re back, I see. I was just daydreaming.”

  She saw the faraway look in his eyes, red-rimmed with fatigue and the sense, perhaps, that his finer days were behind him. His iron-gray hair was sticking out, making him look slightly mad, and the dim light from the old arm-lamp on his worktable gave a deathly cast to his skin, made his bulging veins seem more purplish.

  “How’s Lizzie?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, I didn’t see her.” Gabriella edged forward, all the anger and resentment she’d felt for her father in the past year impossible to recover, even to remember. “Scag, are you all right?”

  “What? Yeah, sure, I’m fine.” He reached for his cane, used it to support him as he got to his feet. “The orchids are nice this time of evening.”

  She smiled. “They’re looking so much better since you came.”

  His old eyes fastened on her. “I don’t intend to be a burden to you, Gabriella.”

  “Scag—”

  “I was a lousy father to you. I know that.”

  “You are the only father I have.”

  “My father…” He broke off, shaking his head; Gabriella could feel the nostalgia come over him. “He was a good man. He’d have strung me up for how I treated you. I wish—well, you two would have gotten on.”

  “I’m sure we would have,” Gabriella said quietly.

  “I haven’t given you much, kid. I should at least give you my independence.”

  “Stop it, Scag. You were there when I needed to figure some things out about myself. I wouldn’t trade those two years in the field with you for anything. I don’t mind being here for you now when you need me. That’s how it ought to be, you know.”

  “I wasn’t there a lot of times when you needed me.”

  He hadn’t been. There was no denying that hard, simple truth. But Gabriella could only shrug. “Water over the dam, Scag.” She managed a small smile. “Look, what happened last year—the fight we had—I didn’t mean half the things I said.”

  “Sure you did. And most of it was true. I’m a selfish old man who’s done as he’s pleased most of his life and now doesn’t have a pot to piss in. I’d rather do things the hard way because it’s more exciting and I’m impatient and don’t trust anyone else to care as much as I do.” He gave his only child a not entirely unself-satisfied smile. “And I’m a lawbreaker.”

  Gabriella couldn’t suppress a grin. So he had been listening a year ago. At the time, she hadn’t been convinced he’d heard a word she’d said. “Well, you’re forgiven.”

  He grinned back at her, his age-yellowed teeth showing. “Always good to forgive an old man before he ends up on the scrap heap. There’s nothing more unsatisfying than forgiving a dead man, except maybe not forgiving a d
ead man.” He straightened, moving toward the door with his cane. “Well, I expect you’re hungry and need to figure things out about Lizzie. She’ll manage, Gabriella. She knows to run when the going gets too tough. I wish there was more I could do, but my days…” He pushed open the aluminum, pausing as he looked back at the orchids one more time, breathed in their smell. “What the hell. Things change.”

  He went through the door out onto the deck, and Gabriella remained in the cool, fragrant greenhouse. Was he too tired and preoccupied to make it down the stairs by himself? Should she offer to help him? She thought of herself in her seventies. If she could make it down the stairs on her own, it’d annoy her if someone offered to help.

  She smiled. If she couldn’t make it down the stairs on her own, probably it’d still annoy her if someone offered to help.

  “Gives me the chills how much I’m like that old man,” she muttered, going out onto the deck. She listened. She could hear him scraping his way down and called, “You okay?”

  “Yes, goddamnit. I’m not a billy goat, but I can still get down the damned stairs on my own!”

  He was such a pain. “There are worse things than needing a helping hand, you know,” she yelled down after him. “You want a ride home?”

  He snorted loudly and slammed her apartment door shut in reply.

  At least, she thought, he wasn’t going home depressed.

  When she was sure he was gone, she removed Lizzie’s package from the big stone pot. It felt like a coffee-table book or a notebook of some kind, or perhaps a box of a similar size and weight. “You’ll make yourself crazy wondering,” she muttered to herself, then returned to the greenhouse.

  Her apartment would be the first logical place anyone would look for the package. There were the usual obvious hiding places: the freezer, under a bed, her underwear drawer, the back of a closet. But someone might not realize she had the roof and miss it altogether. And even if they did go up there, who could tell what was what given Scag’s messy habits and most people’s general unfamiliarity with orchids?

  She stopped halfway through Number Two, the intermediate section of the greenhouse. Why was she assuming—was she assuming?—that someone would come after Lizzie’s package? Knowing Lizzie, the contents could be something purely sentimental. The package could be a ploy to make the emotional upheaval of her decision to leave Joshua Reading all the more dramatic—provided she was at a safe distance.

  But Gabriella remembered Lizzie’s frightened, pained look on Saturday, remembered that Pete Darrow had followed her too, and remembered Cam’s warning about Darrow’s abortive foray into blackmail in the past. There was every reason to think that someone might come after a package Lizzie Fairfax had deliberately left in her best friend’s safekeeping before she ran off.

  The thought of Cam brought Gabriella up short.

  Never mind Pete Darrow. Cam could be the one who came after Lizzie’s package.

  The warmth and humidity and sweet, earthy fragrance of the third section of the greenhouse enveloped her, helping to ease some of her tension. If Lizzie were safely on her way and her package—regardless of its contents—in safe hands, perhaps there was nothing to worry about. Joshua might be angry, depressed, confused for a while, but eventually he’d rally, and certainly Titus wouldn’t want to make more of his younger brother’s broken engagement than was absolutely necessary. The whole mess could blow over relatively quickly.

  Feeling alone, almost spooked by the darkness, Gabriella walked down the pebbled aisle to the end of the greenhouse, where a large box fan stood in a corner amidst piles of Scag’s junk: empty bags and cans, discarded plastic pots, pieces of black plastic, pieces of broken clay. It was his own private dump.

  She picked her way through the mess, finally coming to the big, rattling box fan. It was turned off for the night. In addition to liking the right temperature, light, and humidity, orchids preferred movement with their air. Some, of course, were fussier about it than others. Gabriella reached behind the fan and dropped Lizzie’s package, then covered it with some black plastic and an empty vermiculite bag. She wasn’t worried about Scag accidentally throwing the package away. If the mess was going to get cleaned up, she’d have to do it. Trash pick-up, he would say, wasn’t the job of volunteer labor. Of course, if he agreed to let her pay him for his work, he still wouldn’t do the trash.

  Satisfied that the package was safe at least for the moment, she returned to her apartment and dialed Cam’s number from her kitchen phone. She got his answering machine, but even hearing his taped voice prompted memories of their kiss. It had been a moment of possibilities, of promise.

  Then the beep came, signaling her to speak, and she said, “I don’t like being followed,” and hung up. So much for possibilities and promise.

  Two minutes later her intercom buzzed, announcing a visitor downstairs. She assumed it would be Cam arriving to interrogate her about her mad dash out to Logan Airport. But that, she thought, pressing down her intercom button, was a street that ran two ways. “Yes?”

  “It’s Pete Darrow. We need to talk.”

  She swore under her breath. Just what she needed. Her stomach, just settling down, started to churn all over again. Tension spread from her toes up through her shoulders. She had no intention of letting Pete Darrow into her apartment while she was there alone, never mind with Lizzie gone and her package up on the roof.

  “I’m on my way out,” she said quickly. “I’ll meet you downstairs in two minutes.”

  A quick glance in the bathroom mirror told her she looked as if she’d been charging off to hell and back, not doing calming yoga stretches. Her hair was coming out of its hasty, short ponytail; she tugged the covered rubber band the rest of the way off. There wasn’t much she could do about the wild look in her eyes or the nervous energy that had her virtually twitching. She took several deep, calming breaths. She had to appear at least somewhat self-possessed or Darrow would know instantly that something was up.

  Don’t get ahead of yourself, she warned silently. Just be yourself.

  She made herself take the two flights of stairs one at a time. Darrow had gone out onto the stoop to wait, where he was leaning casually against the iron rail. With his arms folded on his chest, he looked fit and confident, every inch the competent ex-cop.

  Taking another calming breath, Gabriella went out to greet him. “Hello, Mr. Darrow,” she said smoothly, “what can I do for you?”

  His dark, probing gaze fell on her, almost destroying her cool. Nothing in his demeanor suggested he considered her a threat in any way, shape, manner, or form. “Lizzie seems to have taken off. She was supposed to meet Joshua for dinner with friends in Cambridge. She never showed.”

  “She didn’t? I hope she’s not sick.”

  It was as if Gabriella hadn’t even spoken. “I thought she might have come by here.”

  “No, I haven’t seen her in several days.” It was the truth, as far as it went. “You’ve checked her parents’ house, I assume?”

  He nodded, his eyes still on her. Assessing the veracity of the witness, Gabriella thought. He and his ex-partner definitely had a few things in common. “She call here?”

  Gabriella shook her head. A promise was a promise, and when she’d made it, she’d known she could end up lying to Pete Darrow and even to Joshua Reading. “Not since I’ve been home. She didn’t leave a message on my answering machine either.”

  “Any idea where she could be?”

  “No. None.” Just not in this country, Gabriella thought. Provided Lizzie had been telling the truth.

  He slouched against the wrought-iron railing, a flicker of amusement crossing his eyes. “You don’t like me much, Ms. Starr.”

  “My feelings toward you are irrelevant.” But she couldn’t imagine this man and Cam Yeager as friends. Yet she and Lizzie Fairfax were an incongruous pair too, she supposed. “Look, I’m sure Lizzie will turn up. Maybe she just forgot or needed an evening alone. She and Joshua have been moving
awfully fast.”

  “Yeah.” His eyes didn’t leave her, but although she didn’t like lying, Gabriella could do it with a straight face; it was a survival skill in life with Scag. “You wouldn’t have her tucked upstairs with your orchids, would you?”

  Gabriella stiffened. “I said I haven’t seen her.”

  He rose up off the rail, half a foot taller than she. “You and Lizzie Fairfax have been friends a long time. You’d lie for her, wouldn’t you?”

  “Mr. Darrow—”

  “Pete is fine,” he said with a strange, almost menacing grin. “We’re on the same side here, right?”

  Gabriella took a breath. “I want you to leave.”

  He ignored her. “You know, once Lizzie took up with Joshua, I pretty much stopped following you, but if you’re not being straight with me…”

  “If I catch you following me,” Gabriella said stiffly, “I will call the police.”

  He laughed, tilting his head back so that he seemed to laugh at the sky. Then his dark eyes dropped back to her. “Listen, sweet cheeks, if I don’t want you to catch me following you, you won’t.”

  Gabriella quickly debated whether she ought to bolt back inside or down to the street.

  Then Cam Yeager appeared at the bottom of her steps, as if he’d materialized out of thin air.

  “Nice evening for a visit.” His casual tone was undermined only by the alertness of his eyes. He placed one foot on the bottom step and leaned forward, as if settling in for a chat. “They say it could rain tomorrow. Nothing like spring in New England. No tornadoes, anyway.”

  Darrow made a sound of disgust and irritation as he faced his ex-partner. “What do you want?”

  Cam shrugged. “Just out getting some air and saw you two.”

  “Bullshit,” Darrow said, not losing his composure. He turned back to Gabriella. “If you want what’s best for your friend, you’ll tell me where she is.”