The Burning Point

by Mary Jo Putney

"If you'd told your father the whole story, he might have lost Donovan, but he'd still have had you. And you were the apple of his eye."

  "I needed to leave Maryland, so he'd have lost me anyhow. This way, he still had Donovan, and I think they were each other's salvation." Kate believed that to her very marrow. Tom had rushed to Kate after Rachel called him. Unable to persuade Kate to call the police, he suggested she join him in California. There, safe from Donovan, she could start a new life. She had seized on the idea. More than anything else, it was her brother's kindness and understanding that had pulled her through.

  The next morning, Kate had called her parents and announced she was filing for divorce. All hell broke loose. Sam had become enraged all over again. The only thing he might have accepted as legitimate grounds for divorce was the truth, and Kate would not reveal it. Julia had attempted to mediate, but Kate wouldn't talk to her, either. Within twenty-four hours of leaving her husband, she was estranged from her father in a breach that was never fully healed. Later Kate realized that Sam had blamed Tom for the divorce, deepening the family schism still further.

  Rachel broke into her thoughts. "Does Donovan know how lucky he was that you let him off the hook?"

  "He knows. Frankly, he might have been happier if I'd crucified him. But what good would it have done to destroy his life?" Kate kicked a pebble along the sidewalk. "Incidentally, Donovan recently told me that his father was an abusive alcoholic. In earlier days he couldn't bear to talk about it."

  "That explains a lot--abusers were often abused themselves when they were children. Donovan's family may have been caught in a cycle of violence for generations," Rachel said. "But I gather you two are getting along well now."

  "Surprisingly so. As housemates, we're quite compatible. We stay out of each other's way."

  "Not a bad recipe for marriage, actually."

  "This is nothing like marriage." The thought made the chocolate cake Kate had eaten coagulate in her stomach like lead.

  "Sounds as if the scars are still tender."

  Kate sighed. "Why do men batter their wives, Doc?"

  "Some men like inflicting pain, but usually abuse is a way of establishing control, showing who's boss," Rachel said thoughtfully. "Some abusers must control everything. Others are losers who can control very little in their lives except their own household, so they keep the wife and kids in line with anger and ridicule and violence.

  "Then there are motives such as fear of losing the partner. Control your wife, don't let her have normal relationships with others, keep her dependent so she won't slip her leash."

  Donovan had always been horrified by his own violence. And, while he was precise and well-organized in his work and personal life, he wasn't a full-spectrum control freak. Apparently he was the sort who had battered and controlled from fear of losing his wife. Kate quoted, "Each man kills the thing he loves best."

  "Not always, but too damned often. If you doubt it, spend Saturday night in an emergency room some time. With a family history of alcoholism, drinking was probably the trigger that set Donovan off."

  "He told me that himself. I never caught on, because most of the time his drinking didn't seem to affect him," Kate said. "Lord, but I was stupid. I thought that love was enough, but it isn't. Do batterers ever change?"

  "Sometimes, if they're motivated enough," Rachel said. "But more often they just find another woman to abuse. Maybe that's what Donovan has been doing."

  "He told me that I'm the only woman he's ever struck. A singular honor, don't you think?"

  "Assuming he's telling the truth."

  "I think so. For one thing, he's given up all alcohol, which is bound to help." Kate watched two squirrels chasing each other amorously along a branch. "Until I came back, he and Val had a thing going. Since Val just told me what a great guy he is, I assume he never slammed her against any walls."

  "Val?" Rachel made a face. "How untidy."

  "Not really. She and I were both terribly civilized and more or less apologized to each other for the situation."

  "Thank God for friendship. It's more reliable than passion."

  They walked through streets they had known their whole lives. Kate felt herself relaxing, partly from the familiar scenes, partly from the calming influence of her friend. Rachel had the kind of composure that could look into a volcano and asked the lava if it was having a nice day.

  At length, Kate said, "You said sometimes abusers do change."

  "Sometimes. If they're very young, as Donovan was, the odds for change are better, especially since he's smart enough to have stopped drinking. But most abusers don't change." Rachel faced her. "Are you seriously thinking about getting back together with him, or is this just a mental exercise?"

  "Of course I'm not thinking of getting together with him again! Even if I wanted that, there's no guarantee he would. But...I'm confused, to put it mildly. He's grown in good ways during the last ten years. Mostly he's easy to have around. But he still has a hell of a temper, even though he seems to be better at controlling it now."

  Rachel shook her head, the perfectly cut dark hair falling into place effortlessly. "What frightens you most--the fear of actual bodily harm, of being injured, possibly even killed? Or the fear of emotional damage?"

  The words rocked Kate. When she'd arrived at Rachel's on that long ago night, she'd been bruised and stained with her husband's blood, but her injuries had been nothing compared to her psychic devastation. "The emotional fears are far worse."

  "All right. Now that you know what you're most afraid of--deal with it."

  Kate winced. "You're tough, Hamilton."

  "Damned right I am. If there's even a remote chance that you're going to jump back into the fire with Donovan, you'd better know what you're risking."

  "I need to think about this. I act weird around him. Attracted, but twitchy. I don't approve of my behavior."

  "No one's perfect, Kate. Not even you."

  "What is that supposed to mean?" she asked, startled.

  "When we were growing up, I always thought you were the most together person I knew. A sunny-tempered extrovert, at ease under all conditions. I was glad you'd decided we were friends before you went to school and realized that I was a geeky kind of kid, not an asset to your reputation."

  Kate was appalled. How was it possible to be friends with someone for a lifetime and know so little? "Geeky? That's as absurd as the idea that I was some kind of Wonder Girl."

  "I was shy and near-sighted and smart in an obnoxious sort of way," Rachel explained. "You were just as bright, but not offensively so. I learned a lot from you."

  "This conversation is getting very strange. If I was so great, how did I manage to end up a battered wife and general coward about relationships?"

  "For the first part of your life you were running on auto-pilot, everything working without much effort on your part. Then Donovan broke your sense of inner safety, and you didn't have very good coping skills. You survived pretty well, but at the price of avoiding genuine intimacy. Until you recover from the damage he did, you're not going to be able to put yourself at risk again. And recovering means that you have to look not only at the fact that you were abused, but also at how you were affected by committing an act of violence yourself."

  While Kate was trying to sort out her friend's meanings, Rachel glanced at the street corner sign above them. "We're almost at your mom's house. Think she'd mind if I stopped in to say hi?"

  "She'd love it, and Oscar Wilde would go mad with joy."

  As they turned the corner to walk the short block to the Corsi house, Kate tried to decide what she wanted from Donovan. Punishment? Closure? The opportunity to work in PDI?

  Or something different, and far more dangerous?

  Chapter 31

  At home, Donovan was surveying the inside of the refrigerator speculatively when Dinah materialized and began batting his ankles. He scooped her up. The blue cream was the happiest little cat he'd ever seen. Everything in the
world delighted her. She didn't walk like normal felines. Instead, she had a buoyant trot almost like dancing.

  Bracing her paws on his chest, she threw her head back and vibrated with pleasure as he scratched her chin with one finger. Her earnest, total enjoyment touched a chord of memory. Good grief, the kitten was like Kate at eighteen--full of anticipation, sure that the world was a place of miracles. No wonder he adored this handful of patchy gray fluff. A pity that humans who lost their trustful innocence could never really regain it.

  Loss of innocence...

  His gaze went involuntarily to the place where that last harrowing struggle had taken place. In the years since, the kitchen had been completely remodeled, enlarged, refloored--but like Lady Macbeth and her ceaseless attempts to cleanse her hands, the psychic stain remained. His mind wanted to veer away. Instead, he forced himself to remember, for the past was the key to the future.

  He'd been tense when they went to dinner at the Corsis that last night, knowing that things were going badly wrong with Kate, yet unsure how to change. He made his pre-dinner gin and tonic himself, more than doubling the amount of gin in the hope it would help him relax.

  Then Tom had dropped his bombshell, and everything went to hell. Donovan had been shocked and unsettled at the news, but it was the sight of Sam's pain that drove him to fury. Why the hell couldn't Tom have kept his tastes to himself? Doing this to Sam was unforgivable.

  Worse, the image of Kate standing with Tom against her family had chilled him to the bone. How long until she stood against her husband like that?

  The next hour was hazy in his mind, the details blurred in a mist of gin, anger and anxiety. He had taken Kate home, the terror that he was losing her like a stake through his heart. Then they reached the house, and his worst fears came true. After a shattering quarrel, she announced that she was leaving him.

  He freaked out, grabbing her in a frantic attempt to prove how much he loved her. Intimacy would draw them together, make the damage of the day fade away. He scarcely noticed she was struggling, until her knife sliced into him.

  The pain and shock had jolted him back to reason, and the wrenching knowledge that a line had been irrevocably crossed. He did his best to downplay the disaster, to change her mind, but it was too late. Too damned late. Kate left, and he had known she was right to go.

  He was shaken from the past when Dinah's sharp little ears suddenly went up. She scrambled from Donovan's arms and raced to the garage door just in time to greet Kate. Feline Early Warning System.

  "Hi." He shook off the cold, black past. "How was the old gang?"

  "Fine." Kate closed the door while Dinah did a scamper-dance around her.

  As happened at least once a day, Donovan found himself staring at Kate to appease the hunger of so many years of missing her. Her golden hair falling forward, obscuring her expression. The graceful figure that was the exact, perfect balance of slimness and curves.

  Hanging her tailored jacket in the coat closet, she added, "And such good luck. This morning I chased Dinah under your bed and managed to find one of Val's lost earrings. A favorite of hers, too."

  Shit. "I'm sure she was delighted."

  "More guilty than glad."

  He felt a surprising stab of nostalgia for the relationship he'd had with Val. Simple, mutually enjoyable, with no pain or guilt. Why couldn't he have settled for that? Why did he long for the hurtful complexities of his relationship with Kate?

  As soon as his mind formulated the question, he knew the answer. In order to reach the highest peaks, it was necessary to risk the deepest lows. Only with Kate had he known joy. Only with her had he known wholeness.

  "Maybe we should introduce Val to your friend Alec."

  Amusement lit Kate's face. "They'd probably like each other. A pity there's a continent between them." She bent to scoop up Dinah. "Unfortunately, I got to thinking about...the day I left you."

  As unnerving coincidence. "I wish to God that the memory could be razed from both of our minds."

  She sighed. "Impossible. That was one of the defining moments of my life. Take it away, and nothing that happened afterward makes any sense."

  "That's a little too metaphysical for me. I'd settle for oblivion." Yet there were things that should be said.

  "When we had that final argument, you asked if I was afraid that I was a Patsy, not a Patrick." He drew a deep breath. "My father yelled things like that when he was drunk. I wasn't tough enough for him. He thought any male who wasn't macho must be queer. He used to call me Patsy and threaten to make me wear my sister's clothes."

  Kate winced. "And because I wanted to hurt you like you were hurting me, I pushed the worst possible button at the worst possible time."

  "It doesn't matter how furious we both were, nothing justifies my behavior," he said vehemently. "Christ, Kate, how can you bear to be in the same room with me?"

  "I should be asking you that. Especially here in the kitchen, with so many knives within reach." Her tone was wry, but her eyes were serious.

  He'd kept the knife she stabbed him with for years. Finally, knowing what a really sick memento of their marriage it was, he'd dropped it into the Chesapeake Bay. "You're no killer, Kate. What you did was in reaction to my violence."

  "Joseph Campbell said that love is the burning point--the stronger the love, the greater the pain. If he's right, maybe we're better off without it."

  "Never! Love comes in all varieties, Kate. Don't let the fact that my feelings for you shaded off into craziness put you off love altogether."

  She regarded him with intense, unreadable eyes. He was relieved when the phone rang. The man on the other end of the line rattled off a series of terse sentences that made his expression turn grim as his attention was drawn away from personal issues.

  The call ended, and he hung up the phone. "That was the State Department. I hope you've got a valid passport, because we're going to Mexico."

  "Mexico?" Kate's startled tone caused Dinah's head to pop up.

  "Did you read about the earthquake in Mexico City?"

  "Yes, but I thought it wasn't too serious."

  "Not compared to the big Mexico City quake a few years ago. That was a bad, bad time." Sometimes he dreamed of the people searching the ruins frantically for their loved ones. "We took down twenty-six damaged buildings then. This quake was nowhere near as bad, but the epicenter was right under a mid-rise housing project that turns out to have been built on a site that had been badly filled. The ground moved like jelly."

  "Those are the damaged buildings shown in today's paper?"

  "Right." He found a notepad and started a list. "Almost all of the casualties were there, in La Casa Miranda. The Mexican government wants the buildings down ASAP, before more people are injured."

  "I see. And because PDI worked with them before, they want you."

  "Naturally. So the Mexican government asked the U. S. government, and presto, half of PDI is on the way to the airport."

  "High level. I'm impressed."

  "What's even more impressive is the government citations for classified work we can't talk about."

  "Dinah, you're going to have to stay with your grandma and your Uncle Oscar again. When do we leave, Donovan?"

  "Tomorrow if possible. If not, then Monday morning. Your Spanish will come in handy."

  "And this time, I know enough to be useful on the job."

  "Kate, I don't want you working in those buildings. Earthquakes make structures incredibly unstable--all bets are off in terms of predicting how they'll come down. Sam had an instinct for knowing how damaged buildings would behave. Without him, the work will be even more dangerous than the other times we've done this kind of job."

  "Let's see if I've got this right," Kate said. "You're saying that I'm so incompetent that I might accidentally bring down a structure if I'm allowed inside?"

  "Kate..."

  Her eyes widened. "I see, it's the women and children and lifeboats. In other words, my life is more va
luable than yours, or Luther's--what would his wife and kids say about that?--or Jim's, or Ted's...."

  "Sarcasm will get you nowhere. This kind of job is a bitch, and I don't want you in a place that might collapse at any minute. Believe me, you'll earn your pay. There will be plenty of work for you without actually loading explosives."

  "Can you honestly say that you'd tell me to stay out of quake-damaged buildings if I were a man? Surely not."

  But she wasn't. She was Kate. Fudging, he said, "If the man was a novice at this work, I might."

  "I really, really doubt that. Protectiveness is normal and it goes both ways, but I can't accept it on the job. It's not that I'm panting to have a building fall on my head, Patrick. But if I'm going to do this work, I have to do all of it--the routine, the boring, the fun, and the scary. Otherwise, I might as well go back to San Francisco."

  Once he would have done his damnedest to lay down the law. She'd almost fallen down an elevator shaft in Las Vegas, for God's sake, and that had been as safe as a demolition job could get. But if he was to have any kind of future with Kate, it must be built on new foundations. He would have to accept her as an equal, no matter how much he hated the thought of her in danger. "All right, Kate, you win--you work under the same conditions as everyone else. Just don't take any foolish risks, macho woman."

  "No, sir."

  Her smile was almost worth the knowledge that she would be risking her neck.

  Almost.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  A major aftershock hit. The structure shifted, groaning, and Kate lost her footing in the treacherous rubble. Terror spiked through her as she hit the floor, chunks of plaster banging her hard hat and bruising her ribs and shoulders. God in heaven, the building was coming down on her! Was this how Sam had felt in the instant before he died?

  Kate came awake with a jolt. For an instant she was disoriented. Then the angle of the morning sunshine told her that she was home in Maryland, safe, after an intense week of work in Mexico. During the quake's terrifying aftershocks, she'd had trouble remembering why she'd been so hell-bent on proving herself equal to anything. Only a damned fool would volunteer to go into the crumbling death traps of La Casa Miranda.