by Joanne Pence
“How does your head feel?” he asked, leaning over her. His hand gently traced a path from the side of her face to her neck, her shoulder, lower…
“I’ve got the headache from hell, but I think it’ll be okay soon.”
His hand stilled. “A headache?” Richie rolled onto his back. “And we aren’t even married.”
“Married? Where did that come from?”
“I know how you women think.”
“Oh, you do, Mr. Smart Alec Know-it-all. This time, you’re quite wrong!”
“I only know what my buddies tell me about married life, and it ain’t pretty!”
“Not to worry. It’s nothing you’ll ever find out about if you keep talking this way.”
“If?” Richie propped himself up on an elbow to look at her, with a roguish smile. “That sounds like progress.”
All of a sudden, Rebecca sat bolt upright, nearly knocking Richie onto his back once more. “She’s at Shay’s house.”
“What? Who?”
“Salma. What time is it?”
Richie picked up his watch from the nightstand. “It’s—oh, my God—it’s six in the morning. I’ve never been awake at six in the morning. Go back to sleep.”
“I can’t. If she’s there… They had some kind of history, that’s obvious, but what if Shay doesn’t know she’s killed two people? He could be in danger!”
“Shay? No way.”
“Yes! We’ve got to get over there right now.”
o0o
Shay didn’t want to touch her, but he seemed unable to keep his hands from reaching out to hold her narrow shoulders, and then brush her hair back from her face. Its angles were sharper than when she was in her twenties, deeper and more interesting, while her eyes had a sadness and desperation he hadn’t seen before. Still, it was as if all the years they had been apart vanished into nothing.
He dropped his hands and stepped back. “I can get a private plane for you. It’ll take you close to Toronto. Once you’re in Canada, money and papers will be waiting. Canada is bringing in a lot of refugees, and I suspect all their paperwork, including that from Lebanon, is irregular. All you need to do is find a way to blend in.”
She gave a wan smile. “Don’t be too American, in other words.”
“That’s right.”
“There’s one more thing,” she said. “When I leave, I worry about Hannah.”
The name was like a stab to his heart. “Hannah? That’s her name?”
Salma nodded. “Gebran may make her life miserable when I’m gone. I can’t be sure… I shouldn’t speak badly of him, he has always been a good provider, a hard worker. And even though he always suspected something, he never spoke against me or Hannah. At the same time, he’s rather … cold to her.” She paused. “My father knows and understands what happened, but at some point, he might need your help.”
“Of course I’ll help him. Whatever he needs. And … and Hannah, too.”
“Keep watch over her, please. One day I hope you’ll meet our daughter. She’s wonderful—and a bit strange, like her father.” As Salma studied his face, her hand lifted slightly, and he thought—hoped—she would reach for him. But she let it drop back to her side. “She’s so smart, it sometimes frightens me. She is truly your child.”
He felt as if he were shattering inside. “And your son?” he whispered.
“Adam will be fine with Gebran.”
Shay shook his head. “I’m sorry about so much.”
“Don’t be. Don’t ever be.” She looked at him with those beautiful deep brown eyes. “I was cruel to you when I left you, but I never stopped loving you. Every minute. Every day.”
“Salma.” Her name was a prayer on his lips. He wished he could hate her—hate her for the smiles she never gave him, for the family they would never have, not even when she had borne his only child. He wished he could hate her for all the years that would never be theirs, and for the empty despair he felt whenever he thought of her. But that was a wish that would never come true.
She stood. “I have to go. I have things I must do before I can leave—mainly writing out some information about the children for my father. I have to do it alone, or I know I’ll forget. But, as I said, he understands and will help.”
“Wait.” Shay stepped into his study, and when he returned, he handed her some cash and a burner phone. “Call the number on the phone when you’re ready to leave. I’ll let you know where to meet the driver who’ll take you to a private plane.”
“Thank you.”
He nodded. She gave him a quick kiss, then turned to go. But he caught her wrist.
She stared at him, and then their lips met as he pulled her close, holding her tight, not wanting to ever let go. And she held him the same way. For that moment, that brief moment, time stopped and he allowed himself to remember how it once felt to love, and to be loved.
But then, she broke his hold and left the house.
He watched her drive away, and when he could no longer see her, he shut the door and returned to his private, terrible solitude.
o0o
Richie drove Rebecca to pick up her car which was still outside the Najjar home in the Oceanview area. He couldn’t believe how early she’d gotten him up, but at least he was relieved that she seemed fine and her headache was lessening.
He then drove to Shay’s house, with Rebecca following in her SUV.
Richie rang the doorbell and Mrs. Brannigan opened the door.
“Oh, my,” she said, looking at Richie, “the world really has spun off its axis. I didn’t think you ever saw the light of early morning. Sort of like that Count Dracula, himself, come to think of it.”
“Very funny. And, this is Inspector Rebecca Mayfield,” Richie said as they stepped into the foyer.
“Rebecca, Mrs. Brannigan. Shay thinks she’s his housekeeper, but really she’s the one who keeps him.”
“Posh, Richie! You’re too cheeky by half. And it’s nice to meet you, Inspector Mayfield,” Mrs. Brannigan said. “Give me a moment while I see if—”
“It’s okay,” Shay said as he walked down the stairs. “I’ve been expecting them.”
Mrs. Brannigan gave him a strange look, one eyebrow lifted, and then went back up to his apartment.
“I’m here to arrest Salma,” Rebecca said. “I hope you won’t try to interfere.”
“She’s not here,” he said.
“But you’ve seen her,” Rebecca stated.
Shay nodded. “She told me what happened.”
“What did you do?” Rebecca asked.
“I did what I’ve always done,” Shay said. His body blocked the stairs up to his living area.
As Rebecca eyed the stairway, Richie spoke up. “You helped her?”
Shay folded his arms. “Maybe I’ve done nothing.”
“Or, you helped her,” Richie repeated.
“She’s not some innocent person who needs protection,” Rebecca said. “I believe she’s killed two people.”
“Two?” Shay looked stunned.
“Yussef and her mother-in-law, Fairuz Najjar.”
His lips tightened. “I have nothing to say.”
“Where is she?” Rebecca demanded. “You can’t hide her. That puts you in legal jeopardy.”
“I’m not hiding her,” he said. “You can search my house. Search everywhere you want … with a warrant, of course.”
“I can bring you in and demand answers.” She spat out the words.
“Try it.” His tone was low, threatening.
“Stop!” Richie insisted. “This has gone far enough. If Shay says he’s not hiding her here, he’s not. That doesn’t mean he hasn’t given her money”—he studied Shay closely as he added—“fake id’s, maybe a plane, and heaven-only-knows what else to help her escape. In fact, I suspect that’s what he did. But proving it will be another story, especially if we can’t find her.”
“I will find her.” Rebecca’s eyes bored into Shay’s.
“I
won’t let you,” Shay stated.
“You’ll have no choice.”
Shay pulled open the front door. “I have nothing more to say to you.”
Richie faced Rebecca. “Go,” he said softly. “Please.”
She looked from him to Shay. “Shay, I’m sorry, but eventually you will need to tell me where she’s gone. The woman is dangerous.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
In Shay’s living room, Richie sat on the sofa and stared at his friend. “Whenever you’re ready,” he said gently. “I can’t help you if I don’t know what’s going on.”
“It’s a long story,” Shay said.
“Given how ungodly early it is, we’ve got all day—a long, long time.”
Mrs. Brannigan walked into the living room carrying a tray with coffee, Irish soda bread, and a variety of jams and lemon curd. “If I’d known Mr. Tate was going to be entertaining this morning, I’d have made something fancy for you, but this will have to do.”
“Thanks,” Shay said, pouring them both some coffee. He sat in a wingback chair across from Richie.
“That helps,” Richie said, after taking a sip of coffee and buttering some bread. “Anytime you’re ready.”
“I don’t like to talk about myself,” Shay said.
“No, really? That’s a news bulletin. In case you didn’t know it, you’re more close-mouthed than anyone I’ve ever met. Now, why are you helping a woman Rebecca thinks has murdered two people?”
Shay put down his coffee cup and walked over to the window. He kept his back to Richie, looking out at the street and at the sun coming up over a tree-filled park in the distance. His words were soft. “There's a number of reasons.”
“I guessed that.”
Shay faced him, his face bleaker and more troubled than Richie had ever seen it. “And,” Shay all but whispered, “she’s the mother of my daughter.”
Richie didn’t say a word as the full impact of Shay’s words struck. He put down the bread. “My God.”
Shay’s jaw was tight. “It’ll be hard enough on the girl that her mother’s gone, without hearing that she’s a murderer as well.”
Richie rose and took a step toward Shay. “Hold on, here. Out of the blue, you announce you have a daughter? Why have you kept this a secret?”
“I didn’t. Not the way you think. I only learned about her a few days ago.”
Richie studied Shay’s face looking for bitterness, relief, or anything that would help him understand what his friend was thinking, how he was processing all this. He saw nothing but rigidity and stoicism.
“Good Christ.” Richie went back to the sofa. Shay followed and sat again on the wingback chair. The two friends just stared at each other a long moment, shaking their heads. Richie could see that Shay was even more stunned by this turn of events than he was.
“Okay,” Richie said after a while. “We’ve got to figure this out like two logical human beings.”
“It’s okay. I can handle it.”
“Shay, you can’t do everything by yourself. There are other people involved now. Including a child. So … so how old is she?”
Shay swallowed hard. “Eight.”
“Her name?”
Shay’s breath seemed to quicken. “Hannah.”
“That’s a nice name,” Richie said, then thought a moment. “Look, maybe I shouldn’t bring this up, but the woman has a husband. Are you sure—?”
“I saw her,” Shay said. “Even before Salma told me, I knew. I was sure.”
Richie rubbed his temple. “God, I still don’t believe it. You, of all people.” As he looked at Shay, his mouth slowly turned into a smile. “I mean, wow.”
“What are you saying?” Shay demanded.
Richie’s grin widened. “Nothing, nothing at all. All I can say, Big Daddy, is you’ve helped me help others. Now, it’s my turn to help you. But first, I need to know the story, the whole story this time.”
Shay shut his eyes a moment. “That’s fair,” he said, then nodded. “But where to start? I think … it might have been all the time I spent in the Middle East helped me understand Salma Najjar. She left Lebanon behind, but still lives by the rules of its culture, not ours. She married Gebran for the sake of her father, in fact. Gebran had money and a business. What he didn’t have was a wife. When we met she was unhappy, and as a result open, and perhaps vulnerable. Too vulnerable.
“I guess it was easy for her to fall for a man who had no ties, and no family to speak of. She told me that when she first came to this country, she had high hopes for her future, but she quickly realized that, even here, she couldn’t break her traditions and family obligations. She simply didn’t know how. She would say how much she envied me my complete freedom. She never understood that being completely alone could be its own form of punishment.
“Also, as much as I understood her because of my experiences, because of hers, she understood me. In Lebanon she had seen what fighting and killing can do to a man. Do you know how many Americans, particularly women, simply have no understanding at all about that way of life or how it affects a person? Even you, Richie—you’re a friend—but if I told you some of the things I’ve seen and done, you’d walk out of here and never look back.”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
“Let’s hope I never have to test that,” Shay said.
“I trust you, and I do hope you do me.” Richie waited a moment, then asked, “So, what happened with you and Salma?”
“We kept seeing each other despite her marriage. We saw each other for over six months. It went on long enough we became complacent, took chances. Particularly the one time Gebran went out of town, overnight, for some dry-cleaner franchiser meeting.
“The next day, she called in a panic. Her brother-in-law had seen her with me that morning and then followed her to her husband’s dry cleaners where she had to relieve her father for a doctor’s appointment. Yussef waited until her father, Zair, had gone, and then he entered the shop.
“He confronted her—told her he’d tell his brother about her affair. She’d be divorced and her father out of work. She would never see her boy again. He even threatened her with deportation. I know that when they were in Lebanon, her father was afraid for his life. She feared he’d be killed if they were sent back.
“She begged Yussef not to tell Gebran. He told her what she needed to do to ‘win’ his silence, and then he locked the shop door. She grabbed the gun kept under the till in case of robbery, and as soon as she got the chance, she shot him.”
“So she killed him,” Richie murmured.
Shay nodded. “When her father arrived back from the doctor’s, he saw what had happened. The two put Yussef’s body in the trunk of her father’s car, and cleaned up the shop so that when Gebran returned to the city, he’d think they had cleaned the carpets and all, with no suspicion of what had actually happened there.
“After that, Salma called me. In the middle of the night, her father and I met and moved Yussef’s body into the park, to such a remote area I thought there was no chance he’d be found. I was right, for nine years.”
“What happened between you and Salma after the killing?” Richie asked.
“I saw her two times, then not again until now.”
“That’s hard to believe.”
“Too much had happened. First, we had the problem of Yussef’s disappearance. I learned a big bank robbery took place in the city and the robbers had cleanly gotten away. I found a map of the bank’s interior and gave it to her. When Gebran and Fairuz realized Yussef had disappeared, she told him she had overheard him having a strange conversation on the phone, and watched him throw some papers away. She then gave them the map of the bank.
“As much as Gebran and Fairuz didn’t want to believe Yussef would rob a bank, once confronted with Salma’s evidence, they feared if he were linked to the robbery, the government might go after all of them, possibly deport them. It was a chance they didn’t dare to take. And, they had no reason not
to believe Salma. Yussef was always a bit weird, about everything. As a result, they decided to tell the police Yussef had left the country.”
“You covered everything for her,” Richie said.
“So I’d thought,” Shay said.
“How could you two split up after all that?”
Shay’s mouth contorted into what was almost a smirk—wry, dismayed, and yet sad. “We fantasized about running away, even leaving the country. But it was just a fantasy. I’d just quit the military, and was still pretty raw. And broke. If we ran, we’d have to do it with nothing. I could try to hide Salma and her child, but what if I failed?” He paused, then continued in a hushed voice. “The more I thought about it, the more I realized that for her to disappear would have caused the police to suspect foul play—they’d have dug further into Yussef’s disappearance as well as her own. Just as Yussef saw us together, others might have as well. It was too much of a chance to take. If she was caught, we had no money for good lawyers. No proof that what she did was self-defense. The chance was great that she would spend years in prison. I couldn’t let her take that chance. I couldn’t let her run.”
“Did she agree?”
“No.” The word was cold, clipped. “She said she didn’t care, and that since I had also killed people, I should understand. I continued to say no, that she had to stick to the bank robbery story, and stay with Gebran.”
Richie nodded. “And, in the end, that’s what she did?”
Shay walked over to the window, and kept his back to Richie as he continued. “She was furious at me for not going along with her plan to run away together. Finally, she said she never loved me anyway—that no woman could. She said I’m too scary for anyone to really love, and far too crazy. She had thought I was brave enough to help her get away from her ugly life, but she’d been wrong.
“I tried to say she was lying, striking back at me. But she doubled-down. She said that for the first time since she met me, she was telling me the truth.”
“God,” Richie whispered, heartsick for his friend.
Shay folded his arms, and faced Richie once more. “I don’t think even He could help.”
“So which is the truth? That she loved you, or she used to?”