It Came Upon A Midnight Clear

by Suzanne Brockmann

  Franklin didn't hide his skepticism. "And the ballistic reports are totally wrong...?"

  "Yes," Nell agreed. "They're wrong. I think someone made a mistake in the lab. I think the tests should be run again. In fact, as Crash's lawyer, you should demand that the guns be tested again."

  The captain just looked at her. Then he sighed. "You really don't think Hawken did this, do you?"

  "I don't just think it, I know it," she said. "Billy did not kill Jake."

  Franklin sighed again. And then he pulled a notepad and a pen from his inside jacket pocket. He took a business card with his name and phone number on it and slid it across the table toward her. "That's my number," he said. "You better give me yours. Address, too. And spell your last name for me while you're at it."

  "Thank you." Nell felt almost weak with relief as she pocketed his card and gave him all the information he needed.

  "Don't thank me yet," he said. "I'll talk to the judge about the possibility of getting those weapons retested. It's a long shot. There's no guarantee the court will foot the bill for that kind of redundant expense."

  "I'll pay," she told him. "Tell the judge that I'll pay to have the ballistic tests redone. I don't care what it costs, I'll take care of it."

  Captain Franklin closed his pad and slipped it back into his pocket. As he got to his feet, he held out his hand for Nell to shake.

  "Thank you, Captain," she said again.

  He didn't release her hand right away. "Miss Burns, God forbid I should ever get into the kind of trouble Lieutenant Hawken is in right now, but if I do, I sincerely hope I'd have someone who believed in me the way you believe in him." He smiled. "I can't believe I'm saying this, but he's a lucky man to have a friend like you."

  "Please call the judge, Captain," Nell said. "The sooner the better."

  Nell couldn't sleep.

  It was 2:00 a.m. before she finished writing a grant proposal seeking funds for the theatre, but even after she E-mailed a copy of the draft to Amie, she still was far too restless to sleep.

  Crash was out there somewhere. For the first night in weeks, Nell didn't know exactly where he was.

  She prowled around the kitchen once, opening the refrigerator door but, of course, finding nothing exciting inside. She then pulled on her sneakers and leather jacket. Dunkin' Donuts was calling. Five blocks away, there was a very exciting honey-dipped donut with her name on it.

  Nell turned out the light and locked the door, ready to walk, but the air was so sharply cold, she hurried to her car instead. There had been a real cold spell like this last December, too, she remembered. It had even snowed. Crash had forced her to go sledding and...

  And he hadn't kissed her. Yeah, that had been just another of the many, many nights that he hadn't kissed her.

  She pulled out from the curb, gunning the engine, hoping her car would warm up soon so she could turn on the heat.

  That lawyer, Captain Franklin, had been really impressed by her loyalty to Crash. But the truth was, she was an idiot. She was a certified fool.

  There was nothing, nothing that bound the two of them together, except for her own, misguided wishful thinking.

  Nearly a year ago, she'd had sex with the man. That's all it had been. Sex. Period, the end. All the intensity and seemingly high emotions of the moment had nothing to do with his feelings for her. All the emotion of that night had been about Daisy's death. When Crash had kissed her so fiercely, when he'd driven himself hard inside her, it wasn't because he wanted to join himself emotionally with Nell. No, what they'd done had been purely physical. He'd been using sex as a release for his pain and anger. He'd been taking temporary comfort in surrounding himself with her warm body. She could have been any warm body, any nameless, faceless woman. Her identity truly hadn't mattered.

  The stupid thing was, Nell had been more hurt by the fact that Crash had ended their friendship than by his honest admission that the sex had been nothing more than sex.

  She'd written him letters. She'd been brutally honest, too, telling him that she hoped that what had happened between them wouldn't affect their friendship. She'd asked him to call her when he was in town.

  He hadn't called.

  And he hadn't written.

  And if this mess hadn't happened, Nell knew that she never would have so much as seen Crash Hawken again.

  As she approached, she saw that the orange-lettered Dunkin' Donuts sign was dark. The all-night shop was inexplicably closed, and Nell said all of the absolutely worst bad words that she knew. She even said some of them twice. And then she kept driving. Somewhere in the District of Columbia there was a donut shop that was open right now, and dammit, she was going to find it.

  Nell took a right turn, suddenly aware that she was driving the still-familiar route from the city to the Robinson farm.

  She knew for a fact that there were no donut shops between here and there, but she kept going, pulled in that direction.

  The interstate was empty except for a few truckers.

  She kept the radio off during the twenty-minute drive, waiting for the hum of the tires to lull her into a state of fatigue.

  It didn't happen. When she pulled off at the exit for the farm, she was as wide awake as ever.

  It was more than six months since she'd come out here to pick up a painting of Daisy's that Jake had wanted her to have for the new house. It had been summer then, but now the trees were bare, their branches reaching up toward the sky like skinny arms with clawed hands, tormented by the cold wind.

  God, she hated winter. Why on earth had she bought a house here in D.C., rather than down in Florida? What had she been thinking?

  She hadn't really been thinking that sooner or later Crash would come back and knock on her door. She hadn't actually believed that he'd just appear in her bedroom one night, although for a while, she'd gotten a lot of mileage out of that fantasy.

  No, he'd made it more than clear that he didn't want her. And she wasn't the type to face that kind of rejection more than once.

  But despite the fact that he clearly felt otherwise, she was still his friend. She had been his friend before that one night they'd slept together. And she could be a grown-up about the whole thing, and still be his friend.

  But not if he didn't want to be hers.

  Slowing to a stop as she finally approached the gates of the farm, her eyes filled with tears.

  The Robinsons' farm had always buzzed with life. Even in the dead of night, there had been an intensity about the place—the lights were always on, there was a sense of someone being home.

  But now the place was deserted. The dark windows of the house looked mournfully empty. Sagging yellow police tape flapped pathetically in the wind.

  And there already was a For Sale sign on the gate.

  Her first reaction was outrage. Jake had been dead less than two weeks, and already someone was selling off his beloved farm.

  But then reality crept in.

  The farm meant nothing to Jake now. Whichever of his distant relatives who'd inherited the place obviously realized that holding on to the property wouldn't do anyone any good. It wouldn't bring Jake back from wherever he'd gone—that was for sure.

  Wherever he' d gone...

  Wherever he was, she hoped he'd found Daisy again.

  When Nell closed her eyes, she could picture Jake dancing with Daisy. The image was so clear, so real. In her mind's eye, they were both alive, vibrant and laughing.

  It was bitterly ironic. Even as ghosts Jake and Daisy were more alive than either Nell or Crash.

  The two who had survived were the ones who wouldn't let themselves live. They were quite a pair—one who willingly deadened himself by stepping back from his emotions, and one who was too afraid to live life to its fullest.

  Except Nell wasn't afraid anymore.

  She'd stopped being afraid on the night she'd found out Jake had died, but Crash was still alive. He was still alive, and dammit, she was going to be his friend, whether he l
iked it or not.

  He was still alive, and she was going to fight for him. She was going to do whatever she had to in order to tell the entire world that he was an innocent man, that he'd been falsely accused.

  In fact, she was going to go home and first thing in the morning, she was going to call every single reporter and news contact that she had in her media file. She was going to hold a press conference.

  And she was going to make damn sure those ballistic tests were redone.

  Hell, she was even feeling brave enough to ski down Mount Washington with a banner proclaiming Crash's innocence if that would help.

  Nell turned her car around and headed for home.

  It was 4:00 a.m., but there was a traffic jam on Nell's street.

  There was a traffic jam totally blocking the road, caused by four different fire trucks and three TV-news vans.

  And they were blocking the road because Nell's house was on fire.

  Her house was on fire.

  She didn't bother to park. She just turned off the engine right there in the middle of the road and got out of her car.

  She could feel the heat of the blaze from where she was standing. She could see flames licking out every single window.

  "You better move that car!" one of the firemen shouted to her.

  "I can't," she said dazedly. "My garage is on fire."

  "Are you the owner?"

  She nodded. She was the owner—but what she owned was going to be little more than a charred pile of ashes before this was over.

  "Hey, Ted, we found the lady who lives here!"

  Another, shorter man approached. His hat identified him as the fire chief. "Is there anyone else inside?" he asked.

  Nell shook her head, staring at the flames. "No."

  "Thank God." He raised his voice. "There's no one inside. Everyone get out of there, pronto!"

  "How could this have happened?"

  "It's probably an electrical fire," the chief told her. "It probably started small, but an old place like this'll go up like a tinderbox, especially this time of year. We'll have a better idea of how it started after it's out and we can go in and look around. Whatever the case, you're lucky you weren't home, or we'd probably be pulling your body out of there right now."

  She was lucky.

  She was incredibly lucky. Nell couldn't remember the last time she'd not only been awake this late, but had left the house as well. She was damned lucky.

  She tried very hard to feel lucky as she stood in the early morning darkness and watched everything she owned but her car and the clothes on her back go up in smoke. There were things that were burning right now that couldn't be replaced. Photographs. She'd had a really great photo of her and Crash and Jake that Daisy had taken. All of her books and CDs, the dishes her grandmother had given her, Daisy's irreplaceable watercolour painting. It was all gone. She'd been out of the house for only two hours, and just like that, nearly everything she'd cherished was gone.

  Tears filled her eyes, and she fought them. She was lucky, dammit. She could have died.

  It was dawn before the fire was down to a smoulder, mid-morning before the insurance forms were filled out and the paperwork was filed.

  Nell drove to the Ritz-Carlton—one of the fanciest hotels in town-and checked herself into a very expensive room. She deserved it.

  She was exhausted, but she took the time to call Captain Franklin's office, leaving the hotel phone number with the lawyer's administrative staff, with a message asking him to call if he heard any news of Crash's whereabouts.

  Tired to the bone, Nell peeled off her clothes, climbed into bed and fell almost instantly into a deep, dreamless sleep.

  Chapter 11

  The curtains were hanging open an inch or two, and Crash quietly slid them all the way closed.

  They were effective in shutting out the last streaks of light in the late afternoon sky. He moved silently through the now complete darkness of the room, toward the bathroom that was next to the door.

  He closed the bathroom door all but an inch, and turned on the bathroom light.

  It was dim, but no longer pitch-black. He went back into the other room. Yeah, it was bright enough for him to be able to see Nell's face as she slept.

  She was curled up in the middle of the hotel room's king-size bed. The blankets covered all but her face and the very top of her head. She slept fiercely, eyes tightly shut.

  Crash stood for a moment, just watching her, wishing he didn't have to disturb her, wishing for things he couldn't have. But there was no time now to let her sleep, and there'd never been time for the other things he wanted.

  "Nell," he said quietly.

  She didn't move.

  He nudged the bed with his leg. "Nell, I'm sorry, but you've got to wake up."

  Nothing.

  He sat down on the bed, leaning over to gently shake her shoulder. "Nell."

  Her eyes opened and widened in fear.

  Crash knew at that moment that he'd made a mistake. With the bathroom light shining dimly behind him, she couldn't see his face. All she could see was a big, dark figure looming menacingly over her.

  She took a deep breath to scream, and he quickly put his hand over her mouth. "Nell, shhh! It's me. Crash. Billy."

  She sat up, shaking herself free from his hand, all but launching herself into his arms. "Billy! God! You scared me to death! Thank God you're all right!" She pulled back to look at him in the darkness. "Are you all right?"

  She smelled so good. Crash wanted nothing more than to bury his face in her hair and just sit on that bed with his arms around her. But that wasn't why he'd come.

  And after that one initial hug, Nell seemed as eager as he was to put distance between them.

  She let go of him quickly when he released her, wrapping her arms around her knees as he stood up. "I can't believe you came here. How did you find me?"

  Her low, husky voice was so familiar, so warm. God, how he'd missed her. He had to keep distance between them, or he was going to be tempted to do something that he'd later regret.

  Again.

  Crash turned on the desk lamp. "It wasn't that hard."

  "My house burned down last night. I went out for a doughnut, and when I came back, my house was on fire."

  "I know." When he'd seen the picture in the newspaper and realized it was Nell's house that had burned, his heart had stopped beating. And when he'd read that no one had been killed or injured, he'd gotten dizzy with relief.

  And even though he'd had plenty of other things to do in his quest to find the man responsible for Jake's death, Crash had spent the entire afternoon tracking Nell down. There was no way, no way he was going to let her die, too.

  She ran one hand back through her hair as if she was suddenly conscious of the fact that it was rumpled from sleep. And she pulled the blanket up a little higher around her neck.

  Crash saw that her jeans and shirt were in a pile on the floor. Under those covers she was wearing only her underwear. Or less. He had to turn away from her. He couldn't let his thoughts move in that direction.

  "I can't believe you came to me for help," she said quietly.

  He couldn't keep himself from turning back to look at her. Was that really what she thought? That he'd come here because he wanted or needed her help?

  "I spoke to your lawyer about having the ballistic tests repeated," Nell told him.

  She looked far too good in the soft, romantic light, sitting there, possibly naked beneath the covers of an Olympic-event-sized bed. Crash turned on another lamp, and then another, trying to make the room as glaringly bright as possible. "So that's what it was."

  She squinted slightly in the brightness. "That's what what was?"

  "That's why they tried to kill you."

  She stared at him. "Excuse me?"

  He couldn't keep himself from pacing. "You don't really think that fire was an accident, do you?"

  "According to the experts in the fire department, it was an electrical
malfunction. The wiring was ancient, there was a power surge and—"

  "Nell, someone tried to kill you. That's why I'm here. To make sure that when they try again, they don't succeed."

  She was so completely blown away she almost dropped the blanket. "Billy! God! Who would want to kill me?"

  "Probably the same person who killed Jake and framed me," Crash told her. "Did you tell anyone you were coming to this hotel?"

  Nell shook her head. "No. Wait. Yes. I called your lawyer and left this phone number in case he needed to get in touch with me."

  He swore softly and Nell realized how infrequently she'd heard him use that kind of language. Even words like damn or hell—they just weren't part of his normal working vocabulary.

  He picked up her clothes and put them next to her on the bed. "I'll go into the bathroom while you get dressed. And then we have to get out of here. Fast."

  Nell quickly pulled on her shirt and slipped into her jeans before he'd even closed the bathroom door. "Billy, wait! You honestly think that whoever killed Jake is somehow privileged to your Navy lawyer's phone messages? Doesn't that sound just a little paranoid...?"

  He pulled open the bathroom door and looked at her. He was dressed entirely in black. Black fatigues, black boots, black turtleneck, black winter jacket. Underneath the jacket he was wearing what looked to be some kind of equipment vest—also black. His preference for wearing black had nothing to do with fashion, she realized. He was dressed to blend with the shadows of the night.

  "Here's what we know about the man we're after," Crash told her. "We believe him to be a U.S. Navy commander with a lot of connections. Whether he's that or not, we do know for certain that... We. God, listen to me." His voice shook. "I'm talking as if Jake is still alive."

  He swiftly turned away from her, and for a minute Nell was certain that he was going to put his fist through the bathroom door. Instead he stopped himself, and slowly, carefully laid the palm of his hand against the wood instead. He took a deep breath, and when he spoke again, his voice was steady.