After they had made the arrangements, she hung up the phone. She finished clearing the kitchen, a routine not demanding concentration. As she worked, she found herself dreading the interview. At least she could give them her information about Vernon Petty. She recognized, as Mike had told her when she’d shared her discovery of Vernon’s role, that it would be difficult to prove what he had done. There was no doubt in her mind of his guilt, of course, but more cynical now, she didn’t really expect the authorities would pursue her gut reaction. All she could do was give the information to the man who had phoned tonight.
It was much darker when she stepped out on the deck to call Josh in for his bath. The sky was purple, the shadows giving a sense of mystery to the familiar backyard. Josh was sitting on the second step, his glass insect jar beside him. There were no fireflies imprisoned there, and she pushed it to the side with her bare foot and sat down on the top step, directly behind him. Josh leaned back between her legs, and she bent forward to put her arms around his chest, hugging him to her body.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Waiting for the stars to come out,” he said, and his head tilted back, eyes raised skyward.
She looked up, remembering, despite her intentions, another sky, its darkness spangled with a million diamonds. Now there was only the evening star, already brilliant against the backdrop of approaching night.
“Star light, star bright,” she whispered.
“First star I see tonight,” Josh added.
Smiling, she went on, not really thinking about the words, convenient in her memory, stored there in childhood. “I wish I may, I wish I might…”
“Have the wish I wish tonight,” they finished together.
She squeezed Josh tightly, suddenly wishing she could hold him forever, all the while knowing that her job was to let him go. To prepare him to function without her. To make Josh the same kind of strong man—
“What did you wish for?” he interrupted her thoughts. He put his arms around the outside of her knees, pulling them against his ribs.
She couldn’t tell him that she hadn’t really made a wish, other than that forbidden one—to keep him a child forever, small enough that she would always be able to protect him, to hold him. She tried to think of something, not willing to reveal that she was too cynically adult to believe any more that wishes made on stars came true.
“That Wimsey would come on home,” she offered.
“That was a good wish,” Josh complimented.
“Thank you,” she said. The top of his head was just under her chin, and his hair smelled of the summer, dust and sunshine, little-boy sweet. “What did you wish for?” she asked, not because she wanted to know, but just to hold on to the moment, the quiet, perfect magic of being together as the stars drifted out.
“If I tell you what I wished for, it won’t come true.”
“You asked me,” she argued. “And I told you,” she said, laughing.
“I’m not to blame if you don’t know the rules,” he said reasonably.
“Was yours a good wish, too?”
“The best,” he said softly. “The very best.”
She bent her head to drop a kiss on the sun-warmed softness of his hair, suddenly afraid that she knew what Josh had wished for.
IT TOOK HER A LONG TIME to go to sleep. Worrying about Josh. About the interview. Remembering. The memories drifting upward, unbidden, appearing suddenly out of the lonely darkness, just as the stars had tonight. Just suddenly there against the sky.
When the dream woke her, she didn’t know how long she had been asleep. The images were still in her head, strong and terrifying. Nothing she had really seen. Except in her dreams. But that didn’t make the nightmares any less vivid.
She raised her hand to wipe away the tears. Her grandmother always said that grief would manifest itself somehow. Even those who didn’t seem to make any outward show were still dealing with their loss. And that sometimes it was harder for those who didn’t have the luxury of grieving openly.
She turned on her side, looking toward the windows. There was no sign of morning. Hours of night to be gotten through again, always the hardest.
In the stillness, she gradually became aware of a sound. Soft enough that it would never have awakened her. Familiar and yet out of place.
Tentatively, hardly daring to breathe, she allowed her fingers to move in the direction of the sound and knew with sudden wonder that she hadn’t been mistaken. She ran her hand lightly over the warm fur. There was a small hrump of reaction, a shifting of position, stretching. And then again, the cat’s breathing settled into the familiar, softly rhythmic purr of contentment.
Wimsey was back, and although she wasn’t sure, she thought she detected the pleasant scent of tuna surrounding him. And she lay awake a long time in the less-lonely darkness, thinking about the faith of childhood and wishes made on stars.
THE MAN WHO STOOD UP from behind the table in the room where they had sent her was slim and black, city elegant, dressed in a charcoal gray suit over a starched white shirt, a silk tie. Despite the air-conditioning, a dew of perspiration was shining on the smooth ebony of his forehead, and she fought her automatic smile at his attire, given the heat and humidity. She had not dressed up, choosing instead a cotton sundress that left a lot of tanned skin visible.
“I’m Luke Ballard, Ms. Travers,” he said. He pulled out a leather case, flipping it open with a practiced twist of his wrist to reveal the ATF identification it contained.
“How do you do, Mr. Ballard,” she said politely, extending her hand, which was lost in his. Deke’s ex-partner, she realized, and then knew that she should have guessed who they’d send.
Cool and in control, far more poised than he was, Luke Ballard thought, assessing. He hadn’t expected that. He had thought she might still be suffering from the effects of all that had happened. Emotionally on edge. But if she was, she was hiding it very well, brown eyes as direct as he’d expected them to be.
“Deke Summers was my partner,” he said, images from that long friendship suddenly too clear in his own head. “For a lot of years.”
She smiled at him, waiting through the silence. Not rushing him. A comfortable woman to be around, he acknowledged, and he wondered if that had been part of the reason Deke had been attracted.
“Would you like to sit down?” he invited.
She pulled out the chair on the opposite side of the table and sat down in it, her purse held in her lap, the picture of a Southern lady, despite her exotic coloring and the black sundress. He had been told she was a teacher, high-school English, but she didn’t look like any teacher he’d ever had, Luke thought in quick amusement.
He sat down again, nervous fingers finding the pen he’d been jotting notes with while he waited. She let the silence grow, and finally he looked up. She was watching him with those calm eyes, waiting for him to reveal the reason he had brought her here.
“Deke and I worked together for nine years, except occasionally when he went undercover. Especially when he went inside the Movement. That wasn’t something I was exactly…suited for,” he said, smiling again, remembering all the less-than-subtle jokes.
Again, she answered the smile.
“It took a while for us to be friends,” he continued, still remembering. “Given our backgrounds. Deke grew up hardscrabble poor in Tennessee, and I was ghetto tough and proud of it. But once we were over all that…” He was forced to stop, his throat tightening unexpectedly. He hadn’t known this part would be so hard. The other he’d prepared for, but this—somehow he had expected this to go smooth as glass. It was a story he’d told a hundred times since Deke had disappeared. There had been a lot of people interested in the phenomenon of Deke Summers.
“I knew he was planning to quit—at least quit the undercover work. Take a desk job, something safe. As safe as what we do ever gets,” he amended. He paused again, taking a breath. “And then everything went to hell. The botched raid. That w
asn’t Deke’s fault. That came out in the hearings, but of course, those were a couple of years down the road. And then the witness-security slipup. His wife’s death.”
“Slipup?” she repeated.
“Deke always thought someone inside had betrayed their location, but we never found any evidence of that. If that information came from the inside, it almost certainly happened by accident.”
She didn’t say anything, remembering all the times she’d accused Deke of paranoia, mentally accused him anyway. And she had been wrong. Maybe it was a slipup, but considering all that had happened, somehow she doubted it.
“I tried a lot of times through the next four years to contact Deke, to talk him into coming in. We could have kept him safe. I swear we could. And then finally…I realized he didn’t want to be safe.”
“Didn’t want to be safe?” Becki repeated carefully.
“You hadn’t figured that out,” he said, a statement, not a question. “But then, it took me a long time to understand what was going on inside his head, and I knew Deke Summers better than anyone, a lot longer than you did.” He paused, and then he asked her the question that had finally occurred to him. The obvious question. “If you wanted to hide from people who mostly live in rural areas, where would you go, Ms. Travers?” he asked softly.
The brown eyes held his, her obvious intelligence dealing with what he’d just suggested about the man they both loved. He wasn’t surprised when she refused to answer him, even when he saw the realization in her face.
“You’d go into some city,” he went on, answering his own question. “You’d hide in the urban maze, blend into the faceless throng. You’d stay in cheap hotels that rent by the month in the biggest metropolis you could find. What you wouldn’t do is live in the heart of country that holds the largest portion of the very folks you’re trying to avoid.” He paused and then added the hardest part, hardest for him to have accepted. “Not unless you want those folks to find you.”
Still she held his eyes, and finally she asked, her voice softly reasoning, “And how would you make a living in that city? With no ID? No social security number?”
“Same way,” he said, shrugging off the question. “Odd jobs. City people need carpentry work, too. Be a handyman. Wash windshields, if you had to. Hold out a tin cup.”
“Somehow,” she denied, “I can’t see Deke living like that.”
“Living,” he echoed. The salient part.
“Are you suggesting…” She stopped, unwilling to put the idea into words.
“Deke Summers thought he had a debt to pay for everyone who’d died. Some kind of blood guilt he had to work out. So he never completely disappeared.”
“That’s…” She hesitated again, and he completed the thought.
“Crazy?” he suggested. “Maybe. Enough had happened that maybe he had a right to be a little screwed up. And if not, maybe being hunted like an animal for four years would—”
“Deke Summers was the sanest man I’ve ever met,” she interrupted, defending. “Despite everything that had happened to him.”
It was his time to be silent. Considering.
“Deke always thought everything was his fault,” he said, sharing things he hadn’t intended to tell her, because he thought she needed to know. It might make it easier for her. “He was always responsible. And if things went wrong, he was the one who was supposed to pay the piper. Everything was his responsibility—to see it right. Part of that came from having a drunk for a daddy. Deke’s mama died when he was eight. Worn out, I guess. Worked to death. Mistreated. Deke hadn’t been old enough or big enough to protect her, not from anything, and he always felt that was his failure. And then those children in that compound in the Smokies died, and that became his failure, too. And finally—”
She stood up abruptly. “I don’t want to hear this, Mr. Ballard. I’m sure you think you’re being kind. Or helpful. Something. But I don’t need an assessment of Deke Summers’s character. Maybe he did have a sense of responsibility. Out of proportion, perhaps, to what he could control.” She paused, and then shook her head, “But considering the world today, I’m afraid I don’t find a sense of responsibility something to criticize. He saved my son’s life because he felt responsible for it. I don’t intend to sit here and listen to you try to tear down—”
“Hold on, Ms. Travers. I’m not tearing anybody down. Especially not Deke. I’m trying to explain to you why I believe he lived the way he did the last few years. I didn’t mean any disrespect.”
The angry rigidity of her body softened somewhat, and finally she nodded, but it was obvious that she didn’t intend to let him share any more of the insights on Deke Summers that had taken him a dozen years to figure out.
“I know the name of a man who was involved in what happened,” she said. “Someone who furnished information to Deke’s enemies. From back in Muscova.”
He didn’t say anything.
“If you’re interested,” she added, her eyes accusing him of not being interested enough.
“Vernon Petty,” he said.
“Yes.”
“We know about Mr. Petty’s activities.”
“Did you arrest him? Is that why…” She stopped, because he had begun to shake his head. “Why not?” she asked. “If you knew about him?”
“Because our information came from an informant. If we acted on it, there were some pretty substantial risks involved. We decided punishing Mr. Petty wasn’t important enough to justify those risks.”
“Not important enough?” she repeated, not bothering to hide the bitterness.
There was a long silence while he thought how to tell her. This was the part he had known would be hard. There was no way to make it any easier. He hoped that eventually she’d forgive him.
“We got a lot from this particular informant. More than just information. He wasn’t even ours. He was an FBI agent working undercover in a special unit, some kind of commando-group crap they’d put together. We got real lucky, Ms. Travers. Lucky about a lot of things, things we don’t intend to jeopardize in order to arrest the Vernon Pettys of this world.”
The wide, brown eyes were cold for the first time, the bitterness that had been in her voice reflected in them, too.
This was no less than what she had expected. Obviously her definition of lucky and his didn’t coincide.
“I see,” she said. “Then if there’s nothing else, Mr. Ballard, I think you’ll have to excuse me. I have some shopping to do. I’d hate for this to be a completely wasted day.”
He stood also, watching her walk across the room to the door.
“Would you feel strongly about relocating, Ms. Travers?”
The question stopped her, as he’d intended.
“Relocating?” she repeated, puzzled. He had told her they were no longer in danger. Why was he now suggesting that she needed to relocate? Because they hadn’t arrested Vernon Petty?
“To a major city somewhere.”
She shook her head. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“The FBI agent I told you about used an alias, of course,” he said.
A small, puzzled crease had formed between the dark wings of her brows. He could tell she didn’t understand what he was trying to work around to. And he had to admit he wasn’t doing a very good job of helping her.
This wasn’t fair, Luke thought again. They had all known it wasn’t fair, but it had seemed the best way. To ease her toward the truth, not just to spring it on her, so he added a little more information.
“The name he chose to use was Avery. Richard Avery. Does that name mean anything to you, Ms. Travers?”
“I don’t know what—” The words were cut off. Some thought began to move behind the dark eyes. “Richard?” she said. “There was a man named Richard with the people who took Josh. Mike said he was to be the one…”
There was another long silence. He let her think about what he’d told her. Deke had said she was smart, and apparently he had not
been mistaken. Her eyes glazed with tears, but she blinked, gathering control. She opened her purse and took out a folded sheet of paper. She walked back to the table, and unfolding the picture she had taken from the service-station wall, she slid it across to him.
“Could that possibly be what don’t you intend to jeopardize, Mr. Ballard?” she asked.
Luke looked down at the picture of Deke Summers and the message that had been posted on the electronic bulletin boards all over the country, sent out to the far-flung members of the elusive Movement. To all the groups who had hunted this one man so long. EXECUTED. And with that message, the hunt for Deke Summers had finally come to an end.
He looked up into her eyes, starred with tears. Waiting to have confirmed what he had brought her here to tell her.
“That’s exactly what we don’t want to put at risk.”
“Deke’s alive,” she said softly, her voice without emotion, but what she felt was all there in the dark eyes.
“We couldn’t let you know,” he said, trying to explain the reasons for what they’d put her through. “We had to make sure they really believed he was dead. Deke was determined not to endanger you or your son again. He had to know they were convinced the execution had been carried out.”
“And if they hadn’t been? What then?”
“If Deke had had any doubt the hunt was over,” he said, “you would never have been called.” He shook his head, still unable to believe how lucky they had been. “The whole thing was just a fluke. Or a miracle. The agent took an incredible risk, a spur-of-the-moment chance that shouldn’t have worked.”
“How did he convince them that Deke was dead?”
“Normally, one man would never have been given the sole responsibility, but it all came down before they were ready. You and Deke hadn’t waited for their phone call. Suddenly Deke was there, hours before they’d expected to deal with him. And they realized that as soon as they released the hostages, your brothers would alert the authorities in Cloud Run and someone would come out to the camp. They had to get out of the location. The decision was made, giving in to Richard’s rather frenzied requests to let him handle the execution and then dispose of the body somewhere in the desert. It was the one deviation from normal procedures the commander made. To put one man in charge of that operation. To be fair, however, by the time he allowed that, Deke was no longer much of a threat to anyone.”
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