She laughed again, her body starting to relax until she got to remembering. “I was really awful, but she deserved it, too. Do you know what she said?”
He shook his head, his eyes so kind she could have wept.
“That she regretted letting Matt think they didn’t love him. Think! Can you imagine?” Outrage tightened her throat anew.
“Implying that of course they did love him? And he should have known it?” His grunt satisfied her vengeful side.
“The conversation didn’t get off to a great start when she chewed me out for my lack of the Christian virtue of forgiveness.”
“Hypocrisy in action,” he murmured.
“Yes, except—” Laura searched his face. “She’s right. Should I forgive them?” Have I forgiven Matt, even now?
Tiny creases deepened on his forehead. “I don’t know, Laura. Maybe you’ll be ready someday but this is too soon. Maybe they don’t deserve forgiveness. As crummy as what they did to Matt is, I’m even more pissed that they couldn’t see how alone you and Jake were after losing him.”
She bumped her forehead lightly against that solid chest. “By then...I’d probably have told them where to stuff any apologies.”
He bent to kiss her head. When she lifted her face to his, his mouth moved softly over her temple, her cheek, her mouth. “Warning me not to piss you off?” he murmured.
He had a gift for making her laugh even as she closed her eyes and savored the gentle touch of his lips. He wasn’t asking anything of her, just...giving.
“I told Jake,” she said.
“Mmm.” He nibbled on her lower lip. “Told him what?”
“About this.” She turned her head to try to capture his mouth. “That we’re dating.”
“Dating?” he teased, his voice rich with amusement.
“I also said you’re my boyfriend, and that sounds even sillier, so don’t smirk at me,” she said tartly even as she repressed her own smile. “And that was your suggestion, if you may recall.”
“Huh.” His smile grew to an open grin. “So it was.”
“Did he say anything to you?”
“Just now? No, but I thought he was looking at me funny.”
“That’s because you kiss me and stuff. And he can’t figure out why you’d want to.”
He squeezed her ass with one big hand. “Oh, he’ll understand sooner than he thinks. Give him another year.”
Laura made a face at him. “Gee, good to know.”
“I’m trying to remember when a guy starts having wet dreams.”
“Eww!” She pushed him away. “I don’t want to know. Ever! Is that clear?”
Laughing helplessly, he held up both hands in acknowledgment and surrender. Only then the smile slid away, leaving tenderness. “You okay now?”
“Yes.” She gasped. “Oh, no! The water’s boiling.”
As she reached to open the door, she felt him right behind her.
“Maybe I could sneak back in tonight after he’s gone to bed.”
“Dream on,” she told him, then turned to narrow her eyes. “And not a word about what kind of dream.”
He laughed so hard she shut the door in his face.
* * *
THE NEXT TWO weeks were good. So good, Ethan was suspicious. Jake hadn’t once begged to have a chance to shoot at the range. He hadn’t thrown a temper tantrum, at least not one Laura had mentioned. Maybe the counseling was helping, Ethan found himself thinking, or could be they were in the eye of the storm.
He was happy with how things were going with Laura, too. Which didn’t mean he was ready for this.
Now parked outside the counseling center where she took Jake, he frowned as he looked at the building. He didn’t want to be there. It felt like a commitment he’d sworn he wouldn’t make yet.
Dr. Randall Lang had requested the favor of his presence. So, okay, Ethan could understand that; apparently, Jake talked about him a lot. Well, of course he did—Ethan saw Jake at least three days a week, sometimes more.
This, though—this felt like something bigger than the therapist wanting to meet Jake’s mother’s boyfriend. Were non-family members usually included? It wasn’t as if he lived with them.
Although he was beginning to wish he did. His apartment felt increasingly bare and lonely. When he wasn’t having dinner with Laura and Jake, he’d taken to mostly grabbing a meal out. Cooking just for himself exacerbated the feeling of loneliness. In restaurants, well, at least there were other people around or he ate with fellow cops.
Shaking his head, he got out, locked up and started across the parking lot. He deliberately distracted himself by thinking about his morning.
Pomeroy and Clayton had thrown up their hands and agreed to a plan Ethan had cooked up. Beginning tomorrow, the three of them would spend a few hours every night keeping watch on a potential next victim of the swastika arsonist. He was uneasy waiting even that long; this had been a long break between attacks. But Pomeroy had had to fly to Seattle and wouldn’t be back until late afternoon tomorrow, and Clayton had a personal commitment. Ethan had had no choice but to concede that tomorrow night would be good.
Neither Pomeroy nor Sam Clayton totally bought into his theory, but when they looked at a map with pins stuck in to indicate where incidents had occurred, they could all see the pattern. Ethan strongly suspected they’d find the perpetrator lived smack-dab in the middle, were they to draw a circle taking in every attack.
What they’d done was search for people with Jewish names who lived within that circle—and a few blocks outside it—and chose the next three that struck them as likeliest. They eliminated some who were in apartments or town houses, unlikely targets. Two houses were brick, tough to set on fire without breaking in. Of course, the attack might take a different form if one of those people was the point of all this...but Ethan was betting not. He thought the fires were going to keep getting bigger, and that their guy had started this whole thing because he knew whoever it was he really hated would be vulnerable to fire.
The three had pretty well drawn straws. Every incident had taken place between one and three in the morning. Midnight to three, they planned to be out there. Another bonus was, if dispatch called, they’d be the first to arrive on any new scene. Pomeroy was taking the Fromels, Clayton the Gartenhaus family, and Ethan the Gelfmans, who by chance lived only ten blocks from Laura and Jake.
And, yeah, pretty close to the middle of the imaginary circle.
One of the things he’d done that morning was research the Gelfman family. What he’d learned had his radar humming. Michael Gelfman had lost his wife to cancer close to ten years ago. He’d remarried three years ago, this time to a Gentile woman who already had a child, a boy who was now seventeen. In the past year, young Austin March had been arrested twice—once for assaulting a teacher, the other time for a fight with another boy that ramped up when Austin pulled a knife.
Gelfman’s stepson was an angry kid likely to have made enemies. He could well be the ultimate intended victim. But the stepfather struck Ethan as target material, too; there had been two potential domestic violence calls to the address since Gelfman married Austin’s mother. In both cases, responding officers hadn’t been satisfied but had had to leave, unable to confirm anything criminal had happened.
A troubled household interested Ethan a great deal in this context.
With a grunt, he put the Gelfmans out of his mind and strode into the counseling center without letting himself hesitate. Laura and Jake were already seated in the waiting room. At the sight of him, both their faces shone with relief and pleasure. They wanted him there. He wanted to be there for them. Of course it was right that he be part of this. Whatever had had him jumpy settled.
“Hey,” he said, kissing Laura on the cheek when she stood to greet him. “I was afraid I was late.”
“No, this is perfect.” She smiled at him. “Thank you for coming. I know getting away during the afternoon can be a problem for you.”
“N
othing that exciting was happening today.”
True enough; except for the meeting—and Pomeroy had come to him and Clayton rather than the other way around—Ethan had spent his day thus far glued to his computer and phone. That summed up a lot of his days, come to think of it. Mostly he gathered information. Thrills and chills were rare. His mother, experienced wife of a law enforcement officer, had breathed a sigh of relief when he left patrol for the detective gig.
Jake had barely started to say something when they all heard his name and their heads turned.
The guy smiling at them was about Ethan’s age, good-looking. With those wire-rimmed glasses, almost geeky, but clearly athletic, too.
“Detective Winter,” he said, holding out his hand as soon as they got close enough. “Thank you for coming.”
They shook. “No problem.”
Dr. Lang led them down a short hall to his office, and then sat in one of the chairs. Ethan, Laura and Jake settled together on a comfortably worn sofa. Ethan laid his right arm along the back, behind Jake’s shoulders, his fingers just touching Laura’s shoulder. He knew what message he was sending to the good doctor and decided he didn’t care.
“If I understand correctly,” Dr. Lang started things off by saying, “you knew Jake’s father but had met Laura only at the funeral until fairly recently.”
“That’s right.” He explained again that he and Matt had worked together early in both their careers, then had taken different directions and in fact had been separated geographically, as well, ending up working out of different precincts. “I attended Matt’s funeral out of respect and...” his pause was infinitesimal “...a memory of friendship. Otherwise, I hadn’t set eyes on Laura or Jake until I spotted him at the gun show.”
No, he said, he wasn’t married and had no children, only a two-year-old nephew so far, who lived with Ethan’s sister and her husband in the Seattle area. He liked teenagers, and had done some volunteering, teaching personal safety and hunter safety classes, talking in schools and the like.
“Jake reminds me of his dad and maybe a little bit of myself at that age,” he said, and saw shy pleasure on the boy’s face. He couldn’t tell what Laura was thinking.
“How so?” Dr. Lang asked.
“He looks a great deal like his father. Have you seen a picture of him?” Turned out he hadn’t, but Laura promptly produced one from her wallet.
Ethan wasn’t sure he liked the idea she still carried a photo of her dead husband. He knew that was unreasonable. It might be as much to reassure Jake as anything. He couldn’t help feeling an uncomfortable jolt of jealousy, though.
Dr. Lang studied the picture, then Jake. “Can’t argue about the looks. Your dad was a handsome man.”
Ethan dredged his memory for qualities in the guy he’d liked: a happy-go-lucky attitude, a genuine liking for people that won him a positive response, a love of jokes and pranks that made him popular at the station. Apparently those qualities had gone along with carelessness and the unfailingly optimistic belief that nothing bad would ever happen, and he guessed Laura was thinking the same but hoped Jake wasn’t.
“Jake’s more serious,” he said, thinking it through, “but he has reason to be. I get the feeling he was really well-liked until his current troubles, and he will be again.” He squeezed Jake’s shoulder. “He’s fun to hang out with.”
He explained that he’d been sports-mad at Jake’s age, too, and physically restless, needing to use his body hard so he could focus when it was time to study or sit in class. “I guess I identify partly because the year I turned twelve was a tough one for me.” Why hadn’t that occurred to him until now? He had no idea. “My father is a US marshal,” he said. The therapist nodded his understanding. “Dad was working on something complicated.” He knew what now, but wasn’t going to explain. “He was gone a lot, and my mother was scared. Neither of them would tell me what he was doing, so I was scared, too. I got into some trouble at school that year.”
“Really?” Jake looked at him. “You didn’t tell me that. What did you do?”
“Mostly it’s what I didn’t do. My work. Plus, I had a teacher I really disliked—math,” he said as an aside. “He made fun of a couple of students who couldn’t fight back. I did it for them.” He grimaced, making sure Jake saw the expression. “Wasn’t smart enough to take it to the principal.”
“What happened?” Jake sounded fascinated.
“I was lucky the same way you are. My mother stood by me. Dad finished that assignment and I grew up a little.”
Conversation became, he was sure by design, more general, with them all talking about what they’d done the past week. Hearing Jake chattering about Ethan this and Ethan that, he almost winced. No wonder Dr. Lang had wanted to meet him, he thought ruefully.
Walking out at the end with Laura, Jake bouncing around them like an excited puppy, he wondered who he’d been kidding. Taking it slow? Yeah, that was something you could do dating a woman who didn’t have a kid. But he’d long since crossed a line where Jake was concerned. With Laura, he could try protecting himself, but with the boy...I’m all in, he thought. If Laura ever decided to cut him out of Jake’s life, that would be bad.
Out in the parking lot, a decision he hadn’t even known he was debating made, he stopped Jake with a hand on his shoulder even as he looked at Laura.
“Hey,” he said. “How would you feel about Sunday dinner at my parents’?”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
MEETING THE PARENTS was scary.
Laura hadn’t been in this position for a very, very long time. Of course, she wasn’t 100 percent sure Ethan had told his parents he was dating her. Maybe he’d talked only about Jake. But the warmth in his voice told her he was close to them, so she suspected they knew exactly how he felt about her. Maybe more about how he felt than she did.
In the midst of an attack of nerves during the drive, she discovered she was a little intimidated by his father’s profession, too. So, okay, what he did probably wasn’t all that different from Ethan’s or Matt’s job, but...she kept thinking, He’s a fed. And that sounded big and bad.
And finally, the original plan had been for Ethan to pick them up, but he’d called not that long before she’d expected him and said in a terse voice, “Any chance we can meet there? Something came up.”
She had assured him that was fine, taken the address and plotted her route online. But now she wondered if this hadn’t been some sort of test. What if his parents had demanded he set it up? She pictured them saying, Let’s find out now whether she can take the stresses.
And yes, that was dumb—she knew Ethan wouldn’t do that to her. But the very thought had stiffened her spine. She’d show them all what she was made of.
Jake was really quiet during the drive, too. When she pulled up in front of the house, which she loved on sight, he said, “I don’t see Ethan’s truck.”
“No, it looks like we beat him here,” she said with fake good cheer. “That’s okay. We knew something was holding him up.”
The eternal something that any police officer’s spouse had to learn to live with.
Not letting herself dawdle, she got out and then reached in the back for the pie his mother had agreed to let her contribute. Jake was waiting on the sidewalk by the time she reached it.
“Look at that arch,” he whispered. “It doesn’t go into the house.”
“No, it leads into the garden.” The house, two-story, brick and likely dating to the 1920s, had a fairy-tale feel, with a particularly pointy roof, small-paned windows, some of which had arched tops that echoed the one extending to the side of the house, and a green-painted front door also with rounded top. To make it all more perfect, one of Ethan’s parents loved roses. Many were in glorious bloom in a profusion of shades from creamy white through pale pink to deep rose and even purple. The long canes of a climber clambered over the brick arch, what had to be an old-time rambler scrambled over the detached garage, and a huge rugosa bush filled the spac
e between the front windows. The glimpse she got into the side yard looked magical, too, and the rich scent filled the air.
“And I was feeling good because I finally got around to painting the deck at our place,” she grumbled under her breath.
“What?” her son asked.
“Nothing.”
She rang the doorbell, and then waited in trepidation.
The door opened, and a woman beamed at them. “You must be Laura. And Jake. Come in, come in!” She peered past them. “Still no Ethan?”
“No. I hope he can get away so you aren’t stuck with us on our own.”
His mother laughed. “You should hope. Without him here to defend you, I can grill you!”
Wide-eyed, Jake inched a little closer to Laura.
Ethan’s mother was even taller than Laura, and thin. Short hair that must have been blond was being allowed to go white. She had laugh lines on her face that made her instantly likeable.
Seeing Jake’s move, Mrs. Winter laughed. “Just kidding. Grilling suspects is my husband’s specialty, not mine. I’m Selena Winter.” As she and Laura shook hands, she smiled over her shoulder at the man who was joining them. “Speaking of my husband...Joe Winter.”
He looked startlingly like his son—or maybe it was the other way around. Strands of silver in hair a little darker than Ethan’s and deep wrinkles beside his eyes betrayed his age, but he was still a big, obviously fit, handsome man.
“Ethan said you played college basketball, too,” she said.
His grin looked much like his son’s, too. “Whipped him on the court until he turned, oh, about eighteen.”
His wife snorted. “Try fifteen or sixteen.”
He clasped a hand over his heart. “Now you’re just being mean.”
They all laughed.
“Tell you what, Jake,” Joe Winter said. “How about we grab a ball and shoot some baskets until Ethan gets here? The women don’t need us in the kitchen and who wants to sit around?”
Selena almost caught him with her elbow, but he knew her well enough to dodge at the right time. Laughing, he steered Jake away. Jake looked shy, but went with only one backward look at his mother.
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