by M. E. Logan
“So? I’m sure anyone in my position, having the connections I did and knowing the danger you were in would have done the same thing.”
Jessie looked up at her in shock, and Diana stared her down. They both knew there had been no one else who would have been able to do what Diana had done.
“I thought you did it because you loved me,” Jessie said in an even quieter voice.
Diana fought down the rage she felt welling up. The past few years had taught her a good deal about not speaking when she was angry. “That’s funny, at the time, I thought so too,” she said finally, bitterly.
This time Jessie avoided looking at her. She shifted her weight in the chair, uncomfortable. “It’s my fault. I should have reached out.”
“That would have been nice.”
“I was afraid to.”
“I never took you for a coward.”
Jessie flinched.
“I take that back,” Diana went on abruptly, pouncing on Jessie’s reaction. She knew she was getting ugly, knew it and couldn’t stop herself. She clenched her hands to control her shaking. “You were a coward when you wouldn’t look for Julie because she might reject you. You were a coward when you held on to her as an ideal instead of moving on and finding someone else. So why wouldn’t you be a coward about calling me after everything I risked to save you?”
Jessie’s head jerked up, her face went white and she jumped to her feet. She advanced a step toward Diana, her hands clenched into fists at her sides.
Probably, Diana thought distractedly, no one had ever called her a coward before. She herself didn’t move. As angry as she was, she would have welcomed a physical struggle. But Jessie stopped after a step.
“Coming here was a mistake,” Jessie said hoarsely through gritted teeth, her eyes narrowed.
“Well, it certainly falls under the category of too little, too late. So why don’t you leave? You can tell Nicki you kept your promise and looked me up. And you can tell her what a mistake it was because I threw you out.” She didn’t even get up from the chair.
“Diana,” Jessie started and her voice was shaking.
“What?!” Diana demanded curtly, feeling the cold anger shut down every other emotion.
This time Jessie heard the cold rage and stepped back. “I came to apologize, to say I’m sorry.” She half raised her hand in appeal.
“Fine. If that’s what you came here to say, you said it. Now leave.”
“Diana, I don’t want it to end like this.”
“It already has. It ended years ago. So now you’ve said your piece. You’ve said you’re sorry. Now leave, just leave.” Diana stood so abruptly the chair fell over backward.
With a hurt and bewildered look, Jessie turned away. When she reached out for the door, she hesitated and started to turn back but stopped. She shook her head and went out the door, closing it softly behind her.
Diana went to the door as soon as it closed and locked it, latched it. She bowed her head against the door, listening, but only heard normal apartment-complex sounds. She heard, but didn’t move to the window to see, a car door slam, the vehicle start and pull away. She could still see the surprise, the shock on Jessie’s face, the hurt from Diana’s attack.
Diana pushed away from the door, wiped the tears away, angry with herself for being ugly with Jessie, angry with Jessie for just dropping by like nothing had changed, that three years of silence hadn’t happened, and just angry with the world. Suddenly the apartment was too small, too confining when she wanted…wanted what?
She went to the phone. “Hey,” she managed to say in a civil tone when there was finally an answer. “I found some energy. You still up for that game? Fine, I’ll meet you at the court.” She glanced at her watch. “Twenty minutes? Okay.”
A quick clothes change, stuff the pizza in the fridge, pull the racquetball bag out of the closet, and she was out the door. She had to remind herself to slow down. She had enough adrenaline to fly over to the park but a speeding ticket would not be good. She put Jessie out of her mind.
Brenda pulled in beside her before she even got out of the car. “Glad you changed your mind,” the trim athletic woman greeted her. “Where’d you find the energy?” Then she stepped back when Diana slammed the Jeep door.
“Out of the past!” Diana snapped.
“Okay.” Brenda retreated another step back from Diana. “I guess you’re more than ready for a good game.”
Good friends, Diana decided, are gold. She knew she was angry and shitty but she also knew Brenda wouldn’t ask anything, at least not right away. Right now, she needed that, and she needed something to drain off all this angry energy without doing something foolish. Brenda was a good player, much better than Diana, except when Diana was pissed. Then her reaction time improved, her strength increased, as if every sense she had were determined to eradicate the ball from existence. On the floor, against the wall, in the air, Diana was determined. They were both winded in short order.
“The ball have a name tonight?” Brenda asked as she bent over, trying to catch her breath. Diana shook her head. “You know, if you could do this when you weren’t pissed, you’d be a decent player.”
Diana gave a short laugh and stretched up. She took a deep cleansing breath, released it. She felt better. “Sorry, Brenda. It’s been a rough week.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Budget cuts,” Diana offered in explanation. “Had to tell one of the interns the position’s cut.”
“Your position safe?”
“Yeah. It’s funded by a grant. I’m good for a year. At least.”
Brenda began to move around, indicating she was ready to start again. “So you’re bushed at five o’clock and by seven you’re ready to whip the world.” Brenda cast a disbelieving eye, and Diana began to stretch.
“Yep.”
“Order your pizza and movie?”
Diana bounced the ball and gave her friend a warning glance. “Just leave it right now, Brenda. Please.”
Brenda gestured with the racquet. “Your serve, my dear.”
Diana slowly began to lose her edge, her energy, and it showed in her play. She finally called it, signifying she’d had enough.
“Want to stop for a beer?” Brenda asked as they packed up. “Or are you really ready to go home and face those four walls?”
“You know I don’t drink beer, Brenda.”
Brenda shrugged and looked noncommittal. She still looked noncommittal when the waitress set the bottle and glass in front of her, the cola in front of Diana, and took their sandwich order.
“I don’t understand human nature,” Diana said slowly. “I’ve waited years for that woman to talk to me in some capacity. So when she drops in, I throw her out.”
“Three years is a long time to wait,” Brenda commented as she poured the beer. “And probably dropping in on you was not the wisest choice.”
Diana gave a humorless sound. “When it comes to personal relationships, Jessie doesn’t always make the wisest choices.” She glanced up but Brenda merely looked at her with a bland expression on her broad face. “I know. I’m not the sharpest tack in the box either,” Diana added, before Brenda might dryly point that out to her.
“We can always see more clearly into someone else’s relationship.”
Diana shook her head in disbelief. “I opened that door and saw her and the years just fell away. I literally couldn’t speak. It was like the whole world disappeared, time didn’t matter, nothing mattered except she was there.” She was lost in the memory of Jessie standing there.
“She certainly has a pull on you.” Brenda’s tone was cautious.
Diana shook her head, coming back to the present. “Margaret used to say I lost all common sense when it came to Jessie.” She glanced up to see Brenda bite her lip. “I suppose so.” She sipped her drink. “The highlight of my life was seeing the surprise and pleasure on Jessie’s face when I showed up in town.”
“If she knocked on your door expect
ing that from you, she got a rude surprise. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you so mad.”
“And I had calmed down some by the time I got to the court.” Diana shook her head. “I haven’t been that mad since—” She stopped. Even as much as Brenda had gained her confidence, there were some things she couldn’t say and Since I wanted to break Waldo into tiny little pieces was something she couldn’t say. “Well, for a long, long time. I was so mad I was afraid to move, that I might shatter and explode or I don’t know, something.” She shivered at her remembered anger.
“Did she say why she came?” Diana shook her head. “Why she dropped in on you?”
Diana moved her drink at the approach of the waitress with their food. “She said she promised Nicki, that’s her sister, if she ever got close to Tallahassee, she’d stop and look me up. That’s all.” She accepted the plate, took a deep breath, and waited until the waitress was gone. “You know what I think really pissed me off?”
“What’s that?” Brenda began all the motions of modifying her sandwich, removing the pickle, adding ketchup, salt. “Want my tomato?” Diana shook her head.
“She said she was afraid to contact me in the years past because it might compromise her integrity with her co-workers.” She looked to Brenda for confirmation, and Brenda didn’t look up. “Is that strange or what?”
Brenda closed her sandwich. She didn’t say anything, her expression carefully neutral.
“What?” Diana demanded. “You’re in law enforcement, tell me: did I expect too much?”
Brenda avoided Diana’s eye sas she spoke, which made Diana listen more carefully. “Every place is different. You have to work with those people. They have to back you up. Sometimes you get in places where you depend on them answering your call. You try hard not to give them any doubts.” She looked up at Diana as if checking whether Diana understood what she was saying. “From everything you said, Czar was a powerful force. Anything related to him would have been—” She stopped suddenly. “Questionable,” she finally finished.
Diana realized that Brenda had deliberately picked a more tactful word. She put her sandwich down. “Have I compromised you?” The thought had never occurred to her before.
Brenda shook her head. “No. You’re not doing anything now. You’ve been under such a microscope that everyone knows you’re clean. Oh, there’s been some comments.” She shook her head with an exasperated look. “Nothing substantive to speak of.” She looked up to meet Diana’s defensive gaze. “But you have to understand, at that time, with everything going on, it had to have been a different story.”
Diana took a deep breath. She didn’t like it. She wanted to defend herself that she had done everything she could to keep Jessie safe, but with the passage of time, she had gotten a different perspective. Years of time and dealing with prosecutors and lawyers and police. Oh, yes, she had a very different perspective. “All right,” she said after a moment. “Maybe I expected too much. Maybe I did have the fantasy she’d love me enough to give up police work, but I knew it was a fantasy. I guess what pissed me off was that I never heard anything. I mean, once it came out I saved her butt, I figured I deserved at least a thank you. I didn’t expect something so simple would compromise her integrity.”
“I don’t know,” Brenda said. “I wasn’t there.”
Diana eyed Brenda as she ate her sandwich. There were times she could forget Brenda was in law enforcement. Short brown tightly curled hair, broad open face, soft-spoken, reasonable, pragmatic. Diana didn’t know how she would have survived these past months without the friendship of this woman who exuded calmness, confidence and reason. Nothing seemed to excite her.
“So you think I was wrong,” Diana said finally. That law enforcement had its own little code, its unspoken rules, should not have been any surprise. Maybe an oversight but no surprise.
“Depends on what you wanted. If you wanted to hurt her back.” She raised an eyebrow as Diana’s chin went up. “I repeat, if you were hurt and you wanted to hurt her back for the years of silence, you probably did a bang-up job. If you wanted to open a conversation, you probably blew it. I think a lot of it depends on what she wanted. If she was just looking up an old friend…” Brenda gave Diana a sudden look. “She knows you loved her, doesn’t she?”
“Yeah, she finally got the picture. It was just late in the game. A lot of things started happening then and it got shoved to a back burner.”
Brenda sat back, looked at Diana curiously. “She tell you she loved you?”
No, Diana admitted to herself. “At the cabin she said she missed me, was hurt I never came back, loved me but never understood me. But that was a reference to the past, not the present.”
“Diana?”
“No,” Diana finally answered. “She never said she loved me, never in the present tense.” And she never acted like it either. Friends with benefits, Diana thought bitterly. I’m a fool. She took a deep breath. “So I’ve been carrying a torch all these years for someone who doesn’t love me back? God, that makes me sound pitiful. Or stupid. Or both.” Diana looked at the remainder of her sandwich. She wasn’t going to be able to finish it. “Some fantasy person who looked like Jessie and didn’t exist at all.”
“I wouldn’t say that she didn’t exist,” Brenda said slowly. “And it might well be she does have feelings for you, maybe just not what you wanted.”
Diana buried her face in her hands. “God, I’m an idiot.”
“No, not an idiot,” Brenda assured her. “But maybe you’ve kept too much to yourself for your own good sometimes.”
“I called her a coward.” Through her spread fingers, she saw Brenda wince.
“Not exactly the thing to call someone in law enforcement, dear.”
Diana didn’t raise her head. “I didn’t link it to anything about her job. I just said she was a coward when she didn’t look up Julie, when she used her to avoid looking for a relationship. When she didn’t call me.”
“That might well have been true then, but it probably wasn’t the thing to say.”
Diana slowly raised her head. “I really blew it, didn’t I?” She searched Brenda’s face. “I’ve been doing the same thing I accused Jessie of, holding out for her the same way she held out for Julie.”
“I don’t think it’s the same.” Brenda took a long swallow of beer. “You had a few things going on that were obstacles.”
“Like being tailed when you’re trying to date?” Diana said with bitter amusement. At least she could laugh about it now, and it appeared that Brenda too could see the humor in it. Now.
Brenda did give a smile of remembering. “Well, there were difficulties, I’ll admit. It wasn’t easy but it wasn’t impossible. You and I flirted with the idea of a relationship before we settled down to be friends. You and Kelly worked a bit more seriously at it. You never said a relationship was out of the question.”
Diana ran her finger around the rim of her glass. “Should I have called her?”
Brenda shook her head. “Probably not. You still had a lot of legal issues. State of Kentucky still have charges against you?”
“Kentucky’s a Commonwealth but no, all that just got settled. They were pissed at the Feds over the jurisdiction, and I was the bone between two dogs fighting over territory. I thought it’d never get wrapped up and they’d leave me hanging forever.”
“It might well have been why she couldn’t contact you—because of the investigations. Some jurisdictions are funny about that.”
“So you are saying I blew it—I expected too much from her and then threw her out when she came to apologize?”
Brenda gave a sympathetic laugh. “I don’t know, Diana. This is between you and Jessie. I just hate to see you hurt.” She shook her head. “If you were hurt and wanted to lash out, then that’s done. If she loves you, then maybe she’ll figure out you wouldn’t be so mad if there wasn’t a lot of feeling there. Since you called her a coward, maybe she’ll come back just to disprove it. If there w
as nothing there, then maybe she’ll just pack up and be gone, figuring that, okay, she tried her bit and if that’s your attitude, good riddance. I can’t predict what someone I don’t know is going to do. Hell, I can’t predict what you’re going to do, and I know you a good deal better.”
“You’re not alone in that department. I don’t know what I’m going to do. All I know is I’ve got a splitting headache now and the past—” she paused to look at her watch, “the past four hours have been a nightmare.”
“Thanks.”
“Oh, you’re wonderful, Brenda. What would I do without you, as a sounding board, as a friend, as someone I can count on?” She laughed even though it hurt her head. “You’ll even tell me when I’m wrong. Now that’s a friend. Let me tell you, I’ve had a lot of ‘yes ma’am’ people in my life.”
Brenda finished her beer. “Well, now, friend, I’m going to tell you it’s late. I’ve got a shift in the morning. You’ve got plans. It’s time to go home and go to bed.” She searched Diana’s face. “Bad headache?” Diana nodded. “I’ll follow you home, make sure you get there. You going to make it tomorrow?”
“Oh, yeah. Got to. People to see, things to do.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
“Oh, God,” Diana muttered the next morning when she opened the apartment door to leave. “Florida sunshine.” She squinted at the brightness then closed the door and went back to dig out her darker sunglasses. It wasn’t like she had a hangover, she hadn’t had that much to drink. It was just the combination of the anger, the crying, the lack of sleep. It was not going to be a good morning. She longed to hide in the computer room, darken the blinds, turn down the volume of the day and just hibernate. Not to be. Instead she had to go and make nice with all the organizations she worked with when she researched early Native Americans. So here she was, dressed in blue jeans, white shirt, leather vest and knee-high laced moccasins, going out to bright sunshine, and if experience proved accurate, listening to drums all day long.
“Oh, God,” she repeated as she slipped on the darkest sunglasses possible. She glanced at her watch. “Maybe by three I can leave, come home, crash.” She scanned the sky. Carolina blue, no clouds. The day was already turning warm. Great day for a powwow. Ohhh, my head.