Strangers When We Meet

by Marisa Carroll

  She continued to sift through small and hazy fragments of memory as she stood under the warming spray of the shower. Nothing had seemed out of place in the cold, gloomy woods. Nothing had intruded on the November twilight except the sound of a car engine idling somewhere near the road. Beyond that, she could tell Scott Hunter almost nothing. It might have been a truck engine. Or a car. Even the car she’d seen pass by before they’d started back to the B and B. A nondescript car with tinted windows, driven by a man wearing a ball cap pulled low on his forehead. That was all.

  Nothing was clear in her mind at the moment.

  Nothing but her searing anxiety for Blake.

  * * *

  LIGHTS AND VOICES and pain. He didn’t know how much longer he was going to last. The voices were all unfamiliar, except for Clint Cooper. And Emma’s grandfather. But Emma was gone. Sometime after he’d lost consciousness they’d spirited her away. Had she gone off to meet with Tubb? He’d dreamed that at some point. That he’d seen them walking hand and hand through the front door of the McGillicuddy place.

  “Emma?” The sound he made wasn’t quite human. It certainly wasn’t recognizable. He lifted his free hand and found an oxygen mask clamped over his nose and mouth. The discovery set his heart pounding. He didn’t need oxygen. He could breathe on his own.

  “Take it easy, son.” Felix Dorn spoke from somewhere just out of view.

  He tore at the mask, but someone grabbed his wrist, and to his horror he found he couldn’t shake off the grip.

  “He’s going to start bleeding again if we don’t keep him quiet.” That came from the small woman with the nose that was more suited to a Roman gladiator than a petite blond with cornflower blue eyes.

  “This will settle him down.” Emma’s grandfather leaned over her shoulder and emptied a syringe into the IV tubing in his left arm. “Don’t fight it,” he ordered, his face contorted with his habitual scowl beneath the bright lights mounted in the ceiling of the swaying ambulance. Blake blinked and tried to focus on the old man’s face. His eyes were surprisingly gentle, in stark contrast to his gruff tone and iron hold. Blake couldn’t shake off the grip of an eighty-year-old man. He must be in worse shape than he thought.

  Everything was moving in slow circles. He didn’t hurt like he had before. The pain had receded to a dull ache in his side. Was that good or bad? Medication? Or approaching death? He made one last desperate attempt to make himself understood. “Emma.” He meant to scream her name, but even to his ears it sounded like a whimper. The circles of light began spinning faster. The old devil dog’s face began to dissolve in the glare.

  “Don’t fight it, Marine,” Emma’s grandfather said from what seemed a long way away. “She’ll be there when you wake up. I promise.”

  * * *

  THE RIDE to Pittsfield passed in a blur of humming tires and the click of windshield wipers. The rain had turned to big wet flakes of snow while they were at Twin Oaks. It was quiet for the moment, the police radio silent, the questions finished. Emma had done her best to answer each and every one, but she was afraid her jumbled and imperfect recollections of those terrible minutes before and after the shooting were not much help.

  She laid her head against the back of the hard leather seat and felt her grandmother’s feather-light touch on her arm. A faint smile quirked the corners of her mouth and played across her lips as Martha spoke. “That’s it, take a little nap, Emma Martha. We’ll be there so much quicker that way.” It was the same tactic she’d used on Emma as a child when they were traveling in the car. Sleep and the miles would melt away in a lovely dream. Only this time Emma was afraid if she went to sleep, her dreams would be nightmares of blood and pursuit.

  Emma did as she was told, though, and dutifully closed her eyes.

  Martha Dorn could be as stubborn and autocratic as her husband when she got the chance. She had informed Lieutenant Hunter in no uncertain terms that she intended to make the trip to the medical center with Emma. And that he could inform her husband of that fact when he checked on Blake’s condition on his radio. When Maureen volunteered to drive them instead, Martha brushed aside the suggestion that she would be more comfortable in the Twin Oaks van. “I jounced halfway across Korea in the dead of winter in the back of a Red Cross truck,” she said, her chin high. “I can make it to Pittsfield in the back of a police cruiser.”

  Emma’s fears for Blake kept her from falling asleep, and when they reached the hospital, everything seemed a blur of muted sounds and colors and sharp, unfamiliar smells. Emma felt as if she were floating in a cloud of unreality until she saw her grandfather’s beloved, glowering face.

  “Granddad?” She was afraid to ask straight out how Blake was doing. What if he had died on the way to the hospital? It didn’t bear thinking of.

  “He’s doing fine,” Felix assured her, anticipating her unspoken questions. “Looks like the slug nicked an artery and did a lot of muscle damage. They’re giving him blood and he should be out of surgery in an hour or two. He insisted no one notify his family or co-workers, and he was lucid enough to sign his consent papers. He would have been a good man to have at my side in Korea,” he added gruffly under his breath.

  It was the highest compliment he could pay a man. Emma dropped her head and let the tears come. Her grandfather guided her to one of the chairs in the surgical suite waiting room and patted her awkwardly on the shoulder. “There, there, Emma Martha. Don’t cry. He’s a damned tough young man. He’ll be up and around, if not exactly kicking up his heels, in time for the Marine Corps birthday ball.” No granddaughter of Felix Dorn had to ask what date that was— November tenth. Only a few days away. Emma began to relax a little.

  “You’re sure he’s going to be all right?” she asked, sniffling.

  “I said so, didn’t I?” he responded in his usual, nothing-out-of-the-ordinary crabby tone. It sounded wonderful. She closed her eyes, aware of her grandmother’s hands folded over hers and her grandfather’s solid presence with only a fraction of her mind. The rest of her perception had turned inward, focused on this sudden rush of light-headedness, a buoyancy that she knew was more than just relief. So much more.

  I love you. The words echoed in her mind and in her heart. It didn’t matter that she had known Blake for only a few days. It didn’t matter that she had thought the same thing about her feelings for Daryl Tubb mere weeks ago. This was something so vastly different, so complex and soul-deep, that she had no words to describe it.

  It had to be love.

  Real love. Not the lukewarm, confusing jumble of emotions that had characterized her relationship with Daryl.

  Daryl?

  She had barely given him a thought in hours. Was he still waiting for her? She glanced at her watch. It was after midnight. Surely he had left the roadhouse by now. Gone home to the apartment in Williamstown that she had never seen.

  She was only dimly aware of the long minutes crawling by, of people coming and going, of the waiting room emptying until only the three of them remained. She closed her eyes and, unbelievably, dozed off until a bearded—and seemingly too young—man in surgical scrubs came to tell them that the surgery had gone just as her grandfather predicted. There had been no complications and no lasting damage done. Blake Weston was a very lucky man, considering he’d been shot with a slug calibrated to bring down a deer, the surgeon said, shaking his head. His recovery should be as uncomplicated as the surgery. He accepted Emma and her grandmother’s thanks, shook hands with her grandfather and left the waiting room.

  “I told you everything was going to be fine,” Felix said with one of his rare, rusty smiles.

  Emma smiled. “Everything,” she repeated.

  “It’s going to be some time before you can see him. Why don’t you come down to the cafeteria with your grandmother and me and have a cup of tea or some soup?”

  “I’ll stay her
e,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m not hungry.”

  “We’ll bring you back some broth,” Martha said softly, but with as much conviction as one of Felix’s commands would have held.

  “Some soup would taste good,” Emma admitted.

  “Good. Soup it will be.” Martha and Felix walked out of the room hand in hand and disappeared down the hall. Emma watched them go with a lump in her throat. That was what she wanted in life more than anything else. A relationship, a love affair that would last half a century and beyond. With Blake.

  A movement in the doorway of the waiting area caught her eye, and she turned her head to see Daryl standing there, snowflakes peppering the shoulders of his trench coat.

  She’d forgotten all about him. About the meeting they were supposed to have. Even the reason for it.

  It all came flooding back, and her heart, so light just seconds ago, felt like a stone in her chest.

  “Daryl. What are you doing here?”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “GIVE ME SOME CREDIT, Emma. I came to make sure you were all right.” Daryl looked relieved to see her, but his tone reflected hurt feelings.

  “How did you know where to find me?”

  “My parents,” he said, as though speaking to a child. His tone grated on Emma’s nerves, already rubbed raw by the trauma and anguish of the last hours. She should have told him from the beginning she found that particular habit annoying, instead of keeping quiet and hoping he’d grow to realize it himself. She opened her mouth to tell him so, but his next words forestalled her. “I should have known you wouldn’t have stood me up if there wasn’t a damned good reason.” He crossed the room and took her in his arms before she could stop him. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  His heart was beating like a drum in his chest, and she could feel the tremor in his hands as he hugged her tight. He had been worried about her. There was no faking a response like that. She was ashamed of herself for being suspicious that he might have been. Her anger melted away, replaced by a vague sort of sadness for what might have been. She remembered all the good times they’d shared in the months past, and there had been many of them. But that’s all they’d been. Good times. Not the laying of a foundation for a life together. She had been in love with the idea of being in love, not with Daryl Tubb. She should have admitted that to herself weeks ago when she first suspected his infidelity. Being willfully blind had cost her dearly. “I’m fine.”

  “What happened? Mom and Dad weren’t too clear on the details. Philo and Phyllis called and told them you and Weston were shot in the hills below the old McGillicuddy place. I thought they must have misunderstood the report when it came over the emergency scanner.”

  She stepped out of his arms. He frowned but made no move to bring her back into his embrace. “Philo and Phyllis had it partly wrong. As you can see, I wasn’t hurt at all.”

  “Thank God.” Daryl reached out and touched the butterfly bandage her grandfather had insisted on applying to the cut on her cheek. “What’s this?”

  “It’s nothing,” Emma insisted. “A scratch. I didn’t even need a stitch.”

  His touch was gentle, but it might well have been the touch of a stranger. “Tell me what the hell happened.”

  “We hiked into the hills, and someone took a shot at us. A poacher, I guess, because the surgeon said it was a deer slug that hit Blake.” Her voice cracked a little but she steadied it with an almost physical effort of will. She wasn’t going to break down in front of Daryl. She didn’t want to be comforted by him. And that was the saddest thing of all. She didn’t want to be comforted by the man she’d thought she wanted to spend every day of the rest of her life with.

  Where she really wanted to be was in the arms of a man, still almost a stranger, who was fighting to recover only a few feet away. “He’s going to be all right,” she said so fiercely and with so much conviction that Daryl’s eyes widened in surprise, then darkened with a dawning sense of understanding.

  “That’s good to hear,” he said, but there was a bleakness in his voice that hadn’t been there before. He sounded sincere, and once more Emma felt a twinge of remorse, but mostly she just wanted him to go away and leave her to her vigil.

  “Why did you wait so long to come here if you were so worried about me, Daryl? We’ve been here for hours.” She was so tired she could barely stand upright, but she reached deep inside herself and tapped into a last reserve of strength and clarity. She had intended to have the truth from Daryl about his affair with Blake’s ex-lover tonight, and she meant to keep her promise to herself.

  His sandy brows pulled together in a quick frown. “You aren’t going to make this easy for me, are you?”

  “No. I think I’ve made everything too easy for you as long as we’ve been together.” That, too, was her fault. She had never cared enough, even though she had tried to tell herself she did, and Daryl had picked up on those signals. He wasn’t a bad man. Just a weak one. Perhaps someday he would find a woman he truly loved enough to be faithful to her. Emma wasn’t that woman, and they both knew it in their hearts. But the words needed to be said aloud. The last frayed cords that bound them together, however tenuously, needed to be cut.

  “Let’s sit down. You look like you’re going to collapse at my feet.”

  “I’m not,” she insisted, but she sat down anyway. As important as this conversation was, she found only half her thoughts were focused on it. The rest of her senses were concentrated on every sound, every door opening, every footfall in the corridor that might signal a nurse or doctor coming to give her news of Blake.

  “I didn’t hear what had happened up on the mountain until nearly eleven. That’s how long I waited for you to show up for our meeting.”

  “I wondered if you would even come at all.”

  His mouth tightened. He didn’t like being put on the defensive. “I didn’t have much choice. Weston swore if I didn’t get everything out in the open with you, he’d tell you everything.”

  “Blake?” She wasn’t aware the two men had ever met face to face, except for that night at Blake’s apartment.

  “He tracked me down at the diner this morning.” He glanced at the big round clock above her head. “Well, I guess it was yesterday morning. And...made me an offer I couldn’t refuse, shall we say.” His gaze focused on the wall just past her left shoulder. A muscle jumped in his jaw. “He’s a damned hard man to refuse.”

  “Were you going to tell me the truth?”

  He looked directly at her. “Yes,” he said. “I was.” For a split second she wondered if he was lying to her once more. The fleeting thought must have shown in her expression.

  “Give me that much credit, Emma. I was going to tell you everything about me and Heather. I...I was banking on your forgiveness and your love to give me a second chance.” He reached out and took her hands between his. When she made a small effort to pull away, he tightened his grip a fraction, and she stopped struggling. He watched her closely for a moment, then sighed. “I’m glad I didn’t get any takers on that bet. I would have lost my money, wouldn’t I?”

  She nodded, tears stinging the backs of her eyes. “Yes,” she whispered. “I can’t love a man I can’t trust.”

  “She didn’t mean anything to me, Emma, you know that,” he said, his voice rising a little in desperation.

  “I wish she did mean something to you, Daryl. It’s an even bigger betrayal of what I thought we had together that you were unfaithful to me with a woman you claim to care nothing about.”

  Daryl winced. “You make me sound like a randy kid who can’t keep his pants zipped.”

  “Isn’t that the way you behaved?”

  “It will never happen again, Emma. I’ll swear that on a stack of Bibles. Give me another chance. I’ll never look at another woman as long as I live.” He leaned forward,
his body rigid with tension.

  “I can’t, Daryl.” An image of her grandparents walking hand in hand down the hall flashed into her consciousness. That’s what she wanted from life. To still be holding hands with the man she loved in fifty years. She was like all the men and women who called her show asking for advice. She wanted to find her soul mate, her other half. When Daryl came along, she had tried to force him into the mold, and it had backfired on her.

  “I thought you loved me.”

  “I thought I did, too. But now I know I was wrong.” She tugged free of his grip, and when he clasped his hands together between his knees, she covered them briefly with her own. “I realize now that it wasn’t love, Daryl. Not the kind of love my parents and grandparents have for each other. Not the kind of love that keeps a couple together for fifty years, day in and day out, through good times and bad, and still has them sneaking kisses behind the counter the way I’ve seen your parents do. That kind of love takes work. Hard work. And it can’t be built on a foundation of lies and half truths.”

  “You figured this all out in the last three days?”

  “Some of it.”

  “How much of it did you figure out because of Weston?”

  She looked him straight in the eye. “Quite a bit. But your mother said a lot of the same things. She said your family stayed married. That they were in it for the long haul. We never had that kind of commitment. Admit it, Daryl.”

  “Weston’s on the rebound from Heather, you know.” That dart hit home, but she refused to let him know he’d scored a hit. I love you. The echo of Blake’s pain-racked words filled her head. Perhaps he hadn’t even been speaking to her, but to the phantom of his unfaithful lover. Emma shivered. She didn’t want to consider that. But even if it were true, it didn’t change anything between her and Daryl.

  “This is about you and me. Not me and Blake. It’s over between us, Daryl,” she said as gently as she could. “You know that.”