“Actually, I wanted to ask you to have dinner with me, Kate.”
“She can’t,” Randy said, “’cause I got an upset stomach, and I don’t feel so good.”
Kate didn’t laugh, though not doing so took a good deal of self-control. “I’m sorry, Lieutenant. Not tonight.”
His lips quivered, and she noticed that his Adam’s apple bobbed rapidly. Too bad. She wasn’t going to have dinner with him just to make him happy.
“I’m in charge of the department for the next ten days, you know,” Axel said, as though indicating his status would salvage his pride.
“Yes, I know,” Kate said. “Captain Hickson told me you’d be in charge. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’d better see to those two customers who’re wandering around out there.”
Three afternoons later, she gazed in horror at Officer Jenkins’s sheet-white face when he walked into the store, stopped in front of her, shook his head and didn’t say a word.
“What is it? What’s the…Officer Jenkins, where is Randy?”
Jenkins shook his head, more slowly this time. “Ma’am, I was hoping I’d find him here with you.”
“What happened?”
Jenkins dropped into the lounge chair that she had placed opposite the cash register for tired shoppers. “He got into it with Strange, and—”
Her mind shut down, and she looked down at her fingers. She couldn’t feel a thing, and the shelves full of books blurred into a mass of rainbow colors. Why didn’t she panic? “What do you mean by that? Did he sass Lieutenant Strange?” Surely that calm voice didn’t belong to her.
“He refused to make rounds,” Jenkins told her. “Said he wasn’t doing anything for Strange. And when Strange tried to force him, he turned and ran off. What got me was he seemed to have planned to do that.”
She sat down on the other end of the sofa. “Randy told me that he wasn’t going to do anything Lieutenant Strange asked him to do, and I said that if he didn’t obey Strange, I’d lift all of his privileges for the next three months.”
“Uh…I don’t think I like what I’m hearing. Randy is strong-willed, but he’s a good kid. Strange doesn’t know a thing about kids, and they don’t like him. He yelled at Randy and told him he was Luke’s pet.”
Needles and pins attacked her toes and fingers. She sprang to her feet. “I have to find him.”
“I told Strange to put out an alarm on him, but he said it was too early. I’m off duty, so I’ll go with you.”
She grabbed her pocketbook, remembered the cash register, and stored the day’s take in the safe. “I don’t know what I’ll do if—”
Her heart nearly stopped as the telephone ring jarred her into immobility.
Jenkins answered. “She’s right here, sir.”
She grabbed the phone, anxious to tell Axel Strange what she thought of him. “Hello!” She all but screamed it.
“Hi. Don’t be upset. He’s probably just hi—”
“Luke! Where are you? How did you know? Axel won’t let anybody—”
Luke interrupted. “I’m in Nairobi. Jenkins telephoned me about twenty minutes ago. Stop worrying. I’ve talked with the chief, and he’s got a search out for Randy. Try to calm down. Everything that can be done will be done.”
“But he’s never done anything like this before.”
“We’ll deal with that after we find him.”
She wanted to tell him that she’d be more confident about that with him in charge, but with Jenkins standing a couple of feet from her, she couldn’t say anything personal. Her thoughts must have reached him telepathically, for he voiced them.
“I hate being so far away from you right now, and I ought to be there looking for him. Hell, if I’d been there, it wouldn’t have happened.”
“You…you did what you could.” A glance at Jenkins as he moved away let her know that he might have caught the intimacy of her tone. She was certain of it when he walked out of the office and closed the door.
“Yeah. But if I had been there…I had a peculiar feeling about this whole trip, and I shouldn’t have come.”
“Luke, please don’t punish yourself. This isn’t your fault.”
“He’s all right. You understand that? I’ll see you soon.”
“I hope so. Bye.”
He hung up. Maybe he was one of those people who didn’t like saying goodbye. She flicked off the light, walked out of the office and joined Jenkins. Nothing had changed, but somehow the situation didn’t seem so ominous.
“He took care of it, didn’t he?” Jenkins asked as they left the store.
“Thank you for calling him. He phoned the chief.”
“That’s what I thought he’d do. I can think of a hundred reasons why Luke was promoted over Strange. That man thinks with his ego.”
They searched until after midnight, and Jenkins finally prevailed on her to go home. She went for his sake, because he hadn’t eaten or seen his family since morning. Pains stabbed her feet as though splinters pierced them, but that didn’t stop her from walking the floor the whole night. And by morning, the dry sockets of her eyes guaranteed that she could shed no more tears. She didn’t know how she could open the store. To her relief, Officer Cowan phoned to tell her that he had put a sign on the door, and he suggested that she remain at home.
She had fallen asleep on the living-room sofa, and she jumped up, startled by loud knocking on her front door. The events came back to her, and she raced barefoot to answer it and yanked it open without waiting to see who knocked.
Luke had hung up and started packing. She’d sounded scared, and he didn’t blame her; too many cases on lost children were left unsolved. He phoned the conference secretary, thanked her for the invitation and the opportunity to address detectives from around the world, checked out of his hotel and headed for Swissair. He didn’t ask himself why he’d aborted the best networking opportunity he’d ever get. The chief had promised he’d take care of it, Axel Strange be damned. His luck held, and he got a business-class ticket on the next Swissair flight from Nairobi to Zurich to New York. In New York, he took a flight from LaGuardia to Portsmouth, and nineteen hours after talking with her, he knocked on her apartment door.
“Luke!”
He stared at the woman in front of him, and his vital organs seemed to seesaw in his body.
“Hi. You gonna let me in?”
She stepped aside, her lips slightly parted and her face the picture of wonder. “How did you get here? Lord, I’m so glad to see you.”
He pushed his tired frame through the doorway, dropped his bag at his feet and took her in his arms. “I had to come back here. They didn’t find him yet, I take it.”
She didn’t speak, but he gleaned her answer from the movement of her head against his chest. Her fingers clung to his jacket, telegraphing to him the measure of her desperation, and he had to push aside the urge to love her, to shield her from the world while she held him in her womanly cocoon. Her arm went to his waist, and she guided them to her living room.
“Can I get you some coffee or something?”
“I wouldn’t mind a sandwich. I slept all the way from Zurich to New York, and I missed the meals on Swissair. I didn’t expect anything to eat on the flight from New York to Norfolk. You know the airlines in this country don’t give you anything but peanuts and pretzels.”
He watched her trudge to the kitchen, her jerky movements all the evidence of her tortured state that he needed. His mind had told him not to go to Nairobi, but he’d gloried in the recognition that the invitation to address an INTERPOL conference represented and ignored his inner wisdom. And when she’d needed him, he hadn’t been there for her. Fighting back the bile of déjà vu that furled up in him, he walked to the window, looked out at the garden, walked back to the sofa and returned to the window. Many men in his field would envy his achievements, and he viewed them with pride, but would he forever be accursed by an inability to protect those dear to him?
She placed a tray on the
coffee table, and he walked back to the sofa and sat beside her.
“Thanks.” The chicken-salad sandwich might have been delicious, but he chewed it without tasting it. She sat closer to him, and he tried to concentrate on the sandwich and on all the reasons why he had to keep his hands off her, but her warm body touching his and her faint perfume arousing his bedeviling libido made a mockery of his common sense. He put his free hand on her right one, and she turned over her palm and caressed his with her own, welcoming his overture. That had been the wrong move, he knew, as his need for her began to stab at him. He withdrew his hand and held the sandwich with all ten of his fingers, not caring how foolish it might seem to her.
From the corner of his eye, he saw her lean back and lock her hands together in her lap. “You weren’t due back until next week, six days from now. Why are you here?” The sharpness of her tone was proof, if he needed it, that he’d displeased her.
“It’s…well, it’s my duty to see that my department uses every resource available to it in solving every case, and especially one involving a lost child. That wasn’t being done.”
“Your duty? Listen to me, Luke, I don’t want to hear about your duty. I want to know why you walked away from the most important honor of your life and came back here.”
Before he could answer, she glanced toward the foyer and the telltale truth that sat on the floor in the form of his luggage. “Look at that. You haven’t even been home. You came straight to me from the airport. I want to know why you’re here in this apartment with me this minute.”
He sipped the cool coffee and let time pass, knowing that she had the patience to sit quietly until he answered. He supposed she had a right to an explanation, though he’d have thought she’d guess enough to satisfy her. He couldn’t fault her for wanting the record straight.
“I…couldn’t stay away knowing you needed me.”
She got up and faced him. “If you’d never met the principals in this case, would you have done the same?”
If she wanted a confession, he’d disappoint her. He’d tell her how he felt about her if he came to the point where he knew he wouldn’t turn back, not before. Yet, he wanted her to need him, depend on him and trust him. His head wrestled with his heart and his body’s needs, creating an ambivalence, a frustration, that pounded at him like a river rushing downstream to flood everything in its path.
He patted the cushion beside him. “Come sit down.” The guilt that had nagged him ever since the death of his wife six years earlier spilled out of him, and he confided to her the battering he’d taken from his conscience from the minute Jenkins told him Randy had disappeared. Once more, the woman he cared about had needed him, and he hadn’t been there for her.
“I’m sorry about your wife, Luke, but I don’t believe she would want you to punish yourself about something you couldn’t control.”
“I appreciate what you’re saying, but this is the way it is, and I can only be myself. I can’t and I won’t risk a deeper involvement with you as long as I’m responsible for your safety—and now, for Randy’s. I don’t believe in jinxes, because I’m not superstitious, but I need a clear head, and—”
Her chin went up, and he didn’t feel any of the warmth that had embraced him when he entered her door. “However you slice it,” she said, “Randy’s disappearance has nothing to do with the lucidity of your mind, and you must know that. If you want to distance yourself from me, say so. I’m not about to let it kill me.”
He dropped his head in his hands, the weight of it all hitting him forcibly for the first time. “Well, it certainly won’t leave me unscathed. Let’s be friends, Kate. Close friends. And once we get Randy home and I find out who’s pestering you, I’ll…We can see where we stand with each other.”
She stared into his eyes for a long time, so intently and with such apparent coolness that he thought she might ask him to leave.
“I don’t know whether you care enough for me that I can hurt you,” he told her, “but I do know that I don’t want to cause you any kind of discomfort. Not now. Not ever. So, can we be friends for now?”
The slow nod of her head wasn’t the solace he needed right then, so he waited for her words. “We can be friends, but I don’t see myself developing a sisterly attitude toward you, so be prepared in case I slip up sometime and treat you as though you’re a man.”
He stood and lifted his right shoulder in a quick dismissive shrug. “For that matter, I may remember that you’re a desirable attractive woman. I’d better get out of here. Strange needs to know that I’m back at work.”
“I’m not sure I’ll forgive him for telling Jenkins that a certain amount of time had to elapse before he could send out an alarm for Randy—and just because he doesn’t like the child.”
“You can’t hold that against him, Kate. He merely followed precinct guidelines. Don’t forget, Randy probably provoked Strange, and the man doesn’t know how to deal with children. I’ll call you as soon as I get a line on what’s happening.”
She walked him to the door and stood looking up at him, letting him know that if there was to be any distance between them, he’d have the responsibility of creating it and maintaining it. And as if to prove he’d read her right, she stood on tiptoe and pressed her lips to his in a fleeting kiss. Tremors shook him as whispers of her breath attacked his resolve. Without taking her gaze from his, she reached for the doorknob. Still staring into his eyes, tampering with his resolve, toying with his self-control, she opened the door and stepped aside to let him pass.
“Don’t forget to call and let me know what’s going on.”
He nodded, picked up his bag and walked off.
Kate couldn’t turn on the radio or the television, for fear she’d get bad news. She wondered why, if Axel Strange was so hot for her, he hadn’t bothered to call either to console her or to tell her he was doing everything possible to find Randy. Thank God she hadn’t paid attention to his declarations of passionate interest. Absentmindedly, she ate the untouched half of Luke’s chicken-salad sandwich, heated the coffee and took a few sips. She wanted to call someone, anyone, but to what end? Luke was on the job, and when he knew something, he’d telephone her. She looked in Randy’s desk drawer and found the twenty dollars she kept there for him in case of an emergency. If he’d run away, he hadn’t planned it. She walked through the apartment aimlessly, and when her fingers began to tingle, she realized she’d twisted her hands until they ached. She sat at her piano, something she’d rarely done since moving to Portss-mouth, and began to play, hoping to lose herself in the music.
She played until tears blurred her vision and her fingers hurt. Desperate, she dialed Luke’s cell phone. Then she remembered that he hadn’t been home and didn’t have the phone, because he hadn’t taken it to Nairobi. She went back to the piano, her only solace as it had so often been during her childhood. Finally, she let herself look at her watch. Thirty-five hours since anyone had seen her child. Her briny tears slid over her lips and splashed on the ivory keys, and her fingers began to shake so badly that she had to stop playing.
Get a hold on yourself, girl. She started to the bathroom to wash her face, and when the doorbell’s familiar sound assaulted her ears, she raced to it, slipped the lock and flung it open.
“Luke, what—”
She looked down, and the small boy who stood there holding Luke’s hand filled her gaze. “Randy! Randy! Where…I’m almost dead with worry.” Her arms wrapped around him, and for once he didn’t seem to mind being petted, as he called it. She didn’t try to stop the tears that cascaded down her face as she rocked her child.
“Mom, I’m…I’m kinda hungry. Captain Luke was going to get me a burger, but I told him I’d maybe better be getting home.”
She looked at Luke, her heart bursting with what it held for him. “Come on in, while I get Randy a glass of milk and a piece of toast. You haven’t eaten, either. I can fix the three of us some scrambled eggs, quick grits, bacon and toast in about twent
y minutes while Randy’s washing his face and hands.” She smiled, not caring if she betrayed her feelings. “Will you stay?”
The lights danced in his wonderful eyes, and he patted his stomach, playfully she thought, obviously to drain the air of the tension that simmered between them.
Randy gulped down the milk and barely browned toast and left them alone.
“If you’ll give me what I need, I’ll set the table while you cook.”
She got the dishes, flatware, and place mats and gave them to Luke. In all the years of their marriage, Nathan Middleton hadn’t performed a single chore at home. She put the food on the table within the promised time and, at eleven forty-five that night, they sat down to eat. Luke helped her clean up, and Randy insisted on helping them—Randy who never wanted to do chores—though he had to be exhausted.
“I’m sure you’re tired, Randy,” Luke said as they repaired to the living room, “but before we go to bed you must tell your mother where you were, and apologize for frightening her.”
Was this her Randy, neither pouting nor behaving obstinately? “I’m sorry, Mom. I ran down in the basement at PAL to get away from Lieutenant Strange, and I got lost down there in all that stuff. Then somebody turned out the lights. I was scared, and I guess I cried myself to sleep. When I woke up the light was on, and I was scared to scream, ’cause he was really mad with me. I kept hoping somebody would come down there and find me. Captain Luke woke me up. I…I thought I was dreaming when he picked me up.”
Randy had one more surprise for her. He hugged her, paused, then hugged Luke. As though ashamed of his gestures of sentimentality, he ran from the room.
“He was certainly glad to see me,” Luke said, “but not more than I was glad to see him. We’d combed this city. Then I remembered to ask whether anyone at PAL saw the direction in which he went. Canyon, who’d been at the desk, swore he didn’t see Randy leave the building, and on a hunch I went down to the basement. Kate, that place is a morass of nooks, corridors, tiny passageways, storage rooms, boxes, barrels, old office furniture, sporting equipment, you name it. There’s even a connecting tunnel to the precinct. He’s a brave kid not to have screamed his head off. Thanks for the supper. I’d better be going.” He stood, took her hand and walked her to the door.
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