Axel got into his car, slapped the steering wheel and mused over the quandary his life had become. He loved Jessye, but she wanted Luke. Kate wanted Luke, and he supposed Luke wanted her, but he didn’t intend for him to have her. Why should the man have everything, while he got nothing? And Kate. A woman who’d had the temerity to tell him to leave her store, a miserable little bookstore, when his family owned Fortune 500 companies. Hickson. Kate. It was time he got some of his own. While Jessye had reminisced, he’d added two plus two and come up with four.
Later that night, unpacking her bags, Kate remembered the manila envelope Asa gave her. She’d stuck it in her flight bag.
As she opened it, her eyes widened and her belly clenched, then erupted in spasm after spasm. After a while, she clutched her middle, took a deep breath and forced herself to examine the contents—a packet of Series E United States Savings Bonds in Randy’s name. She counted fifty of them in five-thousand-dollar denominations, a small fortune, because she wouldn’t give them to him until his twenty-first birthday. She looked at the envelope addressed to her, hesitated, then opened it and read:
Our dear Kate,
Nathan punished us by not letting us see our grandchild or bringing you to us. It was our fault, because we spoiled him, and when we finally denied him something, he got even by withholding his family from us. We can imagine the pain he caused you, too, for we know how selfish he was. From our copy of his will, we are aware that little of his estate went to you and his son, and we want to begin to make amends for that. You and Randy are all we have in this world. Please let us be a part of your lives.
Love, Ellen and Asa.
She unfolded the green slip of paper and gasped. It was a certified check made out to her for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Dumbfounded, she telephoned Luke.
“What’s up?” he asked, his voice conveying a wariness that suggested he expected a problem.
“You won’t believe what’s in this envelope.”
“Yes, I would,” he replied, his tone urgent.
She explained what she’d found, and read the letter to him. “I’m too weak to stand up.”
“I can imagine. I suspected something like that, because they convinced me within the hour after we got there that they wouldn’t consider abusing anybody.”
“I’m going to put these bonds away for Randy until he’s twenty-one.”
“Right, and unless you need some of that money I’d invest all of it conservatively and forget about it. You have a nest egg.”
“I’m glad you twisted my arm about going to Hawaii. Anything happen to the store, or out on Biddle?”
“I just got the reports. Not a thing. And I have to admit that puzzles me.”
“But you posted guards around, and they weren’t taking chances. Any news about Miss Fanny?”
“She’s back home. Fine. Seems she fell asleep in front of the TV and the cigar dropped out of her hand and started that fire. When you found her, she was suffering from smoke inhalation. In another half hour it would have been curtains, because the poor woman had just recovered from pneumonia. I’m proud of you, sweetheart.”
“Don’t be, Luke. If I’d stopped to think about it, I might not have risked it.”
“But you didn’t. I know an idyllic spot upstate New York. What do you say we give Randy an opportunity to see Amy, and we fly up there next weekend?”
“I’d love it.”
“And me?”
She blew him a kiss. “Does a morning glory love the sun?”
His voice seemed wrapped in a smile. “Works for me. I love you, Kate. Good night.”
He hung up. She wished he hadn’t done that—she hadn’t blown him a kiss.
At the bank the next morning, she invested in a mutual fund and put Randy’s bonds in a safe-deposit box. Her long steps made little of the three short blocks to her store as she strode along, greeting passersby, her stride lithe and her heart light.
Kate contemplated a weekend with Luke—a tryst where they’d be alone as they had in Biddle the first time she knew him, had him locked within her, tight in her arms. She opened the store and said a word of grace, thankful that there’d been no tampering in their absence. Looking to the street, she saw Officer Cowan’s car and waved her thanks. It crossed her mind that having to trail her wherever she went had to keep the man in a state of boredom. She locked the door, flicked on the buzzer and got to work checking Jessye’s receipts. Her cousin had become an excellent salesperson, something to which her days’ receipts always attested.
At the sound of the buzzer, she glanced toward the door, saw Axel and pushed the buzzer.
She didn’t bother with small talk. “Jessye’s off today, Lieutenant. May I help you with something?”
To her amazement, he took a seat on the sofa that faced the cash register, stretched out his legs, crossed them at the ankles and treated her to a display of self-satisfaction.
Dampness accumulated on her brow and forearms, and he sat there enjoying her discomfort. His grin displayed his perfect white teeth, and his eyes sparkled as though in triumph, reminding her of an operatic tenor who glories in at last having hit a defining high C, or a relief pitcher after he’s struck out the other side. Crafty, too—an animal ready for the kill. She braced herself.
“What do you want, Lieutenant?”
His grin broadened, and he crossed his right knee and swung his foot as though to some imaginary jazz tune. “I don’t want anything, babe. I’m just enjoying the prospect of seeing your royal highness take a fall.”
Tendrils of fear raced down her spine. With his streak of meanness, she wouldn’t put anything past him. And he strung out the torture, making her imagine every conceivable horror, rubbing it in with his disrespectful tone, calling her babe to denote her plunge in his esteem.
She stood straight and proud. “Say whatever you’ve got to say, please, and leave. I have work to do.”
“With the greatest of pleasure. Did you ever find out who apprehended Jethro Raven and set him up for a fifteen-year stretch?”
She nearly choked, and fought back a swirl of dizziness as she clutched the cash register. “Where’d you get…I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
He jumped up, took two strides in her direction and loomed over her, menacing and threatening.
“Sorry. I didn’t know you disowned your own father. My research didn’t disclose that. But when lover boy’s hot after you tonight, babe, ask him how he met your old man.”
She resisted covering her ears with her hands and pointed toward the door. “Get out! And don’t you ever come back in here.”
She watched him saunter out, heard the door slam, and crumpled in a heap behind the counter. Long minutes later, the door buzzer alerted her, and she dragged herself up. How had he known? Only a few relatives in Orangeburg knew of her connection to the case, and of her father’s misfortune.
She made it through the day, all the while procrastinating about asking Luke if he had indeed been the officer who accused her father—a man the whole of Orangeburg knew as an upstanding citizen. Call him and ask him, insisted the jealous inner voice that begrudged her Luke’s love, but she couldn’t force herself to do it. Yet how could she join him for their weekend idyll if she was unsure and suspicious? She tried to figure out how Axel had known, and could only conclude that he’d checked the records. Her father hadn’t been apprehended in Richmond, but he’d been tried there.
If only she’d gone to the trial. She hadn’t been there to support her father because Nathan forbade it, and, without a credit card or sufficient cash, she couldn’t defy him. That was another reason why she’d never again be dependent on a man.
She couldn’t muster enthusiasm for Randy’s success with his clients’ picnic and, for once, she was glad that Jenkins, and not Luke, brought Randy to the store that afternoon.
“Luke told me to let you know he has an emergency, and he’ll call when he can.”
She thanked the
officer and wondered if Luke realized that in sending her such a message by one of his officers, he’d made a statement.
With Randy in bed and the apartment quiet, she couldn’t settle down. She wandered from room to room, opening closet doors, moving books from one shelf to another, making trip after trip to the refrigerator. Unable to shake her blue funk, she got out the flour, eggs, baking powder, Crisco and buttermilk, and made biscuits. Their aroma perfumed the apartment, an odor that she loved, but she barely noticed it. She put some raspberry jam on one of them and walked out into her garden, but the scent of roses as they teased her nostrils, bright moonlight, frolicking stars and soft breeze all reminded her too much of nights with Luke. She went inside and flung the uneaten biscuit in the refuse basket.
Then she suddenly stopped and snapped her fingers. Jessye! The only person in Portsmouth who knew Raven was her maiden name. She looked at her watch. Eleven-fifteen, but she didn’t care.
“Jessye, this is Kate. Why did you tell Axel Strange about my father?”
“What? I didn’t do any such thing.”
“Then how’d he find out? Only you know my maiden name.”
“Good Lord. Honey, you know I wouldn’t do that. That’s something our family doesn’t speak about to outsiders. I told him my maiden name when he asked me. And when he wanted to know where my papa was and what he did for a living, I told him he runs that little old biweekly newspaper. Later, he asked if my papa was an only child, and I told him that my papa and yours are brothers. I guess he did some research and drew his own conclusions. Has Axel—What did he do?”
“Do? Jessye, he implied Luke is the officer who apprehended Papa and set him up.” Unshed tears damped her eyes, but she wouldn’t let them flow, and her lips trembled until her words were little more than warbles. “Jessye, I love Luke. Do you hear me? I love that man.”
“Honey, settle down. Maybe Axel’s wrong.”
“No, he isn’t. I never saw a man more sure of his ground.”
“Well, if that’s true, it’s sure ’nuff awful. You have to stick your chin out and ask Luke about it. Honey, I declare, if it’s not one thing, it’s another.”
“Tell me about it.” She hung up.
At a quarter past one in the morning, she dialed Luke’s cell-phone number. It might not be fair, but she couldn’t help it. She couldn’t stand not knowing any longer.
“Hello.” The velvet sweetness of his voice rolled over her like a soft lover’s breath, and she almost put down the receiver. “Yes?”
She could tell that he was no longer lying down, that he’d sat up, clearheaded and alert. “Luke, this is…Kate.”
“What’s the matter?” The urgency in his voice spoke of his protective nature and his concern for her, but she couldn’t backtrack.
“I’m sorry I woke you, but this is killing me. Axel said I should ask you who apprehended and accused Jethro Raven.”
Icy pellets fought a battle in her belly as she listened in horror to his long silence. When she thought she could stand it no longer, he said, “I did. Why do you ask?”
She pressed her lips together in an effort to control her chattering teeth. “Jethro Raven is my father.”
She hung up.
Bent double with the pain of it, she rocked herself, seeking comfort she knew she wouldn’t find. Of all the towns in the United States, why had she chosen to return to Portsmouth?
Luke Hickson had done his job, but, in her mind, that hadn’t involved determining whether the man was a courier or merely a victim of his own naïveté. Maybe to a police detective, that didn’t matter. By morning, she’d walked until her feet ached, and she’d eaten nearly a dozen biscuits.
Get your act together, girl, she admonished herself. One night’s loss of sleep was enough of her life to waste on any man. After wasting the better part of ten years on Nathan, she knew better than to expect miracles to last. And that’s what Luke had been to her. A miracle.
She showered, awakened Randy and started preparing breakfast. Though her relationship with Luke was history, she would have Randy stay with PAL, because those officers had turned him around.
Kate knew from the sound of the doorbell that Luke was the caller.
“I don’t need this,” she said, thankful that Randy was in the shower and wouldn’t hear their exchange.
He walked in, haggard and obviously out of sorts. “You hung up on me. You didn’t care enough to hear me out.”
“What did you expect?”
He stared down at her, his gray eyes devoid of their flashing charm, dull and lackluster. “I expect the woman who said she loves me, who gave herself to me as if doing so glorified her, who, in the name of love, held me inside her body, I expect that woman to want to hear what I have to say no matter who else is involved.”
She hadn’t known she could hurt so much. Numbness attacked her fingers and toes as Luke continued to stare down at her without warmth or passion, judging her as she’d judged him.
“Well? May I sit down?”
“I…Randy will be in here in a minute, and I don’t want him to hear this.”
He raised both eyebrows. “But it was so urgent that I had to be awakened at almost two o’clock this morning and deprived of the remainder of my night’s sleep.” He took a seat on the sofa. “We might as well get this over with. Let Randy eat in the kitchen. Do you want to hear me out, or not?”
“All right.” She sat in a chair facing him.
He shrugged, as if he didn’t care. Then a grin settled around his mouth, though it didn’t reach his eyes. “Two days ago, you sat in my lap. Now, with all this space beside me on this sofa, you’re over there. Time changes things, doesn’t it?”
His sarcasm restored her equilibrium and poise. “All right, Luke. Tell me for what reason an innocent man should be convicted.”
He rubbed his chin, and she could see that he struggled for self-control. “I was neither judge nor juror. I handcuffed Jethro Raven after I found a twenty-five-pound box of cocaine on the floor in the back of his car. Every courier claims he or she didn’t know what the package contained.” He crossed his left knee and leaned forward.
“I’ve sworn to uphold the law, and if I had caught Marcus with that load, trust me, I would have arrested him. Should I have broken the law for someone else?”
“But you knew he was innocent. Anybody can look at my father and see that he’s an upstanding citizen, that he would never knowingly break the law.”
“If you have such power as that, Kate, we need you on the force. I’ve caught sweet little old ladies trucking heroin. Why don’t you ask your father why he let himself get into that mess?”
He stood, and she saw the door closing on her life. “To you, it’s black-and-white, with no extenuating circumstances,” she whispered.
She hardly recognized his voice, thin and strained. “If you can walk out on me because I did my job as best I knew how and according to my lights, you’re the wrong woman for me.”
“But—” She wondered if he could hear her heart breaking.
“No buts. I should have known you were too good to be true. One of the officers will pick up Randy at three-thirty today, as usual.” He walked a few paces toward the door and stopped. “I won’t be in touch, but if you need anything, anything at all, you know how to reach me and I’ll be there for you.” Before she could react, the door closed behind him.
Gone. Finished. She snapped her finger. Just like that. He’d taken her heart and left behind an empty spot in her soul. Somewhat dazed, she looked around her and couldn’t see anything different. The sofa and chairs retained their olive-green tone and buttery soft leather fabric; her Turkish carpets still graced a highly polished parquet floor; her paintings and flowers stared back at her as if to say, we are still here.
She picked up a magazine and tossed it across the room. To hell with it. “Randy, would you hurry up and get in here and eat your breakfast?”
Luke prowled around his office, knocking his ri
ght fist into his left palm. He looked at his watch. Another twenty minutes. He ought to get some work done while the place was still quiet. He sat down and leafed through the papers in his mailbox. After a minute, he threw up his hands, got up and began walking around his office. He rubbed the back of his neck, went to his desk and started to dial a number. He thought better of it, and hung up. A glance at the clock on his desk, which faced out to call visitors’ attention to the importance of his time, told him that only five minutes had passed.
Enough. When he heard Axel’s voice at the water cooler, he locked his desk and charged out into the corridor.
“Come in here, man.”
“You addressing me?” Axel asked.
He hoped the man wouldn’t pick that time to fool with him, because his tolerance for Axel Strange was nonexistent. “Yes, I’m talking to you, and I said come in here.”
Axel sauntered in, and Luke slammed the door shut, causing the more junior officer to spin around wearing a look of terror. “Uh, what’s up?” Axel asked Luke.
“I don’t see that Langford report on my desk.”
Axel backed up and extended his hands, palms out. “Look. Don’t get uptight. I’ll have it in here tomorrow morning.”
Luke stepped closer to him. “It was due Thursday, and today is Tuesday. If you had been doing your work instead of disclosing the content of confidential files, you wouldn’t be in trouble right now. I could unload you for that.”
“You can’t prove I did that. You and I both know what you’re so heated up about. You didn’t win this time, did you?”
“You’re obsessed with getting the better of me. I don’t know why. But to accomplish that you’d have to show that you’re better than I am at what I do, and you don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of pulling that off. So you tried to break up Kate and me. For myself, I don’t care what you do, but you inflicted a load of pain on her. And for that, I’d like to smash your face.”
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