The Gazebo

by Kimberly Cates

  How much longer could she keep Stone’s profession a secret?

  Stone scooped up the cell phone again, fumbled with it until he pressed some kind of speed dial. Deirdre took the gift of his distraction, hoping to use it to her advantage, staring out the window in hopes the man would lapse back into a silence as hard as his name.

  But whatever hold Stone had kept on his temper seemed to snap. Deirdre jumped, startled as Stone nearly slammed the phone into one of the cup holders on the dashboard. Hooking his long fingers into the knot of his tie, he yanked it down as if it had been strangling him. Tearing the loop over his head, he threw the tie into the back seat. He swore under his breath as he unfastened the first two buttons of his collar, revealing the tanned hollow of his throat and beneath it, a dusting of dark hair.

  “Problem?” Deirdre asked.

  “Hell, no. This day is turning into a fucking joy ride.” Stone growled, and attacked his cuffs, unbuttoning them one at a time and rolling the sleeves up until they skimmed just below the crook of his elbow, exposing sinewy, tanned forearms. His jaw was set so fiercely Deirdre almost felt sorry for whoever had ticked him off.

  Almost. Part of her was glad the jerk who was so good at pushing her buttons was having a few of his own buttons stomped on, hard.

  He should have looked like hell, or at least disheveled, the way he was decimating those Mr. Cool clothes. Instead, the man oozed sensuality, reminding Deirdre of a tiger on a branch, seeming distracted, but ready in a split second to leap on its prey. His gaze burned so hot through the window, it seemed the glass should melt, his shoulders felt broader with suppressed anger, the hard muscles she’d felt when he’d pulled her against him knotted with tension.

  Would he bring that kind of intensity to everything? Burn a woman up with passion if he ever let loose the emotions so tightly coiled under all that tanned skin?

  Her imagination flashed to an image of Stone’s big body covering hers….

  Desire and alarm warred inside her. Deirdre bit the inside of her lip, and looked out the passenger window, trying to blot out the overwhelming presence of the man beside her by thinking of the interview and the tangled past she’d come from. But she could smell the blatantly masculine scent of him, feel the primitive power in him, sense the kind of passion that could turn in a heartbeat from anger to something far more dangerous.

  “It’s showtime,” Stone bit out as he pulled to a stop before a row of lovely condominiums, their perfectly trimmed yards almost Twilight Zone identical, the house numbers so tastefully small she wondered how Stone could be sure he had the right place.

  Deirdre sucked in a steadying breath, filled with a sudden reluctance, absurd considering how far she had come.

  Had her mother kept in touch with this woman? Sent Christmas cards? What would her mother’s friend think of her? Deirdre wondered. Did the woman know…It didn’t matter what this woman knew about Deirdre’s rocky relationship with Emmaline McDaniel. Deirdre was the one whose questions mattered today.

  Please, Mom, Deirdre stunned herself by praying, almost as if for forgiveness. I have to know…who I am.

  She started in surprise as Stone yanked open her door, and she realized she hadn’t even noticed him climb out from behind the wheel or round the vehicle to her side.

  “You’re not going to change your mind now?” Stone taunted.

  Deirdre climbed out of the car, smoothing the sage-green tunic she’d worn over black slacks. Showtime, Stone had said, as naturally as Emma might. Deirdre had to wonder just how this meeting would play out—High drama? Tragedy? Or farce?

  NORMA DAVENPORT FANNED a handful of old pictures out on the white marble coffee table next to a tray of coffee and store-bought cookies she’d arranged on a plate. Her face, tanned as old leather, provided a stark contrast to the wispy, silver-blond hair coiffed to perfection. “After we spoke on Tuesday, I went through my old photo albums and found these,” the older woman said, perching on the edge of an oyster satin wing chair. “Emmaline was such a shy little thing, almost a baby herself, with that darling little boy of hers and that big, handsome husband. She reminded me of a lost bird. Whenever there were parties at the officers’ club I swear she’d try to melt right into the wallpaper.”

  Deirdre shifted on the rose-colored couch and picked up the photo closest to her, peered at the image of her mother looking stiff and unhappy as she stood beside a much-younger Norma at a cocktail party.

  Emmaline’s brown hair curled around a delicate, pale face, a far-off look in eyes too big. Deirdre could almost hear her singing those haunting old jazz ballads that were the only lullaby Deirdre had ever known, songs full of yearning and pain and love gone wrong.

  But once Deirdre had grown old enough to understand the words and recognize the genuine sadness they brought to her mother’s soft eyes, the songs hadn’t soothed anymore. The ballads had left Deirdre longing to be like Cade, able to comfort her, draw their mother back from those dark waters.

  “She never did like getting her picture taken,” Deirdre said. She and Emma had gone through a box in the attic once, at Linden Lane, sorted through a long succession of holidays, Christmas trees, turkey dinners, sledding parties and Easter egg hunts, that showed just Deirdre and Cade and the Captain, as if Emmaline McDaniel had already been a ghost.

  But looking at Norma’s photos, it seemed that Emmaline had always had that haunted quality about her. It hadn’t appeared later, the way Deirdre had so often thought, after Emmaline was saddled with such a disappointing daughter.

  “She looks so sad here,” Deirdre said softly, running her thumb across the picture’s slick edge.

  Stone leaned toward Norma, an absurdly fragile coffee cup cradled in his big hands. “Did Mrs. McDaniel give you any reason why she was unhappy?”

  Norma shrugged, her shoulders bird-thin beneath a tangerine-colored golf shirt. “Yes, she shared some of what she was feeling, just the way all women do. She said she was weary from being dragged from place to place, missing her mother. They were very close, you know, Emmaline and her mother.”

  Deirdre’s heart stung. She gulped a burning hot swig of coffee, then set her own cup abruptly down. She felt Stone’s gaze shift to her, could almost hear the wheels whirring in his head. God above, did the man ever miss a nuance, a flash of emotion?

  In an instant the hint of concern she’d thought she’d seen vanished, probably little more than her imagination.

  “So,” Stone said, “it sounds like there was trouble from the beginning.”

  “The army can be hard on a marriage. Even the strongest ones. And Captain McDaniel was as gung-ho as men come. He loved the danger, the challenge, pushing himself.”

  Deirdre grimaced. The old buzzard hadn’t changed much. It was just a little harder to find danger and excitement in Whitewater, Illinois. But those rare times there was some kind of mayhem he usually ended up in the middle of it, to the amusement of the Whitewater police force.

  Norma sipped her own coffee, staring for a moment into the rich dark depths as if she were peering back in time. “Emmaline hated the fact that Captain McDaniel was gone so much. He’d volunteered for hazardous duty, and would disappear for months at a time. My Paul was with him.” Norma’s eyes softened with grief and worry ages old.

  “That must have been hard for you,” Stone said, so gently it surprised Deirdre.

  “Both of our husbands had cut their combat teeth in Vietnam, long before your father met your mother, Deirdre. Some of the things Paul told me about their tour of duty…” Norma shuddered. “Well, it helped me understand the demons that drove him. But I don’t think Emmaline wanted to hear about the ugliness. Or maybe Martin didn’t want that world to touch his wife.”

  “The Captain still doesn’t talk about it,” Deirdre said.

  “Most vets don’t,” Stone said as if he knew. “Unless they talk to each other. “

  “You know about combat vets, then, don’t you, Mr. Stone?”

  “The brother
hood of cops is the same. Your husband must have trusted you deeply.”

  Stone’s comment made the old woman glow with soft pride. “Paul was twenty when he first arrived in Saigon. But Martin was even younger when he fought there. Did you know that, Deirdre? He was on the front lines when he was just eighteen.”

  “He never told me,” Deirdre said. But then, why would he? He’d certainly never trusted her, deeply or otherwise. And they’d never shared the broken pieces of their lives. They’d just pretended vulnerable places didn’t exist. Still, she could hardly get her mind around the concept that the Captain had only been two years older than Emma was when he’d been dropped into hell, faced that brutal world.

  An ache settled in her chest. She didn’t want to hurt for the Captain. She wanted to feel she’d been justified in keeping silent the past week, reminding herself that he’d shut her out of vital parts of his life, too.

  “And after Vietnam?” Stone set the cup down and picked up another picture, this one of a far younger Martin McDaniel and a buddy displaying bulging biceps with matching tattoos.

  “After the war was over, Paul and Martin stayed in the Special Forces,” Norma said. “Sometimes I think it was almost worse, not even knowing what continent they were on. It was terrifying, watching them pack up and walk away to whatever mission they were sent on.”

  “There was plenty going on in the world then,” Stone said, with a meditative frown. “The Cold War, unstable governments all over Asia and South America. All of it covert.”

  “They made me so proud, our husbands. I’d look at them and think how fine they were, how lucky we were that they were keeping America safe. And yet…every time you kissed them goodbye, you knew it might be the last.”

  “That must have been hard,” Deirdre said.

  “It came to a head three weeks before Christmas one year. That knock on the door. Opening it. Seeing the company chaplain in dress uniform. I was at Deirdre’s making spaghetti sauce when he came. His eyes…I’ll never forget the chaplain’s eyes as he told us the operation had gone sour. The helicopter that was supposed to extract them from wherever they were had crashed. All men missing.”

  “Mom never…never told me,” Deirdre breathed, thinking how little she’d known the woman who’d given birth to her, raised her.

  “We didn’t even know what country they were in,” Norma continued. “And odds were we never would. The one thing we did know for certain was that when a mission went wrong, the men were on their own. Our government would claim they’d turned rogue. No one in the military would ever acknowledge they were following orders.”

  Stone nodded, his eyes suddenly dark, still, with an empathy Deirdre would never have suspected him capable of. A shadow touched his mouth, like something bittersweet. “It must have been hideous,” Jake said. “Thinking they’d given their lives for their country. Fearing they’d be branded as traitors because it was convenient for the high command.”

  Deirdre tried to imagine her fragile mother in that situation, so far from anyone she was close to, believing the Captain was dead or maybe being tortured in some hellhole in the darkest corner of the world.

  “The little boy…Kincaid,” Norma said, pausing to remember his name. “Why, he made it even harder for Emmaline. All he’d talk about was his daddy. Two years old, and he’d wear the hat from his father’s dress uniform, and practice his salute in the mirror. Insisted on kissing Martin’s picture every night before she tucked him in. Insisted Emmaline kiss the picture, too. Kiss Martin’s picture, wondering if he was dead, or how she’d ever tell that child.”

  Tears burned Deirdre’s eyes. She blinked them away.

  “The wives of the missing men, we all celebrated the holidays together, trying for just one day to hold back our grief for the sake of our children. Your brother was playing Christmas Day with a toy gun Captain McDaniel had bought him the day before he deployed, yelling the way boys do. It was the only time I saw Emmaline break down.”

  Deirdre wished she could reach out, touch Norma’s wrist in that gentle way Finn had of comforting even a stranger. But she wasn’t Finn, and she couldn’t even comfort herself.

  Stone surprised her, laying a gentle hand on Norma’s arm. “It must have been torture, not knowing.”

  Norma nodded, her face twisting, making the pain of that grim Christmas seem fresh as yesterday. “When the men arrived back on base, Emmaline told the Captain she couldn’t bear the army life any longer, waiting to hear if he was dead. His tour of duty was almost over. She didn’t care what he did, as long as people weren’t shooting at him and she wasn’t left alone. She wasn’t going to tell that boy his daddy was never coming home.”

  “What happened?” Jake asked quietly.

  “Captain McDaniel came home roaring drunk three days later. He’d re-upped without telling her.”

  “That sounds like something he would do. He’s so hard-headed.” Deirdre winced inwardly, wanting to kick her father for steamrolling her mother with the pain of that near-fatal miss still so new. And yet, shouldn’t her mother have known better than to forbid the Captain to do anything? The instant someone laid down the law to Martin McDaniel, he felt honor bound to break it. “He always did have to have things his own way.”

  “Why, what else was he supposed to do with his life?” Norma asked, astonished. “Sell shoes? Teach school? Deliver mail? He was a soldier, the best of the best. He was the one who brought all those other men home when they’d gone missing. Paul told me Martin outsmarted the enemy, gathered his shattered team together, got them through a jungle, God knows where.”

  Deirdre’s heart ached, but she couldn’t get past the bitterness, imagining Cade waiting for a father who might never come.

  “Yeah, my dad, the hero,” Deirdre sniped, trying to hide the raw feeling in her heart, Norma’s description of Cade jabbing at a far newer wound—Cade’s heartbreakingly familiar face stark with pleading as he tried to shield the Captain, tried to explain his own betrayal.

  “The Captain still has this obsession with trying to save the world. And damned the cost,” Deirdre said. “His last little performance left him with a broken hip.”

  “Oh, dear,” Norma said. “I’m so sorry to hear that.”

  “Not as sorry as my brother,” Deirdre muttered. “The Captain’s staying with Cade at the moment.” God only knew where Martin McDaniel would end up. Sure, he was staying with Cade for the time being, but despite all Cade’s good intentions, a restless, independent warrior like Martin McDaniel wouldn’t stay a guest in his son’s house for long.

  “Mrs. Davenport,” Stone cut in smoothly, “is there anything else you can tell us that might help us understand how this whole deal went down?”

  “Deal?” Norma echoed.

  “What brought the marriage to the breaking point,” Stone explained.

  Norma turned toward Deirdre. “After Captain McDaniel re-upped, things between your mother and Martin went from bad to worse. She cried all the time, and he started staying away from the house as much as possible. Army housing is cramped, the walls were thin. I could hear them fighting. Everyone could. Their little boy, he got quieter, too, like he was always watching, waiting for the next explosion.”

  Sometimes Deirdre was sure Cade was still keeping watch the same way.

  “It’s not easy, being married to a man in uniform,” Norma said gently. “Just doing their job demands more of them than most men would ever be capable of giving.

  “Being a soldier isn’t what they do. It’s who they are. Emmaline didn’t understand what she was asking when she wanted him to go civilian. She was asking Martin to change everything that mattered to him—a lifestyle, a code of honor. She might as well have asked him to change his blood and bone.”

  “In other words,” Deirdre said, “you’re telling me that he’d chosen to have a family, then refused to do what was best for them.”

  “Did he?” Norma asked.

  “What do you mean by that, Mrs. Davenpo
rt?” Stone watched her, intent.

  “I know what Captain McDaniel did might seem hard, unfeeling to you. But Emmaline knew what she was getting into when she married him. She’d signed on to be an army wife. When a man is as good at his job as the Captain is, he’s bound to love it. And frankly, his country needed him. It’s hard for a man to turn his back on that kind of responsibility, especially when his superiors are telling him he’s the only one who can lead a team deep enough into enemy territory, smart enough to get whatever documents or drugs or military secrets are buried in the middle of some jungle and get them into American hands.”

  “At least he’s consistent,” Deirdre said. “He still thinks he’s the only one who can do things right when it counts. He does the cops’ jobs for ’em, the sheriff’s job, and if the courts would let him, he’d be happy to be the judge and jury, too. He would have made a great dictator of some no-name country out there. I’m not sure how great a husband he was, though. Did Mr. Stone tell you why we came here today? To ask…”

  Deirdre hesitated. Why was the truth so hard to say?

  “He said you had questions about the time Emmaline and I were on base together at Fort Benning. It does my heart good knowing you love your mother so much you want to talk about her, even now when she’s gone.”

  Deirdre’s cheeks burned. She glanced at Stone. Hadn’t he told the woman that this wasn’t some benign trip down memory lane? Or had he been afraid Norma Davenport would refuse to see them if she knew the truth?

  “Actually,” Stone said, obviously sensing Deirdre’s unease, “there’s a little more to it than that. Hearing about life on the base, I mean. Deirdre recently discovered a letter that proves her mother had an affair during the time you and Emmaline McDaniel were friends.”

  Dismay flooded Norma’s features. If Deirdre had had any doubts this was the friend her mother had relied on during the affair, just looking at Norma’s reaction would have set them to rest. “I…why, I can’t break a confidence…” Norma stammered. For the first time Deirdre realized why Stone had been so careful, lulling the woman into a false sense of security, getting her to reveal how close she and Emmaline had been until it would be impossible to escape.