“Do you want me to go around to the delivery entrance? Hotel security could meet us there.”
“No.”
“The suits are coming out of the hotel now. I’m putting the car in gear.”
The pounding on the car instantly lessened, and a moment later the car shot forward. Colleen felt a pressure on her covered head; it was Ben’s hand, still keeping her down. She felt the car turn, then turn again, and she sat up, pulling his jacket off her, running her hands through her hair.
“Are you okay?” Ben asked.
“I’m fine.”
“So where to?” the driver asked.
Ben gave him the address of the parking garage.
“Wait a minute,” she said. “We need to talk about this. Are we giving up? What about the delivery entrance?”
“We are not giving up,” Ben snapped. “This is not giving up. This is us not putting up with their lying bullshit. Do you honestly believe that we can get out of the car, up the elevator, and into her suite without being besieged again? Or that there will only be two people in the suite? They weren’t going to tell anyone about this, and yet all those people were there. How do you think that happened?”
“I don’t know.” Colleen hated the idea that Autumn hadn’t kept her word. “Maybe the publicist—”
He interrupted her. “It doesn’t matter to us how it happened. It happened. We can’t trust them.”
“Let’s at least give them a chance to explain and see if we’ve got other options. Call the publicist, and put your phone on speaker. I want to hear.”
“Okay. As long as you don’t grab the phone and say, ‘Hi, this is Colleen.’”
As soon as he turned the phone, it began ringing.
“Yes?” he said curtly.
“Oh, Gary, thank you.” It was a man’s voice. “Let me try and explain what happened out there. I didn’t know until yesterday that some of Autumn’s new supporters were coming, and I apologize for that. She feels a tremendous obligation to them. Apparently she felt that she couldn’t tell them not to come.”
“What about the professional camera crew? Don’t tell me that wasn’t your deal.”
“I will take responsibility for that, Gary, and I apologize. It may have seemed like poor judgment to you, but once you understand how many people will care about the meeting between Autumn and Ariel, people who truly wish them both well, you will be able to see it from our point of view.”
“I wouldn’t count on it.”
“Gary, if your friend is indeed Ariel, she will have some very exciting opportunities open to her. Why don’t you and I sit down, just you and me, and talk about this. We’ve never discussed any compensation for all your efforts, but there is room—”
Ben turned off his phone.
The man had offered Ben money. That had been the worst possible thing to say.
So it had been Autumn who had told all those people about the meeting. Telling her fans was more important than keeping her word.
Maybe she didn’t understand. Colleen wanted to find an excuse for her. She had been a celebrity for so long that it must feel normal to have cameras stuck in her face, to have to do her hair and makeup every time she left her house. She must not realize how uncomfortable that would make normal people. Perhaps breaking her promise on this was no big deal, like bringing chicken sausage when you said that you would bring turkey sausage.
Except how could anyone think that?
Colleen felt betrayed.
“It doesn’t make sense,” she said. “She always seems so sincere about everything.”
“She did, but she’s an actress. She could make us believe that she was sincere.”
The driver pulled into an underground parking garage, and Ben directed him to Grannor’s car. The driver got out to help put their overnight bags in the truck.
“That’s what famous people have to deal with, isn’t it?” she said as soon as Ben got in the Lincoln. The late Diana, Princess of Wales, had spent the last moments of her life waiting outside an elevator in an underground garage. She hadn’t been able to eat in restaurants, try on clothes in stores, or even walk in front doors. Why would anyone want to live like that?
“What’s our plan now?” she asked. “Go back to the lake?”
“If that’s okay with you.”
She said that it was.
I don’t need her. I’ve never needed her. I have a family. I have a great family. She’s the needy one, not me.
And Autumn was the one who had screwed this up. Colleen had played by the rules. Colleen always played by the rules, and she didn’t like people who didn’t.
There wasn’t much to say. After they were out of traffic, Ben turned on the radio, but Grannor’s car didn’t have a satellite hookup or a Bluetooth connection, so after a while he turned it off.
They were still on I-66 when Colleen thought to ask about their hotel. “Do we need to cancel the reservation?”
“Good point, but I’m going to need to turn on my phone to get the info.”
There was a big semi passing on their left. Ben glanced in the rearview mirror and passed his phone to her. “Too much traffic. You’ll have to do it.”
She turned the phone on. The screen showed that the publicist had called him again and again. She ignored the messages and looked for the email from the hotel. It had buttons for confirming or cancelling a reservation so she could cancel without having to call. As she was confirming that cancelling was really what she meant to do, the phone rang again.
“It’s the publicist. Do you want me to turn it off?”
“He’ll keep after me until I answer. Put it on speaker.”
Colleen did so and held up the phone between them.
“What is it?” Ben snapped.
“Gary, thank you for answering. I need to apologize again on Autumn’s behalf. She is so distraught about what happened after you left.”
“After?” Ben looked across the car. Colleen shrugged. She didn’t know what happened after they had left Georgetown any more than he did. “Well, you’d have to be pretty damn distraught to have done that,” he improvised…without knowing what “that” was.
“Her heart is broken, Gary. Truly broken. She didn’t intend to say your name—”
“What?”
“She says it just slipped out. She wanted so badly to get in touch with you, and she thought if her fans knew…They have been so helpful in the past.”
“Her fans are looking for me? Are you fucking kidding?”
“She admits that she might have been too impulsive. She really does want to apologize as well. I’m sure that she will make you understand. She’s not available just at the moment. Can we call you in an hour or so?”
“No, you can’t.”
“But, Gary, we truly want—”
“Whatever you truly want had better not involve talking to me.” Ben started lowering his window. “Because the next thing you hear is this phone going into the Shenandoah River.”
He grabbed the phone from Colleen’s hand and as the car passed over the bridge, he flung the phone out the window. Colleen twisted in her seat to watch its flight.
“That might not have been so smart,” she said mildly. “You could have simply turned it off.”
“You have a point there.”
“And it didn’t go in the river. It landed in the road.”
“Oh, crap…we need to go back and get it. I don’t want someone else using it.”
“You don’t need to worry. A chicken truck crunched it.”
“I guess that’s a good thing,” he groaned.
Chapter 14
The rain started up again as soon as they turned down I-81. They stopped for gas and something to eat. Neither was hungry, so Colleen had two white Styrofoam leftover containers, which she put in the
refrigerator once they got back to the lake.
“Do you mind if I use your computer?” Ben asked. The rain was coming down hard now; it didn’t make sense for him to go to the boathouse.
“It’s in the library, and no”—she knew what he would ask next—“there’s not a password.”
He frowned. “You do talk to your students about digital security, don’t you?”
“All the time.”
She followed him into the library and sat down next to him. “I thought you were being paranoid, using a fake name, but I can see why you did. Can anyone connect you with Gary Vogel?”
“My family, but Ryan knows everything. I ran all my plans by him to see if they made sense.”
The beautiful color wash of Autumn’s home page quickly melted into a still image from a new video. It looked well-lit and professional without the shadows and jerkiness of most people’s cell phone videos. The professional crew must have taken it.
Autumn was standing in front of some tall palm fronds so the background was green and natural. She looked lovely. Her chestnut hair swept back from her face in soft wings and fell gracefully below her shoulders. Her eyes were clear and bright.
When Colleen was “truly distraught,” her eyes got squinty and her face turned blotchy.
Ben hit the play arrow.
“My beautiful Ariel was supposed to meet me today.” Autumn’s voice was low; she seemed close to tears. “We were to be reunited at last, but someone is keeping her from me. Ariel, my darling Ariel, if you are being held against your will, I can protect you. If you can’t get to law enforcement, signal to a waitress or a gas station attendant or the other ladies in the restroom. They will help you. They are—”
Colleen stopped the video. In the quiet she could hear the rain hammering against the porch furniture. “She is so unhappy.”
“Fixing that isn’t your responsibility.”
She didn’t need to be lectured. “Obviously I know that, or I’d have done something weeks ago.”
“She shouldn’t be saying that she was meeting Ariel until she knew for sure,” Ben said. “It would be a big embarrassment if the DNA doesn’t match. Her business is already suffering. She needs to be thinking about that.” He started the video again.
“And, Mr. Vogel, please, I know that there was a misunderstanding,” Autumn pleaded from the screen, “but surely that is not enough to keep me from my Ariel. I love her so much. Gary, please, don’t keep her from me.”
Ben stopped the video again, backed it up, and replayed the last few seconds. And then did it again.
“What is it?” Colleen asked.
He sat back. “Did you hear how she started with ‘Mr. Vogel,’ then switched to ‘Gary’? She got the whole name in without making a big point of it.”
“It might not have been deliberate,” Colleen countered. “When my mother was sick, Genevieve asked me to call her by her first name, but ‘Mrs. Sisson’ was automatic. I might well have used both in one sentence.” Colleen didn’t want to believe that Autumn was as manipulative as Ben was suggesting.
She knew that her memories were turning her mother—Mary Pat—into a saint when she hadn’t been. She had a bit of a temper. Even Colleen thought that she hovered too much sometimes; the boys thought that she did all the time. Because her children were adopted, Mary Pat thought that she had to be the Perfect Catholic Mother, and that was a big burden for any family.
If Colleen wasn’t going to let herself idolize the mother who had raised her, she really shouldn’t do that for anyone else.
“Let’s see if people are actually looking for Gary Vogel.” Ben switched to the Find Ariel message board. Even though Autumn had mentioned the name only a few hours ago, there was a new page for Gary Vogel, and people were checking in with all the Gary Vogels that they knew. Princessbee3 posted that her father was named Gary Vogel. He was a fifty-seven-year-old auto mechanic in Louisville, but her mother said that he had definitely been in his shop all day. Cheerleadergal said that her boyfriend was also Gary Vogel. She had seen him in homeroom that morning, but he had been taking a makeup math test during lunch period so she hadn’t seen him then. He was supposed to be at football practice now. She would run over to the field and be sure he was there.
“They live in Montana,” Colleen said. “Does she really think he might have left homeroom, gotten himself to DC, picking up Ariel on the way?”
Other people mentioned a classical musician in California and a man who had worked in a Kentucky sandwich shop two years ago, but no one knew exactly where they had been earlier in the day. One of the moderators had posted the whitepages.com listings for all the Gary Vogels in the United States.
“This really sucks for these guys.” Ben was shaking his head. “I feel like I should apologize to them.”
Yes. Colleen could understand that. “Hopefully it won’t be as bad for them as it was for the Ariel in San Francisco whose parents had to hire a lawyer.”
“Maybe, but this is crazy-making. I screw up things for myself, but not for other people.” He slammed the computer shut. “This really pisses me off. These lying idiots. I can’t stand dealing with liars.”
No, Ben, it isn’t anger. You have lost control of this situation, and you don’t like that. You wanted to make it easy for me, and you couldn’t. You hate that.
He was staring out the window. With the rain darkening the sky, the lamps in the library turned the mullioned glass into a mirror. His eyebrows were low over his eyes; his soft lower lip had narrowed.
She said his name. He didn’t answer.
Isolation and withdrawal might work for him, but it didn’t for her. Today had been about her too, actually more about her, and she had the right to do what would help her.
“I was supposed to marry Tommy or Mark.”
“What?” That made him turn. “My brothers?”
“Our mothers planned it. I don’t know if Sean and Finn were supposed to marry Kate and Nina, but I was destined for your brothers.”
“Why them? Why not me?”
She stepped forward and put a hand on one of his arms. She needed this too, the comfort of touch. “You were supposed to be a priest, remember?”
“Oh, right. That didn’t work out so well. But why are we talking about it?”
“Because I’m glad you aren’t a priest.” She started moving her hand, just an inch or so at first, up and down; with each motion, the stroke became more sweeping.
His eyes were down. He was watching her hand. “I’m glad too…but, Colleen…”
How good it had been between them that summer. They had been so in love.
She reached up and laced her fingers through the warmth of his thick hair to pull him down. His face was rough with the day’s stubble.
“Is this what I think?” he asked.
“I want it. Don’t you?”
His arms closed around her, tight and hard. On his shirt she could smell the exhaust from the city streets and the fumes from the gasoline pump. The hard pressure of his arms reminded her of his blazer, how smothering it had felt. She ran her hands along his back, hoping to forget the smells and feel of the city. You care about him. You used to love him. Think of that.
He was erect against her. The tempo of his kiss became hard and urgent. All his frustrations of the day spilled out, seeking a release. His hands were strong, raging against the powerlessness of being trapped in that car. He was gripped with a raw need to act, to be doing something, anything, even if it was as stupid as throwing his cell phone out the window. He gripped her hips, lifting her up to the library table, thrusting his body between her legs.
Why was she wearing pants? Why wasn’t she in a skirt? This would have been so much easier in a skirt. His hands were at her waist fumbling with the waistband, but there was a set of double hooks on the front, a button on the inside.
&nb
sp; She put her hand on his chest, moving him aside, and hopped off the table. She had to undo the two hooks, then the button, then the zipper. She slipped her thumbs inside the waistband, making sure that she caught her panties as she pulled the pants down her legs. She kicked her feet free and, putting her hands on the edge of the table, hoisted herself back.
She couldn’t look at him. She had started this. She hadn’t said no. But it was all too matter-of-fact…almost professional. My pants are now off; you have permission to enter.
Did he feel the same way? She didn’t want to know. She caught his belt, pulling him to her.
This wouldn’t have happened with Leilah. Leilah never wore pants.
Ben’s hands were hot on her shoulders, her back, now her inner thighs, but the outside of her legs, her feet, wherever he wasn’t touching her, were cold.
With Leilah he would have been in a bed.
He paused and whispered her name questioningly. “We don’t have to—”
No, no, she wasn’t going to stop this. This wasn’t going to be one more thing that didn’t happen. She slipped her hands around him, feeling the warmth of his skin. The light fabric of his pants was low on his hips. She slipped her hands beneath his belt, feeling the strength of his muscles and urged him to her.
She gasped at the first pressure. He quickened and she tried to let her breathing match his, hoping to concentrate, trying to mirror what he was feeling, trying to feel something, anything, besides the cold against her legs and the thought of Leilah.
She felt more distant from him than ever. She was standing on the shore, and the water’s dark current was carrying him into a darkness, a cell phone striking the rain-slick pavement, the heavy tires meeting it, flattening it. At this moment of most complete physical intimacy, all she felt was the edge of the table biting against the back of her thighs.
He gasped and shuddered, and for an instant the weight of his body sagged against hers. She wasn’t sure that she could hold him. Or that she wanted to.
He regained his balance. “Did you…?”
“Oh, yes. Yes. Almost at once.”
It was a lie. She who hated to lie had lied. But how tedious it would be if she had told the truth. He was a gentleman, he would feel that he had to…It would be a nightmare. So she lied.
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