Chasing Venus (31 page)

This was the room he
had stayed in on his visit, sharing a restless night with Sheila’s brother
Rajiv in the next bed.
 
Rajiv snored
like a basset hound.
 
Reid could
have sworn the entire cabin rattled with every breath.
 
He’d been hyper-aware of other Banerjees
thin walls away, uprooted from their usual locations by his presence.
 
Sheila’s father had been relegated to a
sleeping bag in the living room, while Sheila bunked with her mother in the
only full-size bed.
 
He’d heard the
murmur of women’s voices late into the night, and their stifled giggles.
 
It wasn’t hard to imagine that he
himself inspired a good bit of their nighttime gossip.

Reid trailed Annie into
the kitchen, where she’d begun opening cabinets as if she were searching for
something.
 
“Are you hungry?” he
asked.

She pulled out a can of
soup, eyed the label.
 
“Would it be
too presumptuous, do you think?”

No more presumptuous
than using the Banerjee family cabin to shelter a fugitive.
 
“We can replace what we eat.”

She foraged deeper into
the cabinet and emerged with a second can, then turned to face him.
 
“Which would you prefer, beef vegetable
or chicken noodle?”

The words came out of
his mouth before he framed them in his mind.
 
“I won’t be having any.
 
I can’t stay.”

She raised her brows,
hesitated.
 
Then, “You should at
least eat.
 
You’ve got to be as
hungry as I am.”

Hungry didn’t begin to
describe the state of his stomach.

“You’ll be safer
driving if you’ve eaten something,” she went on, which sounded like a dubious
theory to him.
 
“Plus—”
 
She spun around again, and this time
produced a bag of ground Colombian coffee.
 
“When we’re done with the soup, we can brew some of this for you to take
on the road.
 
To keep you awake.”

He shrugged and
acquiesced.
 
He told himself it had
nothing to do with the fact that the last thing he wanted to do was leave
her.
 
The bottom line, he told
himself, was that she was making good sense: it was dangerous driving on dark
mountain roads when you were both exhausted and famished.
 
He let himself slide past the obvious
fact that coffee could be brewed now rather than later, and that the sooner he
hit the road, the more awake he would be for the drive.

She foraged
successfully for saucepans and a box of crackers.
 
They dove into the crackers while she
put the soup to heat atop the stove.

“Why don’t you microwave
it?” he asked.

She stirred the pots
with wooden spoons.
 
“I think food
doesn’t taste as good when it’s nuked.
 
And that it doesn’t stay hot as long, either.”
 
Dubious Theory Number Two.
 
“It’s also rebellion,” she added, which
surprised him.
 
She met his
eyes.
 
“My ex nuked everything.
 
It was pretty much that he was always in
a rush, going through medical training and all.
 
But after we broke up I went through
this phase where I did everything the opposite of the way he would have done
it.”

Reid crossed his arms
over his chest and leaned back against the Formica counter.
 
“But that’s all over now.”

She smiled to
acknowledge the point.
 
“I like to
tell myself it is.”
 
Abruptly she
turned away, strolled to the other end of the mini kitchen.
 
She spoke again without turning to face
him.
 
“I can’t even imagine what
Philip would think about this whole murder suspect thing.
 
It must make him doubly glad he unloaded
me.”

Her voice was small,
and her head bent.
 
Reid watched
her.
 
He was a good friend of heartache
and quick to recognize its hallmarks.
 
“I think it’s much more likely that he feels for you and wishes he could
help somehow.”

“No.”
 
She raised her head to regard him.
 
“That’s nice of you to say but I really
don’t think so.
 
Philip …”
 
She stopped and bit her lip.
 
“He was never a big one for helping
anybody but himself.
 
He must’ve
always been that way but it took me a long time to see it.”

“If that’s true, then
you’re better off without him.”

She smiled, a weak
effort.
 
“When I’m thinking clearly,
I know I am better off.”

Reid wanted to punch
this Philip character, whom he’d never met and never wanted to meet.
 
Clearly the self-absorbed jerk had done
a number on Annie, then got himself gone when the urge took him.
 
Leaving her to suffer.
 
Still.

Reid refused to move,
refused to obey the desire to bundle her into his arms, whisper that not all
men were terminal assholes, reassure her that better days lay ahead.
 
But those words implied promises he
couldn’t make.
 
The silence between
them grew like a mushroom cloud.

Annie broke the
impasse.
 
“Why don’t you set the
table?” she suggested, and he hopped to it, grateful to have something to
do.
 
He began investigating cabinets
and drawers, trying to find everything they needed.
 
But even that mundane task took them
back to sensitive territory.

“I thought you’d have a
better idea where everything is.”
 
She didn’t look up, kept cracking pepper into the twin saucepans.
 
“I figured you’d been here lots of times
before when you found the place so easily in the dark.
 
But it looks like maybe you haven’t
spent so much time here.”

It was pretty obvious
what she was driving at.
 
Reid said
nothing as he folded paper napkins in half and set soup spoons on top of
them.
 
Apparently he wasn’t the only
one that night being attacked by the green-eyed monster, though it was ironic
that Annie would focus on Sheila, a woman he had tried to love but couldn’t,
rather than on the one woman he had such trouble getting out of his heart.

He made his voice
light.
 
“Go ahead.
 
Ask me.”

She said nothing for a
moment, then set down the peppermill with a clatter.
 
“Okay.
 
Were you ever involved with Sheila?”

“Yes.”

“What happened?”

“It didn’t work out.”

“That’s it?
 
That doesn’t tell me much.”

“No.
 
It doesn’t.”

She rolled her eyes,
then shut off the stovetop burners and began to ladle the soup into bowls.
 
“Well, it tells me something that Sheila
still thinks so highly of you that she let you use this cabin to hide me.
 
In fact,” Annie paused.
 
“It tells me a great deal.”

There was a fresh
undercurrent to her words now, one of sadness and something like longing.

“Surely,” Reid said,
“even if your husband was a lowlife, you’ve been involved with men who
were—” He stopped, wanting to say
worthy
of you
.
 
He rephrased.
 
“—who treated you right.”

“Actually, no.”
 
Her tone was matter-of-fact.
 
She carried their soup bowls to the
table, balancing them carefully.
 
“I
didn’t date in high school and met Philip in college.
 
So he was the only one.”
 
She put down the bowls and let loose a
forced laugh.
 
“The good news for
any new guy is that Philip set the standard pretty low.
 
It’s not hard to beat.”

“You should make it
hard to beat.”

She jerked her head up
as if startled by the sharpness in his tone.

He cleared his
throat.
 
“What I mean is …”
 
He stopped.
 
He felt her gaze on his face as he took
his seat at the table.
 
Watchful.
 
Hopeful.
 
“What I mean is, you deserve happiness,
Annie.
 
And a man who can help you
find it.”

He wondered in the next
moments how time stopped.
 
Normally
time cranked along, refusing even to slow down, but every once in a while it
paused, telescoped, as if to key you in that this, this, was a moment to take
note of.

He knew he wouldn’t
soon forget the sight of Annie across the round pine dining table.
 
The brightness of her green eyes, with
those black lashes that went on forever.
 
That crazy dyed blond hair, which was both unnatural and oddly
sexy.
 
And the extreme stillness in
her bearing when she listened to him.
 
She was intense when she focused and now her laser concentration was
pinpointed on him.
 
It was both
flattering and unnerving.

“Did Donna make you
happy?”
 
Her voice was soft.
 
“I bet she did.”

 
Of course by now Annie had forgotten
Sheila.
 
Reid had known she was too
smart to aim for long at the wrong target.
 
He let out a breath.
 
“She
did.
 
She made me very happy.”

“What happened?”

He knew, of course,
what Annie was referring to.
 
Unfortunately, there was one defining night when it came to Donna, one
tragic storyline that superseded all others.

“We witnessed a robbery,”
he heard himself say, “at a convenience store.”

Annie was silent.
 
Outside the cabin walls rose a pristine
hillside, forested and removed from civilization.
 
But Reid felt himself cast back to the
gritty heart of a city, an LA parking lot, and an ill-advised late-night run to
pick up a pint of ice cream.

“We were on our way
home from a movie and stopped off at an all-night store.
 
I’d just gotten out of the truck to go
inside when I saw a hold-up through the glass door.”
 
He could still reconstruct every detail
in his mind’s eye.
 
The
overbright
fluorescent lights, which made the shop a beacon
in the midnight streets.
 
The
counters stuffed with merchandise.
 
The young male clerk behind the register, raising his hands in the
classic
Don’t Shoot Me
pose.
 
“Bigelow was waving a gun at the
cashier’s face, yelling at him to hand all the money over.
 
The guy looked terrified.”

“What did you do?”

“I got my revolver out
of the truck’s glove box.
 
I was
about to go inside the store when Bigelow came running out.”
 
Reid remembered how their eyes had
met.
 
That split second when they
had registered one another as men, as opponents.
 
“Then he got in his car and raced away.”

“Had he shot the
clerk?”

“No.”

“Where was Donna
through all this?”

“In the passenger seat
of my truck.”

“What did you do?”

Not what I should have done.
 
Not what I would do now if I had a second chance
.
 
“What did I do?” he repeated.
 
“I gave chase.”

“But …”
 
Annie looked puzzled.
 
“You weren’t on duty, right?
 
You had Donna with you.”

He looked away.
 
No.
 
No, he hadn’t been on duty.

“But you gave chase
anyway,” she murmured.

And there lay the crux
of it.
 
He hadn’t been on duty.
 
He could have walked away and no one
would have blamed him.
 
He could
have called in the crime, described both Bigelow and his vehicle, comforted the
petrified store clerk, then bought his ice cream, taken Donna home, and enjoyed
the rest of his evening.
 
That’s
what he could have done and that would have been the end of it.
 
After all, no one had been injured and
store robberies were a dime a dozen.
 
It wasn’t worth an off-duty officer breaking a sweat.

But Reid Gardner hadn’t
been just any officer.
 
He’d been a
cocky 29-year-old
sonovabitch
who’d never suffered
anything worse than a broken nose and who let no crime go unsolved.
 
Who didn’t yet understand how the world
worked.
 
Who didn’t yet understand
that a man could spend a lifetime paying for one lapse in judgment.

“We tore through the
streets,” he said, “Donna and me in the truck behind Bigelow’s car.
 
Eventually he fishtailed into a lamppost
and had to abandon his vehicle.”

“And then you chased
him on foot,” Annie said.

“I told Donna, ‘Stay in
the truck.
 
Don’t get out of the
truck.’”
 
To this day he remembered
the exact wording of his instructions.
 
He remembered her sitting in the passenger seat listening to him,
dressed in jeans and a white tee shirt, her face pale, her blue eyes nervous,
her hand trembling as she pushed her straight blond hair back from her
forehead.
 
She’d looked so pure and
true and trusting.
 
She was a
schoolteacher, for Christ’s sake, who daily walked the halls of hope and
innocence, who wanted nothing more than him, the children they would raise
together, the life they would share.
 
They were to be married in less than five weeks.