Present Danger (12 page)

“I’m proud of you, Bob.”

“Proud of myself, Jimbo, proud of m’self. It’s a real sweet feelin’.”

Lola called everyone for dinner. Muriel admonished the children, who were at their own table, to settle down; and as soon as it quieted she said grace. Platters began to make the rounds.

“So, Otis,” Bob said as he heaped turkey on his plate and then passed the platter. “When’re you and Lola gonna have a couple little rug rats runnin’ around here? You guys been married for—what?—five, six years now?”

“Seven,” Otis replied quietly. “And we’re workin’ on it.”

“Yeah, I can see where that’d be the fun part,” Bob agreed amiably, not realizing that he’d blundered into a sensitive area. He accepted the bowl of mashed potatoes from Otis’s sister and slapped a mound on his plate.

“I’ve told y’ before, bro,” Otis’s brother said with a grin. “I’d be more than happy to lend my ser—”

“Leon,” Aunie interrupted him. “Your mother tells me that you’re a personal trainer at a local gym.” She flashed him her most charming smile. “Tell me about it. I’ve been considering joinin’ one ever since I came to town, but I don’t have the first idea what to expect.” Okay, so she had belonged to a club in Atlanta. She was still interested in what they had to offer up here. “Could someone like me become stronger without addin’ all those bulky muscles?”

“Yeah, sure,” Leon said enthusiastically and leaned forward to discourse on one of his favorite subjects. He forgot all about offering stud service to Lola.

Lola, in turn, shot a grateful glance Aunie’s way, but the turkey she was eating seemed suddenly dry and tasteless. Damn it. Couldn’t she get through just one day without worrying about her lack of fertility?
It was Thanksgiving, and the good Lord knew she had plenty of other things to be thankful for.

Beneath the table, Otis’s massive hand squeezed her thigh.

She had Otis. That was the biggest blessing of her life. But when she thought of him, with that face and body of his that made him appear killer-mean, playing so gently this afternoon with his nieces and nephews, she wanted to cry. He should have his own children to dandle on his knee and roughhouse with. Little boys or little girls. It didn’t matter which. He looked so formidable and rough if you didn’t know him; yet he was the tenderest of men and he’d make an excellent father. He should
be
a father. Did it really matter so much if the children didn’t come from her own womb?

For the first time, seated at the table surrounded by Otis’s family and their friends, she gave serious consideration to the idea of adoption. She wasn’t one hundred percent certain it was something she wanted to do. But she’d think about it.

Suddenly, her food had flavor once again.

The men attempted to sneak off to watch more football once dinner was complete, but Lola had other plans in mind for them. “If you think the woomons are gonna cook this dinner and then do all the cleanup, too, you have another think comin’,” she said. “Clear the dishes.”

“Ah, c’mon, Lola,” Will wheedled. “That’s woman’s work.”

“Wid thinkin’ like that, Will Ryder,” she retorted tartly, “it’s no wonder I’ve never seen a female at one of these functions wid you.” She handed him a stack of soiled dinner plates. “Get busy.”

He looked to Otis, who shrugged and picked up
several platters. “Don’t look at me, boy. I married me a strong-minded woman, just like my mama. I just do what she says.”

Muriel patted Otis’s cheek, then reached past him to gather up the serving bowls. “This here’s the smartest of my boys,” she said as she laughingly dodged the dish towel Leon whipped at her bottom.

Aunie was enthralled. Never had her own family interacted with such warmth and casualness. Thanksgivings at home had always been such formal affairs. The homes of her relatives had been more elegant,
the
table settings richer, and the food served and cleaned up by silent servants. But they hadn’t been nearly as enjoyable.

“Jimmy looks right at home doin’ woman’s work,” Bob called from the kitchen where he was drying plates passed to him by one of the Jackson children, who stood on a chair to rinse the dishes handed to him by his mother. He tugged James’s ponytail when he passed by. “You ever gonna cut off all that hair, boy?”

“Nah, I thought I’d just grow it forever and give up wearing clothes. Save a few bucks that way.”

The women hooted and made ribald comments that expressed unanimous approval at the idea of a naked James. Aunie tried very hard not to, but she could visualize that. Graphically. For in the picture that flashed through her mind, James’s hair might reach the ground but it was still pulled back and clubbed at the nape of his neck with a rubber band. She shivered and industriously scrubbed down counters while she tried to conjure up less inflammatory images.

Late that night, as she lay in bed, she thought about
this holiday with the Jacksons and the Ryders. Difficult now to believe she’d actually dreaded it.

When she’d set off from Atlanta to move to an unknown city on her own, it had seemed like the hardest thing she’d ever done. But it was funny: Seattle was beginning to feel more like home than home ever had felt—that was due entirely, she acknowledged, to the warmth and acceptance of her new friends. And after today’s test run of her ability to fit in, she felt she was finally ready to take the next step.

She was prepared to tackle a few acquaintances outside this apartment house.

The private detective leaned back in his leather chair and gazed at his client across the massive expanse of his polished mahogany desk. His immediate impression was of a sophisticated man of obvious wealth. The P.I. wondered, however, if the client quite grasped just how expensive this prospective venture could become.

“You haven’t given me much to go on, Mr. Cunningham,” he said, and consulted the sparse notations on a yellow legal pad at his fingertips. “Your wife could be anywhere in the United States. She is probably using her maiden name, which is Franklin, and is possibly attending college. She has most likely opened an account at a bank, in which she will have deposited a sizable amount of money. The only correspondence that you are aware of her making is through her lawyer, although it is possible she may
have contacted a man named Geoff Lemire.” He looked up from his notes. “Have I left anything out?”

Wesley crossed his legs, fastidiously hitching his trousers until the creases were aligned just so. “No,” he replied.

“As I said, it’s not much.” The detective tapped his gold pen against the pad. “Has she a particular friend anywhere? Someone she would go to who might help us narrow down the location?”

“No.”

“Then I must warn you, sir, that it could take us a long time to locate her. The blue slip in the packet I gave you earlier specifies our rates.” He watched the man pull out the slip and give it a cursory inspection. He appeared bored. “As you can see, with the amount of man-hours a case such as this could generate, the cost is likely to become most prohibitive.”

Wesley didn’t care how long it would take or what it was going to cost. That bitch had had him arrested and put through the public humiliation of a trial. He pulled his checkbook from the inside breast pocket of his custom-tailored suit jacket. He wrote for a moment and then detached the check, handing it across the desk. The private detective’s eyebrows rose at the size of the retainer and Wesley rose to his feet.

“Find her,” he said in a flat, emotionless voice and walked briskly from the office.

Aunie sat with a group of students at a long table in the campus cafeteria. She didn’t contribute a great deal to the conversations swirling around her, but she nevertheless enjoyed being included in the camaraderie.

She was feeling pretty pleased with herself; she’d
followed through on her Thanksgiving Day resolution to extend her circle of acquaintances. Of particular pride was the way she’d done so without resurrecting her phony old social-butterfly persona, since it had always been a role that had felt fraudulent and forced. She’d created it originally as a tool to assist her in the fulfillment of her family’s expectations, but she’d never felt comfortable with it.

She gave Lola and Otis the lion’s share of credit for her new willingness to make herself accessible to others. From day one, the Jacksons had treated her with a natural, easy acceptance that had made her feel that just by being herself she was a worthwhile and valuable friend. Otis’s description of her as a woman with attitude in all likelihood hadn’t been anything more than a casual comment to him. But to Aunie it had been an enormous ego booster, going a long way toward giving her the courage to trust her true personality to strangers. Her reception by his family on Thanksgiving Day had given her further reinforcement.

She wasn’t vivacious; she was quiet. But their acceptance helped her realize that that didn’t necessarily preclude the possibility of people liking her anyway. Even James, she somewhat grudgingly admitted, had unknowingly added to her confidence, simply by aggravating her. She discovered she liked the way she acted around him. He irritated her so much sometimes, she completely forgot to be shy and became quite aggressive. She liked that; she liked it a lot. Except for her one defiance in divorcing Wesley, she’d never been particularly assertive, and learning that she was capable of standing up for her rights felt like a giant step forward in her quest for independence.

With a secret smile, she thought about the additional
boost her self-assurance had received when he’d kissed her that night in her apartment. Granted, it was in an entirely different area, but she fiercely hugged to her breast that isolated proof of her desirability as a woman.

“Anybody heard anything new on the caller?”

Aunie swallowed the french fry she’d been nibbling and leaned forward to look at the speaker seated further down the table. “What caller?”

Mary, a new friend who was seated on her right, turned her head to look at her, her round blue eyes even bigger than usual. “Haven’t you heard about the guy who’s been calling the female students here?”

That prompted a niggling sense of familiarity, but Aunie couldn’t pinpoint its origin so she shook her head.

Mary gave her a nudge. “Can I have a couple of your fries?” she requested and Aunie pulled the cardboard container along the table until it sat between them. “Thanks.” Mary helped herself.

Holding several fries suspended between container and mouth, she said, “It’s really creepy, Aunie. Some guy keeps calling a bunch of the women students here. No one knows how he gets their numbers, but nearly a dozen women have filed complaints.” She leaned forward on her forearms and looked down the table. “Joe. Pass the ketchup, will ya?” She poked the fries into her mouth and half closed her eyes in appreciation of their salty flavor.

“Obscene calls?” Aunie inquired.

“Not really,” Mary replied with her mouth full, then self-consciously covered her lips with her fingers. “Sorry,” she mumbled around them and swallowed. Her face turned pink with embarrassment. “Jeez, not
only am I eating your food, I’m acting like a pig while I’m doing it.”

Aunie smiled. “Help yourself,” she invited. “I can’t finish them all anyway.” She butted Mary’s shoulder with her own. “And relax, Mary. Emily Post isn’t around, so who the heck cares if you have a couple fries in your mouth while you’re talkin’? I won’t tell if you don’t tell. I’m more interested in what you were sayin’.”

With her natural friendliness, curly blonde hair, and pretty voluptuousness, Mary was outgoing and well-liked. She had a natural confidence that came of knowing herself to be popular. Sometimes, however, she couldn’t help comparing herself to Aunie’s daintiness and obvious breeding, and the mental comparison tended to make her feel oversized and clownish. She found herself trying not to appear as slovenly in her manners and speech in Aunie’s company, something she never particularly worried about with anyone else. Now, however, she grinned in appreciation of the way Aunie had rescued her from her own sense of awkwardness, filled with a warm glow of affection for her new friend. The more she got to know Aunie Franklin, the better she liked her.

She had noticed her, of course, when Aunie had first entered their trig class a week after the semester had begun. Hell, who hadn’t? There was just something about her that had fascinated them all.

She was drop-dead gorgeous for one thing, and for all her diminutive size, she had the type of bearing that attracted a lot of attention. The guys in their lunch group had practically salivated over her, but she’d seemed rich, reserved, and sort of stand-offish, so everyone had pretty much given her a wide berth.

They’d sure talked about her, though. She appeared
to be older than most of the students here and worlds more sophisticated. Her jeans were plain old Levi’s and Lees like everyone else’s, but she topped them with fabrics even the uninitiated could tell were ritzy. It was glaringly obvious she was from a very different background than the rest of them.

Speculation had run rampant about her reasons for attending a dinky little community college when she looked more the exclusive, ivy-league type. Neither Mary nor her lunch partners had entertained any real hope of ever having their curiosity satisfied, however, as Aunie had always sat alone in the cafeteria during lunch, her nose in her textbooks, and rarely had Mary seen her speak to anyone.

But she sure knew her stuff in the two classes they shared and it was obvious to everyone that she was smart. Therefore, when Mary ran into trouble understanding a particular assignment, she had picked Aunie to query about it. To her surprise, she had found her to be very friendly in a low-key sort of way.

She’d half expected to be politely rebuffed, but instead Aunie had immediately sat down with her and explained the mathematical process needed to solve the problems. When Mary’d still had a difficult time grasping the concept, Aunie had demonstrated the process in a number of different ways until she’d finally hit on one that Mary understood. Her patience had been phenomenal. She hadn’t volunteered any private information during that time and she’d still sat off by herself at lunch, but she’d smiled at Mary when they’d caught each other’s eye and had stopped to talk if she were spoken to first. It seemed a ludicrous notion, but Mary began to wonder if her aloofness might not actually be shyness.

Then the Monday after Thanksgiving, Aunie had
approached her and asked if she’d be interested in being her study partner. Mary had agreed enthusiastically and offered to introduce her to the group with whom she ate lunch. Prepared to have Aunie reject the suggestion, Mary had been surprised when instead she’d accepted with every appearance of pleasure.

In view of everything they’d said behind her back, the lunch group had been a little stiff in her presence at first. Her quiet warmth and graciousness had ultimately worked on them the way it had on Mary, however, and by degrees everyone had begun to relax around her. There was still a lot Mary didn’t know about Aunie, but she felt that they were nonetheless slowly becoming friends.

“So, where was I?” she asked.

“Oozing potatoes between your teeth,” Joe retorted and passed the ketchup.

“What a charmer you are,” Aunie rebuked him in her mannerly way but took the sting out of her gentle reprimand with a smile. She prompted Mary, “I asked if the calls were obscene and you said not exactly.”

“Oh, yeah.” Mary curled her lip at a flushed Joe before she turned her attention to Aunie. “The caller doesn’t make sexual suggestions or talk dirty, from what I’ve heard, but what he does is almost worse. He seems to know all sorts of personal stuff about the women he calls.” She shivered. “Can you imagine anything creepier than having some total stranger know everything about you? Take Alice Zablinski, for instance. She just got engaged the other night, and practically before her boyfriend finished putting the ring on her finger, this creep was on the phone describing the weight and shape of the stone.”

“It was the next day that he called,” one of the girls sitting further down the table contradicted her.

“Close enough.” Mary shrugged. “Aunie knew what I meant.” She leaned into the petite brunette at her side and murmured, “God, what a fussy attention to detail. My version has more flair, don’t you think?”

Aunie’s dimples flashed in amusement. “Entirely more dramatic,” she agreed.

Other students sitting at the table began to contribute stories they had heard about the man they’d nicknamed the Campus Caller. The whole affair sounded strange and disturbing, but Aunie was affected the way she might have been by one of those gory slasher movies that teenagers seemed to love. She was repulsed by the anonymous caller’s actions, but basically felt removed from them. Perhaps it was because she didn’t know any of the principals involved or perhaps it was simply because she had concerns of her own that seemed more pressing.

Either way, she didn’t feel it had all that much to do with her.

The next several weeks in Aunie’s life were a healing period. Determined to go forward rather than stagnate in fear, she put Wesley and the injustice the legal system had dealt her out of her mind, concentrating on the present. Her friendships with both Lola and Mary deepened, and her confidence grew daily.

It used to be she mentally cringed at comments on her looks. She had always feared that, should they suddenly disappear, it would be discovered there was nothing of substance behind them and she’d be exposed as a fraud. Attractively cased, she’d been
afraid people would say, but basically a nonperson. One didn’t have to be overly endowed in the intelligence department to realize that an accident of genes did not constitute a personal accomplishment.

Recently, however, she’d discovered she possessed something much more consequential than good bones and flawless skin: She had a brain. It was a realization that made her feel truly substantial for perhaps the very first time in her life.

It still amazed her that she should be drawn to math and computers, of all things. She hadn’t even seen a computer back in high school, except for a basic keyboarding class, and she’d barely scraped by in math. On the other hand, she had never taxed herself in an attempt to comprehend either. She’d taken her family’s assessment of her intelligence at face value and automatically assumed she was lacking in the necessary mental fortitude required for the precise sciences.

She’d had no choice but to take a required math class when she’d signed up for college following her divorce from Wesley, and she’d enrolled in a computer course in an attempt to drag her skills kicking and screaming into the nineties. Determined to gain a well-rounded education, she had struggled to understand them at least well enough to get a passing grade. To her amazement, by the end of the year she’d begun to believe she had an actual aptitude for mathematics and computers. To test herself, she’d loaded her schedule with an abundance of both when she’d picked her courses at the community college in Seattle. Each day that passed with an increase in her comprehension skills added to her growing self-esteem. Now she was tentatively beginning to believe she might actually possess what it took to go the distance
toward a goal she never would have dreamed, a few short months ago, she was smart enough to tackle. Software engineering.

Mary’s friendship was an additional ego booster. Aunie was treated by her new friend as if she were a card-packing member of Mensa.

One day, studying in Aunie’s apartment, Mary suddenly threw her pencil on the table and flopped back in her chair in disgust. “I don’t understand this stuff at all,” she snarled, plowing her fingers through her curly hair. “God, I’ll be lucky if I pull a C out of this course. Why can’t I be smart like you?” She scowled across the table. “Forget your dainty bone structure and that skin; I’d give a bundle to have half your brains.”