The Burning Point (37 page)

"Cases involving sex and your womenfolk seem to set off weird primitive reactions."

"Primitive isn't the half of it. My feelings about Julia aren't Oedipal. More filial, I guess. Since Sam isn't around to protect his woman, I feel like I should. Dumb, right?"

"Right. Not that I blame you for being shocked. I am, too. I mean, she's my mother, we all grow up thinking our parents found us under cabbage leaves and that sex didn't exist before our personal coming of age." Kate's eyes narrowed. "But Julia's love life is basically her business, not ours. It's not as if Charles is an ogre or a sexual predator. They've been friends forever. Charles is a really nice man and a thoroughly eligible widower. I can understand why they've been drawn closer."

"But Sam has only been dead for a couple of months!"

"People react to grief in many different ways. What right do I have to criticize my mother, who was always there for me?" Kate realized that she had always taken her mother's quiet love and support for granted.

Her father, who was so often away on business, was the parent whose approval she had yearned for. Only now, in the wake of death, was she beginning to learn Julia's heart. The least she could do was accept her mother's choices.

"After you left me--how long was it until you got involved with another man?"

"Do you really need to know this?"

He looked away. "Probably not."

"It was over two years before I went out on a date. More than four until I found someone I wanted to sleep with. Does it make you feel better to know that I didn't rebound into another relationship right away?"

"Not really. It's a measure of how much I'd hurt you."

She poked him in the ribs. "All right, Romeo, your turn to say how long it took for you to get back into circulation."

"More than a year. Less than four. A damned good thing I didn't know where to find you. I might have slipped over the edge into really dangerous craziness if you'd been nearby. For months, I was so sure that if I could just see you face to face, talk to you, I could persuade you to come home again."

"That's why I did the divorce long distance. I was afraid that if we were in the same room, even a lawyer's office, it would feel so natural, so right, to be with you, that I'd have jumped right back into the fire. And if that had happened--I don't know if I would have had the strength to escape again."

His fingers locked on the handgrips of the motorcycle. "I can't bear the thought that under any circumstance, no matter how angry I was, that I might have...Christ, I can't even say it."

She had a swift, nightmare vision of the knife in her hand, the razor edge crimson with blood. "I don't know if it was luck or wisdom but the worst didn't happen." She buttoned up her jacket. "Are you safe? I'm getting cold and hungry."

"Yeah, I'm safe." He held out his hand again. When she hesitated, he said quietly, "As God is my witness, I swear that will never touch you in anger again. I don't expect you to believe that right away, but I hope that you will someday."

She dropped the keys onto his palm and swung into the saddle behind him. Tonight, thank God, they hadn't even come close to the kind of explosion that had ended their marriage. She'd spoken up instead of denying and avoiding the issue, and he'd mastered his temper in a tough emotional situation. Progress had definitely been made.

As she wrapped her arms around his waist, it was impossible to suppress a faint tingle of hope.

Chapter 34

Another day, another city. Atlanta in this case. Donovan finished his sandwich and threw the wrappings into the trash. Eating at his desk on a job site was seriously uncivilized. Though when he looked across the cramped office and saw Kate polishing off a portion of pasta salad, he had to admit that she looked civilized.

The phone rang, and he picked it up to find Brian, a PDI foreman working on a job in Honolulu. After hearing why Brian had called, he swore under his breath. "Go ahead and hire new equipment, even if the price is exorbitant. We can't afford to get any further behind on that job. And...be careful."

"More trouble?" Kate asked as he hung up.

"Arson on the Honolulu job site. A Bobcat and a loader were destroyed. I've never seen such a run of bad luck at so many job sites. Arson, accidents, labor problems--you name it, we've had it."

"Anyone hurt?"

"No, thank God."

Kate folded pasta dish, plastic ware, and napkins into the brown bag from whence they'd come, then dropped everything into the recycling bin by the table where she'd been organizing the necessary demolition permits. "That's good. Bad luck tends to come in clusters. Pretty soon the luck will change."

"I hope so." In his more superstitious moments, Donovan wondered if God was telling him he shouldn't be in charge of PDI. Then he'd remind himself of other accidents the company had experienced over the years. The only difference now was that a number of things were going wrong at once. Pure coincidence.

Kate continued, "I've gone through your list. Do you have any more office work for me, or can I swagger over to the site and play construction boss this afternoon?"

"You do that. I'd go with you, but the client, Bob Glazer, will be here in half an hour or so."

Reaching for her hard hat, she got to her feet. "See you later."

An elderly gentleman in a sober suit and old-fashioned hat opened the door. "Excuse me," he said in a soft Southern accent. "Are you the folks from Phoenix Demolition?"

"Yes, we are," Kate said. "Come on in."

He entered, followed by a sweet-faced older woman wearing a flowered dress and carrying a tote bag. "I have a question you all are going to think is very foolish," he said.

"I doubt it," Donovan said. "I like off-the-wall questions."

"My name is Wilfred Bowen, and this is my wife, Essie. It was fifty years ago this weekend that we got married right here in the Hotel St. Cyr."

"Yes?" Kate said encouragingly.

"Wilfred is indulging me, honey," Mrs. Bowen said. "When I heard that you were fixing to knock the hotel down, I asked him to bring me by for a last visit."

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Bowen, but the soft-stripping process has already started," Donovan said. "It won't look the way you remember."

"Nothing ever does, honey. Has the ballroom been ripped up?"

"Actually, I think that's one area that's still pretty much intact," Kate said. "I could take you over there, but you'll have to wear hard hats."

"A hard hat! Oh, my, wouldn't that be fun," Mrs. Bowen said happily. "Can we go right now?"

Donovan glanced at his watch. He had time before Glazer arrived. "Now would be good. The crew is on lunch break and the building is quiet. Once they get back to work, it will be too noisy to think."

After introducing herself and Donovan, Kate pulled visitor hard hats from a box and gave them to the Bowens. Wilfred wore his hat with grave dignity, while Essie looked so cute she could have been a model in a commercial.

Kate led the way outside and across the small plaza to the Hotel St. Cyr. After picking their way through rubble-strewn halls, the group reached their destination to find that it was dusty and shabby, but intact.

Essie circled slowly, her gaze fixed on the molded plaster ceiling high above. "Do you remember our wedding reception, honey?"

"Oh, yes, Essie Mae," he said softly. "I remember."

Essie pulled a large object from her tote bag. "My youngest grandson lent me this gizmo of his, a boom box, he called it, an my daughter gave me a music tape. Would you mind terribly if we had one last dance?"

"Of course not," Kate said.

"Wilfred, honey, could you make this go?"

Her husband frowned over the small buttons for a moment, then hit play. The lilting strains of big band dance music filled the room.

Essie handed a small camera to Kate. "Could you take some pictures, please? So we can show the family at our anniversary party this weekend."

She began shooting as Essie and her husband danced with the expertise born of decades of moving through life together. In the dim light of the ballroom, it was easy to imagine how they had looked on their wedding day.

Donovan tried to imagine what Kate would look like in forty or fifty years. She'd have silvery hair, fragile skin stretched over lovely bones, and that smile. She'd be beautiful.

When she finished shooting, Kate set the camera down by the boom box. Donovan said, "Miss Corsi, is this dance taken?"

She blinked. "Sir, have we been properly introduced?"

"No. I'm the bad boy gatecrasher," he said.

"Wonderful. I have a secret weakness for bad boys."

He clasped her right hand with his left, his other hand going to rest on her supple waist, just above her heavy belt. In hardhat, denim work shirt over T-shirt, and jeans, Kate was as graceful as the debutante she had once been. Donovan envied those young men who had danced with her that night when they'd met. But she'd ended the evening with him, so he'd been the lucky one.

Silently they spun through the room. If this were a real date, he'd pull her close so that her head could rest on his shoulder and he could feel the rhythmic sway of her body against his. The mere thought made his breathing change. Damnation, she'd been wise to insist on no touching in the beginning, because the more they touched, the more he wanted to make love to her. In passion, perhaps, he could truly make amends for the past. Say what couldn't be said in words. A pity this was only an unusual break in the middle of a work day, not a date or a seduction.

The music stopped. Kate lowered her arms, but she didn't move away. For the space of a dozen heartbeats they stared at each other.

The roar of a Bobcat coming to life on the floor above broke the mood. Kate turned to the Bowens. "You timed that exactly right."

"Thank you for letting us have our romantic moment." Essie smiled as she packed away the camera and boombox. "Don't you and your young man ever forget to take time for romance. It helps keep you going through the hard times."

While Kate blushed, Wilfred said sincerely, "Essie, with you there were never any hard times. You were always the sweetest thing in Dixie."

"You see why I've kept him all these years?" Essie said with a smile.

Donovan said, "I'll take you back to the site office now. I have to meet our client there in a few minutes."

"Time to get back to work," Kate agreed.

As Donovan ushered the elderly couple outside, he thought of Essie Bowen's comment about taking time for romance. He liked that idea a lot.

∗ ∗ ∗

Another city, another building to implode. Kate would never get bored by PDI's work, but already she'd passed through the excited novice stage into matter-of-factness. Born to be wild, or at least to bring buildings down. Despite her parents' best efforts to civilize her, she felt more alive, more herself, on a job site than she had at that cotillion.

The Hotel St. Cyr had been solidly built, and a lot of careful calculations and prep work would be required to bring it down cleanly in the middle of a mess of skyscrapers. The project had originally been handled by Sam, so Donovan had to make his own survey of the structure before finalizing the explosives plan. When he'd learned what he needed to know, they'd return to Baltimore, and a PDI foreman would fly in to supervise the rest of the prep work.

Taking Dinah to Julia's house before this trip had given her a chance to get past the awkwardness of the scene Saturday when she and Donovan had chosen the wrong time to drop by. In a triumph of WASP communication, neither of them speaking about the subject openly, Kate had indicated that she had no intention of passing judgment on her mother, while Julia had made it clear that the affair with Charles was over.

Kate wasn't quite sure how she felt about that. A selfish part of her had been relieved by the news--yet how could a daughter be glad to know that her mother had lost a source of comfort at one of life's most difficult times? When Kate got back to Baltimore, she'd have to talk with her mother.

She made her way down to the basement, where a front end loader was making enough noise to raise the dead while ripping away great chunks of non-loadbearing walls. Kate spent several minutes with Gil Brown, the local foreman, going over what needed to be done before demolition. Luckily Brown was quick, and he'd worked on a PDI job before. So far, this project was going very smoothly.

Brown left to go upstairs, leaving Kate in the basement with the front-end loader. Kate did a circuit of the area, which she hadn't seen before. Originally the basement had been divided into a warren of storage and service rooms. The loader had already ripped away more than half the partitions with a violence that cracked the plaster even on the opposite side of the basement from where the machine was operating.

A flick of her flashlight into one of the storage rooms turned into a closer examination when a crack in the ceiling caught her eye. There seemed to be an extra wide beam up there. Exactly the kind of deviation that could affect the explosives plan.

A heavy old wooden crate sat by one wall, so she dragged it under the crack and climbed up for a closer look. Using a screwdriver from her tool belt, she chipped at the plaster to get a better view of the beam.