Together Alone (33 page)

“Appropriate, my foot. You wanted me out so you could shack up with the cop. Did he choose the colors for the bedroom?”

Emily bristled. “I chose them. Neither he, nor any other man but you, has ever seen that room. It’s mine, and only mine, and I plan to keep it that way for a while. Know what I’ve discovered in the last few weeks?” She thumped her chest. “There’s a
me
in this world. There’s an individual inside this body who isn’t anyone’s slave. That individual is tasting freedom for the very first time in her adult life.”

He smirked. “Now, that’s devotion for you, the woman who equates motherhood with slavery.”

She held up a hand. “Oh, no. I wasn’t referring to motherhood, and you know it. I was referring to marriage to you. You held me down, Doug. It’s as simple as that.”

“And he doesn’t? Baby, the only man who gives a woman total freedom is one who doesn’t care where she goes or what she does. So. Is he good?”

Damn good
, she thought.
Much better than you ever were, you self-centered oaf.

She strode toward the door. “I think you should leave.”

He followed her. “Why? Because I’m putting you on the hot seat?”

“Because you’re
way
out of line.” She turned on him in the hall. “Once upon a time you had the right to question me about my life. You don’t any more.
Especially
not with what you did to me. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!” She whirled back around and headed for the kitchen.

“I have every right to question you. It’s
my
money you’re asking for.”

“It’s
my
money,” she yelled. “Hard-earned and long overdue.”

“Keep your voice down.”

She opened the door and hollered, “I’ll raise my voice as high as I want. It’s my life, my turf, my voice.” She stood back and in an abruptly quieter way, one all the more emphatic for it, said, “I want you to leave, Doug. This discussion is done.”

As he walked past, close enough to brush her with his arm, he murmured, “Racing up there for a quick bang?”

“Get out,” she said. A quick bang?
Not quite.
The instant the shiny black car disappeared from sight, she stormed from the kitchen, crossed the driveway, and ran up the steps to the apartment.

Brian had papers spread on the coffee table, and while he didn’t look exactly guilty, he had the good grace to appear unsure.

“Why did you do that?” she asked without preamble. “You saw his car. You knew he was here.”

“I wanted to make sure you were all right.”

“You could have called. Or rung the bell.”

“I was worried he was pulling something mean.”

“Come on, Brian.”

“I’m serious. I’ve seen domestic violence. Men don’t take kindly to being thrown out on the street.”

“He’s hardly on the street. He has a perfectly good place to go.”

“So what was he doing back here?”

“Talking with me. He’ll have to do that sometimes. He’s Jill’s father. Any time he wants to talk with me about Jill, I’ll listen.”

“Was that what he wanted?” Brian asked.

“Not once he saw you. Once he saw you, walking in there like you do it all the time, all he wanted to talk about was when we started sleeping together.”

“Did you tell him?”

“Certainly
not.
I didn’t confirm
anything.”

“Why not?”

“Because what I do with my nights is my business, not his.”

“Are you embarrassed?”

“By what?”

“Our relationship.”

“Of
course
not.” Secretive of it, perhaps, and rightly so, given that it had preceded her separation from Doug. Protective of it, certainly, and excited by it, even now, when she was incensed. Embarrassed? Never. “Why would you ask that, much less think it?”

He shrugged. “I’d have told him, if it were me.”

“Obviously. That’s the real reason you barged in there just now. You wanted him to know. You couldn’t have made it clearer, if you’d hired a skywriter.”

“Damn right,” Brian said, leaving the sofa. “I’m not ashamed of what we have. It happens to be a very fine, very noble, very beautiful thing. I love you. I’m not ashamed of that. Are you?”

“That’s not the
point
,” she insisted, steeling herself against those pale blue eyes that could swallow her brain. He loved her. Oh, God, the words were sweet, so sweet. But she had spent a lifetime being lulled by words into hiding her thoughts. She had to be more honest, more assertive. “The point is that it isn’t
your
place to tell him what I’m doing with my life. It’s
my
place, and no one else’s.”

“Why don’t you want him to know?”

“I don’t
care
if he knows,” she cried, frustrated to the extreme. “But I had a right to tell him in my own way and time. I didn’t need you rushing in there, so blatantly possessive that a blind man would have seen it. I don’t
belong
to you, Brian.”

He stood a foot from her and held the distance. “I never said you did.”

“Maybe not, but that’s the feeling that came across back there. I belonged to Doug, once. I
let
myself belong to him. I let myself play second fiddle. I let myself be
subjugated.
So look where I am.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m forty years old and starting from scratch.”

“I wouldn’t say that. I’d say that you’re forty years old and blossoming in ways you couldn’t have done before. You didn’t have the roots when you were twenty or thirty. Now you do. Now you have a grip on your life.”

“Well, that does sound poetic, but it doesn’t describe some of the feelings I’ve had in the last few months, the last few
days
.” They tumbled out then, so many things that had been germs, now coalescing into thoughts. “It doesn’t describe fear or shock. It doesn’t describe the awful upset of losing my underpinnings, of having the rug pulled out from under my feet. It doesn’t describe the sting of being betrayed, or the knowledge, deep down inside, that I let it happen,
let
it happen, and it
doesn’t
describe the stark realization that I have no one to depend on in life but myself, and that I’m not terribly well equipped to take on the responsibility. That is scary stuff, and what’s
most
scary, is that I set myself up for it. I let Doug keep me in the dark about finances, and about his feelings toward me. Want to be poetic? I can be poetic. I let myself be crippled. Now I’m learning how to walk.”

“Do you love me?”

“Yes, I love you!” She never would have had an affair with him if she didn’t. “But I won’t use you as a crutch! I won’t just stumble from one relationship into another. I won’t be dependent like I was before. If we have a future, you and I, I want it to be
different.
I want there to be respect.”

“I respect you. I have from day one.”

“I need to respect myself. That’s what I’m working on now.”

“By writing. I can buy that.”

“There’s more to it,” she said and spoke with a confidence that felt new and so, so good. “I’m finding my voice. I’m deciding what
I
want for dinner, not what Doug wants, or Jill wants. I’m sleeping in a bedroom decorated to
my
tastes. I’m using the bathroom when
I
want, not when no one else wants it.”

“I have no problem with that. But what does it mean for us?”

“It means,” she said with a sigh, feeling a great release, a catharsis she had never known with Doug, “that I need my space. It means,” she said with a smile and, reaching up, curled her hand around his neck, “that as sweet as it is for you to run to my aid, I need to deal with Doug on my own. I need to sleep alone sometimes. I need to get to know
me
.”

“But you do love me?”

“Yes.” She sighed in resignation this time. How could she
not
love him, when his eyes worshiped her that way. “I do love you.”

He slid his hands down her spine, and lifted her, fitting her thighs to his hips as he backed her to the wall by the door. “Will you sleep with me those times when you don’t need to sleep alone?”

She nodded.

“Will you eat what I decide to cook sometimes?”

She nodded again.

“Will you have sex with me right now?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s too soon. I’m too newly separated.”

“We made love before you were separated at all.”

“Shhh.”

“I need you, Em.” His breath was hot against her forehead, his arms enfolding her with exquisite care and incredible strength. “I’ve been in agony, waiting for something to happen. I was afraid you’d patch things up with him.”

“How could I, if I’m in love with you?”

“You’d have done it for Jill, and I love you for that, too, only I’ve missed you something awful.” His voice broke into a gritty groan, with the deepening of his embrace. “Oh, babe, do I ever need you.”

The feeling was mutual. She didn’t want it, indeed, had every intention of working to make herself more self-sufficient, but, Lord, she had missed him. Her body remembered the intimacy of his, the love-every-part-of-me need, and cried for it now. Did that mean she was weakening? Or just realizing what she wanted and taking it? “I came here to make a point about independence.”

“So make it,” he whispered. “Take the lead all you want. My body’s yours.”

It was tempting. His body was magnificent—long, hard, leanly muscular, properly haired. “What about Julia?”

“Sleeping.” He moved against her in hungry ways, then, with her back to the wall, took her face in his hands. “It’s so swollen inside me, all I want to give you, and it isn’t only sex, it’s all the other stuff.”

“I know,” she said. He had been giving her the other stuff since the first day she’d met him, and while a part of her wondered if she should refuse sex on principle—she wasn’t being anyone’s physical outlet, not ever again—another part couldn’t fathom why she would want to deny herself the pleasure. Wasn’t the pleasure a product of that other, more soulful stuff?

Deciding that being independent didn’t have to mean living stoically or chastely, she gave a wonderfully replete sigh and sought his mouth.

B
RIAN WAS FEELING THWARTED. HE GAVE EMILY
love, great sex, even space when she needed it. But the one thing that he wanted to give her, more than anything, continued to elude him.

The fingerprint that his contact had produced, the one that enhanced the two-year-old Daniel’s print, hadn’t matched up to a thing. So Daniel Arkin didn’t have a criminal record. He hadn’t been enrolled in a military school, or any other school that fingerprinted its students. He wasn’t a Green Beret, a Navy Seal, or a government employee with high-security clearance—the last understandably, since he would have only been twenty-one, but Brian hadn’t left anything to chance.

“Give it up,” John said more than once. “You’re not gonna find anything this late.”

“What do you think happened to him?”

“A drifter. A gypsy. Christ, I don’t know. But he’s gone.”

Gone, but far from forgotten, which was why Brian persevered. Not that he wanted Emily to forget Daniel. He would never, ever ask that of her. But he wanted a resolution, just as she would, if she knew there was a chance.

Maybe there wasn’t. But he had worked on cases that had looked to be dead in the water, when a single bubble broke the surface. He couldn’t give up yet, particularly now that Emily’s life was starting to change. She had ended her marriage and begun to write, and she was giving herself to Brian in ways that suggested forever and a day, but he wanted more than a suggestion.

That was why he drove two hours to Lower Hadley, the small town to which he had traced the woman who owned the candy store in Grannick at the time of Daniel’s disappearance. The store had been down the street from the post office, with a view of the place that was oblique at best and, at worst, as had been the case that day, obscured by the truck owned by one of two customers in the shop at the time. Moreover, a taffy-pulling machine had been on, creating a noise of its own that would have drowned out most any sound from the street.

The woman hadn’t seen a thing, hadn’t heard a thing, didn’t know a thing.

He wasn’t surprised. But he was discouraged. He had already talked with four others—the owner of the bakery, a client in the real estate office, and the two customers in the candy store that day.

Nothing.

Driving back to Grannick, he agonized over where to turn next. He had gone through the list of known sex offenders, had talked with those who had been in town at the time of Daniel’s disappearance, had even—quietly, gently, and without John’s knowledge—checked out Nestor Berlo’s story.

When he learned nothing there, he turned to the computer, using it as cold case squads often did, generating a list of child-snatchers from Daniel’s time give or take five years. Pulling strings with every contact he had ever developed, he tracked down each one.

Several were dead. Most were in jail. He interviewed three of the latter with no luck, and as for those who had been on the streets at the time Daniel was taken, all had alibis placing them far from Grannick, alibis corroborated by either law enforcement officers, or by friends, relatives, or employees. Brian knew how easily a friend or relative could lie. But he couldn’t open an investigation without a germ of suspicion, and he didn’t even have that. None of the child-snatchers from Daniel’s time had taken children that young, from cars or homes, without asking a ransom. None of the
known
child-snatchers, at least. Which left the ones who weren’t known. Which left Brian right back where he’d begun, way out in left field.

He stared at the computer, reading and rereading files so often that he knew their contents by heart. Names, profiles, rap sheets—he had been hoping upon hope to find something, hoping that if he looked long enough, he would see a clue or a pattern.

He wanted Daniel solved. He wanted Emily to be able to close the book, literally and figuratively, on that chapter of her life. Mostly he wanted her to know that he had done it for her, wanted her to look up at him in the adoring way that made his chest swell and his throat grow tight with thoughts of how much she mattered.

There had to be an answer. Okay, so he was emotionally involved. Okay, so he wasn’t being as realistic as officers of the law were supposed to be. But his emotional, unrealistic, involved-with-Emily self insisted that someone, somewhere had to know what happened to Daniel.

For lack of other direction—and because Emily was thinking about Daniel more, because she had all those notes spread before her, because Brian thought there might be a clue in them, in
her,
that she had been too close to the case to see—but mostly because Doug was gone and Brian felt freer to love her, he started stopping by in the middle of the day to see how she was doing.

He brought sandwiches with him on Monday. On Tuesday, because snow was falling and the world was cold and crisp, she made soup. On Wednesday, because he felt she needed a break, he dragged her from her computer to the Eatery.

They were on their way home when his radio crackled. He picked it up and conversed with the dispatcher. Cursing the timing, he stepped on the gas.

“What?” Emily asked.

He should have left her home, where things were safe and Daniel’s disappearance was the only one she had to suffer through again and again and again.

“Brian?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“It’s another missing child, isn’t it?”

He figured she had made out at least part of the dispatcher’s message, and careened around a corner, muttering, “Missing doesn’t mean kidnapped. Christ, what
is
it about this town?”

“The dispatcher said the end of LaGrange. That’s a wealthy area. Did she say Hammelman?”

“Sounded like it. Do you know them?”

“Not well. They own movie theaters. They’re friends of the Berlos.”

Brian grunted. “Is that friends of his, friends of hers, or friends of lovers somewhere along the way?” The Berlos were definitely unusual. He slowed when he approached their stone wall, not because it was theirs, but because it marked the way to China Pond Road. “Am I dropping you home?”

“No.”

He reaccelerated. “Didn’t think so.” He continued down LaGrange until he reached the large brick house with a cruiser parked behind a small Mercedes, which was parked behind a Jaguar, which was parked behind a larger Mercedes on the circular drive. “Wait here,” he told Emily, but she was already out of the car.

Munroe had his forearms on the roof of the cruiser. He pulled them off to fill Brian in. “Three-year-old girl. Mother left her with a sitter. They’re both gone.”

“No note left behind saying where they went?” Brian asked.

“Nope. The child has a bad cough. The mother was real clear about coming back at one to take her to the doctor.”

“Maybe the sitter got scared and took the little girl to the hospital herself.”

“
Him
self. The sitter was Richie Berlo.”

“Richie Berlo?” Brian asked in dismay.

“His mother and Mrs. Hammelman are best friends. They were going to Hartford, and when the little girl couldn’t be with her playgroup because of the cold, he was filling in.”

“Why wasn’t he in school?”

Munroe shrugged. “Gotta find him to ask him. Half the department’s out looking. No one’s seen him.”

“Did they put out an APB?”

“Not yet.”

“Why not?” Brian demanded, foolishly. No APB had been issued for the same reason that Harold had looked the other way when Richie had tried to shoplift from his store. Money talked. Nestor Berlo was to be spared embarrassment at all costs.

To Emily, Brian muttered. “That kid is a disaster waiting to happen.”

“They won’t touch him,” she confirmed.

“I will. I know some of his hiding places. Come on. Let’s join the chase.” But before he could reach the Jeep, the dispatcher had told Munroe that the chase was underway, high-speed, on the outskirts of town. Munroe passed the word to Brian.

Brian put a flasher on the roof and his foot to the floor.

“I’ve never been in on a chase before,” Emily said.

“And you won’t be now,” he informed her, listening to the radio with one ear as the others reported their positions. “I’m going fast. That’s one step slower than speeding, which is three steps slower than chasing.”

“Go faster.”

“No with you in the car and slush on the road.”

“Don’t you want to catch Richie?”

“No. All I want is to be there once he’s caught. I want my turn questioning him. I’m not intimidated by his father, the way most of this town seems to be.” He turned up the radio. Excited reports were coming in, one after the other.

“How much do you know about Nestor?” Emily asked with the tact of a loyal Grannickite.

“I know that his lover is the same sex as his wife’s lover, if that’s what you’re getting at.” A quick look told him that it was. He frowned at something the dispatcher said. “Ridge Road?”

But Emily was more familiar with the town. “River Road. It’s a little beyond.” She leaned closer, because the voices were coming fast and furious. “
What?
”

Brian started to speed. “Accident,” he said.

“Who?”

“I don’t know.”

“John.”

“Let’s wait and see.”

“John’s hurt.”

“We don’t know that.”

“They just said so. They’re calling an ambulance.”

“Stay cool,” Brian said, feeling anything but. He hated it when any officer was hurt, hated it even more when he knew the officer, and when he knew the perpetrator, when his gut told him the whole thing could have been prevented, he hated it the most.

He whipped around corners as fast as the Jeep would take them, fishtailing around a few on the remants of yesterday’s snow, hitting his horn more than once when an unsuspecting driver threatened to intrude on his path. He was wired by the time he reached River Road. His nerves sparked hotly when he saw John’s cruiser wedged on its side against a tree.

“My God,” Emily cried, tugging at her door.

Brian wanted to make her stay in the Jeep, but short of tying her down, he didn’t know how, and then ambulance sounds came from behind, and it seemed pointless. He ran forward just as a crew of others righted John’s car. Emily was among the first to get to John, but she, too, had to stand aside when the EMTs came through.

“He’s alive,” she told Brian. “He’s talking.”

But Brian could see John’s facial expressions. “Looks like he’s hurting. His legs?”

“Yes.”

He put his hands on her shoulders, and said, “Stay here until they get him in the ambulance. Want to go with him?”

“Yes.”

He passed that word on, then turned to the side. There, standing by his slush-spattered sports car, looking for all the world like a spectator, rather than the object of a manhunt, was Richie Berlo. The Hammelman child knelt like a forgotten bag of groceries on the front seat of his car.

“What was this all about?” Brian asked with a tired sigh. Before Richie could answer, he walked past him and lifted the child from the car. “Hey, you,” he teased, “where you been?”

“We went riding,” she said in the kind of sweet, little-girl voice he imagined Julia would have at three. “We went fast. It was fun.”

“Your Mommy’s worried.”

“But I didn’t cough once.”

With a look at Richie that forbade him to move, Brian carried the child to Sam. “You take her. I’ll take him.” He returned to Richie with a pair of handcuffs.

“What’re those for?”

“They’re what we use when we don’t trust that the people we’re taking in for questioning won’t turn tail and run.”

“Questioning? For
speeding?
”

Brian snapped on the cuffs and set off, hauling Richie along.

“Where are you taking me?”

“For starters to get a good look at the guy they’re laying out on that stretcher over there. In case you don’t recognize him, he’s the chief of police in this town. He’s someone’s husband and someone’s father and a friend to lots and lots of people around here. He’s the guy who might have died just now, thanks to you.” He took Richie by the back of the neck. “Look good.”

John was sickly pale. Blood ran from a facial cut. His features were twisted with pain.

When Richie started to turn away, Brian tightened his hand. “Watch, goddammit,” he muttered under his breath, though, in fact, his own eyes had found Emily’s. She was frightened for John, but there was something reassuring in the look she sent him. It calmed his nerves.

He waited until she climbed in behind the stretcher. None too gently, he ushered Richie to the Jeep and shoved him inside.

I didn’t make him hit the tree,” the boy protested once they were on the road.

Brian held the wheel with both hands. “You knew he was behind you, you knew he wanted you to stop, you led him on a merry chase. He wouldn’t have hit the tree if you hadn’t done that.”

“He skidded on ice. It wasn’t my fault.”

“What were you doing with the little girl?”

“Nothing. She was bored, so we took a ride.”

“With her mother coming back at one?”

“I forgot. And anyway,” he added, sounding petulant and wise, “they’re never back when they say they’ll be. Brunch takes hours. It’s the most important thing they have to do with their lives.”

“Yours is school. Why weren’t you there?”

“Because I had to babysit.”

“You didn’t have to. You don’t need the money.”

“I was doing her a favor. I was doing my mother a favor. Besides, I’m a senior. School is irrelevant at this point.”

“Not if you want to get into college.”

Richie made a sputtering sound.

“Ahhh,” Brian interpreted. “Getting into college isn’t a problem. Not with Daddy greasing the right palms. So you were doing Mrs. Hammelman a favor. Why would she think you’d kidnap the child?”

Richie looked appalled.
“Kidnap?
I didn’t
kidnap
the kid. Is that what she says?”

“Yeah. I want to know why.”

The boy’s expression soured. “Go ask her.”

“I’m asking you. You’re the son of her best friend. Her first instinct should be to trust, not accuse.”

“She doesn’t like my father.”