Blue Dawn (15 page)

Don’t you think you have enough material already?”

Allie was flabbergasted. Had he been bored all week? Had she mistaken support for mere acquiescence?

“No, I don’t,” she retorted. “Each story is different. And this one—Eva Bukowski’s disappearance—is the most interesting of them all.”

“But the reactions are always the same,” Erik persisted. “Horror. Loss. They can’t forget. It’s ruined their lives.”

“So?” Though Allie had recovered from her initial surprise, she was puzzled by Erik’s sudden resistance and his apparent dismissal of the strong emotions they’d recorded this week.

“Besides, they aren’t exactly the same. And anyway, it’s only three columns. Sometimes repetition is good.”

Allie opened the door and got out. After the car’s air-conditioning, the afternoon heat seemed to swallow her, almost cutting off her breath. She forced herself to breathe, then looked around through the waves of shimmering heat at the street so like the one she grew up on. The two and three-story houses were packed closely together, their tiny front yards marked off with wire and wood fences and everything from vegetable gardens to towering sunflowers and masses of flowers. Competing aromas of cooking dinners fought for her attention, bringing with them an unexpected wave of homesickness.

She turned back to the car. When Erik made no move to get out, she opened the door and peered at him. “Well, aren’t you coming?”

“No.”

“What do you mean ”no”? You have to come.”

“I can’t see the point of another head shot of a grieving relative.” He pressed his lips together.

Allie sighed, and pushed her hair away from her face. She was starting to wilt under the intense heat. “Come on Erik. Don’t go all
prima donna
on me now,” she said. “This is the last photo for this series and I need it.

Erik didn’t move. His expression didn’t change.

Suddenly exasperated, Allie pushed forward the seat and grabbed for Erik’s camera bag. “All right then. I’ll take the photo myself.”

“No.” With lightning speed, Erik turned and grasped her wrist.

Shocked, Allie stared at him, nose-to-nose.

Was the heat getting to Erik?
And why, whenever she started to think she had him figured out, did he always throw her a curve ball?

After a strained moment, Erik relented. His angry gaze calmed, and he released her wrist. “All right,” he said without expression. “I’ll take the photo of the brother. But only one. Try not to stretch this interview out any longer than a few minutes.”

More puzzled than ever, Allie watched as Erik retrieved his camera bag, eased his long body out of the car, unlatched the low wire gate, and strode up the narrow walk to the Bukowski’s house. He turned at the foot of the gray wooden porch, and waited, unusual impatience etched across his face.

Allie walked slowly towards the house, pondering Erik’s change of attitude. Were these interviews getting to him more than she’d realized? Was there even more feeling behind that stoic exterior than she’d realized? Or was he just bored and impatient?

After a brief knock, the door was opened by a plump, elderly woman. With her lined face, her white hair tied back in a bun and a clean but worn apron, she reminded Allie of her own mother.

“Miss Stanislawski?”

When Allie nodded, the woman smiled kindly.

“My husband is waiting for you in the living room.”

She lead them through a small kitchen to an equally tiny living room, where a twenty-nine-inch television in an imposing wood console dominated the room.

On an old, well-cared-for couch sat a man of close to eighty years. Despite his age, and the continuing hip problems Allie had been told had left him immobile, he held his large frame erect.

The heavy blunt hands of a man who had been a butcher all his life sat unmoving in his lap.

Intelligent eyes regarded them from a pale, hollow-cheeked face sporting an immaculately-groomed mustache.

“Thank you for seeing us, Mr. Bukowski.” Allie took the seat beside him. She glanced at Erik, but he was already down on one knee, opening his camera bag.

She returned her attention to George Bukowski, who had been sixteen when his sister disappeared. Mr. Bukowski picked up a cracked and yellowed chocolate box from the arm of the couch. “Yes,” he said, his voice quavering, ”and I found this box of old photos for you, too. I hadn’t seen a lot of these for years.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful.” Allie leaned forward.

With shaking fingers, the old man unearthed a trove of family photos. She saw Eva, and later George and his brother Michael, as babies, as young children, and as teenagers. She watched Eva bloom from a chubby, smiling baby, to a shy youngster, to a sweetly beautiful young woman, all of it in the bosom of a hard-working, happy family.

And then the pictures stopped.

Allie swallowed, trying to bottle the emotion that had surfaced again and again during the last few days of the most painful interviews she’d ever undertaken. Then, with a gentle but thorough approach, she began a series of questions to elicit the events surrounding Eva’s disappearance, and her family’s reaction.

As the questions became more pointed, the old man’s eyes filled with tears. His voice quavered, and a hitherto undetected Polish accent surfaced.

“After she was gone, it was like a hole in my life. A hole nothing could fill. Always I wondered. If only I’d been there. Maybe I could have stopped it.

Maybe they would have taken me instead of her.

And my parents. They never recovered. It’s what killed them. Both of them died within a few years.”

Allie bit her lip against the ache that invaded her heart with each retelling of the story, each one the same yet so different. She swallowed again, trying to gather her thoughts for the next question, when the old man continued.

“What especially hurt my parents were the neighbors who claimed my sister had been abducted by Martians,” he said with a disgust that still held strong after all these years. His bottom lip curled. “They claimed to have seen a stranger and some kinda spaceship hovering over the house. They babbled on about an odd blue light—”

A crash cut off Allie’s exclamation of surprise.

She turned to see Erik, pale and grim-faced, retrieving his camera from the floor. She frowned.

It wasn’t like him to be clumsy.

Anxious to hear more, she turned back to Mr.

Bukowski. “What? There was nothing about that in the papers?”

“That’s right. Because it was garbage. Just fool idiots who’d had too much to drink that night. The story didn’t go anywhere because the police knew it was foolishness from a couple of drunks. But it hurt my parents all the same.”

“Oh my,
Jurek!”

Mrs. Bukowski, bearing a tin tray of tea and cookies, stood in the archway from the kitchen to the living room. She was staring at Erik, who had lowered his camera at her exclamation.

“Look! Look at the young man,” she said, her voice rising with excitement.

Mr. Bukowski turned to look at Erik. So did Allie.

“Doesn’t he look just like our grandson Peter?”

Erik couldn’t breathe. The sensation of three sets of eyes watching him, waiting for some acknowledgment of Mrs. Bukowski’s innocent comment, was unbearable.

The seconds ticked by in the small, stifling room. Despite the heat, Erik could feel a trickle of cold sweat running down his back. He knew he should respond, knew he needed to shrug his shoulders or make some light comment.

But he couldn’t do it. The will was there; his body refused.

Finally he managed to gulp down some air.

Then, like a blind and deaf man, he ignored Allie and the Bukowskis—
his great-uncle and aunt, by
the stars
—picked up his camera bag and headed straight for the door.

Outside, he unlocked the Jaguar and hurled his camera bag into the back. As he slammed shut the door, he noticed the familiar blue glow emanating from his hand.

He cursed and shoved his hand into his pocket.

The unsummoned glowing was a sign that he was completely out of control. Usually he could call it—the physical indication that he was a member of the hereditary Zalian elite class—at will. But not now. Now it had taken on a life of its own.

He gritted his teeth and leaned against the car.

He shut his eyes and desperately tried to force a rigid control over his careening thoughts and emotions, to shove the blue light back where it had come from.

He thought he had reasserted firm control over his weak human side earlier this week. Clearly he had failed. But why? After Allie had pointed out the similarity between him and his grandmother on Monday, he had prepared himself for a situation like the one that had just occurred. He thought he had been ready.

He was wrong. Nothing he’d told himself, none of the Zalian principles he had reviewed over and over, had prepared him for the pain he had witnessed this past week. Particularly the pain of his own great-uncle.

Eyes still shut, he clenched his fists. As a child, he’d been frightened, then moved by his grandmother’s silent, bleak misery and that terrifying wail. But he’d never understood the depth of her misery, or the reasons for it, except in the most superficial way.

He opened his eyes and stared ahead unseeing. He no longer had that luxury. For the first time, he not only understood but felt to his core his grandmother’s suffering and her wordless misery at the ripping away of all she held dear.

Despite the heat, a chill of awareness crept up his spine, along with a growing sense of horror.

Knowing what he knew now, how could he proceed with his plans? What if he inflicted the same misery on Allie? Or something equally as dismal?

He recalled the image revealed by the crystal.

He clamped his mouth shut against the cry of despair that welled up from deep inside.

“What the hell was that all about?”

Startled, Erik turned his head and looked at Allie. She stood beside him, hands on her hips.

She wore a frown, and her emerald eyes narrowed dangerously.

He suppressed a grimace. He hadn’t even heard her come up! More evidence of just how badly he was falling apart.

When he didn’t respond, she dropped her bag to the ground. “Erik! What are you trying to do?

Mess up my best interview? And that was such an innocent little comment by Mrs. Bukowski. Not much different than the one I made earlier in the week. Why did you run out like that? I know you didn’t want to be there in the first place, but . . .”

Her voice trailed off. Her expression changed with lightning speed from annoyance to surprise, and then alarm.

“You look terrible,” she said, her brow wrinkling. “Is something wrong?”

She stepped forward and placed a cool hand on his forehead. He steeled himself not to react.

Unfortunately, the physical tug of destiny that had first appeared in Allie was now working on him, too. His expression impassive, he fought it.

She frowned again. “Well, you’re not hot. But you look absolutely terrible. Like you’ve seen a ghost or something. What’s the problem?”

He moistened his dry lips, trying to control his inner turmoil.

Allie’s expression softened. Her eyes, always that inviting green, widened and gentled with concern. She touched his cheek with her fingertips.

“I want to know what’s wrong,” she said softly.

“Something
has
to be wrong. I can see it,” she insisted. “You’re so quiet. You keep everything inside. Not like me. I go on about everything. But you keep everything to yourself. And that’s not good. Something is bothering you and you should tell me.”

“Why?” The word came out a croak.

“Because maybe . . . maybe I could help. And even if I couldn’t, sometimes just talking about things, problems that are bothering you, helps.”

She smiled self-deprecatingly. “I know I talk a lot, but I am a good listener. Especially when it’s important.”

Erik looked at the ground and fought against the tenderness he found harder and harder to resist.
If she only knew
, he thought, falling back on the armor of bitterness.
She wouldn’t be
offering solace. Anything but.

He raised his head once more, determined to slay her wasted concern with coldness. He made the mistake of waiting a moment too long, of letting the human tenderness he saw in her eyes envelope him, caress him, tempt him to let down his Zalian guard.

For one brief moment he faltered, teetering on the edge of what for him could only be a dangerous trap.

“No.” He turned away from those eyes, from the generosity and caring she offered. He turned away from the part of him that was human and was mutinously trying to connect with the one human being for whom he cared far too much. “There’s nothing to talk about.”

Beside him, Allie sighed. She moved closer. He held his breath, waiting for her to touch him.

Wishing she would. Hoping she wouldn’t.

When her fingertips tentatively brushed the inside of his elbow, he stiffened. Slowly, gently, she strengthened her grasp on his elbow, coaxing him to turn towards her. When he refused, she stepped in front of him, and he found himself looking into the tender sweetness of the one face that could lure him to disaster.

“Maybe not,” she said quietly. She studied him.

“But you still don’t look well.”

She glanced at the watch on her slim wrist.

“It’s already four thirty,” she said. “I don’t feel like going back and writing my column now. And by the time we get back to
The Streeter
it will be just about time to leave anyway.”

She looked at him again. This time, her lips curved upwards and her eyes flashed impishly.

“You don’t look good, that’s for sure. Maybe you’re right. Talking won’t work. But if that’s the case, I know something else that
will
. Come on.”

The ”something else” turned out to be dinner at the small and crowded two-story home of Allie’s sister and brother-in-law in a neighborhood not far from the Bukowskis. Despite a suspicion that he’d be better off far from Allie’s disturbing concern, Erik had agreed to accompany her.