Burn 2 (10 page)

It’s
all your fault. You left her in that apartment.

Pat glances at him. “It will be all right, Devon.”

“I hope so.” He will never forgive himself if she isn’t.

A little too late, isn’t it?

Finally, they draw up to the corner of Thirty-third Street where it crosses Seventh Avenue. There is a Corner Bakery there, its interior warm, golden and welcoming.

Pat pays the cab driver as Devon wrenches open the door and rushes into the bakery.
The aroma of freshly baked pastries wafts to his nostrils, but the last thing on his mind is food. He scans the patrons at the tables.

Come on, come on, Abby, be here.

Then he spots her just as Pat enters through the revolving doors. Abby is seated at a corner table with an older man whom he presumes to be her father. Devon rushes over to them.

“Abby!” he says.

He looks at the two of them with anxious eyes, perusing Abby for any signs of maltreatment. Then he casts a wary glance at her father, the man Pat told him is named Gunner Holt. A multimillionaire. A sugar baron. A man he knows nothing about but has speculated on everything from arson to the rape of his own daughter.

“Devon!” Abby appears to be very thankful that he is here.

“Abby, are you all right?” Devon has to tear his eyes away from Gunner Holt, who looks inexplicably sad.

“I’m OK.” Abby grabs his arm. She doesn’t introduce the two of them. “My father and I have reached
an amicable solution, haven’t we?”

Her tone is slightly on edge.

Her father doesn’t acknowledge this. His eyes flit away.

“Then there is nothing more for me to say here,” Abby declares, getting up. “This is finished. Come on, Devon, let’s go.”

Devon is simultaneously relieved and bewildered. Abby seizes his arm and walks him toward the exit. She nods at Pat Chalmers.

“Good to see you here.”

“We have to talk,” Pat says.

“Yes, but not here.”

The three of them march to the exit, and it isn’t until they are on the sidewalk that Abby visibly relaxes.

“What happened?” Devon demands.

She sighs. “It’s a long story, one that I should have told you, among other things.”

“
I’m sorry I acted the way I did.”

“No, you had every right to be mad.”

He looks back at the door of the Corner Bakery. “Is he going to follow us?”

“No, he will not,” she says determinedly.

After Pat has left, they return to their apartment.

“Will your father come for you again?” Devon asks Abby.

She lifts her chin. “No, I don’t think so. We have an understanding. He keeps his part of the bargain and I keep mine.”

Devon unlocks the door and they go in. It is night now, and it has been one long, tiring day.

Abby’s knees buckle suddenly and she flops onto the couch before her legs can give way. Her face is drained and her body feels hammered from all angles. There isn’t a shred of energy left in her.

“Abby?” Devon kneels by her anxiously. “Are you OK? Are you hurt?”

She knows what he is not so secretly afraid of – her father hurting her.
Oh yes, he has hurt me, but not in the way you think
.

“I’m just so tired, Devon.
” Her voice comes out tinny and weak.

“Let me carry you to bed.”

He scoops her body up in his strong arms. She lets him. She remembers him doing this the first night she came here, when she was physically hurt and debilitated. She remembers his warmth and comfort when she was still a total stranger to him. Maybe she had fallen in love with him that very first night and she hadn’t realized it.

He carries her into the bedroom and lays her gently down onto the bed.

“You want to take your clothes off?” His voice is gentle, not seductive. Now he is playing
the role of the solicitous boyfriend.

“OK,” she says in a small voice.

She lets him take off her shoes, and then her jeans. She sits up as he tugs her shirt off her head. He pauses at her brassiere and panties.

“Do you want to leave those on?” he asks.

“For a while.” She is too tired to undo the clasps herself.

He
covers her with the blanket. His gestures are tender and loving. His face wears an expression of worried calm. She knows why he is feeling this way. Their outburst this morning remains unresolved, and the specter of his incrimination weighs heavily in the room.

He sits by the bed for a moment. Their hands creep to each other’s. He clasps her palm tightly.

“I’m sorry,” he says in a choked voice.

Tears spring to her eyes. “I’m sorry too.”

He looks away. In the shadows thrown by the single lamp, the angles of his beautiful face are lighted up. She admires the contours of his profile. Ari was good-looking, but certainly not in Devon’s league.

He clears his throat. “I have something to confess.”

Her chest quails. Does she really want to hear this? Can she take in any more pain today? If he confesses to her that he did really kill Rachel Krieg, would she still love him, or would she turn him in to the police herself?

“Go ahead,” she says, the tempo of her pulse drumming rapidly upward.

“It’s about Rachel Krieg,” he says. He is nervous, she can tell. His hands clutch the side of the bed, bunching fistfuls of the sheets.

“Go on.” She can’t keep the tension out of her voice either.
She clenches her fist under the blanket.

“That night . . . the night everything went to shit . . . she asked me to do something for her.”

I know what it is, she thinks. Bondage, mayhem and a whole lot of spanking. But she nods anyway to encourage him.

He says,
without preamble, “She wanted to have my baby.”

This time Abby is stunned. It is the last thing she has been expecting.

“W-what?”

He says bitterly, “She had this plan, you see. One she wasn’t planning on telling me until that night.
I didn’t discover until later that she was fifty-one years old, but not yet menopausal. It seems that she had always wanted to have a child, but couldn’t because of some disease involving her tubes. She finally had it cleared up with some new surgical procedure which hadn’t been invented yet when she was younger, and she wanted a child.”

He pauses.

“Only thing was that she didn’t want a husband or a boyfriend. So rather than getting impregnated by an anonymous sperm donor, she wanted someone she knew had ‘the right genetics’, or so she put it. Naturally, she thought of me.”

“Why is that?” Abby asks. But she thinks she knows. Devon is beautiful, and it would
only be probable that any children he fathered would be beautiful too. Physically, he had the genetics, and he is even-tempered and benign in disposition.

“I don’t know. Maybe she thought I would give the baby good genes.
I told her I wasn’t that smart, and so that part of the genetics would be inconsistent, but she insisted. She said she had plenty of smarts for both of us, and it is important the baby grew up to be a good person, more than anything. She needed that from me.”

Devon pauses
again, deep in regret.

“
She said she would pay me twenty thousand dollars for my effort. I would even get to do it raw. I told her I didn’t want the money for something like this. It was not a service I wanted to embark on. If I wanted to be a father, I had to be a real father, not some surrogate sperm donor. She didn’t take kindly to my answer. We exchanged heated . . . words.

“She . . . she accused me of
being difficult. I think I must have thwarted her plans, because she called me . . . things she wouldn’t ordinarily call me, not even during our bondage play. I must have made her really mad.”

Abby’s spirits sink.

“What did you do next?” she whispers.

“I left. I swear that is all I did. I didn’t understand her rage at me, but then I chalked it up to not understanding women in general.” He gives her a rueful and mirthless grin.

“Did you tell this to the police?”

“No. I-I don’t know if it was the right thing to withhold it. But I thought it was deeply personal – something between Rachel and me. I did tell Pat Chalmers though.”

Abby’s mind swims. She can imagine him wresting about telling such a personal detail – which can be misconstrued as a motive for killing Rachel after the heated argument, although it was a tenuous connection. And yet, it is not a good thing to omit truths from the police.

“What did Pat advise you to do?”

“She advised me to come clean. But I don’t know.” His face is desperate. “I don’t know what is the right or wrong thing to do anymore. It’s like I’m screwed any which way I turn. What do you think I should do?”

She’s floored. She doesn’t know what he should do either. It’s no use turning back time and saying you
had to do this and that, or say this and that. What matters is what they would do from now on.

“I think you should do what Pat tells you to,” she says. “That’s why we hired her. She knows more about these things than you and I possibly can.”

“That’s why
you
hired her. Abby, I can’t let you pay for my defense.”

“Well, consider it
a loan.” She knows he doesn’t have the money to foot it, no matter how many tricks he turns, unless he finds a sugar mommy to bail him out.

“
I will pay you back with interest,” he says, determined.

She let
s him have that. He has his pride, she reckons.

“So tell me about your father,” he insists. “I told you my secrets,
and now it’s your turn.”

She has been
dreading this. But she knows he would ask her sooner or later. You don’t disappear like that and get Devon all frantic without owing him an explanation.

“I made a pact with my father never to tell what transpired between us,” she says.
Or to tell anyone what he really is – a neo-Nazi who has harbored and who is still harboring the vestiges of the war criminals.

When Devon looks nonplussed, she grabs hold of his hand.
“Please, please let me honor that, Devon. It’s something we both have to carry to the grave. That was the pact I made this evening with him. I don’t tell anyone his secret, and he leaves me alone . . .
forever
.”

He takes this in. She watches him breathe
in deeply.

“This means I can do what I want and when I want it without his say-so. I have my trust fund, which is considerable.
We can live off that, Devon. You can paint fulltime. You don’t have to do whatever you do to make money anymore.”

She watches his face turn dark.

He says abruptly, “I know you are ashamed of me, Abby, but you don’t have to take the opportunity to run down what I do every moment you get.”

“No, you misunderstand me. I – ”

“I have told you everything about myself. All my secrets. And you seem to just want to ‘fix’ things.”

“Devon, please don’t let us fight. Please,” she begs.

The last thing she wants to do is for him to walk out on her again.

He appears to struggle within himself for the same control.

“You are right,” he says in a tight voice. “I promised myself I wouldn’t fight with you anymore if you came back to me. I’m going to honor that promise.”

“And I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to give you the impression I was running you down. It’s just that I thought . . . I thought – ”

“I have to pay my own way through life, Abby. I can’t sponge off people. It doesn’t matter how rich you are, or what pact you made with your father. This is who I am and I still have to pay my own way. Surely you can see that.”

She can, actually.
And she is both sad that he chooses to be like this and proud of him at the same time. She only wishes he would do something
different
. But she can’t change everything about him overnight. He wouldn’t be the person she fell in love with in the first place if he is that malleable.

He says,
“I haven’t eaten anything all day. I’m starving. Why don’t I go make us some sandwiches? Then we’ll both take a shower and go to bed.”

“Sounds like a great plan.” She gives him a small, relieved smile.

It’s a truce for the moment, but she knows it is far from over.

When Devon has finished making the sandwiches – egg mayo on toasted brown bread – he carries the plate into the bedroom. And stops short when he sees Abby fast asleep.

His chest twitches. She is exhausted, he knows. She probably hadn’t slept the night before. And neither had he.