Familiar Stranger (8 page)

"What's wrong?" David asked.

"Nothing."

He frowned and then pulled off to the side of the road and turned to face her.

"That look on your face is not nothing," he said. "Talk to me."

She looked away, afraid he would read what was in her heart. "It's no big deal. I just wanted to take a few pictures to remember this day."

It wasn't what she said but what she omitted that hit him like the proverbial rock. God. It was just like before. She didn't trust he would come back and was making memories for the day that he would leave. What hurt him the most was that he couldn't promise to return. He could say he wanted to. But that didn't mean he would live through his confrontation with Frank.

It was at that moment he made up his mind to quit thinking negatively. He, by God,
was
going to come back and he
was
going to spend the rest of his life with her. He brushed the side of her cheek with the back of his hand, then gave the lobe of her ear a gentle tug.

"That's good. We can look back on them when we're old and gray and remember that I was the one who caught the most fish."

Cara turned her head, saw the challenge in his eyes, and in spite of her fears made herself smile. Two could play at this game of pretend.

"The most fish? You're already telling me this is going to be a competition in which you're going to win and you haven't even wet your hook?"

He grinned as he pulled onto the road. "So I like a little challenge now and then. What's so wrong with that?"

"Absolutely nothing," she said. "And I'm going to add a little something to the pot, okay?"

"Why not? I know how to be a good sport. Name your something."

"The loser has to clean the fish."

He wrinkled his nose. "I don't know. I don't want you hurting yourself."

She laughed. "My word! The utter gall of the man. Not only have you announced yourself winner before the game even starts, but you're already concerning yourself with my inability to clean a fish."

"Not
a
fish, my darling woman. Lots and lots of fish."

"Fine. I accept your challenge."

He nodded in satisfaction. "Good. Now … is this the turnoff you told me to take, or do we take the second one posted on that sign?"

"This is it," Cara said, pointing toward a narrow blacktop road leading off to the right of the highway. "Caribou Lake, dead ahead."

* * *

It was late afternoon before Cara showed signs of wearing out. They'd shared a picnic and taken pictures and reminisced about so many people that David's head was flooded with things he had spent years trying to forget.

To his delight, she'd caught the most fish, and her pride had been obvious. His claim to fame for the day was that he'd caught the smallest, which she had promptly recorded for posterity with a demand for a pose. Laughing, he'd held up the four-inch fish on the line, measuring it with his thumb and forefinger for the camera as she snapped the shot.

He glanced at her again, as he had so often during the day, smiling about the smear of dirt on her forehead and the faint hint of sunburn on her reddening nose and cheeks.

"Don't you think it's time to call it quits?" he asked.

She looked at him, her eyes snapping with challenge.

"Only if you're the one who's saying uncle."

"Then uncle … and aunt, and cousin Joe, and Uncle Bob, and whatever the hell else it takes for you to admit you're as tired as I am."

She grinned. "All right then, just one more cast and I'm yours."

"Now you're talking," he said, and then watched as she made a perfect cast into the lake.

"Good one," he said. "Where did you learn to fish like this?"

"My son, Tyler. He demanded his time between ballet lessons and cheerleading practices."

David nodded, wondering where Ray Justice had been during those years. So far, Cara rarely mentioned his presence in their everyday lives. Then her next comment answered his question without being asked.

"Ray was always working," she said. "Someone had to do the guy stuff with our son." Slowly, she reeled in the line, skillfully playing the lure in the water as she talked. "I got pretty good at it, too. In fact, there for a while, spending the night at Tyler's house was all the rage because his mom wasn't squeamish about worms."

David grinned.

Suddenly, Cara's line jerked.

"I've got one!" she shouted, and began backing up as she reeled.

The pole was bending, the line quivering and taut. When it was less than five feet from the shore, they could see the shadowy shape of the fish beneath the water.

"It's a big one," she squealed. "Just look at him fight."

David glanced toward the water just as she took another turn on the reel. In that moment, the fish slipped the hook. The tension went from constant to nothing and the hook came up and out of the water like a pronged bullet, heading straight for Cara's face.

David reacted without thinking, spinning between her and the missile, then flinching in pain when the hook set itself deep within his back.

Still blinking from an impact that never happened, Cara saw David reaching over his shoulder, feeling his way around the wound. When he removed his hand, it came away bloody.

"David?"

"It's in my back," he said. "If I had a pair of needle-nosed pliers, I could pull it out."

"Oh, my God," she moaned, and made him turn around. "I saw it coming and just froze. If it hadn't been for you, it would have been in my face."

"It's nothing," he said. "Lord knows I've had worse. Now go look for the pliers, will you?"

"I will not," she stated firmly, and took a pocketknife out of her tackle box and quickly cut the line. "We're going to the emergency room. You're going to have that taken out like a decent human being, not ripped out of your flesh like some barbarian."

"But I am a barbarian," he muttered.

"Not in my world, you're not."

"Damn it, Cara, it's a little bitty hook."

"That's imbedded in your back," she retorted.

He glared.

She frowned.

He sighed.

She began gathering up their things.

"Give me those," David said, taking the heaviest of their gear out of her hands. "I'm not crippled."

"No, just difficult," she said, and then started to cry. "God … don't do that," David said, as he followed her to the car.

"I have to," Cara said.

"Why?"

"Because I'm a woman and because if I don't cry, I might say something stupid. Trust me. It's better if I cry."

In spite of the burning pain in his back, he had to grin.

When they reached the SUV, she opened the back door and slid the rods inside.

"Is this something I should start getting used to?" David asked.

Her cheeks were streaked with tears, her eyes still brimming, but she managed a weak smile as she took the tackle boxes from him and put them in the floorboard behind the front seat.

"What? You mean crying?" she asked.

"Um … that and being bossed around."

This time her smile was genuine. "Was I bossing?"

"Oh, yeah."

"How did you feel about it?"

He grinned back. "Scared?"

"Oh, right," she muttered, and held out her hand. "May I please have the car keys?"

"And you're driving, too? Dang, Cara, I'm not dying."

"Do you know where the hospital is?"

"Oh."

"That's what I thought. The keys, please."

He handed them to her without further argument and got into the passenger side.

"What about the fish that we caught?" he asked.

"Drat," Cara muttered, as she realized she'd left her stringer of fish in the water. "Wait a minute. I'll be right back."

David watched her sprinting toward the lake, her long, slender legs making quick work of the distance. When she reached the shore, he saw her kneel and lift the stringer out of the water. But to his surprise, she didn't bring it to the car. Instead, she gently removed each one and released them into the lake.

When she got to the car, she tossed the empty stringer into the back seat with the rest of the tackle and brushed her hands on the seat of her pants.

"So, I'm not going to have to clean them after all," David said.

She looked at the bloodstained portion of his shirt and the hook still protruding from his back, and her eyes filled with sympathetic pain.

"I just realized how the fish must have felt when they bit the bait. I thought it was only fair that I let them go."

David's heart twisted. Her empathy for suffering was humbling. He thought of all his years in the military and then his years with SPEAR and wondered, if she knew what he'd done in the name of freedom, would she still be as sympathetic to his pain?

Chapter 5

«
^
»

T
hey walked into the emergency room, still arguing. The nurse at the admitting desk looked up, saw the blood on the man's shirt as well as some of the same spots on Cara's arms.

"Cara! My word! What on earth is going on? Are you hurt?"

"I'm not, but he is," Cara said. "He's got a fishhook in his back."

"Goodness gracious," the nurse said. "Come this way. We'll get that taken care of immediately."

In a town as small as Chiltingham, it stood to reason Cara would be recognized, but for David, a man who'd spent most of his adult life pretending to be someone else, it was a bit disconcerting.

"How did this happen?" Frances said, as she reached for a pair of scissors and began cutting David's shirt down the middle of the back.

"I liked that shirt," David muttered.

"You can buy another one," Cara said. "Now quit fussing and let her do her thing."

David wanted to glare, but the damned hook was really starting to throb. If he had to give up a good T-shirt, then so be it. Anything to get a little relief from the pain.

"There now," Frances said. "I'm going to get Dr. Edwards. I'll be right back."

Cara bit her lower lip. Now that the shirt was gone, she could actually see how deep the hook had gone.

"If that had hit my eye, it would have blinded me. I can't believe you just stepped in front of it like that."

"It was reflex," David said. "It didn't amount to anything much."

"It's much to me," she muttered through tightly clenched teeth. "If I say you're a hero, then you're a hero."

At that point, a tall, skinny man who looked to be on the far side of sixty walked up to the side of the examination table where David was sitting. If it wasn't for the white lab coat he was wearing over a Grateful Dead T-shirt and jeans, David would have doubted the man's authenticity. This, he supposed, would be Doctor Edwards.

"Well, now, Cara, who do we have here?" he asked, looking at Cara instead of the man on the examining table.

David frowned. They were acting as if he was dumb, as well as bloody.

"My name is David Wilson," he said, answering for himself.

"He's my friend," Cara said. "And if he hadn't moved as quickly as he did, that hook would have been in my face, not his back."

Now Marvin Edwards looked at David, looking past the bloody condition of his clothes to the anger on his face and offered his hand.

"Then on behalf of the residents of Chiltingham, let me be the one to thank you. Cara is a much beloved member of this community and it seems you have averted a tragedy. I like to fish myself, and know how these things can happen. One minute a fish is on the hook and the next it's not. Those hooks can come flying, especially if there is a lot of tension on the line. How did you react so quickly?"

David wasn't in the mood to explain that it had been the same instinct he'd had a thousand times before in the jungles of Vietnam.

Knowing a sniper was hidden somewhere up a tree. Knowing there were booby traps on the trail up ahead although nothing could be seen.

Knowing that the smiling old man who appeared on the trail in front of him was holding an unpinned hand grenade beneath the sheaves of rice.

It was an ingrained sense to survive. Or in this instance, to protect.

"I don't know. I just did," he said.

Marvin Edwards smiled, satisfied with David's reticent attitude. He could respect that. There were plenty of times when he didn't much want to talk. Unfortunately, in his line of work, he didn't have the luxury of clamming up.

With the shirt off his patient's back, Marvin ran his fingers across the multitude of scars on David's body without comment, then waved at Frances.

"Get me a syringe, Frances. We're going to need to deaden this area first."

The nurse busied herself at a nearby table while David fidgeted beneath Cara's worried gaze.

"Look," David said. "Trust me, Doc, this is nothing. I've been hurt enough times in my life to know the difference."

"Then humor me so I can humor our friend Cara Justice. What do you say?"

David grimaced. "Fine. Look and dig. It's just a hook."

Marvin Edwards grinned. "Look and dig? I spent all those years and all that money on medical school just so I could look and dig?"

The older man's sarcasm almost made David grin. "Sorry. Figure of speech."

"Apology accepted," Marvin said, as he closed the curtain around the examining table and took the syringe the nurse handed him.

"Here goes nothing. Please don't move."

David sighed, barely aware when the doctor shoved the needle into his back, but he winked at Cara, who looked as if she was going to cry.

"Honey, why don't you go find a bathroom and wash that blood off your hands?"

"Are you saying you don't want me here?" she asked.

"No. I'm saying you don't need to be here. You're going to cry again and it's really not a big deal, okay?"

"Promise?"

"I promise."

"I'll be right back," she said.

"I figured that."

She slipped out of the curtained area, leaving the two men alone.

"So … David, is it?" David nodded.

"Exactly what line of business are you in?"