Gone Too Far (16 page)

Found Janine, dead on the floor. Lord God help them all.

As much as she ached to be with Ihbraham, she was not going to call him. He was one of the three people in this world who Mary Lou loved, one of the three who loved her, too. Janine was already dead because of her. Haley was in danger just by being her child. There was no way Mary Lou was going to put Ihbraham at risk, too. No freaking way.

She couldn’t stop herself. She had been strong for so long, but now as she sat on Whitney’s bed, in that horrible pink and white bedroom, she started to cry. And this time it was Whitney—little messed-up demon child Whitney—who put her arms around her and murmured that it was going to be okay, that she wouldn’t tell her father anything, that Mary Lou’s secret was safe.

“I’m not going anywhere until I talk to the guy at the car dealer,” he told her, his voice gravelly with sleep.

“Yeah, I know,” Alyssa said. “That’s why you have exactly five minutes to shower and get your ass out to the parking lot. You might want to say a quick prayer that the place opens at nine and that our man works Tuesday mornings. Max’s orders didn’t include side trips, but I figure the way you drive, we can make it up on the road.”

“Thank you,” he said.

“That wasn’t necessarily a compliment.”

“No,” Sam said. “I meant thank you for—”

“You now have four minutes and forty-eight seconds,” Alyssa cut him off, and cut the connection, too.

Sam hauled ass for the shower.

“I didn’t shower,” Alyssa informed him. “I figured we needed directions to Harrison Motors more than we needed me to smell sweet.” She put the car into drive. “Don’t touch that coffee until you open that map and verify that the intersection of Routes 20 and 24 really is south of here.”

Sam wrestled with the road map. “It is.” He looked up at the motel’s proximity to the highway in front of them and said, “Take a left out of the lot.” He glanced over at her. “I happen to think you smell very sweet. I’ve always thought you—”

“Please don’t be a jerk this early in the day,” Alyssa interrupted him. “I’m doing you an enormous favor here, Starrett. Don’t pay me back this way.”

“Sorry. I was just trying to be honest.”

“Can’t you just say sorry?” Alyssa asked. “And leave out all the noisy bullshit for a change?”

He sighed. “Sorry.”

They drove in silence, but it lasted for only about twenty seconds before he asked, “Sleep well?”

“No,” she said tersely. “I woke up to the news that Max is moving the entire office down to Sarasota, and I don’t know why. I didn’t speak to him directly, but he ordered me to bring you there. I’m not supposed to let you out of my sight.”

“Shit,” he said. But then he laughed. “Maybe he found out my birthday’s coming and he wants to throw me a surprise party.”

Alyssa laughed, too, despite herself. “Yeah, I’m sure that’s it.” She glanced at him. “Aren’t you at all worried?”

“Worried is my new middle name.” He fished through the bag of doughnuts until he found the chocolate-covered one. “But first things first. First we find out if there’s even a prayer that Mary Lou and Haley are still alive. Then we can go to Sarasota and find out how badly I’m about to get reamed. Depending on the news from Harrison Motors, I might even be willing to speculate how bad it’s going to hurt, as we drive back south.”

Alyssa glanced at him again. “Is your birthday really coming?”

The smile he gave her was slightly strained around the edges, but it was still pure Sam. “There are so many creative ways I could answer that, but they’d only piss you off. So, yeah. My birthday’s next week.” He paused. “You want to give me a present?” He didn’t wait for her to answer because obviously he knew she’d jump to sexual conclusions. “Help me find Haley. I don’t care if the whole freaking FBI is in Sarasota ready to help find her. I trust you. I want
you
working on this case.”

He’d surprised her with that one. But she shook her head. “I can’t pick and choose assignments—”

“Maybe you can’t, but Max sure as hell can. I know this isn’t your normal counterterrorist assignment, but—”

“I really don’t have the power to tell Max what to—”

“Then take time off,” Sam implored her. “Lys, I wouldn’t ask you to do this if it wasn’t important. Please. The thought of never seeing her again is . . . I’m dying, here.”

Silence. What could she say?

“Jules is on his way back from Hawaii,” Alyssa finally told him. “I’m sure he’ll be willing to—”

“Yeah,” Sam said, correctly reading her words as a great big no. He couldn’t keep at least a little sarcasm from escaping. “Thanks a lot.”

She was dying here, too. But she didn’t dare tell him that. She bit her tongue and clenched her teeth and didn’t let the words escape.

He was clearly reining himself in, too. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to sound so . . . You’ve been really great, and I appreciate your efforts. I honestly do.”

“It’s all right,” she said. “I’ll do what I can, Sam, but . . .” She cleared her throat. “This isn’t exactly my dream case.”

He laughed. “Yeah, no kidding.”

“How long do I stay on this road?” she asked.

Sam made a big show of checking the map. “Another two miles, it looks like. At least.”

More silence.

Then, when she picked up her coffee, he said, “Careful, it’s really hot.”

God. Alyssa didn’t want Sam to be kind or considerate or thoughtful. She didn’t want him to apologize or to be sincere or to care whether or not she burned her tongue. She wanted . . .

She didn’t know what she wanted.

“Thank you,” she said, not daring to look in his direction as she took a big sip anyway.

It burned all the way down.

“Oh, how pretty,” Maria said to me. “The delivery boy brought you flowers.” She bustled to the door. “I’ll take those.”

I was taking advantage of the opportunity and starting to swing my legs, cast and all, to the side of the bed, when I heard Walter’s voice. “No, I’ve been ordered to deliver them personally to Lieutenant Smith.”

A lieutenant colonel in the Army Air Corps had actually been mistaken for a delivery boy. I opened my mouth to set Maria straight when I realized that Walt was dressed in civvies—including the goshdarn silliest cap I’ve ever seen in my life. He met my eyes and gave me the smallest shake of his head—
no.

So I shut my mouth and tucked my legs back under the covers. What on earth was he doing here in Savannah, Georgia?

“I have a private message for Miss Smith,” he told Maria, in the absolute worst cornpone deep south faked accent I’d ever heard, “from Lieutenant Colonel Gaines. I’ll be in some real, real hot water if I can’t deliver it to her and get me a reply to take on back.”

“It’s all right, Maria,” I said. “I know Walt quite well.”

I think it was the sight of me sitting up in bed, looking as if I was going to be obedient about her order to keep using those ass-freezing metal bedpans, that made Maria the torturer relent.

“Don’t let her get out of bed,” she ordered Walt before rushing off to the other end of the ward to torment the poor girl who’d had the appendectomy.

Walt glanced at the girl in the bed next to mine as he approached, and I did, too, but she was fast asleep. For the first time, I was glad I was at the end of the row of hospital beds, as drafty as it was, closest to the door. Across the center aisle, two beds down, Lily Foster was sitting up, doing her nails, waiting to be discharged. She could see us, but she was too far away to hear our conversation if we spoke quietly.

“What are you doing here?” I asked. I pointed to the chair for visitors that was next to the bed. In all the weeks I’d been here, no one had used it. Until now.

“We heard about the accident,” Walter told me in his regular voice. He set the flowers on the little table beside my bed and pulled the chair closer. “I came as quickly as I could. I’m sorry I didn’t get here sooner.”

“I’m okay,” I told him.

He looked at the bandage on my head. “You didn’t write. Mae and I were worried.”

“I was, um, unconscious for a while.”

“They said you broke a rib which in turn punctured your lung.”

“It wasn’t as bad as it sounds.”

Walt nodded, clearly not believing me.

It was ironic—me getting into a traffic accident not a week after I’d brought a plane down in a controlled crash. I’d walked away from that only to end up in this hospital just a few days later. But bad weather and poor driving had caused the Army transport I was riding in to skid off the road. It sure as hell wouldn’t have happened if I’d have been driving.

“Why aren’t you wearing your uniform?” I asked Walt.

He was silent for a moment, and I could tell that he was wondering whether or not to tell me the truth. I knew right then that the truth was going to make me steaming mad.

“I tried to get in to see you earlier in the day,” he finally admitted. “In my uniform. But . . .” He cleared his throat. “Apparently visitors as well as patients need to be a certain correct color to get through these doors. However, it didn’t take me long to note that delivery
boys
could be any color they wanted to be.” He smiled at me, so utterly
not
a boy, but rather a very full-grown man. “What do you think of the cap? Nice touch, huh?”

“Almost as good as the accent,” I told him. “I’m so sorry.”

“Think of it as my last chance to wear civilian clothes for a while,” he said. “For a
long
while. Until the end of the war.”

I sat up even straighter. “Are you telling me . . .?”

“Yes, I am.” He was smiling. “The squad leaves for North Africa in a few weeks.”

He’d come all this way not just to make sure I was okay, but also to say good-bye. This was the last time I was going to see him—maybe forever. I was glad I was sitting down because I suddenly felt light-headed.

Walt had wanted to go and do his part for his country for so long. I tried to be happy for him, tried to smile back at him, but all I felt was terrified. I felt stripped bare.

I’d hidden the truth for so long—not just from Mae and Walter, but from myself as well. But here it was. No longer something that I could ignore. I loved him. He was a black man and he was married to my dearest friend, but damn it, I
loved
Walter Gaines with all my heart.

And this was it. It was possibly—probably—the last few moments I’d spend with him. Ever. I knew far too many good men who went to fight the Germans and the Japanese and never came home again.

Walter glanced up, and I knew he was monitoring Nurse Maria. I looked, too, but she was still terrorizing the appendixless girl.

There was a whirlwind going on inside my head. Should I tell him? I wanted to tell him. I
couldn’t
tell him. He was married to Mae. How could I tell him? How could I betray her that way? But did he love me, too? Yes, I knew he loved me, too. I could see it in his eyes, in his beautiful, beautiful brown eyes.

I opened my mouth, and “Fight hard, fly harder, and fuck the Germans first” came out.

Walter laughed. “Yes, ma’am.”

I wanted to kiss him. Was that really too much to ask—just one kiss for an entire lifetime? Because even if he did come back home, he’d be coming back to Mae and little Jolee. I knew he loved Mae. How could anyone
not
love Mae?
I
loved Mae. I wanted to kiss him, but I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. I didn’t want to do that to Mae, and I didn’t want
him
to do that to Mae, either.

“I’ll take care of Mae and Jolee,” I told him. Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry. “First thing we’ll do is start planning your welcome home party.”

“You stay safe yourself,” he told me.

“I wish I was going with you.” That much I could say with all the emotion in my heart.

He was looking at the bandages on my head again. “Are you really all right under there?”

I was self-conscious of all that gauze. Although I would have been even more self-conscious if my head
hadn’t
been wrapped up. Thanks to the tailgate of the truck, I had a nasty gash a few inches above my hairline. “They shaved off a chunk of my hair in order to stitch me up.”

“Hair grows back.”

“I hope so.” I had a scrape on my cheek, too, that hadn’t completely healed, and I knew it made me look battered. It was hard to meet Walt’s eyes—a throwback to the days when I was young and stupid and married to Percy Smith, who’d dinged me up on a regular basis. I hadn’t looked anyone in the eye back then. “I must look awful.”

Walter took my hand. “You look beautiful, Dorothy—just as you always do.”

I don’t know what shocked me more—that he called me beautiful or that he touched me. I do know that the moment his hand touched mine, I clung to him as if my life depended on my never letting go. And—horrors!—I started to cry.

His hand was so dark and mine was so pale, it was shocking and hypnotizing and heartbreakingly wonderful. And I knew that this was it—even if he came back from this war, he was never going to touch me like this again unless I damn near killed myself again.

“Hey, now,” he said softly, leaning in real close. “Hush, baby, it’s all right.”

He pretended I was crying about the accident, asking me all kinds of questions about how scary it must’ve been trying to breathe with only half a lung after that truck rolled over and over, and about Betsy Wells, a nurse assigned to the Fifty-fifth, whom I’d just met that night, who died in my arms, and about how I’d climbed back up that incline with a broken ankle to flag down a passing car to go get help.

But he was a smart man, Walter was, and he knew what I was really crying about. He had tears in his own eyes as well.

“I’m sorry,” I told him, as I still clung to his hand, this time with both of mine.

He looked down at those hands of ours and he looked back at me and he opened his mouth to speak, and I stopped him.

“Don’t,” I said.

He looked back at our hands and laughed softly before he met my eyes again. “I wasn’t going to,” he said quietly. “I was just going to say that in a different lifetime . . .”

I nodded as I held his gaze for a long time. It wasn’t a kiss, but it was all we could give each other—all we
would
give each other.

Lily Foster was staring now, aghast at the sight of me holding hands with the delivery “boy.” Maria, too, was starting toward us.

Walter slipped his hand free from mine and got to his feet. “I’ll give your message to Massah Gaines,” he said in that ridiculous accent.

“Be sure to bring his wife my love,” I told him as I wiped the tears from my face.

“Sho’ nuff, Missy Dorothy.”

That one made me laugh, even as I started to cry again. “Tell him to fly like I’m right on his tail. He flies better when I’m up there with him.”

“You’re always with him,” Walter said in his regular voice, meeting my eyes for one last time, for all we knew for
the
last time, as Nurse Maria escorted him out the door.