Suddenly

by Barbara Delinsky

  “Don’t assume the worst.”

  “She was abandoned once. Now she’s probably wandering around, thinking it’s happened again. She was so sad then. She may be bigger now, but she’s just as helpless.”

  “Cats aren’t helpless. They can fend for themselves.”

  “This one doesn’t know how.”

  “It’s instinct.”

  “But she’s just a baby,” Paige said, and put her chin in her palm. On one level she knew she was being foolish. On another she was feeling devastated. “I’ll put signs up. Someone must have seen her.” Assuming whoever had broken into the house hadn’t taken kitty in a car and dumped her far away.

  Noah’s fingers continued their work. After several minutes, leaving one hand on her arm, he slid to the step below. “Hey,” he said softly, studying Sami. To Paige he said, “She’s getting bigger. Looks none the worse for the excitement around here.”

  Paige shifted Sami to her lap. The little girl didn’t belong to her any more than kitty did, but the worry was there. “Thank God she and Jill weren’t home.” Her throat grew tight with emotion. She forced words past it. “If anything had happened to either of them, I don’t know what I’d have done.”

  “Do you have any idea who might have broken in or why?” Noah asked.

  She shook her head.

  “Nothing’s missing?”

  “Nothing obvious. Television, stereo, CD player—they’re all there. Same with my parents’ silver, which would have brought in a bundle on the black market.”

  “Do you keep any patient records, confidential reports here, that someone might have wanted?”

  “None.”

  “Then robbery wasn’t the motive, at least not robbery in the traditional sense. Stealing your peace of mind is something else. Do you have any enemies who may be out to give you a scare?”

  “Enemies? In Tucker?”

  “A difficult case that may have upset a parent? Maybe an unstable parent?”

  “I have several, but I can’t imagine they’d do this. Small-town doctors have a kind of protection. You might disagree with something they say, but you can’t tell them to go to hell, or next time you get sick, you’re out in the cold.” She stood suddenly and went down the stairs. “Kitty?” She looked back up at Noah. “I thought I heard something.” She moved aside a rhododendron branch. “Kitty?” But there was neither movement nor noise.

  Discouraged, she returned to the stairs. She leaned heavily against the wood railing and looked up at the house. Inside, Norman was making notes on a pad. She had a sudden sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.

  “Are you okay?” Noah asked.

  “I guess. It’s just the thought of a stranger going through my things. The intrusion. The violation.” Her imagination took her further, to an image of kitty mutilated and left to die, meowing piteously but with fading strength.

  Noah left the stairs and started thrashing through the rhododrendron.

  “She’s not there,” Paige said. “I’ll have to go through the neighborhood putting up signs.”

  But he moved to the next bush and worked his way toward its base. He straightened with a wide smile on his face and kitty in his hand. “You heard something all right.”

  Instantly relieved and grinning, Paige took kitty in her free hand and hugged her against Sami. She buried her face against the animal’s neck, which was soft, warm, and blessedly intact. “I was so worried.” At that moment she couldn’t imagine sleeping without kitty on her bed.

  “Paige?” Norman called from the door. “Can’t find any sign of forcible entry, but since the doors weren’t locked, that’s understandable. Mickey’s staying here to dust more while I go asking around the neighborhood. It’s possible that whoever it was went in and out the back way through the trees so no one would see, but it’s worth a try. Do me a favor and don’t move anything until Mickey’s done?”

  Paige nodded. She looked toward the house and swallowed hard. Her skin crawled when she thought of touching her own private things after a stranger had touched them.

  “I’m calling the girls on your team,” Noah said. “They’ll help neaten up when it’s time.”

  “No, no,” Paige said, though she was touched by the offer, “don’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’ll upset them. They’re too young.”

  “Not too young to help someone who has helped them out many a time. It’s a good lesson. Besides, they like you, and they’ll like being off campus.”

  But Paige hated the idea of the girls giving up their evening to clean up her house.

  “I’ll let them out of study hall for it,” Noah coaxed.

  At that, she couldn’t resist a crooked smile.

  Pushing off from the step, he said, “I’ll be back.” A handful of long strides took him across the lawn to his car.

  The van was packed with Paige’s team and pizza. By the time it pulled into her driveway, Mickey had left and the local locksmith was at work installing the dead bolts that Paige would never have bought if she were the only one involved. But there was Sami now, and Jill; Paige wouldn’t be able to go to work with a free mind, knowing that they might be prey to a thief on the loose.

  Then again, this thief may have deliberately waited until they left the house, may have sat in the bushes and watched. While it was reassuring to think that they hadn’t been in danger, the thought that someone had been so calculatingly determined was terrifying.

  She tried to think of who it might be and what he might have been after. She still couldn’t find anything missing. While the girls neatened the living room and kitchen, she tackled the bedroom.

  “This is the worst,” Noah observed from the doorway.

  Nearly every drawer had been opened and searched, leaving mounds of femininity stuffed haphazardly back in. The closet shelves had been re-arranged none too neatly. Mara’s knitting basket had been overturned, scattering skeins of yard hither and yon.

  Paige tossed underthings into a laundry basket. She didn’t care how many washes she had to run, she would run them all night if that was what it would take to restore a sense of purity to her life. “I can’t imagine why anyone would do this.”

  “The world is full of perverts.”

  Angrily, disgustedly, she tossed a nightgown into the pile. “I always thought Tucker was different.”

  “No place is different. Not that this had to be the work of a dangerous criminal. It could have been someone with a weird sense of humor. Are you sure nothing’s missing?”

  She had checked her jewelry box, but nothing was gone. She had checked the closet file that held the official paper on her mortgage, her insurance, her IRA. Nothing was even out of place, as it might have been if the papers had been photographed.

  With a sudden pang, she thought of Mara’s letters. Pushing aside dresses, blouses, and slacks, she pulled from the closet the apron that Mara had made for her several birthdays before. It had been a joke; Paige had never been much of a cook, despite Mara’s attempts to humiliate her into it. The last of those attempts had been this apron. It had no less than a dozen pockets on the front. Mara had claimed that they were deep enough to hold every ingredient Paige would need to bake a chocolate cake in an organized fashion.

  Paige didn’t know about that, since she still hadn’t tried to make a chocolate cake, but the pockets were more than deep enough to hold packets of letters. They were intact, all four, each with its own bow neatly tied.

  “Nothing’s missing,” she said, and wondered why she had thought of the letters with such a pang. Probably because they held great personal meaning. But for that same reason, a thief would be disinterested. Which apparently he had been, since the letters hadn’t been touched. Unless he hadn’t realized they were there.

  But why would anyone want Mara’s letters?

  “What is it?” Noah asked.

  She shook her head. “Nothing special.”

  “You sure went pale loo
king for those.”

  “They’re personal.”

  “Letters from a lover?”

  She shot him a droll look. “No, not letters from a lover. I’ve never had a lover who was that sentimental.”

  “Would you want one?” he asked, leaning against the bureau, “or would you consider sentimentality a sign of weakness?”

  She began tossing T-shirts into a second laundry basket. “Sentimentality isn’t a sign of weakness. Nor, though, is it enough to make a lover top-rate.”

  “What else does it take?”

  “Strength, individuality, conviction—traditional values in a man, but macho when they stand alone. Mixed in with a little sensitivity”—she sucked in her breath—“potent.”

  “You’ve never found a man like that?”

  “No.”

  “Is that why you’ve never married?”

  “I never married,” she said, attacking the drawer with slips and stockings, “because marriage as an institution never held much of a lure. I didn’t need it.”

  “Didn’t need the commitment?”

  “Didn’t need the burden.”

  “What burden?”

  “The burden. Obligations. Expectations that can’t be met.”

  “You mean, you don’t want to be tied down to one man?”

  She made a face to show the absurdity of that.

  “Then what expectations can’t you meet?” he asked.

  “I work, for one thing, and not nine to five. I’m on call many evenings and weekends, and I like my work. If someone were waiting for me at home, he’d be in for a long wait.”

  “Maybe he’d have things to do himself. Maybe he wouldn’t mind.”

  “Maybe not, but it’s a moot point, seeing as I haven’t fallen madly in love with anyone from Tucker.”

  “What about me?”

  “A, I’m not madly in love with you, and B, you’ll be gone in a year. You don’t count,” she finished with what she thought was a confident flourish, then caught a movement at the door. She looked that way to find Sara by the jamb and quickly crossed the room. “Hey, Sara. How’s it going out there?”

  “The baby’s crying. Can I get her? I have a little brother at home. I know what to do.”

  Paige took a quick breath. “Sure.” She watched Sara leave, then turned back to Noah, who was picking up a scattering of clothes from the closet floor. “I didn’t realize there was a child from the second marriage.” That complicated things even more.

  “Are you washing these?” Noah asked darkly.

  She shook her head. “Dry-cleaning. Put them on the bed.”

  “But you have to sleep there.”

  “Then the love seat.”

  “I’ll put them in the car,” he said, and went to do it.

  Facing two filled laundry baskets, Paige piled one on top of the other and carried them to the laundry room. She started the first load of wash, then went up the stairs.

  Sara was learning against the bars of Sami’s crib, not touching, just looking. Paige crept to her side and whispered, “She fell back to sleep?”

  “I guess.” She dropped a hand into the crib and touched kitty, who was curled in a ball. “Did he send you after me?”

  “No. He’s outside putting things in my car.”

  “You know, don’t you.”

  Paige didn’t pretend ignorance. “That he’s your father? Uh-huh.” She didn’t believe in playing games with adolescent girls who were often smarter than she was. In Sara’s case, honesty was a must.

  “Did he tell you not to trust me?”

  “No. Why would he do that?”

  “Because he doesn’t trust me himself. He knows I lie.”

  “Well,” Paige said, unable to say one way or another what Noah knew, “I’ve never seen you lie.”

  “You have.” She looked at Paige with quiet defiance. “There’s no baby back home. My mom had enough to handle with me. She wasn’t about to have a second.”

  The hurt rang familiar to Paige. “Did she tell you that?”

  Sara fingered kitty’s paw. “No, but I could tell. Everything was fine as long as I was invisible, but after a while that was harder to be.”

  “I know.”

  “No, you don’t,” Sara scoffed.

  “I do. My parents had me when they were nineteen. I was one major chain around their necks. They wanted to be flying all over the world, not staying home to raise a child.”

  “But did they?”

  “Stay home? For three reluctant years. Then they were gone.”

  “So who took care of you?”

  “My grandmother.”

  “Was she happy about it?”

  “Very. It gave her another shot at parenting. She felt she could do everything right the second time around.”

  “Don’t say that’s what my dad’s feeling, because he didn’t do anything the first time around.”

  “Maybe he sees that was a mistake. Maybe he’s trying to correct it.”

  She didn’t answer. After a minute of fiddling with kitty’s ear, she nudged the animal closer to Sami. “Do you like him?”

  “Your dad? Sure. He’s a nice guy.”

  “I mean, like him,” she drawled.

  Paige drawled back, “I don’t know him enough to say.”

  “He looked right at home in your bedroom.”

  “He was helping pick up. Giving moral support. It’s scary, this kind of thing,” she said, and looked around. “Whoever was here even went through the baby’s things. Why would he have done that?”

  “I don’t know. Breaking and entering isn’t my thing. I just steal from stores.”

  Paige sighed. She put an arm around Sara’s shoulders and said softly, “I’m glad you told me that. If you only steal from stores, then my parents’ silver is safe, and my grandmother’s Waterford, and the diamond earrings my father gave me when I turned sixteen.” She tugged Sara toward the door. “Let’s go down. You can help with my room. More appropriate you than your dad. It’s women’s stuff.”

  * * *

  Late that night, after a semblance of order had been restored to the women’s stuff and everyone had left, after Sami had taken the evening bottle that she was on the verge of giving up, and Jill was asleep, and the new bolts on the doors had been thrown, Paige crawled into bed. While she absently tossed a tiny paper ball for kitty to retrieve, she opened another packet of Mara’s letters.

  “I love him, I think,” she wrote. Paige looked for a date but could find none. It was pretty old, if Mara was referring to Daniel in the present tense. Daniel had been dead for fourteen years.

  It seems I’ve known him so long, and half the time we’re arguing, but there’s a side of him that few people see. He comes across as a guy who’s totally confident, when the opposite is true. He was the youngest in his family and the least able to do things the others did. I identify with him in that, which is maybe why I can understand so much of what he’s feeling. When I tried telling him that once, he got angry. He doesn’t think he’s insecure. So I don’t tell him anymore, but I can see it in everything he does, especially when he’s with me and needs the upper hand.

  Poor guy. He tells himself that he’s the kingpin of the practice, when everyone knows that he isn’t. He brought his local contacts to the group, but he has no business sense. He had his office on the opposite side of Tucker—

  Tucker?

  —when we arrived. Paige was the one who booked space right next to the hospital, which is where he should have been all along. Paige was the one who put the group together. She was the one who decorated the offices and designed the letterhead and hired Ginny and Dottie.

  Paige set down the letter in astonishment. Mara was talking of Peter. She snatched it back up and read on.

  She did it purposely, of course. She let him take the credit. Maybe she was being polite, or diplomatic. Or maybe she knew how insecure he was, too. What she didn’t know then, and doesn’t know now, is how hard he fought agains
t that insecurity. He studied his way through school and went into medicine, and he came back to Tucker to hold his head high. I admire him for that—and because he’s a good doctor. He may be arrogant sometimes, but there are other times when he’s that little boy sitting alone in a corner of the schoolyard, steeling himself against the taunts he is sure will come. Those are the times when I melt. Paige tells me I have a thing for the wounded. She should only know the extent of it.

  Paige skimmed the remaining lines of the letter, set it aside, and opened another. Halfway down, she read:

  He comes in the middle of the night and never stays long. He says that it wouldn’t be good for the group if the others knew we were involved, and maybe he’s right. Paige and Angie wouldn’t understand the attraction. He can be a pain in the butt sometimes. But they don’t know how good it is with him. In the middle of the night, he’s a clinger. He holds me like he’s afraid someone will come along and snatch me away, and even if he’s doing it in his sleep, I don’t care. It makes me feel good.

  Mara and Peter. So it was true. And Paige hadn’t known a thing.

  She skimmed that letter, then several more, moving quickly over passages that were blatantly physical. At the next to last letter in the bundle, she slowed.

  I shouldn’t be surprised, really. I never could sustain a relationship for any length of time. Something always goes wrong.

  But it wasn’t my fault this time. We were cleaning up after working in his darkroom when I found the pictures buried under a pile. At first I thought they were cut from a book, they were so striking, and then I recognized the model. She graduated from Mount Court two years ago. Peter claims she was of age at the time he took the pictures, and she might have told him that, but he was fooling himself. He could have checked the medical records and found out. She was barely seventeen, posing in the nude in ways that would put him behind bars for years.