Troubleshooters 03 Over The Edge

by Suzanne Brockmann

  She didn’t move, didn’t answer. God, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d been this embarrassed, this . . .

  Disappointed.

  “Teri, come on.”

  Devastated. That was a better word for what she was feeling.

  “Please open the door.”

  Stupid. Yes, she definitely felt stupid, too.

  What was she thinking? The senior chief had been working overtime to set her up with Mike Muldoon. She should have realized right from the moment he’d asked to come into her room that this was another of his kindhearted lessons in confrontation. Instead, the moment he’d put his arms around her, she’d kissed him.

  No, kiss was too nice a word for it. She’d inhaled him. Attacked him.

  Thrown herself at him.

  Oh, God.

  The door opened with a click, and Stan came in. Figures he wouldn’t need a key.

  Teri didn’t look up, but she knew he was repocketing whatever tool he’d used to pick the lock. And then he sat down beside her, his back against the wall. The miracle worker to the rescue.

  She wanted to cry, but she wouldn’t. She couldn’t. Not with him here.

  “I shouldn’t have done that,” he said quietly. “And I can’t just walk away and assume you’re going to be all right now.”

  “I am all right,” she lied. No, she wasn’t. She wanted to kiss him again. She wanted to wrap her arms around him and . . .

  “I honestly didn’t intend to kiss you like that,” he told her.

  “I know.” Teri wiped her nose on her sleeve. “Believe me, I know.”

  He sighed and turned slightly to look at her, but Teri kept her own eyes focused on her boots. Don’t cry.

  “I was watching you today and thinking about what you said about being intimidated by men who were . . . I don’t know, older. Authority figures. And I thought if I came in here and acted like some kind of asshole, like Joel Hogan, you could practice standing up to me, and Christ, I hear myself say this and it sounds like the most asinine idea in the world. I mean, it was an asinine idea before I lost my freaking mind and kissed you.”

  He took a deep breath. “I don’t know why I did that. I have no real excuses—”

  “It’s all right,” she said. God, he thought he’d kissed her. He didn’t realize she was the one who’d jumped him.

  “I could give you some bullshit about stress and fatigue and the amount of adrenaline that goes through a man’s body during an op like this and what that does to the male anatomy. But that’s just crap. Or I could tell you that you’re the most attractive woman I’ve ever known but that’s not news to you either.” He sighed, rubbing his forehead. “And it doesn’t make it any better—as if your being beautiful means you deserve it when other people lose control. You know that’s not true and I know it, too. The best I can do, Teri, is apologize and assure you that it won’t ever happen again.”

  Teri rested her head against her knees and tried not to laugh. Or cry. She wasn’t sure what would come out if she made so much as a sound.

  “Your turn,” he said. “Talk to me. God damn, slap me across the face if you want to. Say something.”

  She took a deep breath. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “The hell it wasn’t!”

  I kissed you. But she couldn’t say it. She couldn’t bear the thought of sitting here while Stan gently explained that, yes, although he found her attractive, he wasn’t in the market for any kind of emotional attachment, especially not with a complete headcase like her.

  She still didn’t know if he had a girlfriend back in San Diego. She hadn’t managed to ask him, and now wasn’t the time to do it.

  “I forgive you,” she said instead. “I know what you were trying to do. Really. I understand. And it’s all right. It is.”

  She could feel him watching her for several long moments. “Has it occurred to you that you might be a little too understanding?”

  She lifted her head at that. “You want me to stay mad at you? Fine. I’m mad at you.”

  He laughed softly. “Yeah, I guess maybe I do want that. I’d feel a whole hell of a lot better if you called me a jerk.”

  “You’re a jerk,” she told him obediently, her voice muffled. He was a jerk—for not realizing she’d wanted him to kiss her, to keep on kissing her. For not being on the verge of falling in love with her, too.

  Stan was quiet then, for at least a minute. Maybe longer. But finally he cleared his throat. “At the risk of messing up our friendship even more than I’ve already messed it up today,” he said, “I’m going to ask you something I’ve been wondering abut for a while, about something that I think happened to you when you were a kid. Because you said something before that made me think—”

  “Don’t,” she said.

  He was silent for a moment. Then he asked, “You ever talk about it with anyone?”

  “No.”

  “Not ever?”

  “No.”

  “Not with anyone?”

  She lifted her head as anger coursed through her. She didn’t want to talk about this. Not now. Not ever. “No.”

  He scratched his ear. “That’s not good.”

  “You ever talk about any of your bad shit, Senior Chief?” She purposely used his rank even though it suddenly felt strange for her to call him that instead of Stan. When had that changed for her?

  But his eyes were gentle, and she couldn’t look at him for long.

  “I don’t have any bad shit, Teri.” His use of her name was intentional. Obviously he’d noted her attempt to bring them back to a place where they were mere colleagues instead of friends, and was rejecting it. “Not like yours.”

  “Then how come you’re not married?” she asked. “How come you’re alone?” There, she’d asked. Sort of. If he had a significant other, he’d tell her now.

  “I’m alone because I choose to be alone.”

  In other words, he’d rather be alone than be with her. That stung.

  So Teri snorted. “Yeah, right. You’re really happy living in that empty house. What, are you afraid if you get married, she’ll die like your mother did?” She couldn’t believe the harshness of the words that were coming out of her mouth.

  But to her surprise, Stan nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Fair enough. And yeah, maybe I am afraid of that. Or maybe I saw how hard it was for her every time my father left for another tour in ’Nam. I don’t go to war, but I go away, sometimes for months at a time. So it’s my choice to be alone. But you didn’t choose what happened to you.”

  Oh, God, she didn’t want to talk about that. But he kept coming back to it, relentlessly.

  “You didn’t choose your mother’s dying,” she countered.

  “That’s true,” he agreed. “But I was eighteen when that happened.” He was silent for a moment. “How old were you?”

  Teri shook her head. “No.”

  “No, you don’t remember?” he asked.

  She didn’t want to remember. Huddled in her bed, too scared to move . . .

  “Give it a guess,” he persisted. “You don’t need to be exact.”

  Hoping, praying that tonight he wouldn’t come in. Stay out of my room! She’d never said those words to him. She’d been too afraid.

  “Thirteen?” Stan asked.

  Teri shook her head. No.

  “Older or younger? And, please, I’m praying that you’re not going to say younger.”

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  “Oh, god damn it. Please tell me how old you were.”

  She had no intention of telling him. She meant to stand up and walk out of her own hotel room, just to get away from his questions, if she had to. But the word came out of her, almost on its own accord. “Eight.”

  He made the kind of sound a man might make if he were punched in the gut. His face twisted as if he were in terrible pain, and as she looked at him, she saw tears in his eyes.

  There were tears in his eyes, but she was the one who sudde
nly started to cry.

  She didn’t know where it came from, this sudden storm of emotion, but she couldn’t stop it. Maybe it was acknowledging it aloud for the first time. Maybe it was knowing that she was finally going to tell someone. Maybe it was because part of her desperately wanted to tell, while part of her desperately wanted to keep it buried, forever.

  Teri reached for Stan. Or maybe he reached for her. Same as earlier, when she’d kissed him, she wasn’t quite sure who moved first. But then it didn’t matter, because she was in his arms, and he was holding her tightly while she cried.

  “I’m so sorry,” he murmured, as if it were all somehow his fault.

  “It’s not as bad as you think,” she told him when the tears finally eased. Her face was pressed against his shoulder, against the warmth of his neck. He smelled like heat and dust and hard work and coffee. “He never touched me. Not really.”

  “Not really?” Stan asked. “What does that mean, not really?”

  “He came into my room at night,” she whispered. “And he . . .”

  She couldn’t say it. At the time, she hadn’t even known what he was doing with that furtive movement of his arm, as he stared at her with his robe hanging open. It hadn’t been until years later that she’d truly understood how sick that bastard had been. The handkerchief he always took from his pocket after he came into the room and closed the door behind him. The full-body shudder that signaled the fact that it was almost over, that he would soon take his ugly face and his whispers of how much he loved her and leave.

  Teri knew Stan was imagining that the bastard hadn’t stopped at the edge of her bed, and she knew with a revolting certainty that it had been leading to just that. If she hadn’t left for summer camp . . .

  Summer camp, the bane of her existence, had saved her from physical abuse. The emotional and psychological damage, however, had already been done.

  Teri wiped her eyes, embarrassed that he’d seen her cry. She never let anyone see her cry.

  But Stan was barely breathing, his arms still around her. He was as tense as she’d ever seen him, waiting for her to finish her sentence, to explain.

  Maybe if she started from the beginning . . .

  “He was one of my mother’s boyfriends,” she whispered, not sure just how much of this she’d really be able to tell him, how much she’d be able to say aloud. “A live-in. They all were, really. She didn’t like to be alone. This one was younger than the others, younger than my mother. And he would’ve been good-looking, except his smile was so . . . I don’t know . . . fake, I guess. And his eyes . . .”

  She’d been afraid of him from the start, from the moment she’d come down to dinner and found him sitting at the table. He was always watching her with those pale eyes, always sneaking up behind her, always touching her hair, her face, her bottom. Always asking for a kiss good night.

  “I came home from school one day, and he was in my mother’s bedroom, going through her purse.” She’d stopped in the doorway, frozen with shock, just as he was taking twenty dollars from her mother’s wallet. “He was stealing from her, and as I watched, he didn’t try to hide it. He smiled at me, and put the money in his pocket, and put her wallet back in her purse. And I knew I had him. I knew my mother would kick him out. She wouldn’t live with a thief no matter how handsome she thought he was.

  “But then he told me I couldn’t tell. He told me if I told anyone, anyone at all, he’d kill my mother.”

  “And you believed him,” Stan said. “Oh, Teri.”

  “I was eight,” she said. “He told me . . .”

  “What?”

  “That he’d make it look like an accident, and then he’d get custody of me. He said then it would be just him and me.”

  She’d gone from the euphoria of knowing that he would soon be out of her house for good to the hot fear that came with the thought of losing her mother. Her mother was far from perfect, but Teri loved her. And the threat of spending the rest of her life with him . . .

  “So you didn’t tell.” Stan held her even more tightly. “And, Christ, he was testing you, wasn’t he? He probably figured if you wouldn’t tell about that, then you wouldn’t tell if he . . .”

  She nodded. “A few days later, he came into my room for the first time.”

  “Jesus,” he said, his voice tight. “It happened more than once?”

  “It happened nearly every night for I don’t know how long. Months.”

  Stan made a strangled sound. “And your mother never thought that was strange? Him going into your room like that?”

  “My mother passed out around eight-thirty every night.”

  “God damn her!”

  She pulled back so that she could look at him. “It wasn’t her fault—”

  “God damn her!” He was crying. Senior Chief Wolchonok was crying. “She drinks so much that she can’t protect her own child from being abused, and it’s not her goddamn fault? Who’s fault was it, Teri? Yours?”

  “I never told anyone,” she whispered. He was crying. “I should have told.”

  “You were a baby!” He wiped his eyes with the heel of one hand, still holding her with the other. “Your mother should have protected you. This asshole—what was his name? Because I swear to God, I’m going to find him and I’m going to f— I’m going to kill him.”

  He was dead serious. This man who was so careful not to use the f-word in front of her had killed before, in the line of duty. He knew what it meant to leave a body lying lifeless. This was no idle threat.

  “Tell me his name,” he said again.

  “I don’t know it,” Teri told him. “Honestly, I don’t think I ever knew. My mother called him darling. I thought of him as him or he. I don’t think I wanted to give him a real name.”

  “He’s the one at fault,” Stan told her, pushing her hair back from her face. “He’s the one who was sick. Your mother should have protected you, and he . . . He shouldn’t have let himself get near you.”

  He was silent for a moment, and then he sighed. “Teri, you’ve got to have mercy on me and tell me what he did when he came into your room, because what I’m imagining is pretty hideous.”

  She tucked her head back into his shoulder. Maybe she could say it if she didn’t look at him. Maybe she could say it without actually saying it. “He exposed himself and he touched himself and he . . .”

  “Jerked off?” Stan said it for her, and she nodded. “In front of an eight-year-old. My God, how sick is that?”

  “I didn’t know what he was doing,” she told him. “I’d never even seen a naked man before, but I knew whatever it was that he was doing, him doing it there, in my room, was wrong. I tried closing my eyes, but he made me watch. He told me he’d kill my mother if I didn’t keep my eyes open and—”

  Her voice was shaking so hard, she had to stop and take a breath. But once she’d started, it seemed to tumble out of her, this awful thing she’d never told anyone before.

  “After dinner every night, when my mother was still awake, he started making me sit on his lap so he could read me a story. My mother thought it was cute, that he liked reading to me so much, but all the time he was . . . God, he was rubbing himself against me with his . . .” His thing. At the time, as an eight-year-old, she’d thought of it as a thing. A hideous thing.

  Stan, too, had to work hard to keep his voice level. “And this went on for months?”

  “I can’t remember exactly when it started. I remember he was around for the Easter party at Professor Bartley’s house, though. He hid jelly beans in his pants pockets and he got Connie and Mattie Bartley to reach in, looking for them, but I wouldn’t go near him.” She knew what he was really hiding in there. “It ended when I went away to summer camp in July. He and my mother broke up while I was away.” She laughed, but it came out very shaky. “I’d always hated camp, but that year I was packed and ready to go three weeks early.”

  “How long were you gone?” Stan asked.

  “Six gloriou
s weeks.”

  “Did you find out that this guy and your mom had split while you were there? I mean, did she call you and tell you so at least you knew you were finally safe?”

  Teri shook her head no. “I found out when I got home.” Darling, come say hello. Teresa’s back, her mother had called out as they’d walked into the house, and Teri had braced herself, nearly sick with fear, ready to come face-to-face with him again.

  “So you spent the whole six weeks thinking you were going to have to go home to this monster? Thinking he was waiting there for you.”