by David Archer
“I dunno,” I said. “Sounded like some kind of robot, so I figure he was using a voice changer. And it wasn’t exactly a threat; more like he was just saying I was creating problems. He quoted scripture at me, about how women are supposed to submit to their husbands and said I was ruining people’s lives by telling them not to put up with abusiveness.”
“She’s fibbing,” Nicole said. “She left off the part where the guy said God wanted him to show her the error of her ways, and how he hoped she learned before he had to put an end to her so-called ‘evil ways.’ I said she ought to tell the police, but she won’t.”
Dex just looked at me for a second or two, but then he turned to Nicole. “Cassie can take pretty good care of herself,” he said, “and she’s about as stubborn as a mule. If it turns into a problem, though, she isn’t stupid.”
I grinned at him. “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I said. “Makes me feel like a big girl.”
“Good, but it’s still something you ought to take seriously. I don’t like people threatening you, Cassie. I’m guessing you’ve already thought about it pretty hard, but was there anything in the way he talked that might have seemed familiar?”
“I have thought about it,” I said, “and I can’t think of anything. It’s probably just some guy whose wife left him after she came to see me, and he thought he could scare me a bit. I doubt I’ll hear anything else from him; bullies aren’t usually very persistent, except when they have a captive victim who’s afraid of them. I ain’t afraid of no bully.”
Dex burst out laughing. “You aren’t afraid of anything except getting too close to someone,” he said. “Speaking of which, I’ve got to go to the company Christmas party next week, and I want you to come with me.”
I stared at him. “Who is it at work you want to terrorize?”
Nicole’s mouth flew open. “Cassie!” she said scoldingly.
“Nobody,” Dex said. “But one of the girls in the office keeps hinting that she wants me to ask her out, and I figure she’ll stop if she sees me with a date. Since you’re the only girl I know who wouldn’t take it as the first step to the altar, I want to take you.”
I snorted. “That’s crude,” I said. “Why not take her out? You could be missing out on a chance at real happiness, Dex.”
He rolled his eyes at me. “Cass, she’s about twenty years old and lives with her parents. She sings in her church choir and teaches a Sunday School class for third grade girls. Can you really imagine me with someone that innocent and sweet?”
“You’re right,” I said, “you’d ruin the poor kid. Okay, fine, when is it?”
He grinned at me. “Next Friday night. They’re having a dinner and giving everyone some little gifts, which is why I have to let them know if you’re coming or not, then the bosses will make a short speech and hand out the annual bonus checks. That’s the only part I really want, but it might be mean to show up just for that, right?”
“Yeah, probably,” I agreed. I caught Nicole watching out of the corner of my eye. “Got a buddy who might want to take Nicole?”
Dex turned and looked her over appraisingly, making her blush and look down at her beer. “Nicole, how do you feel about greasemonkeys?” he asked, and she looked up at him with half a grin starting to show.
“My dad was a mechanic,” she said.
He nodded, then dug his phone out of the holster he kept on his belt and dialed a number. “Jimmy? It’s Dex. What are you doing right now? Well, I am sitting at Grizzly’s with my friend Cassie and a very pretty friend of hers named Nicole.” He grinned and looked at Nicole again. “About five-seven, one-twenty, with black hair and brown eyes you could fall into. If you’re not here in fifteen minutes, I’m calling Brian.” He cut the call and dropped the phone back into its holster.
“Jimmy Hanks,” he said. “About the same size as me, maybe thirty years old, and his biggest complaint in life is that he can’t find a woman with brains. He’s a pretty good guy, but you might have to put up with a rude joke now and then. I mean, he works with me, so what can you expect?”
“Okay, now I’m nervous,” Nicole said. “I was only kidding about wanting to meet someone.”
I laughed out loud. “Now who’s the psychologist? Think I don’t know desperate when I hear it? I don’t know Jimmy, but I trust Dex completely, so if he says Jimmy’s a decent guy, you can believe it. Give him a chance.”
Dex grinned when she said she would, then reached over and grabbed my hand. The band was playing one of the new fast dancing songs, and Grizzly’s had gotten used to seeing the two of us out on the dance floor now and then, so I let him pull me up out of my chair. “We’ll be back,” I called to Nicole as he led me out to the middle of the dancing crowd.
Several people moved away from us, but that always happened and I didn’t let it bother me. Most folks, I’ve learned, feel self-conscious around burn victims because they can’t think of anything to say to them. It’s not that they actually fear us, even when we look like me; it’s just that they don’t know how to act around us and feel like they might say or do something wrong.
I put my arms around Dex’s neck and he pulled me close. “I don’t normally like to play cupid,” he said, “but she just looked pretty lonely, and Jimmy really is a very intelligent guy. He doesn’t like air-heads and she says she doesn’t mind a mechanic, so they might like each other.” He spun us around and slid one leg up between mine in a classic “Dirty Dancing” move. “I was actually going to call you and see if you wanted to meet up here tonight.”
“Oh, really,” I said, trying to sound seductive while also implying that the thought of some Dex hadn’t previously occurred to me. “It has been a little while, hasn’t it?”
Dex chuckled. “It actually has,” he said, “and if you feel the same way, I’m certainly not going to object, but that wasn’t why I was gonna call you. Okay, okay, I’ll confess the thought might have crossed my mind that we could talk about that once we were here, but the reason I was going to call you was because I heard from Bobby Sykes this morning.”
It took me a second to remember who Bobby Sykes was, but then I smiled. Not long after I met Dex, right after I found his missing former girlfriend, he had tried to talk me into becoming a private investigator. To convince me, he had hooked me up with a few people who needed that kind of help, and I spent a couple of weeks looking into their individual situations.
Bobby Sykes had been one of them. He was an Army buddy of Dex’s, and his problem was that he couldn’t find an old high school girlfriend. She had still been a couple months shy of graduation when he had enlisted, and he lost track of her while he was in Afghanistan. He’d been back for a couple of years and had reconnected with Dex, but every time they talked it was always about how he wished he could find her. Dex had asked me to look into it, and I had done it just to see what would happen.
The girl, whose name was Giselle Roberson, proved to be hard to track down. Her family had moved away from their hometown of Joplin, Missouri, within days after she graduated high school and no one seemed to know where they had gone. At first I thought that was strange, until I found out that Giselle’s father had been fired from a local company over allegations that he had sexually harassed some of the women there. Obviously, they had moved away so that he could get a new start.
Mr. Roberson was an engineer, and had spent his days sitting at a computer designing parts for home appliances. His specialty was in designing the computerized circuitry that made the appliances more efficient, and I suspected that he would have gone to another company where he could do the same type of work. A little research told me that there were only about fifty home appliance manufacturers in the country, so I literally just sat down and started calling them all. I hit the jackpot on the tenth call I made, when I was transferred directly to him.
I gave him some bogus story about how I was a headhunter, trying to find someone with his skills, then took a flight to Denver. Three hours after I landed, I
found Giselle working in a coffee shop and sat down to talk with her. She had been both surprised and delighted that Bobby had hired someone to track her down, and called him while we were sitting there drinking coffee together. Bobby Sykes had packed up and moved to Denver only a month later.
“Really?” I asked with a smile. “How’s he doing?”
“Pretty good,” Dex said with a smile of his own. “He was calling to invite both of us to the wedding. He and Giselle are getting married in January.”
There’s something about happy endings that just make life worthwhile. I had decided not to go on and become a private eye, because I felt the work I was doing was too important at the Outreach, but it felt very good to know that I had done something to make two people happy.
THREE
Nicole was waiting for me when I got to the office the next morning, and she was in an awfully good mood. I looked at her for a moment and grinned.
“Looks to me like somebody had a good time last night,” I said.
“Oh, really?” Nicole asked. “Let’s just say that Jimmy is taking me out this weekend and leave it at that, shall we? And I notice you seem to be pretty chipper this morning, yourself.”
“Dex and I ended up at my place,” I said. “My cat likes him, so I ended up having to compete with her for his attention. I finally dragged him to the bedroom and shut the door so Critter couldn’t get in.”
We talked about work for a couple of minutes and then went to our individual offices. I checked the board in the reception area and saw that I didn’t have a client scheduled in until ten, so I shut my office door and gave Dex a call.
“Hey, there,” I said. “I just wanted to say thanks for last night. After dealing with all of the sad stories in this place for a week, it feels good just to be held.”
“Anytime,” Dex said. “I’d have to say I had a pretty good time, myself. By the way, have you seen Nicole this morning? Jimmy is positively glowing.”
I chuckled. “I had to listen to several minutes of what a great guy Jimmy is. Who knows, maybe something will actually work out for them, like it did for Bobby and Giselle.”
“Yeah.” He hesitated, and I could tell there was something on his mind.
“Spit it out,” I said. “What’s eating you?”
He still hesitated for another second, but then he opened up a bit. “I was just wondering,” he said, “but does it ever bother you when you hear about people finding their happy ending, while you’re still settling for a romp with me once in a while?”
I laughed. “Dex, what in the world brought that on? Do you think I’m trying to trap you into marriage or something? I’m not, I promise you.”
“No, it’s nothing like that,” he said. “I just—now and then, I wonder what would happen if we got a little more serious. I’ll be honest enough to tell you that if I ever did want to be with somebody on a permanent basis, you’d probably be at the top of a very short list.”
A lump of ice suddenly formed in the pit of my stomach. “Dex,” I said slowly, “you know how I feel about that. And you are far too great a guy to get saddled with something like me. If you’re starting to get too attached, maybe we should just back off from each other.”
“Whoa,” he said. “That’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m just saying that I don’t want you to start thinking about things like that and feel like I’m only taking advantage of your situation. I can guarantee you right now, I’m in no hurry to get permanently hitched to anybody. At the same time, you’re probably the only woman I know that I think would be worth it, if I was thinking of such a thing.”
He’s lying, said a voice in my head. He’s trying to back down, because he’s afraid you’ll bolt and run.
That voice in my head was my friend Abby, or at least it was the kind of thing I would expect her to say in a situation like this. Abby had died the night I was burned, because she was trying to help me escape from my fiancé. Both of us were set on fire, but she didn’t survive. I’ve been living with her in my head ever since, but I don’t believe in ghosts. She isn’t really there, it’s just a part of me that misses her so badly that I created a copy of her, and that copy offers me advice from time to time whether I need it or not.
“Okay,” I said, letting him believe I was accepting his explanation. “I just don’t want you to get hurt, Dex. I’m damaged goods, and that isn’t going to change. The last thing in the world you’d ever want to do is saddle yourself with a man-hater like me.”
He laughed, and I heard the old Dex in it. “Honey, if what you did last night was hating me, I think I’m ready to shoot for loathing. Talk to you later.” He was gone, just like that.
I put the phone down on my desk and leaned back in my chair. It wasn’t that I was actually afraid of having a long-term relationship, it was just that I couldn’t imagine being able to make one work. Since the fire, I’ve become independent and headstrong, a lot more than my parents claim I always was. I do things my way, and I don’t want to answer to anybody. Dex is a great guy, and I know my scars don’t bother him, but any kind of a permanent relationship would mean having to change parts of myself to suit whoever I was with. Considering that those parts were forged in the kind of heat a blacksmith would use, I don’t think it would be all that easy.
I spent the rest of the time before my appointment making sure all my paperwork was up-to-date. It’s amazing how quickly it can get behind, especially when the Outreach gets busy. Some weeks, I might counsel as many as thirty women, and there are a minimum of sixteen forms I have to fill out on each one.
Doing all that tends to occupy my attention, and it wasn’t until I finished that I looked up and realized it was almost 11 o’clock. My appointment hadn’t shown up.
Wanda Sparks had been coming to the Outreach for longer than I had worked there, but she had never accepted any actual help. She used to see Marsha, who is now the manager of the facility, but Marsha had been out sick one day and I had taken her appointments. Since then, Wanda always wanted to talk to me.
Her husband, Lester, is a typical abuser. He was what we typically classify as a Common Couple Abuser, which basically means that he has a tendency to grow angry and lash out at Wanda when he feels that he isn’t getting his way. His violence is not extremely dangerous, usually involving only slapping her face or pushing her, and even I didn’t believe she was truly in danger of any serious physical injury. Both Marsha and I had suggested that Lester might actually benefit from couples counseling, but Wanda didn’t want to bring it up to him. “It’ll only make him mad,” she said. “I get enough of that already.”
Personally, I felt Wanda needed to be going to a counselor of her own, but between the expense and what she saw as the shame, it just wasn’t going to happen. Unless we were busy, I was okay with letting her come and vent to me. She always seemed to feel better afterward, and I could at least keep an eye on the situation to see if it was escalating.
Wanda never missed an appointment. She had come in when she was sick with the flu—which resulted in me catching it, and really pissed me off—and not even the worst possible weather would stop her. I stepped out into the lobby to see if she might be waiting out there for me, but there was no sign of her.
Angie, the receptionist, looked up at me and grinned. It had taken her a couple of months to get used to my appearance, but she’d become quite friendly since then. “Cassie? Looking for somebody?”
“Wanda was supposed to be in today,” I said. “Have you seen her?”
Angie narrowed her eyes. “No, I haven’t. She hasn’t called in, either. Think she’s okay?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I think I’m going to call her and make sure.”
I went back to my office and looked up her number in our computer system, then picked up my desk phone and dialed. It rang twice, and then was answered by Wanda’s oldest daughter.
“Hi, Lizzie,” I said. “This is Cassie, down at St. Mary’s. Is your mom home?”
Lizzie was fourteen, and had occasionally accompanied her mother to my office. She had seen her father getting rough with her mother, but she had a tendency to act like Wanda was exaggerating things. For all I knew, she might have been.
“No,” Lizzie said. “We don’t know where she is. She left yesterday and said she was going to the store, and she never came back.”
“She what?” A chill was running down my spine. Since I had been with the Outreach, three women we had counseled had vanished, and two of them had been found dead, murdered by their abusers. The third had turned up alive, and it turned out she was hiding while she tried to find a way to change her name. “Lizzie, where is your dad?”
“He’s at work,” the girl said. “He went out and looked for Mom yesterday, but he couldn’t take any more time off. I don’t know what to do, I’m worried.”
“I’m on the way,” I said. “I’ll be there in about fifteen minutes or so.”
I grabbed my purse and coat and headed out, stopping long enough to tell Angie to reschedule the rest of my appointments for that day. I hurried out to my car and started it up, then pointed it toward Wanda’s address.
Wouldn’t you know it? They were tearing up the street not far from her place, trying to repair a broken water line. I had to go almost half a mile out of the way and deal with a couple of stoplights before I got there, five minutes later than I meant to.
Lizzie was standing at the door waiting for me, her little brother and sister playing on the living room floor behind her. She opened the door as I hurried up to it, and the two of us went to sit down in the kitchen.
“Tell me everything,” I said.
Lizzie shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know anything to tell you,” she said. “Mom told me to watch the little ones yesterday while she went to get groceries at Walmart, and she never came back. Daddy said her car was sitting in the parking lot, but there was no sign of her anywhere around.”
“Did he call the police?” I asked. “Did he at least do that much?”
