by Dale Mayer
“I don’t want there to be a reason,” she said, hating the petulance in her voice.
Nico wanted to ask her a lot of questions but not in a scenario where anybody could overhear. The best thing to do was just put in their time. And it seemed like forever when he finally got word that they would be disembarking. He looked down to see she was still asleep, her head against his shoulder and her arms curled up into her chest as she tried to shift sideways. She would be damn sore and stiff after this ordeal, but at least they were landing on American soil again. He nudged her gently and whispered in her ear, “Hey, wake up. We’re coming in for a landing.”
She opened her eyes and blinked at him and then widened her eyes as she stared around, reality slamming back into her. She nodded and said, “Good. These seats are horrible.”
He grinned at her. “But the price is right.”
She laughed. “I doubt the airline’ll refund the flight I missed though,” she said.
“No, I don’t imagine they will. But maybe because it was a kidnapping, they might.”
“We’ll see,” she said. “I’ll have to take it up with them when I get back home again.”
He helped her disembark, and, as they stood at the base, she asked, “Now what?”
“Now,” he said, “we’re leaving again.”
And he walked her across to a different pad where another plane was waiting. She groaned. “Another one?”
“Another one,” he said.
“Well, thank you for getting me home.”
“Getting you home without everybody in the world knowing.”
She winced at that. “I didn’t think about the media hype. I’m sure they all heard I was kidnapped, so they’d be all over the place every step of the way.”
“Goes along with being a public figure,” Keane said cheerfully.
“I don’t want to be a public figure,” she said. “Remember that part about staying home and writing books?”
“A lot of authors are public figures too,” Keane said. “Did you consider that?”
“I wasn’t planning on doing anything that would be quite so popular. I more or less needed to convey the words in my mind that need to be spoken in a much less volatile way.”
Keane laughed at that. “I suspect you’re the kind of person who causes chaos no matter where she goes.” He turned to look at Nico and said, “You better keep that in mind.”
She glared at him. “That’s not funny.”
He laughed and said, “Absolutely it is.”
Inside the next plane, she realized it was the same damn thing again. Nico buckled her down, and it took another forty minutes before they were airborne again. “So now, what do we do on this flight? I’m too achy to sleep more.”
He shrugged and said, “What do you want to talk about then?”
“Something that doesn’t involve this case.”
“So tell me about your childhood.”
“It was glorious, and then my parents died. And that’s the end.”
“And you don’t remember the details?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think I want to remember the details. I was first in foster care for all of grade four, I believe. Even the details get hazy though. Most of the time I hated so many of the foster homes.”
“Were your foster parents so bad?” Keane asked on the other side of her.
“No, I just think they were so busy with a lot of kids that they couldn’t deal with one who was too traumatized. I wasn’t an easy child during that time.”
They nodded. “Did they say why you and your brother were split up?”
“That’s easy,” she said. “He was much more difficult to handle. He was really angry, threw lots of fits, was hard to control. He was removed from the home and went to another place.”
“Well, hopefully at the other place, he got some help for the anger and the grief that had to have been choking him.”
“Maybe,” she said, “but I don’t know about that. I didn’t get a chance to find out because I never saw him again. And that ended up making me feel even angrier.”
“What about your marriage?” Nico asked.
She shut up on that topic.
Now that was an interesting reaction. He leaned over and studied her face. “What aren’t you telling me?”
She shrugged. “Just more guilt,” she snapped. “Do we really have to talk about that?”
He didn’t know what to say because guilt wasn’t what he expected.
“Why would you feel guilty?” he asked. “I gather you weren’t happily married?”
“I was very happily married,” she murmured, dropping her head back and closing her eyes again, rather than seeing their faces. “My husband got sick right away, probably had been sick before I met him and before we got married. His treatments were difficult, and his medications were even worse, and he changed. And, no, it wasn’t his fault. And, no, I didn’t love him any less. But living with him was not easy.”
“What medications?”
“He had brain cancer and a couple other sideline issues that just seemed to make life even more difficult. But he kept reacting to the medications. He would get angry. He gained fifty, sixty, seventy pounds, and his face would blow up and swell, and he’d have trouble going to the bathroom. It was really hard on him.”
“Sounds like it was hard on you too.”
“But nobody ever thinks about that,” she said. “You’re supposed to be there for your spouse, for the person you love. You nurse them through sickness and health, but nobody tells you that, from the time you’ve come home from your honeymoon, it’s possible to get so badly sick.” She swallowed, then whispered, “It was a brain tumor, and it took him five years to die. Five years where I watched the beautiful future I had hoped for and the man I loved go through endless pain and torment. At the same time, every time his medication was changed, he would go through this personality shift and …” She fell silent. “Listen to me. I’m bitching about how he acted, and yet he’s the one who died.”
“I think part of the problem,” Nico said quietly, “is you feel guilty because you felt the way that you felt.”
“Sure,” she said. “Wouldn’t you?”
“Well, I would hope that I’d understand that that’s where I needed to be and that I did the best I could and then move on.”
“Well, the trouble is, I haven’t moved on,” she snapped. “I still feel guilty for not being the perfect angelic wife that I was supposed to be.”
“Did you yell at him?” Nico asked. “Did you tell him off for being who he was? Did you get angry that he was sick? Did you let him see it?”
She stared at Nico in horror. “Of course not. I’d never do that. He was the one who was already going through all the trauma. I wouldn’t add to it.”
“Exactly,” he said. “So why do you feel guilty? You’re human. You were taken to the edge of your endurance. You had to watch somebody you love die in a slow and painful way. I hardly think that’s something you should feel guilty about.”
She frowned at him. “So how come it sounds completely normal when you say it, but it’s hard for me to clear my head from anything other than feeling bad because I could have done better?”
“Think back to the days that you looked after him. Some of the worst days of your life. How exhausted you were, getting up at nighttime, how exhausted you were during the day because it never ended. Do you really think you could have done more?”
“No,” she whispered, tears in the corners of her eyes. She brushed them away impatiently. “There were days where I went and cried in the shower. Sometimes two in one day just so I could bawl and not have him know. It was torture.”
“I think a lot of that is survivor’s guilt,” he said softly. “And I do understand that too.”
“And how is that?”
“Because I worked as a SEAL before this. I’ve been there where my buddies all died in missions, and I survived. You don’t want to be the only
person who walks away, where everybody looks at you and wonders why you lived and why not the guys with the families and the kids and parents they supported, instead of the single guy who appeared to have nothing and nobody waiting for him and not even a scratch on his body.”
She opened her eyes. “Wow,” she said. “I imagine that’s pretty tough.”
“It is tough,” Nico said. “But I had no explanation for why I survived, and the others didn’t either, except they would say it wasn’t my time. For me, it was like, why not my time? Why would I survive, and they didn’t?” he murmured. “But your only choice is to deal with the circumstances, and then you move on.”
“So maybe I haven’t moved on,” she whispered.
“You haven’t,” he said. “But this is a really good time to let it all go. And maybe you won’t have quite so much anger in your world, and you can find peace inside for when you write your books.”
He settled back and closed his eyes, leaving her to her thoughts. It was his own accident in his mind that he kept dealing with over and over again. He knew his own words needed to be taken to heart himself, but it was hard sometimes. Survivor’s guilt was something he wouldn’t wish on anybody.
Chapter 8
Landing the next time at the Coronado base in California was the end to a long, arduous journey. And Charlotte was never more grateful to get home than she was then. She stretched her arms up and around, loving the heat, loving the noise, loving the smog and everything about it.
“I do love California,” she said, crying out in joy.
“Good,” he said. “The day’s about to start, at least for us. For this town, it’s already after lunch. Let’s see if we can get you home.”
“Sounds good to me,” she said. “It might be afternoon, but I’m more than done.”
“That last trip wasn’t too bad, was it?”
“It was all rough,” she said. “My butt’s killing me. I don’t think I want to sit for a week.”
“Well, you have to sit in the vehicle,” Keane said. As they walked out onto the base, he signed off for a vehicle and hopped into an army jeep, joined by Nico and Charlotte, and then drove them off base.
“You guys get to take equipment just whenever?”
“Only in special cases,” Nico said with a laugh. They headed onto the main highway back into San Diego, and she gave him her address, but Nico had already memorized it. A beep came from his phone, and Nico read the text and nodded. “We’re clear.” When they pulled up in front of her small brownstone townhome shortly thereafter, Nico looked at it in surprise and said, “This is a wealthy area of town.”
“My books do fine,” she said as she hopped out and looked around. She wanted to scream with joy. She was home; she was safe, and it would be a beautiful day. She ran up the steps only to have Nico intercept her. She frowned as he stepped between her and her front door. “What?”
“We’ll go in and check it first,” he said.
She planted her hands on her hips, feeling her temper spike. “I’ve come a long way to be home. Why on earth would you even begin to think that my house needed to be searched?”
“Because our team found bugs in it before.”
“Bugs?” she asked cautiously.
“Bugs,” he said, “as in listening devices.”
She stared at him in shock, the color falling from her face. “What are you talking about? How and why would anybody plant bugs?” She tried to breathe properly. “And maybe a better question is,” she asked when she could, “why on earth would they care what I say?”
“That’s what we have to find out.” He took the keys from her fingers, quickly unlocked the door, and then, with a nod to Keane, stepped inside. She went to follow, but Keane put his arm across the doorway, barring her from entering. She turned and glared at him.
He gave her a lazy smile. “Not until we say so.”
She wanted to stamp her foot on the floor, like a child, but that was as much about exhaustion and frustration from what had gone on for the last few days. “I get that you guys are trying to protect me, but I’m home. This is my home.”
“So you planted those audio devices yourself?” he asked curiously. “Just what do you listen to then, if that’s the case?”
She glared at him. “You have to be mistaken.”
“No, I don’t think so,” he said.
Just then Nico came back and opened the door. “It’s clear.”
She rolled her eyes at him as she sailed past him. “Of course it’s clear. Remember that part about it being my home?”
“Remember that part about bugs?” Nico plunked down his bag on her kitchen table.
“I think you guys are the ones who messed up with the bugs,” she said. She didn’t have a very large place, but it was more than enough for her. She headed straight for the coffeepot.
“You won’t sleep tonight if you have more coffee.”
“Yes, I will,” she said. “Coffee right now is good.”
“Can you explain the bugs?”
“No, I can’t,” she said. “Of course I can’t. Nobody gives a crap about what I say or who I say it to or when.”
“Well, somebody does,” he said. He walked over to the kitchen counter and lifted the one device left behind for him to identify. He held it up for her. “This is one of three.”
He watched as the color drifted off her face again. “I don’t know what those things are,” she gasped. The reality of seeing it versus hearing about it was just too much. She sagged down to the kitchen chair and buried her face in her hands.
“I’m sorry,” Nico said, “but we really do need to get the bottom of this.”
“You keep saying that,” she said. “How’s it going though?” There was a snappiness to her tone that she didn’t mean. She pinched the bridge of her nose, then said, “I’m sorry. I have no reason to snap at you guys. You’ve been nothing but easy to get along with, and you’ve done everything to keep me safe. I’m being an ungrateful brat.”
“You’re tired. You’re fed up, and you’re frustrated,” Nico said. “The bottom line is, I need to know who would come through your house on a regular basis.”
“Nobody,” she said. “I live a fairly loner lifestyle.”
Instead of taking that for an answer, Keane dropped a pad of paper in front of her along with a pen. “Write them down,” Keane said. “And hopefully you’re being honest, and the list is damn short because, like you, we’re also tired.”
She winced at that reminder because the two men had been on just as difficult of a return journey as she had, somewhere around thirty hours of it to stay under the radar. The good thing about all that was she regained some of her Saturday, what with the time zone change from Sydney back to San Diego. She nodded and wrote down the few friends she had, and, at the very end, she put down Maggie’s name. “She works here, of course, so she’s another one.”
There were only four names.
“No boyfriends?” Keane asked.
“No,” she said, “not currently.”
“Any past disgruntled boyfriends?” Keane asked.
She shook her head. “No, I still haven’t moved on from my husband,” she said.
“What about his family?”
She shrugged. “I don’t have anything to do with them.”
“And nobody else that’s upset with you outside of the industry that you’re always protesting against?”
She shook her head. “No, that causes me enough stress and strife. I don’t need more.”
“Right.” Nico picked up the pad of paper and marked a line through the middle of them and said to Keane, “Half for you and half for me.” And the two men set up their laptops and got to work.
“It won’t help you,” Charlotte said in exasperation. “Absolutely none of those people would have put bugs in my house.”
“Maybe not,” Nico said, “but somebody close to them might have.”
That stopped her in her tracks.
He glanced over at her and smiled. “You going to crash?” But he could see the restless energy eating away at her. She was tired, restless, and needed something to do that she could jump into. “Why don’t you make some coffee,” he suggested. “For us. I still don’t think you need any caffeine.”
Her quick frown in his direction made his grin widen.
“No, you don’t have to feed us and give us coffee,” he said, “but we do work better that way.’
She raised both hands in frustration, stormed over to the counter, and readied the coffeepot to brew, as he returned to his work.
Nico was much more concerned about this assistant of hers, this Maggie. The fact that Charlotte’s previous assistant had died in a hit-and-run was suspicious as hell. It also had opened up a vacancy. This Maggie person was conveniently on hand to fill it. Yet it could be just luck and timing, if she’d truly needed a job.
“What’s her address?” he called out. Charlotte didn’t even pretend to not know who he was talking about. She spouted it off, and he realized it was just a few blocks away. “So does she walk to work?”
“Usually, yes,” she said. “Lots of times she works from home and then comes here for meetings—or sometimes she comes here, and we do a bunch of work for the afternoon. Then she picks up stuff that she can take home again and returns there.” Charlotte walked to the table and pulled out a chair and flopped down beside him. “It’s an arrangement that works out really well for both of us.”
“I can’t imagine having an assistant in my house,” Keane said.
“I wasn’t a big fan of it at first,” she said. “It works much better this way, when she’s here for part of the time and then back at her place for the rest of the time. I still want privacy and peace just to be alone.”
“There is something very odd about having another person in your space, when it’s not a spouse or family member,” Nico said.
“Not really. Plus, it’s work,” she said with a laugh. “And I’m trying to do my own writing, and it’s hard to do that if she’s here, interrupting me every five minutes.”
