Just One Look

by Mary McBride

  “You’re stuck with me, I guess.”

  Or he was stuck with her, Sara thought.

  He came up behind her to peer at the monitor. “Those look just like the dishes my mother had when I was a kid,” he said.

  “Well, if she still has them, they’re probably worth a lot of money.”

  “No kidding?”

  She pointed to a pitcher the color of a green Tic-Tac on the left side of the screen. “This little beauty goes from anywhere from eight hundred to a thousand dollars, depending on its condition.”

  Joe whistled through his teeth. “Jesus. What’s it made of? Solid gold?”

  “Solid clay,” she said. “Just pottery. It’s called Fiesta.”

  “So this is what you do? Buy and sell this stuff.”

  She nodded. “I’d make your mother a nice offer for hers if she was interested.”

  “I’ll ask her when I see her next week. She and my dad are planning a big bash for their fortieth anniversary. In the meantime, though, could I interest you in my used set of paper plates? I’d even throw in a service for eight of plastic forks and spoons.”

  Sara looked over her shoulder. “Don’t you have anything from when you were married? Wedding gifts? Silver and china?”

  He shook his head. “Too many memories. I hauled it all to Goodwill.” He gave a little chuckle. “Some bum’s probably eating pork and beans off our Royal Copenhagen right this minute.”

  There was so much muted sadness in his smile and such pain in his eyes that it made Sara’s heart ache. “How long were you married?” she asked. “Or would you rather not talk about it?”

  “No. It’s okay. Ten years. Or almost. Edie died just a few days before our tenth anniversary.”

  “What happened?”

  “She was crossing Lymond Boulevard just as a drunk made a wide right turn against a red light.”

  Sara flinched. “Oh, God.”

  “She never knew what hit her,” he said with a kind of grim finality. “Listen, I don’t want to keep you from your work. I just came up to ask where I can take a shower since there’s no tub in that bathroom off the kitchen.”

  “Oh. I didn’t even think about that. I’m not used to having guests. Er, I mean...”

  “Baby-sitters,” he corrected her.

  “I’ve pretty much cleaned out all the bathrooms,” she said. “You might as well go ahead and use mine.” She pointed across the room where a door stood ajar. “Right there.”

  “Okay.” He started toward it.

  “There are fresh towels in the closet.”

  “Okay.”

  “Oh. And Decker?”

  He turned back. “Yeah?”

  “I know you’re a detective, but don’t snoop, okay?”

  What the hell did she think he’d snoop for, anyway? Joe wondered while he toweled off after his shower. His gaze strayed across the white marble top of the vanity. He identified the perfume that was driving him crazy. Even the bottle had a sensuous, curvy shape. Other than that, all he saw was the usual, not-sosensuous assortment of tissues, soap dish, comb and brush and vitamins.

  No toothpaste, though. He’d brought his toothbrush yesterday, but forgotten to toss the mangled tube of Crest into his gym bag, so he opened the top right drawer of the vanity where he assumed Sara’s would be. It was, along with cotton squares, Band-Aids, disposable razors and—hello!—three, no four, little foilwrapped, prelubed, extra thin ribbed, for God’s sake, condoms.

  Joe closed the drawer, then realized he’d left the toothpaste inside, so he opened it again and then stared at the small dark blue packages. It hadn’t occurred to him that there might be a man in her life. He’d simply assumed that there wasn’t. She hadn’t asked for anyone to be notified when she was at Saint Cat’s. She hadn’t made any quick, reassuring phone calls once she’d gotten home. At least he didn’t think so. And she certainly hadn’t mentioned anybody. A boyfriend. A lover. A fiancé.

  He squeezed out a half inch of toothpaste, stared at himself in the mirror while he brushed and felt like a world-class jerk. What did you think, Decker? That she was a thirty-year-old virgin? That she was Sleeping Beauty just snoozing until you came along? That there was a place for you in her cozy little cave of a life? Jerk!

  He spat the foam he’d worked up into the sink, then turned the water on full blast to wash it away. The guy was probably out of town and that’s why she hadn’t called him. Hell, maybe she had. Maybe she’d lain in that pillow-littered bed of hers for hours last night, whispering to him on the phone. Or sat up half the night composing long and lovelorn e-mail to him. Who knew? Who cared?

  All Joe knew, though, was that whoever this guy was, he hadn’t taken very good care of Sara, allowing her fears and anxieties to accumulate until they threatened to wall her in. That never would have happened, he thought, if she’d been his. Not in a million years.

  He stabbed his legs into a fresh pair of jeans, then gave his clean flannel shirt a couple whacks to get the wrinkles out. He threaded his belt, buckled it, glowered at that top right drawer one last time, then headed downstairs where he’d left his shoes and his gun in the bathroom off the kitchen.

  The marble was chilly beneath his bare feet, but Joe went down the staircase slowly, studying the paintings more closely than he had the night before. Damned if there wasn’t a Matisse, a circle of dancing leaf shapes on a vivid blue background, right in the middle of the stairs, and, at the bottom, a Picasso. Sara couldn’t be too strapped financially if she owned these, he decided. Of course, she couldn’t pay the mortgage with a Picasso or a Matisse, and maybe she couldn’t bear to part with them.

  He, on the other hand, had parted with nearly everything after Edie died, selling the house with most of its contents, then moving the few things he’d kept to a one-bedroom apartment not too far from the precinct house. He’d hardly spent any money these past three years, other than on the bare necessities, so his bank account was pretty flush as a result. There was probably even enough to put a hefty down payment on a Victorian fixer-upper similar to the one he and Edie had had.

  He stopped halfway down the long hallway. Why he was thinking about another house he hadn’t the vaguest idea. Crazy, he thought. Worse than crazy. Maybe some of Sara’s neuroses were rubbing off on him. Probably it was because he hadn’t spent any length of time with a woman other than Maggie in the last three years, and half the time he didn’t even notice that Mag was a woman. These domestic moments with Sara were just making him a little nostalgic, that was all, uncovering a side of him he’d buried pretty deep. Joe shook his head. A down payment on another big, paintsucking, time-taking, money-eating Victorian. That’ll be the day.

  He turned into the kitchen and stopped dead once more. The back door was wide open. “Sara,” he called, and when he got no answer he called louder. “Sara!”

  Every nerve in his body snapped to life. His gun was in the bathroom to the left. There wasn’t time to get it. There was only time to sprint across the kitchen and out the door.

  Sara had managed to drag the fifty-pound bag of birdseed from the back door, where Kelvin had left it, all the way across the patio and down the back lawn to the little white-frame structure that once was her playhouse but now served as a utility shack and potting shed.

  If she’d had any sense, she’d have waited until Lieutenant Decker finished his shower, then asked him to use those glorious muscles of his to do it for her, but she’d decided that wasn’t quite kosher, considering the taxpayers’ money that paid his salary. Instead, she’d put on her old thick parka and the ski mask she kept stuck in its pocket and proceeded to wrench nearly every muscle in her body pushing, pulling and pummeling the sack through the foot-deep snow. The birds better appreciate this, she thought.

  She stood up as much as she could in the dim, lowceilinged shack, thinking she should probably push the seed sack in farther, but then deciding the hell with it. Once she locked up, no squirrels would be bothering it unless they had a key. Sta
nding all scrunched over, she twisted her neck right, then left to relieve some of the stress on her spine, then winced and slowly began to back out of the diminutive door.

  Something slammed into her with such force that there wasn’t even enough time to scream before her body thudded sideways onto the snow-packed ground. Sara heard her breath leave her body with distinct oof as a terrible weight pressed her into the cold snow.

  She couldn’t breathe. Oh, God. She couldn’t even move. Everything went pitch black for a second, and then everything went a blinding white when her ski mask was viciously ripped from her head.

  A litany of curses cracked in the cold air above her. Sara forced her eyes to focus. If she’d failed to see the Ripper before, this time she intended to succeed, even if it meant that the fiend’s face was the last thing she would ever see. What she saw, though, wasn’t the Ripper at all, but Joe Decker’s livid face. Relief welled up. Then pure rage.

  The lieutenant was sitting on her, straddling her rib cage, glowering and peppering her with words like idiot and fool and what the hell was he supposed to think when he saw the drag marks through the snow.

  “Get. Off. Me.” Her arms were pinned so she couldn’t push him. “Now.”

  He eased one leg to the side, snarling while he . shifted his weight. Then, instead of getting up, he knelt beside her and grabbed two fistfuls of her parka to lug her upright. “Are you okay?”

  “Barely,” she snapped. Her breath had come back, accompanied by a severe case of the shakes.

  “What the hell were you doing out here?”

  “Bir-birdseed.”

  “Birdseed,” he echoed.

  “P-putting it in the shed.” She pointed a shaky hand toward the open door. “Would you clo-close the door and lock the padlock, please?”

  After raking her with a final glare, he got up and stalked to the shed where he cursed the bag of birdseed, pushing it in farther inside before he slammed the little door closed, then snapped the lock. It was only then that Sara noticed the lieutenant was barefoot and wearing only jeans and a flannel shirt in this bitter cold.

  “You’re going to freeze to death,” she said.

  “No kidding.” He stomped to her through the snow, then held out a hand to help her up. “Come on. Let’s get back inside before we both freeze to death.”

  Sara was shaking so badly, from the cold and from - the aftereffects of the attack, that she couldn’t move. Her teeth were chattering, and her bones felt like taffy. “I don’t think I can.”

  Without a word, he bent over and gathered her in his arms, then stood and started for the house. In her down-stuffed parka, Sara kept slipping in his grasp. “This is like carrying the Michelin Man,” he grumbled, not breaking his stride as he shifted her against his chest.

  “Well, it’s your fault,” Sara said, not all that irritably, as she clung to his neck, enjoying the sensuous scratch of his jawline against her cheek and the fragrance of her coconut milk shampoo in his damp hair. “You shouldn’t have come out like this, Decker. Barefoot and with your head all wet.”

  “I didn’t have much choice.”

  “What in the world were you thinking?”

  “Oh, not much.” He jounced her again. “The back door was wide open in twenty-degree weather. There were drag marks across the yard. Being the good detective that I am, I just naturally assumed you were doing something weird with a fifty-pound bag of birdseed.” The rough anger was gone from his voice, replaced by a touch of amusement.

  “I’m sorry I alarmed you. I never once thought....”

  “It’s all right.”

  She was quiet a moment. “I guess I should thank you for blindsiding me.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Did you really think I was the South Side Ripper?” she asked.

  “No,” he answered, crooking his neck to look at her, beginning to work up that razzle-dazzle thing his mouth did. “I knew it was you all along, Sara Campbell. I just wanted to take your breath away.”

  And he did just then. He really did.

  Jerk, Joe said to himself while he held a long fireplace match to a pile of kindling. Not only had he almost broken every bone in Sara’s body, but then, after he’d carried that trembling body to the house, he held her so long that she finally felt forced to clear her throat and suggest it was okay to put her down.

  She was upstairs, taking a warm bath to rid herself of the shakes. What she hadn’t noticed was that he was shaking, too, not half as much from the cold as from seeing that damn ski mask. In the same moment he’d lunged for the Ripper, he pictured Sara’s lovely body, lying in that little shed, bleeding from the deep slashes of that bastard’s blade. There wasn’t a doubt in his mind that, if it had been the guy, Joe would have killed him right there. No handcuffs. No Miranda. No arrest, except the lethal arrest of his worthless life.

  Never before had he lost his head on the job. His temper, sure. He lost that ten or twelve times a day. But he’d never lost his cool. He’d never crossed the line from professional force to private fury. Not until today. He knew that he would have when Edie was run down, but the drunk had been apprehended and booked while he was at the hospital, then stashed safely behind bars until his trial, so Joe had never had a chance to rip him apart the way he wanted to.

  The kindling caught, sending gold fingers of flame over the stack of logs, warming his face and reminding him of the heat he’d felt when he’d held Sara in his arms. He’d been as oblivious of the snow under his bare feet as a swami walking over red-hot coals. He’d meant what he said about wanting to take her breath away, but he was relieved that she had laughed at the ridiculously romantic remark. He was, he decided, officially crazier than Sara. But her craziness didn’t matter because she was a civilian. His craziness, on the other hand, could get her dead.

  He walked to the rolltop desk and punched in a call to Maggie. Just as he suspected, the pay phone had been wiped clean of prints. There was more bad news when she informed him that the department’s shrink was on vacation, and Cobble wouldn’t authorize a replacement, so there was no way they could use hypnosis to try to prod Sara’s memory. The worst news, though, was that Maggie had made plans for the evening after Joe had told her he was staying with Sara.

  “Call Underwood,” Maggie suggested. “The way he loves women and money, he’d volunteer to baby-sit in a hot minute.”

  That was the problem, Joe thought after he hung up and returned to the fire. As much as he knew he had to distance himself from Sara Campbell, he wasn’t anxious to let anybody else share her sanctuary.

  The fire was popping and burning bright by the time Sara came down from her bath half an hour later, looking calm again and none the worse for being tackled by a hundred and eighty pounds of hell-bent cop.

  “Feeling better?” Joe asked.

  “Much.”

  She was rubbing her damp hair with a towel. Her face was flushed from the warm bathwater. Her fragrance was already filling the room. The temperature seemed to go up several degrees. Then it plummeted when she informed him coolly, “I’m going back up to my computer to get some work done, Lieutenant. Just make yourself at home. There’s sandwich stuff in the kitchen if you get hungry.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  It was obvious that he’d offended her with that dopey remark about taking her breath away. Hell, he’d offended himself. But he didn’t know how to apologize without making it worse, so he didn’t say anything.

  “Will you be staying here tonight?” she asked.

  “It looks that way.”

  “Okay,” she said, sounding neither thrilled nor disgusted. Just cool. Remote. Her breath definitely not taken away, but wholly in her possession. “I’ll see you later, then.”

  Sara was tempted to bang her head against the monitor where the images of pottery had been little more than a multicolored blur for the past few hours. This was no way to run a business, she thought. It was no way to run a life, becoming all bumble-brained just beca
use a gorgeous man made a flippant remark. If she had it to do all over again, she would have laughed at him and said, “Yeah. I’ll bet you say that to all the girls, Decker.”

  He probably did, too. Nobody who looked that good suffered from lack of female companionship, Sara was sure. And even if he were on the prowl, a confirmed recluse would be the absolute last choice for a man as vital as he was. Even Carter, who wasn’t half as vital as the lieutenant, had walked out on her rather than remain cooped up here. For that matter, her parents hadn’t wanted to spend much time with her before her anxieties got the better of her.

  She sighed and closed her eyes. Maybe if she tried harder to remember the South Side Ripper’s ugly puss, the police could catch him and then she’d have her old life back. Joe Decker would be gone from her house and her mind. But, hard as she tried, that mind still refused to divulge a face. She could see the ski mask, but there was nothing beneath it. Just nothing. No eyes. No nose. No face at all.

  She shut down the computer and went downstairs to see about dinner, avoiding the den and the sight of the lieutenant in all his denim and flannel glory. The kitchen was dark at almost five o’clock, so she flipped the lights on and began to gather ingredients for pasta and a salad.

  Where was the Parmesan cheese that Kelvin was supposed to bring her? She couldn’t make her luscious tagliatelle verdi con aglio without Parmesan. After looking in every cold nook and cranny in the refrigerator, she slammed the door.

  “Aw, nuts.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  The lieutenant’s voice came from the doorway. Sara turned to see him rubbing his eyes, then combing his fingers through his rumpled hair. She guessed that he had fallen asleep in front of the fire and wished she had peeked in to see that.

  “Kelvin didn’t bring me the Parmesan I ordered,” she said, then muttered, “now what am I going to do?”

  “No problem. Where’s the nearest store?”