by Mary McBride
“I need a chair,” she said, and Joe immediately began to toss things onto the floor, disclosing a tattered blue recliner. She sagged into its depths, closing her eyes to fight the onslaught of dizziness.
“Pretty bad, huh?” he said.
“I’ll be all right in a minute.”
“No, I meant the room.”
He sounded so forlorn that Sara forgot about her distress. She opened her eyes and gazed around. It was pretty bad. No, it was worse than that. It was the saddest room she had ever seen.
“Aw, Joe,” she said softly.
He gave her the oddest look. For a second it seemed he didn’t recognize her at all, but then it seemed he not only recognized her but knew her better than anyone else in the world. Knew her and loved her. Her breath stalled in her throat.
“Let me find that tux and we’ll get out of this dump,” he said, then disappeared into another room, leaving Sara to survey the devastation of his life.
There were boxes everywhere, some of them taped closed, others disgorging their contents onto the floor. Magazines that once might have been neatly stacked slid across the carpet like so many cards and mingled with tattered books. She counted three white cartons of take-out Chinese, plastic forks still poking from their tops. She picked those up and crammed them into an already full wastebasket. She righted one skewed lampshade, then sighed and gave up. What she needed, rather than a broom and a dustpan, was a shovel and a Dumpster.
On the far side of the unmade sofa bed, Sara spied the corner of a framed photo among the clutter on a bookshelf, so she made her way around the bed to inspect it more closely. It turned out to be a picture of a wonderful Victorian house, a venerable painted lady, with scrollwork and gingerbread and balusters in varying shades of yellow and ocher. A perfect house, she thought. One that was the epitome of home, sweet home if ever she had seen one.
And sitting there on the wraparound veranda were the proud and happy owners, Mr. and Mrs. Joe Decker. The woman was petite and blond and lovely, and the man by her side was smiling in a way that Sara had never seen him smile. There was nothing roguish about it. That smile was composed of pure love. For a moment Sara ached to see a similar one.
“I found it. Let’s get out of here.”
Sara eased the picture onto the shelf. “I wasn’t snooping,” she said, feeling as if she’d just been caught spying on him. “I just...”
“No problem. Hey, at least you know I haven’t always lived like this.” He gave the room one last, scathing glance. “Come on. We’re outta here.”
His tux, as it turned out, reeked of cedar rather than mothballs. When Joe unzipped the garment bag later that evening, several heart-shaped cedar chips fell out. He held them for a moment, turning the smooth, reddish wood over in the palm of his hand, trying to imagine Edie’s determined expression when she’d put the chips in the bag so long ago to foil the moths. Her image, though, refused to materialize in his brain.
It was easier somehow to picture Sara’s sweet, sympathetic face at his apartment when she’d seen the staggering disarray in which he existed. He’d expected her to be horrified at the sight, or if not that, then at least completely disenchanted. That she’d been so moved by his plight and his pitiful surroundings had touched his heart. And when she’d uttered that soft, sad, “Aw, Joe,” he thought he’d fallen just a little bit in love with her, if he hadn’t already been.
He hadn’t planned on that, he thought. If he’d planned on anything at all, it was merely spending time with her here in her cozy sanctuary, inevitably spending time—long nights and lazy mornings—in her pillowy bed. Love had never entered his mind. Not once. Until tonight.
“Very chic, Lieutenant.”
Her voice startled him when she came into the room directly across the hall from her bedroom. The cedar chips fell from his hand into the open garment bag. Joe lifted the tux on its thick plastic hanger.
“No moth holes,” he said, inspecting the sleeves and lapels, “but it’s probably way out of style.”
“Only if it has a Nehru jacket,” she said with a little laugh, “or a psychedelic cummerbund.” She came closer, sniffed, then crinkled her nose. “Maybe we should hang it outside overnight so it doesn’t smell like a redwood forest.”
“I’ll do it,” he said when she reached for the hanger.
“I can do it, for heaven’s sake. I’m perfectly safe out on my own back porch for one minute, Joe. Good grief.”
He didn’t want to tell her that she wasn’t. He didn‘t’ want to let her know that taking the tux outside gave him a good excuse to check around out back, to see if there were any footprints that shouldn’t be there or if any of the threads he’d tied earlier in the day had been disturbed.
“It’s late,” he said. “You should probably get some sleep.”
“I need to finish frosting the cake.”
“Why don’t we cheat and have a piece of it tonight with a glass of milk?” he suggested.
“We can’t do that.”
Sara looked so truly appalled that it made him laugh. “Why not?”
“Well, we just can’t, that’s why.” Her hands fluttered at the folded collar of her turtleneck. “It’s a birthday cake, and it’s not my birthday yet.”
Joe checked his watch. “Almost. Another ninety minutes.”
Her lush lips firmed, and she crossed her arms. “No. Absolutely not. And don’t you dare sneak a piece, either, Decker. I mean it.”
“What’s the big deal?”
“I don’t know, but it is a big deal. It upsets my sense of order, I guess.” She grinned. “And it’s against regulations.”
“Ah. Well, far be it from me to go against those.” He covered his heart with his hand, then reached out to skim a finger along her cheek. “I like your sense of order, you know. I could use some of that in my life right now.”
“I noticed,” she said softly.
She leaned into his touch like a cat, causing Joe’s heart to beat harder and his blood to take a decidedly southward turn. There was no order in what he was feeling, only an urgency he hadn’t experienced in years, and along with that a tenderness he’didn’t even know he was capable of.
“You’re distracting as hell, you know that, Campbell?”
Her big green eyes shone merrily when they lifted to his. “Is that good or bad, Lieutenant?”
“I’ll have to think about that. Can I get back to you?”
“Absolutely. I’ll be the one in the kitchen, licking frosting off my fingers.”
Sara was doing just that when Joe came into the kitchen along with a cold blast of air. When he eyed her cake greedily, she shoved him away with her hip.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” she said. “Here. This is all you get.” She held up her right ring finger, still gooey with white icing.
His fingers circled her wrist like a warm bracelet, then instead of merely licking the frosting, he took her finger in his mouth and gently sucked. Sara’s heart slammed against her ribs so hard she thought she was going to pass out. She reached out her left hand to steady herself and promptly gouged a wide swath in the side of her cake.
“Damn,” she whispered.
Joe released her finger. “What?”
“Now you’re distracting me,” she exclaimed, licking icing from her left hand while pointing with her right to the wounded cake. “I don’t have any icing left to fix it, either.”
He grinned. “Well, in that case, let’s just eat it.”
Sara slapped his hand. “Don’t you dare. What happened to that order you were craving, Decker?”
“I lost my head.”
“Obviously,” she said with a little snort as she picked up the cake and moved it out of harm’s way.
“Sara.” He was standing close behind her when he spoke her name with a huskiness that sent a little ripple of desire along her spine. “Sara,” he said again, moving closer, so close that she could feel the heat of him penetrating the back of her sweater, feel his breath
on her neck.
He put his hands on her shoulders, lodged his chin in the crook of her neck. “This is going to happen, you know. Us. Sooner or later.”
She knew, but all she could do was nod.
“But later’s better than sooner, under the circumstances.” He circled his arms around her. “I don’t want to let down my guard, and I would if we...”
“I know,” she answered with a soft sigh. “I keep forgetting this is work for you. I keep forgetting about him.”
“We can’t afford to forget.” He nuzzled her ear. “But don’t think for one second that you’re just a job to me. I want you, Sara. I haven’t felt like this about anybody in a long time.”
“Neither have I.” She could hardly speak for the sensations that were coursing from her ear throughout her body. “I never expected this to happen.”
He chuckled, his breath warm against her neck. “Well, I guess if the Ripper’s ever done anything good in his whole worthless life, it’s this.”
Sara stood there, letting Joe’s warmth surround her, absorbing it into her very soul, amazed that someone seemed to care so much and at the same time more than a little afraid, wondering how something so good could have been born of a murderer’s evil.
Maggie stopped by early the next morning on her way to the station. Her blond hair looked a bit disheveled and her Irish smile didn’t pack its usual pizzazz. Joe poured her a cup of coffee.
“Sorry this is all falling on your shoulders, Mag,” he said, leaning against the counter while Maggie took a seat at the island. “I’ve got to stay here, though.”
“You’re getting awfully comfortable here, aren’t you, Decker?” she asked, eyeing him over the rim of her cup. “A little too comfortable, maybe?”
“She’s a nice lady.” That was about all Joe was willing to disclose about his comfort level at the moment, and his partner knew him well enough to let the subject drop. “What’s going on down at the store?”
“No prints turned up in the new victim’s car,” Maggie said, “but you probably already suspected that. The ME’s doing the autopsy this morning, but he’s already ninety-nine percent sure that the Ripper’s our guy on this one.” She took another sip of her coffee. “Oh, yeah, and Cobble’s getting pretty suspicious about this sudden lingering illness of yours.”
“Let him. I haven’t taken a sick day in seven or eight years. He might be willing to risk a witness’s life, but I’m not.”
“I take it the nice lady hasn’t remembered anything yet?”
Joe shook his head. “She dreamed about him the other night, but blanked out on the face after she woke up.” When Maggie gave him the fish eye, he added, “Alone.”
“What do you want me to tell Cobble?” she asked.
“Tell him anything you want. Tell him I’m keeping his goddamn witness alive so he doesn’t have another murder on the books. Tell him to go—”
“Good morning,” Sara said, appearing in the doorway. “If I’m interrupting something, I can come back.”
Maggie stood up. “Good morning. Hey, it’s your kitchen. I was just stopping by on my way to work to see how things are going.”
“As well as can be expected, I guess.” Sara glanced at Joe, as if for confirmation, or perhaps to glean what, if anything, he had told his partner about how things were going.
“Happy birthday,” he said, trying to keep a note of intimacy out of his tone when all he wanted to do was wrap Sara in his arms and kiss her until she couldn’t breathe and make this the best birthday of her life.
She smiled, walked toward the coffeepot. “Thanks. I almost forgot.”
“Congratulations,” Maggie said. She drained the last of her coffee and put her cup down. “Well, I’ve gotta go check in.”
“Let me know when the autopsy report comes in, Mag.”
“Will do.”
Joe let Maggie out the back door but wasn’t quick enough to escape one last squinty-eyed perusal from her or a final warning, uttered sotto voce. “You be careful, partner.”
“Be careful about what?” Sara asked when he came back.
“Nothing.” He shrugged.
She raised a skeptical brow. “Joe? Be careful about what?”
“You.”
“Me!” Sara exclaimed.
“Maggie’s a detective, remember? I think she detected a rise in my blood pressure when you came in the room.”
“Was she right?”
He folded his fingers around his wrist and ticked off fifteen seconds on his watch, then multiplied by four, then grinned. “Yeah. A definite rise. This could be serious.”
“Well, I think I might have a cure for that,” she said.
“Does it involve lips, by any chance?”
“Most definitely.” With a smile worthy of the Mona Lisa, she went to the refrigerator. “I think we should have birthday cake for breakfast, Decker. What do you think?”
“Breakfast! Cake? Where’s your sense of order, Campbell?”
“Gone, apparently.”
She laughed as she ran her finger along the edge of the cake, then offered the sweet clump of frosting on her fingertip to Joe.
Sara’s sense of order was definitely out of whack for the better part of the day. She could hardly concentrate on business, so she turned off her computer shortly after noon and went downstairs to begin preparing her birthday dinner of veal piccata and penne with Swiss chard and pine nuts. While she was washing the big, dark green leaves of chard under the faucet, the front doorbell rang.
“Joe,” she called, knowing he didn’t want her to answer the door under any circumstances but not knowing if he’d heard the bell.
When it rang again, she shut off the faucet and dried her hands on a towel while she trotted to the door. To her surprise, Joe was already there.
“Why didn’t you open it?” she asked, suddenly a little fearful of what or who might be on the other side.
“It’s for you,” he said.
Sara narrowed her eyes. “What do you mean?”
“Go ahead. Open it.”
More curious than alarmed, Sara tossed him the damp towel, then opened the door to a young delivery boy holding an large rectangular box.
“Flowers for Miss Sara Campbell,” he said.
“Oh, gosh!” It probably wasn’t the most sophisticated greeting the boy had ever received, but it was the first thing that came into her head. It had been a long time since anyone had sent her flowers. “Oh, my goodness.”
The boy put the long white box in her outstretched arms. “There you go, ma’am. Enjoy.”
A hand emerged from behind her with a crisply folded bill.
“Thanks a lot,” Joe said to him.
After Sara angled the long box through the door, Joe took it from her, saying, “Let me see that for just a sec.”
“What are you going to do? Inspect it for a bomb?” she asked. He was squatting on the marble floor of the foyer, untying the box’s big red bow, taking off the lid, then riffling through the green tissue while muttering to himself.
“Joe? What in the world are you doing?”
“What I’m doing,” he muttered, “is making this right. Ouch. Dammit.”
He brought his thorn-stuck thumb to his mouth for a second, then plunged it in the box. Then, one by one, he pulled out five long-stemmed roses and tossed them aside.
“What are you doing?” Sara asked. Was he crazy? Did he really think those gorgeous roses were some insidious trick of the Ripper?
He put the lid on the box, retied the bow, then stood up. “Happy birthday, Sara.” He put the box in her arms again.
She looked at the box, then at the five discarded blooms, then at the pleased grin on Joe’s face. “Help me out here, Decker.”
“Thirty-one roses,” he said, “for your thirty-first birthday.”
“But...”
“The battle-ax on the phone at the florist’s refused to sell me the thirty-one roses I wanted. They only sold them by the dozen. Pe
riod. Policy. Regulations. So I said okay, fine, no problem, charge me for three dozen, but put thirty-one in the damn box. No. She couldn’t do that.”
Sara started laughing at the exasperation on his face and in his voice.
“Okay, I told her. Here’s what you do. Put three dozen roses in the box, then take out five. Well, then she got kind of huffy and wanted to know what she was supposed to do with those five. And I got even more huffy and told her just what she could do with them.” He sighed. “I was actually pretty surprised they arrived at all, to tell you the truth.”
She hugged the box. “This is the best birthday present I’ve ever gotten. Thank you for going to so much trouble.”
“You’re welcome.” He sucked on his wounded thumb again. “Just watch those thorns. I think my friend at the florist’s chose the sharpest ones she could find.”
Dinner was at eight in the huge, walnut-paneled dining room with its White House sized crystal chandelier and inlaid table only slightly smaller than Rhode Island. Even thirty-one roses in a tall crystal vase looked puny in comparison.
Sara had done her best to make it intimate by setting their places at a corner of the big table. And by some miracle that Joe figured he’d never begin to comprehend, she had come up with a dress that was the exact color and texture of the roses. The rich velvety crimson scooped low at the neckline, then caressed her breasts and hips before flowing to the floor. She wore a bit more makeup than usual, Joe noticed, making her eyes a deeper green, framed by thick, dark lashes, and she’d done something shiny and alluring with her hair. Every once in a while a diamond would sparkle at one of her ears.
She looked so beautiful, so ravishing that he could hardly take his eyes off her, and he ate his Swiss chard obediently, without a single snide comment or complaint, all the while hoping that the aftershave he’d used before he dressed was strong enough to mask the cedar stench of his tux.
