SULLIVAN'S MIRACLE

by Lindsey Longford

  Leaving her was the hardest thing he’d ever done, but his anger was so all-consuming he was afraid of what he might say if he didn’t. He couldn’t inflict his anger and fear on her while she was so ill, so he kept going. Shutting the warped door behind him, he leaned against it, looking up at the rain-darkened, empty sky. There were no answers there, either. Slamming his fists into his pockets, he walked to his car and sagged against the wet metal. Sliding to the ground, he rubbed his burning eyes with his knuckles.

  Off in the distance, an ambulance siren wailed as it approached him, heading to the far end of the island. Red lights boiled past him in the streaming rain. It was as if the whole world were crying for his Lizzie and he could only sit dry-eyed, scorched by a fury against the heavens too hot for tears.

  Inside, Lizzie heard the thump of his shoulders against the door and jerked. If he came back, she’d never find the courage to send him away again. She couldn’t fight Sullivan and her own longings.

  The thunder of her heart was loud, shaking her apart. She fumbled in the drawer for her pills, opening the bottle with her teeth. In her hurry, she dropped it. White pills rained to the sheets.

  As she leaned over, there was a sudden burst of pain and a rushing of pulse in her ears, until she didn’t know whether she was hearing the roar of the surf or the pounding of her heart, louder and louder until light flared around her and she was drowning, drowning in light and silence. But still the slow thud of her pulse mingled with the oncoming tide outside her window.

  And she was free of pain. Free as she hadn’t been for so long that she’d forgotten how wonderful it was to move lightly, swimmingly. Moving faster than she could ever remember doing, she raced toward that swelling light that promised peace.

  Suddenly, agonizingly, she remembered everything. Everything she’d wanted and never had. Sullivan. Children. Unbearable, that sense of loss, because all she’d had to do was reach out, take a leap of faith, and she hadn’t.

  Sullivan was right. She’d been a coward.

  So much she should have told him. She’d never told him she loved him. Anguish whipped through her as she remembered everything left unsaid. She had to warn him about … something.

  He was in danger.

  A yearning so strong that it was unendurable pierced her, slowing her headlong flight. Slowly, slowly, she turned.

  In all that radiant light a flash of brilliance, blue like the blaze of Sullivan’s eyes, streamed through her. Indescribable joy. “Ah,” she murmured over the slamming of her heart as she reached out, trying to tell him she’d been wrong, so wrong about everything.

  Too late, too late, the wind whispered. Too late.

  Struck by her out-flung hand, the teacup fell to the wooden floor, rolling end over end. It rattled against the floorboards for a long time until only the roar of the surf and the ticking of the clock filed the room.

  *

  Chapter 2

  « ^ »

  August

  Sullivan slid the scrap of paper with the phone number back and forth on his desk and watched the cop scope out the newsroom.

  Her deliberate perusal piqued Sullivan’s interest. Even now force of habit caused him to take mental notes. Summer-weight uniform. Cop hat at regulation angle. Macho Sam Browne belt holding the gun and swagger stick. Shoes polished to a blinding shine. Pausing, the cop looked around and spotted Hinky Tom gone ballistic at his terminal. Always pushing deadline, Hinky, at least, was working on a story. Sullivan’s story had fizzled. Or been scuttled. He still didn’t know, didn’t much care.

  The cop bent over and asked Hinky a question. The electronic hum of computers, the distant and constant ring of phones, the buzz of the light tubes behind the plastic—white noise covered voices and conversations, providing a measure of privacy. Hinky’s skinny fingers flipped vaguely toward Sullivan.

  Still leaning over Hinky’s compulsively neat desk, the cop glanced toward Sullivan, then she straightened. The snap of her head as she asked a question wobbled the rigidly placed hat. The cop thumped it into place again as Hinky nodded.

  The cop’s slow stroll through the aisle formed by desks and computer stations would have been impressive if it hadn’t been for the slight hip sway.

  Sliding down on his tailbone and propping his sneaker-clad feet on his desk, Sullivan waited. Mildly curious, mostly bored, he played the paper around his fingers as he watched her. Dropping from her narrow waist, the dark blue stripe lining the side of the blue pants drew his attention to her gently rounded hips. To her long legs, which looked good even in the stiff uniform. To the slight rise of her breasts under the white shirt. She’d have had a lot of trouble putting together some kind of uniform back in the old days. He looked away.

  Suddenly, two desks away from him, she stopped, and her hand flew to her throat. Her mouth opened and he caught a glimpse of white teeth, but she didn’t speak, just kept looking at him in bewilderment, as if she’d momentarily lost her bearings.

  Maybe it was the look of confusion in those huge brown eyes peering out from under the damned hat, he didn’t know, but something pulled Sullivan slowly out of his chair, light-headed from the blood draining from his brain.

  The air was thick around him and he was having trouble catching his breath as she stared at him, but all his senses were so heightened that he heard the rasp of her fingernails as they caught on the white cotton of her shirt and slid down the blue pant stripes, heard her inhale, heard the loud click as the clock hand moved. He clutched the edge of the desk, crumpling the piece of paper in his shaking hands. Connecting him to her, an invisible wire twanged and whirred, electric with possibility. He tried to free himself from the strangeness of the moment, but something stronger than steel chains kept him rooted where he stood.

  Stuffed under her hat, her wildly curling hair floated with a will of its own around her face. Thick and glossy as melted chocolate, unruly strands framed her square face with such rich color that it was all he could do not to touch the cloudiness crackling like dark lightning around her face.

  Despite the crisp uniform and her arrested stance, she gave the impression of movement, of being propelled by a life force so powerful that it brightened the air around her, and from the dark cave where he’d buried it, a raw and primitive need came prowling out, snarling in its fierceness.

  In spite of her long legs and curves, she was small and delicate, her flushed skin shining. A gleaming drop of perspiration slipped down her throat, to where the slope of her neck disappeared into her starched white shirt. Glittering over the steady beat of her heart, it hung between skin and collar, pulsing, pulsing, pulsing with her erratic breath.

  Sullivan watched the glitter of that shining drop and let all his rage slam through him, hating her because she’d awakened a dark, frightening urge in him, an urge so primal that he could have taken her right there, standing up, in the most elemental mating of his life. Hating her because she was alive and she wasn’t Lizzie.

  Didn’t look like Lizzie, didn’t remind him of Lizzie, wasn’t Lizzie, and he couldn’t bear it.

  He sank to his chair and buried his face in his fists.

  “Sully! You got a visitor!” Hinky’s voice whined.

  Taking a deep breath, Sullivan placed his hands palm down on the desk. A distant corner of his rational self noted the trembling of his fingers. He unfolded the crumpled paper that held the phone number and flattened it over and over while he wrestled with the bitterness that was his second self.

  He’d thought he was getting better. He’d made himself believe that he could get through the empty days without Lizzie, but he was crazier than he’d realized if he could overreact to a small, brown-eyed, brown-haired cop.

  He wanted to yell at Lizzie and tell her how ticked off he was with her for leaving him behind in a world that had no meaning without her.

  But his Lizzie wasn’t there and he couldn’t yell at her or touch her.

  Sullivan moored the paper under the facedown, empty picture
frame. Working late around Christmas, missing Lizzie so badly he was sick with grief, he’d torn her photograph out and ripped it into so many pieces that when he’d flung them away in the parking lot, they’d drifted down like some strange snow flurry, taunting him in the serene night.

  The cop was standing in front of him when he finally looked up. Wariness had replaced the lost look in her enormous eyes. Guarded, cautious, she was pure cop and all-business.

  “Mr. Barnett?” Her voice was orange-blossom honey flowing around him, slow and easy and sweet.

  “That’s me.” He smiled with no amusement. “What’d I do, sugar-buns? Park in the mayor’s spot?”

  Her hands hovered over the buttoned pocket holding her notepad while she studied him. She frowned and then took out the pad and clicked her pen. Watching him, she paused for a moment.

  Sullivan stared right back. Let his eyes drift to the white plastic name tag in a metal frame over her breast. Waited. His throat was dry and he wished he still smoked. Wished he had a double bourbon in front of him.

  She frowned again and cleared her throat. Once more honey and sunshine poured around him as she spoke. “Mr. Barnett, I have to ask you a few questions about the threats you’ve received in the last three weeks.”

  “I didn’t ask for—”

  She stopped him with an outstretched, square palm. He noticed she’d bitten her nails to the quick. “I know about the car bombing—” she looked at her notes “—nine months ago?”

  “That’s right. December. Good for you, sugar-buns.” His anger was making him as mean and nasty as a rattler kicked up from the brush. “You’ve done your homework. I’ll let Chief Jackson know what a hell of a job his boys…” He stopped, drawing out the pause. “Sorry, boys and girls—”

  “Women, Mr. Barnett. And men.” There was grit under the honey, but her face was expressionless. The lift of one silky brown eyebrow could mean anything—or nothing.

  “Yeah.” Sullivan pushed himself away from his desk. He wanted to erase that bland cop look from her face. “The car bombing’s old news, sugar. I’m busy, and you should be. So why don’t you just hustle off and make your parking-ticket quota?” He wanted her out of his sight, off his turf and away from him.

  Her peat-brown eyes glinted as she considered him. “I’m not a meter maid.”

  “Congratulations.” He picked up the wrinkled square of paper and the phone. “Look, Officer—” he peered at her badge “—Webster.” He looked again at the rectangle above her right breast and let his eyes linger before looking her right in the face. “Maggie.”

  Even under the heavy cotton, the tiny movement of her breast as she inhaled was visible. A foot farther away and he would have missed the infinitesimal trembling of the badge. She wasn’t as poised as she appeared. The meanness coiled in him full-time now, and he realized he liked making her uneasy. He stifled the niggling voice telling him he wouldn’t like himself when he thought about this scene later. “Look, Officer Maggie, I’m on deadline here,” he lied. “I have to make a phone call. I told the detective who was here in December everything I know. Go root out his notes. Talk to him, not me. I don’t have time.”

  “Mr. Barnett.” She clicked her pen a couple of times, annoyance in each careful click.

  Turning his back, Sullivan punched in the first three digits. So he was being rude. So what? He shut his eyes. It wasn’t the little cop’s fault he couldn’t stand looking at her. His problem, not hers, that looking at her ate at him like acid with all that he’d lost and would never have. Tough. But too bad for her that she’d landed in his personal hell. He punched in the last number and tucked the receiver between his ear and his hunched shoulder. He listened with absorbed attention to the recorded time and temperature. Ninety-seven degrees at four p.m., a hundred percent humidity. Typical August afternoon in Florida.

  A slim index finger severed the connection. The click of her pen punctuated the snap of the notepad onto his desk. Sullivan gaped, no longer interested in whether the mercury would hit 99 degrees or not.

  Her hat was skewed to one side and dark curls pushed it farther off center as he watched. Across her pale cheeks, a sprinkle of cinnamon freckles stood out. “Mr. Barnett. Sit down, shut up and stop acting like a jerk.”

  Sullivan sat. He shut up. Her finger just missed jabbing him in the chest.

  “Now—” she leaned forward and the soap-clean scent of her hair made him want to bury his face in its swirling darkness “—I have a job to do, and I can’t do it without asking you some questions. Think you can drop the tough-guy routine for a few minutes so we can both finish our jobs?” She narrowed her eyes as she leaned close to him. Anger sparked in the brown depths.

  He couldn’t believe he’d sat down. He never backed off from cops. Or other authority figures. “I don’t like bully-boy—” he smiled nastily “—or bully-girl cops.”

  “Fine. We’re even. I don’t like wise-ass journalists.”

  That faint perfume of sun-hot skin chilled by air-conditioning, and her own woman smell, vaguely familiar, drifted to Sullivan. Before he realized what he was doing, he was breathing deep of her bittersweet fragrance, taking it inside, where it circulated through his lungs, his blood, became an aching part of him. He’d read somewhere that every breath a person took had been shared with everyone else who’d ever lived. He was breathing the air that Officer Maggie exhaled, the air Lizzie had breathed, all shared in an intimacy too poignant to think about.

  Suddenly so weary he could barely keep his eyes open, he leaned back. “All right. Ask your questions. Get on with it.” He splayed his fingers against his eyes and tried to forget that Lizzie, too, had smelled of that same sweet soap-clean fragrance.

  Officer Maggie picked up the pad and pen. With his toe, Sullivan hitched a chair over for her to sit down. He positioned the chair as far from him as he could without looking ridiculous. He didn’t want to breathe in her fragrance, didn’t want to be close enough to touch that springy soft hair swirling around her face.

  He was walking too near the edge of control, and he was scared. Too little sleep, too much brooding, too much unending grief. He’d stayed away from liquor’s easy sleep during the long, waking nights. Chalk one up for him. He rolled his shoulders. When Maggie-the-Cop left, he was going to go to Lizzie’s beach house and swim until he was so tired that dreams and loneliness wouldn’t keep him awake. He rubbed his eyes. “What do you need to know that I didn’t tell the other cop?”

  She ran her finger under the edge of her hat, resettling it. Sullivan caught once more that elusive fragrance.

  “Detective Kelly’s been taken off your case. I’ve been assigned to it.”

  Her gaze was impersonal, but the edge to her voice made Sullivan ask, “Why you? Why now?” A shadow swam through the depths of her eyes, turning them deeper, darker. “You’re not even a detective.”

  “I’ve been promoted.” The shadow flicked away. “But I’m qualified to handle the case.” She didn’t move or look away from him, but she clicked her pen rapidly until she saw him glance at her fidgety fingers. She stopped midclick. The final pip jarred her. She winced.

  “All right.” Sullivan scratched his chin reflectively. All his instincts were stirring; something didn’t make sense to him. “Look, I didn’t file a complaint. I didn’t ask for an investigation. Detective Kelly called back twice after the bombing and indicated there hadn’t been any progress and probably wouldn’t be. Nothing that could be tied to anyone, at least. So, for all intents and purposes, the bombing investigation was closed.”

  Sullivan had never believed the policeman when he’d insisted that no traceable evidence had been found. He’d been there, and the explosion had thrown him flat on his face onto the gravel driveway. He’d seen metal chunks soaring sky-high in the night, fiery-red periods against the blackness. He’d smelled the burning hair on his arms, and he’d seen the snakeskin cowboy boots as someone stood near him and laughed. No, he didn’t believe the police had come up
empty-handed, and he thought it was real curious that the little cop had shown up now. As far as he knew, nothing had changed, but something must have. He reckoned he shouldn’t trust her any more than he could pitch a piano through a basketball hoop.

  “So tell me, Officer Maggie,” he drawled, watching every nuance of feeling in her expressive eyes, “how’d y’all find out about this new batch of letters? Who said anything about threats?”

  “Your editor did. Somebody values your skin even if you don’t.” Her smile was like quicksilver, flashing through her eyes, curving her lips and disappearing.

  He wished she didn’t look so vulnerable when she dropped her guard and smiled. Cops weren’t supposed to smile like that, like sunshine fire burnishing the gulf with radiance. He swung his feet up onto his desk and rolled his chair farther away from her. “Yeah, that figures. I reckon Walker hopes I’m going to win him and the paper a Pulitzer one of these years, but can’t if I’m six feet deep in a metal box. Walker’s a little sentimental that way.” Tapping his feet together, he continued, “Anyway, doing what I do, I get these threats all the time. My job’s to find out who’s got his—or her—” he corrected with a quick glance at Officer Maggie “—hand in the cookie jar. Can’t turn over a rock or a log and not stir up maggots. Nothing new, so why’re you being handed a case that’s virtually busywork?”

  He almost missed her wince, but he was so used to weighing everything people said, watching their every reaction so that he could sift out lies from truth, that he caught the imperceptible tightening of her eye muscles. Maggie Webster was making him very curious. Barely wet behind the ears, she had an inner steel. He was beginning to wonder why Jackson—or someone else in the good-ol’-boy network—had sicced this baby cop on him. Sullivan looked at the fine tracery of lines at the outer edges of her eyes. Maybe she wasn’t such a baby cop after all. He didn’t like what he was thinking one little bit.

  “This investigation isn’t busywork. I’ll find out as much as I can. Maybe more than you want me to know.” Her voice was official and smooth, the honey warmth just under the surface and not quite hidden by that iron determination. “You should never ignore death threats, Mr. Barnett. Particularly when someone’s already tried to blow you up into unidentifiable bits and pieces.” Notebook in hand, she shifted in the metal chair, and once more her fragrance floated in the artificial office chill. “So tell me, Mr. Barnett. What rock have you been poking under lately? Who’s trying to kill you?”