Licensed for Trouble

by Susan May Warren

  “Could be, although I don’t know how he found me. Unless he was watching Windchill.”

  “This just gets worse,” Max said, shaking his head. “Why did I ever decide to track down my past?”

  Boone shifted in the sand, watching the chaos on the bridge.

  “Because . . . it matters.” Jeremy glanced away, the edges of his mouth tight as if his words had leaked out beyond his control. “Because knowing who you are gives every choice you make relevance.” He stared at PJ, tenderness in his eyes. “Because if you know what you’ve been through—the things you’ve done, both good and bad—the choices you make today have merit. Resonance.” He touched her face, ran a thumb down her cheek. “Not knowing your past steals meaning from your future.”

  Then he nodded as if in answer to some lingering question. “A fresh start has no meaning unless you understand what you left behind.”

  The paramedics hit the beach, one carrying his medical kit, the other with a blanket.

  “I’m fine,” PJ said, raising a hand toward them.

  “Humor us,” Boone said, towering over her, his arms akimbo.

  An hour later, she sat wrapped in a blanket in the back of the ambulance. Other than a bruise on her sternum where the seat belt garroted her and the raw burn of her lungs from the icy water, she’d suffered no lasting effects. They’d given her a tetanus shot and some antibiotics all the same. She’d refused an overnight stay at the hospital.

  “Let’s go home.” Jeremy stood just outside the ring of light slanting from the open doors of the ambulance. He’d turned eerily quiet as the paramedics took her vitals, checked her for bleeding.

  Boone harassed the crime scene team, having blocked off the bridge, their spotlights glaring on the jagged metal.

  The wind cut through her sodden clothes as she returned the blanket and slid out of the ambulance.

  Boone crossed the grassy park toward them. “Listen, I think she needs to sleep at her sister’s tonight. I’ve already called. Connie is waiting for her.”

  PJ opened her mouth to protest but let it die before it could gather speed. Yes, a night at Connie’s might help her sleep.

  Jeremy turned to him. “I hate to ask, but it’s too cold to ride home on the bike.”

  “I know. I’ll drive it to Connie’s place. I have a guy waiting to take you to Connie’s.” Boone gestured to a cop leaning against his rig in the lot.

  “You’ll stop by the house?” Jeremy asked.

  Boone nodded.

  PJ sensed more in that question than she could currently sort through.

  “Where’d Max run off to?” PJ asked as Jeremy led her to the parking lot.

  “He’s cleaning up the house and moving on,” Jeremy said quietly.

  “But I want to ask him more about Ratchet, see if we get any electrical jolts.”

  “Stop!” Jeremy held up his hand. It shook, and the emotion in his eyes rattled clear through her. “Just stop, already.” He took off his jacket and curled it around her, holding on to the lapels. “I should have driven the bus. . . .”

  “Jeremy.” She caught his wrists. “Jeremy, I’m okay.”

  “You might not have been!” He closed his eyes, notching his voice down. “Someone tried to kill you and nearly succeeded.”

  “But they didn’t.”

  But her words were lost on him and he turned away.

  She put a hand to his back, felt his muscle pulse. “I’m sorry we fought,” she mumbled.

  “What if I had lost you?” He turned, his eyes red as he stared at her as if not seeing her.

  She had no words.

  “The worst part about all this is that I never thought I’d feel this way about someone again. It’s like I’m watching it happen all over, with the nightmare getting closer and closer, and I can’t do anything to stop it.”

  Then, before she knew what to say, he stepped close, slid his hand around her waist, and kissed her. He tasted of the lake, and it seemed her entire body remembered his lips on hers, breathing life into her as they’d risen to the surface. Every part of her tingled, and somehow, she tasted salt.

  Could it be her own tears? Because even as he held her, she knew the truth. Trouble. It didn’t matter who did the name-calling—Boone or Jeremy or even herself. Or even the voice she’d heard as she’d flown through the sky. She couldn’t hide from the truth. Not when it was written in every dripping pore of her body. She couldn’t escape it. And just like Jeremy couldn’t bring her into his past, she couldn’t keep him away from hers.

  She put her hands on his chest and pushed. He broke away and buried his face in the crook of her neck. His lips moved as if he were breathing her in. His soggy shirt made her shiver, but he held her so tight, she couldn’t quite let him go.

  Tomorrow. She swallowed and her throat burned. She’d let him go tomorrow. Because together, they were headed for broken hearts and disaster.

  Finally he pressed his forehead to hers. “Did you say you went skydiving today?”

  She wiped her tears with a quick swipe of her hand, fighting for a smile. “I think I’ll wait to answer that until I have a pizza and dry clothes.”

  * * *

  She’d seen the Pontiac before. PJ stared at the ceiling of her old bedroom in Connie’s house, tracing the moonbeams slatted on the white chenille bedspread, finally able to feel her toes, and trying to erase the feel of Jeremy’s hands on her, holding her. She kept replaying the accident—she refused to call it attempted murder, thank you—through her mind, second by terrifying millisecond.

  Yes, she’d seen that car before. But where? The image burned into her brain, knotted her into the covers.

  Okay, she should surrender to the inevitable, get out of bed, pad downstairs to where Jeremy slept in the guest bedroom/office—thanks to Connie’s generosity and keen lawyerly recognition of a man on the edge—and wake him. Together they could log on to her computer, maybe access the DMV database . . .

  Except that would only drag him deeper into her world.

  Her tangled, suffocating, near-death-experience world. No, she’d stirred the hornet’s nest. She’d have to extricate him before anyone else got hurt.

  She flattened the covers on either side of herself and stared at the ceiling. The front headlights of the GT bored into her like eyes, the malevolent grin of the grille—

  That was about enough of that. She skimmed the covers off and flicked on the side lamp. Light puddled over her. They’d stopped by the mushroom house on their way to Connie’s—not pausing to survey the wreckage of her walls—and picked up her belongings, as well as Joy’s diary. It lay on top of her duffel, and she swiped it up, nesting it into the covers as she flipped it open.

  Clearly, she and Prudence Joy had more in common than she wanted to admit in the wee, grainy hours.

  September 1960

  A new life. That’s what Hugh promised me, and I believed him. I believed his smile and the way he held me, the way he told me that he would never leave me. But now what? I suppose we’ll be okay; he says it and I hold on to it. But while the rest of my friends were boating and making their college plans, I stood out in the hot North Carolina sun, my body expanding, not even able to wear the thin ring he gave me, and watched Hugh in his brilliant new uniform. He is brave and strong, and the baby moves inside me, and all I can think is . . . yes, a new life. God, I pray it’s true.

  April 1961

  Sunny is beautiful. She has her father’s green eyes, and they light up when he comes into the room after his long days, and sometimes nights, of training. The Army is more difficult than he anticipated. Hugh is changing. I expected his joy, and instead, he treats me with a sort of fear. He asked me to write home to my mother, to tell her where we are, but I can’t. He doesn’t know that my mother already found me. Sent me a telegram, telling me that unless I return home, there is no forgiveness waiting in Kellogg. I threw it away. I have Sunny. And Hugh.

  March 1962

  I think I will die if I don
’t hear from Hugh. Nine months is too long to wait for a letter, a note, a call. And worse, they won’t tell me where they sent him. I know he’s not safe, and at night, the fear chills me. Sunny had her first birthday, her first tooth, calls me Mama. He is missing his child’s life, and the ache burns in me with every silent day. My mother wrote again. I have her letter in my bureau next to the bed.

  February 1963

  It’s been three weeks. Three weeks since the knock on the door. MIA. I know he isn’t dead—I would feel it.

  Come home to us, Hugh.

  A thump on the stairs. PJ stilled, her pulse ratcheting high.

  Another thump and squeak.

  PJ put her thumb in the diary, then pushed the covers back and stepped lightly on the floor.

  She eased the door open. The moon turned the hall milky from the tiny window over the stairs. Tiptoeing out, she closed the door behind her and crept down the stairs.

  Connie stood bathed in the cold light of the open refrigerator. PJ watched her sister take out the orange juice, pour herself a glass, and then sit down at the table with a magazine.

  “What are you reading?” PJ whispered.

  Connie jerked, spilling her orange juice down the front of her. “What are you doing? Are you stalking me? Good grief.” She swiped up a couple napkins and dabbed the front of her pink silk bathrobe. “Now I’m all sticky.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t want to wake Jeremy.” She pointed to the closed door of the office.

  “If he’s even sleeping. From the look on his face when you went upstairs to bed, I half expected him to be sitting on the bottom step or pacing the hallway.”

  “Maybe he’s taking a break.”

  “Poor guy. It’s not easy to be in love with PJ Sugar.” Connie winked at her.

  PJ slid into a chair at the table. “He’s not in love with me. I’m more like his worst nightmare.”

  “I disagree. He never took his eyes off you all night.” She sighed. “Boone never looked at you like that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, Boone always had a half smirk on his face—well, when he didn’t look like he wanted to strangle you. There was a sort of amusement there. But Jeremy—he looks completely undone when he sees you. As if you scare him to death, but with a sort of confusing admiration. Like the way he stood at the bottom of the stairs and just watched the empty space after you left as if he might be waiting for you to materialize.”

  “I do scare him to death. Especially after tonight. ”

  “You scare all of us. Hence, why I’m up in the middle of the night—”

  “Reading a baby magazine?” PJ flipped the pages to the front cover. “Baby Today?”

  “Hey, it’s the only time I get to read the contraband.”

  “Contraband?”

  “It is according to Vera and her silly superstitions. I’m not allowed to buy myself anything for the baby until after it’s born. The entire layette—we’ll have to stop off at Babies and Baubles on the way home from the hospital.”

  “Why?”

  “She says we don’t want to tempt fate.”

  “That’s completely morbid.” PJ reached over and took a sip of Connie’s juice.

  “Well, not if you think about their sketchy medical care over there. Anything they can do to give their baby a fighting chance for survival. I can’t cut my hair, sit in a draft, eat spicy foods . . .” She lowered her face into the crease of her magazine. “I’m losing my mind.”

  PJ rubbed her sister’s neck. “It’ll be worth it. At least you don’t live with our mother.”

  Connie turned her cheek on the magazine. “Who called, by the way, and said she’d be back tomorrow night. She said she has a surprise for us.”

  “Shirts that say, ‘My mother went on an awesome cruise without telling me and all I got was this lousy T-shirt’?”

  Connie grinned. Sat up, began paging through the magazine. “So what are you reading?” She gestured to the book in PJ’s hand.

  “The journal of Prudence Joy Barton.”

  “Oh, let me at it. That sounds much better than Baby Today.”

  PJ handed it over. “It is. Joy ran away with Hugh because she was pregnant. He joined the Army—I think he must have been in special forces or something, because they didn’t tell her where he went, although I have a feeling it might have been Vietnam.”

  Connie paged through the journal. “I read an article about how there were Green Berets training the South Vietnamese long before Kennedy sent troops in. There were MIAs and POWs before we even admitted to being there. ”

  “I think maybe Hugh turned out to be one of them. He went MIA in 1963.”

  “So what happened? Did Hugh die?”

  “Probably. I haven’t gotten that far.”

  “That’s so sad.”

  “Yeah. That could be why she came home and married Clayton Barton. She needed a father for her child.”

  Connie read an entry. “Do you think she still carried a torch for Hugh? Maybe Clayton got jealous.”

  “Of a dead man?”

  “Oh, believe me, dead men have more power than you think. Just ask Sergei. He could look at Davy and see Burke if he chose to. But he doesn’t—he sees a little boy that belongs to me. He sees the boy that’s becoming his son.”

  “So your previous marriage never bothered him?”

  “There were questions. But we decided we could have something much better. Knowing the betrayal I’d had before made him want to heal that for me. He wanted me to see that this time, it could be different. He proves that to me every day.” She ran a hand over her tiny belly. “But some people just can’t figure that out.”

  PJ nodded. “Maybe Clayton couldn’t move on.”

  “Or Joy couldn’t. Not everyone is able to recover from their first love.”

  PJ sank her chin into her hands on the table. “Jeremy thinks I can’t move on either. He believes Boone and I are over but I can’t let go of the past. He thinks I’m holding on to the name Trouble because it makes me feel safe. That if I’m trouble, then I can’t expect anything more from myself.”

  “Hmm, sounds like something someone wise might say to you.”

  “I remember, Connie; you get full credit.”

  “Well, your Jeremy is a good PI to figure it out too.”

  “It’s a good thing one of us is . . . because I think all my supersleuthing just might get Max killed. If someone from his past tried to kill me tonight, then he is in danger. And I caused it. What Jeremy doesn’t get is, any way you look at it, I am trouble. It’s not a brand; it’s a fact. And one of these days, someone is going to get hurt.”

  Connie took a long breath. “You’re not trouble. But I do live in fear. I wish you’d drop this.”

  “I have to finish it. Find out if someone is after Max, and stop them.”

  “I think you should leave that to Boone.”

  “No—I’ve dragged him and Jeremy and even you and your family too far into my world. I gotta fix this.”

  “You’re starting to scare me. I’m waiting for an ‘and then what?’”

  PJ sighed. Closed her eyes. And then maybe it was time to leave town and take trouble with her. Away from the people she loved. She lifted a shoulder. “It would be better for Jeremy if I wasn’t here. All I do is remind him of his greatest fears—seeing someone he loves get hurt, even killed.”

  Connie wrapped her hand over PJ’s arm. “What does Jeremy have to say about that?”

  PJ drummed her fingers on the counter. Behind her, she heard a creak, the groan of the wood floor under shifting weight.

  Jeremy stood in the foyer, wearing a pair of Sergei’s running pants and a gray T-shirt. “I just wanted to make sure you were okay. . . .”

  Perfect. “Jeremy—”

  He held up a hand. “Listen, I didn’t mean to eavesdrop. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  He moved into the office, closing the door softly behind him.

  Chapter Seventeen


  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  PJ had been asking herself that for the better part of ten years. Usually at the beginning of every crazy job she’d landed, from the time she spent the summer scrubbing pots in a Russian-language immersion camp, to her gig as a large-animal feeder at the San Diego Zoo, to her longest job—a two-year stint learning how to jump out of flaming buildings. She’d been a bicycle delivery girl—well, a delivery girl of all sorts, really: pizza, newspapers, flowers—and a waitress, and of course, she’d managed a gig at a gym, handing out keys.

  Which came in handy when faking a lost health club pass.

  “What does it look like I’m doing?” PJ yanked her wrist from Jeremy’s grip as he bent down by the pool, after grabbing her between laps. “Swimming. I should ask the same thing about you. What have you been up to? I woke up at Connie’s and you’d split. Not even a note.”

  “I had things to do, Princess.” He gave her a splash. Smiled as if he hadn’t been standing in the hallway last night, overhearing her comment about their doomed future. And how she planned on doing her own split, right out of his life.

  “Since when do you swim laps?” He took off his sunglasses, and already a line of sweat trickled down his face from the heat of the indoor pool. Leaves tapped against the bank of windows behind him, trying to get their attention.

  PJ shot a look across the pool, through the wall of glass, to the workout room, where Randy Simonson, aka Ratchet, hoisted free weights onto his shoulders, now doing squats. “Since the guy I’ve been tailing all day works out at the weight room and pool. Good thing I still had some clothes in the Vic or I would have had to swim naked.”

  “I don’t want to speculate on whether you would have gone that far.” Jeremy glanced at the weight lifter. Ratchet packed the muscle into a sculpted package, all curves and sinew.

  “Does he have a tattoo?”

  “Yep. Just like Max’s. I think this guy might be the Lyle Fisher we’re looking for.”

  “Wait a second—I thought Max was Lyle. At least Bekka’s mother says so.”

  “No, Max is Owen . . . or . . .” She shook her head. “Okay, yes, I don’t know who Max is. But put a baseball cap over his red hair and Ratchet certainly could have been the one outside arguing with Bekka before she died.”