by Modean Moon
“Come on, Todd.” An officer reached for him.
Todd shook away from him and stood up. He lurched toward Ginnie but was caught by two pairs of strong arms.
“I’ll get you for this. Sometime when you least expect it, I’ll be back. I’ll tear you up, Ginnie. You won’t get away with this.”
Only when they reached the door did he revert to his hysteria. “No!” he cried, a long, agonizing scream, as he fought his restraint.
Ginnie could still hear him screaming as they thrust him into the back seat of the patrol car.
Chapter 8
How long had she gripped the table? Slowly, Ginnie became aware of the ache in her fingers, which still held the other edge, the smoothness of the wood beneath her cheek, the inanely tinkling music-box Christmas carols floating in from the living room.
And how long had she lived with the terror of Todd’s threat? Weeks, actively. Months, on a less intense level. But not since she’d bought this house had Ginnie consciously remembered his words, and that had been well over a year and a half ago.
She roused herself. She couldn’t stay like this all night. Already her body protested the unaccustomed posture. She sat up, easing her shoulders and rubbing a hand across the back of her neck. She no longer heard ice pelting against the window. Had it stopped?
She lifted her head to look outside and froze in stop action. A shadow. Just the corner of a shadow, outlined briefly as it passed the kitchen window. Had someone been watching her?
The roar of her heart drowned out all other sounds as she tried to listen for anything unfamiliar. Was that a footstep? Or just another creaking timber in this old house?
A footstep. She heard it again. Another. Then another. Approaching the back door. And then the crash of a fist on wood. And another. And another.
She sat there, still frozen in immobility.
“Ginnie! Ginnie! Are you all right?”
Neil. She loosed her tightly held breath. Neil.
The chair scraped across the floor as she willed her knees to straighten, as she willed her muscles to relax, and then fell with a crash as she willed herself to stand up.
“Ginnie! Open this door!”
She fumbled with the lock, and when she had unfastened it, the door thrust open in her hands.
“Are you all right? I —”
“I — you frightened me.”
“I’m sorry. I’ve been pounding on your front door for — When you didn’t answer, I came around the back. I saw you through the window. I thought...”
Ginnie backed away from the door, letting him enter, and righted the overturned chair. He closed the door behind him.
They stood in awkward silence. She knew what he must have thought, seeing her stretched out across the kitchen table.
He looked older, she thought. Strands of silver now liberally laced the dark hair at his temples. The lines running to each side of his mouth were deeper, as though he seldom smiled anymore. If anything, though, he was more handsome than the laughing, triumphant young lawyer she had fallen in love with. And more — more foreboding than she had ever thought possible. He was the man she had lived with, the man with whom she had gone through so much, and yet he was a stranger.
“No. I’m... I’m all right,” she told him.
A sharp pain of desire twisted through Neil. Ginnie could still do that to him. After all these years, she still held that power over him. And yet she looked as vulnerable and as innocent as the day they met. Only now, her eyes held thinly veiled fear and a wariness that he knew he was responsible for putting there.
“Have you heard —” They spoke simultaneously. Both fell silent.
“How are —” Their words mingled again.
“Please,” Ginnie said. How on earth did she greet an ex-husband in the middle of the night, one whom she had never wanted to leave, one whom even now she wanted to take her in his arms, to hold her, to tell her everything was going to be all right?
“Won’t you sit down?” she asked, wanting to say more, knowing she couldn’t. “You must be cold. Can I — can I get you something hot to drink?”
Neil seemed to rouse himself and stamped the snow from his shoes on the doormat. “Yes. That would be nice, thank you. Let me use the telephone to call the sheriff’s office.”
“It’s...” She gestured ineffectually toward the telephone. “It may be out. It was giving me trouble earlier. I don’t know if —”
“Your telephone is out of order?”
She recoiled from the harshness in his voice.
“It does that sometimes in wet weather. The telephone company promised they had finally fixed it the last time. I think the problem must be in the connection at the back of the house, but I’m not sure.”
He muttered an oath. “When did it start acting up?”
“A little while after you called the last time.”
He lifted the receiver and scowled before slamming it back in place.
“Damn, Ginnie! What would you have done if —” He bit off his words. “I have a phone in my car. Can I go out the front? It will be easier than walking through the drifts out back.”
“Of course.” She led him through the house, let him out the front door and stood shivering against the cold in the open doorway waiting for him. He returned with a garment bag and a shaving kit.
“I’ve given everyone the mobile phone number, and the sheriff’s office is going to try to roust out an emergency crew for your telephone. There hasn’t been any word yet.” He indicated the garment bag. “Do you mind if I change? I got wet wading through your backyard.”
Only then did she realize how he was dressed. A black cashmere overcoat covered a smartly tailored black suit showing just a hint of silk in the fine wool blend. White-on-white silk shirt. The gold studs and cuff links she had given him for Christmas the first year. Black tie, of course.
“I did interrupt your party. I’m sorry. Was it terribly awkward for you?”
He glanced at her, raking his eyes over the floor-length emerald wool she wore. “It seems that mine wasn’t the only party interrupted tonight, Ginnie. Don’t worry about it.” He shifted the bag in his hand. “Where can I change?”
She showed him to the guest room, got him hangers for his clothes and fresh towels for the adjoining bath, and retreated from the room, back to the safety of the kitchen.
As she measured tea and poured boiling water into the pot, she heard the faint sound of the shower running. A hot shower, she knew, to chase away the chill. At one time, she would have carried his cup into the bathroom to him and held it outside the shower curtain waiting for him to reach for it. She’d never had the nerve to draw back the curtain and blatantly watch him, and now, for one mad moment, she felt an impulse to do just that.
Stop it, Ginnie! she warned herself. She’d been afraid to do that when she’d had the right to. Now she no longer had that right.
When Neil returned to the kitchen a few minutes later, he wore jeans, a rust-colored turtleneck sweater that set off the breadth of his shoulders and black socks.
“I left my boots in the car,” he said by way of apology. “If you don’t mind, I won’t go out for them now.”
Aren’t we formal? she thought. Two strangers skirting the edges of what they really wanted to say. At least she was. Maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he had no more to say than what he already had.
She handed him his tea. When he said thank you in that same restrained voice, she could stand it no longer.
“Are we going to avoid the subject all night?”
Neil glanced at her sharply, drank from his tea and set the cup on the counter. “Only if you insist upon it.”
He overpowered her. Just by standing there in his sock-covered feet, his presence threw her so emotionally off balance she felt incapable of beginning the conversation. Already her familiar red and white kitchen was alien territory, not hers any longer, indelibly marked by him.
She picked up her cup. “Let’s go into the
living room.” There, perhaps, she wouldn’t feel so confronted by him, as though, somehow, this were all her fault.
But there, on the sofa, lay the disarray of pictures and papers just as she had left them. Ginnie felt Neil watching her as she scraped them, and her wedding ring, into the wooden box and set it on a side table.
The fire had burned down to coals, but the tree lights still twinkled, the puppy still slept in his box and the music still repeated itself. The room was the same as it had been hours before, but now, with Neil here, it would never be the same again. She silenced the stereo.
Neil knelt by the puppy, watching it but not disturbing it, and then, to give himself something to do, he added logs to the glowing embers. This room, he thought, like the rest of the house he had seen so far, was much like Ginnie. It had a gentility, an old-world quality which should be spared the harsh realities of the present. The physical symbols of security with which she had surrounded herself didn’t make saying what he had to say any easier.
“Your house is—is very comfortable,” he told her, postponing the inevitable conversation.
She didn’t acknowledge his comment. She sat silently. Waiting.
He straightened and looked into the fire. He might as well get it over with. There’d be no better time.
“Todd has been under heavy medication for the last two years.” He spoke haltingly. “It seemed the only way of controlling him. The doctors are pretty sure that his first big flare-up was caused by angel dust, PCP, but whether he took it deliberately or had some slipped to him, we’ll probably never know. And he has some flashbacks because of that. But that isn’t the whole of it, Ginnie.
“He’s a seriously disturbed boy and probably has been for years, at least in varying stages. Recently, a new psychiatrist joined the staff at the hospital. Some of these medications they give are pretty awful in and of themselves and over a period of years can mask the underlying symptoms to a degree that the doctors can’t get a true picture of the patient’s progress.
“What they were doing was weaning Todd from all medication.”
Neil turned to her. No. There would never be a better time to say this, or a good way. “More or less to see what’s left of him, I think, although that wasn’t the explanation they gave me.”
He drew a steadying breath, looking away from the shock and compassion he saw in Ginnie’s eyes. Continue, he told himself. Get it over with.
“Todd has had a couple of flare-ups since the change in his medication, but when I visited him this morning, he seemed quiet. He seemed almost rational. We talked about Christmas. He asked when he could come home. The hospital tells me that nothing unusual happened the rest of the day, that he went to bed quietly, that he seemed to be looking forward to Christmas morning.”
“Do they know when he left?” she asked. “Or how?”
“It isn’t a jail, although there is pretty strong security there. Apparently, he forced a lock in the reception area. For some reason, the alarm didn’t go off. He went through a window. They found a piece of his shirt hanging from the top of the gate.”
Ginnie sank onto the edge of the couch. “Why, Neil?”
If he heard her underlying question, he ignored it.
“By the time he shows up, or is found, he may not even remember why.”
Neil turned his back to the fire, standing motionlessly in front of it.
“You don’t really have any reason to worry, Ginnie. He can’t get far in this snow.” His voice dropped—low, so low. “And the authorities in at least four counties are looking for him.”
The magnitude of that struck her. These would be strangers looking for an escaped mental patient, not men who had known Todd most of his life. The night that Todd had shown up at her house, one of them had even attempted to draw a weapon on him. Unbidden, Neil’s story of Mickey Flannagan flashed through her mind. She choked back a sob.
“Oh, God. Will they hurt him, Neil? I never wanted him to be hurt.”
She looked up at him, her eyes pleading with him to tell her that nothing more tragic would happen. He heard the question in the tremor of her voice and saw it in her eyes, but he couldn’t give her the answer she wanted, that he wanted.
“I don’t know, Ginnie. I hope to God it doesn’t come to that.”
She caught her breath on a sob. She would not cry. Now was not the time for tears. What must Neil be going through? It had to be much worse for him than for her. Now she would be strong. She could give him that much, if nothing else.
She watched wordlessly as he walked toward her. He knelt beside her and placed one hand on her shoulder.
“It will be all right, Ginnie.”
She heard no conviction in his words. Tentatively, she reached out to him, tracing the lines of care in his face. The sob broke from her as he gathered her to him, cradling her against his chest.
“Ssh, Ginnie. It will be all right. It will be all right. Please, God, it will be all right.”
“What have we done?” she moaned, holding him to her, needing him to deny her question and knowing he couldn’t. “Oh, Neil, what have we done?”
Ginnie felt the softness of fine wool beneath her cheek, the ridge of an arm beneath her back, a hand draped possessively over her breast and another resting gently on the swell of her hip. Neil, she thought contentedly and snuggled more closely against his sleeping warmth. Neil? Her eyes flew open.
Light flooded through the sheer curtains. A bright chill pervaded the room. They lay entwined on the sofa. Ginnie shifted uncertainly, and, as she did, she felt the change in Neil’s heartbeat that told her he was also awake.
She felt his arm tighten and his hand move slowly, reluctantly, from her breast to the relative safety of her ribs.
She looked up at him and saw in the depths of his dark satin brown eyes, unguarded now, a desire as great as that which sparked to life within her, and she became aware that his were not the only arms, the only hands, that had trespassed during the night. Her own were around him, not so intimately, but speaking just as eloquently of her own unconscious needs that sleep had freed her to express.
She should move, she told herself. She should end this embrace of body and of eyes, but she was incapable of doing that.
Without tightening his clasp, he held her. Without speaking, he spoke to her. She knew that with one sign from her, or perhaps without it, Neil would kiss her, and that if he once kissed her, they would not stop until they had brought to fruition the intimacies they had so innocently started. So long as she didn’t move. So long as she didn’t break the spell.
She waited, her throat dry, her heart pounding frantically, her eyes never leaving Neil’s face. She felt the slight tremor that moved over him. Then he was bending, slowly and oh, so carefully toward her, until his mouth was just inches from hers, and then less than a heartbeat away. He hesitated, his lips parted slightly. His arms tightened around her.
Yes, Neil, she pleaded silently. Yes. They could worry. about the consequences later, so long as they had this time, now, just for the two of them.
She moistened her lips and wondered if she would dare rise to meet him if he did not end this agonizing anticipation.
An irritating buzz grated across her nerves. Neil’s head jerked toward the noise. The spell was broken.
Ginnie sagged in disappointment against him. “My alarm clock,” she said without waiting for his question. “I forgot that I set it.”
She scrambled from his arms and into her bedroom. Grimacing, she slapped off the alarm. “Traitor,” she snapped. “You never sound nearly that loud or commanding when I need you to.”
She debated returning to the living room. No. The moment was gone. Anything between them now would probably be as forced as the conversation had been last night.
Instead, she retreated to her bathroom. A bath, quick and functional, was what she needed now, and warm, serviceable clothes. And her boots, if she could just remember where she’d put them the last time she wore them.
She became aware of the aromas of coffee and bacon and smiled. Neil had always been a breakfast person. She made her way into the kitchen, stopping only to check on the puppy. His basket was empty.
She found the puppy in the kitchen, trying with his ungainly little legs to keep up with Neil’s long strides. Neil didn’t seem to be paying much attention to the collie, but he stepped carefully over and around him as he made his way from the stove to the refrigerator to the table, preparing breakfast with a skill which surprised her. He had never before been even competent in the kitchen.
“I plugged in the pot. Your coffee is on the table,” he said as he noticed her. He turned back to the stove. “Eggs? Or do you still prefer to skip those in the morning?”
“Just bacon and toast,” she said. “Thanks.”
So. They were back to being polite strangers. And yet, she realized, not quite.
She noticed a bath towel draped over the back of one of the kitchen chairs and a few lingering drops of moisture. on the collie’s coat. “You took him out?”
“Mmm.” Neil’s response was muffled as he busied himself with the eggs. He slid them onto one of two waiting plates before he carried both plates to the table. “He didn’t quite know how to handle snow. I’m afraid he mostly played. He’s going to have to go back out.”
He motioned toward the table. “Your breakfast is getting cold.”
The table was set properly. The toast was just the right color, not burned as she’d half expected. The bacon was crisp, just the way she liked it. His eggs were the way he had always requested them and even she had trouble preparing.
