“Please don’t be a jerk this early in the day,” Alyssa interrupted him. “I’m doing you an enormous favor here, Starrett. Don’t pay me back this way.”
“Sorry. I was just trying to be honest.”
“Can’t you just say sorry?” Alyssa asked. “And leave out all the noisy bullshit for a change?”
He sighed. “Sorry.”
They drove in silence, but it lasted for only about twenty seconds before he asked, “Sleep well?”
“No,” she said tersely. “I woke up to the news that Max is moving the entire office down to Sarasota, and I don’t know why. I didn’t speak to him directly, but he ordered me to bring you there. I’m not supposed to let you out of my sight.”
“Shit,” he said. But then he laughed. “Maybe he found out my birthday’s coming and he wants to throw me a surprise party.”
Alyssa laughed, too, despite herself. “Yeah, I’m sure that’s it.” She glanced at him. “Aren’t you at all worried?”
“Worried is my new middle name.” He fished through the bag of doughnuts until he found the chocolate-covered one. “But first things first. First we find out if there’s even a prayer that Mary Lou and Haley are still alive. Then we can go to Sarasota and find out how badly I’m about to get reamed. Depending on the news from Harrison Motors, I might even be willing to speculate how bad it’s going to hurt, as we drive back south.”
Alyssa glanced at him again. “Is your birthday really coming?”
The smile he gave her was slightly strained around the edges, but it was still pure Sam. “There are so many creative ways I could answer that, but they’d only piss you off. So, yeah. My birthday’s next week.” He paused. “You want to give me a present?” He didn’t wait for her to answer because obviously he knew she’d jump to sexual conclusions. “Help me find Haley. I don’t care if the whole freaking FBI is in Sarasota ready to help find her. I trust you. I want you working on this case.”
He’d surprised her with that one. But she shook her head. “I can’t pick and choose assignments—”
“Maybe you can’t, but Max sure as hell can. I know this isn’t your normal counterterrorist assignment, but—”
“I really don’t have the power to tell Max what to—”
“Then take time off,” Sam implored her. “Lys, I wouldn’t ask you to do this if it wasn’t important. Please. The thought of never seeing her again is . . . I’m dying, here.”
Silence. What could she say?
“Jules is on his way back from Hawaii,” Alyssa finally told him. “I’m sure he’ll be willing to—”
“Yeah,” Sam said, correctly reading her words as a great big no. He couldn’t keep at least a little sarcasm from escaping. “Thanks a lot.”
She was dying here, too. But she didn’t dare tell him that. She bit her tongue and clenched her teeth and didn’t let the words escape.
He was clearly reining himself in, too. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to sound so . . . You’ve been really great, and I appreciate your efforts. I honestly do.”
“It’s all right,” she said. “I’ll do what I can, Sam, but . . .” She cleared her throat. “This isn’t exactly my dream case.”
He laughed. “Yeah, no kidding.”
“How long do I stay on this road?” she asked.
Sam made a big show of checking the map. “Another two miles, it looks like. At least.”
More silence.
Then, when she picked up her coffee, he said, “Careful, it’s really hot.”
God. Alyssa didn’t want Sam to be kind or considerate or thoughtful. She didn’t want him to apologize or to be sincere or to care whether or not she burned her tongue. She wanted . . .
She didn’t know what she wanted.
“Thank you,” she said, not daring to look in his direction as she took a big sip anyway.
It burned all the way down.
April 3, 1943
From the journal of Dorothy S. Smith
I was deep in an argument with Nurse Maria the masochist about whether or not I should be allowed up to walk to the bathroom, when there was a knock on the door to the hospital ward. “Flowers for Lieutenant Smith.”
“Oh, how pretty,” Maria said to me. “The delivery boy brought you flowers.” She bustled to the door. “I’ll take those.”
I was taking advantage of the opportunity and starting to swing my legs, cast and all, to the side of the bed, when I heard Walter’s voice. “No, I’ve been ordered to deliver them personally to Lieutenant Smith.”
A lieutenant colonel in the Army Air Corps had actually been mistaken for a delivery boy. I opened my mouth to set Maria straight when I realized that Walt was dressed in civvies—including the goshdarn silliest cap I’ve ever seen in my life. He met my eyes and gave me the smallest shake of his head—no.
So I shut my mouth and tucked my legs back under the covers. What on earth was he doing here in Savannah, Georgia?
“I have a private message for Miss Smith,” he told Maria, in the absolute worst cornpone deep south faked accent I’d ever heard, “from Lieutenant Colonel Gaines. I’ll be in some real, real hot water if I can’t deliver it to her and get me a reply to take on back.”
“It’s all right, Maria,” I said. “I know Walt quite well.”
I think it was the sight of me sitting up in bed, looking as if I was going to be obedient about her order to keep using those ass-freezing metal bedpans, that made Maria the torturer relent.
“Don’t let her get out of bed,” she ordered Walt before rushing off to the other end of the ward to torment the poor girl who’d had the appendectomy.
Walt glanced at the girl in the bed next to mine as he approached, and I did, too, but she was fast asleep. For the first time, I was glad I was at the end of the row of hospital beds, as drafty as it was, closest to the door. Across the center aisle, two beds down, Lily Foster was sitting up, doing her nails, waiting to be discharged. She could see us, but she was too far away to hear our conversation if we spoke quietly.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. I pointed to the chair for visitors that was next to the bed. In all the weeks I’d been here, no one had used it. Until now.
“We heard about the accident,” Walter told me in his regular voice. He set the flowers on the little table beside my bed and pulled the chair closer. “I came as quickly as I could. I’m sorry I didn’t get here sooner.”
“I’m okay,” I told him.
He looked at the bandage on my head. “You didn’t write. Mae and I were worried.”
“I was, um, unconscious for a while.”
“They said you broke a rib which in turn punctured your lung.”
“It wasn’t as bad as it sounds.”
Walt nodded, clearly not believing me.
It was ironic—me getting into a traffic accident not a week after I’d brought a plane down in a controlled crash. I’d walked away from that only to end up in this hospital just a few days later. But bad weather and poor driving had caused the Army transport I was riding in to skid off the road. It sure as hell wouldn’t have happened if I’d have been driving.
“Why aren’t you wearing your uniform?” I asked Walt.
He was silent for a moment, and I could tell that he was wondering whether or not to tell me the truth. I knew right then that the truth was going to make me steaming mad.
“I tried to get in to see you earlier in the day,” he finally admitted. “In my uniform. But . . .” He cleared his throat. “Apparently visitors as well as patients need to be a certain correct color to get through these doors. However, it didn’t take me long to note that delivery boys could be any color they wanted to be.” He smiled at me, so utterly not a boy, but rather a very full-grown man. “What do you think of the cap? Nice touch, huh?”
“Almost as good as the accent,” I told him. “I’m so sorry.”
“Think of it as my last chance to wear civilian clothes for a while,” he said. “For a long while. Until the end o
f the war.”
I sat up even straighter. “Are you telling me . . .?”
“Yes, I am.” He was smiling. “The squad leaves for North Africa in a few weeks.”
He’d come all this way not just to make sure I was okay, but also to say good-bye. This was the last time I was going to see him—maybe forever. I was glad I was sitting down because I suddenly felt light-headed.
Walt had wanted to go and do his part for his country for so long. I tried to be happy for him, tried to smile back at him, but all I felt was terrified. I felt stripped bare.
I’d hidden the truth for so long—not just from Mae and Walter, but from myself as well. But here it was. No longer something that I could ignore. I loved him. He was a black man and he was married to my dearest friend, but damn it, I loved Walter Gaines with all my heart.
And this was it. It was possibly—probably—the last few moments I’d spend with him. Ever. I knew far too many good men who went to fight the Germans and the Japanese and never came home again.
Walter glanced up, and I knew he was monitoring Nurse Maria. I looked, too, but she was still terrorizing the appendixless girl.
There was a whirlwind going on inside my head. Should I tell him? I wanted to tell him. I couldn’t tell him. He was married to Mae. How could I tell him? How could I betray her that way? But did he love me, too? Yes, I knew he loved me, too. I could see it in his eyes, in his beautiful, beautiful brown eyes.
I opened my mouth, and “Fight hard, fly harder, and fuck the Germans first” came out.
Walter laughed. “Yes, ma’am.”
I wanted to kiss him. Was that really too much to ask—just one kiss for an entire lifetime? Because even if he did come back home, he’d be coming back to Mae and little Jolee. I knew he loved Mae. How could anyone not love Mae? I loved Mae. I wanted to kiss him, but I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. I didn’t want to do that to Mae, and I didn’t want him to do that to Mae, either.
“I’ll take care of Mae and Jolee,” I told him. Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry. “First thing we’ll do is start planning your welcome home party.”
“You stay safe yourself,” he told me.
“I wish I was going with you.” That much I could say with all the emotion in my heart.
He was looking at the bandages on my head again. “Are you really all right under there?”
I was self-conscious of all that gauze. Although I would have been even more self-conscious if my head hadn’t been wrapped up. Thanks to the tailgate of the truck, I had a nasty gash a few inches above my hairline. “They shaved off a chunk of my hair in order to stitch me up.”
“Hair grows back.”
“I hope so.” I had a scrape on my cheek, too, that hadn’t completely healed, and I knew it made me look battered. It was hard to meet Walt’s eyes—a throwback to the days when I was young and stupid and married to Percy Smith, who’d dinged me up on a regular basis. I hadn’t looked anyone in the eye back then. “I must look awful.”
Walter took my hand. “You look beautiful, Dorothy—just as you always do.”
I don’t know what shocked me more—that he called me beautiful or that he touched me. I do know that the moment his hand touched mine, I clung to him as if my life depended on my never letting go. And—horrors!—I started to cry.
His hand was so dark and mine was so pale, it was shocking and hypnotizing and heartbreakingly wonderful. And I knew that this was it—even if he came back from this war, he was never going to touch me like this again unless I damn near killed myself again.
“Hey, now,” he said softly, leaning in real close. “Hush, baby, it’s all right.”
He pretended I was crying about the accident, asking me all kinds of questions about how scary it must’ve been trying to breathe with only half a lung after that truck rolled over and over, and about Betsy Wells, a nurse assigned to the Fifty-fifth, whom I’d just met that night, who died in my arms, and about how I’d climbed back up that incline with a broken ankle to flag down a passing car to go get help.
But he was a smart man, Walter was, and he knew what I was really crying about. He had tears in his own eyes as well.
“I’m sorry,” I told him, as I still clung to his hand, this time with both of mine.
He looked down at those hands of ours and he looked back at me and he opened his mouth to speak, and I stopped him.
“Don’t,” I said.
He looked back at our hands and laughed softly before he met my eyes again. “I wasn’t going to,” he said quietly. “I was just going to say that in a different lifetime . . .”
I nodded as I held his gaze for a long time. It wasn’t a kiss, but it was all we could give each other—all we would give each other.
Lily Foster was staring now, aghast at the sight of me holding hands with the delivery “boy.” Maria, too, was starting toward us.
Walter slipped his hand free from mine and got to his feet. “I’ll give your message to Massah Gaines,” he said in that ridiculous accent.
“Be sure to bring his wife my love,” I told him as I wiped the tears from my face.
“Sho’ nuff, Missy Dorothy.”
That one made me laugh, even as I started to cry again. “Tell him to fly like I’m right on his tail. He flies better when I’m up there with him.”
“You’re always with him,” Walter said in his regular voice, meeting my eyes for one last time, for all we knew for the last time, as Nurse Maria escorted him out the door.
As if his plaid sports jacket wasn’t bad enough, Jon Hopper of Harrison Motors had a comb-over that was distracting as hell.
Sam followed Hopper and Alyssa to the back of the car lot, unable to think of anything except, what the Jesus God did this guy look like in the morning, fresh out of bed? His hair above his left ear probably hung down to his shoulder.
“This is the car,” Hopper said, pointing.
What the . . .? It was Janine’s black Honda, not the maroon and light blue POS that Mary Lou had gotten as a permanent loaner when their minivan had been rear-ended and totaled back when they were first married.
Oh, man, that minivan . . . The thought of it still made Sam shudder. And despite what WildCard and Nils thought, Sam really hadn’t gotten into that accident on purpose.
The fact that it was the Honda and not the POS was noteworthy. If Mary Lou had been driving her sister’s car, that probably meant Janine had been driving Mary Lou’s. And lookie who had ended up dead. And lookie who had called up Mommy dearest, pretending to be Janine and trying to spread a little disinformation about which sister was in truth still alive—namely Mary Lou.
Which made Sam think a couple of things. One, that someone had been trying to kill Mary Lou in the first place and had goofed. Two, that there was probably more than one player on the killer’s team.
Killer A had probably delegated the job to Killer B: Go ice Mary Lou Morrison Starrett. She lives at 462 Camilia Street. She drives a maroon and light blue POS with California plates. Brown hair, kind of short, stacked. Killer B toddles off to Camilia Street. Janine—brown hair, short of stature, stacked—comes home in the maroon and light blue POS with California plates. It was easy to see how Killer B could’ve made a mistake that Killer A probably wouldn’t have made. The million-dollar question was, Had Killer A realized Killer B’s mistake? Yes. Why else would Darlene Morrison have been visited by those goons looking for Mary Lou? If they thought Mary Lou was safely dead, their search would’ve already been over.
The sign on the Honda’s windshield said $2000. Hah. Mary Lou would have been lucky to get even an eighth of that from Mr. Comb-over.
Sam pulled on the pair of latex gloves that Alyssa had handed him when they arrived at the car lot, and opened the car door.
“Touch as little as you can,” she’d advised him. “We’ll be sending someone out to get fingerprints. Don’t mess that up or I’ll get yelled at.”
He opened the glove box with a pen and checked under the seats for anyt
hing his ex-wife might’ve left behind. There was, of course, nothing there.
Alyssa was speaking to Hopper. “—really appreciate it if you could look up the paperwork for this car and tell us who handled this transaction.”
“We got a call on this yesterday,” Hopper said. “I don’t need to look it up again. I wrote up this deal.”
That was a stroke of luck in their favor.
“I know it’s been a few weeks,” Alyssa said, “but can you describe the person who sold it to you?”
“Shoot. It was a woman, I remember that much, but . . .”
“Do the best you can, Mr. Hopper.”
“Well, she had her kid with her. I remember that. Kids usually make deals like these more of a hassle—everything takes longer, you know, because the parent is being pulled two ways. But this kid was quiet. Cute, too. A little boy with blond hair and big blue eyes.”
A boy? That made Sam look up, and Alyssa met his gaze. Still, the hair and eyes were all Haley.
Alyssa looked back at Hopper. “And the mother?”
He squinted in concentration. “I remember she was crying, so I didn’t really look at her too closely. She was pretending she wasn’t—I figured the last thing she’d want was me staring at her red eyes and runny makeup. I think she might’ve had light hair, too, but I could be wrong. She was, uh, well endowed. I do remember that.”
“Was anyone else with her?”
“Just the little boy.” He said it with such conviction for someone remembering something that had happened three weeks ago.
Sam pulled himself out of the backseat, and Alyssa glanced at him again.
“You’re sure of that?” she asked Hopper.
“Like I said, I wasn’t really watching her all that closely, but, yeah, I’m sure about it. There was no one else on the lot then or any other time that day. Some days are a ghost town, you know?”
“You have records that confirm that? You know, that there were no other deals made that day?” Sam asked, pulling off the gloves. They left behind a powdery residue on his hands that he wiped on his jeans. “Just so we’re sure you’re thinking of the right day.”
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