The Backup Plan

by Sherryl Woods

  Her last assignments had been the most challenging. It had been impossible to calculate the risks, impossible to find trustworthy sources, impossible to predict whether she would live long enough to get the story on the air. Many said it took a danger junkie to accept such assignments, but she’d never seen herself that way. She simply had a job to do. The risks were worth it because events that unfolded without the glare of news cameras often led to untold horrors and chilling secrecy.

  Yet in all of her thirty-one years she’d never had such terrifying dreams. She figured she’d come too close to the edge and seen too much. She’d lost friends this time, some of the best and brightest in the business. That had sucked the life right out of her.

  Maybe Ray had been right. Maybe it was time—past time—for her to go home. There was nothing left to prove here.

  As she crouched beside her hotel room bed after being frightened by the unexpected ring of a phone, her heart finally slowed to a more normal rhythm. In that instant she realized that she couldn’t get home fast enough. If she stayed here any longer, she’d come completely unglued.

  Later that morning when Dinah told Ray what she’d decided, she was hurt to see relief and not regret in his eyes.

  “It’s for the best,” he assured her.

  “It’s not forever,” she replied because she needed to believe it. “A few weeks, a couple of months at most.”

  Ray got up and closed the door, then gestured for her to sit down. “Listen to me, Dinah. You get back to South Carolina and make a place for yourself. Get a job at the local station. Be their superstar. Find yourself a good man. Settle down and raise a family. This is no life.”

  “It’s my life,” she protested, horrified by what he was suggesting. It was too damn close to anonymity and suffocation.

  “Not anymore,” Ray insisted. “I’ve seen it happen before. An excellent reporter goes through a close call, sees someone they know die right in front of them, whatever, and they start cutting back on the risks. They’re a little more hesitant, they play it a little safer. Or they do the opposite and turn into some sort of rogue I can’t control. Either way, a reporter like that is no good to me.”

  Anger filled her at the grim picture he presented. “Are you saying I’ll never be able to do this job again?”

  “Never as well,” he said bluntly. “You’re beautiful and smart and talented. Put all of that to work for you back home. If not in South Carolina, then at the network in New York or Washington. I can get a transfer authorized anytime you say the word. Find yourself a real life and live it. What we do over here, it’s necessary, but it’s not living. It’s courting death.”

  “Are you telling me this just because I’m a woman?” she asked heatedly. “That’s a little sexist even for you.”

  “Maybe so,” he admitted candidly. “Mostly, though, I’m telling you this stuff because I like you. I want to know you’re out there somewhere safe and happy. I don’t ever want to have to make the same call to your folks that I’ve had to make to other reporters’ relatives.”

  Dinah drew in a deep breath and asked him the question that was burning in her gut. “Spell it out for me, Ray. Are you telling me I can’t come back, that you don’t want me here?”

  Ray hesitated before replying. “No,” he said with obvious reluctance. “The network would have my head for saying this, but I’m telling you I hope like hell you won’t.”

  He regarded her with a worried frown. “Listen to me, okay? Think about what I’m saying. You’ve done the heroics, proved whatever you set out to prove to yourself. You’re a top-notch journalist, one of the best, but maybe it’s time to stop and figure out who Dinah Davis really is.”

  Her stomach sank. She thought she had figured that out the day she turned in her first television news report. Now this man she trusted was telling her she’d gotten it wrong.

  “Then you think I should quit?” she asked, hating the fact that her respect for him ran so deep that she was actually considering doing as he asked.

  “Yes,” he said firmly. “Get a real life, Dinah.”

  She tried to picture the peaceful, ordinary life he was describing. The image eluded her. “You actually think I’m destined to be somebody’s wife and mother?” she asked.

  “Why the hell not?”

  “And if I decide that what I am is a foreign correspondent, that it’s all I was ever meant to be?”

  He gave her a sad look. “Then I pity you.”

  “It’s what you’ve done all your life,” she reminded him.

  “And look at me. No wife. No family. No one who gives a damn whether I come home or not. That’s not a fate I’d wish on you. Isn’t there someone back home you think about from time to time, some man who got away?”

  Dinah started to shake her head, but then an image of Bobby Beaufort appeared in her mind. She couldn’t stop the smile that spread across her face. It had been ages since she’d thought about Bobby. He’d been in her life almost as far back as she could remember. He’d wanted to marry her, but she’d turned him down to chase after her dream.

  “There,” Ray said triumphantly. “I knew it!”

  “He was no one special,” Dinah insisted. “Just a friend.”

  A good friend who’d promised to be around if she ever got tired of roaming the globe. If she was ready for love, she was supposed to turn to Bobby. She would always own a piece of his heart, at least that’s what he’d claimed. All she had to do was come home, say the word and they’d be married before she could say Las Vegas. That was what they’d agreed when she left town. He was her safety net, her backup plan. She’d never expected to need him.

  She didn’t need him now, she asserted silently. All this stuff Ray was saying meant nothing. She’d straighten herself out and come back here…eventually.

  In the meantime, though, she met Ray’s worried gaze. “Okay, then,” she said at last. “I quit. I suppose there’s no point in doing this by half measures.”

  She said it halfheartedly, but Ray gave her an encouraging smile.

  “Good for you, Dinah! It’s the right thing to do.”

  Maybe so, she thought despondently, but just in case she’d made a huge mistake, maybe the first thing she ought to do when she got back to South Carolina was look up Bobby Beaufort. Maybe he was meant to save her from the kind of lonely life Ray was describing. She’d know when she saw him.

  Bobby had never made her palms sweat or her pulse race, but he was a good guy. Soothing and dependable, he’d never, ever let her down. In fact, his sweet attentiveness had nearly suffocated her, but maybe she’d changed. Maybe she was ready for someone to lavish her with love and attention.

  She thought of that and her lips curved once more. Yes, indeed, a woman who’d just impulsively quit her dream job needed to keep her options open.

  2

  After four dinner parties in a row to welcome her home, Dinah called a halt.

  “Mother, that’s enough! I’m pretty sure there’s not a soul in Charleston, at least in certain social circles, who doesn’t know I’m back in town.”

  Dorothy Davis regarded her with dismay. “Just one more,” she coaxed. “A few people from the committee to save Covington Plantation.” Her eyes suddenly lit up. “In fact, Dinah, if you’d give a little talk, we could turn it into an impromptu fund-raiser. I’m sure people would be fascinated with all your adventures. And these renovations are going to cost a fortune. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could work together to raise some additional funds?”

  Dinah glanced at her mother. Her adventures were precisely what she was trying to forget. If Dinah tried to explain that to Dorothy it would heighten her mother’s overprotectiveness. It had taken her several unnerving calls months ago to convince her mother that she was fine and that there was nothing for her to worry about. Apparently she’d been successful in downplaying what had happened because her mother hadn’t mentioned a word about it. Dinah didn’t want anything to kick those maternal antennae back
onto alert now.

  She tried another tactic.

  “Haven’t your friends pumped me for every bit of in formation they’d care to hear, Mother? No one wants to know what it’s really like over there.” Dinah was a hundred percent certain of that. “It’s not great dinner table conversation,” she added. “They’re content knowing it’s happening on the other side of the world.”

  “Not everyone here is shallow, darling,” her mother scolded. “You’ve always sold us short.”

  Dinah sighed. It was true. She had. But she’d heard nothing since coming back to change her impression of her parents’ friends. They lived in their monied, insulated world and were happy enough if it didn’t rain on their golf games.

  “Forget the fund-raiser, Mother. I’ve never been any good at that sort of thing. And please don’t plan another dinner party. I came home for some peace and quiet. As it is, I’ve barely had a minute alone with you or Dad or Tommy Lee and his family.” Not that she was all that unhappy about missing out on the questionable joy of being around her brother’s children. From what little bit she had seen, they were holy terrors.

  Still, there had been precious little of the quiet she’d anticipated. Aside from the dinner parties her mother had held at their house, she’d been trotted out to lunch with her father’s business cronies half a dozen times. She had yet to see a single one of her own friends, not that she’d kept in touch with that many of them since she’d left for college.

  She wasn’t exactly excited about seeing anyone at all. Every chance she got, she stole off to the solitude of her room or sat in the back garden with an unopened book in her hands. She’d told herself the inertia was only temporary, that she’d snap out of it in a few days, but she was beginning to wonder if it wouldn’t be easier just to give in to it.

  Judging from the worried frown that creased her mother’s otherwise unlined face, Dorothy had taken note of Dinah’s reluctance to leave the house.

  “Is something going on that you haven’t told me?” her mother asked. “Sitting around in this house all day is not like you.”

  “I don’t just sit in the house. Sometimes I sit in the garden.”

  Her comment drew another chiding look. Dorothy Rawlings Davis had never known what to make of her only daughter. Dinah had scoffed at tradition. Though she’d reluctantly agreed to go through with it for her mother’s sake, Dinah had made a mockery of her debutante ball. She’d attended private school under protest and, worse, had chosen to go to college out of state, to New York, no less. It had grated on her father, who’d at tended the Citadel and then Clemson, and her mother who’d graduated from the University of Charleston without ever leaving home.

  Her brother had thankfully followed tradition or her parents would most likely have died of shame. Dinah’s celebrity had allowed them to hold their heads up just a bit higher these last few years. She wondered what they would think if she told them she was thinking of giving it all up forever.

  Even at eight o’clock in the morning the vast differences between Dinah and her mother were apparent. Her mother was wearing an expensive, tailored suit, antique gold jewelry that winked with diamonds, Italian designer pumps, a perfect French manicure and had every strand of her perfectly highlighted hair in place. Dinah wore a favorite pair of old shorts, a halter top and she was barefooted. She hadn’t had a manicure or pedicure in years and her hair was cut in a haphazard style that could best be described as wash-and-wear. In less than a week she’d fought off six attempts by her mother to change that with a spa day. When it came to style Dinah was still a bitter disappointment to her socialite mother.

  Even so, her mother did seem to be touchingly happy to have her home. Dinah could even understand her desire to cash in on Dinah’s reflected celebrity. She wasn’t a bit surprised that her mother wasn’t taking no for an answer.

  “Darling, it’s just that you’re so rarely here,” her mother said. “I want to be sure that everyone gets a chance to see you before you go gallivanting off on your next assignment.”

  Dinah told herself she should admit that she wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon, but she wasn’t ready to do that. Silence allowed her to go on pretending that this was a temporary sabbatical. It would be another few weeks before she started to wear on her mother’s nerves. Then her parents would start asking the really tough, unanswerable questions about how such a fabulous career had wound up in the toilet. Right now they were proud of her and it was nice to bask in that, at least in small doses.

  She forced a smile. “I know, Mother, but let’s put it off a few days, okay? Let me catch my breath. I haven’t even seen Maggie yet or any of my other friends.”

  Maggie Forsythe was the one person Dinah truly was anxious to see aside from Bobby. She was the only one Dinah dared to mention. If she uttered a peep about tracking down Bobby Beaufort, her mother would draw the wrong conclusions. The prospect of a wedding was just about the only thing that might distract Dorothy from her daughter’s news about being all but kicked out of Afghanistan by her worried boss.

  “Okay, if you insist, I’ll reschedule for the week after next,” her mother finally relented. “You will still be here, right?”

  “I’ll be here,” Dinah assured her.

  Satisfied, her mother rounded the dining room table and pressed a kiss to Dinah’s cheek. “I’m so glad you’re home. Your father and I have missed you.”

  Dinah’s eyes stung at the sentimental tone in her mother’s voice. She had always shunned her mother’s overt displays of affection, but all of a sudden the little impromptu hugs and kisses made her weepy.

  “I have to run. I have a meeting about the renovations at the plantation this morning. It’s likely to drag on all day,” her mother said. “What will you do today? If you don’t have anything in mind, you could come with me and take a look around. We’re making excellent progress. I think you’d find it fascinating.”

  Dinah knew her eyes had probably glazed over at the suggestion, so she tried to feign enthusiasm for her mother’s latest pet project. “If you’re involved, I know it’s bound to be amazing,” she said. “I promise to get there, just not today.”

  Her mother hid her disappointment well, but Dinah knew she’d hurt her. It had always driven her crazy that Dinah showed no interest in any of her favorite civic or historical preservation projects.

  “Okay, then, I’m off,” her mother said. “Will you be here for dinner?”

  “Of course,” Dinah said. “If that changes, I’ll call or leave word with Maybelle.”

  “I’ll see you later, then.”

  When her mother left, the sound of her heels tapping on the hardwood floors, the scent of Chanel lingered in her wake. Dinah felt the tension in her shoulders ease the minute she was finally alone.

  Coming home had been harder—and easier—than she’d expected. She’d been welcomed like the prodigal daughter, pampered by their longtime housekeeper, and treated like a celebrity by her family’s friends.

  The hard part was lying and keeping the pretense that she was just fine, that her career was perfect, her life amazing. She kept it up because she wasn’t ready to admit the truth, not to them, not even to herself.

  Some days she could convince herself that she was fine. As if her body sensed that she was in a safe haven at last, she hadn’t had a major panic attack since she’d arrived. The nightmares had even diminished. She’d only awakened a couple of times in a cold sweat with her heart hammering so hard she’d felt it might burst from her chest.

  She’d managed to accommodate her parents’ meet-and-greet dinners as well as the thankfully brief lunches at her father’s club. Increasingly, though, the mere prospect of leaving the house had made her palms turn damp. Although she’d been able to face the possibility of a roadside ambush or a car bomb a mere week ago, she now could barely stand the thought of walking down the comparatively safe, familiar streets of Charleston. She knew that hiding out wasn’t smart, or healthy. Nor was it one bit like he
r. Always full of energy, Dinah was determined to recapture some of her old spirit.

  She decided to start by looking for Bobby. It would be good to see him, catch up a little, figure out if there was a single spark that could be fanned into a conflagration that might help her forget what she would have to give up to stay here.

  She gathered up her dishes and took them to the kitchen.

  Maybelle Jenkins, who’d run the Davis household Dinah’s entire life and her mother’s family’s before that, immediately rushed to take them from her. “What do you think you’re doing?” she scolded. “You trying to get me fired? Tidying up is what I do around here.”

  Dinah grinned at her. “We both know you do a whole lot more than that. You keep this place running. You hold this family together.”

  Maybelle swept her into a hug, one of many she’d readily dispensed since Dinah’s homecoming. “Lordy, but I’ve missed you. You’ve been away too long, girl. It’s about time you came back to see us. Some of us, we ain’t getting any younger, you know.”

  Though she looked ageless with her smooth brown complexion, Maybelle had to be at least seventy-five. She’d been almost twenty when she’d gone to work for Adelaide Rawlings when Dinah’s mother was born. That was fifty-five years ago.

  Dinah grinned at her now. “Who’re you kidding, Maybelle? You’ll outlive all of us.”

  “Especially if you keep getting in the way of them guns and bombs,” the housekeeper chided. “That close call you had ’bout gave me a heart attack. Never saw the sense of you doing such a thing. Thought we raised you to be smarter.”

  Dinah met the dark brown eyes of the woman who’d been such a constant in her life. A sudden need to unburden herself nearly overwhelmed her. Maybelle had always patiently listened to every one of her childhood hopes, dreams and heartaches.

  “Can I tell you something you can’t repeat to anyone?” Dinah asked.