Protect Me, Love

by Alice Orr

  He turned left and, fortunately, she followed, out from under the building’s awning and away from that area of visibility through the glass front doors. He waited till they were well away from that entrance before moving off from the center of the sidewalk into the lee of another building where they’d be less conspicuous. He mentally crossed his fingers that she’d follow. He breathed another cloud of vapor when she did. She turned with him as if there were a string attached from his shoulder to hers and she’d been programmed to take her cues from any tug on that connection.

  “You can give me the gun now,” he said in a carefully even tone.

  She looked up at him, raising her eyes slowly from their straight ahead stare to his face. He didn’t detect any of what he would call recognition there at first. She’d merely transferred her blank stare to a new target.

  “I’d like you to give the gun to me now,” he said.

  He continued to betray no hint of urgency though he knew exactly how urgent it in fact was to get that gun away from her in her present, unpredictable state. Meanwhile he thought he might have seen a flicker of something in her eyes, but maybe he only wished it would be there.

  “Delia, it’s me. Nick.”

  “I know who you are.”

  Her answer was so unexpected he almost jumped at the sound. He had to remind himself not to make any startling moves.

  “I thought you wanted this,” she said.

  She was holding the gun in front of her and toward him. He reached carefully across the space between them, still taking extra care not to do anything alarming, especially while the gun was pointed at his midsection. He touched the gun barrel first and eased its aim gradually outward toward the currently empty street. He slipped his fingers over hers on the grip and was about to say something he hoped would coax her to let go. She did so all of a sudden then, without being asked. Fortunately, Nick’s instincts were keener than he might have expected after so much stress and strain. He clamped his fingers around the gun before it could clatter down onto the sidewalk.

  “I’m hungry,” she said as matter-of-factly as if they were out for nothing more than a morning, or actually by now midday, stroll. “There’s a diner not far from here on Broadway.”

  She turned away from him without another word and began walking east on Ninety-first Street.

  Chapter Twenty

  They were seated in a booth at the Argo Restaurant before Delia came fully back to herself. She’d ordered a hearty breakfast though it was well past breakfast time. She wanted the comfort a steaming plate of eggs scrambled soft and home fries would give her. Being in this diner also helped. Greek-owned diners were a neighborhood staple just about everywhere in Manhattan. There was a uniformity about them, especially in the way they smelled, as if they all brewed their soup in the same communal pot each morning. That kind of reliability felt good to Delia right now. The only thing out of the ordinary were the signs of the season, carols playing in the background and colored lights strung along the wall shelf behind the counter. Unfortunately, their off and on twinkle reminded her of Penelope Wren’s living room.

  Delia turned away from that reminder. Nick sat watching her from across the table while his coffee cooled in front of him. His expression was very perplexed, as if he might be watching a bomb that might or might not explode. His bewilderment struck her as very funny somehow. Despite all the horrendous things that had been happening to her and around her, maybe in defiance of them, she began to laugh. The sound was almost foreign to her at first. She hadn’t heard herself laugh in what felt like an extremely long time. She hadn’t thought about it till this minute, but she really hadn’t laughed much in general over the past five years. That realization made part of her want to stop laughing and start crying, but she didn’t.

  “Are you all right?”

  The very tentative way he asked that, as though he saw her as an eggshell so fragile even a raise in his voice could collapse her shell, sent her into another gale of laughter more irrepressible than the first. She tried to choke it back, but there was no stopping the peals of what sounded like merriment trilling through her and out of her. The other patrons of the diner looked quizzically her way. She took a deep breath and clamped her mouth shut. Several more small eruptions burst through the bulwark, but they were considerably reserved compared to the uncontrolled guffawing of a moment ago. She kept herself staring at the Formica table in front of her. She wasn’t ready to look at Nick just yet. She was certain she’d be set off into further paroxysms if she did.

  “Delia, are you all right? Can you talk to me?”

  Two questions at once. Oh, no! She nodded yes to the first and shook her head no to the second. The absurdity of that was more than she could stand. She burst out giggling this time, like she couldn’t remember herself doing since her teenage pajama party days. She knew she had to stop this and get back under control. She was close to gasping for breath. She bent over, put her forehead on the table and tried to focus on the coolness of the Formica-topped surface while sporadic spasms continued to escape then began gradually to subside. She said a small, silent prayer that she would be able to pull herself together and stay that way. When she finally thought it was safe to lift her head, she found the waiter standing by the table with a full plate of food held just a few inches above where her head had been on the table. She clamped her teeth down hard on her lower lip.

  “She’s remembering something funny,” Nick said, and Delia had to bite her lip even harder.

  The waiter looked at her, shrugged, then set the plate down in front of her. “No matter,” he said. “In New York I see everything.”

  Fortunately for Delia’s struggle toward decorum, he walked away after that. She gulped in another deep breath, then another.

  “Oh, dear, oh, dear, oh, dear,” she chanted as she resolved to compose herself right this very minute. Nick was still watching her and still perplexed. She could feel that without looking at him. “I’m all right,” she managed in a voice quavering on the edge of her hardfought-for control. “Just a little tension release, I guess.”

  She inhaled deeply and let her breath out slowly each time. The yoga class she’d taken a couple of years ago was coming in handy now.

  “I can think of worse ways of getting rid of stress,” he said, sounding relieved.

  She looked up at him then, at his dark, shadowed eyes and the tumble of thick hair blown thicker still by the winter wind. Suddenly the impulse to laugh had disappeared.

  “I can think of a better way,” she said.

  Her near whisper carried with it a charge of sexual energy that crackled across the table. She saw Nick suck in his breath fast and knew the charge had connected.

  “I think we’d better stick to the business at hand for the moment,” he said after a few deep breaths of his own.

  An image of the two of them together on top of this table flashed across Delia’s mind. They were tearing each other’s clothes off while plates and cutlery crashed to the floor around them. She felt her pulse race and had to gasp again. First a spastic fit of laughter, now vivid turn-on fantasies. She absolutely had to get a grip on herself.

  “And what is the business at hand?” she forced herself to ask. She was still shaky.

  “Well, to start with, I don’t believe Samuel lives in that apartment we were just in,” Nick said as he continued to eye her warily.

  “What makes you say that?”

  Nick leaned so close across the table she could smell his clean, masculine scent. Delia had to will herself to concentrate on what he was saying.

  “Samuel was a nut for nature, so much so I can’t imagine he isn’t still into it. He collected pieces of wood and stones he thought had interesting shapes. He kept a lot of plants, too. He had a natural talent for making them grow, and he loved to take care of them. There were no plants or nature specimens in what we saw of that apartment, and I’m willing to wager there are none in the rest of it, either.”

  “Ma
ybe he lost interest in that stuff.”

  “Maybe, except that it was more than an interest with Samuel. It was his passion.”

  Nick was still leaning close, watching her. He probably could see skepticism in her eyes.

  “Do you have that letter?” he asked.

  “What?” She didn’t get what he was talking about right away.

  “The letter we found at Penelope’s that was supposed to have come from Samuel.”

  She thought for a moment, then reached into the pocket of her coat, which she’d flung over the booth back next to her. She took out the crumpled envelope.

  “Here it is,” she said.

  Nick took the envelope out of her hand and looked it over.

  “See,” he said. “Just like I thought I remembered. The return address isn’t written out in longhand like the rest. It’s just a printed label. There are stationery stores and office places in this town that will stamp these things out for you while you wait. Anybody could have had this label made and put it on here to look like Samuel was living at that address.”

  Delia snorted and shook her head. “You’re really desperate to come up with a way to make it look like my brother isn’t behind this thing, aren’t you?”

  Nick had his mouth open and a look on his face that made her almost certain he was about to launch into a defense of his theory when the front door to the diner burst open and a hefty guy in a bright green down parka charged in.

  “Happy Christmas Eve day, everybody,” he shouted.

  The cashier by the door smiled wryly. “Same to you, Jimmy,” she said.

  Delia shot up out of the booth and grabbed her coat, nearly sweeping the plate of untouched breakfast off the table.

  “I have to go,” she said. “There’s something I promised to do today, and I have to do it.”

  How could she have lost track of such an important occasion as Christmas Eve day? She really had been taken out of herself by all that’d been happening to her lately.

  “You can come along if you like,” she said to Nick, who was still sitting in the booth with his mouth open.

  She turned on her heel and headed for the door almost too quickly to let herself think that he just might be right about the envelope.

  ONE OF THE LAST places Nick wanted them to head for right now was Hester Street. He’d argued with Delia about that half the way down there, including through the stop at Gramercy Park, which he also didn’t want to make. Then he gave up. He’d always thought of himself as a persuasive man, but he was no match for her stubbornness. She insisted she had obligations and refused to listen to his objections, and that was that. He’d never known a woman, or maybe anybody at all, who could make him so exasperated. The last time she was in this neighborhood, somebody tried to run her over with a car. What could she be in for now? Maybe a sniper out to shoot her in the head? That thought, and the way it rang through to Nick as a real possibility, sent his hand to the back of his waistband to assure himself his hardware was still there and at the ready.

  Delia came across as a piece of hardware herself sometimes, like now when she was determined to have things her own way. She also still believed Samuel could be behind all of this. Her insistence on that almost had Nick considering the possibility she could be right. At least, Samuel might be one of the possible suspects, along with Tobias Wren, who appeared to have dropped out of sight. There was also the not-so-incredible theory that Delia’s tormentor came from right here on Hester Street. A smart woman like her should know that could be true, but she didn’t want to hear about it. Nick, on the other hand, was well aware that this settlement house was full of repeat offenders, substance abusers and, most significantly, people who were down on their luck and close to desperate. That added up to strong motive in Nick’s book.

  “Motive for what?” Delia asked.

  They were on their way up the steps to the front door of the settlement house main building. They’d been at the diner during late lunch hour, even though they’d ordered breakfast. The ride down here with a stop in between had taken nearly two hours. It was now going on the end of afternoon. The sky was already turning dark, maybe with the chance of more snow. The lights had been turned on over the door. Two fellows were on ladders on each side of the doorway, stringing lights and garland. Nick’s guess was that they’d deliberately waited till Christmas Eve, the last minute, to do the outdoor decorating. Otherwise in a neighborhood like this one, the decorations were liable to get stolen before the holiday came around.

  “Motive for knocking over a lady from uptown and picking her pockets clean,” he said in answer to Delia.

  “Who do you think would do that?”

  Another naive question. Nick sighed. “Jaycee and her friends are one possibility.”

  “And where do you think she parks her late-model sedan while she’s living on the streets?”

  Delia had a point. Jaycee and her gang weren’t likely to own a car like the one that tried to run Delia down. Still, there were other possibilities.

  “People like this sell information all the time. Maybe whoever’s after you got to somebody here and put them on the payroll.”

  Nick had opened the front door for Delia to pass through. When he looked up, he noticed the guys on the ladder were giving him the evil eye. They must have heard what he said. He told himself he didn’t care. He knew he had a cop’s suspicion of street people and the like. Though he knew that was a prejudice, he also believed he was justified in thinking the way he did. That’s why he checked up and down the street for lurking characters, and vehicles, too, before following Delia inside. He avoided the hostile stares of the guys on the ladders. They’d probably made him for a cop type by now. That meant he and they were natural enemies, or at least on opposite sides of a very important line. Nick felt like telling them that he liked being on Hester Street even less than they wanted him here, but he kept his mouth shut.

  Delia didn’t head left toward the classrooms as she had the other day. She turned right along a wide corridor where kids were draping handmade paper chains over the tops of the bulletin boards and in doorways. For a moment the red and green construction paper loops strung together reminded Nick of his own childhood. He was a little surprised to see they still made paper chains. Some things about holiday time and kids must stay the same always. He reminded himself not to get too nostalgic about that.

  The activity in the corridor grew even more intense as they approached a wide doorway. Delia pushed the latch bar on one of the double doors and hurried through. Once again she was bustling along too fast to let Nick move in front at point position where he could check out what she might be getting herself into. He had to content himself with rear guard for now, with checking the corridor before following her through the double doors. He was almost disgruntled to see a totally unthreatening scene of children and adults alike scurrying about in preparation for Christmas. But, no matter how innocent this place might appear on the surface, he intended to keep on his toes. With that resolve in mind, he wasn’t too pleased to find Delia inside the settlement house’s huge recreation hall nearly engulfed by a hug from Jaycee.

  The hall was as busy as the corridor had been. Red and green crepe paper streamers had been strung in a canopy over rows of long tables covered with white paper tablecloths decorated with children’s holiday drawings in crayon. As he strode past one of those tables, Nick recognized the same kind of stick figure family he’d drawn himself as a child. The mother, father and children were holding hands between a Christmas tree and a fireplace with stockings hung at the mantel. Nick wondered how many of the children who came to this place had ever actually experienced such an idyllic scene in their own lives. The thought couldn’t help but touch his heart with a pang of compassion. All the same, he hurried across the rec hall toward Delia.

  They’d stopped at Gramercy Park on the way down here so she could pick up a huge bag of gifts she’d stashed in her apartment. Nick had been dead set against doing that, but
once again she wouldn’t listen. His frustration level had been over the top from then on. When she’d insisted on carrying the bag of gifts herself, he’d shrugged and let her do it. Now, Jaycee was directing Delia toward the evergreen tree at the other end of the hall. She hurried toward it with Jaycee in her wake and Nick not far behind but at enough of a distance so he could survey the room and Delia at the same time.

  She unloaded a pile of brightly wrapped packages and arranged them under the tree that was hung with more paper chains and strings of popcorn, too. In fact, all of the decorations on the tree looked to be handmade. Nick couldn’t help remembering the elaborate trees in the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria and thinking how much more like a real Christmas this one here looked. There he was, in danger once again of turning to holiday mush, until a glimpse of Delia’s face rehardened his resolve.

  Jaycee had been poking around among the tree branches while the pile of gifts was being stacked underneath. Finally, she’d pulled an envelope out, the square kind that holiday cards come in. She handed the envelope to Delia. Nick was instantly reminded of the card she’d picked up at her mail service office and what turned out to be written inside. He watched as she slipped her finger under the envelope flap and tore it open. He’d been right. It was a card. She didn’t appear to pay much attention to what was on the outside. She flipped the card open almost instantly and read what was inside. It was his glimpse of her face at that moment that sent Nick hurrying toward her.

  “What is it?” he asked, trying to keep his voice calmer than he was feeling.

  She swept past him, shaking her head as if to indicate that she couldn’t answer right now as she headed toward the door out of the recreation hall.

  “Where are you going?” he called after her, taking long strides to keep up with her near-run.