haven’t seen you walking on this beach before. Do you live around here?” he asked eventually.
She shook her head.
“My home is up ahead, off the point,” he told her. Jennifer thought it must be nice to live on the lake, be able to enjoy this beach whenever the notion struck. It was expensive property. They walked in silence again and Jennifer hoped the next thing said was going to be goodbye.
“What happened last night, Jennifer?”
His voice was low and deep, the emotion carefully checked. He had stopped walking and was watching her closely, watching her reaction. “What?” Jennifer honestly didn’t know how to answer the question.
“You’re married. You have a beaut of a black eye. I want to know what happened, so I can decide what I should do,” he elaborated patiently, but tensely. There was nothing idle about his body language or his focus on her.
She didn’t answer him right away. What was she suppose to say? She already felt horrible. The last thing she wanted was someone treading in an area of her life where she herself was not yet able to cope. “They are not related.”
He removed a hand from his jacket pocket and reached out slowly, clearly afraid he would startle her again, to gently touch the swelling that radiated around her right eye and down her cheek, and when he spoke, the emotion was no longer contained. “Jennifer, this is recent.”
His touch burned and made her cringe inside over everything she had lost. “I walked into a door,” she said flatly.
He frowned. His entire face tightened at her nonanswer and her rejection of his question. “Jennifer…”
He wanted to help and it was the last thing she wanted. “I don’t want to talk about it.” Her voice was firm, rigid and laden with warning. Scott wanted to protest. She could see that. All the signs where there. The clenched hand, the set jaw, the eyes that refused to yield the question. But something stopped him, and he pushed his hand back into the pocket of his jacket and nodded abruptly before looking away. Jennifer watched, grateful. He was angry and doing his best not to direct it toward her. She had left an awful dilemma for him, but she couldn’t release him from it. She did look battered. She was bruised, tired, exhausted and jumpy. But for the life of her she simply couldn’t explain the truth. She could barely cope with it herself. She simply couldn’t deal with it this morning.
He started walking again, and she followed him. He deliberately shortened his steps so she would once again be walking across from him. They walked along in silence, and Jennifer could see Scott measuring every step she took, measuring the growing exhaustion, the heaviness of the fatigue that made her veer off center time and time again. She could do little about what he saw. She was exhausted and she knew it and she had no reserves left.
They’d gone more than a mile down the beach and were near a private boathouse and pier when he stopped. “This is my home.” He said the words, and she heard that he hated saying them. He didn’t want to go. He didn’t want to leave his questions unanswered. He wanted to help. She read all of those desires as he stood and looked at her. She did her best to look directly back, even if the intensity of his gaze made her want to drop her eyes and look away. “Could I walk with you a while longer? Would you like some company?” he asked, and she could feel the tug to let him do so.
She shook her head. She suddenly realized what a mess she’d created, and the fact that she had no desire to fix it both amused her and made her sad. She smiled, and it was the first genuine smile she had formed in the past seventy-two hours. “No. I’ll be just fine, Scott. Thank you for offering.”
He didn’t want to hear that answer. “You’re sure?”
He was pressing her to change her mind, and her sense of fatigue grew all the greater. She needed to be alone now more than ever. There was no room in her life for company and conversation when there were memories demanding her attention.
Jennifer nodded. “Go on. I’m just going to walk for a while longer,” she assured him.
He reluctantly did as she asked. Jennifer watched as he walked up the path to his back patio. She turned toward the grove of trees and began to walk again, determined to not return home until her body demanded sleep and the memories were banished. A few minutes later she was frowning, angry with the fact she now suddenly missed the company. No, not company, him. She missed him. The sun was barely up, and she was thinking about a stranger. She would never see him again, but he had entered her life briefly on one of the toughest mornings of her life, and she would probably always remember him because of that one fact.
Jennifer racked the balls, flipping them to solid, stripe, solid, the eight ball in the center, and sent the cue ball rolling to the far end of the table. The college kids at the next table to the right were laughing at rather crude jokes, and the group of six guys at the bar were boisterous and drunk. Jennifer ignored them with the ease of practice. The first two tables to her left were empty, but Randy and William were playing at the third, and she occasionally tuned in to their conversation, a rather fascinating discussion of a drug case that had been in the papers the past couple of days. The two cops were serious players, and she often played one or the other during the course of an evening. Tonight she preferred to play alone. She broke the rack of balls with a vicious stroke—short, explosive, centered.
She had killed Thomas Bradford tonight.
The chapter, written an hour ago, sat in her briefcase, scrawled by hand on a tablet of white paper while she sat at the back corner booth, shelling peanuts and nursing a diet cola.
The only thing she had left was her career and she had just hung it out to dry. Ann was going to kill her; her agent would not appreciate having the golden goose killed. Jennifer smiled tightly without it reaching her eyes and drilled the seven ball into the rail to send it the length of the table and into a corner pocket. He was quite dead, her detective, Thomas Bradford, the bullets having hit him in the middle of the back and ripped through his chest. He was now as dead as her parents, as dead as her husband, as dead as her three-month-old daughter. Dead.
Maybe she should sell the house.
She contemplated the idea as she moved around the table, laying out her next shot with the precision of someone who had learned to see the game as an interesting study in geometry.
“Jen, what happened? Who hit you?!” The jacket dropped onto the stool next to her, the detective’s shield flipping visible. Randy and William both looked over at Bob’s words and immediately left their game, heading her way. Jennifer looked up at her friend, annoyed, and then looked back at the cue ball and laid her next shot with finesse, nudging the ten ball into the side pocket without disturbing the eight ball. She wasn’t surprised to see him. It was midnight, and Bob Volishburg got off at eleven-thirty. He knew her car. This place was on his way home. He would come in to talk with the other guys from the force, maybe play her a game and then see that she got safely home. He had a mission in life to see that she always got home safely. Compliments of her brother, Jennifer was sure.
“I walked into a door,” she replied flatly.
The honest answer went over about as well tonight with the three cops as it had done four days earlier with Scott.
“I was wondering if you would come back,” Scott said, stopping a few feet away from her so as not to crowd her space and startle her. His voice was calm and steady while inside his reaction was one of elation. She was back. He had been praying and hoping and working toward this day. She was sitting out on the pier behind his house, dangling her feet over
