By the Book (8 page)

“No,” he said, at a loss. “No one. I—”

He was about to explain that he wasn’t an extrovert, that he could talk to someone for hours and never mention anything personal if he wasn’t in the mood to share—and he was rarely in the mood—but she smiled and shook her head. She didn’t need an explanation. She already knew.

“I was just thinking that if you hadn’t told anyone in town about your job before now, that it was sort of interesting how close all the speculation about you really was.” He frowned. “The mercenary/war hero/CIA-FBI-spy guy that was either a loving son or nephew that no one seemed to know anything about.” He started to laugh. “No. Think about it. It’s like that gossip game that kids play where one whispers something into the next person’s ear and he whispers into the next person’s and so on down the line. And when the last person tells what he’s heard, it’s completely false or a garbled mess of the truth. You’re not a mercenary or a war hero but you’re in the military. You’re not with the CIA or the FBI but you work with them, and where you work is referred to by its initials. You’re not a spy, but you do spy work ... sort of.” She bobbed her head. “You’re a relative—a son or a nephew.”

For an intelligence analyst he didn’t seem to be computing very quickly.

“Don’t you see? You said you and your father had lost touch long ago, that you didn’t even know where he was until after he’d had his stroke. But someone in this town knew all about you and told someone else, who told someone else, and that’s how things got so confused but still held some element of the truth. And how did whoever it was that notified you, know where to reach you?”

His gaze slipped away from her face, roamed a bit, and then returned.

“You think my father kept tabs on me?”

“Who else?”

“And he might have told someone about me.”

“I’d say he bragged about you.” When his expression turned ambivalent, she hurried on to convince him. “Come on. Mercenary, war hero, CIA, FBI, spy? Those are all fascinating and heroic and dangerous. That’s the truth and pride getting blown out of proportion on its way through the grapevine. If he’d never said anything about you, there wouldn’t have been any rumors at all, or maybe just that you were his son, from your meeting with the lawyer. Or if he hadn’t been proud or known exactly what you were doing all that time, he might have casually mentioned to someone that you were a sailor, and the rumor would have gone through the mill and come out that you were a bum from the docks somewhere.”

“You’re really reaching here,” he said. “And I appreciate what you’re trying to do and all ...”

She could tell he didn’t appreciate it at all. “I’m not doing anything but telling you what I really think. You said I should.”

If she was right, and if for one second he started to believe she was right, a whole new bag of bugs would open up, and he wasn’t sure he’d want to look into it. Still, there she was, her honesty and sincerity as plain in her expression as the pale scattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose. She was a thoughtful woman—he’d seen a hundred examples of it—and she was simply too nice, too kind to instill false hopes where they didn’t belong.

“I did say you should. And I still want you to. I just can’t promise I’ll always agree with you.”

Say no ... and mean it.

—Nora Roberts

Though it’s easy to spell and one of the shortest words in the English language,
no
is extremely hard to say and even more difficult to enforce. But it’s not impossible.
No
is a complete sentence in and of itself. No explanations are needed. No excuses required. If you mean to say no, say it. Then say it again. And again ...

“N
O. NO. NO,” SHE
told her mother over the phone. “Do not touch your savings or even think of cashing in one of your bonds to pay his gambling debts, Mom. You need that money to live on.” It was midmorning and already her stomach was growling for lunch. Hungry and now angry she could hear her own voice puncturing the ceiling of the requisite noise level inside the bank. She glanced about, saw heads turning, and lowered it. “Listen to me, Mom. Just giving him the money isn’t going to help. He’ll do it again and again until you’re broke.” She listened. “No, I can’t get him a loan here. He has no collateral and I know he won’t pay it back. No. No. I haven’t abandoned him. I told him this morning I’d help him think of something, and I will. But you have to promise me not to give him another dime.” She waited. “Promise me. Okay. Now try to relax. Remember your blood pressure. We’ll think of something. I love you too.”

She hung up the phone and pressed her eyes closed with her fingers. This lesson in saying no was getting a real workout. She’d told Felix, “No. No. No,” earlier that morning when he’d suggested
she
loan him the money.

“I won’t,” she’d said, recalling that the counselor she and Jane and her mother had gone to see about Felix’s drinking problem had said it would only make his drinking easier for him, loaning him money, solving his problems for him. “I couldn’t anyway. I don’t have that kind of money just sitting around.”

“It doesn’t have to be the whole ten thousand. Five would keep them off my back for a while,” he said, nursing a cup of black coffee. He actually looked better drunk than sober these days. To see what he’d become was heart wrenching.

“You don’t have anything you could sell? Nothing stashed away?”

He gave her a flat look. “You mean all the stale air she left me after the divorce? I doubt anyone would be interested in buying the air I breathe. But maybe this old shirt?” His expression brightened falsely. “Think I could sell the shirt off my back?”

“I’m trying to help you.”

“Then you’re going to have to come up with more than a buck fifty-two. These guys are serious, Ellen.”

“I realize that,” she said, getting up from the small kitchen table to put her cup in the sink. She hesitated and frowned over his reference to a buck fifty-two, then let it go. “I have to go to work. You stay here today. Sleep. Don’t drink. Don’t go out to drink. I need time to think.”

“Don’t take too long.”

“Ellen?” She jumped at the sound of her name, turned to find Joleen standing beside her desk, looking concerned. “Is everything all right? Are you all right?”

“No,” she said automatically. “But I will be. It’s just some personal stuff. Can I do something for you?”

Joleen looked around them for privacy, then bent low and spoke in a soft voice. “It’s about the loan you’ve applied for at Quincey’s First Savings and Loan.”

“What loan?”

She made an awkward noise in her throat. “The loan they called here to get a personal reference for just now. As an employee of First Federal, you should have come here first, dear. I know it isn’t any of my business, but we have special rates for—”

“I haven’t applied for a loan anywhere. I don’t know what you’re talking about, Joleen.”

“You cosigned? On a loan application? Yesterday? With your brother?”

“No. No way. No. I didn’t,” she said, shaking her head as the pieces fell into place. “Yesterday. No. Joleen, I’m sorry,” she said, reaching for the telephone. “For taking up your time. For taking up the Savings and Loan’s time. I’ll call them right now and straighten this out.”

Joleen straightened up, completely dumfounded. She lingered a moment, then wandered off.

Ellen was mortified, with a singular craving for blood with her lunch. After settling things with the Savings and Loan—a simple matter of canceling the request she hadn’t made in the first place—she took a few minutes’ refuge in the ladies’ room, locking the door, checking both stalls, then sitting on the counter next to the sink to think of something pleasant ... anything pleasant.

Naturally, Jonah came swiftly to mind, and she smiled. What a wonderfully strange creature he was. Quiet and reserved was her initial perception, but she hadn’t factored in thoughtful and intelligent, really intelligent. A thinker. An observer.

She hadn’t realized she was tired of sitting in one position over dinner until he’d suggested they leave—and yet the minute he did, she knew that something in her manner or posture had given her away. He was like that, watching her all the time. Not as if she were a bug under glass, but as if she were a creature he wanted to know in its natural habitat, because it mattered to him. Because he wanted it to survive and thrive in his presence, as if he were an intruder or a foreign organism in a pristine petri dish. Watching her to see if he could fit into her life somehow, without damaging it, without upsetting the natural balance of her existence.

The derisive noise she made echoed through the restroom. If he knew how unbalanced her life really was, he wouldn’t look twice at her. Well, he might look, but he’d see she was just a too-nice person who couldn’t stop people from walking all over her.

With more to say and so much more they wanted to know, they had both been reluctant to cut short their first date. It had been a perfect summer evening with a bright half-moon and more than enough stars in the clear night sky. They’d walked up one side of Glover Street and down the other, talking, talking, talking. They were so alone in their own little world, they didn’t notice the change in their surroundings from commercial to residential until the streetlights grew few and far between and she tripped over a piece of uneven sidewalk.

“Oops. You okay?” he asked, still holding her, a protective arm wrapped behind her after successfully breaking her fall. “Maybe we shouldn’t have come so far without infrared, for night vision.”

She laughed and held on to him until she was steady ... and for just a little longer after that.

“You mean you don’t have any special equipment sewn into the lining of your jacket? Or folded into the heel of your shoe?”

“Sorry. Wrong guy. You’re thinking of James Bond.”

No, she wasn’t. She was thinking that his arms felt good around her, strong and safe, and that she liked the way he smelled, soapy and male.

“Oh, that’s right. No British accent. We’re doomed.”

“Not yet, we’re not.” With his arm still around her, he turned her back the way they’d come. “Here, lean on me. I have super X-ray vision.”

“That’s Superman.”

“Oh yeah. Well, I’m surefooted. How’s that?”

She chuckled and adjusted her rhythm of walking to his. “I think that was the last Mohican.”

“How about we just stumble back together?”

“I like that one.” She smiled at him.

“Me too,” he said, his voice low and soft, the warm pleasure in it heating her blood. “Now, where were we? You have a mother and a married sister and they both live here in town and ... oh yes, you were going to tell me about your brother.”

“No, I wasn’t.” Not tonight. Not anytime soon if she could avoid it. “I was about to ask you a question.”

“Ask away.”

“Do you gamble at all?”

“Gamble. Do you mean with cards, or with life in general?”

Well, now that he made the distinction ... “Both.”

“No. I’m not much of a risk taker. Personally or professionally. A finely tuned calculation is about as close as I get to taking any kind of chance on something I don’t know for a fact. Even when I act on instinct, I have facts to back it up. It’s the nature of my job—my nature, too, I guess. As for gambling with cards ...” He thought a moment. “We played a lot of poker when we were at sea. Hours and hours, as I recall. I wasn’t very good at it.”

“You lost a lot of money at it?” She heard the hopeful note in her voice and cringed.

“Probably,” he said with a chuckle. “I never kept track. I’d lose what I had and quit. Play again after payday.”

“But you didn’t run up huge debts,” she said. It was a statement more than a question, and while she was glad he was a practical sort of man, she also knew he wouldn’t have the answer to Felix’s dilemma and that she wouldn’t feel comfortable discussing it with him.

He’d been glancing at her frequently, but now he gave her a steady look. “Was your father a gambler? Did he have problems with it?”

“No. No. Nothing like that,” she said, feeling bad about the gentle concern in his voice. He had problems of his own and didn’t need to be concerned about hers as well. Besides, a not-too-nice woman with the right attitude could solve her own problems, right?

To ease his mind, she launched herself into the carefully constructed character study of her father she’d developed in her youth. The story of a family man who had worked every day as a foreman in a glass factory that was part of the huge Ball Corporation out of Muncie. The man who drove the family up Interstate 69 every summer, stopping in Marion to pick up cousins, depositing them all at the family-owned cabin on Salamonie Lake for the summer—returning to Quincey to spend the summer alone, to work. A Hoosier fan. A member of the American Legion. A sportsman who liked to hunt and fish. A man who led his life happily and contentedly.

And that was where her adult version of the story would have kicked in, had she allowed it. A man who led his life happily and contentedly—as long as he had a beer in his hand. Funny, he hadn’t seemed like an alcoholic; she never thought of him as one. He wasn’t like Felix. She’d never seen him falling-down drunk or abusive or in any way different than the fathers of all her friends—except that he liked to drink beer on hot afternoons, after work, after dinner, in the car, after church on Sundays, during the Hoosier games. ... But by the time he died of liver disease six years earlier, Felix had long been showing signs of having serious problems. By the time they sought counseling for Felix’s problem, it was too late to help her father and too late to remodel her memory of him.

Oh, in her mind she knew the truth, but what she told Jonah was the only truth her heart would accept.

“And were you Daddy’s little girl?” he’d asked when she finished.

“His favorite, you mean?” He nodded and she laughed. “Oh, no, that was Felix. Felix was everyone’s favorite. The baby. The only boy. Even Jane and I spoiled him rotten.”

He smiled at that, looking thoughtful. “You never did tell me about him,” he said. “What does he do? What’s he like? Does he live here in town too?”