Finding Sarah (31 page)

Even before he could see her
clearly, Randy knew it was Sarah leaving the DMV office in the Municipal
Building. Her walk, the tilt of her head, the way she tucked a wayward lock of
hair behind her ear. He could almost smell the peaches, even though she was
still thirty feet away. She dug through her purse, and for a moment, he thought
about ducking to the back entrance.

Coward.

He took a deep breath and strode
down the hall toward the police department offices, burying the desire to
approach her.

She had her insurance check, he
knew, although he’d made the Polk County Highway Patrol into the good guys. He
didn’t want her coming to him out of gratitude. Kovak had done all the
follow-up on her kidnapping. The fact that Chris was now a murder suspect had
been all over the papers. He’d seen her on the news after that one hit the fan.
She looked composed, like she’d finally made peace with David’s death.

It had been almost two months
since she’d sent him away, and he’d dealt with the pain. Or so he’d thought.
Without knowing exactly why, he stopped, turned, and glanced back.

She looked up from her purse, her
gaze hesitating at his face. He saw the uncertainty in her stone blue eyes, the
eyes he saw in his dreams every night, and he could see her trying to find an
escape route. Her face was as transparent as ever. Damn, he didn’t know if he
wanted to shake her or hug her. His promise to give her space kept him from
doing either. He gave her a polite nod and a quick smile. Waited.

“Hi, Randy.” She stepped toward
him. Looked at his chest, not his eyes. At least she wasn’t looking any lower.

“Hi yourself. You look good.” But
not happy. Shadows under her eyes, and she was still too thin. Definitely hug,
not shake. He dug for control.

“Started working out.”

“Good for you.” He saw the gears
spinning before she spoke again.

She shifted her purse from one
shoulder to the other. “Will you call me? I’d like to talk.”

“I can spare a few minutes.” He
motioned to some seats in the lobby.

“Can’t. Jennifer’s waiting.” She
hurried past him toward the door. He watched her stop, look over her shoulder,
and his mouth went dry.

“Call me,” she said again,
extending her thumb and pinkie to her face, miming talking on a phone.

So she could tell him it was over
for good? He gave her another nod and walked down the hall. Despite the big
lunch he’d just finished, he felt empty inside.

* * * * *

When Randy didn’t call that
night, or the next, Sarah wanted to pick up the phone, to explain, but every
time she reached for it, something pulled her hand away. She had tried
rehearsing the words, but her voice kept breaking. If she couldn’t speak them
aloud in an empty room, how could she say them to him? It wasn’t right. She’d
sent him away. She should make the first move. But was she ready?

The memories she’d blocked had
come flooding back and she was dealing with them. What if he couldn’t cope with
someone who spent way too much time as an emotional basket case? Her support
group said give it time. Time. How long would it take? Even the money from the
insurance settlement hadn’t helped. Being her own Sarah didn’t feel the way she
thought it would.

When she’d bumped into Randy the
other day, her first instinct had been to race up to him and bury herself in
his chest. But he’d looked so distant. Did he care? Probably not, or he would
have called.

Sarah sat on the edge of her bed
and looked at the pile of clean laundry in the basket beside her. Somehow, she’d
managed to pair all her socks without regard for color or style. She dumped
them onto the floor to start over when he called.

“Is this a bad time?” His voice
was guarded.

“No. Doing laundry.” Darn, she
was already breathing too fast. She listened to the silence on the other end of
the line. “How are you?” she finally said. Dumb, but a start.

“I’m okay. Busy. Sorry I didn’t
call sooner.”

“Randy, this is hard for me.
Please, bear with me?”

“Always, Sarah.”

This time, she heard compassion
in his voice and something loosened inside. “I’m going to a support group. It’s
helping, but I’m still confused.” She took a deep breath. “Whenever I think of
you, everything comes rushing back, and I don’t feel the same inside, and I
want it all to be like it was, but it isn’t, and I don’t know how long it will
take, or if—”

“Let me be there for you. Please.”

“I want to.” She wondered if he
could hear her—she could barely get the words through the lump in her throat.

“Let me in, Sarah. I’m here for
you.”

She sniffed. “I do want to,
honest.”

“Open your door.”

Sarah walked to the door and
peered through the peephole. Across the hall, cross-legged, leaning against the
wall, sat Randy, talking into his cell phone. That lock of his hair still hung
into his eyes. She longed to brush it back. She went to release the deadbolt,
but her hand shook. Weak-kneed, she sank to the floor. “Not yet,” she
whispered.

“Then I’ll stay here. What did
you want to talk about?”

“You. Me. Us.”

“I like the sound of the last one
best.”

“That’s what scares me. I thought
I knew
us
, but now I’m not sure. Every
us
thought has Chris in
it. We never did any normal get-to-know-each-other stuff, did we? It was always
your job. The case. Even going to a play turned into the case.” She rested her
palm on the door, leaned her forehead against the cool wood. “What if we don’t
like each other when there’s no case?”

She heard a deep sigh. “Would it
help if I said that I never thought of you as part of a case? That I couldn’t
wait for it to be gone so that we could be together?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Open the door, Sarah. Let me
tell you face-to-face that I love you. That I’ll do whatever you need. That I
understand you need time and space, but it won’t keep me from loving you.”

Heart pounding, Sarah pulled
herself up and unlocked the door. Randy must have heard the deadbolt release,
because when she opened it, he was standing at her door, the phone still to his
ear.

“I hope you’ll invite me in. We
can continue on the phone if it makes you feel better,” he said. “I’ll sit on
the couch and you can go into your bedroom.”

She managed a smile and clicked
off her phone. “Stay. You’re here. I’ve been avoiding you and it isn’t fair.
You didn’t do anything wrong.” She considered the couch, then sank into one of
the armchairs. “I got the insurance money, but you know that, don’t you? And
about Chris murdering that woman—and David?”

Randy put his phone in his pocket
and sat in the chair opposite hers. He nodded.

“Did you have something to do
with it?” she asked.

He compressed his lips, but didn’t
answer.

“You did, didn’t you?”

“I lit a fire or two. What’s
important is the truth, not who found it.”

“Why didn’t you say something? I
mean, one day, I get this check from the insurance company and a form letter
that says that based on new evidence, the Highway Patrol no longer considered
the case a suicide.”

“If I told you I had anything to
do with it, I thought you might feel like you owed me. You said you needed to
work it out for yourself. I didn’t think my part in finding the truth needed to
be part of the mix.”

“You know what was the worst? It
wasn’t finding out Chris murdered David. That made me furious for a while, but
then, everything fell into place. I’d made my peace with David’s death, and
finding out he didn’t kill himself—well, that kind of outweighed the anger. The
worst was finding out Chris killed that woman when he was at school.”

Her voice started to tremble and
she couldn’t look at Randy. She almost picked up the phone again, but instead
went into the kitchen and turned off the overhead light. “Turn off the lamp.”

Randy clicked the switch and she
returned to her chair, hiding in the twilight’s semi-darkness.

“It took a while for all the
memories to come back. Chris didn’t rape me. He couldn’t. He tried to … consummate
… the stupid staged wedding, but he couldn’t perform. He told me he wanted it
to be true love, not like it had been with his bad girls. I figured he was
talking about prostitutes, and he said that with us, there wouldn’t be hitting.
But when he couldn’t get an erection, he started hitting me. I tried being
submissive, but he was too angry. That’s when I fought back and got away, but
now I keep thinking he could have killed me, too.” She choked back something
between a laugh and a sob. “Funny, isn’t it? I’m safe now, but I’m more scared
than I was when he had me in bed with him.”

“You’ve been having nightmares,
haven’t you? Flashbacks?”

Although it was a question, she
knew he was telling, not asking. She met his eyes for an instant before
lowering her gaze. Took refuge in the familiar. “You want some hot chocolate?”

“Sounds good.”

She went to the kitchen and saw
Randy head toward the stereo. “Bridge Over Troubled Water”
shimmered
through the room. He stood at the edge of the kitchen, singing along softly.
When the song finished, he whispered, “I’d like to be that for you. Your
bridge.”

Silent tears trickled down Sarah’s
cheeks. She handed Randy a mug and took hers back to her chair. He followed two
paces behind her and settled into the other one.

Sarah closed her eyes and tried
the relaxation techniques she’d been learning at the Women’s Center. A deep
breath in through her nose to a count of three, an exhale through her mouth to
a count of eight, her mind focused on a peaceful beach. When her heart stopped
drumming against her rib cage, she spoke.

“I’m going to try to explain
something I don’t understand myself. I need you to stay where you are and not
interrupt.”

“Take your time.”

“When I sent you away before … it
was—” She swallowed and tried again. “When you brought me home, when you
touched me, it didn’t feel the same. No tingles. Not like with Chris, but
strange.

“Before all this happened, when
you took me in your arms, I felt like nothing bad could ever happen to me. I
was afraid I wouldn’t feel like that again. I needed to find some way to
separate you from Chris. I didn’t know how I could explain that to you without
hurting you. But I think hiding from it hurt you even more.”

Even in the dim light, she saw
his brown-and-hazel eyes fixed on her. “I was so sure I could do everything on
my own. But I couldn’t. I felt like a failure, and I was afraid you wouldn’t
want me anymore.”

“Remember when you showed up at
my place?” Randy said. “After Starsky and Hutch? You came to offer help. I
accepted. There’s no shame in that. Neither is getting outside help. I’ve been
there.”

“You? When? Why?”

He inhaled, his eyes lost their
focus, and Sarah knew he was finding a place deep inside him where the memories
were buried. When he spoke, there was no inflection in his voice.

“Ten years ago. I was still
pretty green. Uniform. There was a robbery. Guns. I did everything by the book,
but firing my weapon at another human being, even one who would have killed an
innocent bystander— You always wonder if there might have been another way. One
where no one would have to get hurt.”

“Oh, God. That must have been
horrible. Did he … Was he… How did you—?”

“I killed him. I saved a woman,
but I took a life.”

“I’m so sorry.” She looked up at
him, her eyes stinging with tears.

Randy blinked back his own. “It’s
part of the job. We have mandatory counseling. It helps, but I know what the
nightmares are like.”

She wondered if he’d slept with
the lights blazing the way she had for a week. She thought of how long it had
been before she could take down the trash without Maggie coming along. She
leaned forward to set her mug on the coffee table and Randy reached to help
her. When his fingers brushed against hers, a tingle—faint but familiar—made
her quiver.

“I liked making love with you,”
she murmured. “I don’t know what I’d do if it couldn’t be the same. Would you
want to be with me forever if the pleasure never came back?”

He set her mug down with a clunk.
“You can’t think I’m in this just for sex. If that’s all you thought, we can
say goodbye right now.”

“No!” Her response was automatic
and its vehemence surprised her.

He pressed his fingertips to his
temples, slid them down to his chin and exhaled a shaky breath. “So, does that
mean you still have feelings for me?”

She hesitated. Images of Randy
and Chris swirled through her mind. Then there was only Randy. “Yes. I do. But
can you undo a relationship and start over? Pretend we’re meeting for the first
time? I don’t think so.”