Lexington Connection (34 page)

“She certainly has a pull on you.” Brenda’s tone was cautious.

Diana shook her head, coming back to the present. “Margaret used to say I lost all common sense when it came to Jessie.” She glanced up to see Brenda bite her lip. “I suppose so.” She sipped her drink. “The highlight of my life was seeing the surprise and pleasure on Jessie’s face when I showed up in town.”

“If she knocked on your door expecting that from you, she got a rude surprise. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you so mad.”

“And I had calmed down some by the time I got to the court.” Diana shook her head. “I haven’t been that mad since—” She stopped. Even as much as Brenda had gained her confidence, there were some things she couldn’t say and
Since I wanted to break Waldo into tiny little pieces
was something she couldn’t say. “Well, for a long, long time. I was so mad I was afraid to move, that I might shatter and explode or I don’t know, something.” She shivered at her remembered anger.

“Did she say why she came?” Diana shook her head. “Why she dropped in on you?”

Diana moved her drink at the approach of the waitress with their food. “She said she promised Nicki, that’s her sister, if she ever got close to Tallahassee, she’d stop and look me up. That’s all.” She accepted the plate, took a deep breath, and waited until the waitress was gone. “You know what I think really pissed me off?”

“What’s that?” Brenda began all the motions of modifying her sandwich, removing the pickle, adding ketchup, salt. “Want my tomato?” Diana shook her head.

“She said she was afraid to contact me in the years past because it might compromise her integrity with her co-workers.” She looked to Brenda for confirmation, and Brenda didn’t look up. “Is that strange or what?”

Brenda closed her sandwich. She didn’t say anything, her expression carefully neutral.

“What?” Diana demanded. “You’re in law enforcement, tell me: did I expect too much?”

Brenda avoided Diana’s eye sas she spoke, which made Diana listen more carefully. “Every place is different. You have to work with those people. They have to back you up. Sometimes you get in places where you depend on them answering your call. You try hard not to give them any doubts.” She looked up at Diana as if checking whether Diana understood what she was saying. “From everything you said, Czar was a powerful force. Anything related to him would have been—” She stopped suddenly. “Questionable,” she finally finished.

Diana realized that Brenda had deliberately picked a more tactful word. She put her sandwich down. “Have I compromised you?” The thought had never occurred to her before.

Brenda shook her head. “No. You’re not doing anything now. You’ve been under such a microscope that everyone knows you’re clean. Oh, there’s been some comments.” She shook her head with an exasperated look. “Nothing substantive to speak of.” She looked up to meet Diana’s defensive gaze. “But you have to understand, at that time, with everything going on, it had to have been a different story.”

Diana took a deep breath. She didn’t like it. She wanted to defend herself that she had done everything she could to keep Jessie safe, but with the passage of time, she had gotten a different perspective. Years of time and dealing with prosecutors and lawyers and police. Oh, yes, she had a very different perspective. “All right,” she said after a moment. “Maybe I expected too much. Maybe I did have the fantasy she’d love me enough to give up police work, but I knew it was a fantasy. I guess what pissed me off was that I never heard anything. I mean, once it came out I saved her butt, I figured I deserved at least a thank you. I didn’t expect something so simple would compromise her integrity.”

“I don’t know,” Brenda said. “I wasn’t there.”

Diana eyed Brenda as she ate her sandwich. There were times she could forget Brenda was in law enforcement. Short brown tightly curled hair, broad open face, soft-spoken, reasonable, pragmatic. Diana didn’t know how she would have survived these past months without the friendship of this woman who exuded calmness, confidence and reason. Nothing seemed to excite her.

“So you think I was wrong,” Diana said finally. That law enforcement had its own little code, its unspoken rules, should not have been any surprise. Maybe an oversight but no surprise.

“Depends on what you wanted. If you wanted to hurt her back.” She raised an eyebrow as Diana’s chin went up. “I repeat, if you were hurt and you wanted to hurt her back for the years of silence, you probably did a bang-up job. If you wanted to open a conversation, you probably blew it. I think a lot of it depends on what she wanted. If she was just looking up an old friend…” Brenda gave Diana a sudden look. “She knows you loved her, doesn’t she?”

“Yeah, she finally got the picture. It was just late in the game. A lot of things started happening then and it got shoved to a back burner.”

Brenda sat back, looked at Diana curiously. “She tell you she loved you?”

No,
Diana admitted to herself. “At the cabin she said she missed me, was hurt I never came back, loved me but never understood me. But that was a reference to the past, not the present.”

“Diana?”

“No,” Diana finally answered. “She never said she loved me, never in the present tense.”
And she never acted like it either. Friends with benefits,
Diana thought bitterly.
I’m a fool.
She took a deep breath. “So I’ve been carrying a torch all these years for someone who doesn’t love me back? God, that makes me sound pitiful. Or stupid. Or both.” Diana looked at the remainder of her sandwich. She wasn’t going to be able to finish it. “Some fantasy person who looked like Jessie and didn’t exist at all.”

“I wouldn’t say that she didn’t exist,” Brenda said slowly. “And it might well be she does have feelings for you, maybe just not what you wanted.”

Diana buried her face in her hands. “God, I’m an idiot.”

“No, not an idiot,” Brenda assured her. “But maybe you’ve kept too much to yourself for your own good sometimes.”

“I called her a coward.” Through her spread fingers, she saw Brenda wince.

“Not exactly the thing to call someone in law enforcement, dear.”

Diana didn’t raise her head. “I didn’t link it to anything about her job. I just said she was a coward when she didn’t look up Julie, when she used her to avoid looking for a relationship. When she didn’t call me.”

“That might well have been true then, but it probably wasn’t the thing to say.”

Diana slowly raised her head. “I really blew it, didn’t I?” She searched Brenda’s face. “I’ve been doing the same thing I accused Jessie of, holding out for her the same way she held out for Julie.”

“I don’t think it’s the same.” Brenda took a long swallow of beer. “You had a few things going on that were obstacles.”

“Like being tailed when you’re trying to date?” Diana said with bitter amusement. At least she could laugh about it now, and it appeared that Brenda too could see the humor in it. Now.

Brenda did give a smile of remembering. “Well, there were difficulties, I’ll admit. It wasn’t easy but it wasn’t impossible. You and I flirted with the idea of a relationship before we settled down to be friends. You and Kelly worked a bit more seriously at it. You never said a relationship was out of the question.”

Diana ran her finger around the rim of her glass. “Should I have called her?”

Brenda shook her head. “Probably not. You still had a lot of legal issues. State of Kentucky still have charges against you?”

“Kentucky’s a Commonwealth but no, all that just got settled. They were pissed at the Feds over the jurisdiction, and I was the bone between two dogs fighting over territory. I thought it’d never get wrapped up and they’d leave me hanging forever.”

“It might well have been why she couldn’t contact you—because of the investigations. Some jurisdictions are funny about that.”

“So you are saying I blew it—I expected too much from her and then threw her out when she came to apologize?”

Brenda gave a sympathetic laugh. “I don’t know, Diana. This is between you and Jessie. I just hate to see you hurt.” She shook her head. “If you were hurt and wanted to lash out, then that’s done. If she loves you, then maybe she’ll figure out you wouldn’t be so mad if there wasn’t a lot of feeling there. Since you called her a coward, maybe she’ll come back just to disprove it. If there was nothing there, then maybe she’ll just pack up and be gone, figuring that, okay, she tried her bit and if that’s your attitude, good riddance. I can’t predict what someone I don’t know is going to do. Hell, I can’t predict what you’re going to do, and I know you a good deal better.”

“You’re not alone in that department.
I
don’t know what I’m going to do. All I know is I’ve got a splitting headache now and the past—” she paused to look at her watch, “the past four hours have been a nightmare.”

“Thanks.”

“Oh, you’re wonderful, Brenda. What would I do without you, as a sounding board, as a friend, as someone I can count on?” She laughed even though it hurt her head. “You’ll even tell me when I’m wrong. Now that’s a friend. Let me tell you, I’ve had a lot of ‘yes ma’am’ people in my life.”

Brenda finished her beer. “Well, now, friend, I’m going to tell you it’s late. I’ve got a shift in the morning. You’ve got plans. It’s time to go home and go to bed.” She searched Diana’s face. “Bad headache?” Diana nodded. “I’ll follow you home, make sure you get there. You going to make it tomorrow?”

“Oh, yeah. Got to. People to see, things to do.”

“Oh, God,” Diana muttered the next morning when she opened the apartment door to leave. “Florida sunshine.” She squinted at the brightness then closed the door and went back to dig out her darker sunglasses. It wasn’t like she had a hangover, she hadn’t had that much to drink. It was just the combination of the anger, the crying, the lack of sleep. It was not going to be a good morning. She longed to hide in the computer room, darken the blinds, turn down the volume of the day and just hibernate. Not to be. Instead she had to go and make nice with all the organizations she worked with when she researched early Native Americans. So here she was, dressed in blue jeans, white shirt, leather vest and knee-high laced moccasins, going out to bright sunshine, and if experience proved accurate, listening to drums all day long.

“Oh, God,” she repeated as she slipped on the darkest sunglasses possible. She glanced at her watch. “Maybe by three I can leave, come home, crash.” She scanned the sky. Carolina blue, no clouds. The day was already turning warm. Great day for a powwow.
Ohhh, my head.

The green-uniformed deputy sheriff stopped her from turning into the parking area filling the open field. Diana paused to look at the serious face behind mirrored sunglasses and the broad-brimmed hat. “Feeling better this morning?” Brenda asked.

“Pretty much, but the sun’s too bright. Good turnout so far?”

Brenda looked out over the rapidly filling field, the traffic coming down the county road. “Hasn’t stopped since nine this morning.”

“Poor baby. You got your comfy shoes on?” She was always surprised how authoritative her friend looked when she was in uniform.

The signal came for another line to start for parking, and Brenda motioned for cars to continue. “See you later. Have a good day.”

Diana parked the car and started across the field. She would put last night behind her, and she began to relax.

The feeling started about an hour later. She was at a booth looking at pottery when the hair stood up on the back of her neck. She rubbed her neck, not thinking about it and then it registered. She was being watched. She hadn’t had such a feeling for a long time, and she couldn’t imagine she had done anything recently for anyone to put a tail on her. Nothing was impossible, however. She moved along, skipping the jewelry, going over to watch the dancers’ circle. While there were dancing demonstrations at posted times, any member could dance between times. The drummers were drumming and there were about four dancers demonstrating their skills, moving in the circle, and they had drawn a small crowd. Diana could watch the dancers and unobtrusively inspect the crowd.

When she got that restless feeling again, she scanned the crowd. She didn’t get a clear glimpse except for the dark hair, but the movement was familiar enough for her to think she recognized it.
No, couldn’t be. I’m seeing things.

Just the same she moved back into the crowd, circled around and went down the row of demonstrations: cooking, weaving, drum-making, storytelling. She stopped and talked to people; after all, that was why she came. She got involved in conversation and was able to forget that specimen-in-a-tray feeling. However, when she moved, it came back. She glanced behind her and saw the individual moving through the crowd. She swore under her breath.
It just can’t be.

She turned abruptly and walked off by herself. Couldn’t be Jessie. Had to be her imagination because of the previous night. After all, she didn’t get a clear view, it was just a shoulder and someone walking away. There were lots of dark-haired women here. For Pete’s sake, it was an Indian powwow. Tall, slender, graceful—the image tugged at her memory.

Stop it
, she told herself.
First of all, it would be a hell of a coincidence if Jessie, just traveling through town, happened to attend the powwow. And why in your wildest dreams do you think Jessie would want to talk to you again after you threw her out last night? And what are you going to do if you do see her? Apologize? Cry? Insult her again? Get over it, Diana. That was just your imagination.
Or wishful thinking
.

By the time Diana sat down with a plate of pulled pork and fries, she knew she had to clear her head. She ate mechanically, just because she had to do something with her hands. She had really screwed it up this time and now she was seeing Jessie in every jeans-clad woman out of the corner of her eye. That was not good. Hindsight was working overtime telling her how badly she bungled a situation she had been wanting for a long time. And the worst of it was she didn’t have the faintest idea how to salvage it—if there was anything to be salvaged. Her headache was beginning again.