Men of Intrgue A Trilogy (40 page)

“You don’t think you’ll go back to Almeria?”

“I’m a little afraid to go back,” Karen answered frankly. “Even if this crisis is settled the unrest is going to keep on indefinitely. And if they ask me to return, working at Government House would keep me right in the thick of it.”

“Thank God,” Grace said, relieved. “I was afraid you would be determined to stay on there.”

“Not after the past week,” Karen said, subdued. “The USA looks pretty good to me right now. I think I’ll try for a job around here, then get my own place.”

“What about your apartment in Ascension?” Grace asked. She was scanning the numbers on the metal fence, looking for the section where she’d parked her car.

“I don’t know. I guess I’ll close it up and ask my landlady to send the clothes and personal stuff. The furniture isn’t worth transporting; she can sell it.”

“This way,” Grace said, spotting her station wagon. They walked in silence for a while until she went on, “Karen, I know you said you didn’t want to discuss the kidnapping. But if you just answer one question I’ll forget it, okay?”

“Okay. What’s the question?”

“You weren’t hurt, were you? I mean physically?”

“No, not at all,” Karen replied reassuringly. “Some of the men were but they left the women alone.”

“Gallantry?” Grace asked sarcastically.

“Who knows?” Karen answered wearily. “But I can tell you the worst that happened to me was that I got a terrible scare.”

“That makes me feel a lot better,” Grace said, sighing. They reached her car and she unlocked the passenger door for Karen. “Still, it must have been awful.” Then realizing that she was still pursuing a subject she had promised to drop, she fell silent and walked around her car, getting in on her side.

Karen slid into her seat and buckled her seat belt, looking around at the familiar green New Jersey turnpike signs, feeling as though she had just returned from another world.

“Now, there’s no rush about getting your own place,” Grace said, starting the car and pulling out of her space. “Take all the time you want. We have plenty of room, and Ken and the kids are looking forward to having you in the house.”

Karen almost winced. She knew that Grace was sincere, but the role of dependent relative was not one Karen intended to play for long. At the moment she had no choice, but her first order of business would be to get out on her own.

“What about money?” Grace asked. “Do you have any? We can lend you some if it’s necessary.” She pulled up to the lot monitor’s booth and paid her parking fee.

“That’s thoughtful of you but I still have that bank account at Federal Trust in Manhattan. My share of the money Dad left us is in it.”

“It’s a blessing you never moved it to Almeria or you might never have seen it again. Do you have any real idea of what’s going on there now?” She steered the station wagon onto the access road for the turnpike.

“Nobody seems to know. The rebels have been arrested, but the group supporting them is still acting up and nothing is settled. Believe me, Grace, I don’t care. By the time we were rescued all I wanted concerning Almeria was to be out of it.”

“Who rescued you?” Grace asked curiously. “I heard something about it on the news but the reporter wasn’t very clear. They weren’t police, were they, or government agents?”

“They were a team of mercenaries,” Karen said. “They were paid to go into Government House and get us out.”

“They must have been good at it,” Grace observed, gliding up to the northbound entrance for the turnpike and taking her ticket from the machine. “The report said it was all over in fifteen minutes.”

“Yes,” Karen replied evenly. “They were very good.” She shifted in her seat and rolled down the window. “How does Tom like kindergarten?” she asked.

“He wasn’t too keen on it at first but he’s getting used to it,” Grace replied.

“I can’t wait to see him,” Karen said. “Does he still look like Aunt Elizabeth?”

Grace grinned. “More than ever. She’ll never be dead as long as Tom is around to stare at me with those district attorney eyes. I swear, sometimes I think she’s come back in that little body to tell me to clean up my room and do my homework.”

“I know what you mean,” Karen sympathized. Grace’s son resembled their aunt in an uncanny, almost supernatural fashion. It was difficult to look at him and completely dismiss the theory of reincarnation. “And how is Mary? Charming everybody at nursery school?”

“Sure,” Grace said. “She’s charming as long as she gets her way. Cross her and the charm fades very fast.”

“She’s only three, Grace.”

Grace shook her head. “You indulge that girl too much.”

“My godchild, after all.”

Karen settled back in her seat and watched the exits pass in a blur of off ramps and overpasses. Grace lived in the Passaic County suburb of Wayne in a development of ranch houses and split levels, built twenty years earlier, when Wayne was still rural and the township mostly farmland. Now it was a crowded, bustling hodgepodge of shopping malls, professional offices and industrial complexes, and the house Grace and Ken had purchased when they were first married was worth four times what they’d paid for it. Ken worked as a chemist for a pharmaceutical company in one of the corporate parks, and their two children attended local schools. Grace was on the PTA and took exercise classes with her neighbors; Ken was a member of the Elks and played golf. They were the perfect nuclear family and always made Karen feel as if she had traveled backward in time and landed on “Father Knows Best.”

“It’s been a while, huh?” Grace said.

Karen turned to look at her. “What?”

“It’s been a long time since you passed through here.”

Karen nodded. “It’s busier than I remember it.”

Grace grimaced. “It gets busier every day. Ken says if any more New York commuters relocate to this area he’s going to write his congressman about moving Wall Street to North Jersey. It would save everybody a lot of traveling.”

“Do you remember Alice Dunphy? Her parents had a farm just outside of Oakland. I wonder if it’s still there.”

“I doubt it. Probably ten colonials are sitting on it now.”

“Her father used to say it was just forty-five minutes from Broadway, like the song.”

Grace snorted. “That was never true. The only thing that’s forty-five minutes from Broadway is the corner of Broadway and Thirty-Third Street.”

“I love New York,” Karen sang softly, like the tourism advertisements, and Grace laughed.

Conversation flagged and Karen put her head back against the headrest, closing her eyes and thinking about her forthcoming job search. She would get the Sunday papers with the full classified sections that weekend, and type up a resume to be printed for distribution. As Grace drove she made her plans, unaware that her employment prospects would turn out to be much narrower than she had suspected.

In the weeks that followed, Karen discovered that getting a job was a problem. With no local references and little demand for a Spanish language translator in affluent suburbia, she sent out a lot of unanswered queries and made quite a few fruitless phone calls. She continued to respond to want ads and finally got a written referral from the Almerian attache´, but the opportunities presenting themselves were still few. She came to see that her skills would be more in demand in an urban environment with a bilingual population, and she expanded her horizons to include cities like Paterson and Passaic. She resolved, regretfully, to include a car in her increasingly alarming budget calculations, and routinely sent resumes to people she had little hope of hearing from in return.

More than a month passed and she was still unemployed. She helped Grace with the kids, read, took long walks, composed what she hoped were riveting cover letters, and meditated on the meaning of life. Nothing worked. She still couldn’t forget Steven Colter.

One afternoon Grace came into the paneled rec room with the mail and handed Karen a letter.

“England,” she said, indicating the postmark. “Must be from your friend Linda.”

It was, and Karen put it in her jeans to read later, staring out at the lawn and the turning October trees.

“What’s the word on the job search?” Grace asked, sitting down and glancing at her watch. She had to pick up Mary from the nursery school’s morning session in twenty minutes.

“Discouraging,” Karen replied. “I’m thinking of buying a pistol and holding some of these personnel people at gunpoint.”

Grace smiled slightly. “I wouldn’t adopt such drastic measures just yet.” She paused thoughtfully and then said, “Karen, tell me if I’m being too nosy, but I get the definite impression that something is still wrong.”

“Of course something is still wrong. I can’t get a job.”

Grace shook her head. “That’s not what I mean.” She twisted a lock of hair around her finger and went on cautiously. “Maybe you should see a counselor.”

Karen stared at her. “What?”

“I’ve read about people having delayed reactions to these hostage situations,” Grace added hastily, in a rush now to get it all out, “and I think maybe it would help you to talk to somebody, a professional who would know what to do.”

“Grace, have you been raiding the local library and playing psychologist again?”

Grace’s pale complexion turned pink. “I’m only trying to do what’s best for you,” she mumbled.

Karen got up and hugged her sister, then sat on the floor at her feet. “I know I haven’t been my old self, Grace, and it’s sweet that you’re concerned about me. But the problem has nothing to do with my captivity in Almeria. It’s not even the job situation, really, though I must admit that feeling I was accomplishing something would help to take my mind off it.”

“Off what?” Grace said. She looked down at her with the dark eyes that were the mirror image of Karen’s own, and their mother’s.

“I met a man on Almeria.”

“Oh,” Grace said softly, nodding. “I see. Was he one of the government workers?”

“No.”

“Then who? A native?”

Karen shook her head. “The leader of the team who rescued us. An American.”

Grace studied her. “Well?”

Karen shrugged. “I haven’t heard from him since I left.”

“Does he have this address?”

Karen nodded. “I gave it to him.”

Grace stood and walked to the sliding doors, rubbing at a finger mark on one of the glass panels with the tail of her shirt. “Did you think you would hear from him?”

“Not really,” Karen sighed. “But I guess somewhere inside I must have been hoping or I wouldn’t be this disappointed.”

Grace turned and faced her. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

While they went to get Mary, Karen filled Grace in on what had happened with Colter. Grace listened carefully, asking few questions. It wasn’t until they had returned to the house and Mary had settled in front of the television to watch “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” that Grace asked, “Are you sure you want to get involved with a man like that?”

“A man like what?” Karen asked, looking up from the latest version of her resume, which made her sound like a cross between Joan of Arc and Joan Lunden.

“Well, he must be about as far from Ian as anyone could possibly imagine,” Grace said reasonably.

“Maybe that’s a good thing,” Karen responded. “Ian and I weren’t exactly compatible if you recall.”

“But a man who traipses around the globe putting himself into dangerous situations all the time, a man who could be killed at any moment?” Grace said. “Why set yourself up for that?”

“It’s a pull I’ve never felt before,” Karen replied quietly. “There’s just something about him.”

“Oh, no,” Grace said, holding up her hand. “Don’t tell me. I know what this is. I remember all those wild boys you were always trying to ‘help’ before you settled down with Ian. This guy Colter is just an older version of Billy Sykes.”

“I didn’t settle down with Ian—I just settled. Into boredom. And Billy Sykes has nothing to do with this.”

“Maybe not as an individual,” Grace said, “but the pattern is still there. You always felt sorry for the lost and lonely ones. You were always going to change their lives. And all you ever got from it was trouble.”

“There wouldn’t have been any trouble with Billy if Aunt Elizabeth had been reasonable. Reporting him to the juvenile authorities just put him on the wrong path, and it went downhill from there.”

“He would have wound up on that path anyway and finished in prison just like he did. And this Colter has all the Sykes trademarks: no family and no friends, combined with the good looks and that aloof personality you seem to find so irresistible.”

“He’s not aloof. He’s actually quite charming.”

“You know what I mean; personally aloof, hard to get close to, withdrawn. I don’t know why that type fascinates you, Karen. Anyone else would have appreciated Ian and still been with him. He’s really a good person.”

“I know he’s a good person!” Karen said heatedly. She would never be able to make her sister understand. Grace valued having a family above all else and thought anything was worth enduring to achieve that goal. Her husband Ken, who was also a good person and the proverbial “good provider” their aunt had always recommended to them, put Karen to sleep. She could no more imagine being married to him than she could imagine still being married to Ian.