Time After Time (16 page)

She folded her arms across
her chest, but that had the effect of hiking her T-shirt higher, a
luxury she couldn't afford, so she settled for yanking the sides of
the T-shirt down low, which flattened the fabric over her breasts —
also not a good idea.

"How'd he get in?" Jack
asked, with a burning look that left her unsure who it was that was
getting in where.

"I ... don't know. I
must've forgotten to lock up. I was very tired."

"Ah. I see. Right through
the old door. Well, that saves wear and tear on your window
screens, I suppose." He muttered something she couldn't hear, then
ran his hand distractedly through his unruly hair. "What'd the guy
look like? Can you tell me that, at least?"

The implication that she
was an absolute dodo rankled. "I certainly can," she said crisply.
"I only saw him from behind, of course, but he was a tall male in
pants and a shirt."

"Excellent," Jack said
with a thin smile. "That means we can quickly eliminate all the
short men in dresses we come across."

"Why are you being this
way?" Liz said angrily.
"I
didn't commit the crime!" She brushed past him
and began picking up books and dishes at random, then turned around
sharply with an armful of debris and found herself nose to chest
with him.

In a voice that was a
husky, electric mix of fury and frustration, he muttered, "Get
upstairs — and get dressed — now."

He was right, of course.
What was she
doing,
prancing around the kitchen half naked?

"All right!" she said. She
dumped the cookbooks on the counter, the dishes in the sink, and
then swung around to face him, her bottled-up confusion of emotions
easily matching his own.

"But let me tell
you
this,"
she
hissed. "That stupid barbed wire isn't worth
squat! You
got over it!
He
got over it! All
you're getting for your effort is a possible case of lockjaw. And
... and let me tell you
this,"
she added, more furious now than before. "It
makes me feel like I'm in a federal prison! That's what
all
of us on this side
feel like: a despised struggling working class, huddled in the
shadow of your greatness. I'm embarrassed — do you hear me? —
I'm
embarrassed
to have my friends come over and see that barbed wire. What
kind of message does it send about my neighbors and me? We're all
good people. We pay our bills. We have jobs, we have children, we
love our parents, and we cut our lawns. Who do you think you
are?"

"You're upset," he said in
answer. "You're taking it out on the barbed wire."

"Who the
hell,"
she repeatedly
softly, "do you think you are?"

Without waiting for him to
tell her — and she was sure he had a grand opinion he was just
itching to express — Liz turned and went upstairs to
dress.

She was pulling a sweat
shirt over her T-shirt and jeans to ward off the waves of shivers
that kept washing over her when she heard the deep rumble of a car
engine much more powerful than any of the compact cars her
neighbors owned. She glanced out over her window boxes. Yep.
Newport's finest, as prompt as could be, despite it being their
busy hour for arrests: bar-closing time.

She righted the lamp she'd
knocked over earlier and thought how grateful she was that Susy was
with her grandparents. Then she went back downstairs, dreading to
see Jack Eastman's face. He'd shredded his hands in an effort to
save her, and she'd responded like an ill-mannered, mean-spirited
bitch. Her parents, who'd brought her up better than that, would've
been scandalized by her ungrateful outburst.

Jack and two policemen
were all standing in the living room, filling up most of the
available space. It was odd, sensing so much testosterone coming
from there. Ordinarily the room was filled with a soft feminine
presence: Susy; Victoria; Liz's mother, who baby-sat so often. It
was a room of ivory, rose, and grass-green colors; cold blue and
gray and white didn't belong there at all.

The three men turned as
one to look at her — The Victim — and Liz began immediately to
blush. She had no intention of being the object of anyone's
sympathy, even though part of her was so grateful for their
protection that she wanted to dispense hugs all around. The younger
of the officers, flashlight in hand, nodded to her and then headed
for the back door.

"I know who did it," she
announced with a lift of her chin.

"Yes, ma'am?" drawled the
older officer, waiting patiently for more.

Liz glanced at Jack, who
was watching her with a look fiery enough to scorch her eyebrows.
He didn't like it at all, this B-movie revelation of hers. Well,
too bad. She would've gladly told him her suspicions, if he hadn't
been so busy treating her like a child.

"A young man named Grant
Dade was here this afternoon, pestering me for access to some
historical papers I found in the attic of this house, which I've
just bought," she said calmly. "When I declined, he became angry
and stalked off. A friend of mine was here at the time; we both had
a bad feeling about him."

"Are any of these
historical papers missing?" asked the officer.

"Well, no," Liz said,
glancing at the shoeboxes stacked neatly on the hearth. The only
shoebox missing was one Victoria had borrowed earlier. "I
intercepted him before he got the chance."

"Mr. Eastman tells us you
got a look at the perpetrator," the officer said carefully. "Were
you able to make a positive identification?"

"Well, no," she said
again. She gave them her description, such as it was, of the
burglar, and then gave them a much better description of Grant Dade
and of his whereabouts.

"For God's sake," said
Jack, unable to contain himself any longer. "You mean to say you
couldn't notice a foot- long ponytail on a man whose back was to
you?"

Liz said coolly, "When I
first saw him, he was dropping to your side of the fence in a
stumble. He was bent over; the ponytail wouldn't have
shown."

"You have no proof at
all!" said Jack. "You're blaming an innocent man!"

"How do you know?" she
asked.

He flushed and looked
away.

The older officer cleared
his throat. "Well, now, let's take this one thing at a time. I'll
write up the report, and you can sign it, Mrs. Coppersmith, and
then we'll see about having Mr. Dade in for questioning and to
check his hands. Is there someplace I can—?"

Liz motioned the officer
toward her kitchen desk, still sitting serenely in the middle of
her mess. Maybe her mother was right after all: always do the
dishes and straighten up before bedtime.

Jack said, "If you don't
need me anymore, officer—"

"No, that's fine, Mr.
Eastman. Thank you. And better see about those puncture wounds," he
advised in a friendly way.

Liz turned to Jack and
said, "Would you like a lift around? Or do you plan to go back the
way you came?"

He glowered and said,
"I'll walk, thanks." He added, "About our meeting
tomorrow—"

Canceled, of
course,
she thought glumly.
Give my regards to Bellevue.

"Under the circumstances,
I think we ought to put it off a day. Same time Saturday all right
with you? I'll be at the shipyard all day."

She nodded, feeling like a
jerk. He'd behaved rationally through the whole thing,
whereas
she 'd
been — well, a jerk. "Look, I want you to know ... I'm
grateful," she murmured, bowing her head. "And sorry."

"Sure," he said curtly,
and he left.

"At least let me pay for
the shirt!" she called out as he hit the street.

He turned around. In the
darkness, she couldn't see the expression on his face. But she was
pretty sure she heard a snort before he turned and began walking
away.

It annoyed her; everything
about him annoyed her. She ran down the steps after him, ready and
willing to take him on again. But it was too late; in the blink of
an eye, he'd been swallowed up by the fog.

Liz turned on her heel and
began marching back up her steps when she suddenly heard the
chime-sound. But coming from where? From the pear tree? The holly
bush? The inside of her head? She froze in place. She knew the
sound so well. It was haunting her nighttime dreams and her daytime
reveries. She knew it like the sound of her own
thoughts.

She shuddered, unwilling
to suffer any further torment on this endless night, and went
inside.

Eventually the officers
left, and Liz, jumpy as a cat now, began — at last — to attack the
mess in her kitchen. It took five whole minutes. She could hear her
mother's voice:
Was that so hard?
She was about to turn off the lights and head
upstairs when she remembered the packet of letters that she'd
hurled across the table earlier when Victoria was over.

The packet wasn't there
anymore.

"I
knew
it!" she cried
triumphantly.

Shit.

Liz returned home the next
morning from amending the Crime Report at the police station and
found Victoria sitting on the front steps, shoebox on her
lap.

Victoria, wearing a big
straw hat and a lavender sundress, waved one of the letters at Liz
as she pulled the minivan onto the graveled parking space. "Where
have you been?" the redhead cried. "I have news!"

"I
have news," Liz said grimly.

She got out of the van,
pausing at the foot of the steps to take in her little cottage.
It
looked
the
same — just as sweet as could be, with its lemon-yellow paint,
deep-green shutters, and white picket fence. The pink climbers on
the rose arbor were in the last stages of bloom; she could smell
the scent from where she stood. Even Victoria was the same, with
her fey outfit set off by the ever-present heart-shaped pin.
Everything was the same.

And nothing was the
same.

Liz sat on the steps next
to Victoria and brought her up to date on the events of the night
before.

Openmouthed, Victoria
said, "This is unreal! My God — do you think it
was
Grant Dade?"

"That's the message I left
on Jack's machine this morning," Liz said, pulling off an
espadrille from her foot and knocking out a stone. "Who else would
want a packet of hundred-year-old letters?"

"Jack really climbed over
the barbed wire for you?" Victoria asked in a dreamy voice. "How
utterly romantic."

Liz said, "You wouldn't
have thought so if you'd seen him—or me," she added wryly. "We
looked like a scene out of
Friday the
Thirteenth."

The trouble was, it
did
seem romantic. Every
time Liz thought of it, her stomach fluttered in a way it hadn't
since — well, since she'd made her last dumb mistake. Uh-unh. She
didn't
want
this
to be romantic. Heroic, maybe. Neighborly, for sure. But not
romantic.

"He was just being nice,"
she said lamely.

Victoria gave Liz a
knowing grin. "Ri-ight," she said. "Well, we'll find out pretty
quick if Grant Dade did it. if his hands look anything like you've
described Jack's, it'll be obvious."

"Unless he was a ghost,"
said Liz, standing up and tipping Victoria's hat off her head.
"C'mon in — I'll make tea."

She slipped her key in the
lock and pushed the door open. The cottage was so small that,
standing in the front doorway, Liz could gaze directly through the
back kitchen windows and see the view of East Gate and its superb
grounds. It made her fall in love with her house all over again
every time she opened the door.

This morning, however, the
view was different. Liz could see a workman standing on a ladder on
the other side of the chain-link fence, just about eyeball to
eyeball with Victoria and her.

He was taking down the
barbed wire.

"Whoa,"
said Victoria in a husky voice. "This is
heavy-duty
devotion."

In her recap of events to
Victoria, Liz had skipped her little diatribe about the federal
prison. She realized, as she watched the workman roll up one of the
strands of barbed wire, that she'd shamed Jack into this. Couldn't
she have just waited? He might have done it on his own.
Eventually.

"Now he'll be able to get
here with a lot less fuss," said Victoria slyly. "For those
midnight trysts of yours."

"Now criminals will be
able to get over
there
with a lot less fuss," Liz said with uneasy
candor.

Victoria looked at her,
surprised. "The Robber Barons live thataway," she said, jerking a
thumb toward East Gate.