A Dark Love (8 page)

“Never watched football?” Nan bustled back in with a plate of cookies, which she set on the coffee table. “Do you realize you’re talking to one of the most famous men in Colorado?”

Caroline smiled uncertainly, but one look at Nan’s face revealed she was serious.

Ken chuckled, embarrassed. “Well, maybe the most famous football player in Storm Pass. I might as well tell you now, since my father will get around to it before long.”

“His father has an entire room full of his trophies. Ken’s just too modest to tell you. You know, he played for the Kansas City Chiefs until season before last.” Nan paused to watch Caroline’s reaction.

“Oh.” Caroline nodded. She recognized the team name but that was it. Her life over the last two years had not allowed for anything as normal or mundane as watching pro football on TV.

“Sit, you two,” Nan ordered. “I’ll get dinner started before I show Alice around.” She disappeared into the kitchen.

Which left them on their own. Caroline got the definite feeling that this was what Nan had intended. She snuck a glance at Ken, who was settled against the back of the chair with his legs stretched out in front, watching Pippin race around after Nan’s Jack Russell terrier, Scout.

He caught her glance and winked.

Leaving no doubt that he was happy for the time alone with her. Caroline cleared her throat, not comfortable to sit in companionable silence with him. “I can’t imagine what it would be like to grow up knowing you have talent,” she said truthfully.

“Everybody has a special talent,” Ken said.

“Not like yours,” she said.

Ken considered this, flexing the toes of his hiking shoes. “My talent is hard to explain, but I’ll try.” He eased forward, resting his arms on his knees and letting his feet land on the rug with a small thud.

Suddenly he was in close range, all broad shoulders and big arms. And keen eyes. “The moves were always there, a part of me, like my arms and legs. Getting drafted to play pro ball was incredible.” He smiled, remembering.

“I met my wife in Kansas. Soon to be ex-wife, as it turned out.” He gave a small shrug. “I got injured and had to give up the game. She wanted to be married to
a football star, not a guy who used to play pro.” He shrugged again and let out a long breath. “You win some and lose some, I guess.”

There was silence while they both considered this. “Yeah.” Caroline took a sip of her iced tea.

Ken waited, and when Caroline didn’t offer any information of her own, he cleared his throat and continued. “I kicked around Kansas City for a while, then came back home to my true love.”

True love. So he was with someone.

“Fishing,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. “I’m happy when I’m fly-fishing, that’s my big love.”

It was an interesting choice of words. Living with a psychoanalyst had taught Caroline that words carried weight. She risked a look at Ken’s face, and the playful twinkle in his eyes told her he had chosen those words deliberately.

She couldn’t hold back a smile. “Fly-fishing?”

“Yeah,” he said with a grin. “I take groups up the mountain in trout season. You ought to try it sometime.”

Images of old-growth forest pressing right up against the sides of the road, with occasional glimpses of lakes that looked positively primeval, came rushing back to Caroline from her bus ride just, what, day before yesterday? “I can see why you came back,” she said simply.

Ken took another sip of iced tea. “I could show you around.”

His tone was casual, but the invitation was not. Caroline hadn’t been on the receiving end of attention from a male in a long time, and certainly the boys she had known from GWU didn’t compare to Ken Kincaid. He was a man, all grown up, and he seemed normal. Un
complicated. Not to mention too handsome to look at. A warning flare went off in Caroline’s mind. She was not free. Not by a long shot. She sipped her iced tea to stall while she considered how to decline. Spending time alone with him would mean trading confidences, personal information. But Caroline knew that a single casual remark could cost her life, and perhaps his, too. “Maybe,” she said, hating herself. “Maybe sometime.”

He drained his glass and stood. The room seemed to shrink around him. “Well, I’ve got to move along now. There’s plenty of trout up there. They’ll keep till you’re ready.” He cocked his head, his lips curved and his eyebrows raised, in a well-I-gave-it-a-try look.

“Yeah,” she said, looking away. But not before she caught the warmth in his eyes, which threatened her resolve.

He took a step in her direction. “Thanks for the tea. I’ll just put these in the sink.” He took her glass, his fingers brushing hers in a small movement that thrilled her. Standing next to him was like standing at the base of a tall building. She didn’t envy the running backs from opposing teams whose job it was to get past him with a football. But right now there was nothing imposing about him at all. In fact he seemed like nothing so much as a very large and very comfortable teddy bear. Caroline fought the sudden urge to move closer.

His gaze locked on hers, and she could swear he sensed her impulse.

Nan appeared, and the moment passed.

The sight of them standing together put a smile on Nan’s face that was so wide her eyes crinkled till they were almost shut. “Leaving so soon, Ken? I made meat loaf for dinner. Join us,” she said, collecting the glasses.

“Thank you kindly, Nan. I’ll take a rain check.” Ken looked through the picture window at the postcard view of the neighboring peaks, where clouds were piling up thick and fast. “Looks like it might turn out to be a snow check.” He grinned.

“Okay, but I’ll hold you to it,” Nan said.

“I promise not to be the only man in Storm Pass who can resist your meat loaf, Nan. Besides,” he said with a chuckle, “Gus would never let me hear the end of it.”

“Well, then come back tomorrow for leftovers.”

“I might just do that. I plan to check on you anyway while your car is in the shop,” he said, serious now.

“Drop in any time,” Nan said firmly. “Door’s always open.”

“Thanks,” he said with a smile. But he directed his next words at Caroline. “I’ll look forward to that.”

Nan bustled around the kitchen after Ken left, cheerier than ever. She whipped up a steaming pot of buttermilk mashed potatoes to go with the meat loaf, and served it with garlicky creamed spinach. She watched Caroline help herself to seconds. “It’s not good to be too thin,” she said approvingly.

Caroline studied her plate. She was five feet, seven inches tall, and had always maintained her weight at a size six. But Porter pointed out flaws, and she began to detest the parts of her body that were weak, such as the soft flesh on her inner thighs and the backs of her arms. She learned to stop eating when he did, whether she’d had her fill or not. Ending a meal still hungry was preferable to being the only one still chewing under Porter’s watchful gaze, like a cow working her cud.

“You eat slowly,” he observed. “You do everything slowly, like a small child.”

Desserts were always shared. Although he offered to order one after every meal whenever they dined out, Caroline learned to say no except on rare occasions.

It felt good not to have someone criticize her for every bite. She’d shrunk two dress sizes during their marriage, and it was probably more than that if she was honest. “I can’t remember ever having meat loaf this good,” she told Nan now.

Nan swallowed, her eyes as lively and alert as someone half her age. “Storm Pass does a body good. It’s done a lot of good for Ken Kincaid.”

Caroline hid her interest at the mention of Ken’s name by taking another bite of creamed spinach.

“He was hurt, physically and mentally, when he came back. I guess that wife he had in Kansas liked the limelight more than she liked him.”

Caroline took a bite of meat loaf, hanging on every word.

“It’s her loss,” said Nan. “I’ve known Ken since the day he was born, and there’s no finer man anywhere except maybe his father. He’s licked his wounds long enough. He needs to open up and share his life with somebody new. And she’ll be a lucky girl. And that’s the world according to me,” Nan said with a laugh. She pushed back her chair and stood, waving off Caroline’s offer of help. “You’ve had a big day. You need to soak in a hot tub and go to bed with a good book. You can get the lay of the land here and start work tomorrow.”

Caroline spent the evening doing both, but nothing could quell the feelings brewing inside her. Relief that she had found a place, at least for now, and a tingle of pleasure at the thought of Ken Kincaid and his laughing brown eyes.

She lay in bed, waiting for sleep to come, listening to the wind in the trees.

Something banged, keeping time with the wind gusting outside, hard and loud.

Caroline’s heart stopped. She tensed, waiting for the tinkling sounds of breaking glass, the scrape of a door being pushed.

But none came.

Her pulse slowed after a while and her muscles relaxed.

It was probably nothing more than a loose shutter.

She was not safe, she knew this with every molecule in her being. Porter would search until he found her. He was searching now.

A
fter the paralysis of his initial shock, Porter reverted to his bachelor routine, seeing patients during the day and dining on takeout food at night. He informed the one waitress who asked that Caroline was visiting family and would return soon.

He kept himself busy with the task of putting their home in order, the new order. He purchased cartons from a do-it-yourself moving store and packed up Caroline’s belongings to give to the Salvation Army. There was one exception, her cherished collection of Herend figurines handed down from her grandmother, with whom she had been especially close. These he took to a weedy lot behind a strip mall and smashed, one by one.

He ran into Lindsay Crowley at the garage as he waited for the Saab, loaded with boxes of Caroline’s stuff. Lindsay had been walking by their townhouse often, waving Porter down any chance she got to ask about Caroline.

She did so now. “Don’t tell me you’re moving?”

Porter grimaced. The woman’s voice was loud, attracting the attention of everyone within earshot. “Just some spring cleaning.”

“And here it isn’t even springtime,” Lindsay drawled. “Isn’t Caroline the lucky girl? I can’t get my husband to pick up his own socks!”

The customers in line behind them laughed.

Porter stared straight ahead, ignoring the look Lindsay gave him.

“Is Caroline back?” Lindsay stared pointedly at Caroline’s purse, which Porter had grabbed on his way out the door. It was balanced now on top of a moving carton, vulnerable to Lindsay’s prying eyes.

His neck muscles contracted involuntarily. Porter felt his cheeks flare, aware now that everyone within earshot was awaiting his reply. “Probably tomorrow.”

“Probably? You mean you’re not sure? Is she driving or flying?”

It was a dig, he was certain of that. A small reminder that her husband could pull Caroline’s flight records any time he wanted, if he so chose. But he hadn’t. “She hasn’t made up her mind.”

Lindsay looked ready to say more but her Mercedes sedan wheeled into view. The attendant jumped out and held the door, waiting.

But Lindsay Crowley stayed put.

Now the attendant was watching them, too.

“How is Caroline? Is she doing any better?”

Porter held his ground. “Fine.”

Lindsay didn’t move.

Porter shifted his weight and swallowed.

“Well,” Lindsay said finally. She dug inside her purse, jotted something on a business card, and leaned in close enough to envelop him in fruity perfume.

He wrinkled his nose.

Lindsay’s voice close up was soft and lilting. But the
look in her eyes was hard enough to match Porter’s own. “You tell that wife of yours she’s missed. I’d be grateful if you would ask her to call me as soon as she gets back. Here’s the number to my cell phone.” She flipped the card with one perfectly manicured hand so that it landed on top of Caroline’s purse.

Porter’s only response was a quick nod. Relief washed over him when his Saab pulled into view.

He popped the trunk and laid the cartons inside, crumpling Lindsay’s business card. He slammed the trunk.

The Mercedes horn blared, too loud in the confined space, making Porter jump.

He glared at Lindsay.

Lindsay Crowley leaned out her driver’s side window, smiling sweetly. “You remember what I said, I need to speak with her as soon as she gets back, you hear?”

She peeled off in a squeal of tires.

The phone on Police Officer Mike Hartung’s desk was on its third ring.

The woman seated across from him, outfitted head to toe in top-of-the-line Nike tennis attire, flashed him a helpful smile. “If you need to answer that, you just go right ahead. I’m not in a hurry.

“Well, not too much of a hurry,” she added after a tiny pause.

Long enough, Officer Hartung guessed, to give him time to reflect on the information she had given him about herself. That she was married to the head of a powerful federal agency and lived “right around the corner” from Police Service Area 2 on Idaho Avenue, N.W. Code, meant to inform him that she dwelt in one of the priceless town homes in this part of Georgetown,
an area that Officer Hartung had taken a solemn oath to protect and serve.

Hartung let the call go to voice mail. “I understand your concern, Mrs. Crowley. But in all likelihood, your neighbor is on vacation like her husband said.”

The woman in the tennis skirt kept smiling but shook her head. She placed one manicured, suntanned hand on the surface of his desk.

Hartung wondered if all those diamonds got in the way of her tennis serve, and decided they did not. She was used to them.

“Ah told you,” she repeated, letting her Southern accent show through. “He was carrying boxes of her things to get rid of, to put into his car, and her purse was right there on top.”

Hartung shrugged. “Guy’s allowed to clean his closets.”

“Are you married, Officer Hartung?”

The question caught him off guard. Hartung shrugged. “Everybody’s married.”

Lindsay Crowley beamed as though he showed real promise. She shifted around in her little tennis skirt, and Hartung had to admit that for a woman of a certain age, she had terrific legs.

He looked away.

Lindsay Crowley leaned in close so he got a whiff of her perfume.

Something imported, he’d bet.

“I will tell you something about women’s handbags, and you can check this with your wife when you return home to her this evening,” Mrs. John Crowley said. “That purse was a Louis Vuitton Alma.”

Straightening up, she recrossed her shapely legs, as though nothing more needed to be said.

But Officer Hartung suspected Mrs. John Crowley wasn’t finished with him, not by a Texas mile.

“You see, Officer, the Alma will never go out of style. Never.” Her blue eyes darkened with concern. “No woman would give her Alma away, not if she could help it.”

She let her words hang in the air.

In any other city, Hartung thought, neighbors with a beef would be put through to Dispatch and that would be the end of it. But D.C. had adopted a warm and fuzzy approach, breaking its force down into PSA units so residents could get up close and personal with cops, even implementing a “ride along” program for concerned citizens. “Okay, Mrs. Crowley, here’s what I can do,” he said at last. “I’ll take a walk over there and talk to the guy, see what I can find out.”

The look on her face told him she was not feeling the love. Hartung slid one of his cards across the desk. “Here’s one of my cards. There’s someone here to answer your call twenty-four hours a day. Your job is to call me if you see anything suspicious or tell me as soon as his wife shows up.”

Mrs. Crowley did not touch the card.

“And in the meantime,” Hartung said in his best community-first tone, “I’ll open a file and make an official log of your concern.”

She perked up at that.

Hartung opened a file and readied his fingers on the keyboard. “Now, what is this guy’s name?”

Her next words kicked Hartung’s Spidey sense into full alert.

“Dr. Porter Moross.”

The sixth day brought a fateful turn of events. Porter’s last patient of the day departed at half past three. He donned his walking shoes in the hope that he could wear himself out enough to sleep by nightfall. He headed out and left behind the noisy hubbub of Georgetown’s main streets, crossing Rock Creek on the main thoroughfare of L Street before dropping south on Twenty-seventh Street, staying clear of the western edge of the George Washington University campus.

Caroline’s alma mater. A place, Porter knew, he had no business venturing.

He headed east on E Street with its monolithic office buildings.

At Seventeenth Street he reached his destination, the Corcoran Gallery of Art.

He knew he shouldn’t do what he was about to do, but, like a child who picks at a scab until it bleeds afresh, he couldn’t stop himself.

He climbed the steps and went inside.

The smell that was peculiar to museums, Pine-Sol mixed with preservatives, hit him as soon as he walked through the door. He had met Caroline here for the first time on a September day not unlike this one, and he realized now with a pang they had never been back since.

The Corcoran was privately funded and not a part of the Smithsonian, and so was not filled with the hordes of tourists who lined up each day to enter the National Portrait Gallery barely half a mile south. That fact alone made the place attractive to Porter, not to mention the Corcoran’s permanent collection was noteworthy in its own right.

Nobody had loved the place more than Caroline, however, and it occurred to Porter now as he retraced
their steps past canvases by Hopper, Cassatt, and Sar-gent, that he had been wrong to dismiss her taste in art as immature.

“I’m going to paint landscapes in oil,” she had told him. “Open spaces.”

“Landscapes don’t leave much room for pure emotion,” Porter had observed. His taste ran toward minimalism, works that were more likely to be found in New York’s MoMA or private galleries, and he’d wound up at the Corcoran that day by default, more in search of a quiet haven from the last of the summer tourists on the Mall than anything else. He hadn’t minded the Turner exhibit, and his decision to stay that day had changed the course of his entire life.

He wandered the halls now, fighting back tears, wishing he could sacrifice a limb for the chance to turn back time and try again to make Caroline happy.

But he could not.

Night was descending when he left the place at closing. He wandered the Mall aimlessly for a while as it emptied of tourists. He studied them, the parents with fanny packs and maps of the Metro corralling bickering children back to their hotels. Porter was filled with a yearning he hadn’t experienced in a long time, not since his own childhood long ago.

He walked back along Constitution Avenue and up into Foggy Bottom, eerily quiet except for the stealthy horde of homeless that set up camp each night on the sidewalk grates that billowed steam from the empty buildings above.

Porter knew most of them suffered from untreated schizophrenia, and odds were one of them might act out a paranoid delusion and end his life before help arrived.

But he was too despondent to care. He wandered north and west finally onto F Street, drawn back against his better judgment directly into the heart of the jostling urban campus of the George Washington University.

Porter knew coming here would only deepen his wound, reopen it right down to its core. But that pain represented a connection to her and to another, ancient wound that would not heal. And more than anything, Porter yearned for some connection with that wound. Anything. So, powerless over his subconscious urges, like his many patients, Porter wandered the crowded streets of Foggy Bottom, alone with his ache.

“Hello. Hey, sir, hello.”

Porter hunched lower into his sports jacket and kept walking.

But the caller was persistent. “Hey, mister, hello.”

Porter stopped and turned. He vaguely recognized the uniformed doorman who had rushed out onto the sidewalk from the lobby of an apartment building.

The man’s English was heavily accented. “Hello, sir. Where’s you wife? I seen you with her sometime but no more.”

Porter scowled and took a step back, signaling he was in a hurry.

The doorman paid no attention. He motioned with one hand near the ground. “And the leettle dog she no bring for me. Peepen, right?”

Porter gave a quick nod, more to shut the guy up than anything else. “Right.”

“I keep treats for him, when he come to stay when missy goes.” The doorman motioned with his chin, smiling, at the fortresslike building that took up the entire next block.

Porter grew very still.

“She finish her project?”

The man pronounced it
pro-jhek
. Porter became aware of a scratching sensation under his collar from the hairs on the back of his neck, which had begun to move. His wrinkled his nose at the suddenly too strong smell of exhaust from passing cars and nodded. “She did.”

“That’s good,” the man said, still beaming. “Tell her to come say hello. Bring the doggy.”

“I will.” Porter did a quick about-face and headed in the direction the man had indicated.

To the GWU Gelman Library.

A bored-looking guard stopped him at the entrance.

“I forgot my ID,” Porter lied.

The Gelman Library was reserved for use by undergrads.

The guard shrugged and leaned forward slightly. Interested, no doubt, by the prospect of a confrontation. “Listen man, you either come back when you find your student ID or you come into the office and fill out the necessary paperwork.” The guard relaxed against the back of his chair.

No doubt he didn’t get many takers on the offer to fill out paperwork.

Porter looked past him through the entry doors. He hadn’t been inside the place in years. A large bank of computers took up much of the ground floor. “I, uh, just needed to get on a computer. Can I get Internet access here?”

The guard’s eyes narrowed. “Whole place is wired. You can bring your own laptop. But I can’t let you in without a valid student ID.” The man pushed his chair
back and made as if to stand, signaling this tête-à-tête had come to an end.

But Porter had learned all he needed to know. Caroline could have talked her way past this guard easily enough, especially with an ID that had only recently expired. “Thanks.” Porter mumbled and left.

The walk home seemed to last an eternity, and a million possibilities presented themselves to him along the way.

A dim lamp in the foyer illuminated Porter’s way past the deacon’s bench in the downstairs hall. He activated the keypad, and his office door swung open. The place was silent, save for the ticking of a mahogany grandfather clock. He switched on the computer even before he turned on the brass desk lamp.

The machine whirred to life, flashing through startup screens. It held the key to his future. Anticipation made his skin tingle as though he was wearing it inside out. He scratched at the bumps that were already rising on his face. An excess of emotion always brought out Porter’s old enemy.