“It wasn’t.” Zack picked up another nacho, gazed at it proudly, and then ate it.
“I thought I was going to end up a crazy old lady living with my dog.”
“Dogs,” Zack corrected.
“I only had Einstein then. Maxwell and Heisenberg showed up after we moved in. Well, actually, I found Maxwell down on Fourteenth Street across from the Music Hall, but it was the same principle.” Lucy looked over at Zack. He was staring into the fire so she slipped Heisenberg a nacho. Maxwell noticed and quietly padded around the love seat to her side.
“So you got married to keep from being a crazy old lady?” Zack shook his head. “It would never have happened, but I guess I can see your point. What I still don’t understand is, why Bradley?”
“He was there. It seemed right.” She shrugged and slipped Maxwell a nacho.
“It was wrong,” Zack said sternly, and then he looked from his empty plate to hers. “Do you want the rest of your nachos?”
Lucy passed her plate over, and the dogs followed silently to sit in front of Zack.
“Listen, I just fed you guys a whole bowl full of dog food, so I know you’re not starving. Cut it out.” They sat and stared and he said, “Okay, one each. One. That’s all.”
Lucy watched him feeding her dogs nachos and felt a wave of heat roll over her. She was one sick puppy. She’d been having hot flashes ever since she’d first seen him in the restaurant, and now he was turning her on by being nice to her dogs. She’d been divorced two days, and already she was lusting after a hyperkinetic dog feeder.
The phone rang, startling her, but Zack reached over and snagged the receiver off the piecrust table before she could get up and answer it.
“Hello?” He looked puzzled. “They hung up,” he said, doing the same. “Who would hang up if a man answered?”
“Well, not Tina,” Lucy said. “She’d give you the third degree. Not my parents, they wouldn’t notice. Not my friends, they’d want all the dirt about you.”
“How about Bradley?”
“Bradley doesn’t call here.”
“Ever?”
“I’ve only talked to him once since the blonde. He called the same day, but I was still pretty upset then, so I told him I never wanted to hear from him again. And he asked me to please not tell Tina he’d called, and I was so disgusted, I hung up. Oh, and there was one other time. I saw him at the lawyer’s the day we signed the papers. He said hello. And he sent me the note. That’s it.”
Zack frowned. “That’s weird. What’s wrong with him?”
“Nothing. He’s happy with his blonde.”
“When I find Bradley,” Zack said, “I hope he resists arrest.”
“You can’t arrest Bradley. You don’t know that he’s done anything wrong.” Lucy stood and picked up Zack’s plate from the floor.
“Oh, yes, I do,” Zack said. “Even if he didn’t shoot the blonde, he’s a rat. And I, for one, am going to make sure he’s sorry.” Then he popped the last of the nachos into his mouth, got up, and followed Lucy out to the kitchen.
Anthony came over to see the yearbook, and they searched the downstairs until eleven that night and found nothing except Bradley’s note to Lucy, asking her to lunch.
“He doesn’t sound too damn apologetic,” Zack said. “Listen to this. ‘Please meet me at the diner on Second Street, so that I can explain to you why you’ve acted hastily.’ And you were going to meet him?” He narrowed his gaze at her. “You must still be hung up on him.”
“Of course not,” Lucy said. “I don’t want him back. I just want to understand what happened. And anyway, that’s just Bradley’s way. He’d never admit that he was wrong. Just the fact that he wrote and asked me to meet him is amazing. Bradley never asked for anything in his life. He always assumed people would do what he wanted, and usually they did. He was very…authoritative.” Lucy took back the note and read it again. “Poor Bradley. He must have been really upset. He even wrote, ‘Please.”’
“I don’t like Bradley,” Zack said.
“Actually, neither do I,” Lucy said.
“Good. Hold that thought,” Zack said.
WHEN ANTHONY LEFT AND Lucy went upstairs to take her shower, Zack enjoyed the fire, the dogs, and one last beer. This is nice, he thought, stretching his legs in front of the fire. This is comfortable. This is…
He stopped in the middle of a sip of beer.
This was a lot like what Anthony had been talking about in the diner the other day.
He put the bottle down to consider. Anthony had offered him two impossibilities as protection for Lucy, knowing he’d reject them and volunteer.
He’d been set up.
“I’ll kill him,” he said to the dogs, and Heisenberg flopped over on his back.
Well, it was no problem. He’d just call Anthony tomorrow and tell him to send over a replacement. Zack picked up his beer to drain it. Not Eliot, of course. He was too old and too slow.
And not Junior, either, because…
Zack stopped again, the bottle halfway to his mouth. There was nothing wrong with Junior. He was young and strong and quick, and he would do a terrific job of protecting Lucy.
Right here in her house.
In fact, Junior could be sitting right where Zack was by tomorrow night. All Zack had to do was call Anthony.
Hell.
He got up and stomped to the kitchen to throw his bottle in the recycling box, whistling to the dogs as he went, and two of them went trotting past him as he opened the back door.
Maxwell and Einstein. Zack looked around for Heisenberg, and then remembered. “Oh, for crying out loud, dead dog,” he said, and heard the thump as Heisenberg rolled over and the click of his toenails on the hardwood floor.
“Thank you for joining us,” Zack said and closed the door behind him.
WHEN HE CLIMBED THE stairs later, he met Lucy at the top, wrapped in a floor-length white terry-cloth robe big enough to cover a couch. Her hair was in loose, damp, greenish ringlets, and she looked vaguely like a cover on a science-fiction book he’d once read.
“I was going down to let the dogs out.” She stepped back from the top of the stairs.
“I already did. All present and accounted for.”
The three dogs had padded up the stairs by that time and sat watching them quietly. “Bed,” Lucy said, and Heisenberg swerved into her bedroom while Einstein and Maxwell went up another flight to Zack’s room. “Oh, I forgot.” She hesitated. “They sleep on your bed.”
“No,” Zack said. “Maxwell, maybe, but Einstein, no. There won’t be room for me.”
“It’s a big bed,” Lucy said, but she called Einstein back down and held her bedroom door for him. “I did buy beds for all of them. They just didn’t like them. They’d rather sleep with me.”
They’re no dummies, Zack thought.
“I put clean towels out for you,” Lucy went on. “In the bathroom. Do you need anything else?”
You, Zack thought. She looked like a bulky mummy in her robe, and her hair was green, and he wanted her. It was crazy. He needed a shower. A cold one. “Thanks,” he said. “Good night.”
“Good night.”
He turned toward the bathroom door, and then decided he’d been too abrupt, but when he turned back, her bedroom door was closing and she was gone.
Good. Because the last thing he needed was to get involved with Lucy Savage and her three dogs.
Even though all his instincts were for it.
He shook his head and went to take a cold shower.
THE NEXT MORNING, Zack took Lucy to the hospital.
“That’s her,” Lucy whispered, looking at the woman’s pale face under the stringy blond hair. “That’s the woman who was with Bradley.”
Zack put his arm around her and led her away from the bed, alarmed at how white she was, almost as pale as the woman in the hospital bed.
“Are you okay?”
“Bradley did this? Bradley couldn’t have done this.”
Lucy looked back at the bed. “I know it’s the same woman, but he couldn’t have…” She shook her head, too upset to finish.
“Hey.” Zack took her through the door, away from the silence and the whiteness of the room. He found a bench for her in the hall and sat beside her, keeping his arm around her while she bit her lip.
“Somebody violent did that. Bradley’s not violent,” Lucy said finally. “I don’t think Bradley has emotions.”
Zack tightened his arm around her. “That’s the kind who usually break, honey. The ones who yell all the time blow off steam. The ones who don’t, well, when they blow, it’s an explosion. And this was a gunshot. It’s easy to shoot a gun. Too easy. One bang, and it’s over, and you don’t even have to get close.”
Lucy shook her head. “It’s like everything I knew has turned out to be a lie. I can’t even trust my own judgment anymore. Look how wrong I’ve been. And I can’t even talk to him to find out why this happened. I’ve been totally wrong, and I’ll never know why. This could all happen to me again because I’ll never know why.”
Zack watched her bite her lip again, and the sight of her even white teeth cutting into her soft bottom lip disoriented him for a moment. What kind of fool could Bradley have been to risk losing Lucy to be with that blonde? Hell, how could he have wanted to be with anybody but Lucy at all?
Lucy leaned back against the wall suddenly, pulling his arm with her. “How could I be so blind? How could I have been so stupid?”
“Hey.” She looked so confused and betrayed that Zack was stung. He pulled her close and cuddled her to him, wrapping his arms around her as if to shield her from Bradley and anyone else who might hurt her. “Look, honey. A lot of people do things that the people who know them say are impossible.” He closed his eyes, savoring her soft warmth and feeling slightly guilty about it. “It happens all the time. All we have to do is keep you safe until we catch him. You can talk to him then, if you want. But it won’t always feel like this. It’ll be okay.”
“I feel safer with you after three days than I did with Bradley after eight months,” Lucy said into his shoulder. “I’m so dumb.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Zack tightened his hold on her. “I’d say that’s pretty smart of you.”
ZACK TOOK LUCY OUT for Sunday brunch so neither of them would have to cook, and by the time they’d finished, she’d relaxed again. She was still quiet, but the terrible tension he’d felt in her while he held her was gone, and for Zack, for a while, that was enough. Anything was better than watching Lucy suffer.
He really wanted to kill Bradley.
“Now we search the upstairs,” he told her when they got home. “All your secrets will soon be mine.”
“I don’t have any secrets,” Lucy said.
“Well, then you should get some,” Zack said, and they looked at each other for a moment, and then both looked away.
The first room they searched on the second floor was Lucy’s—a big sunny room almost filled with a huge Victorian bed covered with an equally huge crazy quilt.
“I made the quilt,” Lucy said. “It’s just tied, not quilted, which is why it’s kind of lumpy, but that’s okay because that way I could put more layers of fill in it.” She smiled at Zack. “It’s really warm. I love it. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done.”
Her smile made Zack’s mouth go dry. He hadn’t seen it often enough to get used to it, and the thought made him both sad and angry. She should be smiling all the time. If she were his, he’d make damn sure she was smiling all the time.
Of course she wasn’t his, and he didn’t want her to be his because he was too young to settle down, and anyway, he couldn’t visualize her naked, which he was pretty sure meant she was like a sister to him, but still…
She should be smiling all the time.
“Zack?”
“I really like the quilt. Let’s look at your closet.”
Her closet had two racks in it. One side was full of soft pastel flowered dresses. The other was full of severe tailored suits in navy and black and dark brown, all with their price tags still attached.
“You schizophrenic?” Zack asked.
“No,” Lucy said. “I bought the dresses. Bradley bought the suits.”
“Then Bradley should have worn the suits. Why did you stay with this guy?”
“He wasn’t a bad person…” Lucy began, but she stopped when Zack rolled his eyes. “I know. The blonde. But that isn’t the Bradley Porter I knew. He was good to me. He loved me. He just wasn’t…fun. And he didn’t approve of me, really. He wanted to, but he didn’t. None of that is enough grounds for divorce. He’s not a bad person. He’s just…lonely. I couldn’t leave him. He was so lonely.”
“Which would explain the blonde,” Zack said and then kicked himself as Lucy winced. “Sorry.”
“No, I asked for that one,” she said. “What next?”
They tapped the walls, and turned the drawers upside down, and looked under the rug and found nothing. By late afternoon, they’d turned both the second and third floors as upside down as Lucy’s drawers and found exactly the same thing—nothing.
“You don’t even have any junk,” Zack complained as they finished the last room on the third floor. “What’s wrong with you?”
“I’ve only lived here nine months,” Lucy protested. “It takes time to accumulate good junk.”
“You’ve had time to accumulate three dogs.” Zack stepped over Maxwell, who was staring into space again. “If you could do that, you could accumulate a little junk.”
“You don’t accumulate dogs.” Lucy patted Maxwell, who didn’t seem to notice. “You meet them, and you both know that you belong together. And even if you know that that’s dumb, and you don’t need a dog, and you can’t handle the responsibility, and you don’t even want a dog anyway, there it is and you have to go with it. It was meant to be.”
Zack stopped in his tracks. “Why does this sound like some dumb women’s magazine description of the perfect relationship?”
Lucy’s head jerked up from Maxwell to him. “Listen, the best relationships of my life have been with dogs. And they aren’t dumb at all. Einstein never brought a blonde into my house, and Maxwell never stood me up in a restaurant, and Heisenberg never grabbed me in an alley.”
“Hey,” Zack said. “How did I get into this?”
“Sorry,” Lucy said.
ANTHONY CAME BY THE house late in the afternoon. He stood in the middle of Lucy’s soft, flowered living room and said, “This is a wonderful room. It feels good just to be here.” He smiled down at Lucy. “It’s like you.”
Lucy beamed back. “That’s the nicest thing you could have said to me.” She stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek, and he put his arm around her.
“Hey,” Zack said. “Let’s be professional here.”
“You want to be professional?” Anthony raised an eyebrow. “Get a haircut.”
“Very funny. What are you doing here?”
Anthony let go of Lucy and sat down in one of the overstuffed armchairs. “I went in to catch up on the reports this afternoon and found a message from the lab. You know the bomb that blew up Lucy’s car?”
“I’ll never forget it.” Zack sat on the arm of the loveseat and pulled Lucy down onto the cushions beside him.
Anthony leaned back in his chair. “It wasn’t much of a bomb to begin with, according to the lab, although granted it did a nice job on the car. But the really interesting part is that, besides the extremely long timer that not only gave you time to notice the cat, knock Lucy into the driveway, and then have a long conversation with her—”
“Get to the point.”
“It also had a hell of a big alarm clock taped to it with a lot of sinister-looking wires. None of which had anything to do with the mechanism that caused the explosion.”
“Oh, hell,” Zack said.
“I don’t understand,” Lucy said.
Anthony turned to her. “If you had looked in your
car, you would have seen a big package about the size of a shoe box with a clock taped to it and a lot of wires. What would you have done?”
“I’d have thought it was a bomb and run like crazy,” Lucy said. “I still don’t get it.”
“He’s trying to tell you that you were right,” Zack said, disgusted. “Nobody’s trying to kill you. They’re just trying to scare you out of the house. You would have called us, the bomb squad would have confirmed that it was a real bomb. And we would have moved you out of the house for safekeeping, so the house would have been empty. Except that you wouldn’t leave the dogs.”
Lucy looked back and forth between them, incredulous. “My car blew up. This guy blew up my car to scare me out of my house?”
“Well, he didn’t know about the dogs,” Anthony said. “Without the dogs, it would have worked.”
“He could have killed me!”
“No,” Zack said. “The timer on that sucker was almost five minutes. If the package was as big as Tony says, you’d have been long gone before it went off. This nut was just trying to scare you.” He met Anthony’s eyes. “Which means…”
“…there’s something in this house,” Anthony finished.
“No, there isn’t,” Lucy said. “We’ve looked. We’ve looked everywhere.”
Anthony shook his head to stop her. “That’s not all. Your report from the patrolman came in. And not only has Mrs. Dover been complaining about prowlers around this house for two weeks, she also phoned in another complaint last night. If she’s really seeing somebody, he’s still around.”
“You know, I wanted to move out of my apartment because I never felt safe there,” Lucy said. “I moved here because it felt so safe.” She looked around her at the bright, warm room. “I don’t feel so safe anymore.”
“Are you crazy?” Zack said. “You’ve got me for a bodyguard and you don’t feel safe? What’s wrong with you? First no junk, and now this.”
“No junk?” Anthony said.