But no.
It was him.
Silent, as usual.
By now, his silence was as recognizable as Latisha’s nasally voice.
I walked into Terminal B dripping wet, pissed off, and wanting to shoot dead the architects of the whirling dervish of roads that made up Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport.
Get over. Exit. Whoops, no, don’t get over. What are you doing? Turn!
That’s what the signs said. Well, that’s what it felt like the signs said.
Add to that the aggressive redneck personalities of the Texas drivers scurrying around me for the last forty-five minutes. I learned fast that if you’re in a black pickup truck, you get a free pass to signal after you slide into another lane. I vaguely remembered a Jerry Seinfeld riff on “polite” Texas drivers. They weren’t going to stop you from getting over, but they weren’t going to help you, either. You were on your own, baby.
It’s not that they were any worse than New York drivers. I just expected more.
Mike didn’t know where I was, a good thing. He had been back on the job since 3 a.m., when a motorcycle wreck jerked him out of bed. The bike flipped on a highway exit ramp into Clairmont. It was the first fatality for the young deputy who responded, and he was a mess, throwing up at the scene.
To add just a little more suck to Mike’s life, the computer system continued to freeze, Time and USA Today were requesting interviews about Caroline’s case, and Harry Dunn was bugging Mike to drop a DUI for a friend. There wasn’t enough personnel for Mike to keep assigning a cop to the house, so, starting today, he’d parked an empty cruiser in the driveway. He wasn’t happy with this as a permanent solution and mentioned that “something else was in the works.”
My pocket vibrated, making me jump. Had Bradley already landed?
I tugged out my phone.
No.
Lucy.
“Hey, what’s up?” I could hear in her tone that Lucy knew very well what was up.
“Why did you lie to me?” Hurt.
“I’m sorry, Luce. It’s a… long story.”
“Brad called to confirm that I knew you. He said you wanted information on the murder of a guy you dated at Windsor. That you ended up getting screwed by a story he wrote. He wanted to know if you were the type to indulge in revenge fantasies.”
Inside, I was thinking: He didn’t tell Lucy about the rape or this would be a completely different conversation. Maybe he doesn’t know.
“I’m at the airport now,” I said. “We’re meeting in about ten minutes.”
“He told me. Emily, I really didn’t call to ask you why you didn’t tell me the truth. It just came out. I called to warn you that Bradley sounded a little too interested. And with a journalist like Bradley or me, that generally isn’t a good thing.”
My iPhone recommended Tip o’the Hat as the best place for meeting a stranger on a plane in Terminal B. The “Irish-Texas pub” was squeezed beside Bobo China’s Express Waffle Buffet. I couldn’t decide which was a weirder marriage, but the leprechaun doffing his cowboy hat on the neon bar sign might be tipping things in his favor.
No matter, both places were doing a rockin’ business at high noon on an August day at DFW airport, while a long line for security snaked less than a hundred yards away. According to the TV screens, Bradley’s flight from LaGuardia had landed six minutes ago.
My eyes roamed the dim bar, while Lucy’s warning roamed my head. How crazy was I to meet a guy who had, in his own words, “screwed” me? Maybe he wasn’t the Bradley who accosted me on the steps all those years ago, but he could have sent the twerp who did. There was no reason to believe he wasn’t involved.
Half of the men in this place could be Bradley, except not one of them was looking for me. Oddly, I felt safer here than in my house. Safety in numbers, right? And in anonymity. I could hear twenty conversations going on around me and not make out a word anyone was saying.
Two stools along the bar opened up. I slid into one and sat my purse on the other, just in time to prevent a woman with pancake makeup and a gold and white Jessica Simpson carry-on from wiggling her bottom there.
“I’m holding it for my husband.” I smiled sweetly and placed a hand on my stomach. “He’s in the bathroom. Do you mind?”
“You can stop milking the baby crap. I’ve had five of them.” But she didn’t put up a fight, and drifted off.
The bartender slapped down a shamrock-shaped coaster. “I’m not sure I can serve a… pregnant lady. Texas law or something.” He barely looked legal himself.
“Tonic and lime. And see that woman over there glaring at me? Put whatever she’s having on my tab.”
I fingered the curved edges of the coaster, which was printed with some kind of bar trivia game. You were supposed to read the quote on it aloud to your drinking buddies and ask them to identify whether it was Western or Irish.
I stopped spinning the coaster long enough to read it. THE PROBLEM WITH SOME PEOPLE IS THAT WHEN THEY AREN’T DRUNK THEY’RE SOBER. Hmm. Maybe John Wayne. I flipped it over.
William Butler Yeats. I thought he wrote strictly about dappled grass.
The bartender plunked down another coaster and set a plastic cup of half-fizzy water on it. A grayish lime wedge floated on top.
“Thirty-six fifty,” he said.
“That’s one expensive glass of water.”
The voice was brusque, behind me. I willed myself not to flinch as a hand casually brushed my shoulder. I could smell him, of course. Exotic spices. Musk. A scent first extracted from the gland of a Himalayan deer.
When I turned, Brad was pretty much what I expected: tall, dark, handsome, with perfectly proportioned nostrils and a Louis Vuitton briefcase that he was probably vain enough to have picked out himself.
“That includes three martinis for the woman over there,” the bartender said, defensive. “She ordered in advance when she found out you were paying, lady. Are you? Paying?”
I removed my purse from the stool, and the man immediately swapped himself in. He stuck out his hand. “Emily, right? I’m Brad.” His grip was cool and firm. He held my hand a little too long.
Then he answered the question on my face.
“You’re one of two women in here. You’re pregnant in an airport bar and drinking overpriced water that you could find for half the cost in a less overpriced plastic bottle next door. Not that hard to deduce. Congratulations, by the way. I didn’t know.”
He threw down two twenties.
“Did you bring your own car?”
I nodded.
“Then let’s take a walk.”
Already, out of control.
25
He didn’t want to drive anywhere. He wanted to suck down a Coke from the vending machine and sit in my station wagon in a dark garage parking lot where no one could hear us. Hopefully, he would leave me alive.
“We’ve got about twenty minutes,” he said. “It will take at least fifteen to get through that line at security. Should I start or you?”
My hand rested on the door handle while I reconsidered whether I should be in my car with a 200-pound, extremely fit man I didn’t know who could reach across and strangle me before making his connection. Then I remembered Lucy. Yes, she warned me about him. But she said he was decent. I would cling to that, because I needed Bradley Hellenberger to be who she said he was. Who he said he was.
I felt like I no longer had time to waste, and plunged in. “You know that Pierce Martin was a rapist.”
Silence. “Yes, I had that general idea.”
“A few days ago, somebody left a present for me on my doorstep. A copy of a campus police report taken the night Pierce raped me.” Amazing how much easier it was getting to say. I should have tried this long ago. Maybe I wouldn’t be such a wound-up, secretive, compulsive mess who never gave myself fully to anybody except when it came to sex. In bed, I had no trouble letting go entirely. I’d asked myself more than once why I was trying so hard to prove something to a dead man.