Getting Rid Of Bradley

Chapter Six

“They went to high school together.” Zack’s voice was thick with triumph. “Both of them named Bradley could be a coincidence. Both of them involved with banks could be a coincidence. You in the restaurant yesterday at the same time as the phone tip? Not likely, but could be a coincidence. But now this…” He took the book back from her and gazed in satisfaction at the picture. “This is not a coincidence.”

“No,” Lucy said. “It’s not. I don’t understand any of this, but it’s not.”

Zack looked up from the book at the sadness in her voice. “Hey. This doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

Lucy bit her lip. “I just feel stupid. I never saw any of this in him, and I was married to him for eight months. I feel so stupid.”

“You’re not stupid.” Zack flipped the book closed and stood, holding out his hand. “Come on. Let’s shove the rest of this stuff under the stairs and go up and call Tony. Then we can have dinner. What are you making, anyway?”

He grinned down at her, and she forgot Bradley for a minute and just basked in his nearness. Then she took his hand and let him pull her to her feet. “I’m not making dinner.” She dusted off the seat of her jeans. “You are.” She smiled up at him then, glad to have him so close. It was hard to stay depressed when he was so close.

“I don’t know how to cook.” He sounded distracted as he stared down at her.

“What’s wrong?”

Zack shook his head. “That’s some smile you’ve got there when you let it go all the way. I hadn’t seen it before. You should smile like that more often.” He turned her around and started her up the stairs, pushing her in front of him, and then stopped after the first step.

“What now?” Lucy looked back over her shoulder.

“Nice jeans,” he said, looking at her rear end. “Tight, though.”

Lucy felt herself go cold. She went up another step and turned around. “What did you say?”

He let his eyes drift up to meet hers. “I just hadn’t thought of you as the tight-jeans type.”

“Neither did Bradley.” Lucy felt suddenly remote. “Is this a problem?”

Zack frowned at her. “What are you talking about? What problem? I’m leering at your rear end. Slap me if you want to, but don’t look at me like that.”

“Oh.” Lucy blinked.

Zack’s frown dissolved. “I get it. Bradley didn’t like you in jeans.”

“Bradley liked me in suits. He hated jeans.”

“Bradley is an idiot. But then we already knew that. As far as I’m concerned, you should be wearing jeans all the time. Enough about you. I’m hungry. Move it.” He started up the stairs. “Now, as I was saying, I don’t cook.”

“You do now.” Lucy turned back and speeded up to keep him off her heels, relief making her buoyant. “I’m teaching you.”

“Whatever happened to women who like to cook for men every day?” Zack asked as she opened the door to the kitchen at the top of the stairs.

“There were never any women who liked to cook for men every day. There were only women who cooked for survival and pretended to like it. And now there are men who cook for survival. Like you. Think of this as survivalist training. Very macho.”

“I don’t think so,” Zack said, but he followed her through the door into the kitchen.

AN HOUR LATER, ZACK was feeling pretty good.

“I’m really great at this,” he announced as they sat on the floor in front of the fireplace, their plates on their laps and their backs against the rose-flowered love seat.

“Zack, they’re nachos.” Lucy protected hers from Einstein. “They’re very good, but they’re just nachos.”

“Yeah, but I made them. I think I have an instinct for this.”

“I’m just grateful you chose Mexican instead of French.” Lucy eyed the mound of food on her plate. “We’d be up to our hips in coq au vin.”

“We’ll do that tomorrow night,” Zack said, and Lucy said, “No, we won’t. Do you like chili?”

“Yeah, but that comes in a can. I want to chop something.” He grinned at her, and she felt her heart lurch sideways.

Oh, boy, she thought, but all she said was, “You can make chili from scratch. And you get to chop the onions. You’ll like it.”

“Great.” Zack scooped up another nacho with pride.

“Forget it,” he said to Maxwell who was doing his best impression of a starving dog. “It’s all mine.”

Lucy laughed. “Anthony was right. You are like a little kid. Who’s fed you up to now? Your mom?”

“Nope. Mostly, I eat out. Sometimes I open a can or nuke something, but not too often. Canned stuff tastes terrible, and the frozen stuff is worse.”

“And you’re how old? This is just amazing.”

“Hey, I’m alive and healthy. I’m doing okay.” Zack scooped another nacho. “What were you discussing me with Tony for, anyway?”

“He said you have a concussion.” Lucy looked apologetic. “I feel awful about that.”

Zack met her eyes. “You still made me cook.”

“Well, I didn’t feel that awful. Besides, you liked it.”

“It’s the principle of the thing.” Zack ate another nacho. “What else did Tony tell you?”

Lucy blinked. “I don’t remember.”

“Oh, yes, you do, Blinky. Come on. Give.”

“I thought he was very nice,” Lucy said primly, her chin in the air.

Zack shook his head. “You stay away from him. You’re not his type.”

Lucy’s chin dropped. “That’s not what I meant. And what do you mean, I’m not his type?”

“He’s into plastic Yuppies. You know, suits and running shoes and briefcases and car phones.” Zack shuddered at the thought and started on another nacho.

“And what’s your type?” Lucy asked, and then mentally kicked herself. That’s all she needed was for him to start thinking she was interested.

“I don’t have a type,” Zack said. “I’m an equal-opportunity lover.”

“How very broad-minded of you,” Lucy said, and fed a nacho to Einstein on the sly.

“Speaking of types, how did you end up with Bradley?”

“Well, I had decided to get married because of the second law of thermonuclear dynamics.” Lucy kept her voice brisk to keep herself from getting emotional. “And about that time, he picked me up in the library at the university. I considered it a sign.”

“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 Mm?”

“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.”

“Goodnight.”

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.

“Cleanest house I’ve ever searched,” Zack said. “No junk.”

“That’s un-American,” Anthony said.

“So what happens when I go back to school tomorrow?” Lucy said.

“We keep somebody in the house,” Anthony said.

“You’re not going back to school,” Zack said.

Lucy and Anthony both frowned at him.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he told Anthony. “Suppose this guy grabs her and forces her to let him in the house? Suppose he decides to take a hostage? Suppose…”

“Suppose you stop scaring Lucy,” Anthony said. “He’s not going to grab her.”

“We don’t know that. We’ve got one attempted-murder charge that could turn into murder at any time. We’ve got a million and a half that’s floating around somewhere. And we’ve got the guy who’s mixed up with both, who also makes bombs and shoots guns. You want to tell me again about how we should dress Lucy up and send her off to the one place where everybody knows she’s going to be?”

Anthony considered Zack for a moment. “All right. If it’s all right with Lucy.”

“All right,” Lucy said after a moment and went upstairs to phone her principal.

“What are you doing?” Anthony asked when she was gone, and for once Zack was serious when he answered.

“I’m scared for her. You should have seen her at the hospital. She was absolutely rocked. I just want to keep her safe until we get this guy. We’ve got to pretty soon. We’re close. I just want to keep her safe.”

“There’s something else,” Anthony said. “I spent most of the afternoon on the phone to Beulah Ridge, Pennsylvania, trying to catch people while they were home. I talked to a couple of people who knew both Bradleys.”

“And?”

“And John Bradley was the school’s golden boy until he got caught one too many times stealing and cheating. The strange thing was, even while people were talking about how bad he was, there was admiration in their voices. And they said, every one of them, that the one person who stuck by John Bradley through thick and thin, no matter what he did, was-”

“Let me guess.”

“Right. Lucy’s Bradley.” He held up a hand when Zack opened his mouth. “Sorry. Bradley Porter. Seems like there wasn’t much to Bradley Porter except for straight A’s and the cleanest locker in the school. All the excitement he had, he got from hanging around with John Bradley. Hero worship.”

“That was twenty years ago.”

“Bradley Porter invited him to his wedding.”

Zack straightened so quickly that he almost fell off the love seat “What?”

“Bianca Bergman Bradley found the invitation and set out about two weeks ago to track him here. The Bergmans called this morning. They haven’t heard from her since Thursday. Her description matched the shooting victim. We told them about her, and they’re on their way now.”

Zack sat down on the loveseat, totally confused. “The blonde in the hospital can’t be Bianca Bradley. She’s Bradley Porter’s girlfriend. Lucy ID’d her.”

“Maybe she’s both.”

“How?” Zack almost snarled the question. “How could she be? She was in California until two weeks ago.”

Anthony ignored him. “You know, if John Bradley came here to hide with Bradley Porter, a lot of things that didn’t fit suddenly make sense. John Bradley embezzles the money in California and escapes from the cops, his homicidal in-laws, and his shrew of a wife. That part I could understand. But then I could never figure out why he’d come here to Riverbend. Let’s face it, we’re not the Paris of the Midwest. But if he’s got an old friend here who has always done anything he wanted, that part falls into place, too. He calls Bradley Porter. Bradley gets him a room in Overlook using the name of their old home town as an alias.”

“What about the bonds?” Zack said.

“ John Bradley hands over the bonds to Bradley Porter for safekeeping. After all, he’d have to be a fool to keep them in Overlook. Those people will kill you for your socks, let alone a million and a half. Then Bianca shows up and calls you to put the pressure on him, and he shoots her.”

“Right. How did she get my number?”

“She called the station and asked who was handling the Bradley case. They’d give her either you or me.”

Zack leaned back against the loveseat, scowling. “So how did Lucy get involved? Because Bradley Porter hid the bonds in this house?” He shook his head. “We really combed this place. Unless he took up the floorboards, the bonds aren’t here.”

“Well, something is.” Anthony stood to go. “It’s possible that Bradley Porter doesn’t even know about it The desk clerk never saw him, so he may still be just an innocent bystander, helping out an old high-school friend.”

Zack shook his head. “Bradley Porter is involved. I know it.”

Anthony checked his watch and started for the door. “Well, just in case, you take care of Lucy. And don’t assume because she sits there and blinks that she’s okay.”

“Oh, you picked up on the blink, too, did you?” Zack followed him to the door. “You’re spending too much time with her. And what’s this about telling her about the concussion? What else did you tell her?”

“Nothing important. I’m going home to salvage what’s left of my Sunday. Give my love to Lucy.”

“No,” Zack said, and Anthony laughed as he went out the door.

“THERE’S JUST SOMETHING about it that just doesn’t make sense,” Lucy told Zack later while she watched him chop onions at the big old porcelain sink in her kitchen. “This whole master-criminal thing. Especially this thing with you and Bradley pitting your wits against each other. Bradley never pitted a wit in his life.”

“Maybe he just hid that side of himself from you.” Zack picked up the cutting board and moved to the old white stove next to Lucy, where a cast-iron pan full of hamburger was simmering. He dumped the onions into the pan with the hamburger. “Face it, you weren’t close.”

“We weren’t,” Lucy agreed. “Bradley’s a very… closed person, I guess. I thought he would relax after we were married, but he didn’t. And after a while, I didn’t try very hard to open him up. I had the house and the dogs, and that was enough.” She picked up a wooden spoon and stirred the hamburger to keep it from sticking. “I should have tried harder.”

“Why?” Zack took the spoon from her. “He’s a rat who possibly tried to murder his girlfriend. That’s like Mrs. Bluebeard saying ‘I just didn’t give enough.’”

“I suppose.” Lucy felt herself growing depressed again. She opened a blue enameled cupboard door, took down the chili powder, and handed it to him. Then she changed the subject. “Wait until Anthony hears you can cook.”

“Forget Anthony,” Zack said.

THEY ATE DINNER IN THE dining room in the soft amber light of the stained-glass lamp over Lucy’s big oak dining-room table. They talked about his family and hers and about their jobs, moving in front of the fire to the love seat with their coffee when dinner was done. The hours passed, and they lost all track of time, sitting and laughing in the firelight. The only interruptions were two phone calls, both hang-ups that made Zack uneasy. He didn’t discuss them with Lucy, and he made a conscious effort not to talk about either one of the Bradleys or the case, and he watched while all the tension drained out of her, and she smiled and laughed with him.

Maybe when this was all over, maybe then he could call her. Maybe they could go out, or just stay in and laugh.

Maybe when this mess was out of the way, and she was over Bradley, they could make love.

Maybe even fall in love.

It was a terrible thought because it appealed to him so much.

Falling in love meant commitment. Commitment meant marriage. Marriage meant responsibility and adulthood, which led to loss of instincts and old age and death. Or at least children.

Einstein poked his cold, wet nose at Zack’s hand.

And dogs.

He looked around him, at the big old warm house, and the three dogs that were draped comfortably over his legs and snuggled next to Lucy, and most of all be looked at Lucy.

He’d be a fool to fall for her. She was a forever kind of woman, and his idea of forever was a three-day weekend.

Lucy looked up and caught him staring at her.

“Zack?” Her eyes were huge in the firelight, and her lips were soft and full, and without thinking, helpless with wanting her, he bent and kissed her.