Eve’s Wedding Knight

pleased with herself. She sat up and placed the mug on the coffee table with an air of getting down to business. “I suppose you’d like an explanation.”

“Whenever you’re ready,” Jake murmured.

She acknowledged his politeness with an ironic snort, waited a moment, then angled a look at him and said, “Well, for starters, I did not get mugged, no matter what I look like. I got this face falling out of, or maybe into-it’s sort of a blur-a Dumpster.” She held up a hand, though he wouldn’t have dreamed of interrupting. “I do not make a habit of getting falling-down drunk. I’m not even very much of a drinker at all. I seriously do not know what got into me. I didn’t even realize I’d drunk the whole bottle-I did drink the whole bottle, didn’t I?” She sighed and closed her eyes. “What a waste. Do you know what that was? There probably aren’t more than a few hundred bottles of that vintage left in existence, and I just… oh, hell.”

She covered her eyes briefly with one hand, and when they met Jake’s again they held a different kind of pain, the kind aspirin doesn’t have much effect on. “I just kept drinking it. It seemed like the only way I could keep from coming completely unglued. After what I’d heard… I didn’t know what to do.”

Jake cleared his throat. In spite of the fact that his stomach was tying itself in knots and his jaws were tight as steel traps, his voice when he spoke was almost gentle, issued from a layer of calm that was like a thin film of oil on roiling waters. “What exactly was it you heard?”

She regarded him thoughtfully for a moment. Then her mouth quirked sideways in her droll little half smile. “Why do I have a feeling you already know this? But… just found out the man I was going to marry is a very bad man.”

Jake held himself still, except for a single nod.

Her smile vanished. “I, however, had no idea. You have to believe that. I had no idea he-or anyway, his men- were the ones who burned down my sister’s mobile home and threatened her and her kids. I think he would even have had her killed…” Her face blanched dangerously and a look of panic crossed her face.

“And how,” said Jake softly, giving her a moment to regain control, “did you find this out?”

“I heard him say so.” Equilibrium restored, she rose and began to pace. “It was an accident! Pure chance. Just think-I could be married to him right now. If I hadn’t had this crazy idea-” She stopped and put her hands to the sides of her head, her face, trapped between them, a horror-stricken mask. “Oh, God. To think…I’ve actually slept with-oh Lord, I feel sick…”

“Would you like a moment?” Jake asked, pleased that his voice could sound so calm-merely solicitous, nothing more. Because this time it was he who needed that moment, those few heartbeats of concentration in which to find his pathway, his solid footing once again. Because to his astonishment, somewhere in the part of him that was most primitively and essentially male, a clarion call had sounded, roused to battle readiness by her words and the images evoked by them. It seemed half a lifetime of training had failed to make him immune to gut-churning passions and primal imperatives af ter all.

Outwardly relaxed, he watched her through half-closed eyes, watched her shoulders shrink inside his robe as she fought her own inner battle against shame and self-revulsion, while he fought to block out the images his mind had formed…of this woman and Sonny Cisneros, writhing together in tumbled sheets. He told himself the brassy tang in the back of his throat had nothing to do with the woman, that it was his hatred of Cisneros that cloaked those images in a bloodred fog of rage.

“I’m okay,” she said, though the tightness in her voice betrayed that for the lie it was. Jake knew that “okay” was something Eve Waskowitz was not likely to be for a while, no matter how hard she might try to convince herself otherwise. She was an intelligent woman, and quick-witted; and for all her charm and buoyant agelessness, not a bit naive. Not one of the nuances of her situation or their significance had escaped her; her agile mind had followed each possible consequence to its unpalatable conclusion, and it was what she had seen there that gave her eyes that dark and hunted look.

Because he understood gentleness from him would only confirm her certainties, he chose a businesslike tone. “Tell me what happened, everything you remember. From the beginning.”

Eve stared at the top of the kitchen table from between the hands that framed and supported her face. “I have told you everything-three times.” Her voice was soft, exhausted and hopeless. “That’s all-there just isn’t anything else.”

“I know. It’s okay.” Jake muttered the soothing words while his mind hurled itself against the cul de sac to which her story had led him with the helpless fury of a trapped eagle.

With his back to her, he braced his hands on the edge of the sink and leaned his weight on them while he stared out the window at the black-lace pattern of thinning woods silhouetted against the floodlit silver of the hospital parking lot beyond. The distant wail of a siren grew louder, then abruptly ceased.

“It’s not enough,” he said in a voice thick with disappointment. “Not to take to the U.S. Attorney. A statement overheard and uncorroborated-a good attorney would have it buried before it ever got to court. You know that, don’t you?”

He heard the careful clearing of her throat, and then, in a flat voice he imagined must be totally alien to someone so naturally effervescent, “Unfortunately, it’s more than enough for Sonny-just the fact that I heard it. He can’t let me go. You do know that? Plus, I humiliated him-publicly.” She laughed, utterly without humor. “Nobody gets away with that.”

Jake let out a slow and silent breath as he turned to look at her. Though only a few feet away, she seemed somehow to have retreated to a great distance and at the same time grown smaller, not as though she’d shrunk, but more as if she’d consolidated herself-gone inside the walls of privacy and pulled them close around her. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen it happen. It seemed to be in the direst circumstances that people felt most constrained from seeking help. It was the instinct of the doomed animal to go it alone.

“Sonny won’t let this go,” she went on, in a voice close to breaking. “He won’t stop-and he’ll stop at nothing- until he finds me. What scares me is, if he can’t find me, he’ll go after my family. Like he went after Summer and the children…to get Hal. He’d have killed them, if he’d thought it would serve his purpose. The children, too-without even bunking-”

“We’re not gonna let that happen,” Jake said flatly. But it was an automatic response. An angry pulse tapped against his belt buckle, while beyond the windows yet another siren sliced through the night. It’s Saturday, he thought. The hospital would be a busy place, the terminus of the night’s sweepings, the usual debris from the bars, back alleys and… Back alleys…

His heartbeat quickened. “Tell me again,” he said slowly, “what happened after you dropped the champagne glasses.”

She shrugged. “I ran like hell-I told you that. And I hid in the Dumpster-”

He held up a hand, stopping her. “How far were you from the alley? How sure are you that they saw you running?”

“Well, they had to know it was me,” she said with a snort.

“But-” and he was forming words carefully, reining in his hope with the ruthlessness of long practice “- how did they know? You ran like hell, you say-in what? Your high-heeled shoes?” His gaze shifted to the feet she’d tucked back under her chair, feet still clad in the tattered remains of white lace stockings. He heard a gasp, and looking once more at her face, found that she’d touched the fingertips of one hand to her swollen lip.

“My shoes. I think…I must have left them there. I heard the glasses shatter on the walk, and the next thing I knew I was running. I never even-but how could I have run like that in heels? I must have left them. So… that could have been how they knew it was me. Not that it makes a whole lot of difference…”

“Maybe it does…maybe it does.” The pulse was beating in his throat, now, so that he had to breathe carefully around it. “Think about it. Sonny and his men are talking. They can’t be looking out the window at that time, or they’d see you coming and shut up before you got there. They hear glass breaking. What do they do? What most people do-they freeze. For a second or two. Even if they react instantly, it takes a couple of seconds to get to the window. You’re already running. Maybe they catch a glimpse of you disappearing through the gate-maybe not. They run out, see the shoes and broken glasses. Meanwhile, you dive into the Dumpster. Your veil gets caught, the lid falls and hits you on the head-”

“Boy, did it ever. I’ve got a bump, even. And I actually saw stars-” Her voice broke off as Jake grabbed her arm