One Summer’s Knight

Summer gulped a breath as if it were a drink of water. “Yes, sweetheart, it’s a very good thing.” She was conscious of the two men, one on either side of her, hemming her in. Protecting her, she realized. But she felt crowded, suffocated. Suddenly she wanted, more than anything in the world, to be alone. Just to be alone. So she could think about this. So she could realize this. So she could go ahead and be frightened. So she could cry, if she wanted to.

“Mom? Where will we sleep?”

Summer gave David’s shoulders a squeeze. “You let me worry about that, okay?”

“Mrs. Robey,…” Agent Redfield was watching her with his dark, sorrowful eyes, the set of his shoulders telegraphing urgency. He jerked his head toward the tan sedan.

“Yes.” Summer set Helen’s feet on the ground and gave both children a gentle push. “Go on, now-go get into Mr. Redfield’s car.”

“How come we aren’t going in our car?” David asked.

Our car? Funny how the old car didn’t seem so ugly and decrepit now that it was the only thing they had left in the world. She turned to look at it, and even smiled a little at the expression on Agent Poole’s perspiring face as he squeezed himself in behind the wheel.

“Why aren’t we going in our car? Well, because…” Inspiration struck. “Because, Mr. Redfield’s car has air- conditioning!” She gave the FBI man a look of triumph

He acknowledged it with a shrug but no smile-she wondered if he was even capable of it-and went walking back to the sedan, leaving Summer to collect her purse and the children’s backpacks from the Olds and follow.

As she was settling into the passenger seat of the tan sedan, the last remaining fire truck pulled away and went roaring off down the street, leaving them with an unobstructed view of what had once been their home. Silence filled the car. Even Helen was speechless. It was as if a curtain had risen, Summer thought, on a stage set for a play called Devastation. Who could have done such a pointless, heartless thing? And why?

Agent Redfield started the car and made a U-turn in the middle of the street. “Mrs. Robey…”

But Summer had twisted around in her seat to stare back at the blackened ruin, the singed trees and sodden grass, the sagging yellow tape. What does this have to do with Hal? What do they want from me? Her stomach constricted with a hopeless, helpless rage.

“Mrs. Robey,” Jake Redfield repeated, speaking in an undertone as he glanced sideways at her, “I’m sorry about this, I truly am. But I hope you understand now what I meant when I said these people mean business.”

No, Summer thought suddenly, not helpless. Not anymore.

“Maybe you might want to rethink-”

“Re…think…” she murmured, absently frowning. Because a name had just come into her mind, lighting it up like neon. Riley Grogan.

“-how you feel about cooperating with us…”

She turned to him, her breath catching, stopping him there. “Excuse me, Special Agent Redfield,” she continued in a cold, quiet voice, a confident voice, without a trace of a tremor in it. “May I use your cellular phone, please? I would like to call my lawyer.”

The page had come at an opportune time for Riley. He’d been attending a black-tie reception at one of Charleston’s best and ntziest art galleries, the occasion the opening of a show by an artist who had recently begun making a name for himself with his abstract representations of social injustice rendered on bits and pieces gleaned from old sharecropper’s cabins. As Charlestonians had a way of turning such minor commercial enterprises into major events in both the world of art and in Low Country society, the show had attracted media attention from as far away as Boston and New York City.

Normally, Riley preferred to skip openings, unless he happened to actually like the artist, but in this case the gallery owner was a client of his, and it would have been awkward to refuse. So, since Riley made it a practice never to put himself in awkward situations, he’d resigned himself to the evening and had taken the necessary steps to increase the probability that he might even enjoy it.

But the truth was, he’d found the artist’s work disturbing in ways he didn’t care to examine too closely. And the strident and overblown praise for the artist issuing in a constant stream from his date, who happened to be the art critic for Southern Styles Magazine as well as a former Miss Louisiana, irritated him. He thought it vaguely inappropriate, just off the mark, somehow. In fact, as the evening wore on he’d been finding it more and more difficult to appreciate Miss Louisiana’s auburn hair, sparkling green eyes and brilliant smile, which, he’d once thought, along with certain other physical attributes, gave her a startling resemblance to the young Maureen O’Hara. As a consequence, the vibrations from the beeper he wore inside the waistband of his trousers-so as not to spoil the lines of his dinner jacket-had not been an entirely unwelcome interruption.

Summertime had come early to the Low Country, and although darkness had fallen by the time Riley left the gallery in Charleston, the temperature had not. The night smelled of flowers and dust, car exhaust and imminent rain, with a fitful breeze that now and then coughed up, like reminders of a bad meal, odors of the sea and the marshes-the tang of sawgrass and saltwater, with touches of mud and decaying shellfish. It was the kind of evening that even under normal circumstances could stir in Riley a vague and restless disquiet; tonight, coupled with the evocative mood of the show he’d just left, it seemed to have awakened memories that winked on and off in his consciousness like fireflies in the dusk. He drove to Augusta through air as thick and soft as cream, watching lightning flicker across the mountains far to the northwest and listening to Bach on his stereo to keep the memories at bay.

He did allow his mind to dwell some on Summer Robey, though not on what it was about her and her problems that had him making what promised to be at least a four-hour round-trip drive on a muggy Monday evening when he could have been enjoying a candlelit postreception supper-at the very least-with the voluptuous former Miss Louisiana Generally, he did not believe in wasting mental energy on fruitless speculation, and his client had given him very little information. She had told him only that she was once again in the custody of the FBI and therefore, in keeping with his instructions, was contacting him immediately and saying nothing to anyone.

“Protective custody, Mrs. Robey,” he’d heard an exasperated-sounding male voice say in the background. “This is for your own safety…”

When Riley had inquired as to what had happened that she was in need of the FBI’s protection, her voice had gone quiet, hard as glass and just as fragile. “They burned my house, Mr. Grogan. My house.” Needless to say, he had understood that she didn’t mean the FBI

“Stay where you are, I’m on my way,” Riley had told her, and rung off with the soft burr of her barely audible “Thank you” in his ears. It was that sound he thought about. Along with the image of her mouth forming the words, it kept returning to his mind in spite of all his efforts to quell it, like a phrase of music, a tiresome bit of song.

The government building that housed the FBI’s small Augusta field office was closed up tight at that hour. At the front entrance Riley identified himself and stated his business through an intercom, and after a short wait he was buzzed into a cubicle where he confronted a directory mounted on one side wall. Momentarily derailed, he was about to select someone at random when the elevator doors to his right suddenly slid open. He muttered a sardonic “Thank you” as he stepped on.

The doors whisked shut and, after a brief ride to an indeterminable floor, opened again on a large, well-lit room crowded with desks, windowed cubicles and computer terminals. It appeared to be empty of people, except for a tall man with dark hair, a shadowed jaw and the patient, sorrowful look of martyrs and bloodhounds. He gave Riley’s tux a silent and cynical once-over, shook his hand and said, “Mr. Grogan? Special Agent Redfield. Come with me, please?”

He led Riley through the maze of desks and down a short hallway, tiptoeing, for some reason, past a couple of rest rooms, and paused before a door at the far end, one hand on the doorknob and a finger to his lips. Riley quelled a flare of impatience and nodded. The FBI agent turned the knob and pushed the door partway open. Riley stepped silently past him and into the room.

It was a typical off-duty room, perhaps a bit more generously outfitted than some, crowded with refrigerator and microwave, sink and coffeemaker, a table cluttered with newspapers and crossword puzzle pads, several chairs. There was a large sofa along one wall, and a TV set perched on a bookcase with shelves occupied by a VCR and an assortment of reading material that ranged from a Bible to National