“If I got you pregnant, I’m sure as hell not going to walk away.”
“There were two of us forgetting a condom, and I take responsibility for my own mistakes, thank you very much.”
“I am just saying that I’m not going to desert you.”
“If I’m pregnant.”
They stared at each other for a long…well, pregnant beat. Then Mel walked into the airport. Bo followed, kicking his own ass all the way to his plane. They flew for a full hour in silence, during which time he thought far too much.
Could he really walk away? Go back to Australia as if nothing had happened? As if he hadn’t begun to think of North Beach as his home, too? As if the place hadn’t captured a good part of his heart, and Mel the rest of it?
“Here.” Mel reached over and flipped open the ice chest they’d stocked way back in North Beach before they’d come. She pulled out a soda. “You look like you need a hit of sugar.”
“I’m okay.” But he took the can, noticing that she even opened it for him. He must look like death warmed over for her to be babying him like this.
Customary cool long gone, he downed the soda, the icy drink wetting his parched throat but not making him feel any better.
He didn’t know if he could feel better. Could he go back to Australia?
And if he couldn’t, how would Mel take that, when she couldn’t wait for him to get the hell out of her life, he wondered.
“You sure you’re okay?” she asked.
“You’re hovering, Mel.”
She pulled back as if slapped. “Excuse me.”
He swore to himself. “I’m sorry. I just need some quiet.”
“Fine.”
“Fine.” Yeah, he was an ass. An ass with the words you’ve fallen and you can’t get up running through his mind over and over.
He went back to sweating.
“Why did you tell that woman at the bar you’d try to get her money back? What about your money? Wouldn’t you take whatever you found for yourself?” Mel asked him.
“I have the airport.”
She stared at him until he squirmed. “What?” he finally demanded.
She shook her head. “That’s the first time you’ve ever said such a thing, admitted that maybe North Beach has equal value to what you’ve lost.”
He cut his eyes to hers, then looked straight ahead to the horizon, the two of them silent again.
“Why did she go back there to try to buy their silence?”
This from Mel some time later. Clearly she’d thought of little else.
Bo shrugged. “She knows you’re looking for her.”
“But she doesn’t know why.”
“You don’t know that.”
She shook her head. “I just keep thinking that there has to be a good reason for what she did, both to Eddie and those people we just met. She wasn’t a bad person, Bo.”
He grimaced, and she read his thoughts. “Look, I know people can be bad, damn it. I’m not naive. But Sally… God.” She blew out a breath. “She was everything to us. I just can’t…” She shook her head. “I just can’t put it all together and make sense of it.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “If I could have done this any other way-”
That actually tore a laugh out of her. “Oh, no. You prided yourself on being honest, so don’t start lying now just to save my feelings.”
“I mean it. Look, I know I was hell-bent on coming here and wrapping my fingers around Sally’s neck-”
“And then mine.”
“Well, yes,” he agreed with a small smile. “But for different reasons entirely.”
She played with the condensation on her can of soda. “I keep wondering…”
“What?”
She looked at him, her whiskey eyes guarded. “What is it that you want from me?”
“Honesty.”
“You’ve got that now.”
“Affection,” he said before his self-editor could stop the revealing words from escaping.
She paused. Looked out the window. “You have that, too,” she said to the glass.
Then your heart, he wanted to add, but she’d probably put on a parachute and jump. So he let out an easy smile. “Then I have it all, don’t I?”
She stared down at the landscape below, pensive, silent for a long time. “Those things?” she murmured softly just before they landed. “Honesty and affection?” She was speaking to the glass. “I want them, too.”
He waited until she looked at him, and smiled with what he hoped was his heart and soul. “They’re there for the taking, Mel.”
And, apparently, much more than that as well. Certainly more than he’d ever bargained for. And given the look on her face, she felt the same.
They got back just before closing time. Outside a new storm brewed and flights for the morning were already questionable, while inside North Beach something else brewed…
Ernest left after Mel and Bo’s arrival, without so much as a grumpy word, dirty look, or spider in a jar. Char and Al were in a “discussion,” which meant Al had done something stupid and Char had told him so in no uncertain terms, and they weren’t speaking to each other. Danny was also unusually quiet. Well, if one could call the air compressor and gadgets he used for plane maintenance quiet, not to mention the head-banging music he played so loud the entire hangar shook with each thumping beat.
Dimi had incense going everywhere, but if it was supposed to have a calming effect, it’d failed. Bracelets jangling on her wrists, stress in her gaze, she followed Mel into her office. “Tell me how it went. Oh, God, I can see by your face. It’s bad, right?”
“Define bad,” Mel said, sinking to her chair.
“Aw, hell.”
“We found an ex of Sally’s. And Sally had been with him under a different name, Rosario Lopez.”
“What?”
“Yeah, hold on to yourself, it gets worse. While she was married to him, she had her name put on the deeds of his properties, then divorced him and sold those properties out from beneath him. Then vanished.”
Dimi covered her mouth, shook her head, and also sank to a chair.
“And what’s bothering me is, I’m getting this sinking feeling that there are more men out there who’ve been equally screwed. I’m going to call Matt and ask him to find out what other aliases she’s used.”
“Ohmigod.”
Mel leaned forward and squeezed her fingers. “You know what comes next, right?”
“We bury our heads in the sand and pretend none of this ever happened?”
Mel shook her head.
“We put on red glittery shoes and click the heels three times and chant, ‘There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home’?”
“I’m sorry,” Mel whispered. “Please don’t freak out.”
“I don’t freak out.” Dimi opened Mel’s bottom drawer and pulled out three candles that Mel had never used.
“Dimi.”
She was going through another drawer, probably looking for yet more incense. Mel put her hand over hers. “Hey, let’s get out of here, okay? Get some dinner-”
“You mean let’s babysit Dimi so she doesn’t go somewhere and get drunk, right?”
Well, hell. Yes. But Mel couldn’t say that, not when Dimi’s hand beneath hers was shaking, not when her bestest, oldest friend on the planet, her only family, was biting back tears and looked an inch from a
