The two policemen size her up, head to bare feet, before answering. “Did you register for this room, miss?”
She nods.
“And is this man your father?”
She goes sheepish. “Oh goodness, no. No… I don’t know why I said that to the guy at the front desk. I was afraid he wouldn’t rent us the room, I suppose, since we’re not married. He seemed-I dunno-the judgmental type. I just didn’t think it was any of his business.”
“Uh-huh. We’re going to have to see some ID.” They are trying to be dispassionate, trying to dispel their righteous anger now that there is no pervert here to bring to justice.
“You have no right to check up on us. It was consensual, what we did,” Luke says as he puts an arm around Lanny, drawing her against his side. He wants the police to leave now. He wants this embarrassing, nerve-racking experience behind him.
“We just have to see proof that you’re not-you know,” the younger of the two policemen says, ducking his head and making an impatient gesture with his flashlight. There is no alternative but to let the officers look over his driver’s license and her passport, hoping that any police bulletin from St. Andrew hasn’t made it over the border to Canada.
Luke soon realizes that he needn’t have worried: the two officers are so flustered and disappointed that they make the most cursory pass over the identification, quite possibly not even reading either document, before shuffling backward out the door with barely audible apologies for the inconvenience. As soon as they’ve left, Luke pulls the blind over the window that looks onto the walkway.
“Oh my god,” Lanny says before collapsing on the bed.
“We should leave. I should get you to a city.”
“I can’t ask you to take any more chances for me…”
“I can’t leave you here, can I?” He gets dressed while Lanny is in the bathroom, water running. He runs a hand over his chin, feeling stubble, realizing it has been about twenty-four hours since he last shaved, then he decides to see if the parking lot is clear. He hooks a finger behind the blind and peeks out: the squad car is sitting next to the SUV.
He lets the blind fall back into place. “Damn it. They’re still outside.”
Lanny looks up from her suitcase. “What?”
“The two cops, they’re still out there. Running a check on the license plate, maybe.”
“You think?”
“Maybe they’re seeing if we have records.” He rubs his lower lip, thinking. They probably can’t get answers right away on U.S. license plates or drivers’ licenses; they probably have to wait for a reply to come back through the system, through police liaison units. There might be a sliver of time before…
Luke reaches for Lanny. “We have to go, now.”
“Won’t they try to stop us?”
“Leave your suitcase, everything. Just get dressed.”
They leave the hotel room hand in hand and have started walking to their vehicle when the window of the squad car slides down. “Hey,” the police officer on the passenger side calls out, “you can’t leave yet.”
Luke drops Lanny’s hand so she can hang back while he approaches the patrol car. “Why can’t we leave? We haven’t done anything wrong. We showed you our ID. You don’t have any reason to detain us. This is starting to feel like harassment.”
The two officers bristle, uncertain but not liking the sound of the word “harassment.”
“Look,” Luke continues, opening his hands to show that they’re empty. “We’re just going out to dinner. Do we look like we’re going to bolt? We left our luggage in the room; we’re paid up for the night. If you still have questions when your background checks come in, you can always catch us after dinner. But if you’re not going to arrest me, I believe you can’t stop me.” Luke speaks calmly and reasonably, arms outstretched, like a man trying to dissuade thieves from robbing him. Lanny climbs into the front seat of the big SUV, giving the police officers a hostile glare. He follows her, starts the engine, and pulls out of the parking space smoothly, checking one last time to be sure the squad car doesn’t follow them.
It’s not until they’re well down the road that Lanny pulls the laptop from under her jacket. “I couldn’t leave it behind. It has too much damning information on it, tying me to Jonathan, stuff they could use as evidence if they wanted to,” she explains, as though she feels guilty for having taken the risk to save it. After a second, she removes the bag of pot from her pocket, like she’s lifting a rabbit from a magician’s hat.
Luke’s heart warbles in his throat. “The pot, too?”
“I figured after they’d realized we weren’t coming back, they’d search the room for sure. This would give them a reason to arrest us…” She stuffs the bag back in her jacket pocket. “Do you think we’re safe?”
He checks the rearview mirror again. “I dunno… they have the license plate number now. If they remember our names,
PART III
THIRTY-TWO
The highway to Quebec City runs two lanes in each direction and is as dark as an abandoned airstrip. The leafless trees and featureless scenery remind Luke of Marquette, the tiny town in the lonely upper corner of Michigan where his ex-wife settled. Luke has been up once to see his girls, right after Tricia moved in with her childhood sweetheart. Tricia and Luke’s two children now live in her boyfriend’s house, on a cherry farm, and his son and daughter stay with them a couple of nights a week, too.
During the visit, Tricia seemed to Luke no happier with her sweetheart than she had been with him, or maybe she was just embarrassed to be seen by her ex in a run-down house with a twelve-year-old Camaro in the driveway. Not that Luke’s house in St. Andrew was much better.
The girls, Winona and Jolene, were unhappy, but that was to be expected; they’d just moved to town and knew no one. It almost broke Luke’s heart to sit with them in the pizza place where he’d taken them for lunch. They were silent and too young to know whom to blame or be mad at. They sulked when he tried to draw them out, and he couldn’t bear the thought of taking them back to their mother, saying good-bye when all of them were so raw and hurting. He also knew it couldn’t be helped: what they were going through couldn’t be solved in a weekend.
By the end of his time there, as he was saying his farewells on the cement steps in front of Tricia’s front door, things had improved for him and the girls. Their panic had subsided, they had found some solid ground under their tiny feet. They cried when he hugged them good-bye and waved as Luke pulled away in his rental car, but it still tore at his heart to leave them.
“I have two daughters of my own,” Luke blurts out, overcome by the urge to share something of his life with Lanny.
She looks over at him. “Was that their picture, at your house? How old are they?”
“Five and six.” He feels a tiny glow of pride, all he has left of fatherhood. “They live with their mother. And the guy she’s planning to marry.” Someone else was taking care of his daughters, now.
She shifts so she faces him. “How long were you married?”
“Six years. We’re divorced now,” he adds. “It was a mistake to get married, I see it now. I’d just finished my residency in Detroit. My parents’ health was starting to fail and I knew I’d be coming back to St. Andrew… I guess I didn’t want to come back alone. I couldn’t imagine finding someone there. I knew everybody, since I had grown up
