Operation Reunion Read online

  Kayla couldn’t help smiling at her tone of mock grievance. “Is that good or bad?”

  “Mostly good.”

  “You don’t seem like you’d need a lot of protecting.”

  “I don’t,” Hayley said. “But they love Quinn, and he loves me, therefore...”

  She ended the simple yet moving statement with a wave of her hand.

  “Nice,” Kayla said, trying to quash the now familiar ache that was always threatening to crush her, making it hard to breathe.

  “Very. And unexpected.”

  Hayley’s cell phone chirped the arrival of a text message. She excused herself to glance at it. Kayla guessed, from the way her mouth curved into a soft smile, that it was from Quinn.

  Kayla glanced around, looking for distraction from the pain that was so close to the surface. She’d been surprised when Hayley had directed her so far out; in fact, she had begun to feel a little leery the farther they’d gone. She supposed that was why it was Hayley, because if she’d been riding with Quinn, she would have been a lot more nervous; for all his offering to help he was still a stranger.

  At just the time she really began wondering if she’d made an awful mistake, they’d arrived here. They’d left the city limits of Redwood Cove and entered a more rural county area. The three-story green building was somewhat isolated in a clearing hidden by a thick stand of tall evergreens. The color blended with the trees, making it even harder to spot. There were no markings, not even a street number or name.

  “Sometimes we make people unhappy with us,” Hayley had explained. “So the less obvious we are, the better.”

  Off to one side was what looked to be a large warehouse, and on the far side of that, a flat concrete pad with markings painted on it, and an orange wind sock that had been barely stirring in the minimal breeze. A landing site for a helicopter.

  “I would have thought you’d have an office in Seattle,” she had said.

  “Quinn picked this one, and he’s not a city boy at heart,” Hayley had answered.

  No trace of the city here, Kayla thought now as she sat at the large table. The windows here in the top-floor meeting room were large, giving a full view of the rest of the clearing, the trees that ringed it and the sky above. Which was blue today, a clear early-summer day that made the long gray days of winter seem worth it.

  Something moved in one of the trees, a large maple amid the firs. Kayla leaned forward, curious, and her breath caught when she realized it was a bald eagle. No, two of them, she thought, a pair, looking as if they were snuggling together on the sturdy branch.

  “And that,” Hayley said, “is one of the reasons Quinn set up on the third floor even though we’re only using half of the first and the second not at all. They come here often.”

  That bit of information reassured her in a way nothing else could have; the idea of a man like Quinn choosing to situate his office up two flights of stairs just to watch birds—albeit glorious, magnificent birds—was somehow very comforting.

  “Tell me about Dane.”

  Kayla stopped breathing altogether for a moment as the pain she’d quelled for a moment rushed back. Was she that easy to read? Or was Hayley just that perceptive? Probably both, she thought.

  “He’s obviously crazy about you,” Hayley said.

  “He was.” Even Kayla could hear the ineffable sadness in her voice. Just the sound of it made her sadder still.

  “And you?”

  “I’ve loved him in one way or another since I was fourteen.”

  Hayley simply waited. Kayla sighed.

  “That’s when we moved here. I met Dane the next day. I climbed the tree between our houses and couldn’t get down.”

  “So he is literally the boy next door?”

  “He was then, yes. And he was...wonderful.”

  She hesitated. She didn’t want to say anything that made them think badly of Chad, not when she was asking them to believe her and help prove him innocent, but she also couldn’t not give Dane his due. He might have given up on her, on them, but she couldn’t deny he’d stuck with her longer than anyone else would have, that he’d been there for her every step of the way until even his considerable patience ran out.

  “He was like a brother at first,” she said. “Only nicer.” The subtext “compared to Chad” was there, and she guessed Hayley knew it, but she couldn’t bring herself to say it aloud. Besides, didn’t all siblings abuse each other in that familial sort of way? “Dane laughed with me, not at me, for being a skinny, bookish girl with braces. He knew how it felt to be the odd one. You wouldn’t believe it now, but he was kind of a geeky-looking guy back then. People teased him, so he understood how I felt.”

  “He certainly grew up nicely.”

  She smiled. “Yes, he did. We kind of made a pact. To work on ourselves, but not to let them change who we were inside. We couldn’t change other people, but we could change ourselves, challenge the stereotypes.”

  “That’s pretty deep.”

  “That’s the kind of thing we talked about. We used to have long, esoteric conversations about the state of the world and how to fix it, what era of time we’d like to go back to and why, that kind of thing. Even though he was a couple of years older, Dane never treated me like a dumb kid who didn’t know anything.”

  She missed those days, she thought. And wondered if Dane did, too—missed those long talks about everything but themselves because they were fine and destined for a long, happy life together.

  “So, you set out to what, change what people assumed?”

  Kayla nodded. “Dane started working out and found he actually liked it. Pretty soon he was so fit and strong nobody bullied him to his face anymore. He could throw a football better than any guy in school, but no matter how much they recruited him he wasn’t interested. That caught people’s attention. He never changed who he was. He was still into computers, but he was making that cool.”

  “And you?”

  “I swore I’d never be ashamed of being smart. Never try to hide it. I’d kind of started to do that because I thought the cool kids might like me better.”

  “It’s been my experience,” Hayley said with a wry smile, “that most of the ‘cool kids’ are in fact anything but.”

  Kayla laughed. “That’s what Dane said.”

  “When did he stop being your surrogate brother?”

  Kayla blushed. “I always had a crush on him. But he...well, I was just a kid. The difference between fourteen and sixteen is a lot bigger than sixteen and eighteen.”

  “Is that when it changed?”

  “Sort of. At least, it started to, and then...my parents were killed.”

  “And Dane was there for you.”

  Kayla nodded. “Every minute. He never left my side. He took care of things I couldn’t, did things I didn’t have the presence of mind to even think of.”

  She fought off the memories, trying not to let them swamp her. It didn’t happen often anymore, but when it did, it was as fresh and vivid and horrible as if it had been yesterday.

  She felt the warmth of a touch and realized Hayley had reached across the table to put her hand over hers.

  “I can’t imagine.” Those vivid green eyes were fastened on her and full of warmth and concern. “That you’re even upright is a testament to your strength.”

  “Dane used to think that,” Kayla said with a sad smile. “Now I’m afraid he just thinks I’m crazy.”

  “Ten years is a long time.” Hayley’s voice was very even, and Kayla wondered how hard she was having to try to keep it that way.

  “So I should give up on my brother?”

  “I didn’t say that. You are between the proverbial rock and a hard place.”

  “Chad has his flaws—I’m not blind—but he’s no killer. I can’t just quit on him. People say I should forget about it, but—”

  “You can’t.”

  “No.”

  “That’s always irritated me,” Hayley said, as casually as
if they were discussing the weather, “when people say forget about it, put it out of your mind. Like the memory is a physical thing you could grab and shove in a box and hide. You can’t. But you can reduce the time you spend on it, and the only thing that can do that is time.”

  “Dane says quit feeding it.”

  “Good way to put it. But it still takes time. You can not dwell on it, you can have other things ready to supplant it for when it pops into your mind, you can keep busy to distract yourself, but you have to do all that long enough that it recedes from the front of your mind. And you can’t when these notes keep coming.”

  Kayla was so grateful Hayley seemed to understand that she felt her eyes begin to tear up.

  “Thank you for understanding.” Something occurred to her, and as she looked at Hayley’s gentle smile—no wonder her Quinn adored her, she was wonderful—she decided to ask.

  “You’ve been there, haven’t you?”

  “Yes. My mom died last year, of cancer. And my father was a cop. He was killed in the line of duty when I was twelve.”

  Kayla’s breath caught. “How awful.”

  “That’s how I know forgetting’s not possible. Just like Quinn does.”

  “He...lost someone, too?”

  “He was younger than you were. Just a little guy. His parents were both on that airliner a terrorist brought down—bombed—over Scotland in 1988.”

  Kayla gasped. “I remember my parents talking about that, on the anniversary of it, when I was little. They were horrified, all those innocent people. They thought it was one of the worst things that would ever happen.”

  “I wish they’d been right,” Hayley said quietly.

  The unmentioned memory, of the even more hideous attack that had happened thirteen years later hung between them for a moment.

  “That was, in essence, the reason our foundation exists. When they turned the man who did it loose, the injustice of it, when those men in back rooms who had never suffered the loss made that decision, Quinn made one of his own.”

  “And started the Foxworth Foundation?”

  Hayley nodded. Kayla understood.

  “September 11 was one of the reasons we moved here,” Kayla said. “My parents wanted to be out of the city. My mother couldn’t even bear to look at a skyscraper, and my dad would stare at every jet that flew overhead until it was out of sight.”

  She stopped abruptly, the old, sad irony battering at her. She heard a bark from outside and wondered vaguely if it was Cutter.

  “And two years later, they were dead anyway.”

  Hayley’s words would have seemed cold, harsh even, had they not been spoken in such a gentle voice. And if they hadn’t been exactly the words Kayla had been thinking herself.

  She tried to pull herself together. Everything seemed so much closer to the surface than it had been for a while. It was like that whenever a note came, but she had to admit this was more. Because this time she was dealing with it without Dane’s help, without his steadying presence, without his unwavering strength bolstering her.

  “Yes. They were.”

  “What happened to you? At sixteen, you were too young to be on your own,” Hayley said.

  “My dad’s sister happened, bless her. She took me in until I went off to college. Aunt Fay never had kids of her own, couldn’t, but she loved me. She did her best, we got along great, she was fun and smart and the best thing that could have happened to me, under the circumstances.”

  “Dane,” Hayley said.

  “He was already in college by then. I—”

  “No. I meant...” She gestured toward the door to the meeting room. Kayla turned.

  He was here.

  Chapter 6

  Quinn, who had come into the room right behind Dane, signaled to Hayley and they left them alone to talk. It was, oddly, Cutter who seemed most reluctant to go. The dog, who had arrived with Quinn, lingered in the doorway, looking from Kayla to Dane as if he didn’t want to leave them alone.

  Maybe he thinks we’ll start fighting, Kayla thought with a sigh.

  But when Dane crossed the room and sat in the chair Hayley had vacated, she realized that, although he seemed tense, he wasn’t angry. She could read his mood almost as well as her own, sometimes better, and he wasn’t angry. Because he’d given up? Had he let all the anger go when he’d walked away?

  “I checked them out,” he said abruptly. “From what I could find, they seem to be who they say they are.”

  Kayla went still. If he no longer cared at all, surely he wouldn’t have bothered, right? She didn’t ask, mainly because she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear the answer. She didn’t know why he was here, and she didn’t want to ask that either. Instead, she explained what Hayley had told her about the founding of Foxworth.

  “So Quinn was a victim,” Dane said.

  She heard the musing note in his voice and understood; it was hard to picture today’s strong, tough Quinn as any kind of victim.

  “He was only ten,” Kayla said. “And Hayley’s father was a police officer who was killed when she was twelve.”

  He drew back slightly. “Is that why you trusted them both so quickly? You felt connected because of all that?”

  “I didn’t know all that then. But I knew they understood.”

  “And I don’t.”

  “I didn’t say that. I’ve never said that.”

  “But I’m lucky, right?” He was starting to sound confrontational. “I’m not a member of the club. I’m the only one here not damaged by tragedy.”

  She winced at the oblique reference to her counseling group. She’d called it Collateral Damage because that’s what they were. Just as wounded as the actual victims, yet still up and walking around. She’d thought of Walking Wounded, but that didn’t make the point she so strongly believed in—that the perpetrators didn’t care who else they hurt. In war, it was an expected part of the grim business. But for civilians, it was the ugliest of side effects.

  “Believe me, it’s a club you don’t want any part of.” She took in a quick breath. “Besides, I always thought you’d been damaged by mine. Because you loved me.”

  As quickly as that, his demeanor changed. He let out a long, compressed breath.

  “All right,” he said. “If these people are as good as they say, maybe they can do something.”

  Her heart leaped in her chest, and hope sparked to renewed life.

  “Dane!”

  He reached across the table and took her hands in his. The touch, the contact, made joy well up inside her, as if some vital part of her had been restored.

  “Listen to me, Kayla. I’m willing to give them a chance. Everything I’ve found indicates they are really good at what they do.”

  “Yes,” she answered, tightening her fingers around his, feeling an elemental fear that if she didn’t hang on, he would somehow vanish again. “Yes, I think they are. Maybe even the best. Hayley showed me some of their case records. No names, but—”

  “Then if they can’t find Chad, it’s likely nobody can.”

  She saw suddenly where he was going. And knew his next words would require a decision from her. A difficult one. But nothing could be more difficult than his absence from her life the past two weeks.

  “Yes,” she finally said.

  “Then if they can’t, if this comes to nothing, will you quit making this the sole purpose of your life?”

  She drew in a deep breath. She’d had a brief taste of life without him, and it had been immediately clear that it was worse, much worse, than life without knowing how and where Chad was. And she knew Dane, knew she’d pushed him to the edge, and that he was here now at all was a testament to the power of what they’d built together from the day he’d climbed up that tree to sit beside her. He’d understood her even then, that what she’d wanted, needed, wasn’t someone to come along and rescue her, but someone to help her figure out how to rescue herself.

  She knew what she would be promising if she said yes. />
  “I won’t ever stop wondering, or worrying,” she said, wanting it to be perfectly clear.

  “I wouldn’t expect you to. I just want to know that you won’t obsess over it anymore, that you’ll take back your own life. Our life, together.”

  He didn’t say, “Or it’s over,” but the words hung in the air between them as clearly as if he had.

  “Will you give them a real chance and enough time?”

  “I’ll give them a full, honest chance, if you’ll agree to accept whatever they find.”

  Still feeling torn, she nevertheless gave the only answer she felt possible.

  “All right,” she said.

  Dane let out an audible breath. And then he was on his feet, pulling her up and into his arms. Kayla nearly wept at the rightness of it. She clung to him, trembling at how close she’d come to losing this, losing him, forever.

  She didn’t know how long had passed before she heard a slight jingle from the doorway. She looked up and saw Cutter trotting into the room, tail up and waving slightly. The dog came to a stop before them and sat down. He looked at them both, with an expression Kayla would have sworn was satisfaction.

  Quinn and Hayley followed the dog into the room.

  “Why Cutter?” Kayla asked.

  “He came with the name,” Hayley said, reaching to scratch the dog’s ear. “He turned up on my doorstep with only that tag. I tried but never could find out where he’d come from.”

  The dog tilted his head way back to look at Hayley without changing position, looking so comical as he did it that Kayla couldn’t help but laugh. She heard Dane chuckle beside her and savored the sound of it; she’d missed his easy laugh, not just in the past two weeks but, she had to admit, for much longer. She’d caused that, she realized regretfully.

  “I spent some time with a friend of mine this afternoon,” Quinn said in a back-to-business tone as Hayley gestured everyone back into the chairs around the table. “Sam works for the local sheriff’s office.”