3

 

 

Wind whispered through the leaves of the four oak trees surrounding the farmhouse in the Piedmont of North Carolina. It stirred the scents of the gardenias in the shrub beds along the brick foundation. The delightful aroma swirled in the air and slipped through the screen of the window that was barely open.

Deborah drew in a breath and released a sigh. That warm North Carolina night, darkness wrapped around her like a cloak. A refrigerator-blue glow filled the study of the old farmhouse. On her laptop, the response from the personals website dared her to answer.

Hamid, you want a one-night stand? One with a bang? Tell me more, and maybe I can deliver.

The sender?

A guy named Murdock.

She sucked in her breath. “Finally!”

That one word exploded across the small room.

Deborah turned on the lamp next to her and scribbled her contact in the composition book that had sat dormant for six weeks. She opened another message and began typing her find. She stopped. This was too good to e-mail to TL and Nasser.

She had to call TL.

Now.

Her fingers trembling from excitement, she dialed her handler’s number. It rang three times, then rolled to an answering service.

“Counterterrorism, may I help you?” The woman’s smooth voice ramped up her impatience.

“I need to speak to TL Jones.”

“And you are?”

“Deborah Fields. Code five-eight-two-four-five.” The numbers validated her as a civilian contractor working as a web hunter.

“Special Agent Jones is on leave this week. I’ll connect you with Special Agent al-Saad.”

A click and more ringing followed.

“Nasser al-Saad.”

“It’s Deborah.”

“Hey, Deb, how’s it going?” His Texas drawl filled her ears.

“Awesome.”

“Oh? Did Anna win a horse show? Or did DJ get a merit badge?”

“Neither.” Deborah giggled with the giddiness of her find. “The kids are out of town this week at my in-laws in Georgia. I got a hit on Murdock.”

A sharp intake of breath rewarded her.

“Surprised you, didn’t I?”

“You did.” Nasser cleared his throat. “Read it to me.”

Deborah recited the post she’d placed by posing as Hamid on the personals site, then did the same with Murdock’s response.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“I’m thinking this has the potential to be big. We need to discuss this in person. Can you meet me in Raleigh tomorrow at noon?”

“Say 2:30, and I can do that.” Deborah smiled as she thought about an afternoon out of town. “Where?”

“Let’s meet at our usual Starbucks in Cary. We’ll go from there.”

She made a note on her calendar before hanging up. It took her another hour to pull together the summaries she’d written after each contact with the elusive Murdock. Once she collated everything into a folder, she turned to place it at the end of the desk.

Her gaze landed on a picture.

A lump swelled in her throat as she picked it up.

Derek, her husband, offered a devil-may-care smile from a rappelling position when he’d just stepped over a cliff. Her eyes filled as she noticed how his hazel ones crinkled at the corners.

“You’d be so proud of me.” Her whisper broke the stillness of the room. “We’re going to bag this guy, make him pay for the way he’s killed those who serve our country.”

She set it down and blinked several times.

Deborah rose. She took a deep breath, let it out, and took another one.

The threat of tears receded.

Her eyes shot to the clock. They widened.

Ten already, and the horses remained in the pasture.

“Edgar, Colonel!” she called to her dogs.

The Doberman Pinscher and Belgian Malinois skittered across the tile in the kitchen and charged toward her.

“Let’s go outside and get the horses in.”

Edgar yipped as if he couldn’t agree more.

“Come on, silly.” She tousled his ears and let them into the night.

As she stepped onto the screened-in porch, the humid night air surrounded her in a suffocating embrace. Why hadn’t she noticed it when she’d cracked the window?

Deborah headed toward the barn, her Tevas barely making a sound on the thick grass.

A breeze whispered across her bare arms and stiffened into a wind that made the leaves of the two nearest oaks rustle. A smell wafted up from down slope where a wetland had formed below the pond. Rotting vegetation and maybe even something else. Had an animal fallen in and gotten stuck? She cringed and shivered as the elation from her find that evening faded, leaving in its wake a bit of fear.

The FBI had promised her that her anonymity was her safety.

She was safe, right?

Deborah set that one aside as she snagged the leads for two of the horses from the barn. Soft clucks brought them to the fence, and she walked the first two inside and secured them in their stalls. As she brought the remaining six inside, she glanced around the barn in search of her dogs.

They nosed around the entrance.

Deborah lowered the bar across the last stall and shut off the lights. She put a foot forward to return to the house.

Something rattled in the feed room.

Deborah froze. Her breath remained locked in her throat.

“Who’s there?” she softly called, hating the way her voice shook.

Nothing answered.

“Maybe I’m hearing things,” she muttered. She padded toward the double doors.

This time, she clearly heard the scrape of metal on concrete.

The Colonel growled low in his throat.

Deborah reached for the pitchfork resting against the wall near the doors. Her feet carried her forward before she realized it. She gripped it in both hands.

Another growl emanated, this one from Edgar. Both dogs stood rigidly at attention.

Murdock.

Had he found out who she was and come to kill her?

She wanted to laugh at the absurdity, at least until she realized how vulnerable she was.

In the dark, her eyes began adjusting. She noted the long, cylindrical shape of a flashlight clipped to the wall. She grabbed it. With the pitchfork in one hand and light in the other, she tensed. Deborah raised the pitchfork like she was a farm jouster. Her finger depressed the button on the flashlight. With a war cry, she charged toward the feed room.

The raccoon caught in the glare shrieked.

Deborah screamed. She staggered backward. The pitchfork clattered to the concrete, and she grabbed the nearby stall door to keep from falling.

The dogs charged.

More squeals and barking ensued.

Suddenly, she began giggling, then laughing. “Out, you two. Enough.”

The dogs backed away and sat. The raccoon fled from the grain room, down the aisle, and from the barn.

“That was too much.” One last guffaw escaped her as she slipped into the night and secured the barn door. Only after she returned to the house, locked all of the doors, and lowered all of the blinds did her good humor fade.

What if it hadn’t been a raccoon sneaking cat food from the barn cats’ bowl? What if there really had been an intruder, like an escaped con or someone looking to rob her? Or what if Murdock really had shown up to verify Hamid’s identity?

The thoughts drove her upstairs and into the bedroom. She fully armed the alarm the FBI had installed when she’d become a web hunter three years before. As she crawled under the covers, the vulnerability that had occasionally crept over her since Derek’s death visited again like a deadly shadow.

She stared at the picture of the two of them at the Grand Canyon when they’d hiked it. That had been BC, or before children, as they’d joked. Before God had taken Derek so suddenly.

“I wish I didn’t feel this way sometimes,” she murmured as she ran her fingers down the glass. “Usually, I feel so capable. I have you to thank for that, since you made me stand on my own two feet.”

Sadness replaced the worry, and she found it better to turn out the light and pull the sheet and blanket up to her chin.

Something made her open her eyes later that night.

Deborah raised her head and listened. The Colonel sighed in his sleep from his bed in the corner. Beside him, Edgar snuffled in slumber.

Then she saw it.

Lightning.

A storm approached.

She cringed since she loathed thunderstorms.

The wind intensified, once more making the leaves clatter. Lightning flickered through her filmy curtains, followed by the low grumble of thunder.

Deborah clutched the blanket closer to her.

With a loud crack, the storm began in earnest.

She trembled.

The rain poured onto the tin roof. Lightning strobed across the room with hardly a break. Thunder exploded around her.

She began praying and clamped the pillow over her head.

A bright flash nearly blinded her, followed by a huge explosion.

She yelped.

The house shook.

That wasn’t simply lightning striking the house.

Deborah flung back the covers and turned on the lamp.

Nothing.

Fear uncurled within her. She found another flashlight in her nightstand.

With its beam shooting ahead of her, she stumbled into the hallway. The doors to DJ’s and Anna’s rooms stood open. Had she shut the one to Gracie’s and Marie’s?

She shivered.

Her hand reached for the knob.

She pulled back.

Maybe she should call the police.

With one last, deep breath, she pushed open the door.

Deborah cried out and gaped at the leaves, branches, and wet that greeted her.

One of the old oaks out front had hit the house and come clean into the bedroom of her two youngest children. Somewhere underneath the mess lay their beds.

She began trembling as the overwhelmed feeling slammed into her again.

Staggering down the hall to the master bedroom, she fumbled for the cell phone she kept on her nightstand.

Not tonight.

In her haste to escape upstairs, she’d left it on the kitchen counter.

By the weak beam of her flashlight, she stumbled down the stairs and into the kitchen. Her fingers trembled as she dialed the number.

When her best friend’s sleepy voice answered, Deborah sagged against the granite. “Wanda? It’s me. I need yours and Jeff’s help. Fast.”

 

 

“I’m not sure I can keep doing this.” Deborah scrubbed her burning eyes as she stared at the stack of messages she’d printed the night before.

“Are you worried?” Nasser’s question broke into the thoughts rampaging through her skull like spooked cattle.

She blinked. “I’m sorry?”

He gazed at her, his head cocked. “You said you weren’t sure you could keep doing this. We’re so close with Murdock, but if you want—”

A dull flush filled her cheeks. “I must have been thinking aloud.” She closed her eyes and rubbed her temples. “I’m sorry. Thanks to everything that happened last night, I’ve barely had four hours of sleep. I meant this being a single-mom-of-four thing.”

“Allah must have smiled on you.” The young FBI agent sat back in his chair. “He kept you safe.”

She took a deep breath.

Outside, chainsaws buzzed as the guys from the Delta Force, or the “Delta Family” as she called them, continued chopping the oak tree into smaller and smaller bits.

“From what I see, you’re doing a fine job with raising your children.”

A wan smile crossed her face. “Sometimes I wonder.”

She cleared her throat and straightened. Much as she enjoyed speaking with him, she wanted to head upstairs and curl up in bed for a nap. “So what do you want me to do?”

“Write him a message. The key is to not sound overly eager. I’m afraid that if we jump on it, reply that you’d like to meet right away or something, we’ll tip our hand.”

Deborah folded her arms across her chest. “So maybe a little hesitant? Play hard to get?”

“Spoken like a woman.”

A genuine smile finally forced its way loose. “We do have our ways. How about I write back that I’m not sure about his sincerity and that I want to see more of a sign of that? It might push his buttons.”

Nasser fell silent. Slowly, he nodded. “Do it. We’ll see what he says. That’ll also give TL time to get back from vacation.”

Deborah went to the personals site and typed her reply. Nasser read through it, and he nodded. “I think that’s perfect.”

She hit Send, then blew out a big sigh. “We’ve done some tough ones together, but I think this takes the cake. Who do you think he is?”

He rested his chin on his hand and gazed at her, obviously considering his answer and how much he should reveal to a civilian. “I think he’s someone who’s highly placed. In the agency or DHS, I’m not sure since we tend to share informants and information from our undercover operatives. Personally, I think he’s able to get his hands on both. Let’s just say he’s set us back several years, and we’re out for blood, since we’ve lost a dozen or so to him, including five deep cover agents.”

They fell silent.

Nasser rose. “I’d better head to Raleigh. I’ve got a late shuttle back to DC.”

“Thanks for understanding and coming down.”

A quirky smile crossed his lips. “I think you had your hands a bit too full today to come to Raleigh.”

“Yeah, of leaves.”

He laughed. “Keep that sense of humor, and you’ll be fine.”

Deborah saw him to his car. Once he pulled down the driveway and into the stand of woods separating the house from the highway, she retreated upstairs.

Though she yearned for her bed, she found herself stopping at the doorway leading to Gracie and Marie’s room. The late afternoon sun shining through the blue tarp over the gaping hole cast an eerie glow across the space. Leaves and twigs littered the carpet.

Her gaze slid to her daughters’ twin beds.

Both frames lay shattered; the sheets, blankets, and mattresses were ruined.

That slightly panicky feeling returned in the form of exhaustion and short, shallow breaths.

Deborah leaned against the inside wall and slid down until her knees rested against her chest. God, why did this have to happen? Why, when I don’t have a helpmate to lean on? Why?

“There you are.” Wanda Dalton’s voice reached her.

Deborah’s eyes snapped open. “I must have fallen asleep.”

“It’s been a long day.” Her best friend settled beside her.

That earned a brief smile. “I’ll say.” She stared at the mess before them. “I keep looking at this. What if the kids had been here? They…they would have…”

She broke off.

“They aren’t.”

“I know, but what if they—”

“Deb—”

“I could never forgive myself if—”

“But it didn’t happen.” Wanda carefully enunciated the words. “God knew this would happen. It might have surprised you, but it didn’t surprise Him at all. Keep that in mind.”

“You’re right.” Deborah sighed and rested her head against her friend’s shoulder. “I’m feeling so overwhelmed right now. So alone.”

“What are we? Chopped liver?” The playfulness in Wanda’s tone gently reprimanded her.

“No, no. It’s just that…” Deborah fell silent.

Outside, the chainsaw ceased. One of the guys hooted. Then came the easy laugh of another. Zach Maynard. How many times had he been over to help her when she needed a strong back or something done beyond her basic tool skills? It seemed like whenever she called.

“Times like this are when I badly miss Derek. Somehow, when he was alive, it made these types of incidents easier to bear, even if he was deployed.”

“You want a man.”

“Not just any man…”

“A husband.” Wanda chuckled. “But to get a husband, you need to let people know you’re available, so to speak.”

Deborah shifted so she faced her friend. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

“I think you know.”

“Huh?”

“You haven’t noticed the way Zach’s sweet on you?”

“Zach Maynard?”

“Is there anyone else? Zach, as in the guy who’s spent since sunrise calming you down and then cutting up a hundred-year-old oak tree for you. He’s had a thing for you for close to a year now.”

“Really?”

Wanda rolled her eyes. “You haven’t seen that?”

“Uh, no.”

“Zach respects wedding bands, even on the fingers of widows.” Wanda tapped the diamond solitaire and gold band resting on the ring finger of Deborah’s left hand. “I understand what you’re saying, and I understand why you’re wearing that. But if you want a guy to take a risk on you, to ask you out, then he’s got to know you’re ready to see someone. Do you get what I’m saying?”

“Yeah,” Deborah whispered.

“Perfect.” Wanda squeezed her arm. “I came to tell you I’ve ordered some pizza. It should arrive about the time they finish cutting your tree into enough firewood to last you a couple of years. So freshen up and come on down. And think about what I said.”

Deborah climbed to her feet and helped her friend up. “I’ll do that. Thanks,” she softly added. “It’s given me something to think about.”

Much later that night, Deborah’s gaze slid to the picture of Derek. She uncurled from her tuck on the bed and lifted it. Her fingers skittered across the glass. “I miss you, Derek. I do. But I also know you wouldn’t want me to stay single simply to honor your memory. I’d never have expected you to do that either. Would it be okay if I saw someone else? Maybe married someone?”

She closed her eyes. They filled, but she pushed the tears down. Somehow, she knew what he’d say.

I love you and said I would until death did us part. I’m gone now to the Father. You’re free.

Deborah returned the picture to its place. Then she rose. Slowly, she stepped to the dresser and gazed into the mirror. Her slate blue eyes held a solemnity about them. Most likely they always would, thanks to the events that had unfolded in her life.

Now they glimmered with something different. A yearning, maybe? A wish to be seen as more than a mother and a widow? A desire to be known as a woman who could give love? And a need for a sincere kiss? How could she show that?

Her gaze slid to her left hand as Wanda’s words echoed in her ears.

“Derek, I love you. Thank you for the twenty-one years we had together.”

With that, she slid the rings from her finger and stashed them in the drawer.

She closed it and turned away to begin a new phase of her life.