MARCUS’ PHONE RANG just as he was exiting the cramped glasswalled room.
Dale Steadman demanded, “Where are you?”
“The DA’s office. Dale, I think we may have found the missing link.”
He might as well not have spoken. “Coastal Citizens Bank. First and Harbor. I need you to come now.”
“Dale, I’ve got the DA here with me, and we’ve—”
“Get over here now!”
Marcus let the dead phone fall from his ear, slightly embarrassed by the way he had been publicly treated. The DA met his gaze with the hard warmth of one who had been there before. “Client?”
“I think,” Marcus replied, “Dale Steadman is about five minutes away from coming totally undone.”
“Take your time. We can’t move on Skyler until our mister rat gets down from Raleigh anyway.”
“The third man James mentioned. I have a name for you.”
She crossed her arms. “Man, you’re just full of surprises.”
“Sephus Jones. He’s got a record long as Skyler’s.”
“You know this gentleman?”
“Met him. Once. He’s attacked my fiancée. Twice.”
She pointed him toward the door. “You go see to your business. We can hear the rest when you get back.”
Dale waited for Marcus in a bank built to resemble a Grecian tomb fronting Wilmington’s waterside. The bank manager was bug-eyed at the size of the banker’s check he had on his otherwise empty desk. Marcus could see the zeros all the way across the office as the manager’s assistant ushered him inside. He did not need to count them. He knew the amount and he knew what it meant.
“You’ve sold your house?”
Dale replied with the raspy baritone of a man whose voice was only the outermost sign of interior shredding. “How soon can Kirsten be ready to go?”
Marcus waved sharply at the banker, halting him from rising. “Dale, you have got to hear me out.”
“No, Marcus. I’m the one who’s talking here. You’re listening, you’re doing. You got that?”
“But—”
“Question one.” He paused to slide the arm of his jacket across his forehead and then sweep the crook of his elbow down over his face. “Is anything you’ve got to say going to bring my baby girl back to me now?”
“Maybe.”
Dale sent his fist crashing down upon the desk. The banker backed up a notch. “Maybe isn’t an option! Yes or no. Is my baby coming home because of what you have found?”
“I can’t guarantee you that. But—”
“No buts! No maybes, no tomorrows!” Dale kept his gaze leveled at the corner of the office, a grim focus as tight as the menacing crouch to his shoulders. He cocked his head at the check on the desk. The motion corded his neck muscles. “That’s everything I own, Marcus. Everything I’ve spent a lifetime putting together.”
“We’ve managed to speak with one of the burglars you caught.”
“That is ancient history.”
The fact that Dale heard him at all pushed Marcus forward. “They were after Celeste, Dale. They were paid to kidnap your child. It’s all tied in somehow. Erin’s return, Hamper Caisse, the trial, the attack on Kirsten, everything.”
Still he refused to lift his gaze. “So they won.”
“All we need is a little—”
“All we need? All we need?” Dale shook his head, a bull struggling to contain a red-flag rage. “Will you and Kirsten do this thing or not?”
“I think you’re making a terrible mistake.”
“That’s me. Dale Steadman, master of the perpetual blunder. Yes or no.”
“Yes, Dale. If you insist, I will act upon your behalf.”
The banker was so ready he could not get his hands to move fast enough, or keep the tremolo from his voice. “If you’ll just sign here for the receipt of this check, Mr. Glenwood. Thank you. May I see some identification that bears your signature? Fine. You understand that this is a banker’s check, and once you have signed this release, it is as good as cash.”
Marcus signed the triplicate forms, accepted back his driver’s license, then slipped the envelope and the check into his pocket. Five million dollars. He turned back to where Dale’s gaze bore a hole in the far corner and settled his hand upon Dale’s shoulder. Beneath the jacket was nothing save stone.
When he returned to the DA’s office, Hamper Caisse had still not arrived. Marcus placed the check in Wilma Blain’s evidence safe and went for a walk. Two blocks on and he was lost within an east Carolina realm. Pines and hardy scrubwoods formed uniform walls at either side of the road, a comforting enclosure that invited a peace and slower pace. Two blocks farther and he entered a neighborhood of time-washed houses and empty lots turned to neighborhood truck gardens. Dogs panted and watched his passage from shaded porches, reluctant to enter the heat. The sun filtered through the overhead limbs and turned the road into a shimmering silver-black river. Heat blistered the air.
He knew he should apply his mind to the pressures at hand. But the afternoon held room for little more than the sound of his footsteps and the unspoken bonding to this place and time. There was nothing that explained why even a day drenched in summer humidity could sparkle and shine, save for the fact that he belonged here. He was determined to accomplish the impossible in this contemporary world of fickle allegiances. Here he would stay, here he would breathe his last. There was only one more thing he would ask from life, or so it seemed at the time. One final wish, and he would ask nothing further. He stared into the heavens and let the sun heighten his single consuming desire to have a white-haired beauty walk this lane with him.
Which was why, when his phone rang and he heard Kirsten’s voice on the other end, the first words out of his mouth were “Marry me.”
“What?”
He stepped beneath a live oak and gripped the nearest branch with his free hand. “I’m surrounded by a billion pressures, and all I can think about is us. I love you so much it hurts to breathe. Marry me, Kirsten.”
“Marcus …” A pause, then, “Wait, wait, I have to sit down.”
Which is exactly what he did. Dressed in his business suit and sweating through his shirt and jacket both, he dropped down to the dusty curb. A dog meandered over and sniffed at him. There was some hound in the curious canine face, but no aggression. Which was good. Right then Marcus doubted he could have risen to flee a slavering Doberman.
When Kirsten spoke again, she had somehow managed to shed half her age, for it was a little girl’s voice which said, “Being away from you this time has become agony. But a wonderful pain just the same. Do you have any idea what I’m talking about?”
“Oh yes.”
“I am full of contradictions and contrary ways, Marcus. There is much about me that is very ugly. I am trapped by cages I have spent all my life constructing.”
“Does my love hold any hope of helping you? Does needing you so much …” He stopped, caught by the need to gasp. “Kirsten, I will spend a lifetime helping you be who you want to be.”
“This is one of your most remarkable traits,” she said. “Knowing which words carry the most exquisite agony.”
He waited, surrounded by golden light and a distant car’s murmur and the sound of his four-footed companion panting in nervous communion.
“All right.”
“What?”
“Yes, Marcus. I will marry you.”
The drenching relief left him unable to form a single word save “What?”
He could hear her smile. “You don’t believe me?”
“Kirsten …” His heart hammered so hard he knew his voice shook. “I never thought I’d hear you say those words.”
“I want to ask you to do something, Marcus.”
There was no reason for tears now. Or finding his vision clouding over until he could see nothing save a blur of time. “Anything.”
“I want you to ask me in person.”
“Today.”
“In Wilmington.”
“What?”
“I have to come down.”
“Why? I mean, I want you to, but we have things to do.”
“I know. That’s why I’m coming. I’m checking out now. I’ll call you back in a while from the airport and tell you what’s happening. Right now I just want to put our work to one side and sit here. Just for a minute. Do you understand?”