Jan Burke - Sweet Dreams, Irene

Jack just smiled. “Relax, Frank. I was going to tell her sooner or later anyway. Just wanted to give her a little more time, is all.”

“Tell me what?” I said, still irritated.

Frank looked uneasy, but Jack just grinned. “That I did have a choice,” he said, “but I gave up trying to have an elaborate hairdo after chemotherapy.”

“CHEMOTHERAPY?” Shock won out over chagrin, but chagrin was a very close second. “Made life simpler. I don’t even have to blow-dry this cut.”

I stayed silent.

“Leukemia, currently in remission,” he said with a bow, as if he had just finished singing a little song.

I stared for a moment, still not believing it. But as I looked at him, I gradually realized that I didn’t want to believe it. I had lost both of my parents to cancer. I liked Jack, and I didn’t want to hear that he had leukemia.

“I’d prefer,” he added quietly, “that you don’t let word of it get around. I told Frank and I’ve told you. But no one else.”

I agreed to keep his confidence, but I was still shaken.

“I’m sorry,” he said, watching me. “You don’t need bad news right now, do you?”

“I had it coming,” I said.

The subject was dropped for the moment. I stayed quiet, and allowed the two of them to distract me with their conversation as they cleared the table and washed the dishes. Frank built a fire and we adjourned to the living room. Cody, who had been staying close to me all day, opted for Jack’s lap.

As the evening progressed, I began to notice that Frank and Jack talked and laughed together with the ease of longtime chums. They looked to be about as unlikely a pair as could be imagined, but they obviously shared a growing friendship. I wondered about it as I listened to them. It wasn’t the only thing I was curious about.

“What’s wrong? Is your shoulder bothering you?” Frank asked. I became aware that my face had set into a frown.

“Not really. And nothing’s wrong. I just wanted to ask you about a few things.”

“Such as?”

“Such as, where was I when you found me? Where was that cabin?”

He shot Jack a look, but answered, “You were in the San Bernardino Mountains, near Pine Summit. They took you up to the rental cabins. Mrs. Fremont’s rental cabins.”

“Your cabins? Those bastards took me up to your cabins?”

He nodded.

“That makes me furious!”

“Me too,” he said quietly.

I looked over at Jack. I suddenly felt bad about bringing the topic up at all.

As if reading my thoughts, he said, “Keep asking those questions, Irene. You must have more than one or two.”

“How can you stand being around us, Jack? Don’t we just remind you of it all?”

“Do I ‘just remind you of it all?’”

“No,” I admitted.

“Well,” he said, “I guess you and Frank are just about the only people in Las Piernas I want to be around right now. You don’t pity me. What happened, happened to all of us. Differently for each of us, but – I don’t know – I guess I’m not making any sense.”

“You’re making perfect sense,” I said. “Other people – well, it’s easier to be with the two of you. You were there.”

“That’s it.”

I turned to Frank. “What happened while I was gone? How did you find me?”

“I was home. I was worried about you and was just about ready to call the hotel and ask if you had left yet. If you were still there, I was going to have you paged and meet you there.”

He didn’t say anything more for a while. For long minutes, the only sounds were Cody’s loud purrs and the crackling of the fire.

He sighed, then went on. “I got a call from the department, saying they had Brian Henderson’s son on the line, and that he insisted on talking to me, that you were in trouble. They patched the call through; it was Jacob, and he was frantic. I guess he had found one of my cards in your car. When he told me what had happened, I told him I’d meet him back at the field. I made a quick call back to the department, then left. Drove like a maniac. I got there not long after Jacob. He was a mess.

“He told me that although he hadn’t seen them drive up, as he was leaving he had seen a Blazer parked on the corner.”

I smiled. “Thank heaven he saw it. I thought he would be too rattled by what was going on to notice it. I think that kid really is going to be a reporter someday.”

He looked at me and shook his head. “God help him. Anyway, Jacob was a big help. And not just with the Blazer. But to go back to what was happening that night, we weren’t there for very long when the black and white units were pulling up, and we had Jacob take us to where the body was. We made him take us along a different path, so that we wouldn’t disturb footprints in the places where the weeds were matted down.

“To make a long story a little bit shorter, we found prints of three people walking toward where the Blazer had been parked. No sign of where you might have been taken from there. None of the neighbors had seen a thing.

“Somebody took Jacob home. He was really upset; blamed himself. To be truthful, I wasn’t holding together too well by then myself. It was after dawn when we finished in the field.

“Jacob had told me about the message at the hotel. Pete tracked down the guy who had been on the switchboard at the Lafayette that night and woke him up to ask him about the call. Fortunately, they don’t get many messages that late, and this one was unusual, so he remembered it. He said the caller seemed to be a young man. Of course, he didn’t question a young man being named “Sammy.” Found out the same message had been left at the Cliffside. There was no doubt that the girl was dead long before the calls were made. So you had obviously been set up.”

“It was her heart on my doorstep, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” he said.

I motioned for him to stop for a while. I felt tears welling up and tried to keep them from falling, but once again, my emotions refused to be reined in.

“I suppose there’s nothing that can be done about her father?” I said.

Frank shook his head.

I wiped my tears away and asked him to go on.

“Whoever made the call had to know about your connection to Sammy,” he said. “That pretty much had to be someone at the shelter or the newspaper. I tried the shelter first. The girl you had talked to at the funeral – Sarah – was missing. Paul said he was really worried about her and asked if we would let him know if we located her. I had gone back over the journal and made a list of initials from it. I was thinking of going over them with Paul, but then I remembered you telling me about Sarah’s dramatics, sneaking the journal to you when he came into the room. For some reason she hadn’t wanted Paul to know about the journal, and it made me decide to hold off.”

Jack looked away from us when Paul’s name came up. I felt damned awkward and I guess Frank did, too, because he hesitated.

“Maybe we could finish talking about this some other time,” he said.

“No,” Jack said tightly. “It doesn’t matter. It’s too late. He wasn’t who I thought he was, that’s all. Go on, Frank.”

Frank waited, then hearing Jack sigh with impatience, continued with his story. “I went home and tried to sleep. I couldn’t. Jacob called me, and asked if I wanted to get your car – in all the excitement, he had gone home with your car keys. I drove over to the Hendersons’ and picked him up. We went back to your car and he followed me home. I invited him to come in, and Jack stopped by while he was there.”

“I was being a nosy neighbor,” Jack said. “I had just moved into my mom’s place and saw somebody else pulling up in your car, Irene. I wondered what was up.”