Justine Davis - Her Best Friend's Husband

She recited it as if it were a speech she’d memorized. He imagined it probably was; it was easier to answer the inevitable questions if you had an answer packaged and ready, one that you didn’t have to think about. He knew that from his own miserable experience.

“I’m sorry. We lose too many good guys.”

He meant it, and tried to let it show in his voice. When she looked at him, and gave him a smile he realized she didn’t think he could see, he knew she’d gotten it.

“Yes, we do. And he was definitely one of them.”

He let a moment pass, in silent tribute to a man he would never know, before he said quietly, “I wouldn’t have minded you calling, Cara. Even crying. Especially crying.”

He glimpsed her sudden, startled look out of the corner of his eye, sensed her sudden stillness. And wondered what his wife had told her that had made her assume he would want nothing to do with someone because they were grief-stricken and expressing it in the most common way.

He felt a little jab of guilt at the thought; Hope was gone, and the arrival of this much-delayed postcard didn’t change that. He shouldn’t be having negative thoughts about her. Hope hadn’t been perfect, he knew that, but he’d loved her, been captivated by her easy charm and vivacious beauty. And the fact that she had loved him had been flattering in a way, even if now he wasn’t sure exactly what she’d loved.

“I wanted to,” she admitted. “Except for Hope’s parents, you were the only one I knew who was hurting as much as I was, but I didn’t want to make it worse for you.”

The thought that she’d worried about that, even then, touched him, more deeply than he ever would have expected. Disconcerted, he seized on the first thing that came to mind.

“We can’t tell them what we’re doing,” he said. “Gwen and Earl, I mean. It may—likely will—come to nothing.”

“Of course we can’t. We have to do it, I couldn’t rest if we didn’t. But I wouldn’t raise their hopes for anything, when it’s all so…nebulous.”

Her words stabbed at him, and his voice was tight when he spoke again. “It’s new ground in the search,” he admitted. “But you’re not thinking we’re going to find her up there, are you?”

Cara blinked. “Hope? You mean…alive? God, no.”

He breathed again; he’d always suspected little, shy Cara lived a great deal in her mind, and for a moment he’d feared she might have built some kind of fantasy in her head about finding her dearest friend alive and well.

“In the beginning,” she said, in the tone of an embarrassed admission, “I wondered. I used to lie awake at night, picturing Hope living a new life somewhere, maybe with a new name, like she’d seen something and ended up in witness protection, maybe with amnesia, silly things like that.”

It was so close to what he’d been worried she was thinking he was disconcerted all over again. Perhaps he’d known her better than he’d realized.

“Not silly, under the circumstances,” he said, all the while glad she knew now the thoughts had been seriously implausible.

“I know that, now. Grief does crazy things to you. Coupled with uncertainty, it’s almost unbearable.” She took in an audible breath. “That’s why I know we can’t say anything to Hope’s parents. It’s not that I’m expecting to find her, but if we could find out what happened to her, it might…not help, nothing can, but at least they’d know.”

“Closure?”

He hated the word; it made him think of people expect you to pick up and go on as if nothing had happened once the funeral was over, because you had closure. But now he was beginning to wonder. Cara had lost someone, too, and she’d clearly managed to get past it. Was the difference just that, that she’d had closure, where he was left forever wondering?

She shrugged. “I’m not much for buzzwords like that, but there’s something to the theory, I think. Especially when it’s something like this, where you simply don’t know what happened. It’s too easy to slip over the edge and start clinging to thoughts like I had in the beginning, to slide into the madness of believing them.”

Her words hung there between them for a moment while he negotiated a traffic slowdown for a stalled vehicle on the center divider of the freeway. When they were clear, he glanced over at her.

“You don’t think the Waldrons are doing that, do you?”

“No. For all her sweet acquiescence, Gwen is a strong woman. She wouldn’t, and wouldn’t let Earl, either.”

Gabe couldn’t have agreed more with that assessment. And her easy statement of it reminded him once more of the quiet girl who would never have spoken of someone of her parents’ generation in such a way. “You’ve really gone and grown up, haven’t you?”

She smiled then, a flashing, bright expression that nearly stopped his heart in his chest.

“It happens,” she said, her tone so teasing he couldn’t help smiling back.

And just like that the mood in the car changed, from a rather edgy tension to an easy camaraderie he was thankful for; it was much easier to handle.

When they started up the mountain highway called the Rim of the World—for obvious reasons, given the curves and steep drop-offs that marked every mile—they were talking like the old, fairly close friends they’d been. He asked about her own parents, found out they were living in Oregon, where her father was headed toward a happy retirement of endless fishing and her mother was building yet another of the beautiful gardens she was known for. She asked about his father in turn, and smiled when he told her the admiral was still as gruff and feisty as ever at sixty-one, and running his staff ragged down in San Diego.

“He never remarried, after your mother died?”

“No. He says there’s not another woman on the planet who would put up with him the way Mom did. Having lived with him myself, I tend to think he might be right.”

She laughed, and an unexpected warmth flooded him again.

Strange, he thought. He never would have thought seeing quiet little Cara Thorpe again would stir up so much emotion in him. True, she’d been a big part of his life for a while, although always on the edges, and he’d accepted her at first because he loved Hope and she was her best friend. But later he’d come to like the quiet girl for herself, enjoyed trying to gently nudge her out of her shyness, to get her to open up and talk to him.

He’d seen flashes of a different Cara back then, times when she’d surprised him with a cogent, astute observation about something that had made him realize she was indeed the personification of still waters running deep. But he’d been wrapped up in first true love, and hadn’t thought much beyond that about the girl who was the quiet shadow of the lively, vivid Hope Waldron.

Cara Thorpe now would stand in no one’s shadow, he thought suddenly. Not in looks, demeanor, or personality. She—The ring of his cell interrupted his thoughts. He hit the button on the hands-free system built into the controls of the Lexus.

“Taggert.”

“Smallest village in the county. No sheriff’s substation. Two restaurants, one twenty-room motel, some touristy stuff. Post Office in the back of the general store. Same person running it for thirty years. Anson Woodruff. Town gossip. He’s there now.”

Gabe stifled a grin at St. John’s clipped, concise report, and at Cara’s bemused expression as the man’s brusque voice sounded in the car.

“Thank you,” he said.

“More?”

“Not yet. I’ll let you know.”

The click was audible as the connection was severed.

“I gather that was…the machine gun?” Cara said.

“It was.”