Даниэла Стил - Turning Point

It was a prank, which the police had taken seriously. They couldn’t do otherwise, given recent events. And the culprit had disappeared. No one was able to identify him. They hadn’t seen him, only heard his voice on the PA system. There were five hundred students and seventy-five teachers milling around the street, while the SWAT teams continued to comb the school and found nothing except an empty bottle of wine and a vodka bottle in the gym.

Two hours later, the school was considered clean. The students had been sent home by then, and the press were having a field day with the embarrassment that an allegedly former student had made fools of the police.

At two o’clock, Bruno withdrew his troops, and everybody left. It was all over the news by that afternoon, and it set a dangerous example to others. Several youths in the area had been caught and brought in for questioning, but they turned up nothing.

“At least nobody was hurt and nobody got killed this time. I’d rather be made a fool of than go through the other nightmare again, when it was real,” Bill said and they all agreed, but Bruno had been in a fierce mood when he left the scene. A joke like that cost the taxpayers a fortune and threw down a challenge that other idiots were likely to follow. And if they’d seen him and assumed he was about to fire on them or blow up the school, he might have been shot and killed. It had been a crazy, irresponsible thing to do, and it had jangled everyone’s nerves.

They left the office early themselves. And Wendy and Stephanie started packing that afternoon. Wendy had to buy another suitcase for the things she’d bought while she was there. And Stephanie had bought a mountain of things for the boys, more than for herself.

They were still talking about the prank the next day when someone glanced at the TV they kept on in the office for breaking news, and Marie-Laure frowned as she saw a scene that caught her attention. A church had been blown up in Rome. No group had claimed responsibility for it yet, but it was believed to be the act of terrorists. A man had come into the church dressed as a priest, and had exploded a suicide vest, killing forty-seven people, injuring nineteen, and destroying one of the oldest churches in Rome. That one was not a prank, it was the real deal, and a reminder to them of the harsh dangers of the world they lived in.

They all stood listening to the news reports, and it was another wake-up call that they were fighting a war against an insidious unseen enemy who killed children, destroyed churches, and terrified citizens in every country. It was the new wave of how wars were fought. The Italian police were not sure yet if it was the work of one madman, like so many other similar incidents these days, or a planned attack by well-trained terrorists. Either way, people were dying in every country from incidents like this.

“At least it wasn’t in France this time,” Marie-Laure said, sounding tired. Bruno called her that afternoon and said the same thing to her. They still had no leads to who the prankster was the day before. No one had noticed him when he slipped into the school, and they didn’t even know if he had left the building with the other students. He obviously was or looked like a kid himself and knew the school well. He’d gotten away with it, but it was a dangerous game to play, and people could have gotten killed or injured if Bruno had reacted hastily and ordered his men to storm the school. He was glad he hadn’t or the press would have crucified him.

—

The rest of the week was uneventful, and on Thursday night, all eight had dinner together. Gabriel looked depressed that Stephanie was leaving, even though he was going to be with her again in two weeks, which seemed like an eternity to him. Stephanie was excited to see her boys, but nervous about facing Andy. For four weeks it was almost as though he didn’t exist, and now she was going home to be his wife for six weeks until she told him that she was leaving him. And then she would have to start the process so that she could practice medicine in France. She had suggested to Gabriel that he meet with a lawyer and set his own divorce in motion, and he said he was going to wait until he came back from the States too, which made Valérie uneasy, even if Stephanie believed him.

Tom was unhappy to be leaving Valérie, but she had a lot to do in the next two weeks, to leave her PTSD counseling programs in good order. And Tom was going to do a major cleanup of his apartment to get it in decent shape for her. She suggested that an exorcist might be in order, and he said he was thinking about a bulldozer and a Dumpster. Either way, they both had work to do. And the Americans were all going back to their jobs for two weeks until the French team arrived and they were with them for another month of meetings and tours.

Bill was going to London the next day for a last weekend with his daughters, but after that, he wouldn’t see them until July, which seemed like forever to him. His life was a wasteland when he was far from them, and the time in Paris had given him four wonderful weekends to share with them, but he’d have to live on the memory of that now. They would be lonely months for him until July.

And Wendy wanted to face her situation with Jeff, but she hadn’t figured out how to do it, when, or what to say. She was afraid she would fall in love with him again as soon as she laid eyes on him, which was what had always happened before. She didn’t know if she had the guts to leave him, but she wanted to try. She had gotten some perspective in Paris and was determined to act on it, if she could.

Marie-Laure was having dinner with Bruno the night they left. She had been startled when he asked her, and Valérie reminded her that she had been right. He was crazy about her.

Paul said Paris would be dead without their American friends. He reminded Tom to get ready to show him all the best bars and nightclubs in San Francisco. They were going to have a ball together, but Tom was considerably less enthused about the project a month after he’d first suggested it, now that Valérie would be living with him. Paul hadn’t fully absorbed Tom’s transformation yet, but the others had. They had all changed in the last four weeks, more than they could have imagined. It had been an extraordinary month, working with the French emergency services, and now they had a challenge to match when the four Parisians came to San Francisco. It was hard to imagine that they could provide as much for them to do in their own city, it wasn’t Paris, but they promised to try.

—

When the flight took off from Charles de Gaulle Airport on Saturday morning, they left with heavy hearts, and looked down at the city they had come to love that had given them so much, and thought of the friends they’d left behind.

And on Sunday, Bill fought back tears when he said goodbye to Pip and Alex. He promised to call them every day, as he always did. They clung to him and when his flight left Heathrow three hours later for San Francisco, he was already counting the days until July.

Chapter Thirteen

As soon as they came through Customs in San Francisco, reality hit Stephanie right between the eyes. Andy was standing there, looking tall and handsome in jeans and a sweatshirt, and as usual, he hadn’t shaved, but somehow it looked right on him. Ryan and Aden were jumping up and down next to him, so excited they could hardly contain themselves, holding signs they had made for her. Aden’s read “Welcome Home, Mom,” and Ryan’s “We love you, Mommy.” Her heart did a flip and she had tears in her eyes as they flew into her arms, and she picked them both up, one by one, careful not to crush their signs. Seeing them brought home to her how long she’d been gone. Everything at home had seemed so unreal to her in Paris. She felt so far away, like a different person there, and she had to be the old person, or pretend to be, now that she was home. She could hardly remember who that person was. She’d been focused on a new life in Paris, and now she had landed squarely in her old life with both feet.