Lynn Bulock - To Trust a Stranger

Jessie tried to still the aggravation she felt. “I’m not all that familiar with them. They don’t speak up in class.” Not even in the “pop culture” class that was her favorite, where she got a lot of responses from most of the students.

Laura grabbed her car keys and headed for the garage. She called over her shoulder to her sister. “I’ll call you if there’s any kind of problem. Otherwise I’ll be back here, probably with Adrian in tow, in the next hour, okay?”

“Fine.” Jessie tried to look interested in a stack of papers she had to grade. Anything so that Laura didn’t see the look of worry she knew crossed her face as her sister left. Laura was an adult. There was no sense in treating her like a child.

Cassidy stood in the shadows across the street from Adrian’s town house and watched as Laura Barker knocked on the door. To Cassidy, Laura looked more like a teenager than a woman in her late twenties, with her bouncy step and the way she rapped on the door. When the door opened, the man answering looked far older than Laura Barker, mature and wary in a way Laura wasn’t, even though he was years younger.

After Laura went inside, Cassidy pondered how much time to give the two together. It all depended on how much Adrian Bando had connected the dots with the information he had. Cassidy knew the young man was bright; if he’d worked things through and now shared that information with Laura, everything could fall apart even after all these years of careful concealment.

Cassidy knew that timing could be everything. One wrong decision made life collapse like a row of dominoes. Suddenly there was another figure at the door and Cassidy scrambled for even more cover. Being seen now was a bad idea. The figure at the door stood impatiently, checking the street. Then he made a quick motion at the lock, and the door opened without anyone on the other side. Half a block away the noise of an idling engine stopped. The driver of a black sedan opened the door and stepped from the car.

Fifteen minutes later the driver slipped back behind the wheel of the car. The engine purred to life and he pulled away from the curb, slowly turning the corner to disappear from view. If the town house had a back door onto the alley behind it, the car could stop there without being seen.

Ten minutes later Cassidy stood at the front door of the town house, listening for clues to the situation. It was too quiet for more than one person to be in the place. The woman Cassidy found was surprisingly still alive. In fact, if anybody came to her aid now, she might live. That would mess up everything, Cassidy thought. But it was easy to fix.

Thirty minutes later an unidentified person made a 911 call from the pay phone across the street from the town house. By then the fire had been burning long enough that the woman inside would be no trouble to anyone. In the chaos of the arriving fire trucks, no one paid any attention to the nondescript person in jeans walking away from the complex.

Where was her sister? Jessie was at the pacing stage. Laura was usually really good at calling if she was going to be late. Of course she wasn’t quite as good at remembering to charge her cell phone, so she might have had the best of intentions and not followed through. That was Laura. Still, most of the time she showed up when and where she said she would.

Living with Laura’s quirks and habits was such a part of her life Jessie knew them all by heart. And they hadn’t changed that much since Jessie’s junior year in college. That was when Laura had turned eighteen and aged out of foster care. At the ripe old age of twenty Jessie gave up her brief taste of the carefree life on campus to find an apartment for the two of them and make a home for them.

Even that long ago it had been Laura who’d concerned herself with the niceties of things. Jessie would have been content with “starving student” decor like bookshelves from planks and cinder blocks and a couple of mattresses on the floor if she had to have it that way. Their finances didn’t allow for much more. Still, Laura was always filling a jelly glass with wildflowers, or scrounging around in thrift stores for something else to give the place a little lift.

The doorbell rang, jarring Jessie out of her thoughts. “Finally.” She went to the condo’s incredibly small front hall and looked through the peephole. The man on the other side of the door was alone and he didn’t look the way Laura had described the Web designer. Maybe he had gotten a haircut for the occasion.

“Adrian?” she asked, opening the door.

“No, I’m afraid not. Were you expecting him?” In the light of day it was easy to see this definitely wasn’t Adrian. This man was taller, lean in a fit way and his hair was a lighter brown than Laura’s description.

Laura had called Adrian sort of different looking. “He has long black hair, usually tied back, and he’s very pale. Looks like the black belt martial artist that he is, somebody you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley. But so far he’s been this big teddy bear to me.”

This man was older than her students, probably older than her for that matter. Sharply dressed in a dark suit, the set of his jaw said he was definitely no teddy bear. He’d asked her a question and Jessie wasn’t sure how much information she should give a stranger, no matter how good-looking or nicely dressed he was. She decided to go with the minimum. “Yes, I was expecting someone. We had an eleven o’clock appointment.”

“If it’s Adrian Bando, he won’t be keeping it. I’m Stephen Gardner with the St. Charles County sheriff’s department. I’m looking for Jessica Barker.”

“I’m Jessica. And I’d like some proof you’re with the sheriff’s department.” He nodded and took out his identification as if he expected it. She looked it over quickly, trying not to panic. “Nobody who knows me calls me Jessica except for something very official. What’s wrong?”

The man on the doorstep shook his head slowly, looking even more serious than before. “If you don’t mind, let’s do this inside.” He looked like Jessie knew she did when she had to tell a kid they were on academic probation. So the news wouldn’t be good. She asked him in then because she was afraid that if she stood there in the doorway talking to Stephen Gardner any longer she might pass out.

“Something’s happened to Laura, hasn’t it?” Jessie didn’t usually get flustered easily but there was an air about Gardner that sounded alarms in her head. “Tell me she’s not dead.”

He looked a little relieved then but his dark eyes were still somber. “She’s not dead, Ms. Barker. But she is in Mercy Hospital thanks to Adrian Bando or somebody who was in his apartment. And it’s bad. Quite bad.”

Jessie felt her heart in her throat. “How bad? Are you saying she might not make it? She’s only been gone a little while. What on earth happened?”

“There was a fire. And something happened to your sister even before that. I don’t think the doctors know yet how serious her other injuries are. But I know we need to hurry. If you get your things I can take you to the hospital.”

Jessie got ready faster than she’d ever done anything in her life. Only halfway to the hospital in the unmarked sheriff’s department sedan did she notice that she wore two different tennis shoes. She hoped against hope that once she got to the hospital she could laugh with Laura about the shoes. Then she worried the rest of the way there that she might not get the chance.

Was this her sister? Jessie knew the still figure on the hospital bed had to be Laura, but her brain couldn’t process what she was seeing. The woman on the bed could have been anybody the same height and weight as her sister. The one eye not swollen shut was the same bright blue as Laura’s, but it wasn’t focused. Most of her hair was gone, burned in the fire that consumed far too many other things for Jessie to hope that her sister would live. But the hair that was left was the same dark gold Jessie knew. She’d envied it for years, knowledge that sent pain knifing through her now.

“Her lungs filled with smoke from the fire. That’s why she’s on the ventilator, and partially sedated so that she doesn’t fight the machines,” the nurse explained softly.

“Is there anyplace that I can touch her? Can I hold her hand?” Tears blurred Jessie’s vision and clogged her throat. It was hard to find a patch of skin on her sister that wasn’t burned, bandaged or had medical equipment attached.

“You can sit here next to her. She’s going to drift in and out some, given the amount of pain medication she’s on. If she gets more lucid she’ll probably be glad to see a familiar face.” Jessie nodded numbly and found the hard plastic chair, pulling it as close to the bed as she could without getting in the way of anything attached to Laura.

At least she wasn’t alone. The man from the sheriff’s department was still there, just outside the cubicle. “How did you know who she was, or how to get in touch with me?” she asked him. What was his title, anyway? In all the upheaval she didn’t remember any of that, if he’d even told her. Was he a deputy or a detective, or something else altogether?

His voice sounded only a little less choked than hers. “Her purse was in the entryway of the apartment on the floor. It apparently wasn’t a robbery, because her money and credit cards were there along with her driver’s license.”

Her sister had hated her last driver’s license photo, Jessie remembered. Laura said it made her look “goofy.” Staring down at the puffy, unfamiliar face Jessie ached. What she wouldn’t give right now for her sister to look merely goofy.

“There was one more thing. What does this mean to you?” Gardner held out a snapshot, faded and worn with one corner ripped off.

“That’s us,” Jessie said, wondering why on earth Laura had it with her. The two little girls smiled out at the camera, sitting on a blanket in the park. Memories rushed in as she saw the image. She could almost feel the hot sun on her shoulders and taste the tart lemonade they’d taken on the picnic. “It’s the only picture we managed to keep of the two of us before…our parents died.” There was no sense in getting into their tangled history with this man. Better to just stick to the official version that everyone else insisted was the truth anyway.

“You must have been awfully young when that happened.” Jessie didn’t know when she’d heard such compassion in someone’s voice without pity. In the short time she’d known him, this man struck her as unique. She only wished she’d met him under different circumstances.

“I was six and Laura was four. The picture was taken about a month before the accident.”

He looked at the photo again. “Can you think of any reason for your sister to have this with her?”

Jessie shook her head, listening to the machines whoosh and beep around them. “Not really. Maybe later she can explain that.”

His pained silence said more than words would have. He didn’t think there was going to be a later for Laura. And looking at the still figure in front of her, Jessie was afraid he might be right.

“What do I call you, anyway?” It had been hours since she and Steve Gardner had really conversed. He’d gotten them bad coffee from a vending machine or the hospital cafeteria, and a couple of apples. Even though she was hungry, Jessie couldn’t imagine eating much else with the trauma going on around her. She was still hoping that someone would come out of Laura’s cubicle and tell them that things were dramatically better; that she’d turned the corner and then Jessie would go eat something.