Marie Ferrarella - The Man Who Would Be Daddy

There were no landmarks to help her pick her way through the maze. She didn’t like being lost. It was clear to her that he was carrying on some inner conversation with himself that she was only accidentally privy to. It was a subject that obviously caused him pain. Because of what he’d done for her, for Robin, she was determined to learn more.

The policewoman chose that moment to return. “If you follow me, I’ll take you to Detective Harold.” She raised her eyes to Malcolm’s face.

“I’m Malcolm Evans. Officer McGuire told me to come in to give my statement regarding—”

She nodded. “Detective Simms is waiting to see you. Why don’t you both come around the desk and follow me inside?”

Malcolm stepped back and gestured for Christa to go first.

Malcolm Evans. So that had been his name on the sign earlier. Ever since she’d read it, the name had been teasing her. She’d heard it before, though the connection eluded her. It flittered back and forth in her mind like an annoying gnat.

The policewoman ushered them to two adjacent desks in the squad room before disappearing.

For the next twenty minutes, Christa and Malcolm gave their statements to two detectives. Detective Harold questioned Christa about the incident as gently as if he were dealing with his own daughter. She discovered that he had known her father. She answered his questions as completely as she could, all the while trying to listen to what Malcolm was telling Detective Simms. She succeeded only minimally.

Detective Harold offered her the paper he had just finished typing. Glancing over it, she signed her name on the bottom.

Christa laid the pen down. “Is that all?”

“No.” Tyler’s voice came from behind her. “Now you have to pick him out of a lineup.”

She offered an apologetic smile as she rose to her feet. “Sorry, I would have known that if it wasn’t happening to me.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Tyler slipped an arm around her shoulders. “Who’s baby-sitting? Dad?” She nodded. “You know, he makes a much nicer grandfather than he did a father.”

Christa laughed. “Sometimes these things take time. Dad’s a late bloomer.” A stern disciplinarian, her father had turned into a pushover with Robin.

“Almost finished?” Tyler asked the burly man at the next desk.

In response, the detective took out a pen and handed it to Malcolm. “Just needs a signature.”

But Malcolm was in no hurry to sign. Instead, he slowly read through the words the older man had typed on the form.

Tyler laid a hand on Malcolm’s shoulder. “We’ll wait for you in the hall.” The question was silent, evident in the set of the wide shoulders. “We’re going to need your ID, as well—separately,” Tyler explained.

Malcolm only nodded in response. Tyler ushered Christa into the hall.

“So, how did it go?”

“Pretty painless. Detective Harold’s nice—just like you said.”

“Nothing but the best for my baby sister.”

Christa looked toward the glass encompassed squad room. Malcolm was signing the bottom of the form. “Do your baby sister a favor?”

He knew better than to say yes right away. “What?”

“Can you get me some information on him?”

Tyler didn’t have to ask who “him” was. It was against the rules to give out information on the forms, but some rules could be bent on occasion, and this seemed a harmless enough infraction.

“Why?”

“I have a feeling I know him, or of him, from somewhere.” She saw the skepticism in Tyler’s eyes. He probably thought she had other reasons for asking. Maybe she did.

Christa had never been the type to drift through life, Tyler knew. She had to be an active player and turn everyone around her into one, as well. “Isn’t it enough that he was there at the right place at the right time?”

She shook her head. “It’s because he was that I want to know.” She looked toward Malcolm thoughtfully. “There’s something bothering him.”

Tyler frowned. As if she didn’t have enough problems to deal with as an out-of-work single mother with a small daughter to raise and a deadbeat ex-husband who would never make any child-support payments. “There’s something bothering all of us, Christa.”

“I know, but-”

Humoring her, he kissed the top of her head. “Okay, I’ll see what I can do,” he promised.

She grinned up at him. “I never doubted it for a minute.”

It was past four o’clock when Malcolm finally walked out of the police station. As he hurried down the stone stairs that led to the parking lot, he noted that the lot had thinned out considerably. There was only a smattering of cars left. Business at the police station had to be slacking off, he mused.

Walking toward the black sports car, he became aware of the grating, whining noise. It was a sound he was more than passingly familiar with. Metal on metal, sparking nothing but aggravation as it prophesied a stranded motorist.

Malcolm automatically glanced in the direction the noise was originating from.

He might have known.

It was coming from her van.

His initial impulse was to ignore the sound, and her, and just keep walking. That would have been the sensible thing to do.

Malcolm got as far as the driver’s side of his own car before he finally turned around. The grinding noise put his teeth on edge as she tried to turn the ignition on again. He couldn’t just drive away and leave her like this. In a vague way, it was tantamount to a fireman ignoring a fire alarm or a policeman ignoring a cry for help.

He’d thought that she would be gone by the time he was finished at the station. Her brother and another policeman had led Christa in first to look at the men in the line up. It had taken her all of one minute to pick out the man who had car-jacked her van.

It had taken him a little less than three minutes to make the same choice. Malcolm had deliberately taken his time after that, hoping she’d be gone when he walked out of the station.

Obviously, he hadn’t taken enough time.

She was going to kill that thing if she didn’t stop. By his count, she’d tried to start the van six times since he’d left the building.

“C’mon, c’mon, start,” Christa chanted under her breath. The mantra wasn’t working. The engine refused to turn over.

She turned the key again just before he reached her. The window on her side was open, and he heard her mumbling something under her breath, but he couldn’t make it out. The grinding noise drowned it out.

“You’ll flood the engine.”

Christa started, her head jerking up at the sound of someone at her elbow. When she saw it was Malcolm, she relaxed, but not before the exasperated sigh escaped her lips.

“Right about now, I’d like to drown the engine.”

Malcolm nodded. It had been a long time since a car’s problems had baffled him, but he could relate to the helplessness she had to be experiencing.

It was the way he had felt about life when he had found himself alive in the hospital bed. Alive when Gloria and Sally were gone.

Christa threw up her hands in surrender. She’d been trying to start the van for the past ten minutes. Taking every curve life had to throw at her, Christa prided herself on being levelheaded and calm. Today, however, her nerves were very close to the surface.

She looked at him. “Any suggestions?”

In reply, Malcolm circled the front of her van and placed his hands on the hood. Then, as she watched, mystified, he pushed down on it, hard. She felt the vehicle begin to bounce up and down like a small sailboat caught in a storm at sea.

He wasn’t behaving like any mechanic she knew. Christa stuck her head out the window. “What are you doing?”

Malcolm didn’t bother answering. Instead, he gave her an order. “Now try it.” When she just looked at him, he added, “Turn the key.”

Not seeing how what he was doing could make any difference whatsoever, Christa turned the key in the ignition. She was rewarded with the sound of the engine turning over. The van vibrated as the engine coughed to life, shuddering like a wet dog.

Relief coaxed a grin from her. “Is that the auto mechanic’s equivalent of a TV repairman hitting the side of a set when it doesn’t work?”

The principle would take too much effort to explain to her. “Something like that.” He cocked his head, listening to the sound of the engine as it idled. A starter motor wasn’t her only problem. The engine sounded as if it was wheezing, and the car was idling rough. Besides that, he detected the light scent of gasoline.

Not my business, he thought.

But cars were his business. If he let her go now and she wound up stranded somewhere, it would be partially his fault. A great deal had changed in his life, but Malcolm still believed that omission was just as much of a sin as commission.

Trapped by his conscience, he reluctantly asked, “You live far from here?”

The nice thing about the condo she was leasing was that it was so centrally located. “A couple of miles.” She nodded toward the street right off the parking lot. “West Plaza Development. Just off Heather.”

Heather Drive. That was in the opposite direction from his own apartment. Malcolm sighed. He supposed it wouldn’t be too far out of his way. “All right, I’ll follow you home.”

Now, that was a switch. Though she appreciated it, she didn’t see any reason for his abrupt change of heart. “Any particular reason you’ve suddenly decided to become friendly?”

Malcolm sniffed the air. Nothing. The light scent of gasoline must have just been his imagination.

“I’m not being friendly,” he corrected mildly. “I’m being a mechanic. I don’t like the sound of your engine. You might not make it home.”

“I hate putting you out like this.”

That made two of them. He shrugged in reply. “Like you said, you live only a couple of miles down the road. No big deal.”

That sounded more like him, Christa thought. Distant. Matter-of-fact. And he was wrong; it was a big deal. She was a stranger and he was offering to help. Again. She felt bound to tell him the absolute truth.

“It’s not exactly two miles. More like five,” she amended.

Two, five—it made no difference. He had already made the offer:

“Five,” he repeated, accepting the correction. Malcolm glanced at his watch. “We’re still not quite into rush hour yet. Shouldn’t take more than ten minutes to reach your house.” The idling sound the van was making was beginning to sound like someone with smoker’s hack. “Unless, of course, the van breaks down,” he added matter-of-factly. “I’m parked two aisles over.” He jerked his thumb toward the LeMans. “Wait for me.”

It was more of an order than anything else.

He was one strange man, she thought. There was something about him that spoke to her. Despite his size and the aura of power he cast, there was something about him that was reaching out to her. She doubted if he was even aware of it.

Tyler would have said she was meddling.

Mentally, Christa crossed her fingers as she backed out of her space. The van seemed to shimmy and shudder more than usual. She had the impression that it was like a prize-winning stallion past its peak, trying to eke out just a little more life before it died.

She kept her fingers crossed all the way home. The van didn’t die, but Christa had the uneasy feeling that it was touch and go all the way. It was reassuring to see the LeMans in her rearview mirror.