An Act of Persuasion(28)

“Over?” He shook his head. “Hell, Anna, we’re just getting started.”





CHAPTER SEVEN



“HEY.” ANNA WAVED at Mark through the glass partition. He was on the phone, but he lifted his hand in acknowledgment.

She’d avoided Ben this morning by getting a ridiculously early start to the day and taking the bus into the city. She imagined he was parked outside her apartment building right now waiting for her. She told herself that only served him right for being so high-handed and presumptuous as to ignore her insistence that she would be taking the bus.

She would not feel guilty.

Anna settled into her office chair and booted up her computer. As the machine went through its processes, she thought about last night.

“Over?” she said out loud in bad imitation of Ben. “We’re just getting started.”

Why did he have to be like that? Why couldn’t he let it go? She thought her confession would have freaked him out. She knew him well enough to know that he was not comfortable with difficult things like emotions and feelings. The very idea that she’d been suffering from unrequited love should have sent him running for the hills.

Ben didn’t do romance. He certainly didn’t do romantic tragedy. As far she could tell, Ben didn’t do love, either.

Instead of bolting out the door, he’d made his proclamation. They weren’t over. They were just beginning.

It was enough to give a pathetic girl hope. Anna wasn’t sure she wanted it. She didn’t need another six years of suspended animation. What she needed was to move on from him. All those years of loving him and waiting for him to love her back was enough. If something was meant to happen between them, surely it would have already happened.

Although getting angry at him because she had fallen in love didn’t exactly seem fair. It wasn’t exactly his problem, it was hers. But who cared about fairness when you were knocked up and alone?

“Hey,” Mark said, popping his head around the glass wall. “Ben said I have to fire you.”

“What did you say?”

“To shove it. Also, I implied you’re my girlfriend now.”

Anna sighed. “I wish you wouldn’t do that.”

Mark wiggled his eyebrows. “I have to have my fun. Come to my office and bring your notepad. I’m going to need you to take some dictation.”

“Hardeehar.”

Mark loved to use secretary references from the 1950s because he thought it made him sound cool. Occasionally he shouted from his office that he needed coffee or martinis. Every once in a while she brought him a cup of tea, just to be difficult.

Anna sat in the chair in front of his desk while he took his seat.

“So what do you need?”

“A case,” he said. “We don’t have one.”

“You solved the Monroe case already?” Anna was stunned. The case had been cold for more than eight years.

“Child’s play. Turns out Caroline Monroe had run away with a boyfriend and hadn’t been kidnapped at all.”

“That’s awful! All those years she was alive and wouldn’t let her parents know.”

Mark shook his head. “She wasn’t alive. A couple of months after she ran away she overdosed on whatever her drug of choice was. The boyfriend then promptly took off. Once I found him, I was able to track down the record of the Jane Doe who had been left at a hospital in Boston in a coma where she died a couple of days later.”

Anna slumped in her chair. “Her mother was right, then. She knew her daughter was dead. She just wanted to know how and where.”

“Parent intuition. Get ready for it. You’ll sprout some the minute the kid makes his or her arrival. Anyway, while I think the boyfriend was more than culpable at least in not calling for an ambulance when the girl was obviously in trouble, there are no real criminal charges that can be proven against him. His story is he came back to the motel room with food and she was out cold. He called the police anonymously from a pay phone.”

“Sounds too easy.”

“It does. But there’s no evidence to refute his claim so there’s no way for me to go after him. Anyway the Monroes will get to bury their daughter after all these years. So there is that.”

“Yeah, swell.” Anna thought about Mark’s words. Would she be blessed with parent intuition? Could a girl who hadn’t been given good parents actually become a better parent? Her mother, and even her father, had been looming large in her mind lately.