After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall

NOVEMBER 2013

Gordon stood at one end of the table that was really two tables pushed together, one moved from the bedroom of the motel “suite.” Julie stood at the other end, willing him to leave. The rest of the task force had already gone to their own rooms for the night, leaving Styrofoam cups with the remnants of cold coffee, empty pizza boxes, crumpled paper napkins, half-crushed beer cans. On the desk Julie’s industrial-strength laptop, in sleep mode, glowed with a blue light.

It had been a bad idea to hold the team meeting in her room, but Gordon’s wife, impelled by some marital crisis Julie wanted no part of, kept phoning his room after she’d been told not to call his cell. Maybe that was why he hadn’t left yet; Deborah was a weeper. Or so Julie had been told. She didn’t want to know for sure. If Gordon tried to talk personally with her now…

He didn’t. He studied her latest printout, frowning at the equations as if he understood them. “So you think somewhere in Hingham, next Thursday?”

“That’s what the algorithms say.”

“God, Julie, I need a more specific location than that! Unless I can witness an actual kidnapping, maybe even have a camera set up—”

She held onto her temper. “I’m a mathematician, Gordon, not a magician. And I’ve given you everything I’ve got.”

A second later, horror hit her at her own wording, but Gordon, frowning at the sheaf of papers, apparently hadn’t noticed. That caused horror to give way to anger. He never had been any good at reading her feelings, had always enclosed himself in that “objective” professional shell. Well, let him.

He ran a hand over the gray stubble on his head. “I know. I didn’t mean to snap. But funding for this task force is hanging by a thread. The A-Dic isn’t convinced that the child abductions are linked, and he’s never believed any of the witnesses, you know that.”

“I know. Can’t blame him, really.” Two witnesses—no, three now, with Mrs. Carter—attesting that someone had invaded their homes, stolen or tried to steal a child, and then dissolved, child and all, into thin air, to the accompaniment of a burst of bright light. Twice the alleged intruder was a deformed teenage boy with a wobbly head, dressed in what was described as a blanket. Once it was a girl, who had been successfully fought off until she dematerialized. Who would believe any of that? Nor did it help that two of the women had been hysterical types; one was now in a mental institution. Some days Julie wasn’t sure that she herself believed this stuff. The common MOs, yes. The irrefutable fact that the children were gone, yes. Above all, the algorithms that traced a nonlinear but discernible mathematical path for the kidnappings.

She said, “Your Assistant Director has reason to doubt. But I think my usefulness to the task force is pretty much over, and anyway Georgetown wants me back for the spring semester. I’ve booked a flight back to D.C. for tomorrow.”

Gordon looked up. Was that relief in his eyes? She was lying about Georgetown, but he didn’t know that. He said, “Will you stay on call if we have any questions?”

“Sure.” She rose, which was a mistake. The wave of nausea took her by surprise, surging up her throat so suddenly that she barely made it to the bathroom. After she threw up, she kicked the door closed behind her, then took her time rinsing her mouth and brushing her teeth. By the time she came out, he would have gone.

He hadn’t. He stood at the end of the table, papers crumpled in one hand, his still handsome face as white as the printouts. A little vein throbbed in his forehead. “My God, Julie.”

“It’s nothing. Something I ate at dinner.”

“It’s not.” And then, “I have three kids, remember.”

Something in her that she hadn’t counted on, some streak of anger or blame, made her lash out at him. “Now you’ve got one more.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

She sat down. The motel chair creaked under her. “Let’s get one thing straight, Gordon. This has nothing to do with you. I mean, it will have nothing to do with you. You don’t need to be involved at all.”

“You’re keeping it?”

“Yes.” She was thirty-eight, with no real relationship in sight now that the ill-thought-out thing with Gordon had ended. This might be her last chance.

“How far along are you?”

“Three and a half months.” Her stocky figure meant that, with her habitually loose clothing, no one had yet noticed. They would soon. She had arranged to extend her sabbatical from Georgetown to a full year, had already bought a crib, a changing table, impossibly tiny onesies. The nausea was supposed to have stopped by now but, as her obstetrician said, every pregnancy is different.

Gordon’s jaw tightened. “You weren’t going to tell me at all, were you?”

“No.” And then, from that same unexplored well of anger—but at what? “You have your hands full already, with Deborah and your kids.”

They stared at each other for a long moment. Julie found herself studying him almost impersonally, as if he were someone she’d just met. Such a handsome man, with his deep blue eyes, firm jaw, prematurely gray hair that looked masterful rather than old. “Masterful”—that was the right word for Gordon. He liked to control situations. And yet he had been tender with her, from the conventional beginning of too-long “business dinners,” through the trite progression to so much more.

Had she really ever loved him? It had felt like romance, those first few months of delicious hidden hours. And yet even then, Julie had had her doubts. Not because Gordon was married, but because of something in his character and—be honest!—in her own. Both of them wanted to make their own decisions, keep their options open. That stubborn independence was why Julie had never married, and why Gordon cheated on his wife. Neither had ever told the other “I love you.” Both had wanted freedom more than the inevitable compromises and sacrifices of genuine love.

And yet now Gordon stood at his end of the littered table, running his hand through his gray hair and looking more troubled than Julie had known possible. But, then, Gordon was not one to shirk responsibilities. That wouldn’t have fit with his image of himself.

“Julie, if there’s anything I can do… money…”

Her anger evaporated. This situation was not his fault. Nor hers—precautions sometimes failed. Gordon would never leave drama-queen Deborah, and she didn’t want him to, no matter what romantic fantasies dictated that she should want. Julie needed nothing from him.

“I’m fine,” she said gently. “Truly.”

“At least let me—”

“No.” She went into her motel bedroom and closed the door, her back to it until she heard him leave.