Chapter Thirteen

By mid-morning, Shannon was preparing to climb behind the wheel of Pete’s truck to go spend her day with him. Leah made a last check that Shannon’s bandages were staying in place, then hugged her.

Text me if you need me, and I will get back here as quick as I can, Leah wrote. Unless you need me to stay. I can stay, you know.

“I love you, and I appreciate your concern,” Shannon said. “But I’m good. I’ve got this. Okay? Go.”

Larry stepped out of the cabin with his and Leah’s bags, putting them in the back of his truck before walking over to Shannon.

Gonna overnight you a laptop so you can do your classes, he wrote. You’ll have it tomorrow.

“Thanks,” Shannon said, and hugged him too. As she did, she whispered, “You take care of her. She needs you.”

He winked at her once she’d turned him loose.

Shannon got in the truck, waved, then turned around and headed to the hospital.

***

Larry looked over at Leah.

“You ready?”

“I am,” she confirmed. “Let’s get rolling.”

They settled into Larry’s truck to begin the journey back to Chicago.

“So,” she began, “what’s the plan, exactly?”

“Well,” he mused, “I do need to get this locket to Bruce as quick as I can. But Zavier won’t be transported up to Chicago for another day or so, at least. And Duffy? Shannon got him pretty good; he might be in the hospital down here even longer than Pete.”

“Meaning?” Leah’s eyebrow raised.

“Meaning once I hand the locket over, I should have a day or two of down time. And I’d like to help you get your apartment put back together. If you want, that is.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I know. I want to do that,” he answered.

She smiled.

“Okay. Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.”

They traveled into and through Ravenna on KY-52, heading toward US-75.

“What’s our travel time?”

“Seven hours, give or take.”

“Huh,” she said, and fell silent again for a while. Then she took a deep breath and spoke.

“About last night...”

“Yes?”

“Thanks for listening to me.”

“Absolutely. Thank you, for feeling comfortable enough with me to share that.”

A few more miles down the road, she spoke again, but he noticed that she hesitated first.

“You were going to tell me about Molly,” she reminded him.

Uh, he thought. I was hoping maybe we could talk about that kiss, but okay.

“Yes, I did say I’d tell you later, didn’t I? Well. Molly and Pete dated for almost a year. Out of the blue she up and left about eight months ago, I think it was.”

“Poor Pete! What happened?”

“She told him she couldn’t handle him being a U.S. Marshal,” Larry revealed.

“Really? That’s kind of selfish on her part. I mean, I’m sure his job wasn’t a secret when they met, right?”

“Nope, it wasn’t,” Larry confirmed. “And that’s what shocked me when he first told me. But looking back, I think she was fascinated by his career. All mysterious, you know. I think initially, it attracted her to him. But then the reality of being with someone whose job can be really dangerous set in, and she just couldn’t do it.”

“I get that, but still. That must have crushed him.”

“It did.”

Leah pursed her lips.

“So, what about you? Married? Seeing anybody?”

“Not anymore, and no,” he said, a little abruptly.

“Sorry,” she murmured. “I didn’t mean to upset you, Larry.”

He sighed.

“You didn’t. It’s just… that is why I transferred to Chicago.”

“Oh,” she said, eyebrows raised, then hastily added, “You don’t have to tell me. Really.”

Now he softened.

“I don’t mind sharing. It’s just… it’s still hard to talk about.”

He thought for a long moment, then shrugged.

“We met right before I got out of the Army. Whirlwind courtship, and so on. Got married three months later, and not long after that, we were expecting a baby.”

Leah saw his jaw clenching and unclenching and extended her hand.

He took it and held it tightly.

“Anyway, she had a son.”

Okay, he said ‘she had’, not ‘we had’… that can’t be good, Leah thought.

“And I was ecstatic at being a dad. It was something I’d always wanted, someone that I could bring up to the farm in the summertime and teach how to catch crawdads and make smores. You know?”

“Sounds nice,” Leah agreed.

“Only when they did the test to determine the baby’s blood type, the truth came out. I have type O blood, and she had type A. The baby turned out to have type B.”

Larry looked over at Leah and she winced in sympathy.

“So, no possible way the child was yours,” she said, and he nodded.

“Exactly. So, I demanded a paternity test, and that proved it. She finally broke down and confessed. She hadn’t been faithful from day one. She’d just hoped the baby was mine, because, and I quote, ‘you have better benefits’, end quote. And then she made it a point to tell me she never loved me to begin with.”

Leah’s jaw dropped.

“I am so, so sorry.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Unfortunately, I couldn’t get an annulment, since we’d been married longer than a year. I had to file for divorce. She tried to fight me on it, but once the paternity test was submitted to the judge, it was finalized pretty quickly. I’d already broken off all contact with her and moved on with my life. During that timeframe I’d left the Army, completed the FBI Academy and been assigned to the regional office in California not far from the last base I’d been stationed at when she and I met.”

Larry only released her hand to take a drink of the iced tea he’d brought with him for the trip. He set the glass back in the cup holder, reached for Leah’s hand again, and continued.

“And things were good for a while. She left me alone for over a year, and then it started, out of the blue. She would call and leave message after message for me. Then, she started showing up at my office demanding to talk to me. I tried switching up shifts, you name it. She just would not stop.”

“And to get away from that, you had to transfer,” Leah summarized.

“Yep. But wait, there’s more before I even get to that point in the story. She went so far as to threaten and harass a really nice woman that I had just started dating. Needless to say, that woman - understandably - decided that we didn’t need to hang out anymore. And then, it got bad.”

“It got worse than that?” Leah was dumbfounded.

“Much worse. She filed a bunch of complaints against me – and some of them were really serious ones. Like, career-ending, jail time level accusations. But I got really, really lucky, Leah. I had people I worked with who knew the whole situation and who had independently witnessed her behavior. Between their sworn statements, the formal notes I’d kept about all the bizarre stuff going on, and video footage from the surveillance cameras at work, her claims were proved to be false. I filed a restraining order and stalking charges, and then I applied for a transfer, and had to wait until it came through.”

“She eased up at that point, and I heard later she’d found another guy to focus on. But by then, I was beyond ready for a change. When the chance came to relocate to Chicago, I took it, and I haven’t heard anything from or about her since I made the move. Ask Pete about it sometime; he had a front row seat for most of that.”

“Her behavior reminds me of Gregg, to be honest. Maybe she was strung out on drugs,” Leah observed.

“Or as Pete likes to say, maybe she was just whackadoodle,” Larry chimed in, and Leah giggled, which made him laugh.

It’s good to hear him laugh, she thought. I was hoping sharing his story with me didn’t bring him down.

They rode in a comfortable silence for the next several miles, and when they got to US-75 Larry steered the truck north toward Chicago.

“Let me know when you get hungry, and we’ll stop,” he told her, and she grinned.

“I already know exactly where I want to eat,” Leah exclaimed, her eyes twinkling.

“Really? And where is that?”

“Portillo’s.”

“You’re in luck, then,” Larry said with a grin, “because I just happen to know, there’s one just south of Indianapolis.”

“We don’t have to wait until we get to Chicago?”

“Nope.”

“Nice!"