Crazy in Chicago (31 page)

Garnet sat back in his chair and smiled expansively. “None of that matters. I'm an expert. I've got a doctorate, and am published in respected journals around the world. I won't allow drivel like that to be published by anyone associated with me or SUFOW—especially not my assistant.”

“Fine. You won't have to be worried about being embarrassed by me.” Tight-lipped with fury, Roberta bent to retrieve her folder from the floor. “I quit.”

She stalked out. At the door, she turned. “And I'm taking my abduction case to the Society for the Study of Aliens and UFOs. I know they'll be interested.”
 

* * *

Roberta stopped at her desk only long enough to yank her diskette out of the computer. She shoved it and the folder into her briefcase and headed for the door.

She ran down the steps and the walk to her car, which she'd parked out front this morning. Garnet shot onto the porch as she opened the door.

“You can't quit now,” he shouted. “We're in the middle of promotion for my new book.”

Roberta ignored him. She threw her briefcase onto the passenger seat, hopped in and started the car.

“I won't give you a reference!” Through the roar of the engine, she heard Garnet's shout. She ignored him and pulled away from the curb.

Garnet's threats didn't frighten her. She had her royalties. She had skills that she knew other organizations in the field needed. She'd be able to get a job, anytime. She'd stuck with Garnet because, despite his patronizing, superior attitude, she loved the work and she believed he knew his stuff. And he needed her help. Details escaped him and he had trouble organizing anything beyond the day's wardrobe. Few people knew he'd hired another Ph.D. student to help him attain his doctorate.

None of that mattered now. The Society for the Study of Aliens and UFOs had an office on the other side of the city. The director knew Roberta and Garnet, and the miracles she had performed behind the scenes to maintain Garnet's public persona. Roberta had no doubt he would be more receptive to this case.

Still fuming, Roberta maneuvered her car in and out of traffic. “The nerve of Garnet,” she muttered. “Four years of my life slaving away for him, helping him out in every way, and he acts as if I'm the enemy.”

At the last minute she noticed the traffic light had turned red. She slammed on the brakes. “Imagine Garnet accusing Cody of setting me up to make SUFOW look foolish. Imagine—”

Her rant stopped dead. The troubling thoughts that had surfaced earlier, when she'd paused to think, pressed upon her again, this time too loudly to be ignored. Worries about exposing Cody. Cody and Allie and Erik. Thoughts about trust. Cody's trust in her and hers in him. Trust and love and keeping him safe. About what Cody was doing right now. How had he reacted to the news he really had been abducted by aliens? Why wasn't she there to hold him close? And how could she tell this story that the world needed to know without exposing him? Without turning him against her forever? Without revealing their personal relationship? Her head started to ache with the conflicting clamors for attention, clamors that had been kept at bay until now by sheer excitement.

A horn blared behind her. She looked up. The light had changed. With a squeal of tires, she took off, heading in the direction of the SSAU offices.

* * *

Cody twisted the doorknob, but the door to SUFOW's offices wouldn't open, despite the fact it was twenty to ten. He rang the doorbell, jingling the change in his pocket while he waited. No one answered. He rang the bell again. Still no answer.

He peered in the window to the right of the door. File cabinets obscured his view; from the little he could see, it didn't look as if anyone was in.

Swearing under his breath, he hopped the porch railing and jogged down the alley between the two houses to the parking lot in back. A sky-blue Mercedes, looking as if it had just come from the car wash, sat in the shade of the lone tree. Roberta's car was nowhere in sight.

Where is she? Cody glanced back at the house. The only opening was a windowless door to the basement. He strode over to it, and banged on it three times. He waited, but still no one answered. He put his ear to the door and listened. Nothing.

Cody jogged back around to the front of the building. With a last look at the empty porch, he got into his car and retrieved his cell phone from the passenger seat. He dialed SUFOW's number and waited, watching the front door.

The phone rang four times before transferring over to voice mail. “The Society of UFO Watcher's. No one can take your call at the moment. Please . . .” Roberta's melodic voice urged the caller to leave a message after the tone.

Cody punched off, then started the car. Where was she? And why the hell wouldn't that moron Garnet open the door? Cody had no doubt Garnet was in there, but refusing to answer the door and phone out of sheer perversity.

Or because he was furious. Garnet's response to his phone call in the early hours of the morning had been glacial, despite Cody's attempt to explain the urgency. Showing up on his doorstep forty minutes later had infuriated him; he had refused to answer any questions, much less suggest where Roberta might be.

Perhaps Garnet had been telling the truth. Perhaps he hadn't known, Cody acknowledged, though it seemed unlikely. Finally, Cody had been forced to return home. Every few minutes he'd phoned Roberta's apartment. Sometimes he went into the hallway and rang her doorbell. He'd gone down to the parking garage to check whether her car was parked in its spot. It wasn't.

In between he had paced. Paced and worried. Worried about what had happened to Roberta. Was she okay? If she was okay, what was she doing? Could she be telling the story of his abduction—and of the other parties to the abduction—to the likes of Garnet? Or worse, to someone else? She knew the dangers, better than anyone. But she also knew the rewards.

Time and again, he had shut his eyes against the idea that aliens had abducted him. It couldn't be true. He didn't want it to be true. But he kept running into the hard fact that what he'd seen and heard made it impossible to be anything but true. That Allie, whom he trusted implicitly, confirmed it was true. And that Roberta, who loved him and had suspected he'd been abducted all along, knew it was true, too. Why else would she have left, except to tell Garnet?
 

Finally he had sat down to rest. Much to his amazement, he had dozed off, only to awake to full sunshine and the ringing of the telephone. It had been a freezer salesman—and ten after nine in the morning.

Now Cody cut from one lane to another without looking, ignoring the sharp complaint of several car horns and the shouted imprecations. Where was Roberta?

More worried than ever, he pulled the car into the apartment's underground garage. He wheeled sharply around and into his parking space. As he turned off the ignition, he glanced at Roberta's space, and started. Her car was there; she was back!

Relief surged through him, followed by the urge to kill. He leapt out of the car and raced for the lobby and elevator. He shot out of the elevator and down the hallway to her door. He rang the doorbell and knocked at the same time. No one answered. “Roberta!” he yelled.

He rang again and waited impatiently. “Roberta!” He rattled the door knob. “Roberta!”

He swung over to his own door and unlocked it. He ran through the living room to the sliding doors, tossing his keys on the table. It wasn't until he reached the doors that he registered the briefcase. He looked back at the dining room table. A burgundy leather briefcase sat open on the table top.

He halted. Was that Roberta's? Slowly he walked back to the table. Beside the briefcase lay a gold duo-tang folder. On its gummed label was the neatly-typed title, “Alien Abduction, Chicago 1998”.

Cody grew still. In the silence, he could hear his own breathing. He stared at the folder. He didn't want to pick it up. He didn't want . . . .
 

He heard a rustling noise, followed by a long murmur that could have been a sigh. It came from his bedroom.

Not certain what he would find, he headed to the bedroom. His eyes widened as he entered the sun-filled room.

Roberta lay in the center of his bed, her shoulders bare above the pulled-up cotton sheet. She raised her arms in a languorous stretch, and smiled lazily. “Mmm, I thought you'd never get here. Don't you ever go to bed?”

Struck speechless, Cody could only stare. Finally he found his tongue. “How'd you get in here?” he asked stupidly.

Roberta inclined her head to the sliding doors. “You really should lock those doors.”

Still stunned, Cody shook his head. “What? Where were you last night?”

She smiled again, and raked one hand through her curls, glistening in the bright morning sun. She looked at him through half-closed eyes. “In a hotel. The Holiday Inn, you know, the one on East Ohio Street. It's very nice. You should try it some time.”

Cody felt disoriented, the warmth rising in his belly at the sight of Roberta in his bed warring with the pressing questions that had driven him all night. Relief, fear and anger were all mixed up together.

He swallowed and tried to refocus. What was at stake was too important, to him, to Allie and to Erik and their daughter. It would decide their futures, and his. But most important of all, it would tell him whether Roberta truly loved him.

“What were you doing in a hotel?”

“Writing. Writing a summary of your abduction and most of what Allie and Erik told us.”

Cody exhaled sharply. “Did you give it to Garnet?”

“Yes. I did.”

Cody groaned. He was too late.

Roberta squirmed about a little on the pillows. Her action sent the sheet tumbling, revealing her rose-tipped breasts. With a smile, she slowly replaced the sheet. Her hand on her chest, she looked up at Cody, her blue eyes sunny and warm. “Don't look so worried. Garnet's reaction, if I recall correctly, was that my summary was ‘nothing but drivel'.”

“Drivel?” Cody frowned. His brain felt like slow-moving sludge. Was he missing something?

“Oh, yes. And a conspiracy plot too. You know how UFO believers love their conspiracy plots.”

“A conspiracy plot?”
 

“Yes. Garnet accused you and me of trying to set him up to look like an idiot. Your phone call to him last night, as well as your unannounced visit, didn't help matters.”

“What?”

“Oh, it's all right.” Roberta tossed her head. “I'm not crushed. I know Garnet. I finally realized that in SUFOW, there's room for only one star: him. He doesn't want anyone else crowding his solar system. So I quit.”

“You quit?” Cody blinked. Things were happening too fast. After the night that he'd spent, he was having trouble taking it all in.

“Yes. But that's all right. I decided to take my report to the Society for the Study of Aliens and UFOs. I knew they'd be interested.”

Cody groaned again. “Roberta, don't your realize how dangerous this . . .”

“Yes.” She smiled again and snuggled down further under the sheet. “That's why I'm here.” She yawned and stretched again. “I didn't go.”

“I mean, this could really hurt Allie and Erik, not to speak of me. You don't know—”

“You're not listening,” Roberta said gently. “I said I didn't take it there.”

“You didn't take it to SSAU?” Hope flickered inside him.

She shook her head. “Nope. It took a while to penetrate my star-crazed state, but I finally realized on the drive there that no matter how I disguised the facts, you would be too easy to identify. Your case was just too widely publicized last year. At first I'd thought Garnet might be able to help me devise a way to protect your identities, but, since he doesn't even believe me . . .”

Her voice trailed off and she shrugged. “Maybe, sometime, I'll be able to do something with your story. But I'll need a lot more information, and more time with you and with Erik. It will take a lot of thought, about how to do it and why, and even whether I should do it.”

“Whether you should do it?”

She nodded. “Yes. Because I realized something else too, something more important.”

Cody grabbed the door frame for support. He couldn't take too many more surprises. “What?” he asked cautiously.

Roberta raised her head, her eyes shining with the sincerity that he loved most about her. “I realized I'm much more interested in the people affected or contacted by aliens than I am in any fame or notoriety I might gain from telling their stories. I'm more interested in helping them understand what's happened to them, real or imagined, and cope with the effects. I don't like to see people hurting.”

For a moment she hung her head. She raised it again, and looked at him once more, a glimmer of uncertainty in her eyes. “Especially you.” She swallowed. “I'm sorry I left you last night. I really am. I should have stayed. I know how hard this must have hit you, how much you didn't want to be abducted by aliens. I—well, I don't know what came over me. I—yes I do.