Head Over Heels (14 page)

M
arielle grabbed her purse and ran out the door. She didn't know why she didn't call the police first. She should have. She would have any other time.

She certainly hadn't called a friend or relative when Russ landed on the roof of her car. She'd automatically dialed 911. Why she had dialed Russ first this time made no sense, but she'd done it.

She'd barely finished giving the dispatcher all the details when Russ's SUV roared into her driveway.

It had barely come to a stop before he got out and barreled toward her.

“What happened? Are you okay?”

“I'm fine, just feeling kind of shaky. When I got home the door wasn't locked. When I went in, just like at your place, everything was fine. My stereo, my DVD player, my computer, everything was still there. But when I started to unpack my groceries I heard the front door squeak and then shut. Someone was in there while I was.”

It hadn't hit her before. She'd managed to say the same thing to the police, but in telling Russ, her knees started to tremble, and a chill enveloped her. She refused to cry. But she couldn't stop shaking.

Before she could think, Russ pulled her to him and held her tight. She started to shiver, anyway, but immediately felt warmer, and safe.

“It's okay,” he whispered in her ear. “You're fine, and that's all that matters.”

A police car with lights flashing but no sirens pulled into her driveway behind Russ's SUV. He let her go when the squad car's door opened and a uniformed officer stepped out.

“Are you Marielle McGee, the occupant?”

She nodded.

“Stay here until I come for you.” The officer pulled out his gun, and crept into Marielle's town home, poised and ready.

She shuddered. “That gun scares me more than anything.”

Neither Russ nor Marielle said a word until the officer returned.

“The intruder is gone. It's safe inside,” he said.

Marielle followed the officer, and Russ trailed her. When they got into the kitchen, Marielle held her purse above the table, ready to put it down between the half-unpacked groceries.

“Can you tell if anything is missing?” the officer asked as he began dusting for fingerprints.

“My purse doesn't feel right.” Quickly, she set it down and looked inside. “My wallet is missing!”

A wave of fear surged through her, even though she was certainly safe with both Russ and a police officer here.

She looked up into the officer's warm brown eyes. “I can't believe this. I had a couple of bags of groceries when I walked in, and I thought I was going to drop something, so I put my purse down on the floor in the hallway and went into the kitchen.” Her knees started to shake, and mechanically, she walked to the door. “While I was in the kitchen, there was someone here, going through my purse!” She turned to the officer, who had followed her. “What am I going to do?”

“Cancel your credit cards right now, and you'll have to get duplicates made of your driver's license and other identification. Identity theft has become a major problem. You'll still have to watch your personal accounts for a long time after you get your new cards.”

She sagged and looked at the floor where her purse had been. Suddenly, it hit her. “My keys are missing, too. I left them on the floor beside my purse when I came in!”

She ran to the window to make sure her car was still in the carport. “I have a spare key, but if someone else does, too, and they know where I live, my car isn't safe. I'll have to get a locksmith to change the locks tonight.” She buried her face in her hands. “I can't afford a weekend callout. I don't even have my credit cards to pay for this.”

Russ stepped beside her. “Let me pay for that. I certainly owe you more. I insist.”

“Excuse me.” The officer cleared his throat. “Can I ask you a few questions to fill out my report? And then I'll be on my way.”

Marielle nodded weakly. “Certainly.” Numbly, she answered all the officer's queries.

When he left, Russ stayed with her.

“I want to take all my registration and stuff out of the glovebox, just in case,” she said.

She stepped outside and into the driveway, and again, Russ followed her. She was almost done removing everything out of the glovebox when he appeared beside the car door.

“Marielle, what color is your wallet?”

“It's brown. Why?”

“Is this it?” He held up a wallet.

Her
wallet.

Marielle gasped. “Yes!”

She nearly grabbed it out of his hands. “Everything is in here except for the cash! And there wasn't much money anyway.” She sprang out of the car and threw her arms around Russ's neck.

His arms wrapped around her waist, but instead of dancing like she was doing, he stayed very still. When she stilled, he lowered his head and rested his cheek on the top of her head.

He didn't say a word. He just held her.

A million reasons why she shouldn't have been enjoying the warm fuzzies passed through her head. But she couldn't help it. She hugged him back.

She'd seldom had anyone to just hold her, except maybe her mother when she was a child. But really, neither of her parents were huggy types. Michael had never held her just to offer comfort. In fact, the closer they got to the day that was supposed to be their
wedding, the more Michael's hands had roamed—to the point that she often felt uncomfortable.

She'd never felt uncomfortable with Russ. By nature, he seemed gentle and controlled, but today she'd seen another side of him. The expression on his face when he came to her aid today told her how he cared about her. For a man who spent most of his day sitting behind a desk, he had moved fast.

She'd been in love before, but what she felt now was different. Michael had hurt her so badly she'd barely survived, and in hindsight, she could see that Michael had had it in him all along to be totally self-centered.

Russ wasn't cold and calculated in his pursuit of what he wanted, like Michael was. But, like Michael, Russ still had considerable drive. It was different, but he was also driven. She hadn't quite figured it out, but figuring it out didn't change it or protect her from being hurt by it. Russ was on his way up the corporate ladder, and he was very honest and up-front about it. He lived in his own self-sufficient world, and his foray into helping the teens, no matter how much good he was doing, and no matter how much they liked him, didn't change anything.

He was going to leave, and he wouldn't look back.

She wanted to kiss him now, because she was positive that he would kiss her back.

Except she'd lost at love before.

She didn't want to lose again.

So Marielle raised her palms to his chest and pushed very gently, knowing that he would respect her wishes and back away.

Which, of course, he did.

“I should get back in the house. The reason I wanted to come straight home is that I had so much to do. Now I've lost even more time.”

She turned around and stepped toward the door, but a flash of silver made her stop in her tracks.

“My keys!”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. See my pink pompom?”

She picked them up, but they didn't feel right. She weighed it in her hand, then inspected each key.

“Some are missing. My house key is here, so is my car key.” She mentally counted them off. “This is so strange. The ones missing are for things no one could get any access to. The filing cabinet at the office, the shed in my complex where they pile up the newspapers until the recycling truck comes, the lock to my friend's camper.”

“What about the key to the church basement?”

“Too much weight on a key chain is bad for your ignition switch, so I have a separate key chain for the church keys because I have so many. The front door, the basement, the storage locker, the desk, and the closet for the cleaning supplies. That key chain is still in my pocket.”

“So the only keys that are missing are for odd, unrelated things?”

“Yes.” Marielle lowered her hands to her sides. “This doesn't make any sense.”

“A lot of things aren't making any sense. But there has to be a connection. When I go to the center tomorrow I'll talk to Pastor Tom and see if anyone else has had similar problems. At least you know there
wasn't enough time for anyone to have copied any of your keys.”

“I don't know why anyone would want to get into the recycling shed. I'm not even going to bother reporting that to the strata committee. People lose their keys for that all the time. They don't even care. I don't know why it's locked in the first place.”

“I would think to keep out the vagrants. It's a shelter in the cold weather.”

“You're probably right.”

“But I do know one thing. Your intruder was a woman.”

“How do you know that? Did you see someone?”

“No, but I smelled some kind of perfume residue. The thing is, I've smelled it before and I can't remember where. I just know that I've never smelled it on you. So it was a woman who was here, and we know it's a woman who helped herself to my keys. I don't believe in coincidences.”

“You could be right. Someone seems to be targeting our church people.”

“Maybe. I always talk to Pastor Tom before he lets me in every day. I'll run it by him, and I'll let you know what he says.”

R
uss tried to be discreet as he studied his half of the teen group. Was anyone overly nervous? Was anyone too interested in anything not directly related to them?

He couldn't see anything amiss, and it bothered him.

Maybe there was nothing wrong. Maybe he was imagining connections, and in fact everything that had happened was random and unrelated.

It was almost time to go, and he'd found nothing—neither had Marielle. Pastor Tom was concerned, of course, but he didn't have any ideas or suggestions, other than to be careful, and to be doubly sure everything was securely locked up when they left.

“Russ?” said Jason. “Can you come here? I found a file in a strange place. I don't know what to do.”

“What's up?”

Russ leaned over Jason's shoulder while the teen highlighted a file. “I changed the settings to show hidden files so I can clean out my temp files, and I
found this. It's not mine. I don't want to delete it until I'm sure you don't need it.”

“It's okay. You've got the computer that used to be mine. I copied everything I needed, so I wouldn't have to reinstall the operating system. Anything that's not an executable file can be…” He let his voice trail off when he read the file name. “Wait. You're right. Don't delete that one. That's the name of one of my biggest clients, but I would never put a file like that in a hidden directory. Why is this here?”

Jason slid off the chair for Russ to take his place. Russ pulled a flash drive out of his pocket and plugged it into the USB port. “I don't remember this file, so I think I'll copy it and take it home to see what it is.” As he dragged the file to copy it, he couldn't believe the size of it. “There, it's done. Now finish up what you're doing—it's almost time to go home.”

He helped Marielle lock up, making sure the doors were locked and the windows secured. He waved as she drove off, then he unlocked his security bar and tucked it under the car seat.

This time, Russ didn't stop to pick up a coffee and he changed his original plans for a side trip to the grocery store for milk. Today, he went straight home and headed for the computer in his den.

Nothing he tried could open the mystery file, so he left-clicked on the name, which gave him the time the file was last updated.

He stared at the date and time. It wasn't right. The file showed the last update was the day before his accident, but the last time he'd worked on it was on the
weekend, at home. He hadn't done anything to it at the office for at least a week because he'd been too busy with other things.

But he knew who had.

Jessie.

Russ hit the autodial on his cell phone and waited for Marielle to answer.

He leaned back in the chair and rested one arm on top of his head as he spoke. “Jason found the strangest thing on my old computer at the center. I brought the file home, and it appears to be something that Jessie and I were working on, except the date is wrong and I can't open the file.”

“I really doubt there's anything I can help you with,” she said.

“I didn't want to talk to you about the computer. I wanted to talk to you about Jessie.”

“Your co-worker.”

He leaned back in the chair. “Yes. I was talking to Grant, and it was Jessie who was up there and stuck her head out the window after I fell. Grant says she wasn't with the office crowd, but he wouldn't know if she was just standing around anywhere else. Do you know if she was?”

“I don't think so, but I'm not sure.”

“She's about five foot six inches, she's got dark brown hair, shoulder length. No curl—it just kind of hangs there. I can't remember what she was wearing, but she always wears pants, never a skirt, and she wears these punk-style boots all the time.”

“No. I didn't see anyone like that outside. But Russ, I
was
a bit distracted.”

Russ thought back to that day. He remembered talking to Jessie when she first arrived at the office. He remembered walking with her into his office and sitting down at his computer as he was trying to install a new program that wasn't going very well.

The image of getting up and walking to the window formed in his mind as if he were looking through fog, then went blank.

“Russ? Are you there?”

He pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose. “Yes. I think I just remembered something. I actually recall walking to the window that day. But I don't know why. And I think I remember Jessie being in my office at the time. It's still not clear, and when I try to remember, it fades away.”

“That's a start, so that's good. Have you talked to Jessie about it?”

“No. Every time I try to call I only get her voice mail, and the last time I called, her voice-mail box was full.”

“Do you know where she lives? Can you go to her home?”

“I don't have that. But that's a good idea. Grant has to have some kind of address on her, I would think. She's a contract employee, not a regular staff person. She makes her own hours, depending on the project.”

“So what is Jessie's connection to the file?”

“Like I said, the file is in a hidden directory and it's been masked, yet it's clearly named for the last file I was working on with Jessie. But strangely, it was last updated after the date I last worked on it. That tells me that something's wrong, but I'm not sure what. I guess
I'm using you as a sounding board to help me think out loud. I hope you don't mind.”

“Of course I don't mind. I want to help.”

“This is really bothering me. I've made some progress and got it to open, but it's been encrypted in such a way that I can't view it properly. I can tell from the extension that it's probably a video file of some kind. There wasn't any video in the project, so I have no idea what this is, or why it was in an obscure directory. It's like I was trying to hide it—except it's not my file, even though it was on my computer.”

“If you were working on the project together, maybe Jessie was doing some work on your computer and forgot to tell you.”

He shook his head even though Marielle wasn't there to see him. “That's not possible. She always brings her laptop. I'm at the office more than Jessie. If she did anything on my computer, I couldn't do anything but stand there and watch her. I don't have anyplace to work except for my own desk.”

“Russ, I just heard a beep, my battery is dying. If you need someone to talk to, I can come over there. Or maybe if you try to show me the file, working on it might trigger some kind of memory for you.”

“You don't have to do that.”

“But I want to. I can't imagine what it must be like to not be able to remember something so important. This is also affecting me.”

He stared at his computer. She was right. Talking out loud about it had already helped him remember something that was important. “Have you had supper yet? I
can cook something. It's the least I can do if you're going to come all this way.”

“That would be gr—” The line went dead.

Russ hadn't heard what she was going to say, but he'd heard enough to know that she was coming.

He left the computer and went into the kitchen to see what he could scrounge together to feed two people on short notice. Waiting for a package of ground beef to defrost gave him more time to think.

He couldn't imagine why he would have gone to the window that day when he was busy. Also, being busy, he wouldn't have let Jessie work on his computer and tie it up. Yet if one of Jessie's files was on his computer, was the work something she couldn't do on her laptop?

He couldn't
remember
. Just trying to remember made everything sink deeper into the fog.

But even if there was something she needed to do on his computer that day, that didn't explain the date of the file—the Friday before his accident. He'd had an emergency come up for another client, so he hadn't worked on it that day. The last time he'd worked on it was the day before—Thursday.

Unless he'd let Jessie use his computer then, too. Except he knew he hadn't. He could remember everything from that Friday because he'd been in panic mode over a project shutdown.

He had the ground beef fried and was ready to add a can of spaghetti sauce, when the doorbell rang. He opened the door to Marielle, exactly as he'd left her, except her hair was messier. He didn't want to stare, but
he couldn't help it. While Marielle never dressed up, her hair was always neatly combed. The difference made him want to reach out and make it as neat as it always was, but not with a comb—with his fingers—slowly, and gently. And while he was doing that, he would naturally hold her, make the moment last. Maybe even spend extra time playing with that silly red stripe in her hair.

But he didn't have that right. It hit him squarely in the gut how much he wanted her to be with him, even though the supper he was making was certainly nothing special.

She smiled at him. “Hey.”

“Hey, back. I hope you don't mind spaghetti.”

“I love spaghetti.”

The favorite meal of a single man,
he thought. And apparently a single woman, too.

She followed him into the kitchen. As he continued to cook, Marielle opened a few cupboard doors until she found the plates, and began setting the table.

“I was thinking on the way here. The more you tell me, the less I can figure out what you were doing at the window when you were busy.”

He nodded. “I know. I also don't understand how I could have fallen. It's not like I was doing something stupid or risky. How exactly would anyone fall through a window? The only explanation would be if I was climbing out for some reason, and slipped—or if I was pushed. Neither one makes sense.”

“I agree. Why would you have been on the ledge?”

“I wouldn't. It's too risky, and I don't take risks—at
least not that kind. That ledge out there is barely wide enough for the pigeons, never mind my size twelves.”

The table set, she turned around and put her hands on her hips. “You wear size twelve shoes?”

He stirred the sauce vigorously. “I'm six feet tall. I should have a shoe size to match, don't you think?” He grinned.

Marielle continued in a serious vein. “But the only other possibility is that you were pushed. And that would be…”

“…attempted murder.”

Russ and Marielle stared at each other.

“That would certainly explain why Jessie seems to have disappeared.”

“But Jessie isn't a bad person. I've worked with her off and on for about a year. She wouldn't hurt a fly.”

“Even mafia murderers are good people to their mothers. And whenever you read in the paper that someone committed murder and only a thorough investigation uncovers it, usually the neighbors say what a nice person they were.”

“But Jessie…” Russ let his voice trail off as he thought about Jessie. It wasn't possible that she had it in her to try to kill someone, least of all him. But then, he didn't have it in him to do something stupid like climb outside a window and stand on a ledge barely big enough for his toes. The only other possibility was that he was leaning out the window too far and fell.

“I plan to speak with Jessie, but I've also got to find out what was on that file. I think that's where I'm going to find the answers I need.”

“Did you say that Jason found it in the first place?”

“Yes. It was by accident, but he was sharp enough to know not to delete it. He's got a lot of potential.”

“Yes. I'm positive he's going to be able to get out of that neighborhood and live a decent, normal life.” Marielle's voice dropped to barely above a whisper. “Just like you.”

The reminder stabbed him like a knife. That was exactly why he didn't want to be part of that group. It brought to mind what he'd escaped and how hard he'd had to work to do it, along with the personal scars he'd had to endure. He wanted to put those days behind him, and keep them behind him.

Jason also deserved to have everything put behind him. So did everyone in that youth group.

But statistically, only a small portion of the group would be able to get out. Most of them were doomed to repeat the lives of their parents.

“For you have the poor with you always…”
Mark 14:7

It wasn't fair, but then, life wasn't always fair. Everyone had to make choices, and the result in a person's life would depend on the choices he made, and how he handled the harder ones.

Like whether Russ should stick with the church group, or, when his required time was up, shake the dust off his sandals and move on.

For the first time, he didn't know what to do.

“I think the spaghetti is cooked. Let's eat,” he said.

Marielle sat while he served, then Russ sat and folded his hands in front of him, bowed his head.

“Dear Lord, thank You for this food and this day.
Thank You also for the freedom You give us to make the choices You give us…including the freedom to make the wrong choices.”

He had to trust that God would guide him to make the decision that was best in the end. Just like Russ had made the decision with his sister. Everything had worked out in the end. God had been faithful in the things that were important, despite how hard Russ's life had been. His sister was okay, and his mother was happily remarried. God had told him what to do, and Russ had trusted God and followed.

It was just that for all the ten years it took, Russ hadn't been able to see that it had been part of the bigger plan. He'd held it all against God—the hard work, the long hours. But now, after so many surgeries, his sister was happy and a productive member of society, and his mother was free of all the accumulated debts—the medical expenses and the bills his father had left them with. Finally Russ could see things more clearly. His family's needs had made him a more responsible person, and now, finally, he was responsible only for himself.