Fugitive Heart

chapter Fourteen


Ames shook out her apron and tied it around her waist. Another lunch shift at the Back Porch and it seemed as if those surreal, crazy days with Nick had never happened. The regulars sat on stools at the counter or in booths, which might as well have been stamped with their names. Gopher manned the grill. Marty moved like lightning from the tables to the wait station, singing “Pumped Up Kicks” in a tuneless monotone. The air smelled of fry grease and apple pie, and the hum of conversation was as familiar and dull as the droning of bees.

But when Ames stepped out of the break room, the place went suddenly quiet. Everyone looked up. Her skin shriveled at all the eyes upon her, and she felt like she ought to say something, but she had no idea what.

Then a farmer in the corner began clapping, and several other customers joined in. What the hell?

Missy Holmes and Jenny Brown, the Realtor, bolted up from their booth and came to hug her.

“You poor, brave thing,” Missy gushed. “What you’ve been through!”

“If you need anything, anything at all, you let us know,” Jenny added.

“Um, okay, sure.” Ames extricated herself from their clutching manicured fingers, these women who’d barely given her the time of day before. Now she was supposed to be some kind of fifteen-minutes-of-fame celebrity? Why, exactly?

Luckily, the flurry of excitement died down within minutes, and everyone returned to their biscuits and sausage gravy or pile o’ pancakes. Ames earned a few more comments from customers she waited on. Questions about what had happened, which she neatly sidestepped by saying it was an ongoing investigation and she wasn’t allowed to talk about it, and wishes for her welfare, which she accepted with a smile.

But soon enough, everything was back to normal. It could’ve been any weekday morning BNR—Before Nick Ross—except Ames knew when her shift was over, she’d be going out to his house to finalize her plans for the remodeling project.

In the weeks he’d been gone, she’d been out to the farmhouse, cleaning, plastering and painting. Repairing the damage left by the mice and Nick’s search for Elliot’s stuff took days.

Ames hated feeling danger in the one place that had always meant safety to her. She’d drive out the ghosts. She felt too nervous to wear earbuds as she worked, but the silence unnerved her as well, so she lugged Elliot’s old boom box with her as she worked.

With the music pumped up, singing along as she worked, she shed the fear and soon felt happier than she had expected—even if she did check her phone every few minutes for text messages that didn’t seem to come often enough and were too short when they appeared.

She would have kept on working at his house, messing with web pages in the evenings and sleeping in the house, but Gopher begged her to come back to work.

Someday soon she’d have to quit the Back Porch, because apparently being held at gunpoint did wonders for web designers’ careers. She suddenly had a long list of people clamoring for her design services who were willing to pay. Not all of them were in Arnesdale. The story about the attack had been picked up by more than local news, although the whole thing had been vague and called a hostage crisis with unknown motivations. Apparently, the Espositos or someone knew how to handle cover-ups.

The warmth of the diner’s customers’ greeting might have been embarrassing and strange, but yeah, it felt good too.

“If I’d known you guys would treat me like some kind of heroine, I might have come back to work sooner,” she joked to Marty as she piled sticky, empty breakfast plates in a bus tub.

“You’ve been too busy pining over that Sam Allen.”

“His name is Nick,” she said, not for the first time.

Marty had obviously been waiting for this topic to come up again. “Yeah, and what exactly was that name change about? It wasn’t some official witness protection. He was that scared of those people?”

Ames just shrugged. He hadn’t explained, but she suspected it was also part of his attempt to find Elliot without Elliot spotting him coming. As a stalker… Well, Nick said he made a better curator than hunter. She wished she could go to New York and see his little museum.

She’d already spent hours hunting around the museum’s website, looking for signs of him. It wasn’t a bad site; the montage at the start was fun and loaded quickly. Maybe he’d helped put it together. She thought she heard his voice in some of the descriptions of the exhibits, and there was a blurry picture of him smiling next to a group of grade-school visitors. Did he like children? Would he want some of his own? Where would he go if he left New York? He didn’t have to flee the city now.

She blinked and looked around the Back Porch. All right, that’s enough thinking about Nick. If only work would pick up—she’d be distracted. But the morning rush had ended.

“Can’t you tell me anything about the meeting with the FBI people?” Marty hated not getting every detail.

“It was boring. And I didn’t even get to talk to the main guy in person.”

The day before, Ames been summoned to the town hall for a teleconference with Agent Giordano.

The only thing she had to offer the agent was a postcard that had appeared in her mail. It showed a beach and had a Moroccan stamp. Three words had been scrawled on the other side. I am sorry, written in Elliot’s distinctive showy handwriting. Giordano had insisted that she hand the card over to local authorities. She insisted on getting a copy first.

The whole thing had taken less than an hour. In New York, Giordano had sat at a conference table in front of his laptop and scribbled notes as Ames had answered questions about facing the four New Yorkers. It soon became clear Giordano was most interested in the package they’d found at Jake’s house. Did she recall any serial numbers on the bills? No. Did the garbage bag have any distinctive features? No. Could she remember the color of the flash drive? Gray, maybe? Marty now looked as disappointed in her as the agent had yesterday.

“You know I’m not supposed to talk about it, Marty. And anyway, you were there for the most interesting part, charging in like the cavalry.”

That made Marty smile and raise a fist.

The phone vibrated in Ames’s pocket.

“’Scuse me,” she said to Marty and moved into the kitchen to check it. A message from Nick with tomorrow’s date and nothing else. She typed out a long message, then deleted it and just went with, You’re coming back?

A single word: Yes.

Her heart hammered as hard as it would if he’d walked through the door. She drifted through the rest of her shift trying to recall details of him: his smile, the way he laughed. Wait, had he laughed? The small groan of pleasure he’d given as he’d surged into her body…

She wandered back from the kitchen.

Marty looked up from totaling an order. “You okay?”

Ames blushed and nodded, even though the answer was no, not really. She was infatuated with a man—and she’d never spent an ordinary minute with him. Would he stay in such a dull backwater? Would he want to go out dancing? There were those pictures of him in the nightclub. And he hadn’t seemed to like the woods or country. Had he? And she’d been so determined to follow him. Yeah, she still felt that wild recklessness when she thought of Nick.

She’s still go after him if she had to. The thread remained in her mind after the run-in with the Esposito guys: you can die tomorrow translated to don’t wait to live today.

She gathered up some dirty plates and plopped them in a bus tub, recalling the way Nick’s eyes softened after he kissed her.

“Stop it,” she said out loud, hoping to push herself off the obsessed-with-Nick train.

“You have it bad, hon,” Marty said, and for once Ames didn’t have a good, snarky retort, and she didn’t try to hide the truth from her friend. “I kinda think you’re right.”





After a high five and a welcome-back hug from the evening crew, Ames took off. Her plan had been to work on another web page, but the house beckoned her. She’d planned to paint one of the walls in the big bedroom a dramatic, deep red and wanted to see it as soon as possible. It might overwhelm the room, she thought as she stirred and poured.

She painted the wall and imagined a big bed in this room and Nick in it. Or Nick, naked against the red wall.

Her wall in her house.

His house.

Theirs. The thought was triumphant and joy bubbled through her as she saw her goal coming to fruition at last—plus so much more than she’d ever dreamed. For how could she have foreseen a Nick in her life, in her house?

She backed up to admire her work and stepped on the paint lid.

“Crap!”

In her attempt to clean the bottom of her sandal, she managed to get maroon stains on her hands and shirt as well.

With a dramatic groan, she slipped off the sandal and hobbled down the stairs to wash up outside.

A car made its way up the drive—a crunch of tires on the gravel and a dust cloud drifting around the curve. Her heart sped, and she wished she’d grabbed a knife in the kitchen. Maybe she wasn’t entirely over the episode with the New Yorkers. Flashbacks to that horrible night were never far from her consciousness.

The blue Ford was unfamiliar, but the driver wasn’t.

“Nick,” she shouted, dropping the sandal and rushing toward the car.

The vehicle stopped abruptly, though the engine still ran. The door flew open. Nick jumped out and raced toward her, yelling her name. His expression was frantic and for a moment, Ames gazed at him, puzzled.

Then she glanced down at her stained shirt and understood. “No. It’s not blood; it’s just paint. I made a mess. It’s just paint.”

Apparently she wasn’t the only one who relived fears from the mob’s attack.

Nick grabbed her despite her protests that he would ruin his clothes. He clutched her fiercely, so hard she wasn’t sure she could breathe, but that was okay. Breathing was overrated. He whispered her name over and over as he held her.

She gave up worrying about his clothes and put her arms around him too. “It’s okay. I’m so sorry you got scared.”

He finally calmed down enough to let go and back away, but he only went to an arm’s length and he held her shoulders as he looked her up and down. Nick had a smear of red paint on his neck and cheek. At last he smiled. “That’s a pretty good color on you. Is it as good on the walls? Let’s go take a look.”

An absurd happiness filled her, and she had to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” he asked as he pulled her in through the front door. He stopped and sniffed. “Mm, this place smells like paint and you.”

“I think we’re going to be all right,” she told him.