“David, please,” Marianne whispered.
Her husband hesitated as though he might yet whale into Trapper, but he responded to the tension in Marianne’s face and the pleading in her eyes by saying nothing more. He did, however, remain standing in the middle of the hallway with the rigidity of a palace guard and the territorial menace of a junkyard dog.
Marianne broke the tense silence by introducing him to Kerra. They exchanged how-do-you-dos and she congratulated him on the pending arrival. “Do you know what you’re having?”
“A girl,” the couple chorused.
“We’re very happy,” David said, and shot a look toward Trapper that dared him to question his and Marianne’s marital bliss and delight over the baby.
Marianne offered them something to drink. They declined. Then no one said anything for an interminable length of time, until Trapper cleared his throat and gave Marianne a meaningful look.
She turned to her husband. “Trapper’s visit isn’t entirely unexpected, David. I didn’t tell you because, well…I just didn’t. He came to pick up something.”
“What?”
“Honestly, I don’t know.”
David came back to Trapper looking even more murderous than before. “I don’t know what you’re up to. Still playing government agent, I guess. But whatever your game is, if you’ve put my wife and our baby in any danger—”
“I haven’t. I won’t.”
“You have just by showing up on our doorstep. You’re a nightmare, and I want you to get the hell out of my house.”
Up till now, Trapper had tolerated the man’s animosity because, in David’s place, he would have felt the same. But the chest beating was wearing thin. “Look, I don’t want to make trouble.”
“You are trouble.”
“Once I get what I came for, you’ll never see me again.”
“Which will be too soon.”
They might have continued interminably, but Marianne saw an opening and seized it. “It’s in the kitchen.”
David looked like he wanted to object, but he was simply too well bred to make a scene that would no doubt upset his pregnant wife. Kerra’s presence also might have had something to do with his backing down.
He moved out of the way so Trapper could follow Marianne. David’s drop-dead look was mollified only slightly when Trapper linked his fingers with Kerra’s and pulled her along as they filed down the hall toward the back of the house. Trapper tried his best not to swagger.
Kerra couldn’t help but compare Marianne’s cluttered and homey kitchen to her own. This one smelled like the chocolate cake cooling on the counter. Hers smelled like cake only when she burned a certain candle. There were dishes in the sink that hadn’t yet been loaded into the dishwasher. Kerra’s kitchen needed cleaning only when the dust began to show.
She felt terribly outshone.
“Would you like some cake?”
She and Trapper declined, and Marianne seemed to have anticipated they would. She went to a desk built into the cabinetry, opened a lower drawer, and took out a padded envelope bearing a label that had required her signature. As she handed it to Trapper, she said, “I opened it because it was addressed to me.”
“That’s okay.” He shook the envelope, and an article wrapped in newspaper and cellophane tape dropped into his hand. He ripped open the crude packaging. Kerra wasn’t surprised to see that it contained a flash drive.
Marianne said to Trapper, “Even though there was no return address, I knew it had to be from you.”
“How’d you know?”
“Because it looked like your gift wrapping. And this is exactly like something you would do.”
“I had to send it to somebody who would get that, somebody I could trust to hold on to it until I came to get it.”
They smiled at each other in the way of a pair who are able to communicate without words.
Kerra felt terribly excluded.