It's Never too Late
It wasn’t that he was averse to meeting some of the town’s most prominent citizens. He was sure he’d be meeting them soon enough—if Nonnie had her way. He just had something more pressing to do that night.
Rescheduling his time with Abe for that weekend, he started the evening by drinking a beer at the local bar with Sheriff Richards. The sheriff handed a satchel over to him under the condition that this confidential information be returned to him the next morning before anyone knew it was missing.
Mark didn’t go out that night. Not after everyone had left Addy’s house and Nonnie had settled in and the neighborhood had gone quiet. He sat in the chair in the living room and pored over investigative reports, timelines, descriptions of the scene of Addy’s fire, of evidence retrieved from the scene, the processing of the evidence, charts depicting placement of the evidence, of the bodies, the coroner’s reports. He read, and he lived through every single second of the night that Addy almost burned alive.
He choked up when he got to the part about the little girl who hadn’t given up—who’d been found nearly unconscious, with third-degree burns down her back, but still screaming because she wanted her mother to be able to hear her. Addy’s screams had led the firemen to her in time, providing them with her exact location so that the one-minute window they had to get to her was not wasted. Her screams had saved her life.
And it dawned on Mark, he’d seen Addy completely naked. He’d seen every private part of her. Kissed every intimate part of her body. But he’d never seen her back.
He knew now that hadn’t been a coincidence. Addy had deliberately positioned herself so that he wouldn’t ever see her back.
Obviously the plastic surgeons had done a good enough job that he hadn’t felt any scars, but there’d be silvery lines visible—at the very least.
When he was finished reading, he drove to the big-box store that was open all night and then out to the cactus jelly plant to request permission to use a corner of their huge desert property to conduct some experiments.
On Friday morning, he rose before Nonnie did. Or rather, he got up out of the chair where he’d rested his head for an hour’s nap, cooked up some bacon and left it in the warmer for his grandmother before stepping into the shower.
By 7:00 a.m., dressed in slacks and his nicest shirt, he presented himself at Addy’s front door. He had to knock twice.
“Mark?” She’d clearly just come from the shower. She was dressed, in navy blue dress pants, a silk blouse and pumps, but her hair was pinned up and wet on the ends, and she wasn’t wearing any makeup. “Is Nonnie okay?”
“The interfering old biddy is just fine,” he said, not quite erasing the affection from his tone. He loved that old biddy.
“What’s up, then?” She stood back in the shadows. “I was just getting ready...”
“May I come in?” He had a satchel on his shoulder. She could assume it was schoolwork.
Stepping back farther, she nodded toward the door. “Of course.”
He set foot inside and Addy turned toward the hallway. “I’ll just be a minute...”
Letting her go, Mark looked around for boxes or bins containing the belongings she’d be taking back to Colorado with her. The house looked just as lived in as it had the morning before—minus the mess on the kitchen table.
She was gone less than five minutes. “Sorry about that,” she said, a forced smile on her face as she reentered the room. Her long blond hair was combed and pulled back in a bejeweled clip. Her makeup was impeccable. She looked ready to walk into a courtroom.
Or maybe she’d always looked that way and he just hadn’t seen the lawyer in her.
“I’ve never actually associated with an attorney before.”
“I’ve never associated with a man with a genius level IQ.”
“I’m here to ask a favor.”
“Okay. I’ll do anything I can to help. You know that.”
His hands in his pockets, he said, “Turn around and lift up your shirt.”
“What?”
“You said you’d do what you can for me. It’s a relatively small thing, I’m asking. Lift up your shirt. It’s not like I haven’t seen you naked before.”
“I don’t...”
Her gaze implored him and he wanted to give in to her. He thought about that little girl who’d just kept screaming and screaming through a raw, burned throat. Screaming when she couldn’t even remember her own name. “Please,” he said.
Slowly, Addy turned, raised her shirt and showed him skin that was unlike the pearly smoothness covering the rest of her body. Just as he’d suspected, her middle back was lined with silvery scars from that night long ago. Addy let him look as long as he needed to and by doing so, it showed Mark how m
uch she trusted him. More importantly, Mark knew how much he loved her.