Disappear. Kay David
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up each year—a gathered stalk of dried corn and apples—she told herself she’d get through tomorrow, then concentrate on Ben and Libby. They each needed Alex in a different way, and helping them would take her mind off her memories and all the ghosts that came with them.
But just thinking about the past summoned everything to her. Her fingers suddenly tightened on the dried corn husks and pieces of the chaff fluttered to the floor. She stared at the yellow bits, then all at once, despite her best intentions, her heart started to pound and her mouth went dry. With a quiet groan, she closed her eyes. Behind the lids, the image of her mother’s wreath appeared. The lopsided arrangement looked just as it had on the door of the house in Los Lobos the day Alex had come home from Peru.
Gabriel O’Rourke’s face came next, but before it could fully form, a voice broke the silence.
“Hey, you’re supposed to go home first and then fall asleep!”
Alex’s eyes shot open. Randy Squires, Claiborne’s dean, stood in the doorway of her classroom and grinned.
She smiled gratefully at the tall, balding man. Randy was a sweetheart and he never failed to make her feel better, no matter how badly the day had gone. If she let him, she suspected he’d give his right arm to make her happy, although he’d never come out and asked her for a date or made any kind of obvious move. He was too professional for that, but even more importantly, he sensed the wall Alex kept around herself and respected it.
“I’m too tired to go home and go to bed,” she lied. “I think I’ll just hibernate here like some big old bear until January. Is that okay?”
He strolled into her classroom and perched on the edge of her desk. “No fancy trips this year? No big vacation?”
Alex shook her head and explained Ben’s situation.
“I’m sorry to hear he’s so ill.”
“I am, too.” She sat down at one of the tables in front of her desk. “Ben’s a nice guy.”
“Your divorce was amicable, I take it?”
“Very. The last thing Ben Worthington would do is make a fuss over a divorce. He’s too much of a gentleman.”
“But the marriage didn’t work?”
Alex didn’t discuss anything personal with anyone. She couldn’t. “No,” she said in a curt voice. “It didn’t work.”
Her sharpness brought him to his feet. “I guess I’d better head home. If you get bored during the break, give me a call. There’s a new Mexican place over on Guadalupe Street. We could hit it.”
Alex felt a sweep of guilt—she shouldn’t have been so harsh—but she kept her face noncommittal. “Sure.” She nodded. “I’ll keep that in mind. It sounds like a lot of fun.”
Then their eyes met and both of them knew she wouldn’t call.
He left a few minutes after that. Relief washed over Alex as she picked up her purse and briefcase to follow his path out the door. Randy was the kind of guy any woman would be thrilled to have. Any woman but Alex.
She didn’t want anyone in her life, so it was always best to head off relationships before they started: You never knew when the other person might up and disappear.
GABRIEL O’ROURKE watched the bartender flick his rag at the caged parrot hanging over the bar. The sight provided the most entertainment Gabriel had had in the past two days. There wasn’t much to do in Baja this time of year. Or any time of year, but that was exactly why Gabriel came here, or so he told himself.
He’d left the Agency the year before, and he hadn’t given a damn about anything during that time. Caring cost more than he had to give, emotionally and physically. Burned out and disillusioned, when he needed money he did contract work for the government.
He took a sip of his lukewarm Dos Equis and listened to the conversation of the people sitting behind him in the bar. They’d come in late last night, two couples from Denver. The men had talked incessantly about fishing, but Gabriel had the feeling they’d already been hooked. One blonde, one redhead, the women were much younger than the men and their jewelry outshone the lights above the bar. Gabriel wondered idly if the men’s wives knew where they were.
“Well, pecan is my favorite.” One of the women behind him spoke in a deep Southern accent, the words drifting over Gabriel’s shoulder along with cigar smoke from the man at her side. Gabriel glanced at her in the mirror above the bar—it was the blonde. “We always had it on the table when I was growing up. It’s just not Thanksgiving without pecan pie.”
The redhead said something, the men guffawing at her reply, but Gabriel didn’t hear her. His brain was still trying to absorb what the first woman had said.
Until that very moment, he hadn’t realized tomorrow would be Thanksgiving.
A shadow glided across his memory, the whisper of a young woman with a pale face and stunned expression. He blinked and tried to send her away, but he failed as always. Standing up, he threw a handful of pesos on the bar and left, the cool breeze from the ocean hitting his face as he walked outside.
The ghost of Alexis Mission followed him.
Opening the screen door to his bungalow, Gabriel stepped inside the one-room shack. He grabbed another beer from a cooler he kept stocked, then he turned and went back outside to the porch. Fifteen yards away the Pacific Ocean rolled endlessly, the sky beyond it so dark and deep it made him dizzy just to look at it. He’d been on the sandy strip of beach for a week, his original reason for coming the same as the men in the bar—the fishing. He had yet to rent a boat though, and when he was honest with himself, he knew he probably wouldn’t. He’d come to Baja to recuperate, not to fish.
The month before, he’d finished another job for the Agency…and another relationship, and he’d wanted somewhere private to lick his wounds. Usually he missed the former more than the latter, but this time had been different.
He’d met the woman in a bar and Gabriel had been shocked when she’d come to his table and sat down to strike up a conversation. Like men everywhere, he’d kept his mouth shut and let her do her thing, his ego inflating with each admiring glance she’d sent his way. She’d been beautiful and smart and ambitious. Younger than him, too, a helluva lot younger, but then again…weren’t they all?
She’d moved in two weeks later and out after two months. He’d packed up his shit and left San Diego. It wasn’t home anyway—no place was home. He’d come down here.
And now it was almost Thanksgiving.
Gabriel stared at the water but Alexis Mission’s face formed in the waves and mocked him. Like still photos framed inside his mind, he saw snapshots of her life, times when he’d been there and she’d never known. The rough period right after Los Lobos. The emergency room, then the recuperation. The paintings. Her wedding. The divorce. Her job. Each event had brought him close to her…but never too close.
Gabriel had told so many lies in his work he couldn’t remember them all, but he’d never forgotten the ones he’d told Alexis Mission.
Back then, though, catching Guy Cuvier had been his only goal. The man had gotten away with stealing American technology for years and Gabriel had been so determined to stop him that nothing else had mattered. The result had been disastrous and the deception still haunted him: Alexis Mission’s parents hadn’t been killed. And Richard Mission hadn’t witnessed a murder.
He’d committed one.
It’d been self-defense, of course, but Richard had shot Guy Cuvier. Gabriel had worked quickly, knowing nothing but a total disappearance could keep the Missions safe afterward. He’d been wrong about that and regretted the decision as much as he now regretted telling Alexis that her family had died. The idea had seemed like a bad one at the time; in retrospect, it was the worst thing Gabriel could have done.
In the past few years, it seemed as if things had begun