Fighting a yawn, she abruptly pushed to her feet. Walk, girl. And look. Her lieutenant had instructed her to find out if the man was hiding anything, after all. The opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of Marcus through his things might not come again.
‘I’m almost done,’ Marcus said from behind the wall created by his two huge computer monitors. ‘Another few minutes.’
‘That’s fine,’ Scarlett said. ‘I just need to stretch my legs.’ She crossed the large wood-paneled office, stopping at the far wall.
Covered floor to ceiling with framed newspaper headlines, the wall had caught her attention the moment she’d walked into the room. Some were just the headlines themselves, others the entire front page. Haphazardly arranged, all but one of the frames displayed copies of the Ledger. The only other paper represented was the Malaya, the Filipino paper Marcus had mentioned that morning. He’d said that his grandfather had been in the Philippines during World War II, but the headline framed on the wall was much more recent, showing the deposition of Ferdinand Marcos in 1986. Scarlett wondered why it had been included. She also knew she was allowing her mind to wander, procrastinating the unpleasant task of telling Marcus about about Tala’s baby. The news would undoubtedly upset him, but he needed to know.
But she could hear him still typing on his keyboard. She’d let him finish the list first. Then she’d tell him.
She returned her attention to the Ledger headlines – the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the ending of World War II in both Europe and Asia. Sputnik and the moon landing. The assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King. The explosion of Challenger. The fall of the Berlin Wall. 9/11. All events that had changed the world.
The local news was mostly sports and weather related. Headlines celebrated back-to-back World Series wins by the Cincinnati Big Red Machine in the seventies, and Pete Rose’s breaking of Ty Cobbs’s record. Side-by-side headlines recalled the historic Ohio River floods of 1937 and 1997.
‘I remember that one,’ Scarlett murmured, pointing at the photo under the 1997 headline. ‘My uncle lost almost everything he owned. It was the first time in my life a headline affected me personally.’
‘I remember it too,’ Marcus said from his desk. ‘I was with the photographer in the helicopter when he snapped that photo. Seeing what happened from the air . . . it was overwhelming.’
‘I can imagine.’ Her eyes swept across the wall again as she tried to ignore the tingle that tickled everything feminine inside her body every time the man spoke. ‘It’s like a history lesson. Right here in black and white.’
‘I know.’
With a start she realized he was standing about a foot behind her, having somehow moved away from his desk without a sound. Keeping her gaze locked forward, she drew a quiet breath to slow the sudden tripping of her heart, but couldn’t control the shiver that licked across her skin when his scent filled her head.
There should have been nothing extraordinary about his scent. Just soap and a hint of aftershave. She’d smelled the combination on men hundreds, thousands of times. She worked with men, had six brothers, for God’s sake. But this . . . This was different. This was Marcus. She’d dreamed of him for months and now she was here with him. Close enough to touch.
Her hands itched to reach out to him, so she shoved them in her pockets. This was not the time or the place. She was on duty and late meeting Deacon at the park. Time to go, Scarlett. Before you do something you’ll regret later. She’d opened her mouth to tell him she had to leave, with or without the list, when he spoke again, oblivious of her reaction to him.
‘I spent some of the best hours of my childhood in this room,’ he said quietly. Almost reverently. ‘I’d ask my grandfather about each one of these headlines and he’d tell me the story.’
She glanced back over her shoulder, expecting him to be looking at the wall. But his eyes were focused on her face with an intensity that had her swallowing hard. He’d been staring at her, she realized, waiting for her to look at him.
With an effort she returned her attention to the wall, knowing her cheeks had to be bright red. ‘Did, um, did all of these belong to your grandfather?’
He moved to her side, so close that she could feel the heat of his body. She wanted to lean, just a little, but she kept herself upright.
‘Yes, but he didn’t collect them all. Some belonged to my great-grandfather – the really old ones, like the Wall Street Crash and Armistice Day in 1918. My grandfather took over the paper in the early fifties, so all the headlines up there after that were his.’
‘Except the Malaya. Why is it there?’
‘He became friends with a Filipino man while he was in the service, and they kept in touch. The man was part of the resistance effort to depose Marcos, and when they succeeded, he sent my grandfather a copy of the paper. Granddad said he was so proud of his friend that he hung the paper here. It’s the only non-Ledger headline up there.’
‘He was a loyal friend.’
‘That he was. He was also a hoarder. There are boxes of clippings in my mother’s basement. It’s a damn fire hazard but I can’t bring myself to throw any of it out.’
She heard the wistful affection in his voice. ‘You loved him.’
A sigh. ‘Yeah. He could be a hard man, but I loved him. He loved us too, in his own way.’ A long pause. ‘I think some of the things he’d seen, especially during the war, changed him so fundamentally that he couldn’t easily open himself up after that. But occasionally we’d see the real him.’
In his own way did not sound promising. ‘Was that a good thing?’ she asked, not sure she really wanted to hear the answer. ‘Seeing the real him, I mean.’
‘Sometimes. He could be fun, but more often he’d be moody. Of course, we didn’t often see that side of him. Not until we moved in with him.’
‘When was that?’
Something indefinable flickered in his eyes. ‘When I was eight.’
‘Where did you live before?’ she asked, trying not to sound like an interrogator.
He lifted a brow. ‘Don’t even try, Detective,’ he said, and her cheeks heated.
‘Sorry. I really am just curious, but old habits . . .’ She shrugged. ‘You know.’
‘Yeah, I know,’ he said, and for a moment he sounded so . . . incredibly sad. ‘I was born in Lexington. So was Stone. So we were close enough to visit Granddad often, but we never stayed too long and I think he was able to hide the darker moods. When we moved in, well, pretty quickly we figured out the score. Sometimes he’d be the grandfather we’d known before, happy and funny, throwing a football around with us, giving us rides on his shoulders . . . But other times he’d be so angry. We were never really sure which grandfather we were going to get on any given day.’
She looked up at him with a frown. ‘Did he hit you when he was angry?’
He looked down at her, one side of his mouth quirking up. ‘Would you have protected me if he had?’
She narrowed her eyes. ‘Yeah. I would have.’
The little quirk became a true smile, going all the way to his eyes, and Scarlett found herself momentarily awestruck. His face was a little too rugged to be classically handsome, but when he smiled . . . My God. He was beautiful.
‘You would have been only about three years old when we moved in with him,’ he said. ‘But I appreciate the sentiment.’
‘I was a damn tough three-year-old,’ she said lightly. ‘I had to be. I have six brothers.’
He tilted his head, looking intrigued. ‘Older or younger?’
‘Three of each.’
‘Sisters?’
‘No, none. I’m the only girl, though not from my parents’ lack of trying. My mother finally gave up. And don’t think I didn’t realize that you failed to answer my question.’
He shook his head. ‘I would never underestimate you like that. No. He never hit us. When he got that angry look in his eyes, he’d separate himself from the rest of us. He had a home gym in the basement. Punching bag, boxing ring, free weights. He’d go down there and work off his anger to the point that he could lock it away again.’ He paused for a moment, thinking, then shook his head again. ‘We always knew that when he came back upstairs from the gym, we wouldn’t see the real him for a long while, in any form.’