The Other Half of Your Heart Page 18

  Cara nodded abruptly, painfully. “Yes. It’s...Buck’s. I just didn’t let go of it. I didn’t know... not until we started to climb. I just stuck it in my pocket.”

  “What do you want me to do with it?”

  His bewildered expression startled Cara. “I thought you might could use it,” she answered with an edge of sarcasm. “Maybe save us from the bad guys?”

  “I never use a gun.”

  “I thought all you people...”

  “People?” He frowned. “What kind of ‘people’ do you mean?”

  “You are a criminal, aren’t you? Or a spy? If you aren’t, what are you doing here? What is all this?”

  “I told you I wasn’t a criminal, or a spy. Would you kiss a spy or a criminal like you just did?”

  “I didn’t kiss a spy or a criminal,” Cara replied with heart-breaking simplicity. Somehow, it was all falling apart again. “I kissed you, and I don’t care what you are.”

  Dave swallowed heavily, the knot in his stomach that had been growing since the first moment he saw Cara Waters tightening into an iron lump. “Like I said, I don’t know anything about guns.”

  Watching the cavalier way he handled the revolver, Cara could believe that. Trained in firearms safety with her two brothers as a matter of course, Cara was respectful of guns; Dave Burkhart obviously was neither. She took it back carefully.

  “Wait, that first day, when you snatched me off the street...” Cara eyed him carefully, wishing that she didn’t feel as if the entire earth were crumbling away from under her feet. “You shoved a gun in my side and told me if I were quiet, I wouldn’t get hurt...”

  If it had been anyone else, if they had been in any other situation, Cara would have sworn that he looked embarrassed. “I don’t use guns,” he repeated.

  “Well, if that wasn’t a gun, what was it?”

  “We’d better get going...”

  “Dave!”

  “It was a...a Chap-Stick™,” he admitted, then jerked on her hand. “Come on, we’ve got to move...”

  The motors suddenly ceased, plunging the world into thick green silence. It seemed even the relentless wind stopped.

  “They’ve found the jeep. Come on.”

  A Chap-Stick™! Cara didn’t know whether to be amused or embarrassed, but she followed with alacrity. After a moment of indecision, Dave found a slight defile that was so choked with saplings and underbrush it was navigable.

  Halfway down, Cara began to feel as if she were auditioning for the part of Jane. Dave was not much better at being Tarzan, but he was managing to stay more or less on his feet as well as giving her an occasional and much-needed hand.

  “Would you rather have gone right down the hill?” he asked when she started muttering.

  “I’d rather never have left Dallas,” Cara said with feeling, stifling a yelp as a rough piece of wood creased her palm. No, that wasn’t true, she thought suddenly. If I’d never gotten involved in all of this, I’d never have met Dave, never found the other half of my heart.

  “So do I,” he said softly, never knowing what daggers that remark sent through her heart. “You doing okay?

  “I’m okay.” Grimly. “Do you have any idea where we are?”

  “A couple of hundred feet below where we were.”

  “Maybe I should have asked. Do you have any idea of where we’re going?”

  “As far away from those goons as possible, I hope. Feels like this is starting to level out a bit...”

  It didn’t feel anything of the sort to Cara, but as long as she could see Dave leading the way in front of her, as long as she could count on his hand to help her over the rough spots, she didn’t really care. Once they got out of this dratted jungle and out of Mexico, once they could get everything straightened out...

  “There’s a clearing just a little way down,” Dave whispered.

  “Is the army there?”

  “I don’t know...” Cautiously Dave peered out from under the shelter of a curtaining vine. The clearing was larger than it had appeared, at least half the size of a football field, and blessedly empty. He wished he had a better idea of where they were. He wished he knew where la señora and her jolly band were. For that matter, he wished he knew where the army was; they should have had time to move half a division by now!

  “What do you see?”

  Dave felt Cara’s hand slip into his and wished it didn’t make him feel so triumphant. Now wasn’t the time; now...

  “Nothing. Come on...” Grabbing her wrist, he began to run.

  They made it three-quarters of the way across before a rough shout of Spanish shattered the peace. It was followed almost immediately by the rattle of gunfire. The bullets did a crazy dance in front of their feet, kicking up little puffs of grass like miniature geysers.

  At first, Cara didn’t realize she had been shot. Feeling the blow, she thought someone had kicked her in the shoulder and vaguely wondered how that could be. Then her legs simply turned to water and as she was falling. The pain hit like a red-hot wire strung through her shoulder. She tried to scream, to stop falling, to brace herself, but all controls to her body suddenly shut down, leaving her nothing but a powerless passenger.

  “Cara...!” Dave was screaming, trying to catch her, breaking her fall and then shielding her with his body as he struggled to pull the revolver from her pocket.

  The noise became too loud, the pain too much; Cara drifted in and out of consciousness, only vaguely aware of Dave wildly blasting away with the pistol in answer to another burst of rifle fire.

  I’ll have to give him shooting lessons, she thought fuzzily.

  There were more shouts of guttural Spanish, and through her half-open lids, Cara could see two of la señora’s men advancing slowly across the clearing, rifles pointed directly at them. Dave laid the empty pistol down very carefully and raised his hands, deliberately placing himself between the men and Cara.

  More noise. Thunder?

  More gunfire. More shouts.

  Cara felt herself balanced on an edge; on one side was a great dark pool of peace and quiet, while on the other there was noise and confusion and pain...and Dave. She could not go into the dark peace, not so soon after finding the other half of her heart, no matter how tempting it was.

  Not thunder. It was mechanical...a mechanical bird, with great swirling wings. Of course, a helicopter. Cara felt very proud of herself for remembering the word. Somehow, here, on the edge of that great warm darkness, words didn’t seem to be so very important.

  “Cara! Cara, answer me! Come back, darling, come back to me...”

  Cara pulled herself away from the tempting dark peace and forced herself into the edges of consciousness. “You called me darling,” she murmured.

  “You’ve got to get her out of here,” Dave said.

  “I will see she gets to the nearest hospital,” replied a familiar voice.

  Capitan Fonseca? That meant the army was here...they were safe! Cara’s heart sang, but she couldn’t make her mouth work again.

  “Take very good care of her.” There was a tremor in Dave’s voice. He lifted Cara tenderly, cradling her as if she were made of the most delicate porcelain. His lips placed the barest shadow of a kiss on her forehead. Anything more and he would not be able to let go of her, no matter what was at stake.

  “And you?” the capitan asked, receiving the precious burden carefully.

  “No,” Dave said wearily. “There is still la señora, and the other copy of the formula. I can’t go until they’re...taken care of.”

  The darkness was thickening around her in a glutinous mass. “No,” Cara shouted, “No, you can’t leave me...You’ve got to come...” but it sounded only in her mind. Her body lay limp, still, and unresponsive as the capitan placed her in the helicopter, which, with a roar like a cry of triumph, rose quickly above the undulating green ocean of jungle.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Marlene Spaulding didn’t look like the president of a large pharmaceut
ical company. Petite, red-haired, and only on the edge of middle age, she more resembled a prosperous matron or a college professor.

  Cara knew who she was, of course, even when she had first walked hesitantly into her Presbyterian Hospital room three days after Cara was flown back to Dallas. Everyone knew what Miss Spaulding looked like; not only was there a portrait of her in the main hall, but she often ate in the company cafeteria just like any other employee and made it a point to visit every department a couple of times a year.

  That, however, did not explain why a major corporate president would come to visit a very minor employee who, until that time, had been visited only by a varied assortment of law enforcement types. Cara eyed her almost warily.

  “Hello, Miss Spaulding.”

  The older woman looked uncomfortable. “Oh...so you know who I am. That’s good. May I sit down?”

  As gracefully as her bandaged body would allow, Cara gestured toward the chair by the bed. “Please.”

  “Thank you. How clever of you to recognize me.” Marlene perched on the edge of the chair, uneasily, lightly, as if preparing for flight. “Especially after you’ve been through so much.”

  Cara’s surprise was dissipating quickly, replaced by a sharp-edged suspicion. Something very odd was going on.

  Did they still think she had been involved in stealing the formula?

  But if that were true, it would have been a policeman sitting by her bed and she probably would have been in a prison ward instead of a luxurious single room in Presbyterian Hospital.

  “Miss Spaulding...”

  “Call me Marlene,” she said in a gentle tone that alarmed Cara no end.

  “What’s going on here? You don’t think...?”

  Marlene looked startled. “The formula? No, we know you had nothing to do with that.”

  Oddly enough, that didn’t ease Cara’s mind one bit. “Then what? Why?”

  “How are you feeling?”

  “I’ll feel a lot better when I know what it is you don’t want to tell me,” Cara replied bluntly.

  For a moment, the two women stared at each other, then the older woman sighed with resignation. “You’re right. It’s better straight out. You’ve been making a number of telephone calls...”

  “Yes.”

  “About a man named Dave Burkhart.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  Cara could feel a blush spreading like a stain up her face. She had made telephone calls, lots of telephone calls, to everyone she could think of, from the State Department to the chief of police in Puerto Vallarta.

  And why not? Ever since she had been vaguely aware of his staying behind even as he sent her to safety, Cara had felt as if she were only partially there. Something was missing from her very being; now she knew what Señora Fonseca had really meant by the one you truly loved being ‘the other half of your heart.’ Without Dave Burkhart, she was only partially complete, and she meant to find him.

  Cara loved Dave so much it hurt, missed him as she would miss an integral part of her own self, but there was no way she was going to share her most intimate emotions with this elegant, poised businesswoman.

  “He saved my life several times. I…I have to know that he’s safe. No one seems to know anything about where he is. Nobody even seems to care. You’re important...Maybe if you...” Cara stuttered to a halt, remembering too late that the man she loved had gone through a great deal trying to get his hands on a very important formula, which legally belonged to the woman in front of her.

  “You’re in love with him,” Marlene Spaulding said simply. Perhaps she was thinking of Cara, but her own distress was very real. “I’m so very sorry. I don’t know any way to make it easier for you. Last night there was a call from Mexico...someone in the Army. I was asked to tell you that Dave Burkhart died in the jungle.”

  Cara blinked, wondering why she didn’t feel anything. Suddenly there was nothing in the world, no sensation, no feeling, no emotion...

  Marlene Spaulding watched in horror as the young woman slid sideways into a faint that looked as deep as death.

  * * * * *

  “And I tell you I will not accept that!”

  The State Department man sighed. Why had he expected anything else? No matter how delicately he had tried to handle the situation, Miss Waters kept demanding things he was in no position to give. In the two weeks she had been out of the hospital, she had been badgering everyone she could get hold of. It was a grim sign of how his boss thought about him that he had been appointed to deal with the difficult Miss Waters.

  “I am sorry that you are so upset, but that does not alter the facts! There are no records of a Dave Burkhart entering Mexico at any time for up to six months before the incident.”

  Cara frowned. She had been frowning almost constantly practically since she had been brought out of the deep faint that had so frightened Marilyn Spaulding. No one would tell her anything! “And you know as well as I do, that means nothing! What about the call from the Army saying he had died?”

  “As I have told you, we have been unable to reach the officer who made that call because he is on field maneuvers.”

  “Where? On the moon?”

  “Things are done differently in Mexico, Miss Waters.”

  “I know. I was there,” Cara spat with a poisonous sweetness that went far beyond the rules of polite behavior. “Things may be done differently, but the army does have radios, and telephones, and all kinds of modern equipment.”

  “Please, Miss Waters...”

  Tears of grief and frustration clawed at Cara’s eyes as she was almost swamped by a wave of despair. “No, I’m asking you ‘please.’ Please help me find Dave Burkhart. It’s important. He’s important. Please.”

  “All I can tell you, Miss Waters, is that there is no sign of a Dave Burkhart being in Mexico at all. No entrance papers, no hotel registrations, no nothing.”

  Cara hung up without another word, but before the line went dead, the agent could hear her weeping. Not a cruel man by nature, he turned to his companion and sighed.

  “She’s taking it hard. I wish we could tell her something.”

  The other man shrugged. “We have our orders, and they say it’s none of our business. Dave Burkhart is dead, and as far as we’re concerned, that’s that.”

  “Still, I kind of feel sorry for her.”

  “It’ll turn out all right. Seems old Brownley himself has finally gotten back into the country and is going to talk to her in a day or two. He owns most of the company. Something of a hard nose from what I hear. He’ll quiet her down.”

  “I thought the Spaulding woman owned the company.”

  “Just a part, and she is the president, but Brownley holds the majority of the company, along with half a dozen others. They’re cousins or something.” Older, more versed in the ways of the world and the State Department, and therefore much more cynical, the other man dismissed the matter and reached for a file folder. There were other problems they had to attend to.

  * * * * *

  “Another sandwich, Cara?”

  Without looking, Cara took one and added it to the untouched pile on her plate. She shouldn’t have come.

  Around her, the babble of happy people was almost unbearable. The Brownley/ Spaulding company picnic was legendary. Last year she had had a blast, playing softball and eating too much and laughing. Now she felt as if she would never laugh again.

  She shouldn’t be here, like a ghost at the feast. She should be doing something (what?), calling someone (who?). If only she could think of something or someone she hadn’t already tried. Everywhere she went, she got the same answers, and she couldn’t convince them differently. Dave wasn’t dead; he couldn’t be dead. She would know it if he were.

  Somewhere, somehow, Dave Burkhart was still alive. She knew it, just as positively as she knew she loved him with every bit of her being.

  Dave...The ache in her soul was like a physical pain.

 
“More potato salad?” Marlene asked, pointedly ignoring the untouched serving on Cara’s plate.

  “No, thank you.”

  “Cara, you can’t go on like this!” Giving up the pretense, Marlene put down the serving bowl and stared at the younger woman.

  Cara looked away. She didn’t know why the president of the company had taken her on as a personal project, but she now knew she shouldn’t have come to the picnic no matter how hard Marlene had pushed.

  “Look, I know you just mean to be kind, but I just don’t feel in a picnic mood.”

  “Is your shoulder bothering you?” Marlene had been vocal that the doctors allowed Cara to remove her sling much too soon. The doctors had paid her no attention and Cara didn’t seem to care. Alarmingly, Cara didn’t seem to care about anything except a dead man.

  “No. I just...I just want to go home. I’m not in a party mood.”

  “Cara, you’ve got to go on living. I know you had a terrible ordeal, but it’s over...”

  Over? When Dave wasn’t beside her? Ridiculous...

  “Donovan’s assistant said he would be here in a few days. He definitely wants to talk to you personally.”

  Like most employees, Cara was aware that Marlene Spaulding had a remote and some said mythical partner named Donovan Brownley who issued orders from afar and had never even come to the plant. At one time, she would have been excited by his interest; now, unless he could do something to help her find Dave, she could care less.

  “Cheese sticks!” Marlene exclaimed, taking the plate from a round-faced woman who worked in the lab. “How wonderful! You remembered how much I love your cheese sticks.”

  A faint, rhythmic flapping seeped into the air, overlaying the happy picnic noise more and more.

  “Here, Cara, you must try some of these. Lina always uses at least three kinds of cheese in them.” Marlene all but shoved the plate into Cara’s hands.

  The rich, heavy scent of cheese was vaguely repellent, but Cara couldn’t just couldn’t push it back, not with Lina whoever-she-was standing there beaming.

  Like some demented gigantic insect, a helicopter hovered over the picnic grounds, dipping and twisting until at last satisfied it could get no closer to the dining pavilion, then it settled lightly to earth, purring with satisfaction.