HEN I SAW him leaned against the City Square park railings my blood jumped. I was about ready to run. Then I saw Flip.
Had Flip told me he would be coming by the library today? I had no recollection of it. It couldn’t have been at a worse moment. With the man right across the road. I was sure there was no way for Flip to know it but seeing him practically bounding toward me reminded me, or maybe it made me realize for the first time, that I was a criminal.
Technically… well, no. Not ‘technically.’ Actually. Really. I witnessed a serious crime and I failed to report it. I was an accessory after the fact. An accessory to a murder.
An accessory running into a detective on the steps of the library. When the killer was right there across the street. When, if Flip had got there two steps later, I would have been running to grab him. Sprinting to throw myself at the killer. Throw myself at him literally.
My blood drained from my cheeks as I realized it, but that was the picture in my head. That’s what would have happened.
I would have dashed across the street. Flung myself onto him. Into his arms. My lips on his. Wrapped my arms around his hard body. And clung to him. The thought made my head swim. Flip was saying something. All I could do was nod. He was going to take me for coffee. There was no way I could reasonably refuse.
He would want to know why it was that I closed up the library. I never do that. I never go out without leaving someone in charge. When there isn’t anyone else, like today, I take sandwiches, make tea, and stay until closing time. Right now I dreaded him asking me anything.
If he asked me my name or the time I would crumble. Flip does have that policeman’s way of asking questions, too. If you tease or give him an evasive answer, he’s nice about it, but he’ll come back to it. He can’t leave a question unanswered.
The feelings I had for that assassin frightened me. Deep down. It started with sex, for certain. Even I knew that. But there was something darker as well. In the back of my mind I knew it, but I wasn’t letting that out. Not even to let it run around where only I could see it. It could stay in the dark with all its nasty little friends.
I had to consider carefully, though. Could a thing, an affair, a romance—I didn’t think I’d ever even thought that word before, except where it’s used to mean a kind of fiction. A guilty pleasure genre for so many good people. Too near the mark for me, though. Too close to home. Thrillers, fantasy and sci-fi, crime were all the fiction I dared to be immersed in. Even historical romances were like hot buttons for me.
So, could I have an affair with a man like him and keep it to being one of those brief flings? Even thinking about it made me feel dumb. He wasn’t going to hang around for a romance, much less an ‘affair’, whatever one of those really was. He wouldn’t be in town long enough for so much as a ‘thing’ and I should stop trying to kid myself about it.
What I was imagining was just the kind of lust storm that people are swept away by in hard-boiled detective stories and fast, brittle black and white movies. Come to think of it, those are usually fatal to one or both parties.
My mind swerved away again. Anyway, how could I ever ignore or pass up the way he made me feel? That waterfall chasm that opened inside me when I saw him. Both times I saw him. And never mind the way he made me feel, what about the way he feels. The hard heat of his strong trunk. The insistent ridge of pulse that threatened to impale me.
Up until then, seeing Flip from time to time had always made me feel edgy, like I was skating close to something dangerous. Until last night. Now everything had changed. I was seeing Flip from the other end of a telescope. Now he was a toy soldier. A harmless, eager puppy. A puppy who could put me in jail. I felt nauseous.
He steered me into the diner. It was the place we always went. Now, mounting the steps and walking into the room, the green gingham and pine and the white walls, even the smell of the coffee all seemed somehow unfamiliar. Distant. I felt like I’d come as someone else.
Flip'sF face glowed as he showed me to a table, held a chair out for me. He sat across and leaned over. Like it was the greatest fun, he was telling me about a body they’d found. And how odd it was. The alderman who was just about to be interviewed, ‘Interrogated, really,’ but he made me promise not to tell. The FBI were in town. They’d come to interrogate him.
And all of a sudden he ups and dies. Flip laughed about it. He didn’t know if anything would come of it. He and his division were all waiting for the autopsy. The word gave me a chill, thinking of Beary being opened up like a sports bag. Drained. Having his organs taken out and weighed. The contents of his stomach analyzed.
I asked how much detail they would go into. That made Flip scowl. He looked at me sideways. I said I’d seen Beary. Recently. In the library. I felt like adding, with the lead piping. But I didn’t.
Everything I could think of I tried, any distraction that would keep my thoughts away from the man, the killer in the library. In Beary’s office. His strong hands. His scent.
Flip had started to come into the library a couple of months before. The first time, he was looking for material in the newspaper archives for an investigation. I don’t know if he found what he needed, but after that he became a pretty regular visitor. He liked to read history, mostly military history and he enjoyed crime fiction, too.
I didn’t think that was the real reason for his later visits, though. He’d managed to get all he needed to read before he discovered me behind the desk. He was a good-looking guy. Smart and very presentable. I let him take me for coffee a few times. Enough times that I knew he’d like us to do more. He talked about dancing, the movies. He mentioned dinner once.
So far I hadn’t ever taken the bait. I liked him well enough, but that’s all. And I was in no doubt, what he was looking for was more than just a little companionship. All the way I’ve been clear with him. It brought me a little tingle of excitement to know a detective.
He offered to take me shooting more than once. “I could give you some instruction. If you’d like that.” I didn’t respond. Handling a gun would definitely be sexy. I never felt like getting sexy with Flip.
More than once I wished I did. But you can’t make up feelings. Maybe some people can. Not me.
And, letting something start up with Flip would feel like a kind of settling. Especially now. Anyway, I had gotten this far without settling, so I wasn’t ready to start with him or anyone else.
On occasion he would tell me a little snippet, bit of gossip about the investigations he was working on. I had the impression he saved up little snippets. Probably polished them. Certainly he sanitized them for my delicate sensibilities. That was a shame. If he hadn’t, we might have made more progress in the directions he’d like.
He was a nice guy. I once told him that he was a ‘Johnson.’ He liked the double meaning, although, if you take it that way, I wouldn’t be so sure that it was a compliment.
Sitting by the window, nursing my coffee mug, across the red gingham covered table, all that I could think about was how I should have run. Not thought at all and just dashed to the man waiting for me. I stirred my coffee and did everything I could to listen to what Flip was saying to me. I could hardly catch a word of it. We sat across the little diner table, but there were oceans between us.
The most important moment of my life was fading into the past.