“She’s a busy lady.”
“At six o’clock in the morning?”
“Her fitness center opens early.” Although she knew that Tori didn’t personally open the club each morning, she was trying to reassure Coburn, and possibly herself, that Tori would show up. “Eventually someone will check the business line for voice mail messages. If you had called her cell phone—”
“We’ve been through that.”
They had. He’d rejected calling Tori’s personal phone for the same reason he didn’t want Honor placing the call herself. “Anything that goes down will be on my head, not yours,” he’d said.
“Tori and I could be accused of aiding and abetting.”
“You could say I used your kid to coerce you.”
“I could swear to that under oath.”
“There you go.”
Now, as they sat waiting for a sign from Tori, Honor said, “As soon as she gets the message, she’ll come. We just need to be patient.”
But he looked like a man whose patience had run out an hour ago when they had arrived at the designated place. He looked around now and, not for the first time, expelled his breath while mouthing words that Emily shouldn’t overhear. “We’re like sitting ducks. Right out in the open.”
“Well, what did you expect of a secret meeting place?”
“I expected it to have walls,” he fired back.
“It’s safe. No one knows about it except Tori and me.”
“Maybe she forgot that silly code.”
“She didn’t forget.”
“What’s it mean, anyway?”
“It means Ken’s a dork.”
He muttered another vulgarity.
Okay, so the phrase was silly, considering their ages now. But when she and Tori had first sworn an oath on it, they’d been giggling girls. Then they’d continued to use it into their teens to communicate whenever one needed to see the other immediately. It meant, “Drop everything, come now, this is an emergency.”
Of course when they were in high school an emergency had amounted to an adolescent trauma like heartache over a boyfriend, a hateful teacher, a failing grade, and, in Tori’s case, a missed menstrual period. Today’s emergency was for real. “Why here?” he asked.
“Here” was an ancient live oak tree that had roots bigger around than Honor, snaking along the ground in every direction from its enormous trunk. It had withstood centuries of hurricanes, blights, land developers, and other hazards. Imposing and magnificent, it almost appeared artificial, like something a Hollywood set designer had constructed and plunked into the clearing.
“Meeting
out here in the countryside added to the thrill of sneaking out, I suppose. We discovered this place on the day I got my driver’s license. We were exploring because we could. We came across the tree out here in the middle of nowhere and claimed it as our own.
“From then on, we met here to talk about things that were too sacred even to share over the telephone.” She could tell he wasn’t quite getting it. “Teenage girls can be terribly dramatic, Coburn. It’s hormonal.”
He made a nonverbal sound that she couldn’t interpret, and wasn’t sure she wanted to. Threading her fingers through Emily’s hair, she said wistfully, “I suppose one day Emily will be sneaking out to meet—”
She broke off when Coburn sat up, suddenly alert. “What kind of car does she drive?”
“A Corvette.”
“Then that’s not her.” He reached for the pistol at his waistband.
“Wait! That’s not her car, but that’s Tori. And she’s alone.”