They traveled for some time in silence while she nursed her coffee and stared out the window. Unsurprisingly, she looked fresh and eager, her big, tilted eyes glowing. That just made Grady feel even more worn and rumpled than usual and did nothing to improve his mood. He knew he ought to say something, but as usual he couldn’t think of anything that seemed to make sense.
Somewhere along the turnpike southwest of Siloam Springs, she pointed out across the dark hills and valleys, exclaiming, “Oh, look! Christmas lights.”
Grady turned his head and saw a two-story house outlined in brilliant red. “Little early,” he rumbled without thinking.
“It is,” she agreed, “but aren’t they pretty?”
He didn’t say anything. Red lights were red lights, so far as he was concerned. He suggested that she might want to get some sleep. “It’s still an hour or more to Tulsa.”
“I’ll sleep once my son’s tucked in his own bed again,” she commented softly, and they fell back into silence.
After a few minutes, he reached for his coffee and was surprised when she said, “So you’re a hockey fan?”
“Hmm?”
“It’s on your travel mug.”
He glanced at the item in question, drank and set the travel cup aside. “Right. Yeah, I like most sports.”
“Me, too.”
That surprised him. “Yeah?”
“Uh-huh, I’m really hopeful about the Hogs’s basketball season, aren’t you?”
Surprised again. “Football’s more my thing.”
“Oh, that’s right. You played corner for the Hogs football team, didn’t you?”
Surprised didn’t cover it this time. “How did you know?”
“I looked you up on the computer right after my first appointment with your brother.”
“You looked me—” His gaping mouth must have appeared comical, for she laughed, and the sound of it brightened the interior of the night-darkened car.
“I have a propensity for trivia, sports trivia in particular. The name sounded familiar to me, so I looked it up.”
Grady worked at shutting his mouth before he could mutter, “I don’t think that’s ever happened before.”
“Oh, you might be surprised,” she told him. “There are some big sports fans around. My father was one of them, you see, and having only daughters, he literally pined for someone to discuss statistics with. My older sister, Carol, wasn’t interested. She lives in Colorado now.”
“And you were? Interested, I mean.”
“Very. I much preferred sitting in the living room with Dad discussing RBIs and pass completion rates to washing dishes with Mom in the kitchen.” She laughed again.
“So it was more an attempt to get out of your chores than a real interest in sports,” he surmised.
She shook her head. “No one got out of chores in our household. I just like knowing things. Information is powerful, don’t you think?”
Did he ever. “Key to my success as an attorney,” he heard himself say, and then when she asked him to explain that, he did. She asked a question, which he answered, and before he knew what was happening they were in Tulsa.
He quickly became consumed with finding a parking spot in the crowded terminal lot. As a consequence, it didn’t hit him until he was dragging his briefcase out of the backseat of his car that he’d just spent over an hour in conversation with a woman talking mostly about himself—and he had enjoyed it!
The thought literally froze him in place for a moment. Then Paige Ellis tossed her plaid scarf around her neck and tucked the ends into the front of her bright gold, three-quarter-length coat, looking more polished and lovely than a woman in cheap clothes ought to. Grady shook himself, recalling that she was in an emotional stew at the moment and probably wouldn’t remember a word that had been said between them. Her distraction had no doubt led to his own.
Feeling somewhat deflated, he trudged toward the terminal. She fell into step beside him. It had apparently rained in Tulsa the evening before, and little glossy patches of damp remained along the pavement. Paige failed to see one, and the slick sole of her brown flat skidded, so naturally Grady reached out to prevent her from falling. Somehow, she wound up in his arms. She beamed a smile at him, stopping the breath in his lungs. After that he couldn’t seem to find a way to let go of her, keeping one hand clamped firmly around her arm until they were safely inside the building.
Thirty minutes later as they moved from check-in to the passenger screening line he began to worry that arriving a mere hour ahead of their departure time had been foolishly shortsighted. Thanksgiving, after all, was the busiest travel day of the entire year.
Paige chattered about first one thing and then another. His fear that they might not make their flight was reason enough not to interrupt her ongoing one-sided conversation about… He lost track of what it was about. But it allowed him to worry for them both, then to be relieved when they walked onto the plane and into their seats with minutes to spare.
When she reached for the in-flight magazine, he knew a moment of mingled relief and disappointment. Apparently, she thought he would be interested in an article, for she began a running commentary on a piece about the latest in computer technology.
Grady remembered his brother saying that because he lived with four women he heard at least 100,000 words per day. At that moment, Grady didn’t doubt Dan’s assessment. But surprisingly Grady found himself interested. Afterward, they found themselves discussing her work.
Paige Ellis, it turned out, was a marvel of ingenuity and self-discipline. Not only was she a self-taught medical transcriptionist, she had her own cottage industry. By means of a small business loan, she had supplied state-of-the-art computer transcription equipment to four other women, all of whom worked out of their homes and were paid by the hour. By concentrating on doctors in the smaller communities around Fayetteville, Paige had garnered the lion’s share of the transcription contracts in the area. Due to the lower costs of her business format, she was able to undercut her competition substantially.
“Thank the good Lord,” she declared happily, “I will have the time I’ve been dreaming about to spend with my son before it’s too late.” She laughed, and then, to Grady’s shock and dismay, she suddenly began to cry.
For Grady it was like being pulled out of a comfortable chair and thrust on to a torture rack. He didn’t know what to do or say, so he just sat there like a deer frozen in the headlights and listened to her.
“He’s eleven now. Eleven! I’ve missed four birthdays!”
Grady already knew from reading the case file that Nolan Ellis had ostensibly taken the boy for a two-week camping trip at the end of June, three-and-a-half years earlier. It was to have been Vaughn’s birthday gift from his dad, and they were to have returned before the boy’s actual birth date of July 1. The camping trip, of course, had been a ruse meant to give Nolan a two-week head start to disappear, and it had worked like a charm. Only as she’d sat alone hour after hour, she told him, waiting to light the candles on Vaughn’s birthday cake, had Paige begun to realize that the two weeks of her son’s absence might well turn into a lifetime.
The particulars of the divorce were likewise already known to Grady, though the Jones firm had not handled it. That, in his opinion, was most unfortunate, something she matter-of-factly confirmed as the story spilled out of her.
High school sweethearts, she and Nolan had married young. By the time their son had reached the age of four, Nolan had decided that he didn’t want to be married, after all. Resentful over his “lost youth” and the burden of family responsibilities,