“Thank you,” Michael said.
“GI Joe was a toy soldier from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries,” Mr. Simeon told her. “This is his uniform, and this,” he pointed out, “is his machine-gun.”
She took the toy and examined it. The workmanship! The masterful skill! Why, it was a tiny man with perfectly painted eyes and pink lips!
“We played for hours when we were kids.”
Her gaze misted when she set it on Michael. This belonged to his dead brother. She’d examined it enough and handed it back. “Very well. You have convinced me.”
Mr. Simeon’s grin faded. “I must go—”
He was gone before anyone had time to bid him farewell.
“Forgive me for doubting you when he disappeared the first time,” she said after a moment, when they realized he wasn’t coming back.
“There’s nothing to forgive,” Michael reassured. “I would have thought you were nuts if things were turned around.”
“You told me you had no wife in your century,” she quipped, “so I will not ask you the same question, but was there someone you loved you left behind?”
“No. No one.”
“No one?” But he was so handsome, so mysterious and dark. Surely women in any century would want him.
He took her hands and sat back down with her at the table. “The police force was my life, Charlotte. My father was a cop, and his father before him. My brother was a cop, too. It’s in my blood.”
“Aye,” she responded softly, not too dejectedly, lest he think she wished it were not so. She looked around at the large table and the chairs on either side of it. He was preparing to build his force and bring the law into Croydon. It was still in his blood. Where would a wife fit in? Not that she wanted to become his or anyone else’s wife! But what if Preston never married her and Michael found someone else in the meantime? Oh, the very thought of it sickened her and angered her. Frighteningly, it was the part about Michael, not Preston that fired such emotion in her.
“But it made me very unhappy,” he continued. He hadn’t been finished.
She remembered him telling her that there was nothing good about his life that he could remember. “Why were you so unhappy, Michael? Because of Clements?”
“Yeah. I think it began with him. Maybe with 9/11. I don’t know.” His gaze fell to the toy. She wanted to touch him. To make him look at her again.
“What is 9/11?” she asked gently, “’Twas when your brother perished, aye?”
“It is the eleventh day of the ninth month. September 11th. It was a day when some religious terrorists flew some planes—planes are very big metal…carriages that carry passengers from one faraway place to another. They have engines that propel them to fly and wings that keep them balanced in the air. These men flew two planes into two of my city’s tallest buildings and killed thousands of people. It began our war with the Middle East.”
“Oh, Michael,” she cried. “Men do not change. They just have more powerful weapons with which to kill one another. ’Tis very disheartening.”
“That’s exactly what I became. Disheartened. Things just stayed bad. My next partner was Kelly Harkin. We were friends on and off the job. I was invited to her daughter’s second and third birthdays. Kelly was also killed on the job by a child murderer we had been investigating. By this time, I pretty much hated the human race. I had become cynical and negative, expecting the worst in people because most of the people I was around were criminals.”
She closed her eyes for a moment, but then opened them again. She was what she was. She would not apologize for it.
“Were there no criminals who committed their offenses for honorable purposes?”
“You mean like robbing the rich to feed the poor?” he asked. “No. Only in stories. People robbed for themselves, or for drugs—”
Oh, he must have been happy to leave such a place, such a time. She wanted to touch him and draw his attention back to her again and away from the distant memories of his dim past and the world’s future.
“You said you did not want to go back,” she reminded him.
“I did?” He smiled.
“Aye. When William asked if you were going back. Is it true? Do you not want to? I would not want to go back.”
“There isn’t much I have to go back to,” he told her. “A better gun and a place to put it every morning.”
“Then stay here,” she said, tugging on his sleeve. His gaze swung to hers and he smiled.
