The Maze

Titian, but there's some blond in there too and some brown. Ah, you know I didn't want you doing this silly FBI thing. Why? Why did you leave me and do this?"

    Leave him? She said in her low, calm voice, the one she'd practiced and practiced at the Academy when she took courses in interviewing, "I always wanted to be in law enforcement, you know that. The FBI is the best, the very best. It's the heart of the whole system."

    "The heart? I doubt it. As to your always wanting to be in law enforcement, I don't remember that. You started out as a music major. You play the piano beautifully. You were playing Beethoven sonatas since you were eleven years old. You wanted to go to Julliard. I remember you dropped out of the Fletcher competition. I always believed you weren't quite of this world. You seemed to live for your music. Of course we all changed after Belinda. It's been a very long time now. Seven long years. Your father didn't appreciate your talent, didn't understand it since he didn't have any at all, but everyone else did. Everyone was worried about you when you sold your Steinway years ago, when you stopped even playing at parties. Hell, you even stopped going to parties."

    "That was a long time ago, Douglas. Dad isn't particularly disappointed in me now. He hoped I'd finally do something worthwhile. He hoped this was my first step to growing up. He only acted cold to me because I hadn't asked him to help me get in. He was dying to use his pull, and I didn't let him." Actually, she had blackmailed him. When the FBI agents interviewed him after she'd applied, he'd not said much of anything about Belinda or how Lacey had changed. She'd told him straight out that she'd never speak to him again if he did. He'd evidently glossed over everything, and very smoothly. She'd gotten into the FBI, after all.

    She still missed her piano, but that missing was buried deep down, so deep she scarcely ever thought of it now. "Yes, I did sell it. It just didn't seem important anymore." A piano was nothing compared to what Belinda had lost. Still, though, she would still find herself playing a song on the arm of a chair, playing along with the music in a movie or on the car radio. She could remember when she was nineteen playing on the arm of a young man she was dating.

    Douglas said, "I don't remember much from that time, to tell you the truth. It's blurred now, distant, and I'm grateful for it."

    "Yes," she said. But she remembered; she had lived it and held it deep and raw inside her since that awful night. He moved closer to her and she knew he would kiss her. She wasn't sure she wanted him to. Douglas had always fascinated her. Seven years. A long time. But still it didn't seem quite right.

    He did kiss her, just a light kiss, a touch of his mouth to hers, a brief remembrance, a coming back. His mouth was firm and dry. The kiss was so brief, she didn't get the taste of him, just a whisper of the tart champagne. He immediately dropped his hands and stepped back.

    "I've missed you. I had to listen to your father yell and curse that you'd lost it and gone off the deep end when you told him you were changing your major to Forensic Science. 'Fingerprinting, for God's sake,' he told me. 'She'll be wasting herself lifting some goon's damned fingerprints from a dead body!' "

    "You know there's lots more to it than that. There are a good dozen specialties in forensics."

    "Yes, I know. He wanted you to go to law school, of course. He still thought there was hope after you finished your Master's degree in criminal psychology. He said it would be helpful in nailing scum. Your dad, the judge, is always forgetting that I'm a defense attorney."

    "I just changed my mind, that's all."

    "That's what I told the FBI guy who came doing a background check on you. I figured if you wanted to go into the FBI, then I wasn't going to stand in your way."

    What did Douglas mean by that? That he could have told the FBI that she was unstable, that she'd gone around the bend seven years ago? Yes, he could have said that. She wondered if anyone had told the FBI that? No, if they had, then she wouldn't have been accepted, would she?

    "I know my father was positive when the agents came to interview him."

    "Yes, he told me you'd given him no choice. I said good for you, it was your life and he should keep his mouth shut if he ever wanted to see you again. He was pissed at me for a good month."

    "Thank you for standing up for me, Douglas." She had