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“Luckily for us. You’d better have a talk with your Mr. Downing. If he gets involved with her, he may be looking at a similar fate.”
“I’ll make sure he knows. Thanks for the legwork.”
“Any time. But you owe me.” The other man chuckled as they rose to shake hands.
“I won’t forget. See you.”
* * *
Tom picked Annalisa up at the coffee shop and drove to the skating rink. It was in a huge building, with seats for people who just wanted to drink coffee and watch the skaters, and a DJ to call out couple dances and free dances and the like.
“You look very smug,” she told Tom.
He nodded. “I’m armed with some pertinent information.” He smiled at her. “Let’s get our skates on. I could use the exercise. I miss my gym.”
His gym in Chicago, he meant. She smiled and sat down to pull her skates out of her bag and put them on. She’d thought he might reconsider living in a small town. But that was unrealistic, like the hope that he might give up a profession he loved for her. However, she thought, she had today. She was going to live every second of it. It would be something to carry her through lonely cold winter nights for the rest of her life.
They skated, lazily circling the rink, holding hands. It was cold, but they were laughing as they went around and around the huge oval. It was tiring exercise. Annalisa had forgotten how much work it was to skate. By the time she took off her skates and packed them up, and he returned his rentals, they were both rosy cheeked and laughing.
“That was so much fun,” she told him. “I haven’t skated for a long time.”
“It was fun. And now,” he said with twinkling eyes, “for sushi!”
He took her to the little Japanese restaurant he’d found and they ate sushi and drank hot jasmine tea while he talked to her about his life in Chicago.
“It sounds lonely,” she said involuntarily, when he got to the part about what he did on Sundays, which was to lie around and read the Sunday paper and watch movies on Amazon Prime.
“It is lonely,” he confessed after a minute. His dark eyes lifted to her light ones. “I have no one to talk to. I’m pretty much a loner, even when I’m with the guys at work. They’re talking about kids and baseball games and amusement parks with their families. I’m talking about a case I’m working on.”
“It’s that way with me, too,” she confessed. “I don’t get out much. I like to watch movies or the Weather Channel or the History Channel.”
He smiled. “Another weather geek,” he teased.
“Hey, weather is interesting,” she protested.
He pulled out his smartphone, turned it on, and handed it to her. He had about a dozen weather apps. She laughed with pure delight as she handed it back.
“I should show you mine, I guess. Turnabout’s fair play.” She handed it over. Along with the half dozen weather apps, she had language apps, including Chinese.
“Chinese?” he exclaimed, returning the phone to her.
“It’s a beautiful language,” she protested. “I found this app by accident and then I just sort of fell into doing it every day. I’ve been at it for two years. I don’t think I’ll ever get the tones just right because there are four and they’re very specific, but I can read some of it.”
He laughed. “I speak Russian and German,” he replied.
“Isn’t it a small world?” she asked.
“Small, indeed.” He glanced at his watch and grimaced. “We’d better get back before you fall down and go to sleep,” he said. “You’ve been up all night.”
“I wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” she said, her face coloring faintly.
He drew in a breath. “Honey, neither would I,” he said, his deep voice soft with feeling.
They stared at each other for a long moment. He managed to pull his eyes away. “We’d better get going,” he said.
* * *
It was dark when they got back to Raven Springs.
