Arlene was a little annoyed. “Didn’t Will tell me you work with Navy SEALs? They get a call and they go. Immediately. They don’t get any time at all to pack or say goodbye.”
“Last time I checked, Arlene,” Jules said evenly, “you weren’t a Navy SEAL.”
She laughed, just a little. “I know. And I’m sorry. I’m just …”
“I get it,” Jules said. “Caught between Iraq and a hard place. Let me talk to Maggie again.”
The girl was sniffling as she got back on the phone. “I didn’t know that Kevin died.”
“I think your mom probably didn’t tell you that on purpose,” Jules told her. “Look, Mags, here’s what I’m going to do, okay? I’m going to pick you and your mother up at around three.”
“That’s way too early,” Maggie protested.
“No, because we’ll park, and we’ll go inside, all the way to the gate, with her,” Jules said. “I have a pass that’ll get us into the airport, but you’re going to have to go through security, so travel light, okay? Don’t bring a jackknife or—”
“I’ve flown on a plane before, Jules,” Maggie said in a prickly tone that was so nearly identical to her mother’s that it was almost funny. Almost.
“Well, good,” Jules said. “And don’t tell your mom, because I might not be able to get it to happen, but I’ll make a few calls, see if we can’t find out if Jack’s a passenger on a Boston-bound flight. Between you and me, I suspect he’s already in the air. It’s hard to imagine Jack Lloyd being thwarted by dead cell phone batteries.”
She laughed at that, but it sounded watery.
“Anyway, do tell your mom this,” Jules said. “After she boards her flight, I’ll take you home and you can hang with Robin. And if she doesn’t get in touch with your uncle Will, you are completely welcome to stay with us tonight, or really, as long as you need to.”
“Thank you,” Maggie said.
“See you in a few hours,” Jules told her, but she was silent. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” she said, and he could picture her squaring her narrow shoulders and lifting her chin. “I guess I gotta go help my mom pack.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The afternoon was a blur.
When Maggie went into the bathroom to take a shower, Arlene used her daughter’s phone to call Lizzie’s cell, but got bumped to voice mail. So she called the number in Maggie’s contact list for Milton, Mike.
Lizzie’s scary older brother.
Who picked up immediately. “Maggie? Is everything all right? Are you okay?”
“No,” Arlene said, but then quickly said, “Yes. I mean, no, it’s not Maggie, and Maggie’s okay, but …” She quickly explained how she’d first tried calling Lizzie, and then what had happened and how she was going back to Iraq.
He listened quietly, but she heard him sigh.
“I was hoping you could get word to Lizzie,” Arlene said, “and then, maybe, both make a point to be somewhere close by for the next few days?”
“Of course,” he said. “Look, I know how hard this must be for you, and I know you don’t trust me and that dinner you planned was really so that you could interrogate me—”
“She’s thirteen,” Arlene said.
“You think I don’t know that?”
“I think it’ll be easy for you to forget.”
“I won’t,” he said. “I gave you my word.”
“And I’m holding you to it,” Arlene said. “Right now, she needs Lizzie. She needs to feel safe when she’s with Lizzie.”
“I get it,” he said. “I do. And look, I know you have email over there, so why don’t you email me.” He rattled off a gmail address that included his name and the number of his street address—easy enough to remember. “You can ask me anything or check up on me or … whatever.”
“Thank you,” Arlene said. “I will.”
“I’d do anything for Maggie,” he said. “And Lizzie really loves her, too. We got your back, Ms. Schroeder. We’ll be there for her. Come what may. Shit.” He laughed his disgust. “Excuse me. But I knew that Moulin Rouge was going to somehow come back and bite me on the ass. Maggie and Lizzie watched it, like, twice a week, for about four months. Which of course meant that if I wanted to use the computer, I had to watch it, too. Freaking Ewan McGregor …”
From the bathroom, Arlene heard the sound of the shower going off. “Thank you. Again,” she said.
“Stay alert out there,” he said, adding right before he cut their connection. “Be safe.”
Arlene set Maggie’s phone on the end