Defending the Eyewitness

Autumn just tinged the air and he noticed how much shorter the days had grown in the week he’d been here. Oh, they were still long, but the change was more noticeable here than down south. Maybe he was dealing with more than culture shock. Maybe he was dealing with climate shock, too. Desert nights at high altitude could get surprisingly cold, but he was used to hot days. No such thing up here, at least not now. People walked around looking perfectly comfortable in shirtsleeves when he was wishing for sweaters and a jacket.

Well, he’d been raised in places that rarely saw snow or ice. San Antonio had a kind of winter, but he suspected that if he stayed here for long, he might be in for some new experiences. After all, when he’d shopped for clothes, he’d seen some jackets that he had hitherto seen only in movies. He hadn’t quite been able to bring himself to buy one yet, but inside the denim jacket he had chosen, he realized he had some adapting to do. What would have worked most places he’d lived was already failing him.

Amused by his own thoughts, he started whistling as he walked, cheered by the prospect of a totally different experience. Maybe that would help jar him out of the past.

He unlocked the front door of Corey’s house and stepped into aromas that immediately snapped him back in time. He froze, working on centering himself, even as the scents called to mind another time and place.

“Austin?”

He closed his eyes, gathering himself.

“Austin?”

The voice came closer. He opened his eyes and drank in Corey, in all her Nordic beauty. She definitely didn’t remind him of the past. Today she was wearing her golden mane in braids that wreathed her head. With a wrench that felt almost physical, he felt himself land in the present once again.

“Hi,” he said.

“I’ve got a surprise for you.” She was smiling with delight.

“I can smell it.”

“Tortillas,” she said, looking as pleased as if she were giving him a huge gift. “My friend made them. Some with white flour and some with cornmeal because I wasn’t sure which you’d prefer. Come tell me if I’m cooking them right.”

“Sure.” He followed her, trying to shake off a sudden woodenness in his legs. Ridiculous reaction. Stupid reaction. Just some tortillas, for crying out loud.

Apparently she had taken him at his word about stacks, because there were large ones sitting on two plates. Another plate held the ones she had cooked.

“I don’t have a grill,” she chattered. “So I’m making do with a skillet. Will that work? And you said they were cooked fast, so I assume the fire was hot?”

“Just enough to heat them and maybe give them a touch of brown.”

“Try one and let me know what you think.”

He wondered if he would even be able to swallow. What had possessed her to do such a thing for him? What had possessed her friend? They didn’t know him, and Corey had this thing about men, so what the hell? Suspicions began to arise in him. Strings were always attached.

But her face looked so open and pleased. Maybe she was just trying to be nice, although he couldn’t imagine why.

Just as her smile began to shrink, he made himself go to the table and pick up one of the tortillas. White flour. He’d loved them as a kid, but in Mexico he’d more often eaten corn. He bit into it, aware that she was watching, and in an instant was slammed back into his youth in San Antonio.

“Damn, this is good,” he said truthfully. He looked at her again, and saw her smile had returned full force. She spoke. “Melinda says she’ll be happy to make them whenever you want. And despite your doubts, there is a market here. She sold a bunch of them this morning. So, did I cook it right?”

“Perfectly.” He forgot his manners and just shoved the rest of his tortilla into his mouth.

“Do you have a favorite thing to put on it? I didn’t know about that for sure.”

“I’ll put almost anything on a tortilla.” He pulled out the chair and sat, reaching for one made of corn. Another flash of the past as the flavor hit his mouth. “Wow. Just wow.”

“Should I make more?”

“Lady, you can keep on cooking. But you might want to eat, yourself.”

She laughed. “I’ll get to it. They’re really great this fresh, but I keep wanting to add something. Beans? Meat? Peppers? I mean, I guess people around here cook with tortillas, but I’ve never had any Mexican food. We don’t have a restaurant here that serves any.”

He gobbled down the corn tortilla, then rose and headed for the pantry. “I went shopping, remember?”

“How could I have failed to notice? My pantry is bursting.”

“Well, here we go.” He pulled out a can of green chilies, remarking that he wished they were fresh, a can of pinto beans and some seasonings. “Allow me to introduce you to refried beans. The best kind.”

It apparently surprised her, but she let him take over her kitchen. Sitting at the table with coffee, she asked him questions about everything he was doing, and he was glad enough to share. “Just understand, I’m not a master chef. This came from the need to survive.”

He liked the sound of her laughter, even as concerns niggled at the back of his mind. What had made her decide to be so friendly? “We’re skipping a step here, by the way. The canned beans are already cooked, so basically I’m going to be doing only the last half of the job.”

He pulled a half onion out of her fridge where it sat wrapped in plastic, then found the bacon. “Better yet. Fatback would be the choice in Mexico, but bacon...yum.”

“Do you put the bacon in the beans?”

“Just the fat.”

After he’d cooked a couple of slices of bacon, he set them aside on a paper towel, then tipped the frying pan. “About right. You don’t need a whole lot of fat, just the flavor.”

* * *

Corey watched with amazement. He might not be a chef, but he turned into a kitchen wizard right before her eyes. He tossed tortillas into one skillet while he flavored and stirred the beans in another.

“So what brought this on?” he asked.

“What?”

“Tortillas. Cooking them for me.”

“Oh! Well, I was talking to Melinda, and I mentioned that you liked fresh tortillas and it seemed a shame that the only kind you could get around here were the packaged ones from the grocery. Next thing I knew, she was calling and telling me to pick them up. When I got home, I didn’t know whether I needed to refrigerate them or whether they needed to be cooked right away, so...” She shrugged. “It just happened.”

“Thank you both. Do you have a potato masher?”

Jumping up, she pulled it out of the drawer for him and watched him mash the beans. From time to time he added a little water.

“It was really nice of your friend to do this,” he said again. Apparently he was nearly done, because a stack of cooked tortillas made its way to the table.

“She said it was easy. Not nearly as difficult as making a loaf of bread was how she put it. And I was kind of having fun experimenting.”

“Sorry I took your experiment over.”

“I don’t mind. I’m learning.”

Surprisingly soon, they were seated at the table with all the tortillas, a heap of refried beans that made her mouth water, green chilies in a bowl with a serving spoon and a jar of salsa.

“Wow,” she said. “I never thought it could be that fast.”

“Easy meal,” he replied. “It works pretty good with eggs in the morning... Well, like I said, you can put almost anything on a tortilla. It’s basically a rolled-up sandwich.”

The fresh tortillas were so much better than any she had ever eaten. And the refried beans? She’d had them once or twice from a can, ready-made, but these beat any she had ever tasted.

“You made it look so easy,” she said. “And it’s so good!”

He smiled at her, making no apology for his large appetite. “Fresh is best,” he agreed. “It wasn’t a problem in San Antonio, or in Mexico. But I did cheat by getting canned pinto beans.”

“Small cheat. You did everything else. I don’t know where we could get you fresh green chilies, though.”

“Oh, we could probably order them in a quantity suitable for a restaurant.”

She had a mouthful of food and quickly snatched up a napkin as she tried to stifle a laugh.

“I could probably get a friend or a family member to mail some to me, but...” He let that trail off and she saw his gaze grow distant.

It was getting easier for her to be around him as time passed, and she considered that a positive sign. But there was still so much she didn’t know about him, and she wondered how much she dared ask. It was none of her business, after all.

But in the end, she asked, anyway, because it seemed so important. “You aren’t ready to make those contacts again?”

His gaze snapped back to her. “No.” The word was short, but before she could recoil, or feel firmly put in her place, he spoke quickly. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to snap at you. It’s just that...” Again he hesitated and trailed off. “You know how it is with people you’ve known your whole life.”

She nodded, not sure where he was headed.

“They’d be full of questions,” he continued, reaching for another tortilla and covering it with beans, chilies and salsa. “I couldn’t answer. They’d want to know what I’ve been doing all these years. Naturally enough. I’m not ready to go home and tell the necessary lies, not to people I care about. And if they suspected any part of the truth and it started to make the rounds...well, I need to wait a while. I wouldn’t want to draw any trouble their way.”

“Could you? Really?” The thought astonished her.

“Probably not. But I want some time to pass first. I want to be long forgotten by the people who knew me when I was undercover.”

“That hardly seems fair to you.”

“Life isn’t fair. I think you know that.”

She did, intimately, but she didn’t want to think about herself right now. “So where do they think you’ve been all this time?”

“Officially I think I was assigned to a mission in Panama.”

“Circles within circles,” she remarked. “Like a maze.”

“That’s the general idea. Other agents on the ground had no idea who I was. That made for some, um, interesting experiences.”

Corey forgot all about eating, instead trying to imagine all of this. If his own side didn’t know who he was...“You could have been killed by your own people!”

“It was a possibility.” His face seemed to go blank, as if there was more that he didn’t want to reveal. She decided maybe she should just let it go. She didn’t want to make him uncomfortable, or remind him of bad things.

“I can hardly imagine being so alone,” she said finally. Although she could, if she let herself. Not for six years, but for a few days or weeks. Even after her grandmother and aunt had brought her back from Denver, she had felt alone. Separated. In an alternate universe. But at least she had been surrounded by people who cared about her. Austin had faced something very different. “So everyone was out to get you?”

“Not everyone, and not all the time.” He managed a slight smile. “It was most dangerous at the beginning, then later at the end when we were getting ready to roll everything up.”

“Did anyone know who you really were?”

“I had a couple of contacts.”

That didn’t seem like very many to her. Gage hadn’t been exaggerating when he’d said Austin had been walking a tightrope. And without much of a net evidently.

“Why did you do it?” she asked bluntly.

“Someone has to and I was especially suited. Obviously.”

“But did you really know what you were getting into?”

“Who does?”

She might have laughed if it hadn’t been so frighteningly true.

“Look,” he said finally, “it’s really like the rest of life. We all leap and then look because there’s no way we can really know what it’s going to be like. We think we know, but we don’t. Knowing what I know now, I’d never do that again.”

She nodded, understanding. “Was any of it good?”

“Plenty. I met lots of great people who had nothing to do with my job. I made friends. I had fun.”

“What about the bad?”

“I learned not to trust. I’m having trouble shaking that.”

“I learned not to trust, too.” She hated to say it out loud, but since he was being so forthcoming, she felt she should be, too.

“Ah,” he said, “but you don’t trust men. Me, I don’t trust anybody.”

Her stomach sank. She hadn’t wanted to hear that, even though she had suspected it. But what difference did it make? she asked herself. She might be sitting here having dinner with him, but she didn’t trust him, either. Not yet. Maybe never. All she felt was an attraction she didn’t want to feel, an awakening of desires she had never actually experienced because she was afraid, yearnings that now troubled her sleep, all because of this man, a man she didn’t trust. Not really.

Why should she trust him? They’d shared a roof for a week, but he’d pretty much stayed out of her way. She had tried to do something neighborly for him with the tortillas, and he’d been neighborly right back by making her a fine meal she would never have thought to make otherwise. But that was it. All of it.

She insisted on doing the washing up because he had cooked. He didn’t argue, simply thanked her and disappeared upstairs. That gave her plenty of time to think.

To think about a man who must be good at making friends, at pretending to be something he wasn’t. How else could he have inserted himself in such a way that he gleaned intelligence that could be gotten by no other means. After all, that was the whole point of going undercover. So if he wasn’t a natural-born liar, he had certainly had to become one.

Who was the man living upstairs? He seemed honest with what he shared, but how would she know? And he’d certainly shared very little, really. Maybe that whole thing about those Indians had been meant to disarm her. It had worked fairly well, but how would she know truth from lie with this man?

She felt a welcome stiffening of her spine as she put away the leftovers, including two big stacks of fresh tortillas, and washed the pans. If she was going to work on breaking down her walls with men, Austin was the last man on earth she ought to try it with.

He had secrets upon secrets. He might not even be sure who he really was any longer. Gage had sort of warned her, hadn’t he, with that stuff about finding the person he’d left behind. Well, Austin would never be who he used to be. Some things changed a person forever, as well she knew. He certainly hadn’t had time to settle on the man he’d become.

He’d admitted that he didn’t trust anyone anymore, and she wondered if his distrust included himself. It might. Six years undercover had probably taught him some things about himself that he didn’t like. She couldn’t imagine it wouldn’t. Now he had to deal with that along with everything else.

In short, the guy was a mess. Gage had warned her. So why the hell had she begun to lie awake at night fantasizing about him? It hadn’t happened right away, but at some point in the past couple of days, the initial attraction she had felt then squashed had returned big-time.

But maybe that was because he was safe in a way. He wasn’t going to be here for long, he’d expressed no interest in her, other than an occasional look quickly turned away that she couldn’t mistake even in her inexperience. So, yes, he’d evinced small moments of attraction to her, purely physical, but that was meaningless. She gave him credit for not acting on them.

Which left her exactly where? Indulging in fantasies as she lay in her lonely bed at night, fantasies that probably bore no resemblance to reality because she’d never even kissed a man, let alone gone any further.

Then she had a really ugly thought about herself. This whole tortilla thing. Had she done it to be neighborly or because she wanted his attention?

If she wanted his attention, was it only because he’d be gone in a relatively short time? Was she dancing close to the fire because she felt reasonably certain she couldn’t get burned?

Was she using him?

She sat on the edge of the bed, surrounded by her comforting projects, and tried to figure herself out. Could she really be trying to batter down an old wall without regard to what that might do to him? Because he was pretty much in an emotional blender himself.

A wave of self-loathing rose in her. There were a lot of things she didn’t like about herself, but now she had a new item to add to the list. She didn’t like the way she was cowering from much of life. She knew she was a prisoner of her own fears, and it didn’t make her very proud of herself.

In fact, sometimes it disgusted her, but not even disgust was enough to get her over the hump. Over time she had come to trust a small circle of men, like the sheriff and a number of others. Men she’d interacted with frequently for years. She could talk to them, share coffee with them, even invite them in once in a while as she had with Gage.

She was comfortable in this town, or comfortable enough, because the faces had become familiar over the years, but she’d let them just so close and no further. She only ever entirely relaxed with women.

It was a mental and emotional prison that not even a few years of therapy had been able to banish. Honestly, if she had seen Austin walking down the street before Gage had introduced him, she would have turned and walked the other way.

She didn’t like being this way. It just was, and she had adapted as best she could.

So what was with the tortillas? She’d brought them home from Melinda’s bakery when she could have just left a note for Austin that Melinda had made them. He could have picked them up tomorrow.

But no, she had decided to be nice, mainly to Melinda, who had gone out of her way to make them and deserved to sell them promptly. She’d brought them home, intending to put them in the refrigerator and leave a note for Austin.

Instead, for some unknown reason, she’d decided to try cooking some of them. Had she been hoping Austin would show up? She certainly hadn’t expected it to turn into him cooking dinner and the two of them eating together.

All her reasoning at the time had seemed perfectly innocent, but it had ended in the most intimate time she had spent with a man ever: the two of them sharing a meal.

Maybe the most surprising part was that she hadn’t run when he started cooking, rude or not. She wasn’t incapable of it, although she was slowly getting better about it.

Still. She looked at herself and wondered if all her superficial reasons had been just that, superficial. There was no question that her subconscious controlled a huge part of her life. It made her afraid of strange men. It controlled her level of comfort or discomfort with people.

So how did she know what she’d really been thinking when she asked Melinda to make those tortillas, or when she had picked them up?

If it had been purely friendly, then she’d leaped a big hurdle and should be proud. If some other reason had been involved...

She sighed, her head whirling, and reached for her knitting. Was she ever going to get herself sorted out?

She’d been doing without many of the things that were part of a normal life ever since her mother’s killing. Some of that was understandable, but after eighteen years, shouldn’t she have come further?

And if she was trying to go further now, why had she picked the one man who posed the most threat in every possible way. She didn’t really know him, and he’d leave before long, which was a dangerous emotional game to play.

But maybe that was part of what she was doing here: trying to prove that she had good reason to avoid men, and any involvement with them. To prove that she was right to stay hunkered in her safe little hole.

It wouldn’t surprise her. Not at all. But she had no business drawing Austin into whatever she was trying to do here. He had enough problems of his own.

She resolved then and there to firmly reestablish the distance between them. They’d both be better off.

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