Chapter 10 They Spun A Web For Me

Nathan's heart skipped a beat as Duke and… Dana… came out from some back room of the restaurant. Neither of them looked glad to see him, but it took no detective skill at all for him to see that they were very pleased with themselves. Very pleased with each other.

He stuffed that thought down somewhere where he wouldn't have to look at it.

She looked like Audrey.

It hit him again, as it had this afternoon, as it had that night. Hit him hard somewhere soft and he goddamn felt that, if nothing else.

Not even the black hair made any difference.

She was… whoever Audrey had been, confirmed by his hand on her skin, this afternoon. Cool, soft, and that electric charge was just the same. Not Audrey, not his Audrey, and still – his heart skipped and retreated and would have given up the fight entirely given a choice. Nathan forced his eyes down. He was not going to stare.

Duke took a seat beside him, putting Dana as far away from Nathan as the four person table allowed, Nathan noted. She studied him openly as Duke called for a bottle.

Two years, when he'd been ready to wait the full twenty-seven – if she followed her usual pattern – and why couldn't he be grateful for that? He should be glad about it. Instead all he felt was … pain. The concept was almost abstract by now, a memory of pain, but he didn't know what else to call it; the vertigo, the hole inside his chest that threatened to suck him in and down.

She was back and she was helping the Troubled. Like she always did. He'd stopped by McCutcheon's before coming here, and he'd actually caught the man humming as he worked in his shop. Not just worked in his shop, worked on Dana's bike. Cathy had made dinner, offered him some, the sullen teenager replaced with a sly woman-child – who was just really glad to not have to eat with plastic knives and forks anymore. And she'd given his necklace to Dana, sorry.

"I believe you have something of mine?" he said.

Dana slipped her hand into her pocket, then dropped the necklace into his open palm, distant enough that they didn't touch.

"What is that?" Duke asked.

"It was the Chief's," to Duke. "The old Chief's, my father," to Dana. He'd guessed that Cathy had a Trouble that was behind all the fights, but she wouldn't talk to him. But she'd opened up to … Dana… in the course of an afternoon.

Her brows came together, then she reached into her other pocket, and pulled out a ring. Showed it to them. "Explain." Her word was sharp and short, an order. Hurt and confused.

"Explain what?" Duke wondered, completely lost. They'd managed to cut him out within the space of a few seconds.

Dana grabbed at the necklace in Nathan's hand, still there, - he jumped, couldn't help it – and lined up the faces of both together, showing it to Duke. Not identical, but three blue diamonds in a row on both. Showed it to him. "Why do we have the same ring?"

"I don't know. I've never seen that one before."

Duke looked between them, shifting from side to side.

"I don't know where I got it," Dana said, confessing her own confusion. "I don't remember."

"Shh," Duke said, laid his hand over hers, over top of the ring. "Don't worry about it."

Her look was cold and she withdrew her hand.

Nathan took the opportunity to sit back himself. He put the chain around his neck, tucked it under his shirt. He didn't like doing it in public, it felt a bit naked, but he did not trust himself not to lose it out of his pocket, and he couldn't actually check that it was still there just by feel.

"What about yours?" Dana asked, directly, ignoring Duke's hint she should let it go.

Nathan shook his head. "It's not my mother's, I know that. Not the one he wore while she was still alive." He hadn't even known anything about it until after. "I found it after he… died."

Duke gave him an angry glance – he hadn't known about it at all. But, what the hell, if it was a clue, Nathan hadn't known it was a clue until this moment either. It wasn't some secret he'd kept from him. It was his father's and he'd worn it because… it was his father's and it was a part of him he could keep.

It wasn't like he was going to keep a chunk of his father's petrified remains in his pocket or anything.

Dana sat back, flipped her hair back behind her ear – a gesture that stabbed him all over again. In Audrey, that was a signal she was regrouping, frustrated at one approach to a problem or a mystery, she was about to come back with a sudden 90degree turn and he had better keep up.

"McCutcheon says thank you, by the way." Nathan headed her off. He did not want to get bogged down into a lengthy and probably pointless discussion about all that they did not know about the Troubles. Today was more successful than they probably could have hoped, both father and daughter McCutcheon happier than when they got up in the morning, and Dana herself introduced to a fairly innocuous Trouble. She had helped them, and she had gotten her feet wet. But it was only the first of a number of much more troubling steps.

"To you, but not to me."

Nathan nodded acknowledgement of this. "He knew I would tell you."

Dana just laughed to herself and shook her head. "Maine."

"And," to Duke, "that you could bring the Tramp around again anytime."

"Hey!" she called attention back to herself with a light slap on the table. Spread her palms wide. "Sitting right here."

"I'm pretty sure he meant Duke's backwards excuse for a truck." Nathan nearly grinned. Almost. It was a terrible joke, but he couldn't help the lightness that bubbled to the surface. She was back! It was like his facial muscles had forgotten how to make that coordinated expression, though, and the impulse faded away. "You know it's not going to last. He's a single father with a headstrong teenager in the house. Their next argument –"

"I'll go back. It's no troub-" hesitated over the unintended word, shrugged and gave up, "-ble." She smiled at him.

She had no trouble with her smiles.

"Stop it." Duke pushed himself away from the table, violently and suddenly, nearly knocking into the people behind him. Stalked away out onto the deck, taking the bottle with him.

Nathan waved Dana's outrage down. "Let me," when she would have followed him. Which would probably only lead to some barnburner of a fight when Dana could not possibly understand half of what drove Duke. "It's me he's mad at anyway."

*.*.*

Nathan found Duke at the end of the little floating slip where boats visiting the Gull tied up, just down from the deck. As an escape route it lacked imagination. Duke paced the end of the dock, all six feet of it, like he was cornered. Caged.

"And when are you going to get the Bronco fixed?" Duke attacked as soon as Nathan approached.

"It was icy," Nathan repeated, a defense he'd told and retold and told himself. The front passenger side of the Bronco was still a crumpled mess from when he'd slid into telephone pole last February. It was an old argument and by now they could have it by rote, only hitting the highlights.

"You were drunk," his friend spit at him. "You were driving drunk and the only reason you weren't charged is that none of your minions dared."

"Minions?" Nathan deliberately suppressed a smile now. "I have minions?" He crossed his arms and waited. But Duke seemed to have run out of venom, at least for now.

"You know where Audrey and I first met?"

"Beggars Hill. You told me." He had, telling him the story on one those nights they had found themselves alone together, at the end of the bar at the end of a night, more often than he liked to remember, neither of them willing to face the emptiness that waited at home for them. "She was faster on the draw." Leave it to Duke to find that the funniest part.

Nathan nodded. He'd told the story many different ways, the way she pulled on him, the way she joked about pulling another gun, the way she joked even as her life – and her car – were balanced on the edge of oblivion.

"I go back there, about once a week," Nathan said. "Just park there and look over the edge. I wouldn't even feel it. I just figured it was a waste of money, getting the Bronco fixed, until I stopped going back."

Duke stared at him. Music from the restaurant fell down around them, but soft and distant. Rippled waves slapped at the boat hulls and the side of the dock. Boat smell and sea smell, and Duke just stared at him. "You are a cheap asshole, aren't you?"

Nathan tilted his head. That was probably true.

"Don't you dare leave me alone with all this," Duke said, sliding into real anger. "Don't you dare." Fear and anger.

Nathan did not point out that Duke was not alone. Even without him, he was not alone anymore.

"You said it wasn't – she wasn't her," Duke finally released. "You said – and then you two sit there in front of me and it's like – two years just didn't happen. You're finishing each other's sentences. In seconds, Nathan. You said it wasn't her!" Duke stabbed a finger at him like this accusation made some sort of sense, like it was an indictment of a crime committed against him.

The only reason he was still here was because of Duke. Because as much as he thought he couldn't face waiting the twenty-seven years for Audrey to return, he couldn't honorably leave Duke to face the Troubles alone either. After all the years they'd spent back and forth and back as friends and enemies and even – for a while – rivals for Audrey's affections – they were somehow tied to each other – unwilling partners in a three-legged race sometimes, brothers in arms at others.

He wasn't interested in taking Dana away from Duke. If that was even possible. "Audrey had blue eyes. Dark, slate-blue."

"So?"

"Dana's are brown." There, he'd said it, her name. Dana. It wasn't so hard.

"Meaning what?"

Duke was not that dense – but he was locked into resisting whatever threatened his relationship with Dana. Already. Barely forty-eight hours after they'd met. Nathan shook his head. "I don't know what it means. It's her, and it's not her. She shouldn't be back yet. Last time – the Troubles went away when she did." No one knew if that was cause or effect, at least no one that Nathan had been able to talk to. The Troubles had stayed this time. "Last time, she was an FBI agent who thought a crime scene was better than ice cream. We had the same sense of humor. This time she's a bike-riding, cop-hating,-"

"Tramp," Duke supplied, watching him carefully –

" – who is aimed at you like a bullet."

Duke could barely breathe, let alone talk. Never mind think. "No."

"She doesn't know," Nathan assured him. "But someone made her. Copied her, just like all the others. Picked out the real Dana Bellamy somehow and made her for you."

He might as well have kicked Duke in the gut. He doubled over, and had to sit on the gunwale of a boat, tied up behind him. "You are such a bastard, Wuornos." It wasn't a denial. It was worse, because Duke believed him. That hurt on some new level because it was so easy for Duke to believe that this woman he'd fallen for – so hard and so fast – would inevitably betray him like all the others.

"I told you to be careful."

"We were careful. We went through a whole box of careful."

Nathan crouched down beside his friend. He wasn't even finished yet and he had to get it out before he lost his nerve. "She doesn't know. What she feels is real. What she tells you she believes. But you have to know, Duke. You are who you are, and the things you can do – " So many things and not just his own Trouble. Two years and they all carried the scars of war. Duke more than any of them. "You know her history, and her history with your family."

"She helps the Troubled," Duke begged. God knew he was one of them.

This time he did reach for the other man, grabbed and held him between shoulder and neck. "I know. Maybe it's different this time. And maybe this is the time we fix this goddamned thing for good. I don't know." He stood. "I'm just saying, I'm not flirting with your girlfriend, whatever it looks like."

"Fuck you."

"Fuck you too." They were men, after all. Satisfied at least that Duke was not about to throw himself into the bay, Nathan left him. There wasn't much more damage he could do. Someone else would have to pick up the pieces.