Chapter 31: Making Headlines
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"I can't believe this is happening," Frank said, head in his hands. He was the only one of the three at the table who hadn't managed to eat a single bite of dinner. Rachel, meanwhile, had begun to pick from his plate.
"Frank, it was gonna come out eventually anyway," she tried to soothe him. "But we've got to train you on how to be a bit more… uh, tactful with the press."
Scott chimed in. "She's right, Frank. You're not the bodyguard anymore. It's my job to handle those people."
Frank met Rachel's eyes for a moment. He considered himself lucky that she hadn't been more angry with him given the circumstances. Her casual reaction to what had occurred was not what he had been expecting, and it puzzled him.
Scott sighed heavily from his spot at the table. "We might also have to rethink you two commuting around town by yourselves like that. At the very least, I think I should be accompanying you when you go out."
Frank stood up to move to the window. He stared out in silence as dusk set in like a smooth blue veil across the sky, suddenly sick to his stomach. The tables had been turned so delicately on him. Here he was, listening to a bodyguard tell him the exact words he himself had told Rachel all those years ago. If he hadn't been so shaken up from the events of the evening, he would have laughed at the irony. God certainly had a sick sense of humor.
The irony was not lost on Rachel either. He could practically feel her satisfaction from where he stood, but age had mellowed her need to shove it in his face.
"Thank God we already told Fletcher about the pregnancy," Rachel said. "I'd hate for him to find out from the tabloids."
Frank wondered if she was being passive-aggressive with him. Maybe he deserved it.
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She hadn't been kidding about the tabloids picking up the juicy news immediately. On a quick run to the drugstore two days later, Frank saw Rachel's face plastered all over the shelves in the checkout line.
'The Fertile Forty: Rachel Marron's Geriatric Pregnancy'
'Who is Rachel Marron's Baby Daddy?'
Despite his concealed carry, Frank grew increasingly wary of venturing into public on his own. A pistol couldn't stop the press from learning his identity. For the first time in his life, Frank realized he couldn't rely on his self-defense skills to protect himself. Anonymity, once lost, was lost forever.
"At this point it's still just rumors." Fletcher's voice was calming over the phone as Frank paced the front porch of the rental house. "They don't have your name. They don't know who you are. You haven't even technically confirmed that Mom is living there."
"I know you're trying to comfort me, Fletcher, but it's okay to say it. I fucked up."
"Well, yeah. You fucked up royally," Fletcher laughed. "But it's not like it wouldn't be public knowledge eventually."
"I guess I'm just out of my element here," Frank sighed.
"You'll get used to it. It's like anything else. You gotta get broken into it."
Frank did not feel thrilled about that.
"How's Mom holding up?" Fletcher asked.
"She seems to be handling it well."
"I think she's happier than she's ever been," Fletcher confirmed. After a pause he asked, "Are you still happy, Frank?"
Frank was saddened that the boy even had to ask such a question. He hated himself for having to think over his answer. "Yeah. I'm really happy, Fletcher."
Fletcher sounded relieved. "Good. Me, too."
Rachel appeared at the front door. In a moment of panic, Frank pushed the door shut on her before she could come outside with him. He placed his cell phone against his shoulder and feverishly looked in all directions to ensure that no cars were approaching. Her face was lethal when he finally opened the door.
"Sorry, I just wanted to make sure–"
"I know what you were doing," she huffed, shoving past him to come onto the porch. "Not like there's snipers hidden in the bushes, Frank." She gestured to his cell phone. "Can I talk to Fletcher for a bit?"
Frank nodded and handed over the phone. Rachel wandered to the other side of the porch and settled into the cushioned bench, chatting animatedly to her son.
Frank turned to scan the large front yard and surrounding trees. The road was quiet out here. A car would pass once maybe every twenty to thirty minutes. It was discreet, but not discreet enough. He could kick himself for thinking it would be an appropriate choice to live here. He should have taken her somewhere further out, maybe even out of state. He could have put up with the effort to fly into L.A. every other week until the Chatsworth house was sold. Had he been selfish for trying to stay close by?
The wise words of his counselor echoed in his head, "You beat yourself up too much, Frank."
Not every decision in life could be the right one. But somehow, he'd ended up here. He glanced over his shoulder again to see the gorgeous woman behind him, laughing casually on the phone. To know that she now carried his child was a fact that begged him to suspend reality over and over again. He had known being in a relationship with her would require him to make sacrifices.
They would be worth it. He would make sure of it.
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The next week passed uneventfully.
At least he thought it did.
That was because Frank Farmer did not own a television set.
While Scott stayed with Rachel at the house, Fletcher had accompanied Frank to the grocery store. It was such an inconvenience that they required food to fulfill one of their basic human needs.
Frank had never been fond of being in public, but his paranoia had increased to a reprehensible level since the incident with the press. He considered himself in safe company with Fletcher. Fletcher was not known in any capacity to be linked to Rachel Marron, save for his formal surname, which he did not use on casual documents. He instead used his middle name, choosing to be known in the public as Fletcher Samuel. He selected his friends wisely, and only a small circle of young men who attended school with him knew who his mother was.
Still, Frank worried that the boy's anonymity would ultimately end up being a fleeting thing. Fletcher had insisted he was not afraid of the media. As it stood, his generation seemed immune to the preservation of privacy. Frank had to pity him for that.
"Frank . . ."
Fletcher nudged him as they stood in the checkout line, and Frank turned to find himself face-to-face with the magazine display. On the cover of one magazine, in glaring purple contrast, was an aged photo of Rachel Marron stepping out of her limousine in the dress she'd worn at the Oscars. Cropped in such a way, he could barely see the edge of his own profile as he had held his arm out to protect her from the onslaught of fans. Framed directly below, signaled out by a neon pink arrow, was a full face picture of him on the front porch of their rental in Leona Valley. Although he had grown almost a full beard since the picture of the limo, somehow they had linked his likeness with that of her mysterious bodyguard at the Academy Awards.
The room began to spin around him as he numbly lifted the magazine off its place on the shelf and stared around the room. No one was looking at him, but he could have sworn he heard the sound of a helicopter hovering just above the rooftop.
Fletcher, bless his soul, began to dutifully collect all the magazines with the offending cover, and a few others where Rachel's pregnancy featured as the secondary headline. Still in a daze, Frank gathered the rest and stuffed them into the shopping cart. The young woman cashier stared suspiciously at the stack of magazines before looking up at both men. "Rachel Marron fans?"
Both of them shook their heads 'no' at the same time.
Frank conveniently kept his face turned at an angle, refusing to make eye contact with the woman. Fletcher noticed and gently pushed at him to leave the store while he finished paying.
"Why don't you go get the car?"
Frank's ears were ringing as he left the store and he rushed for the truck, casting sidelong glances at every passerby to see if they were staring. He pulled the truck around to the front of the store and helped Fletcher load the bags in under thirty seconds. Just as they were leaving the parking lot, Frank caught a glimpse of a red Nissan Sentra parked at the very end of the street.
"Fletcher," Frank began, his eyes flicking between the rear view mirror and the side mirror, "Do you see that red Nissan coming up behind us?"
Fletcher craned his head to look out the window. "Yeah."
"I think he's been following us."
The look of pure terror in Fletcher's eyes made Frank's heart drop.
"We can't go back to the house until I lose him." Frank shifted lanes to pass the car in front of them. "Brace yourself."
Right as he entered the intersection, Frank threw the truck into a sudden U-turn and began driving in the opposite direction. On the other side of the median he caught the flash of a familiar face in the window of the red car.
"Son of a bitch."
"Who is it?" Fletcher demanded.
"Hold on."
Frank aggressively turned the wheel again and escaped onto a side road.
"Are they looking for Mom?" Fletcher asked frantically, staring out the window.
"That man was looking for her the other day when the press came to our door."
"So he knows where you live."
"Yeah, but I'm taking a guess the guy doesn't do well with direction. He followed us there last time, and I'm sure he's trying to do it again now."
"What do we do?"
Frank kept the truck at a steady ten miles above the posted speed limit as he made his way south. "I'm gonna get on the highway two exits down and try north again."
"Do you think . . ." Fletcher began warily, staring out the back window. "Do you think he saw me, too?"
Frank did not answer.
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Marron's Former Bodyguard: Guarding the Body a little too closely?
Oscars Shootout Survivor: Perfect Aim . . . In more ways than one
Providing Protection Everywhere . . . Except in Bed
Frank angrily tossed each headline aside with a flick of his wrist as he sifted through the stack of magazines. Pictures of Rachel's bright, youthful smile and his stonelike mug stared back at him from each colorful cover.
He was vaguely aware of someone hovering behind his shoulder as he read one stupid subheadline out loud: "Not only will he knock 'em dead, he'll knock 'em up."
Scott stifled a laugh. Frank shot him an offended glare.
"I'm sorry, Frank."
"Just keep it lighthearted, Frank," Rachel reminded him gently from her spot at the breakfast table. She waved her spoonful of Greek yogurt in the air for emphasis as she spoke. "If you really think about it, they're not saying anything bad. It would all come out eventually anyway."
"Why does everyone keep saying that?" Frank asked in frustration. "Why does any of this have to be public knowledge?" He gestured to the stack of news articles on the table with shaking hands.
"You're involved with a celebrity, Frank. You knew this would happen," Scott said diplomatically, watching Rachel from the corner of his eye.
Rachel's gaze, however, was carefully fixed on Frank. "I think he really thought he could escape it forever."
Frank sighed, shaking his head at the ground. "I just hoped it wouldn't happen this soon," he murmured as he left them in the kitchen.
Having just moved into the house, the furnishings were sparse. He had nowhere to sit except for outside on the porch, but it suited him just fine – he could survey the area like an eagle, waiting for prey to enter his field of vision. He collapsed into the bench with a thermos of orange juice and his obnoxious hunting rifle, stroking his beard, daring a single unknown car to drive past.
Frank was having a crisis. He was used to this sort of thing happening to Rachel. Now, it was his face, his eyes, his profile all over the papers along with hers. He hadn't realized how painful it would be to relive those moments before it all happened. He hadn't been prepared to revisit those brief few months he'd served on Rachel's team. Now that he was comfortably in a relationship with the woman, he should have been relieved – or at the very least, unaffected. But he was neither. He was more on edge than ever, and exceedingly upset that this train seemed to have no end in sight.
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"You can take the night off, Scott," Frank told Rachel's bodyguard when the sun had started to set.
"You sure, Frank?"
"Yeah," Frank said with a smirk as he set his rifle down on the table.
"It's not inhumane to keep me overnight, you know."
Frank lowered his voice so that Rachel couldn't hear him from upstairs. "You're used to serving a tough customer."
"You're forgetting that she was much worse when you worked for her."
Both of them shared a laugh as Scott set out the door toward his Ford Explorer.
Frank made his way upstairs, following the sound of Rachel's soft singing into the bedroom.
"I'll never get tired of hearing this," he murmured as he came up behind her at the dresser where she was brushing her hair. She turned her head to smile up at him, and he placed a soft kiss on her cheek.
"You might," she warned.
He shook his head imperceptibly and traced her jaw with his fingertips.
She leaned into his touch with a sigh. "You know what's crazy? I look forward to going to bed every night, just to have you hold me."
The simplest words from this woman could start a fire in his chest.
He slowly wrapped his arms around her, his hand coming to rest along her abdomen. "I don't have to just hold you…" he said, his voice low and suggestive.
Her dark eyes glittered up at him as he turned the light off and guided her to the bed. He kissed her deeply, pulling her body down beside his. Even before she hit the mattress, she was giggling and squirming around in his arms. "Your beard tickles."
His breathy laughter complemented her girlish giggles in a way that made his heart soar. One of the many things about Rachel that enchanted him was how she never seemed to have lost her teenaged spirit. Being with her this way made him feel younger every day.
Despite her assurances that pregnancy did not alter what she could withstand, he made love to her gently, whilst still holding nothing back. He could tell she was tired, so he had no reason to postpone her pleasure. Her soft cries were enough to beckon the turbulent tributary within him, and he held her with aching arms until every coherent thought had vaporized from his mind. She adorned his bare skin with lazy kisses afterward, all collapsed contentment on his chest.
His dreams were disoriented – fragments of senseless scenarios that linked together without rhyme or reason. When he woke in the middle of the night, his senses were on immediate high alert and his body was wound tight, as if he'd been dropped from ten stories up and slammed against the bed.
The open window in their bedroom had made it easy for him to pick up the sound of an idling car outside.
Frank breathed in stillness for several minutes, staring at the ceiling, waiting to see if the dream would release him. But it wasn't a dream.
He turned his head to look in the direction of the window, seeing the scant beams of headlights where they touched the blinds. He carefully twisted himself free from Rachel's fingers, still loosely clasped around his neck. She moaned in sleepy protest as he moved to the edge of the bed, but she did not wake even when he shifted her body aside.
Holding his breath, Frank walked over to the open window to peer between the blinds. He could see the parked car outside the house, its headlights still on. It was just dark enough that he could not make out the color or model of the vehicle, but he could tell it did not belong to Pettigrew.
The red glow of the alarm clock on Rachel's nightstand read 2:31 A.M.
He released a shaky breath, and with fingers still stiff from sleep, he quickly threw on a pair of jeans, pushed open the bedroom door and went downstairs to investigate. The crickets outside formed a thick blanket of sound by which he could barely hear any footsteps that might have already been heading up the porch steps. The downstairs hallway was illuminated by refracted shards of moonlight through the window on the front door. Carefully, Frank slipped his arm through the archway of the kitchen and grabbed his rifle from where he'd left it on the table earlier that night.
He stopped cold when he heard the distinct sound of the car engine shutting down, followed by the sudden rummaging sounds of a person scrambling up the porch steps.
Leaning stealthily up against the corner of the hall, he cocked the rifle, prepared to shoot at the air if necessary to scare them off.
The fact that his chest was still bare somehow seemed to make his heartbeat sound louder in the quiet house. His mind began to race as the jangling of keys thrashed against the door. How could they have had keys? Was it the landlord? A previous owner?
Frank's throat tightened with anxiety as he watched the person's shadow block the moonlight on the hardwood floor, and with a loud thwack, the screen door slammed open, followed by the front door.
Still hidden from view, Frank pressed into the wall, waiting out the blaring beeps of the alarm system to see if they would scare off the intruder. He could hear the labored breathing of someone as they frantically punched in a four digit code, failing once at first, before finally disarming the alarm altogether.
The only person who had the code was Scott Pettigrew.
He knew this was not Pettigrew.
With a deep breath to brace himself, Frank marked his rifle against his arm and violently turned the corner of the hall.