Chapter 18 – Looking For The Prince

Friday, May 2, 2014 – Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas

“Got everything?”

Stephanie looked up into JC's eyes.

“I don't know,” she said with a smile. “Do I still have time to stuff you in my carry-on?”

“I know I've lost some weight dancing on stage, but...I still don't think I can fit in that thing,” he responded, pointing to her backpack thrown across her shoulder.

They smiled at each other.

“I think Johnny might send out the Marines if I go missing anyway,” JC said.

“Oh yeah,” she said wistfully, her Australian accent thick. “I forgot you're a big star again. Girls chasing you all around the place.”

JC looked around at the absence of fans and girls waiting to fall all over him.

“Hmm,” he said. “They must have missed the memo that Lance and I would be here today.”

Stephanie chuckled.

“Surely it's not because most of our fans are in their thirties now and have grown above chasing buses and hiding under room service carts.”

“You know, I was really hoping I'd get to see that while I was here,” Stephanie said, adjusting her backpack. “I almost didn't believe him when Lance first told me about that. I wanted to see that kind of craziness in action.”

“Sorry to disappoint you,” JC said. “I think Addy's glad it hasn't happened yet, though. Justin is driving her insane enough without adding psychotic fans to everything else.”

They both looked up and sighed as they heard a female voice over the intercom, calling for Stephanie's flight number to start boarding.

“Can't we just stop time?” Stephanie asked him. “I don't have to go back to New York, you don't have to go back to the tour...”

“If I had the power to stop the time, I'd have stopped it last night, right before you started packing,” JC said softly.

She was startled when she felt a pair of arms wrap around her from behind.

“Don't go,” Adeline whispered. “Don't leave me with them.”

Stephanie laughed and shrugged the arms off her.

“I feel loved,” she said.

“She just doesn't want to suffer alone,” Lance said with a smile.

Stephanie smiled back, wrapping her arms around him tightly when he pulled her in for a hug.

“I'm gonna miss having you around,” he said. “Believe it or not.”

“I believe it.” She patted him on the back. “Who's going to keep you in line now?”

“I still have muscle,” Addy said, pointing outward. Stephanie laughed when she saw her friend pointing at the bodyguard hanging out a few feet away from them.

“Let's give these two a few minutes alone,” Lance said, looking at Addy. “Jace, we'll be waiting in the car.”

Stephanie smiled as Addy wandered away, hooking her hand into Lance's as they walked towards the airport exit.

“That's the happiest I've seen her in a long time,” Stephanie said. “They must have made up with each other.”

“They are happy,” JC said, watching his friends walk away, hand-in-hand. He reached into his leather jacket pocket. “I want to be that happy, Steph.”

“Stupid happy?” she said with a chuckle.

She watched with a smile as she watched the pair, her two best friends, walk away together. She had been the one that knew from the very first day that they were meant to be together. It had taken a lot of time to convince Addy, and a lot of work to see them through their differences, but she was happy to finally see them as happy as she always imagined they could be.

“I just knew--”

She stopped as she turned around to face him, seeing him knelt down on the ground on one knee.

“You make me that happy,” he said.

Her eyes widened as she saw him pull a small box out of his pocket and open it towards her, revealing a ring.

“Will you be my wife, Stephanie Dawn?” he asked.

She was speechless as he reached up and grabbed her hand.

“JC, I...”

Her eyes connected with his.

“Yes,” she said.

He smiled. “Yes?”

“Yes.”

From several feet away, leaning against the wall with her back against his chest and his arms wrapped around her, Addy and Lance watched.

“What a dork.”

“You helped him plan the proposal,” Addy said, glancing back at him. “If anyone's a dork, it's you. Not everybody proposes on the fly in a church doorway.”

“Will you ever let me live that down?” he asked with a smile.

“Nope,” she responded, smiling back.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“And here comes the night, pulling puppet strings on my heart again...Shows me all of this time I've been blind to this waking life...Now I, see it everywhere...'Cause I'm not lost, just looking for the prince, yeah...And I'm takin' it, one day at a time, and I'm gettin' by...By the way...You're still on my mind...You're still on my mind...”

Addy busied herself cleaning up the lounge on the bus, the buds in her ears playing a soft tune to relax her. Justin had locked himself in his room already, Lance was putting Liam to bed, and she had a rare moment to unwind. Even though by any normal standards, cleaning up wasn't on her list of relaxing things to do, it was more restful than any of her other duties.

She had just picked up a jacket and thrown it across her arm when she looked up to see Lance standing in the doorway, watching her.

“Having fun...watching me?” she asked as she pulled on the cords to remove the earbuds.

“Just interested,” Lance said, leaning up from the doorway.

“Yes, my cleaning is fascinating,” she said with a smile as he took a seat on the sofa. “It's like watching water boil.”

“I was listening to you hum,” he said. “You only hum when you're...happy. Satisfied. Relaxed.”

“I wasn't humming,” she said.

“You do it softly,” he said. “I don't even think you know you do it. Hence why I say you only do it when you're relaxed and satisfied.”

She grinned.

“You notice some very strange things about me.”

“Way back when,” he said, “you know, when you were just my assistant, I could always judge whether you were having a good day by your musical habits. A good day was when you'd putter around my apartment cleaning up my messes and you'd just hum to whatever music was playing. A bad day meant no music, and I knew to watch out.”

“Really?” she asked.

“Things tended to fly across the room when there was no music,” he said.

She chuckled.

“Pens. Clipboards. Planners. Glass candlesticks,” he said with a smile.

“That wasn't you,” she said. “And that...I had a good reason to throw.”

“Lucky for me, I gained the skill of 'ducking',” he said. “Why he never did is still a mystery.”

“He never annoyed me as much as you did,” she said, walking over toward him to take a seat. “But, also lucky for you...I'm only annoyed by the people I love the most.”

“Love at first injury,” he said, wrapping an arm around her as she laughed.

She leaned into his chest, pushing aside the heavy varsity jacket, and lifted her hand. She glanced over her engagement ring.

“They're good together,” Lance said. “I don't know how it works for them, but...it works.”

“Stephanie's wild by nature,” Addy responded. “JC's toned down and inconspicuous. He doesn't let her get too crazy, and she doesn't let him become an old man. They bring out a side in each other that nobody else does. She's going to keep JC young. And him...well she's finally found someone who will keep her from doing a five-to-ten stretch in prison.”

Lance laughed. “Yeah. That's probably it.”

He looked down, narrowing his eyes at the jacket in his wife's lap as he noticed the number embroidered on it.

“Hey, what's Chris's jacket doing on our bus?”

She furrowed her eyes. “This isn't Chris's, it's Justin's. Every time I turn around he leaves it laying somewhere, the little punk.”

“No,” Lance said, picking up the jacket. He ran his thumb over the embroidered number 7 on the chest. “See, Chris's jersey number was seven. Mine was four. Justin's was one and a half. His jacket has the 1 ½ embroidered on it. We had these made after we stopped doing Challenge for the Children games. Each of us has one with our jersey number on it.”

“Justin probably borrowed it,” she said. “He probably lost his – he loses stuff on a daily basis.”

“No, Justin and Chris aren't even remotely the same size,” Lance said. “He'd borrow from me or JC first – rather, steal, since he probably wouldn't ask first.”

“Maybe Chris was on the bus earlier,” Addy responded. “Or Justin found it and didn't get to give it back to him before we left town.”

“I doubt that's the case,” Lance said. “But what does it matter? We'll just set it aside and give it to him when we get to Oklahoma City.”

Addy nodded, scooting out of the way as Lance grabbed the jacket and stood up off the couch. Carrying it over to the other sofa so he would remember to pass it off to Chris when the buses stopped in the morning, he placed it over his arm to fold it. When he ran his hand over the fold to smooth it, his hand ran over a hard bump in the pocket.

“What's the matter?” Addy asked, seeing his face twist in confusion.

“Something in the pocket...”

He reached in, expecting to pull out Chris's bottle of pain pills or maybe a box of candy – something that he would fully expect from Chris – but instead, he held a small, black velvet box in his hand.

“Oh, God,” he said, tossing the jacket on the couch behind him.

He opened the box to look at the emerald and diamond engagement ring.

“Oh, no,” Addy said softly, taking place by his side and looking into the box. “That can't be good.”

“No, it's bad,” Lance said. “Very, very bad. Addy, Chris was going to ask Mel to marry him.”

“Oh, God,” Addy said. “Lance, what are we going to do?”

He shut the small box with a light snap, rolling it around in his hand once before turning towards the couch.

“Forgetting we ever found it,” Lance said, picking up the jacket and putting it back in the pocket. “If Chris wanted to talk about it, he would have come to us. And since he didn't, it's none of our business.”

“We can't just let him keep feeling this way,” Addy said. “He's probably feeling ten times worse than we thought he was.”

“And that's why I'm not going to be the one to remind him how shitty he must feel,” Lance said. “Drop it, Ad.”

She watched him walk out of the lounge room, through the doorway, and heard him close their bedroom door.

“Since when does he mind his own business,” she mumbled to herself sadly, her face falling as she picked up the jacket and walked it off towards the luggage storage.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Little Rock Police Department, how can I direct your call today?”

Eric Rowe picked up his mug of long-cold coffee and took a sip of it, grimacing slightly at the temperature, but swallowing it as he was unwilling to get out of his seat to refill his cup. The precinct outside his office buzzed with the usual activity of the officers and the secretaries taking calls. He stared at the file in front of him as he sat the mug back down on his desk, looking at the large red “SOLVED” sticker.

He'd worked this case for eight months. Eight months of sleepless nights, staying up by the lamplight at midnight pouring over the case file, waiting for whatever he was missing to finally hit him. It was like a lot of other cases in his department, but it didn't matter as much to any of the other detectives – not even his partner.

A twenty-seven year old mother of one – a son, five years old.

Murdered. By her ex-boyfriend.

To his colleagues, it was simply another case. Most of them had been on the force long enough that they had become numb to everything they saw on a daily basis – murders, assaults, rapes, senseless acts of violence.

But Eric was different than the rest of them. They laughed, asked him how he slept at night – everybody in the office jokingly called him the “Angel of Mercy”. He laughed along with them, knowing that they were making fun of him, but he took the title to heart.

He was proud of the fact that he actually gave a damn.

He'd waited eight months to solve the case, eight months to find the evidence that would help him put the guy away and bring justice to her son, who was now mourning his mother's death and learning to live in a foster home. And he had finally found it.

He sighed and leaned down, opening the bottom drawer of his file cabinet, shoving it in with the others.

It was always the same – expecting a sense of relief, but never getting it.

He kicked the drawer shut with his left foot, listening to the metal bang closed and pushing his rolling desk chair back into place.

“Mr. Rowe?”

Eric looked up in his doorway, seeing one of the secretaries leaning in.

“Janine?” he asked.

“You have a call on line two,” she said.

“Thank you, Janine,” he said.

She lightly smiled at him as she turned and walked back out to the lobby. He picked up the black phone on his desk, pressing the button for line two.

“This is Rowe,” he said.

“Who taught you to answer the phone, boy?”

Eric smiled when he recognized the voice on the other end.

“Chief Andrews,” he said. “Surprising to hear from you.”

“It's been a few years.”

“That it has,” Eric said, remembering his days as a patrol officer in New Jersey, under Chief Sebastian Andrews. “You still stomping around in Jersey?”

“Of course,” Sebastian said, the slight Australian-American accent that Eric remembered coming out.

“How's that daughter of yours?”

“Funny you ask,” Sebastian said, “since that's why I called.”

“Uh oh,” Eric said.

“That girl...”

“Vandalism reports go to the main office,” Eric said. “Though I'd be interested to hear the story.”

“No,” Sebastian said with a laugh. “Actually, Stephanie and her friend were down in Little Rock a couple of weeks ago, and I think they were poking around.”

“Poking around what?”

“Well,” Sebastian said, pausing a moment. “About three weeks ago, Stephanie was asking me to look into someone. The parents of a friend of hers – the Westons, I think?”

“Yeah?”

“I don't know what she was up to, but she asked for an address, said her and Adeline were wanting to pay them a visit.”

“Sounds a little suspicious.”

“Yeah, especially knowing my daughter, that's what I thought too,” Sebastian said. “I was just wanting to know if you could take a little time to quietly look into it, make sure my kid isn't creating too much trouble.”

“No problem, boss,” Eric said with a smile.

“Fantastic,” Sebastian said. “I'll fax over the address to you by morning.”

“Sounds good.”

“I owe ya one, kid.”

He exchanged a cordial goodbye with his old boss before hanging up the phone.

He looked up at the clock, sighing as he read 6:30 already. The lobby of the precinct had died down, getting quiet once again as most of his colleagues had headed home to their wives and children, leaving the lackeys and the night shifters who were just starting to arrive for their seven o'clock shift.

He glanced down once more at his file cabinet, scooting his chair back over to it and opening it to retrieve the file again. He looked at the “SOLVED” sticker once more, smiled slightly, and shoved the file back in the cabinet before standing up from his chair and grabbing his coat to walk out the door and go home.

Another case solved, justice brought to one more person – but there would be another waiting for him in the morning.