by Gayle Roper
Or so she thought.
Fifteen
HE CRUMPLED THE newspaper and tossed it in the trash on his way outside. There was an eyewitness. It was confirmed right there on the front page just below her picture.
The very thought of it made him break out in a cold sweat. She could ruin it all, bring him down with just a word. All she needed to do was remember something, anything, and it was all over. The appointment would be out the window.
Of course she might never remember. Frequently, people never fully recalled moments of great trauma. Still, he couldn’t depend on her faulty brain chemistry. It would be putting himself too much at risk. He had to find a way to destroy her before she destroyed him.
It was too bad in a way. She was a very attractive woman in spite of the limp. Under other circumstances he would have enjoyed getting to know her. She had a lovely smile, and those black eyes of hers were memerizing. He grinned as he raced along the off-island roads of Ventnor on his cycle. How he could have enjoyed himself as he made those eyes sparkle with extra life. He had a marvelous and much deserved reputation with the women, a reputation he took care to nurture with his ready charm. They all loved him, even when he broke up with them. She would have been no different.
The fact that she was his enemy rather than his potential lover was but one more sign of the unfairness of life.
Of course, the ultimate way to rid himself of the danger she represented was to kill her. He blinked. Kill her? He frowned. Where had that thought come from? It was common knowledge that McCoy had killed and gotten away with it. In fact, the streams deep in the Pines were probably slowly devouring more than one victim of McCoy’s fierce hatred. He made it a general rule to avoid McCoy these days. He had put all his energy into legitimately escaping the Pines and his beginnings. McCoy had turned to the dark side, to the doing of horrendous deeds and the getting away with them.
Both of them had succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.
But kill her? Become like McCoy? Never! Besides, how would he do it? Shoot her? Run her over? Poison her? One thing he knew for an absolute certainty: He could never, never ask McCoy for help. A shudder rippled through him at the thought of what would happen if McCoy ever had such a hold over him. Blackmail would be the least of it.
Then there was that oath he’d taken: First, do no harm. No, deliberate murder was a whole different ball game, one he was not going to play.
He drove down the night-quiet road, flashing past the darkened houses on his street. Another thought gripped him as he pushed the remote to raise his garage door. He drove in and parked, revving the motor a couple of times before he turned the key.
Physical violence would just involve the cops more. That was the last thing he wanted. Even now he cringed at the risks he’d been forced to take to dispose of the car, risks taken for nothing if her memory returned.
His stomach growled, and he laid a hand over it. He’d missed dinner, something that hadn’t happened in years. Fine food was one of the great pleasures of his carefully constructed life. A sudden vision of macaroni and cheese shimmered before him. He shuddered. Growing up he’d eaten too many dishes on too many nights. Macaroni and cheese with hot dogs. Macaroni and cheese with tuna fish. Macaroni and cheese with bologna. For a break it would be macaroni with canned spaghetti sauce poured over it.
And white bread. Mom brought home a loaf of Wonder Bread every day. He and his father—when he wasn’t sleeping—filled in their hunger holes with the squishy stuff. He liked to crush it into hard pellets and see how long it took a pellet to melt in his mouth. Sometimes he and McCoy took the bread pellets and went fishing in the Mullica River or one of the streams lacing the Pines. Then dinner had been something worth eating.
He’d been twelve when he became the family cook. His mother announced that she wouldn’t be making meals anymore. Her legs hurt too much after her shift at the Food Fair. She couldn’t understand why they were so painful when she was only thirty years old. She’d look down at them with a puzzled expression, though he doubted she could see them over the lump of her stomach.
“I’m too young for arthritis,” she’d say. “Old people get that.”
He’d stare at her and her close to four hundred pounds. Did she honestly not understand the link between excess weight and bad knees?
She drove an old red Chevette as rusty as the old bike he’d found at the dump. The car listed to the left so much it was a wonder the tires on the right didn’t leave the road. Kids sniggered every time they saw her drive by, especially McCoy.
“The left side’s gonna scrape the ground any day now,” he’d say.
He wasn’t the only one who made comments.
“I saw your mom in the store yesterday,” a kid at school would say. “Man, how does she ever fit in that small space beside the cash register?”
Or “Where does she find enough material for those tents she wears?”
One day the prettiest girl in class looked at him. “You’re built just like your mother, aren’t you? You look a lot like her.”
The comment hadn’t been particularly barbed. Now he recognized it as the comment of a junior high girl who didn’t realize the power of words to curdle the spirit. Or galvanize it. On that very day he established an exercise regimen and had kept it up to this very day. Then he’d run and lifted old cans he filled with sand. Today it was the sophisticated routines developed for him by his personal trainer. He had kept the promise he made to himself that long-ago day: He would never, never look like his mother.
He lowered the kickstand on his cycle and set his helmet on the seat. Once inside he went directly to the liquor cabinet. He poured himself a tumbler full of Scotch neat and collapsed on the sofa.
He forced himself to stop thinking of life in the Pines. He’d successfully escaped that prison. It was today’s problem that he needed to concentrate on. No matter how he looked at things, he was stuck with the problem of how to defuse a live time bomb before it exploded all over him.
Sixteen
MARSH WATCHED WITH disbelief as person after person ran up and down Abby’s stairs all day. He’d never seen anything like it. If it wasn’t a little person with a high-pitched voice that curdled his eardrums, it was an adult with a tread like a gorilla.
Didn’t she have at least one friend with a light step and a pleasant voice? Just yesterday he was the only person in Seaside that she knew. Where did they all come from anyway?
Well, he wasn’t going to let her or her friends drive him indoors. It was his house, and he’d work outside on his own porch if he wanted to! That was part of the dream, and he’d paid enough money for the privilege.
He opened his laptop and stared over his rail at the dunes and the ocean beyond, waiting for his thoughts to gel. Instead, he heard a high giggle that he fervently hoped didn’t belong to Abby. Then the two boys clambered down the steps with enough noise to wake the proverbial dead, ran next door, reappeared with arms full of toys, and climbed noisily back up.
“We got it, Jess,” Walker called.
“We got some other stuff too,” yelled Jordan. That kid had the lungs of a carnival midway barker.
The high-pitched giggle floated down, and Marsh sighed in relief. It wasn’t Abby.
Abby. He’d been more impressed than he wanted to admit by the way she’d stood up to the madman next door. Not many people could handle a large, irate man screaming in their face, but she had. He felt a strange pride that she’d done so well.
If only she wasn’t such a gregarious person, he’d appreciate her even more.
He turned back to his laptop, gritting his teeth, applying all his formidable concentration to Craig and Marguerite. Once Rick arrived, Marsh’s present book would be temporarily shelved while they concentrated on Shadows at Noon, last year’s release, and last year’s characters—Nathan, Dixie, and the dastardly Valdez.
Rick was going to be a great Nathan if the script was anywhere as good as Rick had indicated. Marsh knew it
had been good when he finished writing it, but so many fingers got stuck in this particular type of pie before a shooting script emerged that Marsh always worried until the final version of the screenplay was in his hands. His contract called for him to have final approval, but exercising that final approval was one of life’s great challenges, especially when he was on the East Coast and the movie entertainment people, at least the creative community, were on the West Coast. Then there were the on-site changes made during shooting.
“Mrs. Patterson, watch!” a shrill little voice commanded.
There followed a few seconds of silence during which the little demon who belonged to the demanding voice presumably performed. Jordan, he thought. Marsh held his fingers above his keyboard and waited.
“Wonderful, honey!” Abby applauded loudly, whistling between her teeth while her parents could be heard giving more moderate approbation.
Someone ought to tell her that a lady didn’t whistle like a jock. He thought about the tantalizing idea of telling her himself, but only for a couple of minutes. He was smart enough to know a lost cause when he saw one. She’d just tell him about some crazy woman in ancient history who had invented that particularly offensive sound.
“Lunch,” Abby’s mother called.
Amid more thumps and bumps, the herd went inside. Silence ensued; his ears actually rang with it. Marsh grinned and started typing.
Craig looked at the horse with growing concern. It was Magdalene—Maggie—Marguerite’s mare, as proud in her own way as the woman herself was.
“Magdalene?” he’d scoffed when he first heard the animal’s name. “What kind of a name is that for a horse?”
Marguerite looked at his dappled gray and, just short of sneering, said, “And Smokey is a better name?”
“He’s gray.” Craig had always thought Smokey the perfect name for his noble steed and was dismayed to hear how defensive he sounded.
“I didn’t mean to denigrate the vast expanse of your imagination,” she said, barely concealing a yawn. She eyed him with condescension. “You do know what denigrate means, don’t you?”
Only by sheer will did he manage to keep his jaw from dropping to his chest in appalled surprise. Of all the gall! How had a gentleman like Abner Frost produced a snob like her?
She then turned and patted her horse’s neck. When she spoke, her voice was warm with affection. “Magdalene’s name is to remind me that if God can make her namesake into a woman of faith, He can make me into what He wants me to be too.”
If it hadn’t been for the haughty toss of her head, he might have been impressed. As it was, he thought she needed a few lessons from God—or His emissary—on the evils of pride. Craig itched to volunteer for the job, but he had too much respect for God and too little for her to take on a task of that proportion. Thinking he didn’t know what denigrate meant. Mocking Smokey’s name. Looking down her beautiful nose every time she saw him.
It was one beautiful nose, he had to admit. In fact, she was enough to make any man’s mouth water, her dark hair catching the sunlight and shining brightly enough to blind anyone foolish enough to glance her way, her movements a symphony of grace and elegance, her glorious eyes casting spells that entangled all who looked. Too bad she wasn’t as beautiful in character.
As he neared the solitary horse standing just off the road, he realized the mare’s reins were still draped over her neck, neither tied nor trailing. Something was definitely wrong. Marguerite would never leave her horse improperly tethered.
He stopped beside Maggie. She stood unconcerned, nibbling at a patch of scrub grass.
“Marguerite!” Craig stood in his stirrups, scanning the area. “Marguerite! Where are you?”
He saw and heard nothing to disturb him. The silence made his skin prickle.
“Marguerite, you fool woman, where are you?”
Like she’d deign to answer that question. He sniffed. Deign, he thought. I came up with that all by myself. Too bad she’d never know. As he scanned the area for a third time, he wondered how he could let it drop oh-so-casually that he had a degree in animal husbandry and land management.
Good night! I want to impress her, he thought, scandalized by his own lack of character.
God, save me from myself. He meant every word of the prayer with the fervency usually reserved for the care of the beautiful, spare land that surrounded him. A roadrunner streaked by, neck stretched forward like he could arrive at his destination faster if he reached for it. It was debatable who was more startled at the sight of the other, the bird or Smokey, who shied.
“Easy, boy.” As he calmed the horse, he studied the row of cottonwoods off to the south. They lined the creek that was the center of the water dispute between Mr. Frost and Otis Snelling. At least it was the stated cause of the dispute. Craig thought that the War between the States was the greater cause.
Otis Snelling, a Confederate veteran, hated Abner Frost, a former Union army colonel. To Snelling it mattered not that the war was over more than thirty years ago. He had come west after the war, settling in this obscure corner of New Mexico, only to find his neighbor had stood near Grant when Lee surrendered at Appomattox. Snelling would never forget the shame of that day as he stood in the ranks of defeated Rebels. His hate for his Yankee neighbor festered.
Add to that Frost’s success with his property in contrast to Snelling’s inept and unwise use of his, and the bitterness grew. With Frost’s declining health, Snelling saw his opportunity. He just hadn’t counted on Randall Craig.
Marsh was vaguely aware of a car pulling into the parking area beside the house. He glanced up to see an attractive blond woman walk toward the steps leading up to Abby’s.
Now who?
The woman felt his gaze and looked over. She smiled shyly. “Hi, Marsh.”
Jess and Karlee’s mother. What was her name? He’d met her in church a couple of times. He scrambled mentally. “Hi, Cecelia.” Yes, that was it. He sketched a little wave.
“Celia,” she said and disappeared upstairs. He heard a cry of, “Mom!” as the sliding door opened, then closed. Silence again descended.
Well, he’d been close.
Most of the precious Anasazi Creek flowed through Frost land, but there was a short section where it coursed across Snelling land as it made its way down from the mountains. What gave Snelling an advantage in the water dispute was that the water flowed from his land onto Mr. Frost’s. Snelling’s threat was to dam up the water, to divert it so none flowed onto Frost Spring Ranch—unless an exorbitant fee was paid. The law, such as it was in this rugged area northeast of Albuquerque, spoke clearly about water rights. If you bought them with your land, they were yours. If you failed to, tough.
Abner Frost had bought water rights, but Snelling conveniently overlooked this fact as he saw a way not only to make money but also to control everyone downstream.
“You do as I say, old man,” Snelling threatened Abner Frost, “or you’ll have no water.” In this dry, barren, eerily beautiful land, water was as essential as oxygen, treasured more than gold.
It was because of these threats that Mr. Frost contacted Randall Craig, son of an old army buddy.
“I need someone young and strong,” the old man said.
Craig, bored with his father’s well-run Pennsylvania farm, took the next train to New Mexico, looking for challenge and adventure. He just hadn’t expected anything like Marguerite to be part of the bargain.
Surely the fool woman knew enough to stay away from the boundary between the properties. Surely she understood the dangers. Snelling’s men were all one step from jail, either coming or going. Craig shivered at the thought of what they might do to someone like her.
Thumps, thuds, and excited voices interrupted him and announced the departure of the upstairs retinue for the beach. They descended from above with arms laden with chairs, towels, and coolers—coolers? They would be less than a hundred steps from their house! They couldn’t walk home for a drink?—and al
l the other trappings people seemed to think were necessary to sit in the sun. There was even a beach umbrella tucked under Abby’s father’s arm to keep the sun they were going to sit in from shining on them.
Marsh couldn’t help noticing that Abby’s hands were completely empty. Her mother and father, by contrast, looked like pack animals. Even the little girl carried an armful of towels.
I guess you can’t color outside the lines with full arms.
Abby was wearing her bathing suit with a shirt thrown over it. He couldn’t help but notice the scars that slashed across the top of her right leg. Even looking at them three years after the injury, he cringed. He couldn’t imagine what she had suffered, and he knew physical pain was the least of it.
“Go get your suits on, boys,” Abby said to Walker and Jordan. “That is, if your mom says it’s okay. You’ll see us right down there on the beach.” She pointed to the sand.
She was standing with her back to Marsh, but the two boys faced him. Not that they noticed him. Their little faces were fixed on Abby, and they nodded earnestly at her instructions. Marsh knew infatuation when he saw it. Somehow those two little boys had become Abby’s slaves.
At least she hadn’t turned them into beasts of burden.
As he watched, Celia came down the stairs. She kissed Jess. “You be good for everyone.”
“I will, Mom.”
“Remember, we expect you to stay for dinner,” Abby said as Celia climbed into her car. “Don’t worry about Karlee. Mom and I’ll take turns watching her. She’ll probably sleep the afternoon away.”
“I’m going to take a turn too, Celia,” said Abby’s father. “Little girls are my specialty.” He slung an arm around Abby’s shoulders and squeezed. Marsh thought he saw Abby stiffen, but it might have been his imagination.
Celia looked close to tears. “I can’t thank you all enough.”
“Then don’t try,” Abby said as she stepped away from her father. “Get yourself back to work before you miss your next appointment.”