by Nora Roberts
“That’s bull.”
“You’re my friend, and a good one, but you’re also an art dealer. Be honest.”
Angie opened her mouth but at Clare’s steady stare let out only an impatient hiss of breath.
“Well, that’s honest,” Clare mumbled.
“If you haven’t been producing your best work for the past couple of weeks, it’s only because you’ve been pushing too hard. Everything you finished for the show was fabulous. You just need some time off.”
“Maybe. Take my word for it, it’s really tough to push too hard in Emmitsboro. Which is,” she added, holding up a hand before Angie could argue, “only a five-hour drive. You and Jean-Paul can come down and check on me any time you like.”
Angie backed off only because she knew there was no shaking Clare once her mind was set. “You’ll call.”
“I’ll call, I’ll write, I’ll send up smoke signals. Now say good-bye.”
Angie searched her brain for one final argument, but Clare simply stood smiling at her, in baggy jeans, screaming green high tops, and a purple sweatshirt with a huge yellow question mark down the front. Tears burned the backs of Angie’s eyes as she held out her arms.
“Damn it, I’m going to miss you.”
“I know, me too.” She hugged Angie hard, drawing in the familiar scent of the Chanel that had been Angie’s trademark since their art school days. “Look, I’m not joining the Foreign Legion.” She started around the car, then stopped and swore. “I forgot my purse, it’s upstairs. Don’t say a word,” she warned as she loped toward the entrance door.
“That girl will probably make a wrong turn and end up in Idaho,” Angie muttered.
Five hours later, Clare was indeed lost. She knew she was in Pennsylvania—the signs said so. But how she had gotten there, when she should have been cutting through Delaware, she couldn’t say. Determined to make the best of it, she stopped at a McDonald’s and feasted on a quarter-pounder with cheese, large fries, and a Coke while she pored over her road map.
She figured out where she was well enough, but how she’d arrived there remained a mystery. Still, that was behind her now. Nibbling on a fry soaked in salt and catsup, she traced her route. All she had to do was get on that squiggly blue line and take it to that red one, turn right and keep going. True, she had added hours to her trip, but she wasn’t on a deadline. Her equipment would be trucked down the next day. If worse came to worst, she could just pull off at a handy motel and get a fresh start in the morning.
Ninety minutes later, through blind luck, she found herself heading south on 81. She’d traveled that route before, with her father, when he’d gone to check out property on the Pennsylvania border, and with her family, when they’d spent a weekend visiting relatives in Allentown. Sooner or later, the route would take her into Hagerstown, and from there, even with her sense of direction, she would find her way.
It felt good to be behind the wheel. Though it was true enough that the car seemed to have a life of its own. She enjoyed the way it skimmed the road, hugged the turns. Now that she was driving, she wondered how she had managed to do without the simple pleasure of being the captain of her own ship for so long.
An excellent analogy for marriage and divorce. Nope. She shook her head and drew a deep breath. She wouldn’t think of that.
The stereo was first class, and she had the volume up high. It had been too cool to remove the T-tops—and her luggage took up all the trunk space, in any case. But her windows were down all the way so that a bouncy Pointer Sisters classic streamed out into the air. Her clutch foot tapped in time on the floorboards.
She already felt better, more herself, more in control. The fact that the sun was dropping low and the shadows lengthening didn’t concern her. After all, spring was in the air. Daffodils and dogwoods were blooming. And she was going home.
On 81 South, halfway between Carlisle and Shippensburg, the sleek little car shuddered, hesitated, and stopped dead.
“What the hell?” Baffled, she sat, listening to the blaring music. Her eyes narrowed when she spotted the light on the dash with its symbol of a gas pump. “Shit.”
Just after midnight, she made the last turn for Emmitsboro. The pack of teenagers who had stopped as she’d been pushing the Z to the shoulder of the road had been so impressed with her car that they’d all but begged her for the honor of procuring her a gallon of gas.
Then, of course, she’d felt obliged to let them sit in the car, discuss the car, stroke the car. The memory made her grin. She’d like to think if she’d been an ugly little man in a beat-up Ford, they’d have been just as helpful. But she doubted it.
In any case, her five-hour drive had taken nearly double that, and she was tired. “Almost there, baby,” she murmured to the car. “Then I’m going to crawl into my sleeping bag and check out for eight hours.”
The rural road was dark, her headlights the only relief. There wasn’t another car in sight, so she hit the high beams. She could see fields on either side of the road. The shadow of a silo, the glint of moonlight on the aluminum roof of a barn. With the windows down, she could hear the song of peepers and crickets, a high-pitched symphony under a bright full moon. After what seemed like a lifetime in New York, the humming country silence was eerie.
She shivered once, then laughed at herself. Serene, the word was serene. But she turned up the radio a bit louder.
Then she saw the sign, the same tidy billboard that had sat on the side of the two-lane country road as long as she could remember.
WELCOME TO EMMITSBORO
Founded 1782
With a surge of excitement, she turned left, bumped over the stone bridge, then followed the lazy curve of the road that led into town.
No streetlights, no neon, no gangs posturing on street corners. It was barely midnight, but most of Emmitsboro was asleep. By the glow of the moon and her car’s headlights, she could see the dark buildings—the market, its big plate glass windows blank, the parking lot empty; Miller’s Hardware, its sign freshly painted, the shutters drawn. Across the street was the big brick house that had been converted into three apartment units when she was a girl. A light shone in the top window, faint and yellow behind its shade.
Houses, most of them old and built well off the road. Low stone walls and high curbs. Then a clutter of small businesses and more converted apartments with concrete or wooden porches and aluminum awnings.
Now the park. She could almost see the ghost of the child she had been, running toward the empty swings that moved a bit in the easy wind.
More houses, one or two with a light burning, most dark and silent. The occasional glare of a television against window glass. Cars parked against the curb. They would be unlocked, she thought, as the doors of most of the houses would be.
There was Martha’s Diner, the bank, the sheriff’s office. She remembered how Sheriff Parker had sat outside on the stoop, smoking Camels and keeping a beady eye on law and order. Did he still? she wondered. Did Maude Poffenburger still stand behind the counter at the post office, dispensing stamps and opinions? Would she still find old men playing checkers in the park and kids running across to Abbot’s General Store for Popsicles and Milky Ways? Or had it all changed?
In the morning would she wake up and find this vital slice of her childhood was now inhabited by strangers? Clare shook the idea away and drove slowly, drinking up memories like cool, clean wine.
More neat yards, daffodils bobbing, azaleas in bud. At Oak Leaf, she turned left. No shops here, only quiet homes and the occasional restless barking of a dog. She came to the corner of Mountain View and pulled into the sloping driveway her father had resurfaced every third year.
She’d traveled almost the length of town without passing another car.
Climbing out with the nightsong cheerful around her, she moved slowly, wanting to savor. The garage door had to be lifted by hand. No one had ever bothered to install one of those handy remotes. It opened with a loud keening of metal.
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br /> It wouldn’t disturb the neighbors, she thought. The closest one was across the wide street and screened by a neat bayberry hedge. She went back to her idling car and pulled it inside.
She could have gone directly into the house from there, through the door that would lead into the laundry room, then the kitchen. But she wanted to make her entry more of an event.
Coming outside again, she lowered the garage door, then walked all the way down to the sloping sidewalk to look at the house.
She forgot her sleeping bag, her luggage, and remembered her purse only because it held the keys to the front and back doors. Memories flooded her as she climbed the concrete steps from sidewalk to yard. The hyacinths were blooming. She could smell them, sweet and heartbreakingly fragile.
She stood on the flagstone walkway and looked at the house of her youth. It was three stories of wood and stone. Always the wood had been painted white with blue trim. The wide covered porch, or veranda, as her mother had called it, had open latticework at the eaves and long, slender columns. The porch swing, where she had spent so many summer evenings, was still there, at the end of the porch. Her father had always planted sweet peas nearby so that their spicy fragrance would reach out to you as you glided and dreamed.
Emotions, both pleasant and painful, choked her as she set the key in the old brass lock. The door opened with a creak and a groan.
She wasn’t afraid of ghosts. If there were any here, they would be friendly. As if to welcome them, she stood in the dark for a full minute.
She turned on the hall light and watched it bounce and glare off the freshly painted walls and polished oak floor. Blair had already arranged for the house to be readied for new tenants, though he hadn’t suspected that the tenant would be his sister.
It was so odd to see it empty. Somehow, she’d thought she would step inside and find it exactly as it had been, unchanged by the years—as if she’d walked home from school rather than returned after a long journey into adulthood.
For a moment she saw it as it had been, the pretty drop-leaf table against the wall holding a green glass bowl full of violets. The antique mirror over it, its brass frame gleaming. The many-armed coatrack in the corner. The long, slender oriental carpet over the wide-planked floor. The little hodgepodge shelf that held her mother’s collection of porcelain thimbles.
But when she blinked, the hall was bare, with only a lone spider silently building a web in the corner.
Clutching her purse, she moved from room to room. The big front parlor, the den, the kitchen.
The appliances were new, she noted. Sparkling and ivory against the navy ceramic counters and the sky blue floor. She did not step out onto the terrace—she wasn’t ready for that—but instead turned and walked down the hall to the stairs.
Her mother had always kept the newel post and railing polished to a gleam. The old mahogany was smooth as silk with age—countless palms and youthful bottoms had brushed over it.
She found her room, the first off the hall to the right, where she had dreamed the dreams of childhood and adolescence. She had dressed for school there, shared secrets with friends, built her fantasies, and wept away her disappointments.
How could she have known that it would be so painful to open the door and find the room empty? As if nothing she had ever done within those walls had left a mark? She turned off the light but left the door open.
Directly across the hall was Blair’s old room, where he had once hung posters of his heroes. Superman to Brooks Robinson, Brooks to John Lennon. There was the guest room her mother had furnished with eyelet lace and satin pillows. Granny, her father’s mother, had stayed there for a week the year before she had died of a stroke.
Here was the bath with its pedestal sink and its soft green and white checkerboard tiles. Throughout their teens she and Blair had fought over possession of that room like dogs over a meaty bone.
Going back into the hall, she turned into the master bedroom, where her parents had slept and loved and talked night after night. Clare remembered sitting on the pretty pink and lavender rug, watching her mother use all the fascinating bottles and pots on the cherry vanity. Or studying her father as he’d stared into the cheval mirror, struggling to knot his tie. The room had always smelled of wisteria and Old Spice. Somehow, it still did.
Half-blind with grief, she stumbled into the master bath to turn on the faucet and splash her face with water. Maybe she should have taken it a room at a time, she thought. One room a day. With her hands pressed on the sides of the sink, she looked up and faced herself in the glass.
Too pale, she thought. Shadows under her eyes. Her hair was a mess. But then, it usually was since she was too lazy for hairdressers and almost always chopped away at it herself. She’d lost an earring somewhere, she noted. Or had forgotten to put it on in the first place.
She started to dry her face with her sleeve, remembered the jacket was suede, and decided to dig in her purse for a tissue. But she’d set it down somewhere along the tour.
“Doing great so far,” she murmured to her reflection and nearly jolted at the echo of her own voice. “This is where I want to be,” she said more firmly. “Where I have to be. But it’s not going to be as easy as I thought.”
Brushing away the excess water on her face with her hands, she turned away from the glass. She would go down, get her sleeping bag, and tune out for the night. She was tired and overemotional. In the morning she would go through the house again and see what she needed to make her stay more pleasant.
Just as she stepped back into her parents’ bedroom, she heard the creak and groan of the front door.
Panic came first, quick and instinctive. Her always vivid imagination conjured up a pack of roving convicts newly escaped from the correctional institution that was only twenty miles away. She was alone, in an empty house, and for the life of her, she couldn’t remember one move she’d learned in the self-defense course she and Angie had taken two years before.
Pressing both hands to her heart, she reminded herself she was in Emmitsboro. Convicts didn’t tend to roam the streets of tiny rural communities. She took a step forward and heard the creak on the stairs.
Yes, they did, she thought again. Anyone who had ever watched a B movie knew that convicts and psychos always headed for out-of-the-way towns and quiet villages to spread their mayhem.
In the empty room, she looked around wildly for a weapon. There wasn’t even a ball of dust. Heart thudding, she searched her jacket pockets and came up with three pennies, a half roll of Lifesavers, a broken comb, and her keys.
Brass knuckles, she thought, remembering how she’d been instructed to hold the keys with the pointed ends sticking out between the fingers of a closed fist. And the best defense was a good offense. So saying, she jumped forward toward the door, letting loose with the most hideous shriek she could summon.
“Jesus!” Cameron Rafferty stumbled back a step, one hand reaching for his weapon, the other gripping the flashlight like a club. He saw a woman with wild red hair and a kelly green suede jacket come leaping at him. He ducked her swing, tossed an arm around her waist, and used his weight to overbalance both of them. They landed with a thud on the hardwood floor.
“Bruno!” Clare shouted, inspired and terrified. “Someone’s in the house! Bring the gun!” As she yelled, she tried to bring her knee up between her attacker’s thighs and nearly succeeded.
Winded, Cam struggled to pin her arms above her head. “Hold on.” He swore as she tried to take a bite out of him. “I said hold on. I’m the police. I said I’m the goddamn police.”
It finally got through. She subsided enough to look at his face in the slant of light from the bedroom. She saw dark hair, a little curly, a little too long, the stubble of a beard over tanned skin that stretched taut over excellent cheekbones. A good mouth, she thought, artist to the last. Nice eyes, though in the dark she couldn’t be sure of their color. There was a light scent of sweat about him, clean, clear sweat, not at all offensi
ve. His body, pressed hard into hers to keep her still, felt lean and muscled.
He didn’t seem like a psychotic or a crazed felon. But …
She took her survey while she fought to regain her breath. “The police?”
“That’s right.”
Though she was flat on her back, she gained some satisfaction from the fact that he was breathless. “I want to see your badge.”
He was still cautious. Though his grip on her wrist had caused her to drop the lethal keys, she still had nails and teeth. “I’m wearing it. At this rate, it should be imprinted on your chest.”
Under different circumstances, she might have been amused by the exasperation in his voice. “I want to see it.”
“Okay. I’m going to move, slowly.” He was as good as his word. His eyes never left hers as he shifted back and dropped one hand to the badge pinned to his shirt.
Clare flicked a glance over the metal star. “I can buy one of those in the dimestore.”
“I. D.’s in my wallet. Okay?”
She nodded, watching him as carefully as he watched her. With two fingers, he reached in his hip pocket and flipped open a wallet. Clare inched back, then reached out. She tilted the wallet toward the spill of light. She read the laminated identification, frowned at the name and picture.
“Cameron Rafferty?” She looked up at him then, squinting in the dark. “You’re Cameron Rafferty?”
“That’s right. I’m the sheriff here.”
“Oh, God.” She giggled, surprising him. “Then pigs must be flying.” She laughed until tears ran down her cheeks. Baffled, Cam shined his light in her face. “Take a good look,” she invited. “Come on, Rafferty, don’t you recognize me?”
He played the light over her features. It was her eyes, gold and glowing with unholy amusement, that jogged his memory. “Clare? Clare Kimball?” He gave a shout of laughter. “I’ll be a sonofabitch.”
“Yeah, that’s the truth.”