by Nora Roberts
“Thank you.”
Annie smiled, pleased she’d remembered to do the right thing. Then she looked at Angie. “I know you, too. You’re the black woman who’s living with Clare.”
“This is my friend Angie and her husband, Jean-Paul. They live in New York.”
“In New York?” Annie studied them with more interest. “Do you know Cliff Huxtable? He’s black, too, and he lives in New York. I see him on TV.”
“No.” Angle’s lips curved. “I haven’t met him.”
“You can watch him on the TV. He wears pretty sweaters. I like pretty things.” She eyed Angle’s gold panther link necklace. “Where did you find that?”
“I, ah …” A little uneasy, Angie lifted her hand to the necklace. “In New York.”
“I find pretty things, right here.” She stuck out her arm, jangling with bracelets. To rescue her friend, Clare took Annie’s sticky hand and admired her jewelry.
“These are very nice.” Curious, she ran a finger over the silver bracelet on which CARLY was engraved.
“That’s my favorite.” She beamed. “A-N-N-I-E. I wear it every day.”
“It’s lovely.” But Clare frowned as some vague memory nearly surfaced.
“Okay, heads up,” Blair announced. “Here comes the Farm Queen.”
“I want to see!” Annie scrambled away through the crowd to get a closer view, and Clare lost the memory in the cheers from the sidewalks.
They watched the slow-moving caravan of convertibles. Listened to the wild cheers. The crowd shifted, rose on toes, hunched down. Young children were hoisted on shoulders. There was a scent of hot dogs grilling, of sweet, sugary drinks, of baby powder. In the distance Clare heard the first rumble of brass and drums. Her eyes filled.
Girls in glittery leotards turned handsprings, twisted into back bends, tossed silver batons high. If some bounced on the asphalt, the crowd still cheered. Behind them, between them, high-stepping through the town square, came the bands.
The sun glinted off brass and stunned the eyes. Trumpets, tubas, trombones. It glittered on the silver of flutes and piccolos. Beneath the roar of music was the click, click, click of heels on the roadbed. Drums added their magical rat-a-tat-tat.
Jean-Paul nearly swooned when a trio of girls in short, shiny skirts executed a snappy routine with white parade rifles.
The young and the hopeful marched by, in front of their peers, their parents, their grandparents, their teachers, as the young had marched by for generations. They were the lifeblood of the town. The old watched them, knowing.
Angie slipped an arm around her husband’s waist. She’d expected to be bored, not touched. But she was touched. To her surprise, her blood was pumping to the rhythm of horns and drums. When she watched the Silver Star Junior Majorettes file by, some of them hardly bigger than their batons, her throat felt tight.
At that moment it didn’t matter that she was an outsider. Clare had been right, she thought. It was a good parade. It was a good town. She turned to speak to her friend, then stopped when she saw Ernie standing just behind Clare.
He was toying with the pendant he wore. And there was something in his eyes, Angie thought, something too adult and very disturbing. She had a wild and foolish thought, that he would smile and show fangs just before he sank them into Clare’s neck.
Instinctively, Angie put an arm around Clare and drew her forward a few inches. The crowd roared as the Emmitsboro High School Band strutted by, blaring out the theme from an Indiana Jones movie. Ernie glanced up. His eyes fixed on Angie. And he smiled. Though she saw only white, even teeth, the sensation of evil remained.
It took Cam and both deputies to deal with traffic control after the parade had ended. Bud Hewitt was at the south side of town, enthusiastically using a whistle and snappy hand signals. When the traffic thinned enough to muddle through on its own, Cam left the intersection. He’d just stepped onto the sidewalk when he heard the sound of applause.
“Nice job, Officer.” Blair grinned at him. “You know, I have a hard time connecting the guy who chained Parker’s rear axle to a telephone pole with this tin star.”
“Does the brass at the Post know you once set a skunk loose in the girls’ locker room, then stood outside with a Polaroid?”
“Sure. I put it on my resume. Want to grab a cup of coffee at Martha’s?”
“Let’s live dangerously and try the poison at the office.” Grinning at Blair, he started to walk. “So, did Clare say anything about me?”
“Not unless you count her asking me if you’d said anything about her.”
“What did you tell her?”
“Christ, this feels like high school.”
Cam opened his office door. “You’re telling me.” He went directly to the coffee machine and turned on the warming plate under the sludge already in the pot.
Blair eyed it with trepidation. “Can I have a tetanus shot first?”
“Pussy,” Cam said mildly and rounded up two mugs.
“I heard about Biff.” Blair waited while Cam lighted a cigarette. “Ugly business.”
“He led an ugly life.” When Blair only lifted a brow, Cam shrugged. “I don’t have to like him to find who killed him. It’s a job. My mother sold the farm,” he added. He hadn’t been able to tell anyone how much that hurt. The thing was, he wouldn’t have to say it to Blair. Blair would know. “She’s moving south as soon as the deal closes. I went by a couple days ago. She stood in the doorway. She wouldn’t even let me in the goddamn house.”
“I’m sorry, Cam.”
“You know, I told myself I was coming back here, back to town to look out for her. It was mostly a lie, but not all the way. Guess I wasted my time.”
“You get itchy feet here, D.C.P.D. would take you back in a heartbeat.”
“I can’t go back.” He glanced down at the coffeepot. “This shit ought to be sterilized by now. Want some chemicals?” He lifted a jar of powdered milk.
“Sure, load it up.” Blair wandered to the bulletin board, where pictures of felons at large were mixed with announcements for town meetings and a poster showing the Heimlich maneuver. “What can you tell me about Clare’s accident?”
“That Lisa MacDonald was damn lucky Slim was driving down that road at that time.” He handed Blair the coffee, then sat. Briefly, concisely, in the way of cops and journalists, he outlined what he knew.
By the time Cam finished, Blair had downed half the coffee without tasting it. “Jesus, if someone had attacked the woman, Clare was right there. If she hadn’t gotten the woman in the car so quickly and driven away, they both could have been …”
“I’ve thought of it.” All too often and all too clearly. “I’m just glad the idea hasn’t occurred to her. The town’s locking up and loading up. My main concern now is that some asshole is going to shoot his neighbor if he steps off the porch to piss in the bushes.”
“And the woman didn’t see the guy’s face?”
“Not that she remembers.”
“You don’t figure it was a local?”
“I’ve got to figure it was a local.” He drank some coffee, winced, then filled Blair in on everything that had happened since he discovered the disturbed grave the month before.
This time Blair got up and refilled his mug himself. “Things like this don’t happen in a town like Emmitsboro.”
“Not unless something triggers it.” He sipped slowly now, watching Blair. “When I was on the force in D.C., we came across some dogs. Three big black Dobermans.
They’d been mutilated in just about the same way as Dopper’s cattle. We found a few other things there, though. Black candle wax, pentagrams painted on the trees. All in this nine-foot circle.”
“Satanism?” Blair would have laughed, but Cam wasn’t smiling. Slowly, he took his seat again. “Not here, Cam. That’s really reaching.”
“Did you know graveyard dirt’s used in Satanic rites? I looked it up. It’s even better if it’s from the grave of a child. Nothing
else was disturbed in that cemetery. And somebody had hauled the dirt away. Why?”
“Kids on a dare.” But his reporter’s instincts were humming.
“Maybe. It wasn’t kids on a dare who clubbed Biff to death. And it wasn’t kids on a dare who took a knife to those calves. The hearts were gone, Blair. Whoever did it took the hearts with him.”
“Good Christ.” He set the mug aside. “Have you told anyone else what you’re working on?”
“No, mostly I’m just thinking out loud.” Cam leaned forward. “But I’ve got to take into consideration that Lisa MacDonald says the guy who attacked her was chanting. She’d said singing before, but when I asked her about it again, she changed it to chanting. She said it sounded like Latin. You’ve got contacts on the paper, Blair, people who know a lot more about this cult business than I can dig up in a library.”
“I’ll see what I can find out.” Blair rose, trying to pace off his unease. If they had been anywhere else but Emmitsboro, he would have bought into Cam’s theory quickly. As a reporter he knew how pervasive cults had become, especially in cities and college towns. “You figure kids have experimented and gotten in too deep?”
“I can’t say. I do know that drugs usually go hand in hand with this kind of thing, but other than a few kids rolling joints, we don’t see much in this part of the county. There was more of that going on when we were in high school.”
“Maybe you’ve got a renegade. One person who’s wacked himself out reading Crowley or listening to Black Sabbath.”
“It took more than one person to do what was done to Biff.” He ground out a cigarette. “I don’t believe for one minute that a couple of kids listening to black metal and doing a few chants psyched themselves up to do all this. In the books they’re called dabblers because that’s just what they do. What’s happening here isn’t dabbling.”
“And I thought I’d come home for a nice relaxing weekend.”
“Sorry. Listen, I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t mention any of this to Clare.”
“Any reason?”
“Officially she’s my only witness in the MacDonald case, and I don’t want to influence her memory. Personally, I don’t want her any more upset than she already is.”
Blair tapped a finger against the coffee mug, considering. “She spent twenty minutes this morning examining every inch of that burl.”
Cam’s eyes cleared, and he smiled. “Oh, yeah?”
“And to think of the money I’ve wasted on flowers and jewelry whenever I’ve ticked a woman off.”
“You never had my charm, Kimball. How about putting in a good word for me?”
“I never knew you to need anybody to do your talking.”
“It was never this important before.”
Blair couldn’t come up with a joke and rose, jiggling change in his pockets. “You’re really serious about her?”
“Deadly” He rubbed a hand over his heart. “Christ, it feels deadly.”
“You know, that ex-husband of hers was a jerk. He wanted her to give swanky dinner parties and learn to decorate.”
“I hate him already.” He could ask Blair what he hadn’t felt comfortable asking Clare. “Why’d she marry him?”
“Because she convinced herself she was in love and it was time to start a family. Turned out he wasn’t interested in a family anyway. Before it was done, he’d convinced her everything that had gone wrong was her fault. She bought it, too. And she’s still a little raw.”
“I figured that out.” Cam nearly smiled. “You want to ask me if my intentions are honorable?”
“Fuck you, Rafferty” He held up a hand quickly. “Don’t say you’d rather fuck my sister.”
“Right now I’d settle for sitting down and having a rational conversation with her.”
Blair considered for a minute. “When do you get off duty?”
“In a town this size, you never get off duty. There’s no telling when I’ll have to chase off some kid skateboarding down Main or break up a fight over a checkers game in the park.”
“Old Fogarty and McGrath still at it?”
“Every week.”
“You can get to the park for round three just as quickly from our place. Why don’t you give me a lift home, maybe hang around for some barbecued chicken?”
“That’s neighborly of you,” Cam said and grinned.
She wasn’t upset that he was there, Clare thought. She glanced over at the echoing clank of metal on metal and noted that Cam had just missed tossing a ringer.
She wasn’t angry with him. Not really. All she was trying to do was distance herself a bit, give herself some perspective. She’d let things get out of hand much too quickly as far as Cam was concerned. The proof was the way they’d grated on each other since the accident.
Rob had always said she played dirty in a fight, tossing out illogical arguments and past grudges or retreating into frigid silence. Of course, the arguments had seemed perfectly logical to her, and …
She was doing it again, Clare thought, and poked viciously at the grilling chicken with her barbecue fork. Rob was old business, and if she didn’t stop carrying around that particular baggage, she’d be right back on Janowski’s couch.
If that wasn’t enough to straighten her out, nothing was.
Cam was new business, she decided. She hadn’t liked the fact that he’d questioned her like a cop one minute, then tried to bundle her off into a safe corner like a concerned lover the next. And she would tell him so. Eventually.
In the meantime, she’d just wanted some room to reevaluate. Then he’d shown up. First with the burl that he’d damn well known would weaken her. Then today, waltzing into the backyard with Blair. Showing off his wonderful body in snug jeans and a shirt rolled up over his tanned and muscled arms.
She poked at the chicken, turned it, and forced herself not to look up when she heard the shouts and masculine laughter, the ringing of horseshoes.
“He’s got terrific buns,” Angie commented and offered Clare a glass of the wine she’d just poured.
“I’ve always admired Jean-Paul’s butt.”
“Not his. Though God knows it’s fine.” She sniffed at the sizzling chicken. “This is a talent you’ve hidden well, girl·”
“It’s hard to barbecue in the loft.”
“This from a woman who welds in her living room. Are you going to let him get away?”
“You’re full of non sequiturs today, Angie.”
“Are you?”
“I’m just taking time out to think.” She glanced up and smiled. “Look, poor Bud is making cow’s eyes at Alice, and Alice is making them at Blair.”
“Who’s your money on?”
“Bud. He’s slow but steady. Blair will never be anything but a visitor in Emmitsboro.”
“How about you?”
Clare said nothing for a moment, only slathered sauce on the browning chicken. She could smell lilacs from the big gnarled tree as the light breeze loosened some of the petals and had them drifting like snow. Sun and shadow played over the patio. The music crooning from the radio was old tunes from those sweet and happy years before she had had to make decisions or think of futures.
“Did you see the sculpture I was working on last night?”
“The brass piece. It made me think of a woman stretched out on an altar about to be sacrificed.”
“It’s almost scary how easy it is to work here. How compelled I am to pull it out of my head. I always thought I was made for New York.” She looked at her friend. “Now, I’m not so sure.”
“Because of the work or because of those grade-A buns over there?”
“I guess I’ll have to figure that out.”
“Sonofabitch.” Blair jogged over to snag a beer out of the cooler. “Jean-Paul must think we’re playing bocce. When do we eat? I’m tired of being humiliated by a couple of hick cops.”
“I’ll let you know once you guys have shucked that corn.”
They complained,
but they did it. When everyone settled down at the old picnic table on the terrace to a meal of grilled chicken and corn, with Alice’s potato salad and chilled French wine, the mood was easy. There was no talk of murder investigations, but a rehash of horseshoe games.
Along the edging stones, the early roses bloomed, fronted by the impatiens Clare had planted. There was the scent of lilacs and spicy sauce. Bud had positioned himself beside Alice and was making her laugh so often that her gaze hardly ever drifted toward Blair. Afternoon melded into the golden, fragrant, endless evening that is exclusive to spring.
Cam outlined his strategy, maneuvering Alice into his place in the horseshoe tournament and slipping into the kitchen behind Clare.
“Great chicken, Slim.”
“Thanks.” She kept her head in the refrigerator, rearranging plates of leftovers. He took her arm and pulled her out.
“Not that I wasn’t enjoying the view, but I like to look at your face when I talk to you.”
“Potato salad goes rancid fast.”
“You’re awful pretty when you’re domestic. Hold it.” He slapped his hands on the refrigerator, caging her in before she could slip away.
“Look, Cam, I have company.”
“And they’re having a hell of a time on their own.”
Jean-Paul let out a yell of triumph that was followed by a heated but jovial argument. The raised voices came clearly through the kitchen windows.
“See?”
“You’re boxing me in, Rafferty.”
“Looks that way Okay, I’d be more than willing to apologize, if you’d just tell me what I’m supposed to be sorry for.”
“Nothing.” She dragged a hand through her hair. “There’s nothing.”
“Don’t wimp out on me now, Slim.”
“I don’t want to argue with you.”
“Okay then.” He dipped his head, but she slammed a hand against his chest before he could kiss her.
“That’s not the answer.”
“Seemed like a damn good one to me.” He did his best to adjust both libido and ego. “Give me yours, then.”
“You acted like a cop.” She hooked her thumbs in her pockets. “Interrogating me, taking your damn blood tests, and filing your reports. Then you turned right around and acted like a concerned lover, holding my hand and bringing me tea.”