by Nora Roberts
Feeding the greedy tank of the Olds, he watched her come back out, cross to the soft-drink machine. And he wasn’t the only one watching, Jack noted. The teenager fueling the rusting pickup at the next pump had an eye on her, too.
Can’t blame you, buddy, Jack thought. She’s a picture, all right. Maybe you’ll grow up lucky and find yourself a woman half as perfect for you.
And blessing his luck, Jack screwed the cap back on his tank, then strolled over to her. She had her hands full of candy and soft drinks when he yanked her against him and covered her mouthin a long, smoldering, brain-draining kiss.
Her breath whooshed out when he released her. “What was that for?”
“Because I can,” he said simply, and all but swaggered in to pay his tab.
M.J. shook her head, noted that the teenager was gawking and had overfilled his tank. “I wouldn’t light a match, pal,” she said as she passed him and climbed into the car.
When Jack joined her, she went with impulse, plunging her hands into his hair and pulling him against her to kiss him in kind.
“That’s because I can, too.”
“Yeah.” He was pretty sure he felt smoke coming out of his ears. “We’re a hell of a pair.” It took him a moment to clear the lust from his mind and remember how to turn the key.
Both thrilled and amused by his reaction, she held out a chocolate bar. “Candy?”
He grunted, took it, bit in. “Watch the road,” he told her. “Try to find something familiar.”
“I know we weren’t on this road very long,” she began. “We turned off and did a lot of snaking around on back roads. Like I said, Bailey had it all in her head. Bailey!” As the idea slammed into her, she pressed her hands to her mouth.
“What is it?”
“I kept asking myself where she would go. If she was in trouble, if she was running, where would she go?” Eyes alight, she whirled to face him. “And the answer is right there. She knows how to get to Grace’s place. She loved it there. She’d feel safe there.”
“It’s a possibility,” he agreed.
“No, no, she’d go to one of us for sure.” She shook her head fiercely, desperately. “And she couldn’t get to me. That means she headed up here, maybe took a bus or a train as far as she could, rented a car.” Her heart lightened at the certainty of it. “Yes, it’s logical, and just like her. They’re both there, up in the woods, sitting there figuring out what to do next and worrying about me.”
And so was he worrying about her. She was putting all her hope into a long shot, but he didn’t have the heart to say it. “If they are,” he said cautiously, “we still have to find them. Think back, try to remember.”
“Okay.” With new enthusiasm, she scanned the scenery. “It was spring,” she mused. “It was pretty. Stuff was blooming—dogwoods, I guess, and that yellow bush that’s almost a neon color. And something Bailey called redbuds. There was a garden place,” she remembered suddenly. “A whatchamacallit, nursery. Bailey wanted to stop and buy Grace a bush or something. And I said we should get there first and see what she already had.”
“So we look for a nursery.”
“It had a dopey name.” She closed her eyes a moment, struggled to bring it back. “Corny. It was right on the road, and it was packed. That’s one of the reasons I didn’t want to stop. It would have taken forever. Buds ‘N’ Blooms.” She smacked her hands together as she remembered. “We made a right a mile or so beyond it.”
“There you go.” He took her hand, lifted it to his mouth to kiss. And had them both frowning at the gesture. He’d never kissed a woman’s hand before in his entire life.
Inside M.J.’s stomach, butterflies sprang to life. Clearing her throat, she laid her hand on her lap. “Well, ah… Anyway, Grace and Bailey went back to the plant place. I stayed at her house. Those two get a big bang out of shopping. For anything. I figured they’d buy out the store—which they almost did. They came back loaded with those plastic trays of flowers, and flowers in pots, and a couple of bushes. Grace keeps a pickup at her place. I can imagine what they’d write in the Post’s style section about Grace Fontaine driving a pickup truck.”
“Would she care?”
“She’d laugh. But she keeps this place to herself. The relatives—that’s what she calls her family, the relatives—don’t even know about it.”
“I’d say that’s to our favor. The less people who know about it, the better.” His lips curved as he noted a sign. “There’s your garden spot, sugar. Business is pretty good, even this late in the year.”
Delight zinged through her as she spotted the line of cars and trucks pulled to the side of the road, the crowds of people wandering around tables covered with flowers. “I bet they’re having a holiday sale. Ten percent off any red, white or blue posies.”
“God bless America. About a mile, you said?”
“Yeah, and it was a right. I’m sure of that.”
“Don’t you like flowers?”
“Huh?” Distracted, she glanced at him. “Sure, they’re okay. I like ones that smell. You know, like those things, those carnations. They don’t smell like sissies, and they don’t wimp out on you after a couple days, either.” He chuckled. “Muscle flowers. Is this the turn?”
“No…I don’t think so. A little farther.” Leaning forward, she tapped her fingers on the dash. “This is it, coming up. I’m almost sure.”
He downshifted, bore right. The road rose and curved. Beside it fences were being slowly smothered by honeysuckle, and behind them cows grazed.
“I think this is right.” She gnawed on her lip. “All the damn roads back here look the same. Fields and rocks and trees. How do people find where they’re going?”
“Did you stay on this road?”
“No, she turned again.” Right or left? M.J. asked herself. Right or left? “We kept heading deeper into the boonies, and climbing. Maybe here.”
He slowed, let her consider. The crossroads was narrow, cornered on one side by a stone house. A dog napped in the yard under the shade of a dying maple. Concrete ducks paddled over the grass.
“This could be it, to the left. I’m sorry, Jack, it’s hazy.”
“Look, we’ve got a full tank of gas and plenty of daylight. Don’t sweat it.”
He took the left, cruised along the curving road that climbed and dipped. The houses were spread out now, and the fields were crammed with corn high as a man’s waist. Where fields stopped, woods took over, growing thick and green, arching their limbs over the road so that it was a shady tunnel for the car to thread through.
They came to the rise of a hill, and the world opened up. A dramatic and sudden spread of green mountains, and land that rolled beneath them.
“Yes. Bailey almost wrecked the car when we topped this hill. If it is this hill,” she added. “I think that’s part of the state forest. She was dazzled by it. But we turned off again. One of these little roads that winds through the trees.”
“You’re doing fine. Tell me which one you want to try.”
“At this point, your guess is as good as mine.” She felt helpless, stupid. “It just looks different now. The trees are all thick. They just had that green haze on them when we came through.”
“We’ll give this one a shot,” he decided, and, flipping a mental coin, turned right.
It took only ten minutes for them to admit they were lost, and another ten to find their way out and onto a main road. They drove through a small town M.J. had no recollection of, then backtracked.
After an hour of wandering, M.J. felt her patience fraying. “How can you stay so calm?” she asked him. “I swear we’ve fumbled along every excuse for a road within fifty miles. Every street, lane and cow path. I’m going crazy.”
“My line of work takes patience. I ever tell you about tracking down Big Bill Bristol?”
She shifted in her seat, certain she’d never feel sensation in her bottom again. “No, you never told me about tracking down Big Bill Bristol. Are you
going to make this up?”
“Don’t have to.” To give them both a breather, he swung off the road. There was a small pulloff beside what he supposed could be called a swimming hole. Trees overhung dark water and let little splashes of sun hit the surface and bounce back. “Big Bill was up on assault. Lost his temper over a hand of seven-card stud and tried to feed the pot to his opponent. That was after he broke his nose and knocked the guy out. Big Bill is about six-five, two-eighty, and has hands the size of Minneapolis. He doesn’t like to lose. I know this for a fact, as I have spent the occasional evening playing games of chance with Big Bill.”
M.J. smiled winningly. “Gosh, Jack, I just can’t wait to meet your friends.”
Recognizing sarcasm when it was aimed at him, he merely slanted her a look. “In any case, Ralph fronted his bond, but Big Bill found out about a floating game in Jersey and didn’t want to miss out. The law frowns, not only on floating games, but on bail-jumping, and his bail was revoked. Bill was on the skip list.”
“And you went after him.”
“Well, I did.” Jack rubbed his chin, thought fleetingly about shaving. “It should have been cut-and-dried. Find the game, remind Bill he had to have his day in court, bring him back. But it seemed Bill had won large quantities of money in Jersey, and had moved on to another game. I should add that Bill is big, but not in the brain department. And he was on a hot streak, moving from game to game, state to state.”
“With Jack Dakota, bounty hunter, hot on his trail.”
“On his trail, anyway. A lot of it his back trail. If the jerk had planned to lose me, he couldn’t have done a better job. I crisscrossed the Northeast, hit every game.”
“How much did you lose?”
“Not enough to talk about.” He answered her grin. “I got into Pittsburgh about midnight. I knew there was a game, but I couldn’t bribe or threaten the location out of anyone. I’d been on Bill’s trail for four days, living out of my car and playing poker with guys named Bats and Fast Charlie. I was tired, dirty, down to my last hundred in cash. I walked into a bar.”
“Of course you did.”
“I’m telling the story,” he said, tugging her hair. “Picked it at random, no thought, no plan. And guess who was in the back room, holding a pair of bullets and bumping the pot?”
“Let’s see…. Could it have been…Big Bill Bristol?”
“In the flesh. Patience and logic had gotten me to Pittsburgh, but it was instinct that had me walking into that game.”
“How’d you get him to go back with you?”
“There I had a choice. I considered hitting him over the head with a chair. But more than likely that would have just annoyed him. I thought about appealing to his good nature, reminding him he owed Ralph. But he was still on that hot streak, and wouldn’t have given a damn. So I had a drink, joined the game. After a couple of hours, I explained the situation to Bill, and appealed to him on his own level. One cut of the cards. I draw high, he comes back with me, no hassle. He draws high, I walk away.”
“And you drew high?”
“Yeah, I did.” He scratched his chin again. “Of course, I’d palmed an ace, but like I said, brains weren’t Big Bill’s strong suit.”
“You cheated?”
“Sure. It was the clearest route through the situation, and everybody ended up happy.”
“Except Big Bill.”
“No, him, too. He’d had a nice run, had enough of the ready to pay off the guy whose skull he’d cracked. Charges dropped. No sweat.”
She cocked her head. “And what would you have done if he’d decided to welsh and not go back with you peacefully?”
“I’d have broken the chair over his head, and hoped to live through it.”
“Quite a life you lead, Jack.”
“I like it. And the moral of the story is, you just keep looking, follow logic. And when logic peters out, you go with instinct.” So saying, he reached into his pocket, drew out the stone. “The second stone is knowledge.” His eyes met hers. “What do you know, M.J.?”
“I don’t understand.”
“You know your friends. You know them better than I know Big Bill, or anyone else, for that matter.” He could come to envy her that, he realized. And would think on it more closely later. “They’re part of what you were, who you are, and, I guess, who you will be.”
Her chest went tight. “You’re getting philosophical on me, Dakota.”
“Sometimes that works, too. Trust your instincts, M.J.” He took her hand, closed it over the stone. “Trust what you know.”
Her nerves were suddenly on the surface of her skin, chilling it. “You expect me to use this thing like some sort of compass? Divining rod?”
“You feel that, don’t you?” It was a shock to him, as well, but his hands stayed steady, his eyes remained on hers. “It’s all but breathing. You know the thing about myths? If you reach down deep enough inside them, you pull out truth. The second stone is knowledge.” He shifted back, put his hands on the wheel. “Which way do you want to go?”
She was cold, shudderingly cold. Yet the stone was like a sun burning in her hand. “West.” She heard herself say it, knew it was odd for a city woman to use the direction, rather than simply right or left. “This is crazy.”
“We left sanity behind yesterday. No use trying to find that back trail. Just tell me which way you want to go. Which way feels right.”
So she held the stone gripped in her hand and directed him through the winding roads sided with trees and outcroppings of rock. Along a meandering stream that trickled low from lack of rain, past a little brown house so close that its door all but opened into the road.
“On the right,” M.J. said, through a throat dust-dry and tight as a drum. “You have to watch for it. We passed it, had to double back. Her lane’s narrow, just a cut through the woods. You can barely see it. She doesn’t have a mailbox. She goes into town and picks it up when she’s here. There.” her hand trembled a bit as she pointed. “Just there.”
He turned in. The lane was indeed narrow. Branches skimmed and scraped along the sides of the car as he drove slowly up, over gravel, around a curve that was sheltered by more trees.
And there, in the center of the lane, still as a stone statue, stood a deer with a pelt that glowed dark gold in the flash of sun.
It should be a white hind, Jack thought foolishly. A white hind is the symbol of a quest.
The doe watched the lumbering approach, her head up, her eyes wide and fixed. Then, with a flick of the tail, a quick spin of that gorgeous body, she leaped into the trees on thin, graceful legs. And was gone with barely a rustle.
The house was exactly as M.J. remembered. Tucked back on the hill, above a small, bubbling creek, it was a neat two stories that blended into the backdrop of woods. It was wood and glass, simple lines, with a long front porch painted a bold blue. Two white rockers sat on it, along with copper pots overflowing with trailing flowers.
“She’s been busy,” M.J. murmured, scanning the gardens. Flowers bloomed everywhere, wildly, as if unplanned. The flow of colors and shapes tumbled down the hill like a river. Wide wooden steps cut through the color, meandered to the left, then marched down to the lane.
“At the house in Potomac she hired a professional landscaper. She knew just what she wanted, but she had someone else do it. Here, she wanted to do everything herself.”
“It looks like a fairy tale.” He shifted, uncomfortable with his own impressions. He wasn’t exactly up on his fairy tales. “You know what I mean.”
“Yeah.”
A shiny blue pickup truck was parked at the end of the lane. But there was no sign of the car Grace would have driven to her country home. No dusty rental car announcing Bailey’s presence.
They’ve just gone to the store, M.J. told herself. They’ll be back any minute.
She wouldn’t believe they’d come this far, found the house, and not found Grace and Bailey.
The minute Jack pulled up
beside the truck, she was out and dashing toward the house.
“Hold it.” He gripped her arm, skidded her to a halt. “Let’s get the lay of the land here.” Gently he uncurled her fingers, took the stone. When it was tucked back in his pocket, he took her hand. “You said she leaves the truck here?”
“Yes. She drives a Mercedes convertible, or a little Beemer.”
“Your pal has three rides?”
“Grace rarely owns one of anything. She claims she doesn’t know what she’s going to be in the mood for.”
“There’s a back door?”
“Yeah, one out the kitchen, and another on the side.” She gestured to the right, fought to ignore the weight pressing against her chest. “It leads onto a little patio and into the woods.”
“Let’s look around first.”
There was a gardening shed, neatly filled with tools, a lawn mower, rakes and shovels. Where the lawn gave way, stepping-stones had been set, with springy moss growing between. More flowers—a raised bed with blooms and greenery spilling over the dark wall, and the cliff behind growing with ivy.
A hummingbird hovered at a bright red feeder, its iridescent wings blurred with speed. It darted off like a bullet at their approach, its whirl the only sound.
He spotted no broken windows or other signs of forced entry as they circled around the back, passed an herb garden fragrant with scents of rosemary and mint. Brass wind chimes hung silently near the rear door. Not a leaf stirred.
“It’s creepy.” She rubbed her arm. “Skulking around like this.”
“Let’s just skulk another minute.”
They came around the far side with the little patio. There, a glass table, a padded chaise, more flowers in concrete troughs and clay pots. Just beyond was a small pond with young ornamental grasses.
“That’s new.” M.J. paused to study. “She didn’t have that before. She talked about it, though. It looks fresh.”
“I’d say your pal’s done some planting this week. You think there’s a plant or flower in existence she’s missed?”