Flashback

by Cait London

  “Smart-ass.”

  In the bedroom, the sprawling bed where Mallory had died was mussed a little where someone had sat, probably the police or an investigator, scribbling on a notepad, listing the circumstances….

  “Where are you, Mallory? Where is the girl I knew? This isn’t you…it isn’t,” Rachel whispered fiercely, looking around the bedroom.

  Mirrors covered the closet doors, and cosmetics layered a mirrored vanity table, the colors stark, flashy. In the spacious bathroom, Mallory’s cosmetics ran across a counter, mixed with men’s toiletries. I love you, Kyle. Thanks, she’d written in red lipstick across the mirror.

  Kyle…. Rachel frowned, her body tensing. Years ago at twenty-two, Kyle Scanlon had arrived in town in a low, hot red sports car that he later sold to buy part interest in a rundown garage. At twenty and in college, Rachel hadn’t liked the big, tough-looking, angular Kyle, who wore long hair and sideburns and a lot of mechanic’s grease on his tight jeans. That tilt of his head and cocksure attitude said he didn’t care what she, what anyone, thought of him. Twenty-one-year-old Mallory had found Kyle to be fascinating and they’d begun a long-term open relationship. Kyle was thirty-five now, the sideburns were gone, and he’d settled into Neptune’s Landing with an ease that irritated Rachel.

  “If you’d never met him, Mallory, things would have been so different.”

  I love you, Kyle…. Written in lipstick, Mallory’s loopy script remained on the mirror, and behind it, Rachel’s reflection appeared. Careful application of cosmetics couldn’t conceal the shadows of grief and disbelief in her brown eyes. The wind had taken strands of her smooth shoulder-length hair from the band confining it, pulling it back from an average face, edgy and pale with emotion, lips tight with emotional pain. Rachel’s intent expression seemed to peer past the mirror to the woman who had written the note—her sister.

  Why had Mallory taken her life? Why had she turned away from her family? The answers all seemed to be twisted into one name—

  “Kyle. She wrote to Kyle. What was she thanking him for? For ruining her?” A woman who rarely got angry, Rachel was furious with the man she believed contributed to Mallory’s suicide, Kyle Scanlon. “She’s dead because of you.”

  Rachel hurried by the bed again, not wanting to picture how Mallory had sipped her champagne, swallowed her overdose, and had written her brief suicide note to her adoptive family. In the living room, Rachel studied the colorful array of liquor bottles on the minibar, the various glasses glittering from a rack above. She slowly ran her hand over the long black case that held Mallory’s cue, a gift from Trina. On impulse, Rachel opened the case and studied the two-piece custom-made “stick” with the inlaid design. She fitted the cue’s pieces together, studying the well-tended wood, the new tip. Mallory had always taken very good care of her cue, if not herself.

  “Okay, so I wasn’t invited in here for the last few years. You definitely did not want me here. Oh, sure, come see me at Mom’s house, or anywhere else, but here? Why not here? You owe me an explanation, Mallory. This is a hell of a cop-out.”

  I’m still here, you dope. I’ll always be here for you. Mallory’s whisper seemed to echo in the dank, airless shadows, almost so real that Rachel held very still, waiting….

  The wind howled, Nine Balls’ wooden sign on Atlantis Street creaked on its hinges, and the city’s garbage truck was grinding its way down the street, trash cans banging as they were emptied and discarded. The metallic rattling sound said the wind had caught one, sending it rolling down the pavement.

  The truck was running late; Tommy James, the owner of the garbage disposal company, had attended Mallory’s funeral today….

  Anger gave way to pain, and Rachel crumpled into a wide brown overstuffed chair, hugging herself. She kicked away the matching ottoman. “I do not want to think about what happened here, who you were with, or what you did with them. I loved you from the moment you came into class that day. I didn’t bring home a stray for Mom to adopt, someone to pity because your parents had deserted you. You were my sister, the same as Jada, and you couldn’t trust me with whatever drove you to this? After all we’d been through?”

  She should have come home more, tried to spend more time with Mallory.

  In the last few years, Mallory’s drinking had increased, and she’d become a shadow of herself, bitter, cynical, cold.

  And desperate and terribly afraid. Fear seemed to haunt her, and at times, she’d stare at Rachel as if she’d wanted to tell some horrible secret….

  Sisters shared secrets, didn’t they? What did Mallory fear?

  Was it so bad that she had to die to escape?

  “Too bad, Mallory. I owe you and I’m going to pay you back—somehow. What a crappy thing to do, leaving me owing you,” Rachel whispered through a throat tightened by emotion. “I am going to pay you back, and don’t you dare leave here until I do.”

  You don’t owe me a thing, kiddo, Mallory had said years ago.

  “You know I do, dammit, and hell yes, I’m going to pay you back. Damn you.”

  Her emotions shifted from anger to grief instantly. “You never did play fair, Mallory. I love you—”

  Anxious to hurry away, Rachel jerked open the door and a man towered over her. His face was in shadow and his collar was turned up against the cold mist and wind. It could be any one of Mallory’s—Then Shane Templeton, the minister who had presided over Mallory’s funeral, turned his head slightly and the wind riffled his soft, fine hair. He smoothed it and spoke softly. “I saw you coming here. We haven’t really had a chance to talk, and I thought you might need someone to talk to, here—where Mallory lived and died so wrongly.”

  “I—yes, come in.”

  “But you were just leaving. I don’t want to keep you. We can talk some other time. Mallory came to me for counseling, you know.”

  “No, I didn’t. I’d like to hear more, Reverend Templeton.”

  “Please call me by my first name. Perhaps that will make this easier. I’m sorry we’ve never met, though your sister always spoke so highly of your achievements.” Shane entered the living room and Rachel closed the door. “Chilly outside.”

  “It’s cold in here, too.” She clicked on a lamp and studied Shane’s fine-boned face, his full curved lips. “Tell me about Mallory, how you knew her. In the last two years, she—we were a little estranged.”

  Tall and angular and in his late thirties, Shane Templeton was dressed in a full-length dark coat, a dark red turtleneck sweater showing at his throat. His brown hair slid diagonally across his pale brow, softening his narrow face. He glanced around the apartment and then looked closely at Rachel. “I tried to reach her. I told her of the love waiting for her if she would just accept it. Your sister was a wonderful, rich person, you know. Very strong, until—”

  “I know.”

  “Her biological parents were alcoholic, did you know?”

  That fact startled Rachel. “No, I didn’t. She was always very closed about her childhood, before Mom adopted her. We knew that she wasn’t well tended.”

  His blue eyes were fierce, his voice hard. “She was only a child, suffering so much, barely enough food to eat, raised in filth. I felt so helpless as I listened to her. I wanted to comfort her.”

  His tone changed to melodious and calming, his expression gentle. Set in that sharp hawkish face, his blue eyes were kind, and at odds with his angular features, his lips seemed soft with compassion. “I think I gave her something she needed, a little bit…I hope I did. She was such a lovely person.”

  “Mom and Jada told me that Mallory helped at church functions for a time.”

  Shane was staring at the print of the Louvre. He moved to level the frame. “I gave her that. Something to dream about, to have some motivation to get out in life, to travel. It’s a wonderful place, really—France, I mean…. I tried to get her involved with the other women in the church. But there was always something she held apart; some dark recess within her blocked off co
mmunication. She respected your family, though. She loved you all very much.”

  He looked around the living room. “Yes, this place is very chilly. She warmed it with her presence. I wonder if you feel that she’s still here. Sometimes loved ones say that—for a time, then the grief eases and they are able to let go….”

  “I don’t think I can ever let go of her. Mallory was my sister. I loved her.”

  “She was easy to love, so warm and friendly—I gave her a Bible and I wonder—I wonder if it would be too much to ask to return it. I’d like to keep it as a memory of a woman who tried, and use it as an inspiration for other lost souls.”

  Rachel touched his arm and found him shaking. “I’m so glad she had you. I haven’t really been through her things, but yes, if I find it, I’ll see that you get it.”

  “Sometimes people wrapped in grief need a helping hand in dealing with the deceased’s effects. Please let me help. I am rarely surprised at anything, though Mallory did like to play the shock game with me.” He smiled and placed his hand over hers. It was soft and pale, a match to his scholarly appearance. “I would welcome the chance to help your family in your time of need. Please do call me.”

  After Shane had gone, Rachel again caught the slightest vanilla scent, Mallory’s favorite before she began using heavier musks. “Mallory?”

  Rachel shook her head; her sister was gone, and her senses were probably influenced by emotions and grief as Shane had said happened.

  She closed her eyes and heard echoes of a child’s delighted giggle. She saw a young Mallory with matchstick legs and arms running across the beach, diving headfirst into the waves, then turning to dare Jada and Rachel to come into the icy water.

  One look around the apartment told Rachel that child had gone forever, long before Mallory actually died.

  Yet, Rachel sensed that her sister was near. “Don’t you dare leave yet. I’m not done with you,” she stated angrily.

  Then, softer, uneasily, she whispered, “Mallory? You’re still here, aren’t you?”

  You betcha, kiddo.

  Rachel frowned, chilled by the room. On the day of her sister’s funeral, she was too emotional, still attached to Mallory though the last years were difficult. Mallory’s voice and phrases were still trapped inside Rachel’s head, reoccurring with the memories.

  She cursed quietly, though no one could hear but the walls where her sister had led the last bit of her life.

  Silence fell around her, stiff and unyielding, because Mallory wasn’t coming back. “I need you, Mallory. And you aren’t here. That’s enough to make me really mad, you know.”

  Rachel wrapped her arms around herself. “Once upon a time, there were three sisters. Wasn’t it always supposed to be that way? Forever?”

  Mallory’s last words to Rachel echoed around her. “Things change, sugar plum. We’re not in fairy land here, you know…. We’re different, the high achiever/no boundaries/success story girl—that’s you, in case you didn’t know. Then there’s me…low class and always will be. You’re not changing me, and no one can change your mind, once you set it to something. I admire that, I really do. My sister, the high achiever.”

  “I loved you. Didn’t that matter?” Rachel demanded furiously of the cold, empty room, and her words echoed in the silence….

  Two

  AT THE BOTTOM OF THE APARTMENT’S STAIRS, RACHEL wiped her tears with her jacket sleeve. But expensive, trendy brown leather didn’t absorb grief very well and she cursed again.

  The broody hours following Mallory’s funeral had been rough, and she wasn’t ready to return to her mother’s house until she had given Kyle Scanlon a good piece of the hell she was feeling.

  It’d been three days since flying from New York to help her grieving mother and sister with arrangements for Mallory’s funeral. Now Rachel inhaled the fresh spring air. She grimly licked away a lingering teardrop, straightened her shoulders, and started walking toward the outskirts of town. Before she left for her four A.M. New York flight, she was going to rip a good chunk off Kyle’s backside. All the high board fences and locked chain link gates in the world couldn’t protect him now.

  Less than a quarter of a mile away, the Pacific Ocean’s waves pounded furiously against the jutting rocks and sandy beach. The wind carried the sound to Rachel; it equaled her frustrated anger. Her fingers curled into fists. “Scanlon actually had the nerve to come to the funeral,” she said to herself.

  He had the nerve to leer at Rachel when she was glaring at him, warning him that if he didn’t leave, she’d—

  But then a man with two ex-wives who occasionally lived with him—at the same time—probably didn’t care. Just the same, busy with ex-wives, or the assortment of down-on-their-luck characters who he seemed to collect now and then, he should have done something to stop Mallory.

  Rachel tossed back her head, and the wind took her hair flying away from her face, the mist damp upon it. She picked up the pace, cutting across an empty lot that was being cleaned for building. She skirted a heaping pile of upended tree trunks and brush and a bulldozer gleaming like a yellow monster in the streetlights. Her black designer slacks caught on a branch and Rachel stopped to tug free. The branch was sizeable and attached to a tree trunk, the roots stuck out of the ground like an eerie hag’s frazzled hair. On her way to serve Kyle Scanlon just what she thought of him, Rachel yanked at the cloth and her slacks tore, freeing her. Unbalanced too quickly, she stumbled backward.

  The mud puddle surrounding her backside was cold, and she scrambled to her feet. But nothing could stop her from telling Kyle where to go. Where to burn everlastingly.

  The mist carried the scent of the damp spring earth. Mallory’s favorite flower, the daffodil, would soon be blooming—without her….

  An image of young Mallory, running with a fat bouquet of daffodils in her arms, beaming as she gave them to Trina, her new “Mom,” floated by on the wind. Rachel fought the tears brimming to her eyes, wiping them with her hand.

  For exactly the two hundredth and second time that day, Rachel braced herself. She didn’t want “the man-who-had-ruined-Mallory” to see her crying. She wanted to burn him with curse words, flay him into a repentant, spineless, sniveling—And that would take some doing. That confident male, baby-I’ve-got-what-you-want curve of those hard lips was always there.

  But something else had linked Kyle to Rachel today, and it had troubled her.

  Kyle had appeared at the funeral in a navy blue dress suit, a pale blue shirt that set off the vibrant color of his eyes, and a fashionable, expensive tie. For once, his dark brown waving hair was neatly clipped, and he didn’t look like the mechanic who spent most of his time repairing classic cars. Tall and imposing in a suit that contrasted his usual careless shirt, jeans and boots, Kyle’s narrowed stare had softened as he looked at Rachel, and something she didn’t understand had briefly passed between them—and she felt the need to move into his arms, to be held safely.

  On the flip side of that quivering emotion, was the sense that perhaps he needed to be comforted, too…. With his ex-wives and revolving door of down-on-their-luck strays, it was difficult to perceive that Kyle Scanlon actually needed anyone.

  When he’d stood beside the casket, Kyle’s big shoulders had tensed beneath the suit, his legs braced apart, and for just a moment, his fists tightened as he looked at Shane Templeton, the minister who stood amid a cluster of mourners. In profile, Kyle’s jaw was rigid, his mouth compressed into a hard line.

  Shane’s eyes had momentarily widened, his head going back as though he’d taken a slap. But then, the two men in Mallory’s life—one who played within social boundaries and one who didn’t—understandably wouldn’t like each other.

  When Kyle Scanlon had bent over Mallory’s casket, something like tenderness had shifted into those hard-set features. He’d reached to straighten the collar of her dress just as a caring brother would.

  Maybe, just maybe there was an ounce of regret that he’d ruined
Mallory’s life, that he hadn’t prevented her suicide….

  That ounce of humanity wasn’t taking him off Rachel’s hit list. Brush tore at her clothing and she’d snagged her leather jacket, tearing a button away, but nothing was keeping her from Kyle. She trudged down the sidewalk of another two blocks, building her anger. “I’ve never hit anyone, but you, Scanlon, you’ve got yours coming before I fly back to New York.”

  The powerful motor of the city garbage truck ground beside her. Tommy James’s head poked out of the cab’s window, his face shadowed by a baseball cap. “Need a lift?”

  “No, thanks. I’m just out for a walk.” Tommy had always been nice and was probably eager to get home to his wife and two little girls. He was the same age as Rachel, thirty-three, and he’d gotten married right out of high school.

  Most of Rachel’s high school friends were married now and had children. But after seeing her mother’s struggles, marriage and children had been far from Rachel’s plans. She’d wanted an education, a high-paying, challenging job, and independence, and now, as a top human resource officer for a major insurance company, she had them all.

  On the other hand, she had lost touch with a sister who needed her…. Mallory—I wasn’t there for you…I should have been….

  The garbage truck’s gears shifted, grinding slightly as it prowled beside her. “Didn’t get to say how sorry I was about Mallory. She had a hard time in the last few years. Personally, I mean. No matter what happened, Mallory tried to help kids get off the street with her junior league pool programs on Saturday mornings. She got those kids into tournament play, too.”

  Mallory had wanted to give something back to kids like herself, the unloved discarded ones. “I’m okay, Tommy…Just needing to walk it off. I know you want to get home to your family.”

  Tommy studied her for a moment, then the gears shifted again and the engine revved. “Sally Mae said to call her if you or your family needed anything. She sure did enjoy the ladies’ get-together at Nine Balls…a night away from the kids and house. Tell Trina and Jada that we’re thinking of them, will you?”