Damned if she wasn’t too foolish to take her own advice. Her voice soft and unsteady, she stared at the photo that she held in both hands and asked what she didn’t want to know. “And you, John? Where were you when Tom died and Janie got hurt? Were you in the car with them?”
Reaching across the table, he pulled the wallet from her hands, closed and clutched it tightly. With a look as bereaved as any she’d ever seen, he met her gaze and bluntly, brutally answered, “In the car with them? I was driving the damned thing. Tom died because of me. Do you understand?”
She lowered her gaze, made uneasy by the intensity in his eyes, unwilling to witness such grief. She knew too much already about this stranger; she didn’t want to know this. She didn’t want to face what a terrible burden of guilt he’d been carrying all these years. She didn’t want to know that if he had, indeed, lost his grip on reality, he’d certainly had a hell of a good reason for it.
Because she wasn’t looking, when he touched her, she wasn’t prepared for it. He reached out, lifting her chin, raising her face until she felt compelled to meet his gaze again. There was a horrible sort of acceptance in his expression, as if nothing he ever did could possibly make this all right. His family would hate him for it forever—My mother wishes I were dead. My father wishes I had never been born—but he would hate himself more. He would punish himself more severely, more mercilessly, than they ever could.
“Do you understand what I’m saying, Teryl?” he asked, his voice quiet and empty of emotion, his fingers gentle against her skin, almost a caress.
She wanted to pull away, wanted to break the contact with him, to change the subject or get up and walk away, wanted to do anything that would bring this conversation to an end now. But she could do nothing. She couldn’t raise her hand from the tabletop to push his away. She couldn’t make her brain put together a rational thought. She couldn’t give the commands to her body to move, to slide out of the booth and stand up.
She couldn’t do anything but sit there and listen to damningly bleak words she didn’t want to hear.
He made her hear them anyway.
“I killed my brother.”
Chapter Six
Georgia looked like Alabama, John thought, which looked like Mississippi, which looked much like Louisiana. After only a few days back in the South, he remembered why he’d left the freighter in New Orleans and settled in Colorado to work on the first book. He had come to hate the heat and the humidity, had despised the steaminess of summer and the sameness of winter. He had grown tired of the Southern landscape, the oaks and magnolias, the azaleas and the Spanish moss, and especially the pine trees and the kudzu that crept over everything. He had loathed the lushness made possible by the temperate climate, had found it suffocatingly close, an overwhelming reminder of a South American jungle he had once traveled through. He had craved space, had needed a place where nature wasn’t so rich and ripe and threatening to overrun.
He had thought he could find peace in the mountains. After all, many of the best times in his life had taken place in the mountains that ranged through California.
But so had the worst time in his life.
At least he’d found the space he needed. He had found a life he could live.
But it wasn’t his life anymore.
In the last fifteen miles he had watched in the rearview mirror as the sun set, turning the western sky shades of lavender and pink that gradually darkened to deep purple. He liked sunsets. He liked sunrises, too. Endings and beginnings. He hadn’t had enough of them. When Tom had died and Janie had wound up in a wheelchair, so many possibilities had ended. So many beginnings had been cut off before they’d started.
It was time to stop for the night. He dreaded it—dreaded sharing a room and nothing more with Teryl, dreaded the discomfort and the awkwardness. Most of all he dreaded a repeat of those miserable minutes with the telephone cord. If only there were some other way… If only he could trust her…
But there was no other way to get the few minutes of privacy he required, and he couldn’t trust her. If he left her alone and unbound, she would escape. No matter what he piled in front of the door, she would somehow manage to get out, and without her, his chances of ever proving anything would drastically decrease.
He wasn’t sure they were very good with her.
They were on the outskirts of Atlanta, traveling a wide thoroughfare bordered on both sides with gas stations, fast food, convenience stores, and an abundance of cheap motels. On his occasional trips into Denver, he usually stayed at the nicest place in the city, with valets to park his truck, bellmen to carry his luggage, and a concierge to fulfill his every request. What a step down the Heart of the South Motel was. They checked in at the office, then went across the street to buy a box of fried chicken with all the trimmings to take back to the room. This time, since Teryl had the food, he carried both suitcases inside.
For a moment they both simply stood right inside the door. The outside hadn’t been too promising, he admitted as he gazed around, but this room was, if possible, even smaller, uglier, and drabber than the one last night in Mississippi. The walls were paneled in dark brown, the carpet was threadbare, and one of the two mattresses sagged into a clearly visible crater. There were only two lights in the entire room, neither exceeding forty watts, and even those dimmed when he turned on the air conditioner, which ran with a tremendous amount of noise but produced very little cool air.
Teryl sighed and automatically turned toward the bed farthest from the door. He wouldn’t blame her if she complained about the fact that her sandals stuck just a little to the damned carpet or about the heat that the air conditioner was doing little to relieve, but she didn’t say a word. She simply sat down on the bed, removed her shoes, drew her feet onto the bed, and began unpacking their dinner on the nightstand.
As meals went, this one was nothing to brag about. The chicken was greasy; when they wiped their hands, little bits of paper from the napkins stuck to their fingertips. The mashed potatos were instant and the gravy tasted as if it came from a package, too, but the cole slaw was good and the biscuits were buttery and just a little bit sweet.
After a while, he broke the silence. “You like legs, huh?”
She glanced down at the napkin in front of her, where the remains of three drumsticks were lined up. “It’s my favorite piece. Mama used to fry chicken every Sunday for dinner; she would do a whole fryer, plus a couple dozen legs so there would be enough for all the kids.”
“What do your parents do?”
The look she gave him was on the blank side. “I told you. They raise kids.”
“But doesn’t one of them work?”
Disdain sneaked into her expression and her voice. “You try raising a dozen or more kids who aren’t your own, who have been mistreated or abandoned or abused since they were babies, and see if that’s not work.”
“I know that’s work,” he said, his patience exaggerated. “I just meant something outside the home—you know, something that pays a salary and helps support all those kids. Or does foster parenthood pay better than I realized?”
“They get some money from the state to help cover expenses, but it’s not enough. They don’t do it for the money. No one does.” She made an impatient gesture. “There’s not enough money in the world to make taking in someone like D.J. or Carrie or Rico worthwhile.”
He assumed Carrie and Rico were two of her adopted or foster siblings. He focused on the one he was already familiar with. “What’s wrong with D.J.?”
“Nothing.”
But she answered too quickly, and there was too much avoidance in her gaze, to be telling the truth. “Was she mistreated, abandoned, or abused when she was a kid?”
Ignoring his question, she reached for the box of chicken, sorting through it until she found the fourth and last drumstick, but once she had it, she merely picked at it—peeling off strips of crispy skin, then long slivers of dark meat. He watched and waited for her answer wh
ile she scooped a spoonful of mashed potatos onto her paper plate, then claimed one of the last two biscuits from the smaller box.
Finally she looked at him again, her eyes dark, her expression serious, the set of her mouth regretful. “Let’s just say D.J.’s parents had a strange way of showing their affection and leave it at that, okay?”
For the first time in months longer than he wanted to remember, his writer’s curiosity was piqued. If he spent much time thinking about it, it wouldn’t be long at all before he’d created an entire background for her friend, a history starting before her birth and extending through the present and on into the future. He would create evil—people who should have loved her, people who should have helped her—and balance it with good—people who did love her, who did help her, although possibly too late—and soon he would have the bare-bones outline of a story. It would be a story of revenge, he thought. A story that everyone appalled by the horrible things people did to their children could relate to. A story of a hurting, helpless, innocent child grown into a strong, powerful woman who could make the people who had once hurt her very, very sorry.
But right now he wasn’t interested in D.J.’s story—not the real-life horrors she had lived through or the fictional background he could make up for her.
Right now he was interested in Teryl, in learning everything he could about her.
“So neither of your parents has an outside job. How do they manage?”
“My mother has some money.”
“You told me Wednesday that they didn’t,” he reminded her. It had been shortly after she’d finally realized that she’d been kidnapped, and they had been sitting on the shoulder alongside Interstate 10. I’m not worth anything to you, she had said. I don’t have any money. My family doesn’t have any money. She had been scared and pleading.
So had he. Don’t make me hurt you, Teryl. I need you.
Now he watched her flush and shift uneasily, obviously fearful that she’d just made a major mistake. “Not ready cash,” she said, studying her food intently. “It’s in a trust. It’s all tied up in taking care of the kids.”
He could tell her that he wasn’t interested in money, not her mother’s or anyone else’s. If she didn’t believe him, he could even open his suitcase and show her the cash he’d stuffed in a zippered black shaving kit. Last week in Denver, after hearing the news about Simon Tremont and his new book, after discovering that no mail—other than a few cards from Janie—had been delivered to his box in the last four months, he had gone to the bank and closed out the two accounts where he kept ready cash. Unsure of what the problem was and how long it would take to resolve it, he’d taken the money in cash—all $130,000 of it.
But he was pretty sure that finding out he was carrying over a hundred grand in his battered suitcase would have exactly the opposite effect of reassurance on her. She would probably think that he had held up a bank or embezzled it from his employer or some other nonsense. She would probably see it as one more reason why she should be afraid of him.
She wouldn’t think it just might be a reason to believe in him.
In an effort to ease her wariness, he turned the conversation away from the issue of money and back more directly to her parents. “The decision to take in a bunch of special needs kids can’t be an easy one. What made your folks decide to do it?”
She didn’t relax right away; there was still doubt and distrust in her movements, jerky and graceless, as she broke her biscuit in half and took a bite from the top half, the crusty, buttery half. But slowly, degree by visible degree, calm replaced nervousness. The guarded air about her gave way to a more natural openness. “They wanted a large family, but after I was born, something happened. They couldn’t have any more kids of their own, so they decided to open their home to kids who needed one—to kids who needed them.”
“Didn’t you resent the other kids?”
Looking truly puzzled, she stopped eating to stare at him. “Why would I resent them?”
“They were your parents,” he said with a shrug, “but you had to share them with all these strangers who had no claim on them, strangers who needed extra time, extra attention, extra affection. They must have had to spread themselves pretty thin to take care of everyone. Surely you must have felt slighted at some time.”
“I never did.” Her tone was emphatic, her manner insulted. “These strangers were kids, for heaven’s sake—sad little kids who’d been through more pain and sorrow in a few years than most adults experience in a lifetime.” Then she softened. “My parents had an awful lot of time and attention and love to give. No one got left out. No one felt slighted.” She pulled the last piece of crust from the biscuit, then tossed the tender insides onto the napkin with the bones. Before she ate that piece, though, she asked a hesitant question. “Did you resent Tom?”
The unexpected mention of his brother made him stiffen. He had talked more about Tom today than he had in the last seventeen years combined. In the past the things he’d had to say had been too personal, too painful, and the guilt had been too raw. There had never been anyone to listen, anyone to understand or sympathize, anyone to offer something other than damnation for his deeds. There had never been anyone he could trust with his brother’s name, with his brother’s memory.
But he instinctively trusted Teryl, and because he did, he forced himself to ignore the ever-present pain, the guilt, the damnation. He forced himself to answer, and to answer honestly. “Yes, I did.”
“Because he was so perfect?”
Using one of the wet towelettes that had come with dinner, he wiped his hands, then stretched out on the bed, propped a pillow beneath his head, and gazed up at the ceiling. There were water spots there, seeping in from above the window and spreading outward in a yellow-hued stain. “My parents wanted a perfect son and a perfect daughter, and they got them. Unfortunately, they got me in between,” he said, then sighed. “I didn’t resent Tom. I resented that he came first. I resented that he found it so easy to live up to our parents’ expectations. I resented that, compared to him, I looked even more incompetent and inept than I actually was—and, believe me, our parents were always comparing me to him. I resented that he did everything right and I did everything wrong. But I never resented him.”
“Any parent can love a perfect child. It takes someone special to love the rest of us.” There was a faint smile in her voice when she went on. “Words of wisdom from Debra Jane Howell.”
Still staring at the ceiling, he smiled just a little bit, too. “I figured D.J. stood for something like Dorothy Josephine or Dorcas June. Debra Jane’s not a bad name. Why does she go by D.J.? Was she a tomboy growing up?”
That earned what was surely almost a laugh from her. He liked the sound of it. He would like to hear her really laugh, would like to see her really smile. He would like to see her smile at him.
He’d had so few normal relationships in his life, especially with women. Of course, he’d had girlfriends, back when he was a teenager. He’d gone steady with one girl all through high school, a typical California girl—nearly six feet tall, blond, leggy, athletic. They’d known each other from first grade on. They’d shared friends, hot summer days at the beach, and sex as good as it ever got for most teenagers.
He had liked her a lot, but they had broken up after high school. Chrissy—as smart as Tom, as popular as Janie—had gone to college back East on a scholarship, and he had begun seeing other girls, girls who didn’t care about much of anything but sex, which was fair because that was about all he’d been interested in. By the time he’d gotten old enough to appreciate the distinction between girls and women, he’d been out of the market for relationships of any sort. There had been the occasional encounter of a sexual nature, but, except for his arrangement with Marcia, never more than that.
He hadn’t realized until he’d met Teryl exactly how much he missed having more.
Across the room, she was answering his last question. “Not in this lifetime. D.J.’s
always been a perfect little…”
While she decided how to complete the description, he considered a few possibilities. A perfect little lady? A perfect little angel?
But he was way off the mark, he realized, when she finally finished. “A perfect little vamp. Her family had called her Debra Jane, so when she moved in with us, she chose to go by her initials. It was her way of starting over, I guess. A new home, a new family, a new chance, and a new name.”
Vamp. It was an odd word, and it seemed even odder coming from Teryl, describing her best friend. It was a word he might use in a book—a perfect little vamp, a perfect little tramp—but not in conversation, not to describe anyone he knew. Its connotations were too distinctly negative.
Maybe Teryl wasn’t aware of that. Maybe the word, for her, meant nothing more than seductive, feminine, charming.
Or maybe she knew those negative connotations all too well.
He knew from research for one of his early books that there were a thousand different ways for kids to respond to abuse, neglect, and abandonment. Hell, he knew it to some extent from experience. As far as his parents were concerned, they had fulfilled their obligations to him: they had given him food, a place to live, and clothes to wear. They had even helped pay for his two years in college. But if they had ever loved him—truly, unconditionally, the way parents were supposed to—he couldn’t remember it. The soothing, the loving, the affection in his life had come from Tom and, later, Janie. He had a memory or two of being cuddled by his mother, but only when he was very young. The older he had gotten and the more obvious it had become that he wasn’t another Tom, the rarer those moments had become. Neither his mother nor his father had had any patience with a clumsy, awkward, slow-to-learn kid who reminded them with his mere presence that, yes, they were capable of producing a brilliant child like Tom, but they were also capable of producing an unremarkable, less-than-average kid like him.
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