He didn’t wait for a reply before snatching the tray off the counter. But that didn’t save him from hearing them whispering in the parlor, Estelle confiding how she’d seen him drop into a crouch behind her desk.
He nearly bumped into Dana in the hallway, which was lit only by a tiny night-light at knee level. She was emerging from the bathroom, and she smelled of Ivory soap and spearmint. He hesitated, worried that she might have overheard the TV. That she’d believe she had made love to some kind of psycho.
“It was…it was so kind of Mrs. Lockett to leave me the toothbrush and the comb and everything. I need to thank her for it, to thank her for everything she’s done.”
Relief rippled through his tensed limbs. She didn’t know, not yet.
Her gaze dropped to the tray in his hands. “And this is nice, too, but I still don’t think I can—”
“That’s the trick,” he said. “Don’t think. Do you want to eat it in the bedroom?”
“I’m not…I’m not ready to face anyone. Anyone else, I mean.” Without meeting his gaze she slipped back into the room.
He followed her and closed the door behind them, giving in to the absurd fear that Estelle’s story would scuttle in on spider’s legs to whisper the ugly truth in Dana’s ear. Tell her first, his conscience urged him. Before she hears the Izzy Jablonski version from someone else.
She propped the pillows against the headboard, then sat down and pulled the sheet over her thighs. In the lamplight she looked a little better for her cleanup, but her face was pale, and she had a raw-looking scrape beneath her right eye.
With a sigh she told him, “I could sleep forever. And you look tired, too.”
He pulled a delicate cane-bottomed chair next to the bed, and then thought better of putting his weight on it. As he set the tray down on the nightstand, he said, “I caught a few Zs this afternoon, but there’s been lots to do.”
Say it. But the warmth in her expression made it harder. It could be a long, dry stretch before anybody looked at him that way again. The kind of women he craved tended to be skittish around nationally known nut jobs. Especially those given to unprovoked attacks.
“Soup or sandwich first?” he asked.
She reached for the milk instead and took a polite sip, apparently thinking to appease him. She moved to put it down again, but seemed to change her mind before draining three-quarters of the glass.
“I didn’t realize I was so thirsty.” At her stomach’s growl she glanced down. “Hungry, too, apparently.”
“Your body has its own agenda, no matter what’s going on in your head.” His pulse quickened and his muscles tensed. It won’t get any easier, so just go ahead and do it. “It was like that for me in the hospital.”
She touched the side of the soup bowl, then took the sandwich plate instead. “You were in the hospital? Were you hurt when your men…Were you injured in the Middle East?”
“Not physically.” It was all he could do to meet her gaze directly.
“Post-traumatic stress?”
He swallowed painfully, hating this, hating himself. And then he forced himself to nod.
“That’s perfectly understandable,” she said. “Anyone who saw what you did, who saw people killed, would naturally be shaken. Even animals, after something scares them badly—”
“There was…there was an incident when I came home. A mistake I made. In a crowded theater. First movie I saw stateside—or tried to see.” It had damned sure been the last one, too.
She picked a few green chunks of jalapeño from the beer bread and laid them on the plate’s rim like a garnish. “Tell me,” she invited, no judgment in her voice.
He grimaced. “With everything you’ve been through, maybe now’s not the time. You’ve got plenty on your mind without me—”
“Could be I’ll feel better hearing about somebody else’s trouble for a change.” She nibbled a corner of the sandwich half and chewed it woodenly. Moisture seeped from one eye, and she reached up to wipe it.
“Don’t do that.” He shook out her white cloth napkin. “You get jalapeño oil in that eye, you’ll really have something to cry over.”
She went very still while he carefully blotted the leaking tear. Once he had finished she scooted over. “Sit down, will you, please? My neck’s stiff, and it hurts to look up.”
He sat on the edge of the bed. If Estelle and Mamie saw, there’d be talk around town. But considering the newscast, that toothless bit of gossip would have to take a number.
“I wouldn’t have brought it up now,” he said. “Except…this thing that happened…they’ve put it on the news. Made it sound like I’m some kind of menace—and maybe that’s what I am.”
“Then tell me what really happened,” she said. “Because I’ve already seen how twisted up these stories get once they pass through the vulture’s bowels. Believe me, a certain reporter who’s been spreading vile dirt about my family is about to have a day of reckoning. She’s my mother’s friend, or so we all thought. She wasn’t the same witch trashing you? Regina Lawler?”
Jay shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
Then he told her the true story. How carefully he’d chosen the movie in the first place: a mindless comedy a cop buddy had suggested might help him remember how to laugh. How a preview trailer for another flick had put him all wrong with its billowing explosions that conjured up the smoke and smells and screams of that night at the checkpoint. How when he’d seen a tall man in a turban, silhouetted over pyrotechnics, he had leaped on instinct, his shoulder slamming the man’s sternum and bringing him down hard.
How his “terrorist” had shamed Jay with his understanding, despite the blood and stitches and his own son’s horror. Or maybe the professor had been scared to raise a fuss, fearful of calling any more attention to his heritage in a post-9/11 world.
“But the worst part was the screaming—and how everybody looked at me when my friend said I was just back from the Middle East. They’d started out scared, confused about what happened. Then I saw it turn to pity, heard some people start to argue that we shouldn’t even be there. That I was no better than any of the psycho baby-killers back from Vietnam.”
“Oh, Jay. I’m so sorry.” Dana put down the sandwich. “I don’t care how people feel about the war. There’s no excuse for that behavior. You made a commitment and stood by it, a commitment to your country.”
“Sure, they had an excuse for talking that way. I was crazy, Dana—acting like a first-class nutcase.”
“It was an accident.”
“What I did was dangerous, and it could’ve been a lot worse if my buddy hadn’t been there to restrain me. That’s why I checked into the VA to get myself evaluated.”
“But they helped you? Right? I mean, I haven’t seen any signs—”
“I did a few of the group sessions—counseling, I guess you’d call it. But it was hard being around a lot of people stateside. Their priorities…I didn’t get them. And the noise. The cell phones and the TVs and the Starbucks and the strip malls and the music and—”
“So that’s why you came out here,” she guessed, “to escape America—or as much of it as you could.”
He nodded, shrugged a shoulder. “That and the fact that the Dallas PD wouldn’t have me back. Not without extensive treatment. Maybe not even after that.”
“It would’ve been a good idea, Jay, to work things through in counseling. Hiding from the problem—”
“You think I want to live off the government on some kind of psychiatric disability?” he burst out. “That even if I could work again with something like that on my record, I’d beg and plead and jump through hoops to get help from the system? Who’d ever let me carry a gun, knowing something could set me off again? I was broken up about my uncle’s death, but I was also damned lucky to have an offer from the one place where the name Eversole’s worth something, where they wouldn’t look too closely at my references or background. Because not everybody’s got a rich family to hel
p them. Not everybody’s got a safety net when things don’t pan out like they should.”
Dana stiffened. “I’m well aware of that, Jay. But I’m not about to apologize for mine. For one thing, as you might have noticed, it hasn’t exactly bought me a special dispensation against all things unpleasant.”
The chill in her voice lingered, freezing the narrow space between them.
“You didn’t deserve that. See? It’s just one more way of lashing out at others. And one more reason you should stay away from me. Because I’m screwed up, Dana.”
She smiled without a trace of humor. “Maybe that’s the big attraction. Because anybody else would take one look at my life and start running. Even before the thing with Angie, my fiancé already decided I was a bad bet.”
Relieved at the change of subject, he said, “I thought we’d pretty well established the man’s an idiot with no taste.”
“But possibly good survival instincts.”
He faltered through a smile. “Well, you’d have to have suicidal instincts to take a chance on me. For one thing, now that that story’s out, my days as sheriff here are probably numbered. And even if I stay, this is no place for any woman. No place for anyone but scorpions and rattlers and a very few lost souls.”
“Everybody gets lost, Jay. We all wander through one desert or another in our lifetime. There’s still time for you to get whatever help you need to put yourself back on track and return to Dallas, or go anywhere you like.”
“Cops handle things. They don’t go cry on some shrink’s shoulder or snivel around some lame-ass sharing circle and pass the tissue box. And they sure as hell don’t respect any cop who does.”
She made a face. “Oh, so it’s a macho issue. I see. Then you’ll forgive me if I don’t make time to listen to it anymore.”
“You don’t have to listen. Just eat.”
When she only stared, he added, “Unless you want me to feed you. Or call the old-lady brigade in here to do it.”
Her look reflected his mood: sullen, bordering on mean. But she picked up the soup bowl nonetheless and started spooning.
“I’ve got some other things to see to,” he said. “I’ll check in with you in the morning. Meanwhile, I want you to get some rest and lie low. As far as I’m concerned, you’re still in danger as long as you’re here and there’s a killer out there, God knows where.”
Chapter Twenty
Dear sis,
Those prayers you promised must have helped, because it seems we’ve dodged a bullet. Nikki’s fever’s finally down, and she’s eating a little this morning, even smiling.
For how long, no one can guess. With the birth mother dead, we’re almost out of other options. If she’d only listed the father on the original certificate, there might have been some chance. But now? Now we’re using the publicity (or the “public evisceration,” as John is calling it) to go out on the news and ask perfect strangers to be typed for the National Marrow Donor Registry. I know it would take a miracle to find a match in time, but aren’t we due a big break about now?
—E-mail message from Laurie Harrison
Thursday, July 5, 10:49 P.M.
82 Degrees Fahrenheit
The house lay in dark silence when Dana awakened, saturated with too much sleep, too many aches, and far too many memories that cut like shards of broken glass.
Though she’d met with the FBI special agents earlier, cried with her mother in a wrenching phone call later, and finally arranged a flight home for tomorrow evening, Dana had retreated to Mrs. Lockett’s guest room several times and fallen down the mine shaft of exhausted, dreamless sleep. Her recovering body craved rest, but her mind needed the escape more, for every time she woke it was to tears.
Tonight she held them at bay, her mind drifting through the misty layers of Special Agent Tomlin’s endless questions.
A tall man whose gray eyes matched his short hair, he had rolled through the obligatory sympathetic statement quickly before peppering her with a fresh round of questions about last night, the weeks leading up to last night, and so many details about her sister’s history that Dana felt as if her brain had been turned inside out. Each time she started to tire or lose patience, his partner, Petit, an athletic-looking blond man with a slightly chipped front tooth and a homegrown West Texas accent, interrupted the barrage by offering her water or holding up a palm to slow Tomlin down and suggesting, “How ’bout we give Dr. Vanover a minute to catch her breath?”
Which only went to prove that federal agents, too, resorted to the classic good-cop/bad-cop method, not only with prime suspects but with cranky witnesses as well. During one of these breaks she had told the two men, “I’ve been answering your questions long enough. Now I need some answers to mine.”
She tried not to take it personally when the agents denied her every query about gathering both her belongings and her sister’s and having them sent home. The clothing and supplies Dana had left in the adobe were now considered evidence, along with her flooded convertible. Angie’s loom and the tapestry on it were evidence as well, and her clothing, art supplies, few mementos, and abandoned clunker all must be thoroughly examined. Neither man would venture to predict when they might be released. Most frustrating—and something Dana couldn’t help taking personally—was the matter of her sister’s body.
“What about the funeral?” she’d asked. “Surely you can’t expect us to go on waiting, wondering. How can we move on with our lives without knowing when this might be over?”
“I realize it’s not ideal.” Petit leaned forward in his seat to touch her hand. “But most people in your situation opt to hold a memorial service to provide some sense of closure. Then, when the time comes, they hold a private burial for the immediate family.”
The younger agent was an attractive man who seemed genuinely committed to the apprehension of her sister’s killer, yet Dana had jerked her hand away from him without understanding why.
But later, in the wakeful darkness, she knew that his show of concern—though more professional than personal—had touched off thoughts of the man who wasn’t there. The man she wanted desperately to talk to.
“This investigation is now in federal hands,” Special Agent Tomlin said when she had asked about Jay. “You won’t have to bother dealing with these locals anymore.”
She hadn’t liked the way he’d said, “these locals,” hadn’t liked it, either, when Jay had simply dropped her purse and the clothing from her car at the house while she slept. His note said, Even the feds ought to know better than to come between a lady and her handbag, and I figured you could use those clothes you picked up, too. There had been no mention of how he’d charmed these items out of the inflexible Tomlin, or if Jay had found a way to hijack them somehow.
When he didn’t stop by later, she worried each time he crossed her mind. Was his career in jeopardy because of the publicity about the theater incident near Dallas? Or did he fear that rumors of their personal involvement would add fuel to the debate about his fitness?
“Well, Dana, why don’t you just ask him?” Angie challenged.
Dana turned to see her sister sitting in the delicate chair beside her. Her waist-length, sun-bleached hair gave off light enough to illuminate her thin face. Hollow-cheeked but strangely radiant, she looked as clean as thin, blue moonlight and far younger than she had the night before.
“You’re alive.” Relief cascaded through Dana, beginning in her center, radiating through her pores. With joy bubbling inside her, Dana used her arms to push herself upright, launching herself toward an embrace—
The movement, and the pain of sore limbs, woke her to a room as still and black and silent as that salty tomb beneath the desert floor.
“No…” she moaned. “No, Angie. Please don’t do this.”
But Angie wasn’t there to either argue or explain.
Friday, July 6, 8:17 A.M.
76 Degrees Fahrenheit
Forecast High: 103 Degrees
“I won
der where the sheriff’s been.” Dana kept her voice as carefully casual as she could and her eyes cast down toward the cinnamon-raisin toast she was eating.
“Poor young Jay’s been running himself ragged, that’s all. You needn’t worry about him,” Mrs. Lockett told her. Between them sat a carb lover’s fantasy: fresh-baked breads, sweet yellow butter, and strawberry preserves.
As far as Dana had been able to establish, the old woman spent nearly all her waking hours filling the counters of her kitchen with cooling racks of muffins, cakes, and breads, biscuits, pies, and honey-nut rolls. She repeatedly mentioned her need to feed her hungry children—children pictured in the faded photos she kept all around the house. Apparently she had lapses, forgetting that her sons and daughter were decades grown and gone. But she happily fed her friends and neighbors who stopped by to bring her gifts of sugar, flour—all her groceries—and whatever cash she would accept.
Dana thought it wasn’t a half-bad arrangement, but she was happy she had finally arranged a flight home. If she didn’t get out of this house soon she’d be sure to gain ten pounds on the warm and yeasty smells alone. The thought came out of habit, though she’d probably lost that much weight over the past two months from stress.
The old woman swiped a crumb from her lip with a bony finger. “Don’t you fret. Our Jay will overcome this nonsense.”
“Do you mean the—”
“I mean all of it. Those lies about his uncle taking bribes—as if a good man like R.C. would ever do any such thing—and that foolishness on the TV about something that happened right after Jay came home from the war.” The creases of her forehead folded into hard pleats. “Bunch of soft outsiders telling us who we should and shouldn’t have for a sheriff. As if country folk aren’t smart enough to know a crazy man when we see one. We’ve got a lot of experience dealin’ with that sort of thinking. And a lot of practice diggin’ in our heels when some slick city people waltz in and tell us what we should do.”
The Salt Maiden (Leisure Romantic Suspense) Page 18