by Carly Bishop
Cy would find her soon enough, but if he didn’t, she still had to do something with the rawness inside her, the glare of emotion, the rage.
Granny Fee had sacrificed what remained of her sanity in the wake of Julia’s murder. Amy had sacrificed her hearing. She had been playacting, deciding at some level in her childish, accomplished mind that if she couldn’t hear, then she couldn’t have heard the terrible thing, and if she couldn’t have heard it, it must not have happened the way they said it had.
But the price exacted from her now was the one to break her heart and goad her to rage. Her deafness had made her into the woman Cy McQuaid loved—just not enough.
She turned on only one of the bank of lights and closed the door of Takamura’s converted barn behind her. She would see, now, if having come to the heart of her deepest fears, she could split one arrow with another.
She shed her coat and took the leather case from a rack along the south wall and drew out her bow, strung it and then fixed a target to the batt of straw. She selected her arrows, a dozen to warm up with, and two more, the ones that in her hands felt as precisely balanced as it was possible for arrows to be.
She began to breathe, to become as one with her bow, and each arrow in turn. She assumed her distance from the target batt and shut out all other concerns, but her sorrow refused to fade and her anger clung to her like her own skin.
Then, she thought, her anger must be meant to stay, to accompany her as armor to the heart of her fears. She put on her leather arm guard and dispatched six of the twelve arrows inside a few minutes.
In the second set, drawing her ninth arrow, she became aware of the slightest draft, of an intruder slipping inside with her, the air going still again, and her mind went to Cy. She focused deep inside herself, drew her awareness to her arrow only, to the quality of tension of her drawn bowstring, to the release of her fingers, the arcing flight of the arrow, the dead-on bull’s-eye strike, the lowering of her own arms, the unrelenting focus of her eyes on her target.
But as she nocked the tenth practice arrow, her heart began to pound and an uneasiness crept into her mind. She sensed rather than saw or heard the intruder mounting the stairs to the loft. The eleventh still flew straight and true, lodging as if welded to the batch of ten before it...but by then she knew that, whoever it was, it wasn’t Cy.
By the draw of her twelfth and last practice arrow, she knew her uncle had come to deal with her.
She knew by the dance of a tiny red laser light over her left breast, over her heart, that he had her in the sights of a deadly weapon.
An unearthly calm filled her. He could drop her where she stood, but she knew he wouldn’t do that. Wouldn’t risk spilling her blood here in Takamura’s pristine practice hall. Wouldn’t even risk threatening her with slugs perilously close because they would lodge in the floor where they could later be found.
He would have it in mind to force her to run, because she would be crazy not to. He could pick her off with the ease of shooting a hapless fish in a barrel.
But he could have chosen no worse venue for himself than the place where Takamura had long since trained fearlessness into every cell and fiber of her being.
She let her arrow fly, then lowered her bow and looked up, above and to the right of her target batt where the laser beam originated from the loft. Where Perry stood with his weapon, unsmiling.
Saddened.
Dismayed. “She was going to destroy your father, Amy. I had no choice, you see. No more choice than I had in monitoring your E-mail.” He began to walk about the perimeter of the loft. Forced to follow his progress, to turn in place, to keep her eyes trained on him, she read his lips and waited for an opening, a flaw in his attention to the detail of his aim.
“She would not have let it go,” he went on. “Little Julia knew what she knew, so paranoid she rivaled your grandmother. She always had her suspicions, always mistrusted what your father told her. Always believed cousin Pamela was going to steal Byron away from her.”
He gave a bitter, mocking laugh; Amy knew only the barking motion of his head, the sneering shape of his lips. “The irony was always that she was right! Your mother was right!”
Amy began to shake her head no. No, It wasn’t possible. But her uncle went on, carried away with himself, telling his tale as if even now he could not begin to fathom the foolhardiness, the sheer folly of his brother’s behavior.
“Imagine your father, Amy, the respected, upstanding federal prosecutor, the man of bedrock values, brought to his knees over the plight of a poor little rich girl crying rape!
“Imagine him risking his career, his reputation, his family, everything he had worked for, everything I had done to assure his path, imagine him meeting her! Imagine him taking her call in the Salt Lake City hotel room, paid for by the government, the very next night after she escaped! Picture him meeting her in some hole-in-the-wall dive, sitting down with her, giving her money, trusting the slippery, lying, felonious little bitch to turn herself in.” He shook his head. The wonder of it still held him in thrall. “For the sake of that selfish, conniving little piece of tail your father was willing to risk it all. Imagine it!”
But all Amy could imagine was the depth of her father’s compassion, the courage of his convictions, that he was willing to risk all that he was and all that he had for the sake of a girl who had been so faithlessly abused and abandoned.
He had admitted to her what he felt for Pamela, and she believed him. To do what he had done, what he had not admitted to her, he had to have believed with all his being that no one and no principle or letter of the law would be served by making the victim into the scapegoat—not only of her family, the scummy bastard who had raped her and the men who had kidnapped her, but of the judicial system as well.
To her mind, unlike her uncle’s, those qualities made her father a hero. What was justice without mercy?
But she understood, now, her father’s deep reluctance to sit another hour on the bench, much less the highest in the land.
Perry’s aim never wavered despite his stroll about the perimeter of the loft. The spot of laser light on her tank top never varied more than an inch.
“Can you see it, Amy?” He shook his head. “Can you even begin to imagine your mother’s fury, when out of your mouth, five years later, came the spoils of your incessant spying?”
Her composure began to crumble. Her fingers tightened about her bow.
“Yes, Amy!” he taunted. “It was you who betrayed your father’s secret. ‘Pigeon,’ you said. ‘Won’t you please come in,’ you asked. ‘You will be safe. Everything will be okay,’ you said.”
She felt herself slipping, no longer knew what to expect, no longer trusted that he wouldn’t gently, regretfully squeeze the trigger and kill her for the weight of all her innocent transgressions. All he had to do was dump her into one of a half-dozen local ravines, and if her body was ever discovered, it would appear she had been hiking, and had fallen victim to a careless hunter’s rifle.
“It was you,” he accused, “your constant prattling, your fault, Amy, that your mother learned your father was still in contact with Pamela Jessup. Your fault, Amy,” he charged, pointing at her, thundering, “and your bloody fault I was the one present to deal with your mother’s wrath.”
Unimaginable pain roared like a derailed train through her head. Face-to-face at last with the truth of her innocent complicity, her mind gave up its pretense, its power to keep her from hearing ever again. To keep her deaf.
Each word struck her vulnerable eardrums like the explosive blasts of cannon-fire, touched off one after another after another. She sank her knees, tried to cover her ears to blunt the terrifying discord of hearing again, but her bow brought her left hand up short and somehow penetrated her consciousness till she did what she had been trained to do, to create about herself an aura of absolute concentration, and then more, to do what she must to protect herself.
She had the instant, only one, when her unc
le froze with the staggering realization that she could hear again, to act. In a blindingly fast, deliberate succession of movements, she took her thirteenth arrow, nocked it and drew back and sent it hurtling into the heart of the circle of lights. She heard her bowstring vibrate as if magnified a thousand times, her arrow slicing the air, her own battle cry and then the shattering of glass, the sparks and popping of the lights shorting out, plunging Takamura’s converted barn into blackness.
But her own heart beating deafened her mind. Her own lungs drawing breath made her head throb unbearably. She drew her last arrow from the quiver through the staggering pain of hearing again. And then the door to Takamura’s barn flew open.
A rectangle of dim starlight framed Cy. Her uncle’s howl of outrage reverberated till her mind shut down and then she saw the red beam of the laser trained on Cy’s throat where in the same split second her name was torn from him.
The instant expanded in time for her. All rational thought halted, every intention save his survival fled her mind. She gauged the direction and distance of the laser beam, turned, pulled and shot the arrow that rent the air and found its mark and buried itself deep in the flesh of her uncle’s shoulder. His flawless aim jerked wide of its mark. He fell heavily to the deck, and crashed through the railing, and his rifle clattered uselessly to the floor below.
But his screaming cries of pain and vile epithets finally broke her, shattered the barrier of her focus and Amy fell into Cy’s arms covering her ears, crying desperately, “Make it stop, Cy. Please God, make it stop.”
THREE DAYS LATER, with Cy standing to Amy’s right and her father to her left, they buried Perry Reeves in the cemetery in Steamboat Springs. It was a Tuesday, the last in January and the first time Amy had seen her father since her hearing had returned.
Her uncle had suffered a massive heart attack; Amy’s arrow had stopped his firing on Cy, but come nowhere near even a major vessel. It was his rage that had killed Perry Reeves.
Cy had taken her to the only place he knew where silence could be depended on, to his ranch in the high country meadows where her fragile ears could go unguarded.
When he spoke, he signed.
When comfort was what she needed, he held her so closely all she heard was the beating of his heart.
And when she began to crave the sound of his voice, he read aloud to her.
In reverse then, she began to associate the sound of words with the shapes his lips made, but somewhere deep inside her mind were the memories of spoken words, and when she let her mind get around the fact that she knew them by heart and how to make them, that she had in some way always heard the words inside her mind, she reproduced them as faithfully as she had in Marcee Bleigh’s living room.
Still, she had hardly slept. She could blame the furnace coming on, or the wind coming up, or the bed creaking when she moved. But in her heart, what she blamed was the tension, the awkwardness lingering between her and Cy. There was this unbearable uncertainty with each other, a hopelessness for where they had been, for the impasse they had come to before she even imagined she would hear again.
If he couldn’t love her enough before, or tried too hard to take care of her, not accepting her strength and self-sufficiency, how would he be now?
Amy held up through the police interviews, through dropping the charges against her brother. Brent had spent a lifetime paying the wages of his uncle’s sins. Enough, it was finally agreed at her urging, was enough.
And still the sense of impossibility wrangled in her heart. She was no longer deaf, and no matter how Cy had eased the beginnings of her transition to hearing again, he didn’t know how to deal with her now. He walked around her as if on eggshells. Against all odds, he had fallen in love with her, but he no longer knew who she was. She hardly knew herself. What she knew was that he was struggling with some private demons she knew nothing of, and when she couldn’t stand his silence any longer, she followed him outside his ranch house to the barn where they had made love in the frozen loft to have it out with him.
He was busying himself currying the hide of his beloved stallion Knight to King’s X—Charlie.
“I want to know, Cy,” she signed, “what is hurting your heart.”
“If you want to talk to me, Amy,” he answered harshly, refusing to make his lips accessible to her sight, “then talk.”
She battled back her tears and crammed her hands deep in the pockets of the coat of his she was wearing. Every halting sound that came out of her mouth offended her ears, but she drew a deep breath, repeating aloud what it was she wanted to know. “What...is...hurting...your heart?”
His currying stroke lengthened, slowed. His jaw cocked sideways. It took him several long moments to arrive at what he wanted to say.
“When I was a kid,” he said at last, “twelve going on thirteen, my brothers and I were out cruisin’ around town. The old man was the county sheriff. Mostly we’d leave school and go get Matty from the woman who watched him afternoons. The three of us would walk over to the jailhouse. Straight out of Mayberry, minus Aunt Bee. Dad’d take us over to the Yellow Rose Café for supper, then we’d have to wait around another little while till he was ready to close up.
“One night we were hanging around later than usual. The old man had to deliver a summons, so it was long after Matty should’ve been home in bed when we stumbled over this girl. She was just lying there, crumpled up and beaten half to death, in a back alley beside a motel across the street from the bus stop.
“Cam lit out looking for Dad. Matty and I stayed with the girl. I could tell she was alive, not much more. Dad had us haul a mattress out of one of the unoccupied jail cells. We lifted her onto it, then slid her and the mattress into the back of the old pickup and took her home with us.” He picked Charlie’s silvery-gray hair out of the currying comb, hung it up on a nail behind him and chose a soft brush.
“She wound up staying on,” he continued, his voice soft as the daylight filtering into the barn, deep as the shadows where the little gray cat Smoke sat licking her paw. “Got to be we were a family. Matty thought Susan hung the moon and stars. His mother ran out on us when he was knee-high to a grasshopper. The old man took a shine to Susan, too. She was pretty, and fun. She made him into a different man.” His voice thinned. “She had the biggest heart in all of Texas, but we never knew who she was or where she’d come from or why somebody’d beat the living daylights of her and leave her for dead.”
Amy formed the words in her mind, and then spoke them aloud. “Did you ever find out?”
He shook his head, then looked over Charlie’s back at her. “Not one clue. Not in all these years. It never seemed to matter. She was with us. That was the only thing that counted. But when I was driving back from Cedar Bluffs, about the time you found the inhaler in Fiona’s music box, it came to me. The only thing I remember Susan ever letting slip about her past was that when she was a little girl, her family called her Pidge.”
As THEY DROVE to Perry Reeves’s funeral in Steamboat Springs, Amy argued coincidence. Haltingly, as much from emotion as the foreignness of shaping words aloud, she brought up Hollingsworth’s article, reaffirming that Pamela Jessup had died within a few short years of her escape. Surely if she had survived, if the evidence of Pamela’s death was bogus, Zach Hollingsworth would have uncovered the truth.
But, Cy thought, Amy hadn’t seen the panic-stricken look on Susan’s face. He knew now that it had all come together for her in his dad’s hospital room, Susan had finally realized what her call to Byron Reeves on his fortieth birthday had cost his family. He told Amy all that and then gave the disclaimer he didn’t believe.
“I’m only guessing, Amy. Putting the pieces together. But I’m not wrong.” He didn’t expect some miraculous other explanation out of Byron Reeves, or Susan, either. But the whole thing ran up against his lawman mentality, against a code of conduct, a code of honor and justice he’d learned at his daddy’s knee, a code where mercy came in last if it came in at all.
A code he had been raised to embrace and uphold. He had to wonder if his father knew, or if Susan had kept her secret even from Jake.
So now he was faced with the same dilemma Byron Reeves had stared into twenty-five years before.
The same, he thought, watching the miles go by, except that this one shoved an immovable wedge between him and Amy, in a relationship so fragile he had pretty much lost all hope anyway.
She would not leave it alone. “You have to let it go, Cry.”
“It’s not that simple, Amy.”
“It’s just that simple. Pamela Jessup is dead. Susan is someone else now. If you expose her, you mock everything she has been to you.”
“But she’s living a lie that has cost us all—”
“And you know better,” she cried, her words halting and distant from each other, “better even than my father what she went through. Where is the harm in letting it go? Letting her be...at least letting her make this decision?”
Now that she could hear, it was almost as if she could hear his thoughts. Susan had suffered enough. And every time he thought of what she’d been through, from the rape right up to the moment he’d come across her battered and bruised and broken and unconscious, he wanted to throw up.
But then all he had to do was look at the results of Susan’s flight from justice. It wasn’t only that her deceptions, however unwittingly, had soured the regard of Cy and his brothers for their own father.
Cy’s dad must have made his own peace with her secrets, however much or little he knew of Susan’s past. He’d be the first, had been first countless times, to warn his sons off judging what went on between him and Susan.
And Cy knew Amy’s father had acted out of his enormous compassion for Susan—Pamela’s plight. But Byron Reeves had broken the law and lied to his wife, and the consequences to his family, to Amy, to Cy and Amy together all these years later, hadn’t stopped raining down yet.
Maybe Amy could hear now, but that could never make up for having learned the hard way that of everyone she loved, and everyone who loved hex, the only one she could trust or believe in was herself.