He didn’t remember Spike ever looking at anyone the way he looked at Vivian Patin. He hid the exposed need quickly enough but something almost more dangerous remained; Spike wasn’t just falling, he’d already fallen for this woman. Cyrus looked down at the flowers. His own experiences with passion would stay pure and safe as long as his faith was never tested too harshly.
Cyrus dropped the trowel he’d been using and stood up. A rush of sensation had constricted his lungs. He was capable of feeling another kind of passion, had already felt it and fought it on too many occasions. The gentle, exhilarating warmth of human love was denied him by his own decision.
Service, that was his mission, and he would use service to keep him from stumbling so badly he couldn’t recover.
“Lil’s in the kitchen putting groceries away,” Spike said. “Looks as if she’s laying in stores for the whole winter. She’s in a good mood.”
Cyrus sighed. “That’s probably bad news.” He raised his face to the almost too-blue sky and said, “God forgive me for my mean spirit.”
“You’re only sayin’ the truth,” Wally said, sounding disturbed. “You’re never mean. Lil only gets cheerful when she’s been mixin’ somethin’ up.”
Spike frowned in the direction of Wally and Wendy. Cyrus could almost hear him wondering if he could trust Wally to look after the little girl. “Vivian and I would like to talk some things over with you,” he said to Cyrus, still repeatedly returning his attention to the kids.
“Wally,” Cyrus said, giving his sidekick a significant glance. “Take Wendy upstairs to my sitting room. I expect she’d enjoy the books and you might even want to watch a cartoon.” He didn’t suppose he should suggest television to a boy, but none of them would feel safe leaving Wally and Wendy out here.
Wally said, “Okay,” with a lot of enthusiasm and once Wendy got a smile of approval from her father she bobbed up and ran for the house, her arms swinging in circles like miniwindmills. Boa made a close third, scrambling from Vivian’s arms and taking off after the kids. “We’ll take care of her,” Wally shouted.
“Look at that,” Vivian said. “My faithful friend deserts me for children. Never fails.”
“Under the tree?” Cyrus asked, indicating a white-painted bench beneath an oak. “I don’t think we’ll get past Lil too easily if we try going to my office.”
“The bench is fine,” Spike said and put a hand at Vivian’s waist while he walked with her.
Spike touched her, the tip of his fingers curling in then spreading, as if she belonged to him, and nothing about her response suggested she didn’t like it. Cyrus smelled disaster in the making—if it hadn’t already been made.
Vivian sat in the middle of the bench and patted the slats on either side of her, expecting the men to join her. They remained standing and before her eyes they both traded smiles for frowns. Even the atmosphere changed.
Men. If a situation was bad, or might be bad, they made it worse with their efforts to strike the right attitude and take charge.
“We were coming right over after I picked up Wendy from the Majestic,” Spike said. “Got a call. Domestic violence, or so the dispatcher said. Nothin’ more’n a lot of cryin’ and threatenin’. Two kids with a kid of their own. Married a year and scared stiff about money and how to bring up the little one.”
Spike shook his head. “Their parents didn’t approve of the marriage so they don’t have anyone to turn to…or they didn’t.” Spike smiled and Vivian had to smile with him. He could look like a gleeful, overgrown boy. “They called and spoke to Madge while I was still at their apartment. She’s got them coming over to see you after nine o’clock mass tomorrow.”
Cyrus said, “Good, good,” in a distracted manner. He repeatedly looked from Vivian to Spike.
Spike cleared his throat and glanced at Vivian. Typical. When it got right down to it and the problem was his own rather than someone else’s, the man wasn’t so ready to deal with it.
“Madge said you knew Bonine was coming directly to Rosebank after talking to you,” Vivian told Cyrus. For a woman who hadn’t had much sleep, she felt jumpy with energy. She wanted to move around, get things done. “Gary Legrain, Louis’s associate, showed up very early this morning, thank goodness. He’s acting for Mom and me so he sat in on the interview.”
She felt Spike frowning at her and tilted her head sideways, trying to see his face in shadows cast by the oak. “What’s the matter with you?” she said. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“You didn’t tell me about Legrain, or the interrogation.”
“I haven’t had a chance yet,” she told him, starting to stew. “You know I couldn’t talk about things like this in front of Wendy.”
“You should have found a way to take me aside. I need any information exactly when you get it, not hours later.”
“Spike,” Cyrus said mildly, his thick dark lashes lowered a little over blue-green eyes. “Calm down, huh? You’re not being fair to Vivian.”
“Not fair?” Spike stopped speaking with his lips parted and his expression passed from angry to mortified. He stuttered slightly when he said, “Maybe. If that’s true, I’m sorry. None of my damn business, anyway.”
Vivian felt like slapping him. “So you say.” Unfortunately what he said was true but she intended to change that. “You’re in this case up to your neck. Errol Bonine’s got his net strung between trees just waiting for you to pass that way, then he’ll cut the rope and you’ll be hanging right where he wants you.”
Cyrus and Spike gave each other that man-to-man glance again and Vivian took deep breaths to keep her cool.
“Aren’t you going to ask what I mean by that?”
“Sure,” Spike said in a voice guaranteed to make her doubt he intended to take a word she said seriously.
“No,” Vivian said and stood up. “I’ve got a question to ask first. And if you two insist on standing over me—like you weren’t already twice as big—I’ll have to stand, too.”
“Don’t be ornery with me,” Spike said and kicked at the grass with the toe of a brown boot. “The last thing I want to do is make you mad.”
She managed to avoid rolling her eyes. Cyrus sat down on one end of the bench and stretched out his long legs.
“What did your father mean when he said he didn’t want to visit your broken body in the hospital again?” she asked Spike.
Damn Homer’s big mouth anyway, Spike thought. There wasn’t any harm in him but sometimes he just didn’t think. “I had an accident in New Iberia. I was a detective.” And his bitterness showed. “Just one of those things.”
“What things?”
From the interest Cyrus was taking, Vivian could tell this was news to him also.
“There was a problem with some guys. Three guys. I’d been stakin’ them out for weeks and couldn’t seem to get enough on ’em to take ’em down.”
“Why was that?” she asked.
“Vivian, don’t you ever stop askin’ questions?”
“Not after what your dad said this afternoon, and now this explanation. Homer meant you’re in danger again. He thinks Bonine was behind what happened to you.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Was he?”
Spike pushed his hat low over his eyes. “He swore he knew nothing about it. And the gov’nor believed him so I had to as well. Didn’t matter because I was kicked out for not being a team player.” He gave a short laugh. “I learned from all that. I used to think I was the maverick who would set the world on fire. Now I’m grateful to have any kind of job in the law and I know I’m going nowhere.”
Vivian moved closer to him until her toes, bare in strappy sandals, touched one of his boots. She looked up at him, way up at him. “If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s a loser.”
He raised a brow and became expressionless.
“I don’t mean you’re a loser,” she said in a hurry. “I just mean you’ve been knocked around—and I know tha
t creepy Bonine was behind it—and all you have to do is start believing in yourself again. We’re going to make hash out of that man and feed it to pigs.”
Cyrus found a Kleenex and blew his nose. “Something in the air,” he said. “This has been the worst year for allergies.”
”You,” Spike said to Vivian in a menacing tone, “will keep your nice nose out of my business. This isn’t a party game. For God’s sake, Cyrus, tell the woman there’s a killer on the loose out there and she’s not to do anything stupid.”
Very suddenly Cyrus got to his feet and called, “Madge, why are you sitting over there?”
Responding from her seat on the top step outside the kitchen, she raised her voice and said, “I’ll wait till you’re through. I don’t want to interrupt.”
“You couldn’t interrupt,” Cyrus told her. “Come join us.”
Vivian met Spike’s eyes but he looked sad and lowered them at once.
“Lil’s poured iced tea for us,” Madge said. “Any takers?”
They all chorused “yes,” and Madge disappeared back into the kitchen to reappear with a tray and head in their direction.
“She’s so pretty,” Vivian said, appreciating the other woman’s energetic walk and the way her clothes fit so well—and her hair bouncing about her shoulders.
“Yes,” Cyrus said and this time Vivian avoided looking at Spike.
Madge reached them and held out the tray for each of them to take a glass of iced tea.
“Thanks,” Vivian said. “Just in time to save you and me from the wiggles.”
Madge looked at her uncertainly but Vivian pressed on. “I was so grateful you arrived in time to stop Detective Bonine from wiggling. I’m not sure I wouldn’t have gotten sick.”
That pulled a grin out of Madge. “Do you know why the detective is so angry, Spike?”
“Uh-huh. Me. He hates my guts. We used to work together and he was afraid I’d upstage him, or get in the way of whatever he had going,” he finished darkly. He winced and said, “Forget I said that, please. I know better.”
“Do you want to explain all that wiggling?” Cyrus asked.
“Oh, that,” Madge said innocently. “Just a girls’ joke, right, Vivian?”
“Yup.”
Apparently unconcerned about grass stains, Madge sat on the ground with her feet crossed in front of her. She fell silent but fidgeted, turning her glass around and around and making patterns in the condensation on the outside.
At last she said, “Barging in on the interview was unforgivable. I’m sorry.”
Vivian choked on her tea and swatted at some flying insect intent on a divebomb attack. “Well, I’m not sorry. Bonine would have had me there for hours. If you weren’t sexy enough to distract him, goodness knows where he could have gone with his questioning. He’d already scared me. But one look at you and he got all cuddly.”
Cyrus looked right at Madge but let his eyes slide away and Vivian wished, again, that she could learn to censure her mouth.
“Sometimes,” Madge said, “I get completely carried away. Usually when I kind of get into something I’ve got to pull off. Do you know what I mean?”
Vivian had been trying to forget Madge’s wild words in front of Legrain and Bonine. “I know,” she said.
“The first idea you figure will shut people up doesn’t even connect with your brain before it slops out of your mouth.”
“Oh, yeah,” Vivian said with feeling. “Done that one too many times.”
“I don’t think anyone read much into it,” Madge said. “Probably just thought I was blathering on.”
Vivian prayed that it would be true. “Don’t worry about it.”
The men were quiet and watchful and when conversation faded, Spike said, “You’re talking in code. Are you gonna crack it for us?”
Madge looked panicky but Vivian giggled and kept on giggling until Madge joined in. When they collected themselves, Vivian said, “You’ll find out when the time is right,” while she fervently hoped no one noticed or repeated the not very subtle hints Madge had delivered at Rosebank.
Vivian edged closer to Spike, but faced the opposite way. Two herons swept in to land on a bleached cypress tree barely showing above the surface of the bayou. Vivian tried to concentrate on the birds and their freedom to come and go, but there was too much more to say here and all of it was bad.
She needed to feel Spike’s warmth, his strength. And she didn’t think she cared what anyone else thought. He could be the one to rebuff her if he wanted to. She slid her left arm beneath his right one and held on. Spike still faced the others while Vivian looked toward the bayou.
He rubbed her forearm and she wanted to kiss him. He might only be trying to give her courage, but still he didn’t care who saw him around her.
“Hang in there,” he said. “Dealing with bullies takes time to learn. I think you’re doing great.”
“This is what Bonine wants to make people believe,” she told him. “He believes I killed Louis and you helped me because you hate him and you’ve been looking for a way to make him look bad.”
”Bullshit.” Spike said through his teeth. “Crazy. He’s lost what mind he ever had.”
“My prints are all over everything. I ruined any hope of lifting footprints from the ground and messed up the rest of the evidence. The only prints on the telephone were mine and yours—and Louis’s, I guess. I took it from inside of his briefcase. Of course I shouldn’t have done that but I wasn’t thinking rationally. He thinks Louis was really bringing bad news, probably that Rose-bank didn’t really belong to us, according to him. And Bonine decided there was something to that effect in the briefcase and I stole it.”
“Ass,” Spike said, glaring into the distance.
“Take heart,” Vivian said. “He told me you’d have gotten rid of your prints if you were worried about them. He only thinks you’re covering for me. Lucky you.”
“Don’t take Bonine seriously, y’hear,” Spike said. He didn’t like the way Cyrus and Madge were looking anywhere but at him and Vivian. “He’s not interested in you.”
“I know what he’s interested in. Don’t sell me short, Spike, I may get down, but I also get up again when I’ve got to get on with it.” She pulled her arm from beneath his and turned around. “Listen up.”
Cyrus and Madge paid attention immediately. “Enough pussyfooting around. I’ve got one major mess on my hands. We already knew there were those who didn’t want us here. Between trying to make big decisions, like how many rooms to finish before opening, and how we’ll make the grounds inviting enough to camouflage how most of Rosebank will still be under repair for a long time—and hitting walls every time we try to get the money worked out—we’ve had plenty on our minds.”
She had their full attention. “Now we add the tragedy of Louis’s death, and the fact that there’s a crazy killer running around out there. We have just about nothing going for us except guts, but we’ve got plenty of those.
“Everyone means well and I love you for it. Without all of you, I don’t know what we’d do. But—” she gave long looks to Cyrus and Spike “—don’t talk down to me or treat me like the little woman. Some of us really don’t like that.”
“Amen,” Madge said and Cyrus’s head whipped around. Vivian decided it wouldn’t hurt Madge to get tougher around here.
Spike shoved his hands deep in his pockets and slouched, the brim of his hat so low over his face it all but touched his nose. If there was one thing she couldn’t stand, it was a sulking man.
“That detective intends to get you,” she told him. “That’s old news. I just don’t know if you’re taking it seriously enough. He wants you as an accessory to murder.”
“You read too many crime books,” he said, infuriating her. “I don’t need anyone to watch my back for me.”
Arrogant son of a bitch. “Well, I do,” she said and instantly regretted her renegade tongue.
All eyes were on her.
Spi
ke shifted his weight. He continued to look stubborn and closed. She guessed they really hadn’t known each other long enough for her to understand the man and maybe she never would.
Vivian felt her mood shift. She had a sudden desire to be outrageous, something she still hadn’t learned to control. She reached up and knocked his Stetson forward so that it fell. And she caught it before Spike could. He shook his head, but smiled faintly.
“You’ve got to watch yourself with the ladies,” Cyrus said. “Didn’t your mama tell you how unpredictable they are?”
“Crazy, you mean? Nope. My mama didn’t tell me much of anything.”
Little by little the pieces of Spike Devol came out. If Vivian had to guess she’d say talking about himself was unnatural but something had knocked him off his guard.
“I don’t find it admirable when men put women down because they don’t know how else to keep on feeling superior,” Madge said and gave Cyrus the benefit of her considerable talent for staring people down.
He smiled at her.
Madge didn’t smile back.
From what Vivian had been told, Madge was known to be direct but it could be that today would be remembered as the day she climbed all the way out of her envelope.
Spike kept on scuffing at the grass and Vivian had a notion to stand on his boots. She made sure she did no such thing. “Spike,” she said, breaking an awkward silence. “I want you to work the case at Rosebank.”
She had the sensation she was all alone out here and talking into a void. Not one word did any of them say.
“I trust you—”
“What are you thinkin’?” he said. “You know—and I would like to do it—but you know I can’t. Not unless you can get that place moved over the line into St. Martin.”
Vivian decided not to jump on that one. “I’ve worked it all out,” she told him. “There’s nothing to stop you from doing some private work when you can, is there?”
He said, “No,” in the slow manner of a man who felt himself backing into a corner.
“Good. Then will you work for me?”
Spike became aware of bees droning, and how much hotter it was getting. Madge hummed and Cyrus joined in. The tune could be “A Good Man Is Hard To Find,” but he couldn’t concentrate well enough to be sure.
Kiss Them Goodbye Page 11