Moonlight Lady

by Barbara Faith

  “That’s really not necessary.”

  “Sure it is.” The band was playing a soft rumba. He thought about asking her to dance again and decided not to because he was afraid if he held her in his arms he wouldn’t be able to let her go.

  They crossed the lobby and went up the three flights of stairs. At the door of her room, he hesitated, because he wanted to kiss her again. While he was thinking about it, Lisa said, “Thank you for dinner.”

  “Any time.”

  She smiled uncertainly. “Well...” She reached into her purse for her key. When she found it, Sam took it out of her hand and opened her door.

  “Get some rest.” He handed her the key. “You’ve had a long day. You must be tired.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Well...” But still he hesitated, not wanting to say good-night. “Probably see you at the beach tomorrow.”

  “Probably.” She offered her hand. “Good night, Sam. Thank you for dinner and thank you again for rescuing me.”

  He managed to resist the urge to pull her into his arms, and said, “Good night, Lisa.”

  With a nod, she went in and closed the door. He stood there for a minute or two, then with a sigh went next door to his own room.

  But it was a long time before Sam went to sleep. And when he did it was to dream of a small, fairylike young woman with moonbeams in her hair.

  Chapter 3

  Breath coming in painful gasps, heart thump, thump, thumping. She ran through darkness and swirling foggy mists of Spanish moss that hung like gray and wispy ghosts from gnarled and bony branches of twisted trees. Had to get away! The roar of a motorcycle came from behind her. Gaining on her. Oh, no! Please, God, no...!

  Straining with the effort to breathe, drowning in waves of fear. Feet mired in sand. Everything in slow motion. He was gaining on her. His heavy hand was on her shoulder. “Got you,” he cried. “Now you’ll pay...”

  The whistling slash of the strap. Strangled cry. Piercing scream...

  She awoke, shivering and frightened in the stillness of the night, with her heart beating so hard against her ribs she could scarcely breathe.

  She tried to take deep breaths, to still the frantic pounding of her heart, to will herself back to sleep. But every time she closed her eyes, the dream came again. The palms of her hands grew damp, her throat went dry and she was afraid to go to sleep.

  She got out of bed and went into the bathroom, poured water into a glass and held it in both hands so she could drink. But she didn’t put on the light because she didn’t want to look at herself in the mirror.

  When she came out of the bathroom, she shivered in the coldness of the air-conditioned room. Sliding back the balcony door, she stepped outside and went to stand at the railing to look out at the sea.

  It had been almost five years since she’d last had the dream, but it still had the power to terrify her. Just as the thought of her father, though she hadn’t seen him in almost eleven years, still terrified her.

  In her mind’s eye she saw the farm—row after row of potatoes she had to dig, row after row of beans she had to pick. The field of corn where she tried to hide. The gray clapboard house.

  Whenever she thought of the house, the room irrevocably burned into her memory was the kitchen. Table and four chairs. The refrigerator and the stove with the broken oven door. And the kitchen door, with the strap that hung from the hook there.

  And her father, big Matt Collier, who ran his Ohio farm, his animals and his family with cruel and heavy hands. His wife, Margaret, whom he never called by name, and Jimmy, his son, four years older than Lisa. She had grown up always afraid, almost always silent, trying to shrink into herself so that her father wouldn’t notice her.

  Jimmy wasn’t like that. Unlike Lisa, who had learned early on never to talk back to their father, Jimmy kept trying to stand up to him.

  “It wasn’t the horse’s fault he couldn’t pull that heavy load,” he’d say. “You shouldn’t have hit him with the hoe. You didn’t have no right to do that. You made him bleed.”

  Very carefully, with slow, precise movements, their father would put his knife and fork across his plate and push his chair back from the table. She would sit there frozen, looking from her father to Jimmy, too paralyzed with fear to move.

  “Now, Matt...” Her mother’s voice would quiver. “The boy didn’t mean no harm.”

  He’d take the strap off the back of the kitchen door and reach for Jimmy. And the beating would begin. Jimmy wouldn’t cry, at least not at first, but finally the sobs would come. And when they did, she would feel the tears streaking down her own cheeks.

  When he saw them, her father would turn his gaze on her. “What’s the matter with you?” Holding Jimmy by the back of his shirt, he’d tower over her, big, threatening. “You want something to cry about? You want a lick or two?”

  “No, Daddy.” Snuffling back her tears, biting hard on her lips, she’d stare down at her plate, her fear like a living thing growing inside of her.

  She’d had her share of whippings, but she hadn’t suffered nearly as much as Jimmy had. He’d run away a few days before his seventeeth birthday. She didn’t blame him, but she’d never forgiven him for not taking her with him.

  Her mother—her poor, ineffectual mother—had died a week after Lisa’s high-school graduation.

  “It’s your place to stay home and take care of things now,” her father had said to Lisa after the funeral. “I’ll be wanting my lunch on the table at noon like always and my supper at six. You give me my meals on time and keep the house clean and we’ll get along. If you don’t, I reckon you know what’ll happen to you.”

  Two days later, when he went into Dayton to buy a new set of tires for his truck, Lisa took a bus to Miami. She had seventy-eight dollars her mother had somehow managed to save and keep hidden, and a check for twenty-five dollars her mother’s sister in Cleveland had sent for her graduation.

  She got a job waiting tables at a restaurant on the beach, and by scrimping and saving, she managed to put enough aside to pay for a term at the University of Miami. She worked for the four years she went to the university, and all the while, like an escaped criminal, she’d lived in fear that her father would find her. And dreamed the recurring dream that he did.

  But always in her dream he’d been in his pickup, chasing her through fields of corn or among Florida oak trees hung with Spanish moss. Never before had he chased her on a motorcycle. She tried to analzye this new version of the old dream, and though she told herself it was nonsense, she knew that it had something to do with Sam O’Shaughnessy. O’Shaughnessy, who was big and brawny like her father. Tough like her father. The kind of man she would always be afraid of.

  She had known a few years after her marriage that she had been drawn to Philip because he was so unlike her father. Philip, for all his faults, was a slender, quiet man. He never raised his voice, and though he may have belittled her verbally, he had never physically harmed her. For all his faults, he was in his own way a gentleman. Perhaps, though she had fallen out of love with him a long time ago, she would have stayed with Philip had it not been for his affair with a Fort Lauderdale artist who had managed to win his praise. The affair had ended the seven-year marriage.

  Without warning, Lisa’s chin began to tremble and she started to cry. She hadn’t wept during or after the divorce, but she did now. She cried for the broken marriage, and for Philip, because she no longer loved him. She cried for her dead mother, for her lost brother and for the child she had been, the little girl who had lived in fear.

  * * *

  Sam liked to hear the sound of the waves at night. That’s why he’d shut off the air-conditioning and opened the sliding door to the balcony. He slept stretched out naked on top of the sheet. No dreams disturbed his sleep, but suddenly he came awake, cop instincts alert, listening.

  It took a moment to identify the sound of a woman crying. He sat up and reached for his shorts, and when he put them on, he wen
t to the open door and looked out. Lisa Collier stood by the railing, head bent, shoulders shaking, one hand over her mouth to try to smother the sobs that would not be smothered.

  He said, “Lisa?” very softly, but she didn’t hear. He started to climb over the three-foot wall that separated their two balconies. But he stopped. He knew about that kind of grief. It went gut-deep, too terrible, too personal to infringe upon.

  He drew back into the shadows, feeling the pain that was her pain, yet reluctant to interfere.

  He went back into his room and lay upon his bed. In a little while she stopped crying. He pictured her standing by the rail, a small, sad woman clad in a thin nightdress, looking out at the vast and endless sea.

  A while later she went in and he heard the sliding door close. He hoped that the crying had exhausted her. He hoped she would sleep.

  But he did not. The sound of her weeping stayed in his ears, the picture of her in his mind.

  * * *

  No matter how badly he slept the night before, Sam always awoke a little before six, ready for the first cup of coffee of the day. Even in Jamaica.

  He lay for a few minutes wondering about the woman in the next room. She’d told him that she had only recently divorced. Was that what she’d been crying about? Did she still care for her husband?

  He wondered what kind of a man she’d been married to, what kind of a wife she had been.

  He got up and dressed in a pair of khaki shorts and a T-shirt, shoved his feet into a pair of sneakers and went looking for coffee.

  The dining room hadn’t opened yet, but that didn’t stop him. He followed the blare of reggae music coming from the radio in the kitchen, pushed open the swinging doors, and when the two men working at the stove turned, said, “How about a cup of coffee?”

  One of them poured him a cup. He hefted one haunch on a counter and drank two cups while he shot the breeze with the two men. When he finished, he said he’d see them later and headed down to the beach.

  The skies were gray and heavy with clouds that threatened rain. The waves crashed against the shore and the air was misty. It was the kind of day Sam liked. No sunshine and roses for him; this was weather that stirred a man’s blood and made him want to beat his chest. He took a few deep breaths, swung his arms around a couple of times, did a few knee bends and started running up the beach.

  Jamaica was a far cry from New York. It was good to be away from traffic noise, the squeal of brakes, the shouted insults of cabbies, the panhandlers and drugged-out weirdos. From the smell of the precinct, peeling green walls, phones ringing, uniformed buddies, guys in handcuffs, the clack of typewriters.

  Five years ago he’d made lieutenant. He’d worked homicide first, then drug enforcement. He’d been in a few shootouts and gotten a couple of medals for bravery in the line of duty. He could sniff out a drug house ten blocks away and he’d gotten a reputation as a bloodhound, a cop who never gave up, who wouldn’t stop until every drug lord in New York was behind bars.

  A year ago the DEA had summoned him to work for them. He didn’t want to leave the NYPD, so they’d worked out an arrangement where he was on loan to the DEA for special jobs.

  He liked the men he worked with and he felt a sense of satisfaction in bringing down the dealers and the pushers. But there were times when he felt as though he’d seen too much, done too much. In the last few months he’d felt so soul weary, so disillusioned that he’d wanted to throw in the towel. But he hadn’t. He never would because he had his own demons to deal with. And because drug lords like Juan Montoya were responsible for deaths he didn’t want to think about. He wanted the bastard so badly he could taste it.

  The DEA hadn’t wanted to send him on this job because something big was going down in Kansas City. It had taken a lot of persuading on his part to convince them, when Montoya escaped, that he was the man for the task.

  “I know every inch of Jamaica,” he’d said. “I know the people, I’ve got connections on the island. If anybody can ferret Montoya out it’ll be me.”

  Still thinking about Montoya, Sam rounded a curve in the beach, stopped for a moment and looked out at the sea. He narrowed his eyes and tried to see through the mist. “What the hell?” he said aloud. Five-foot waves were sweeping in, and some damn idiot was swimming out beyond the breakers.

  He ran down to the shore and waved his arms. Whoever it was spotted him, and now he could see that the swimmer was trying to make it back to shore. He’d advance a few strokes, then a wave would hit and he’d be right back where he’d started, arms flailing the air when he went under, fighting the surge of water every time he bobbed to the surface.

  The way he was going, he’d never make it.

  With a muttered curse, Sam kicked his sneakers off and, yanking the T-shirt over his head, plunged into the surf and started swimming. The fellow spotted him again, then again went under.

  Sam swam as hard as he could. The swimmer came to the surface, and all of a sudden Sam realized it wasn’t a guy, it was Lisa Collier. What in the hell was she doing swimming in weather like this? Then he remembered last night on her balcony, the way her body had hunched in pain, the sound of her sobs. Had she swum out this far deliberately, knowing she couldn’t make it back?

  Grunting with effort, Sam plowed through the waves. He was close enough now to see her face, to see the terror there, to know that she was trying with every bit of her strength to reach him.

  Two yards away, one. He grabbed for her hand, snagged her wrist just as a six-foot roller hit. They went down together. He tightened his hold, hung on and fought with his free arm and with his legs for the surface. They broke through. He swung his head to get his wet hair out of his eyes. “Hang on to my shoulders,” he cried.

  She nodded her understanding and he started for shore. But the current was against him, and halfway there he had to stop and catch his breath. He turned, treading water. He saw the fear in her eyes and the determination, and he knew she hadn’t been trying to do herself in. She put her arms on his shoulders and treaded water with him.

  “You all right?” he managed to ask.

  “Yes.”

  But her face was chalk white and she sounded exhausted.

  He got his breath. “Okay, let’s go,” he said.

  She kept one hand on his shoulder and tried to swim along with him. Thunder cracked, lighting split the sky and it started to rain. The undertow sucked at his legs, trying to drag him down. His arms were tired; the breath rasped in his throat. He kept his eyes on the shoreline. Come on, you bastard, he said to himself. You can do it. Couple of more strokes. God, I’m tired. Yeah, so what? Swim, damm you, swim!

  His feet touched bottom. She let go of his shoulders and he put his arm around her waist. It was still hard going, but they were almost there. Another couple of yards. Water to his thighs, his calves, ankles. They struggled up onto the beach. She slumped down onto the sand; he sagged beside her on his knees.

  “You okay?” he asked when he got his breath.

  She lay on the wet sand, breathing hard, her face still chalky. A shudder ran through her. She brushed a strand of wet hair out of her eyes and rolled over onto her back. “Yes,” she managed to say. “I’m—I’m all right.” She took a deep breath and looked up at him. “Thanks. If it hadn’t been for you...”

  The words trailed off. She closed her eyes, spent, breathing hard. Finally she pushed herself up to a sitting position. “I’m a good swimmer. I thought I could handle it. I didn’t mean to go out so far. I didn’t realize the tide was so strong.”

  He started getting angry, knew it was a reaction to the fear that they weren’t going to make it, but couldn’t stop himself. “It was a stupid thing to do,” he said.

  “I—I know.”

  He stood and, reaching down a hand, pulled her up beside him before they headed back for their things. “If I hadn’t come along...” The thought scared him so much that for a minute he couldn’t go on. His anger was all mixed up with fear because he kn
ew that if he hadn’t come along when he had, she’d probably be fish bait by now.

  “What in the hell were you thinking of, swimming this far from the hotel on a day like today? You almost drowned!” His anger got the best of him. He grabbed her arms and shook her. “Dammit!” he shouted. “You—”

  “Don’t!” Her face was frozen in fear, her eyes wide with terror.

  He let her go. He said, “Lisa?” and stared at her, shocked, stricken. He raised a hand to wipe the wet hair back off her face, and when he did, she jerked her head away as though from an expected blow.

  When he’d first started with the NYPD and he’d been on patrol-car duty, he’d seen battered women. He knew how they reacted to the slightest touch, how they flinched away. Had Lisa been battered?

  He felt her tremble. “I—I’m sorry,” she said. “I guess I overreacted.” She tried to smile, but her lips quivered and she still looked afraid.

  He wanted to put his arms around her, but he feared if he did she’d be scared again. “You’ve got to get into some dry clothes,” he said in a matter-of-fact voice. “You’re shaking.”

  He picked his T-shirt and sneakers up off the sand and she reached for her beach bag. He started to take her hand, but stopped himself.

  When they got to the hotel, he walked her up to her room. She took the key out of her beach bag and, when she had opened the door, turned back to him. “There really aren’t any words to thank you,” she said. “But I do thank you. If you hadn’t come along...”

  “But I did.” He summoned a grin. “Let me know next time you decide to take an early morning swim. Okay?”

  “Okay.” She held her hand out and he took it in his. It was very cold and very small. He thought again of the way she had reacted to his anger and felt a stab that was like a physical sickness in the pit of his stomach because someone—he didn’t know who but suspected it might have been her husband—had hurt her. He wanted, as he had on the beach, to put his arms around her and tell her that she was safe and that nobody would ever hurt her again. But he didn’t. Instead he said, “You’d better get right into a hot shower.”