by Jodi Thomas
“It reminds me of the way the wind makes the tall grass dip and flow,” she said then bit her lip as if suddenly unsure of her work. “You can change it if...”
“I love it.” He’d never seen anything like it. The staircase seemed to move and flow as he crossed the room. “I’ll have a work of art in my house thanks to you.”
“We’ve still got a lot of work to go before they’re sanded and stained.”
“How’d you learn to create something so beautiful out of blocks of wood?” The question was out before he thought.
“My dad taught me. I had a playhouse with a staircase like this.”
Yancy smiled, glad he hadn’t upset her with his question. “I had a box in the vacant field next to our apartment once. I called it my hideout, until some homeless guy took it over.”
They both laughed.
When she picked up his coat as if it were now hers, he knew their night was over.
“Sorry about crying,” she said. “And for stealing your coat, which I’ll give back as soon as the nights warm.”
“No problem.” He moved to unlatch the door. “One thing I have to ask, Rabbit. Are you safe when you leave here?”
She nodded. “I stay in the shadows of the trees when I walk. I have a safe hideout to live in with no homeless folks nearby.”
“I hope it’s not made of cardboard.”
Standing on her toes, she kissed his cheek. “It’s not. See you tomorrow night.”
Yancy turned and let their lips touch, making the kiss more than a peck, but just short of passionate.
He felt her tremble again.
Without moving, he whispered against her moist lips, “You’ll always be safe here.”
She moved away, but he saw the truth in her rainy-day blue eyes. She believed him. Maybe she wasn’t afraid of him. Maybe she was more afraid of being close to anyone.
Standing in the open doorway, he watched her disappear into the night. He’d broken a rule tonight. He’d lied to the law and he didn’t care. He’d do it again and again if the lies would keep her safe.
He had no idea why she wanted to step out of her life.
All he knew was that he was glad she’d stepped into his.
CHAPTER TEN
Mauve Monday’s indecision
FOR THE NEXT few days, Parker tried to come up with a plan to get to Tori without anyone following her. She worried that her gallery needed her at the helm, but deep down she knew that wasn’t true. She left it often to visit artists and to travel with some of her collection. She went to other gallery shows all over the world. She’d set up the place to run as smoothly without her as when she was there.
Tori needed her. She had to find a way to get to the farm near Crossroads. The talented painter, like many gifted people, needed someone else to help her work through the everyday problems. Parker knew this firsthand—she had lived with an established sculptor her first year out of college who could demand six figures for his work, but couldn’t remember to pay the electricity bill.
They hadn’t worked out as lovers, but he’d given her the direction for her career. She’d loved the business part of the art world. She was fascinated with the details it took to put a show together, with discovering new talent and directing their careers. She sometimes thought of herself as the director and the artists were the actors. They got the spotlight, but deep down, she knew that a little part of their success belonged to her.
This she could do. Organize. Polish. In a way, it was a safe career. She didn’t have to prove her own talent; she simply had to show off others’.
But with the travel and the late nights, she’d never had time or any real desire to develop friendships or keep a lover longer than a season. Now, when she could really use someone she could trust, there was no one to call.
Tori must have felt that way in the airport that night. Parker knew she could be the artist’s friend, only who would be Parker’s friend?
Each night she watched the news. There must not have been much going on, because a few of the stations were doing nightly updates on Victoria Vilanie’s disappearance. They had experts saying it was obviously a kidnapping. They interviewed Victoria’s high school teachers and her first art instructor in college. All said that Tori was shy. One of the anchormen said that Victoria was one of the best young painters in the country and the world couldn’t afford to lose her.
Parker watched, knowing that when she disappeared to go check on Tori, no one would mention her on the news. More and more, she realized she had to step up and be a true friend. If she didn’t, the public would eat the shy little artist alive if they found her.
So, to be that friend, Parker had to make sure that no one followed her. No one would think that she also was vanishing. She had to make her leaving look like it was simply a business trip, nothing more.
As she planned, she forgot about how her leg felt weak and how her back often hurt. She forgot how sad the young doctor had looked when he’d stared at her. He hadn’t said she had cancer. He hadn’t had to. Parker had always known someday the curse of the Lacey clan would find her. “I don’t have time to die right now,” she said to herself. “I’ve got too much to do.”
She thought of calling Dr. Brown and telling him he’d just have to wait a few weeks before he “made her comfortable,” but she guessed he would have figured that out when he’d returned to her room and found she’d gone. She’d seen his number on her list of missed calls, but she refused to call his office back. Right now she had to convince her staff that she was traveling for work while she made plans to get away totally unnoticed by anyone who might think that she had a connection to Victoria Vilanie.
To disappear, she’d need some help from someone who either knew nothing about what she was doing or could be trusted completely. A saint or an idiot, she reasoned.
Slowly, she began compiling a mental list of all the people she’d called friends over the years. One by one she made calls.
Her lab partner in college didn’t remember knowing a Parker Lacey.
Her college roommate was eight months pregnant with her fourth kid and said she didn’t have time to chat.
Two old lovers wouldn’t take her call.
Her former boss had died two years ago.
The only neighbor she knew had moved a year ago, and Parker hadn’t noticed.
Parker paced the room like a caged lion. Surely, in thirty-seven years, she’d made one friend. She didn’t need a kidney; she only needed a favor. Someone to loan her a car or pick her up from the airport after one of her staff thought they were taking her to catch a plane.
Someone she could trade IDs with, maybe? No, that would be too much like a spy novel.
Even someone to give her a ride would be nice. Surely she knew a friend who would do a favor without asking too many questions.
As the days passed she realized she was being watched. If she didn’t plan carefully, she’d lead the FBI—or worse, the press—right to Tori.
Only Tori wanted her to come. Parker had to find a way. Once they were on the farm, they’d talk. Parker would help Tori plan; after all, planning was what she was good at.
Parker thought about how the brooding cowboy on the adjacent farm would react if press crews pulled up next to his land. He barely talked to her—or anyone else—the day she’d bought her farm.
The good thing about living next to a loner like him was that she didn’t have to worry about him spreading rumors of someone living at her place. She doubted he’d even noticed Tori there. If he had, he would have thought it was none of his business.
That one trait just might classify him as a friend in her book.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
GALEN STANLEY PULLED the truck he’d rented in Liberal, Kansas, into the motel just outside Crossroads,
Texas. The twilight rain was threatening to freeze over. He’d been driving for hours and was ready to stop.
The trail was cold.
His body felt every bit of his almost fifty years as he climbed from the huge rig. He could have slept in the back of the cab, but tonight, this close to the town he grew up in, he needed silence and a roof over his head.
He’d taken this assignment not because it was easy or had much chance of being successful, but because when he’d seen one of the locations he’d be checking out, he knew it was a sign telling him it was time to go back.
Back to the place he’d run from over thirty years ago. He’d been a traveler ever since.
As much as he hated to admit it, his gypsy blood sometimes whispered through his veins. He believed in signs and curses. In the past thirty years, he’d cheated death one too many times to not know that it would eventually find him. Maybe this place where it all began would be the place it all ended.
The loneliness that always weighed on his broad shoulders seemed heavier tonight. Maybe it was the knowledge that there would be no one to come home to. Not before, not now, not ever.
When he walked into the motel lobby, a sleepy old man in overalls climbed out of his recliner and limped the five feet to the counter. He didn’t look too happy at being pulled from his TV program.
“You got a room?” Galen didn’t bother to smile.
“Sixty a night for truckers. Breakfast is included.”
Galen nodded and pulled two hundreds from his wallet.
“Name?” The old man moved to a computer that looked twenty years old. “And I’ll need ID, address and an email if you got it.”
“Gabe,” Galen lied, as always. “Gabe Santorno.” He passed him a driver’s license with that name, along with an address in Denver that was simply a mail drop.
“One night, Mr. Santorno?”
“No. Two.” He hadn’t been this close to Crossroads in years. It was time he stopped working long enough to look around.
The old man chuckled. “You planning to take in the sights, stranger?”
Gabe raised his head and looked directly at the man. His gaze hardened. Fear flashed in the clerk’s eyes.
The old man lowered his gaze first. “Just making conversation, mister. Your business is your own.”
Gabe took the key and rolled his shoulders, forcing himself to relax. “Call me Gabe,” he said in a low tone. “And no, I don’t want to take in the sights. I just want to sleep. Tell the maid to skip my room.” The place didn’t look like it would have turndown service anyway.
“Then have a good night, Gabe.” The clerk was trying to act as if he wasn’t bothered, but he kept his head down. “If you sleep through breakfast, there’s a café in Crossroads a few miles down the road that’s worth eating at. Some say it’s got the best chicken fried steak in the state.”
“Thanks. I’ll remember that.” Gabe turned to leave, then added, “Old man, you were smart not to reach for that gun you’ve got beneath the counter.”
“What makes you think I’ve got a gun?”
Gabe smiled. “You’d be a fool not to out here on this lonely stretch of highway, but I mean you no harm. I’m just a trucker passing through.”
As he walked away, he heard the old guy whisper, “You’re a hell of a lot more than that, Mr. Santorno, but it’s none of my business.”
Gabe parked the truck on a side lot and walked back to his room with his one suitcase. All he owned, all he needed was in one bag. It had been like that since he was seventeen. He’d wanted it that way.
Once inside, he locked the door and checked the windows. Then Gabe tried to relax. He stood in the shower until the water turned cold. He had a week’s worth of stubble, but he didn’t bother to shave. A man with a bit of scruff is more forgettable, he decided. And that was exactly what he wanted to be. Forgettable.
Standing wrapped in a towel, he forced himself to stare into the mirror. Scars crossed over his body like lines on a road map. Some were more than thirty years old, and some were from his army days. One, on his left shoulder—a souvenir from his last job—wasn’t quite healed. He didn’t care about any of them. He’d given up caring about anything or anyone years ago.
An army sergeant told him once that he fought like a warrior angel in a hurry to get to the afterlife. Maybe he was, but hell didn’t want him and heaven didn’t seem ready to take him in. He’d be fifty on his next birthday, and his black hair was salted with gray. One day soon, he’d lose his edge and the warrior would fall.
Gabe laughed. When that day came, he wanted to be buried in the Crossroads cemetery. Maybe that’s why he took this assignment. Maybe it was time to visit what would someday be his last resting place.
He slept until ten, then dressed in black and slipped from the back window of his motel room. The rain had stopped but the road would still be slick. As he jogged the two miles to the little town, Gabe tried to push aside the last time he’d been in Crossroads, but the memories kept flooding back.
He’d been barely seventeen and dumb enough to believe in love. Jewel Ann Grey had been a year younger and even wilder than he was. He’d loved to say her name as if it were one word.
Even though there had been bad blood between the Stanleys and the Greys for years, he and Jewel Ann had run away together one night, full of dreams for their future. Their only crime that night was loving each other.
A few hours later, her father, leading a small caravan of pickups, caught up with them. He’d brought a truckload of relatives set on teaching Gabe a lesson for thinking a Stanley boy could marry a Grey girl.
As Gabe ran on the gravel beside the road, memories of that night pounded across his mind. He’d compacted them into short blasts, like hits to his heart. The details were gone, but the pain was still there.
It had been dark and rainy, like tonight. He’d pulled over when her relatives flashed their lights, thinking he’d talk to them. Only his own dad had been just behind the Greys and there had been no talking to either man that night.
It was probably the only time the two families had ever got together. Jewel Ann’s father pulled her away, not caring that he ripped her clothes as she fought.
Gabe’s dad had shoved her relatives aside as he came after his own son with a bat.
Two of Jewel Ann’s uncles held him while his old man beat him. Her screams, as they forced her to watch, hurt worse than the blows. His dad had always been a cruel man, and he proved it that night. Once Gabe started bleeding, his old man put his hand against the wound, not to stop blood, but to make sure it flowed over his fingers. Then he took a break from the beating so he could spread blood over the girl’s breasts.
She’d screamed until she passed out. Even her father’s slaps wouldn’t wake her.
They took her home, but his dad stayed long enough to cuss his son and tell Gabe that if he ever came back he’d kill him. Even after Gabe could no longer move or even try to fight, the blows kept coming, breaking skin and bones.
His dad left his only child in the ditch, covered in blood and mud. In his mind his son had dishonored the family, and there would be no coming back home.
Gabe knew he’d die if he didn’t move, and pure rage made him get to his feet. Slowly, he limped to a truck stop a few miles down the road. It was almost dawn by the time he reached the place. There was no one to call, no use in reporting the crime. Everyone in town was afraid of his dad—even Gabe’s mother.
He hid in the back of a truck with Colorado tags and slept as it drove north across three states.
When the trucker found him later that night, he dropped Gabe off at the hospital. When the doctor realized how much blood he’d lost, he said it was a miracle Gabe was still alive. He had broken ribs, a broken arm and a concussion. And after they sewed up his cuts, he also had forty-seven stitches crisscr
ossing over deep bruises.
It wasn’t a miracle he’d lived, Gabe thought. It was determination. He’d spent the days in the hospital changing, hardening, so nothing would ever hurt him again.
In the midnight moonlight Gabe reached the Crossroads cemetery and pulled out his flashlight. The trees that he remembered as being small were overgrown now and permanently bent by the wind.
The Stanley family graves were there, near where the canyon dropped down off the flat land at the back of the cemetery. It wasn’t an ideal spot—on rocky ground and hard to get to by car. But Gabe always thought it had the best view of Ransom Canyon.
The facts about his parents were carved in the headstones: His father had died a few months after he’d beaten his son almost to death. His mother had died ten years later. There were no other graves in the family plot, even though it could have held a dozen more. To his knowledge, there were no more Stanleys. Only him.
He moved to the Grey family plot, looking for one name: his one love, Jewel Ann. Even in his mind, when he said her name, he said it fast as if it were one word.
There were six Grey graves dated the same year he’d been beaten. Two were names of the men he remembered holding him down that night. Jewel Ann’s uncles. No new graves since. What was left of the Grey family must have moved on. After all, both families had roaming in their blood, so it would have been unusual for them to stay on this land for so long.
Jewel Ann Grey’s grave wasn’t there. If she was dead, she hadn’t died here. Somehow that gave him comfort.
Gabe liked to think she’d married someone acceptable and moved on, but that night had probably damaged her as much as it had him.
He clicked off the flashlight and walked along the canyon’s edge, knowing one missed step on the shadowy edge might be his last, but he’d walked this close to danger so many times it felt comfortable.
Below, he saw a few lights from a little lake community. He remembered there being only a few houses near the water, but now the shadows of homes surrounded the lake and spread up the valley almost to the north road.