The Kindness of Strangers (Skip Langdon Mystery #6) (The Skip Langdon Series)

by Julie Smith

  Still, there was her husband …

  Stop that, she thought. You’re too smothering, nobody could take it.

  Skip was saying something. “Do you think I’ll ever get over this?”

  She was so pathetic, this huge, competent woman, obviously so unlike herself right now, that Boo wanted to hug her and tell her that yes, everything would be fine; but she wasn’t sure of that.

  Probably Skip would never get over it completely. But she would stop being depressed.

  “Of course you will,” she said. “People do.”

  It just takes time, and it’s incredibly painful.

  “It’s taking so long.”

  Oh, God, why can’t I put a bandage on them or something?

  “Want to come back Wednesday? We could do twice a week for a while.”

  Skip nodded, looking pathetically grateful, this large woman, so defeated in her triumph. If a woman’s gotta do what a woman’s gotta do, she had—and now she was flat as a busted balloon.

  Boo thought: We never know what life will bring us.

  When Skip had gone, she realized how much the other woman had affected her. She had ways of closing herself off from her clients’ pain—all therapists do—but there was something about this one, something like seeing a wounded lion.

  She went to find her daughter. She had ten minutes before the next one.

  Chapter Three

  THEY WENT TO the burger King on Canal Street because Noel thought nobody else would be there. Torian had heard her mother say that if you didn’t want to be overheard by the people you were talking about, you had to go to Hooters. Burger King was good if you didn’t want to be seen.

  Anyway, she preferred it to PJ’s or the Croissant D’Or because she wanted a Coke instead of coffee.

  Noel said, “I brought you the poem. May I read it to you?”

  Asking her permission.

  He was so diffident, so shy with her. She didn’t really know how to respond—nothing had prepared her for this—but she thought it best to accept the role he assigned to her, that of lady receiving her troubadour.

  It felt odd. It felt downright absurd.

  She was just Torian Gernhard, who had the worst clothes in the class and got tongue-tied when a cool boy spoke to her, and here she was with Noel Treadaway. That in itself didn’t make any sense, but the way he treated her was madness—like a queen, yes, but not the way a king treats a queen, the way a servant does.

  Of course it made her uncomfortable, because it was too weird and too unlikely and made her feel like she was in a dream. But in a strange way, it also seemed her due. Usually, she felt rattled, but there were moments when she felt she brought it off pretty well.

  She was about to say that of course he could read the poem when he said, “You have no idea how cute you are with those glasses on.”

  She felt her cheeks flush and her right hand tear them from her face. She’d forgotten she was wearing them.

  “No, leave them on.”

  “I’ll put them on later. If you ask me real nice.”

  She leaned forward a little, seductively, she hoped, though she hadn’t had much practice at this sort of thing.

  He laughed. “What a grande dame.”

  How many of her friends even knew that phrase? Her heart swelled with gratitude that this was happening, that he’d noticed her.

  She made her neck and spine long and looked haughtily down her nose. “You may read the poem now.”

  His hair was gold in the sun, his blue eyes kind right now, but sometimes she thought they would burn a hole through her.

  We are the opposites that attract, she thought. Light and dark, tall and short, thick and thin.

  Sunny and sad.

  But she wasn’t nearly so sad when he was with her. Sometimes she thought he’d been sent from heaven to save her, to give meaning to her life.

  They’d known each other four months now, but this magic, this love between them, was new, now going into its fourth week—its twenty-second day, to be exact.

  She had wanted him from the first, but that was nothing. She got hardly anything she wanted, unless you counted the occasional Coke.

  She had written poems about him. He liked poetry. She’d never in her life met a soul who did, not even Sheila.

  Poetry and classical music. It was too much to ask.

  “Are you sure you’re ready?”

  She nodded slowly, grandly.

  Tears stood in her eyes when he had finished. The images were so crystalline, so pure and clean she felt her body tingle, as if she had dived into a mountain stream. They made her wish she lived in a place where there wassnow, wish she could have her own house with her own bowl, in which there would always be carnations.

  Wish she could get away from Lise and live with Noel.

  She had fallen in love with him long, long before he noticed her, and for months had not gone to sleep without his face in her mind. She’d been beside herself when they started seeing each other.

  But the way she felt right now, at this moment, was so much more intense that she thought it threatened to explode her body.

  “What is it?” he said. “What’s wrong?”

  “The poem …” How could she tell him it wasn’t the poem, it was him?

  “It reminds me of you.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “So pure. So lovely in your purity.”

  She smiled. “So simple.”

  He took her hand, which had been obsessively folding a napkin. “Don’t.”

  “Oh, the napkin. Nervous habit.” But even as she spoke, she saw that he was shaking his head.

  “Not the napkin. I meant don’t be ironic—don’t cheapen the meaning. You heard what I said. I want you to take it in, not push it away.”

  No one had ever talked to her that way.

  The tears had fallen now and were running down her face, so that she could see clearly again. He was still holding her hand. She stared up at him, unable to form words, and he stared back, their eyes locked like necklaces that had tangled.

  Lise would die. My father would die. It would kill him.

  She couldn’t look away.

  “Let’s take a walk,” he said, and she thought, He needs air, too, barely surprised to realize once more how much they were in tune with each other.

  But she was wrong this time, and if they had needed air they wouldn’t have found it in the steamy embrace of early September, which pressed on Torian’s chest as she stepped onto the sidewalk. She was still trying to adjust when she felt herself pushed against a wall, Noel’s mouth on her, his huge hands in her hair.

  Before Noel, she had never tasted anyone’s tongue, never felt hands on her body, except her mother’s when she was tiny and her dad’s when she hugged him. Just one of Noel’s hands could reach from her waist to her breasts, could cover her entire shoulder. To feel them on her was to feel safe from the world, from Lise, from the penetrating sadness that informed her life.

  His tongue was silk and velvet at the same time, and all the perfumes of the East, and the sparklers that had so enthralled her as a child, and yet it was also something soft and wet for which she could think of no simile at all. She had tried to write about it, and there simply was no analogy in her experience. It was soft and wet and delicious, and yet certainly not like the soaked cake of a trifle or the plump thrill of an oyster, both of which sounded revolting when you put them down on paper. Nothing at all like the satin, electric ecstasy his tongue could produce, nuanced and gentle and delicate and maddening in its purposeful slowness.

  She thought: Caramel, maybe. Butterscotch. But that conveyed only the sweetness of it—not the aliveness. The joy.

  He was hard and huge and overwhelming, and yet if she focused only on the caresses, minute feather touches in her invaded mouth, it was like falling into a golden cloud, encompassing and infinite and softer than the air itself.

  “I needed to kiss you,” he said, and pulled away, walking n
ow, holding her hand. They were on Canal Street and could have been seen, yet he did it anyway, and she did not stop him.

  They walked toward Woldenberg Park, and when they reached the levee, there was a breeze from the river, which lifted her hair off the dampness of her face.

  He touched her cheek. “You’re so beautiful.”

  She might have said, “You are a god. You are Apollo. You are the golden light of my soul, and the sun itself,” if she could have spoken, but a hunk of steel wool had grown in her throat and lodged there like a cancer.

  She stared up at him again, into the pale blue of his eyes, cold, pale blue she had thought at first, but hot now, lit with the heat of something she didn’t understand, and wanted.

  “It’s going to rain.”

  “It’s going to storm.”

  “The storm is here, Torian. Inside.” He touched his heart.

  She understood so completely it embarrassed her, made her feel naked in public. She said, “Sometimes you don’t talk like an American.”

  “Don’t I?” He looked surprised. “Only with you. I don’t know why.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Yes. I do.” He said no more and, knowing, she didn’t ask. She liked the rhythm of the exchange. With him, every word was a poem, every moment a haiku, a minute a sonnet, an hour an epic.

  They walked until they came to a place where there was no one close, and he pulled her down to the grass. She slid under him, holding him tight, feeling the hard muscles of his legs, the rock of his chest harsh on hers, like the Earth itself, above her and below her, enfolding her.

  He had rolled onto her reluctantly, she had had to pull him, but now he plowed his fingers once again into the silk of her hair, and raised himself on his elbows, his breath hot in her face.

  “I love you. Oh, God, I love you so much.”

  She closed her eyes, taking it in, knowing it was true and yet not believing it.

  He pinned her wrists, but gently, so that she would not be frightened, yet in such a way that she could not mistake his mastery, and she thought that if she died in that second she had lived fully.

  “Make love to me,” she said, and he rolled off her, staring up at the sky, hands on his chest.

  For a moment, she stared at the sky herself, and saw that it was darkening. Lightning flashed, so perfectly matching her mood, and disappeared. She waited till the thunder before she touched the gold hairs on his arm.

  He didn’t respond.

  “What is it?”

  He seemed to go deeper inside himself, and she could have kicked herself for causing it.

  He’s afraid he’ll hurt me, she thought, and whispered to him. “I want you, Noel, I want you; don’t treat me like a child. I know what I’m doing.”

  Her breath was ragged, her throat raw; she was dizzy from the effort of it. She felt soft, open, like a white petal, yet somehow there was power in this. It was deeply confusing, but heady, and she could not stop.

  She threw an arm over his chest and buried her lips in his neck. “Noel. Don’t turn away from me.”

  He threw back the arm and pinned her again, this time not gentle at all, angry. “Stop!”

  Tears came again. She couldn’t follow her emotions, or his, could understand nothing at this point.

  The rain started then, a few soft, fat drops at first, then a stinging flood.

  He jerked her to her feet and pulled her to him, jeans against jeans, her soggy hair straggling. His face, slick with rain, tense with the pain of his struggle, was unearthly beautiful, yet oddly familiar. She realized, finally, where she had seen it. In final acts: onstage, in movies, even on television.

  He’s a Montague, she thought, and her head whirled with the import of it. Her age was even right.

  Yet she knew, deep down, that there was something skewed about the analogy. She just didn’t want to think about it.

  * * *

  Once more, lightning split the sky, and Noel thought what a strange, pathetic sight they must be, clutching each other like runaways, too dumb to get out of the rain. But here on the levee, both soaked, no one would see them or recognize them. They could clutch and cling as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

  And maybe it was. All kinds of people fell in love with each other. Mobile people and paraplegics. Retarded people and those of normal intelligence. People who spoke different languages. Dolphins, even, fell in love with human beings.

  ]Why not Torian and me? Why not? Why not?

  He could think of no good reason except the conventional: only pedophiles fall in love with children.

  But he wasn’t a pedophile and hadn’t the least interest in children—only in Torian, who happened to be fifteen, but who looked like an adult and had the serene wisdom of a lithe young Buddha. He hated the New Age phrase “old soul,” but he felt that he knew one. There was nothing of the child about her except her age.

  He remembered the first time he saw her, how surprised he had been at her beauty—those huge eyes and thick, dark eyebrows, her serious jaw, her thinness. She had taken Joy from Boo and held her and fed her as if she had already raised seven children of her own, and he had known instantly that his child was in good hands with her.

  They’d gone to a fund-raiser that night, he and Boo, and gotten home early, at Boo’s insistence. Boo had been worried about the new babysitter. Even then—it seemed ironic now—he’d told her not to worry, said Torian looked like a kid who could handle it if the house burned down, and Boo had started to worry that she’d left her curling iron on.

  They’d developed a system: Boo would go in and shoo Torian out while Noel waited in the car to drive her home, two blocks away. He could have walked her, but that had seemed awkward, and it was pouring rain that first time.

  Her face was wet and shining when she got in the car. “My God, it’s the most beautiful thing I ever saw!”

  “What?” he had said. “It’s just a Honda.”

  “The night. The French Quarter! Look how beautiful.”

  And she had almost literally pressed her nose against the window, luminous in her appreciation.

  He had fallen in love with her at that moment; he could see that, looking back.

  “Should we drive around a minute?”

  “Yes. Oh, yes. Let’s go down Dauphine. There’s a building there I love.”

  It was the one at the corner of Toulouse, sand and rose with age, cracked and watermarked, elegant in its decrepitude. It was a favorite of his as well.

  After that, he collected jokes for her, even making up riddles. She did it too and was good at it.

  When he saw her with a volume of poetry—an anthology for school, he thought—he felt a funny leap in his chest, and couldn’t rest till he brought out all his old books.

  And he thought: What became of me? How did I get from there to here? He had once thought he would have an academic career.

  One night she couldn’t babysit, and a friend of hers had come instead—Sheila, he thought her name was, though he hadn’t the least recollection of her. A strange moroseness had come over him when he came downstairs, expecting to see her, a new joke on his lips, and she wasn’t there.

  He had been strangely out of sorts that night, and he and Boo had fought.

  Not until one bizarre moment a month ago had he put any of this together, had he had the least understanding of it. Boo had gone early to an afternoon party, having arranged for Noel to meet her there after a business lunch. He’d come home to change into shorts and get the car, and Torian was there, of course. For some reason, he was surprised. He’d never seen her there in the daytime, hadn’t somehow, expected her. Yet there she was, reading in the living room, (which hadn’t yet been torn apart), bare feet on the coffee table.

  She was all in white—T-shirt, shorts, and sweatband catching her dark hair. She looked up and smiled. “Oh. Hi, Noel. Joy’s asleep.”

  She turned the book over: Sanctuary.

  Noel said, “Not his best.�
��

  “I love it. I’ve read it three times.”

  “‘Temple Drake,” he said, understanding in some uncanny way.

  “C’est moi.”

  “Are you Brett Ashley as well?”

  She nodded. “And Nicole in Tender Is the Night.”

  “Emma Bovary?”

  She made a face. “Never. Not in a million years. Emma’s a dingbat.”

  She has to be more than fifteen, he thought, and went to change.

  He remembered perfectly well what he had sung in the shower: “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” He wasn’t thinking of her at all, or of anything in particular.

  He had picked up his keys, his hair wet, walked into the living room, sat down on the sofa beside her, put his keys on the coffee table, and said, “Anna Karenina?”

  As she turned toward him, before she could speak, he had kissed her. It was fast, he didn’t push it, but he thought she responded, just a little. When he let her go, she looked as if she’d been struck.

  He pulled away, not acknowledging that it had happened, and said, “What about Scarlett O’Hara?”

  “Who’s that?” she had said, and given him an ironic smile.

  “See ya.” He got out as fast as he could, sweat beaded on his forehead, not able to believe what had happened. It seemed so strange, it had happened so fast, had been so utterly unexpected, that he almost thought it hadn’t. He had no idea what to make of it, hadn’t planned it, hadn’t even considered it. It was as if some part of him he couldn’t control had taken over.

  Why? Why did I do that?

  He knew the answer. He just couldn’t believe it.

  And what of Torian? Would she tell her parents? Boo?

  Would she call the police?

  If, somehow, word got back to certain people, he wouldn’t get the job he wanted.

  Fuck the damn job! I’ll finish my Ph.D. and be happy. I’ll marry her if she’ll have me.

  Marry her? Hold on, old buddy. She’s fifteen.

  “What is it?” said Boo, when he got to the party. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”