by Nora Roberts
Then she saw Nate.
He sat alone at a rear corner booth. Since that was a prized spot, it told her he’d been there for some time. He had a mug of coffee and a newspaper. But he wasn’t drinking; he wasn’t reading. He was off somewhere, in his own thoughts. Bleak and sorrowful thoughts.
Looking at him from across the busy room, she knew she’d never seen anyone so alone.
Whatever his long, sad story was, she thought, it was going to be a killer.
As she started toward him, someone called her name. While she answered it with a wave, she saw Nate draw in. She watched him bring himself back, deliberately pick up his coffee and settle himself before he looked over. Smiled at her.
An easy smile, secret eyes.
“You got a good night’s sleep.”
“Good enough.” She slid in across from him. “You eat?”
“Not yet. Did you know people used to commute from Montana to work in the canneries around here?”
She glanced down at the newspaper and the article. “Actually, I did. It’s good pay.”
“Yeah, but not exactly a daily battle with rush hour. I figured you lived in Montana because you wanted to raise horses or cattle. Or maybe start a paramilitary camp. Okay, gross generalization, but still.”
“You’re a real East Coast boy. Hey, Wanda.”
“Meg.” The waitress who looked to be about twenty, and perky, set down another mug of coffee, pulled out her pad. “What can I get you?”
“Couple eggs, over easy, Canadian bacon, hash browns, wheat toast. Jocko?”
“Ditched him.”
“Told you he was a loser. What do you want, Burke?”
“Ah . . .” He searched around for his appetite, then decided the sight and smell of food might help him locate it. “Ham-and-cheese omelette, and the wheat toast.”
“Gotcha. I’m dating this guy named Byron,” she told Meg. “He writes poetry.”
“Can only be an improvement.” Meg turned back to Nate as Wanda walked away. “Wanda’s parents were one of the seasonals when she was a kid. Used to spend her summers here when they worked in the canneries. She liked it, moved up permanently last year. Habitually dates assholes, but other than that, she’s okay. What were you thinking about before I came over?”
“Nothing, really. Just passing the time with the paper.”
“No, you weren’t. But since you did me a favor last night, I won’t push it.”
He didn’t deny; she didn’t press. And she didn’t, though the urge scraped at her, reach over and stroke his cheek. When she had a brood going, she didn’t want comfort. So she gave him the same courtesy she expected for herself.
“Is there anything else we have to do here before we head back? If we’re going to be a while, I want to have someone go out and check on my dogs.”
“I called the State cops. A Sergeant Coben’s in charge of the case, for now anyway. He’ll probably want to talk to you—and your mother at some point. There’s not likely to be much movement on this until they can get a team up there and bring him back down. I called the hospital. All three boys are in satisfactory condition.”
“You’ve been busy. Tell me, chief, do you take care of everybody?”
“No. I just handle details.”
She’d heard bigger bullshit in her life, but then she lived in Lunacy. “She do a number on you? The ex-wife?”
He shifted. “Probably.”
“Want to spew? Trash her over breakfast?”
“Not so much.”
She waited while Wanda served the meal, topped off the coffee. Meg cut into the eggs, letting the yolk run where it liked. “So I slept with this guy in college,” she began. “Great looker. Kind of stupid, but he had tremendous staying power. He started playing this head game on me. How I should think about wearing more makeup, dressing better, maybe I shouldn’t argue with people so much. Blah blah. Not,” she said with a wag of her fork, “that I wasn’t gorgeous and sexy and smart, oh no, but if I just fixed up a little more, went along a little more.”
“You’re not gorgeous.”
She laughed, her eyes dancing, and bit into her toast. “Shut up. This is my story.”
“You’re better than gorgeous. Gorgeous is just lucky DNA. You’re . . . vivid,” he decided. “Compelling. That’s the sort of thing that comes from inside spaces, so it’s better than gorgeous. If you want my opinion.”
“Wow.” She sat back, surprised enough to forget her breakfast. “If I was anybody else, I’d be speechless after a comment like that. As it is, I’ve lost my trend. What the hell was I talking about?”
This time when he smiled, it reached his eyes, warmed up the gray. “Asshole college boy you slept with.”
“Right. Right.” She dived into the hash browns. “There was more than one, but anyway, I was twenty and this dude’s passive-aggressive insults were starting to get under my skin—especially when I found out he was boffing this brain-dead bimbo with pots of money and breast implants.”
She fell silent, concentrating on her breakfast.
“So, what did you do?”
“What did I do?” She drank some coffee. “Next time we went to bed, I screwed his brains out, then slipped him a couple of sleeping pills.”
“You drugged him?”
“Yeah, so?”
“Nothing. Nothing.”
“I paid a couple of guys to carry him down to one of the lecture halls. And I dressed his sorry ass in sexy women’s underwear—bra, garter belt, black hose. That was challenging. I made up his face, curled his hair. Took some pictures to put up on the Internet. He was still sleeping when the first class started piling in at eight.” She ate some eggs. “It was a hell of a show—especially when he woke up, got a clue and started screaming like a girl.”
Enjoying her, appreciating the single-mindedness as much as the creativity of her revenge, Nate toasted her with his coffee. “You can bet I won’t be commenting on your wardrobe.”
“Point of the story. I believe in payback. For the little things, for the big ones. For everything in between. Letting people screw you over is just lazy and uncreative.”
“You didn’t love him.”
“Hell, no. If I had, I wouldn’t have just embarrassed him. I’d have caused him intense physical pain in addition.”
He toyed with the rest of his omelette. “Let me ask you something. Are we exclusive?”
“I consider myself very exclusive, in every way.”
“What we have going on together,” he said patiently. “Is this an exclusive arrangement?”
“Is that what you’re looking for?”
“I wasn’t looking for anything. Then there you were.”
“Uh-oh.” She let out a long breath. “Good one. Seems like you’ve got a whole big pot of good ones. I don’t have a problem limiting myself to swinging from the chandelier with just you, for as long as we’re both enjoying it.”
“Fair enough.”
“She cheat on you, Burke?”
“Yeah. Yeah, she did.”
Meg nodded, continued to eat. “I don’t cheat. Okay, sometimes I cheat at cards, but just for the hell of it. And sometimes I lie when it’s expedient. Or when the lie’s just more fun than the truth. I can be mean if it suits me, which is a lot.”
She paused, reaching across to touch his hand for a moment so there was a connection between them. “But I don’t kick a man when he’s down, unless I’m the one who put him down in the first place. I don’t put him down unless he deserves it. And I don’t break my word if I give it. So I’ll give you my word. I won’t cheat on you.”
“Except at cards.”
“Well, yeah. It’s going to be light soon. We should get going.”
SHE DIDN’T KNOW how she was going to handle it with Charlene. Any angle she picked, the result was going to be the same. Hysteria, accusations, rage, tears. It was always messy with Charlene.
Maybe Nate read her mind, because he stopped Meg outside the door of
The Lodge. “Maybe I should break this to her. I’ve had to give family members this kind of news before.”
“You’ve had to tell people their lover’s been dead in an ice cave for fifteen years?”
“The means don’t change the impact that much.”
His voice was gentle, in direct contrast to the jagged edge of hers. It calmed her. More than calmed her, she realized. It made her want to lean on him.
“Much as I’d like to pass this plate to you, I’d better handle it. You’re welcome to pick up the pieces after I’m done.”
They went inside. A few people were loitering over coffee or eating an early lunch. Meg flipped open her coat as she signalled to Rose.
“Charlene?”
“Office. We heard Steven and his friends are going to be okay. Roads were still too bad, but Jerk swung in to fly Joe and Lara down this morning. Get you some coffee?”
Nate watched Meg walk through a doorway. “Sure.”
SHE WENT STRAIGHT THROUGH the lobby area, skirted the counter and entered the office without knocking.
Charlene was at her desk, on the phone. She gave Meg an impatient, back-fingered wave.
“Now, Billy, if I’m going to get screwed like that, I expect to be taken out to dinner first.”
Meg turned away. If her mother was haggling over the price of supplies, she had to let it run through. The office didn’t look efficient. It looked like Charlene—female and obvious and foolish. Lots of cotton-candy pink in the fabrics, armies of silly dust catchers. Paintings of flowers in gold frames on the walls, silk pillows mounded on the velvet settee.
It smelled of roses, from the room spray Charlene spritzed every time she entered the room. The desk itself was an ornate reproduction antique she’d bought from a catalog and paid too much money for. Curvy legs and lots of carving.
The desk set was pink, as were all her personal stationery and Post-its. All of them were topped with Charlene in fancy, nearly illegible script.
There was a pole lamp beside the settee—a gold wash with a pink beaded shade more suitable, in Meg’s mind, to a bordello than an office.
She wondered, as she often did, how she could have come from anyone whose tastes, whose mind, whose ways, were so directly opposed to her own. Then again, maybe her own life was nothing more than an endless rebellion against the womb.
Meg turned back when she heard Charlene purr her good-byes.
“Trying a price hike on me.” With a short laugh, Charlene poured herself another glass of water from the pitcher on her desk.
Didn’t look efficient, Meg thought, but looks were deceiving. When it came to business, Charlene could calculate her profit and loss to the penny, any time of the day or night.
“I hear you’re a hero.” Charlene watched her daughter as she sipped. “You and the sexy chief. You stay over in Anchorage to celebrate?”
“We lost the light.”
“Sure. Just a word of advice. A man like Nate’s got baggage and plenty of it. You’re used to traveling fast and light. It’s not a good match.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. I need to talk to you.”
“I’ve got calls and paperwork. You know this is my busy time of day.”
“It’s about my father.”
Charlene lowered her water glass. Her face went very still, very pale, then the color erupted in her cheeks. Candy pink to match the room.
“Did you hear from him? Did you see him in Anchorage? That son of a bitch. He’d better not think for one minute he can come back here and pick things up. He’s not getting anything out of me, and if you’ve got any sense, you’ll say the same.”
She shoved away from the desk and stood, her color rising from pink to hot and red. “Nobody, nobody walks away from me then walks back. Not ever. Pat Galloway can go fuck himself.”
“He’s dead.”
“Probably had some sob story to tell. He was always good with . . .
What do you mean he’s dead?” Looking more annoyed than shocked, she flipped back her curly hair. “That’s ridiculous. Who told you such a stupid lie?”
“He’s been dead. It looks like he’s been dead a long time. Maybe only days after he left here.”
“Why would you say something like that? Why would you say something like that to me?” The angry red color had drained, turning her face white, white and drawn and suddenly old. “You can’t hate me that much.”
“I don’t hate you. You’ve always been wrong about that. Maybe I’m ambivalent toward you most of the time, but I don’t hate you. Those boys found an ice cave. It’s where they took shelter part of the time they were on the mountain. He was in there. He’s been in there.”
“That’s crazy talk. I want you to get out.” Her voice rose to a hoarse shriek. “Get the hell out of here right now.”
“They took pictures,” Meg continued, even as Charlene grabbed one of her paperweights and heaved it against the wall. “I saw them. I recognized him.”
“You did not!” She whirled, grabbed a trinket off a shelf, threw it. “You’re making this up to get back at me.”
“For what?” Meg ignored the statuary and glassware that smashed into walls, onto the floor, even when a shard nicked her cheek. It was Charlene’s usual method of venting temper.
Break it, destroy it. Then have someone sweep it up. And buy new.
“For being a lousy mother? For being a big ho? For sleeping with the same guy I was sleeping with to prove you weren’t too old to steal him from me? Maybe for telling me, most of my life, what a disappointment I am as a daughter. Which offense am I pulling out of my hat?”
“I raised you by myself. I made sacrifices for you so you could have what you wanted.”
“Too bad you never gave me violin lessons. I could use one about now. And guess what, Charlene. This isn’t about you or me. It’s about him. He’s dead.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Somebody killed him. Murdered him. Somebody hacked an ice ax into his chest and left him on the mountain.”
“No. No, no, no, no.” Her face was frozen now, as still and cold as the sky behind her. Then it collapsed as she slid down to the floor to sit among the broken china and glass. “Oh, my God, no. Pat. Pat.”
“Get up, for God’s sake. You’re cutting yourself.” Still angry, Meg marched around the desk, grabbed Charlene by the arms to haul her up.
“Meg. Megan.” Charlene’s breath hitched in and out, in and out. Her big, blue eyes swam. “He’s dead?”
“Yes.”
The tears spilled over, flooded her cheeks. On a wail, she dropped her head on Meg’s shoulder and clung.
Meg fought her first instinct to pull away. She let her mother weep, hold on and weep. And she realized it was the first sincere embrace they’d shared in more years than she could count.
WHEN THE STORM PASSED, she took Charlene up the back way to her room. It was like undressing a doll, she thought, as she took off her mother’s clothes. She doctored the minor cuts, slid a nightgown over Charlene’s head.
“He didn’t leave me.”
“No.” Meg walked into the bath, scanned her mother’s medicine cabinet. There were always plenty of pills. She found some Xanax, filled a glass of water.
“I hated him for leaving me.”
“I know.”
“You hated me for it.”
“Maybe. Take this.”
“Murdered?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” She set the glass aside after Charlene took the pill. “Lie down.”
“I loved him.”
“Maybe you did.”
“I loved him,” Charlene repeated as Meg pulled the covers over her. “I hated him for leaving me alone. I can’t stand to be alone.”
“Go to sleep for a while.”
“Will you stay?”
“No.” Meg pulled the drapes, spoke into the shadows. “I don’t hate being alone. And I need to be. You won’t want me
when you wake up anyway.”
But she stayed until Charlene slept.
She passed Sarrie Parker on the stairs on the way down. “Let her sleep. Her office is a mess.”
“I heard.” Sarrie raised her eyebrows. “Must’ve said something that put her into a hell of a temper.”
“Just try to get it cleaned up before she goes back in there.”
She kept walking and grabbed her coat as she swung into the restaurant. “I have to go,” she said to Nate.
He pushed away from the bar, caught up with her at the door. “Where?”
“Home. I need to be home.” She welcomed the cold, the light slap of the wind.
“How is she?”
“I gave her a tranquilizer. She comes out of it, she’s going to crash down on you. Sorry.” She pulled on her gloves, then pressed her hands to her eyes. “God. God. It was what I was expecting. Hysterics, rage, why do you hate me. The usual.”
“Your face is cut.”
“Just a scratch. China-poodle shrapnel. She throws things.” She breathed carefully as they walked toward the river. She watched the ghost of her breath fly and fade. “But when it sank in, when she understood I wasn’t messing with her, she fell apart. I didn’t expect what I saw then. I didn’t expect what I saw on her face. She loved him. I never considered that. I never thought she did.”
“It doesn’t seem like the best time for either one of you to be alone.”
“She won’t be. I need to be. Give me a few days, Burke. You’re going to have your hands full around here anyway. Few days, this will settle in some. Come out and see me. I’ll fix you a meal, take you to bed.”
“Phones are back up. You could call me if you need anything.”
“Yeah, I could. I won’t. Don’t try to save me, chief.” She slid her sunglasses on. “Just handle the details.”
She turned, pulled his head down to hers and indulged them both in a hot, seeking kiss. And drew back, patted his cheek with her gloved hand.
“Just a few days,” she repeated, then crossed to her plane.
She didn’t look back, but she knew he stood by the river, knew he watched her fly away. She blanked it out of her mind, all of it, and let herself soar over the tops of the trees, on the edge of the sky.
It wasn’t until she saw the drift of smoke from her own chimney and the silky bullets that were her dogs race across the snow toward the lake that she felt her throat slam shut on her.