by Ros Baxter
She closed her eyes, squeezing them hard, reminding herself of the reasons why she couldn’t let him kiss her in this bed, with her so hurt, and him so exhausted and angry and with his vulnerability on full display.
She could feel a tsunami building on the horizon, sweeping away common sense and good reason and all the things on which Louise Samuels had built her perfect, post-Stone-Mountain life. She had done this before – thinking she could have something different with him, a different life; twenty years ago. And that very night had shown her how wrong she was. Stone Mountain was everything she hated about who she had been and what had happened. And it was also the place she needed to stay away from to keep the ghosts at bay.
Twenty years ago, she had run because she needed to be away from the scene of where the horror had happened, and she had run because she had been sure that hooking up with Gage would be Louise Samuels repeating Skye Samuels’ history: sleeping with some beautiful, wild boy without giving a single thought to common sense, compatibility or safety.
Lou’s brain harped at her that history had proved her wrong on that score – Gage had turned into, if not a model citizen, at least a hell of a farmer and father. But there was still the other thing that had happened that night. For Gage, there was nothing else but Stone Mountain, or more accurately, Sunset Downs. For Lou, Stone Mountain was the place where she had come undone.
Lou took a breath and pushed a palm against his hard chest, which had somehow moved very close. ‘No, Gage,’ she whispered, her hand betraying her by refusing to move from its happy place on his chest.
Move, Lou, move away from him. You’ll only hurt him again, when you go.
Gage froze in the face of her words, and in the uncertainty in his eyes she saw the teenage boy she’d come to know that night twenty years ago – the one beyond the hard shell he’d built to protect himself from his father, and the town.
‘Why not?’ His voice was a low rasp, and it sliced into her brain.
What could she say? He knew some things, but he didn’t know it all. Hot tears pricked at the back of Lou’s eyes and she blinked furiously. But Gage didn’t miss anything.
‘Oh, darlin’,’ he said, reaching out big arms to her, his face so open Lou had to fight even harder to push back the tears. ‘I don’t know how it was. I don’t know exactly,’ he went on. ‘But I know how it must have hurt.’
No. He didn’t. Because he didn’t know the whole story. He just knew what they all knew, what they all thought they knew. He forgave what she had done to him because of the grief. But he didn’t know what she had really done. And he couldn’t know. Not ever.
Because if he did, if anyone did, it would be the end of all the delicate work she had done to stay whole. So she squeezed her eyes shut against his beauty and his nearness and his tenderness and she killed the thing that wanted to rise up and engulf them both.
‘It’s not that, Gage,’ she said, the words burning her throat. ‘I’m fine, with all that.’ Yeah, right. ‘It’s just …’ She took a breath and then the plunge. ‘There’s someone else, back in the city.’
Gage retreated, his body stiffening. His eyes narrowed. She could feel him assessing her like she was an animal and he could sniff the truth from her. ‘Sure didn’t seem like there was anyone else the other day,’ he purred, his face hard and his eyes full of recrimination.
Lou steeled herself and shrugged, even though the movement shot pain into her head and shoulders. ‘Muscle memory,’ she said, trying to go for a light smile. ‘Sorry. I should have said. We shouldn’t have. I …’ She paused, grasping for the thing that would work, that would convince him, and keep them both safe. It dropped into her brain like a piece of traitor’s silver. She spoke in a firmer tone. ‘You know you and me, we’ve always had a thing, but this guy … We’re in love.’
Gage made a disgusted noise in the back of his throat. He rolled off the bed and turned his back, bending down for his boots and giving her a fine view of his sweet arse.
‘I’ll be getting out of your way then,’ he growled, heading for the door. ‘So you can sleep.’ The sight of him leaving hurt; his back was so stiff and his manner so final. ‘You should stay in this room till you get the all clear. Save you making the trek from the cabin. I’ll bunk down there.’ He sounded reasonable, but very distant.
‘No, I –’ she began, but he was gone.
Lou lay on his bed, taking in the hard, warm scent of him, wishing she had at least let him kiss her first, so that the perfect memory she might take away with her would be even more perfect. Then she chastised herself. She had left him once before, after a lover’s kiss.
She wouldn’t do it again.
Chapter
9
The heat is on
Lou cleared her throat. ‘I’m sorry, but that is relevant exactly how?’
The fifty-something investigator with the distracting bald head cleared his throat. He’d done charming, then accommodating, then patronising, and he was fast moving to downright rude. Lou smiled to herself. She was obviously doing something right.
She dragged her chair a little to the right, so the afternoon sun streaming in from the window didn’t reflect quite so blindingly off his scalp. She wondered if zapping her with his pate was a strategy. He was a hard one to work out, unlike his limp young partner, who seemed bored and ready to wrap this thing up already.
‘Well,’ Detective Farmer said, scratching his goatee and shifting his considerable bulk in one of Gage’s lovely old antique dining chairs. ‘I guess I’m just … wondering … if Ms Samuels –’ He grinned at Skye, showing off a row of veneers that looked at odds with his untidy grey suit. ‘Beg my pardon, now, Ms Samuels Senior.’ He emphasised the last word and Skye snorted.
‘Nothing senior about me, sunshine,’ she barked in a voice that told Lou she was nervous about the encounter. She’d obviously ducked around the back for one too many cigarettes this morning.
‘Sorry, ma’am,’ he said, smiling with such determined artifice that Lou’s stomach started to clench. ‘If Ms Skye Samuels’ condition is …’ He paused, shrugging delicately, as though he was sorry but there was nothing for it. ‘Terminal.’ He let the word sit fat and awkward in the room for a moment before he went on. ‘If she is terminal,’ he began again, more confidently this time, ‘then some’ – he held up a thick finger bedecked by a fat gold signet ring – ‘some suspicious types might see that as a reason for her to deliberately set fire to her home.’
Lou frowned, feigning lack of understanding. ‘Why?’ She forced her voice to be flat and brutal. ‘If she’s dead, why does she care?’
‘Because you’re the beneficiary,’ Detective Farmer said with a flourish. ‘And maybe she feels like she should leave something to her only daughter. The house itself wouldn’t have fetched much, not in the current market.’
Ah. Understanding settled comfortingly into Lou’s bones. So that was what this was. That was why these two slick limpdicks had made the trek from Sydney. Hard times, rural town, people looking to get out. They must have had a spate of such incidents. Homes weren’t worth much once towns died; the insurance money started to look very attractive. And the company would be keen to send a message, no doubt heavying the police to bring in the big guns and get to the bottom of the cause of the fire.
Lou sighed with relief. Things were always so much easier once you knew what you were dealing with; and while she knew in her bones that Skye had lit the fire, she also knew that these two wind-up coppers were barking up completely the wrong tree if they thought the reason was so that Skye could leave a legacy to her beloved Lou.
‘Detective,’ she said, clearing her throat. She spoke softly because she knew he was already annoyed with the way she had checked his credentials so thoroughly; insisted on sitting in on the interview; brandished her impressive qualifications in the way she only ever did when it was absolutely necessary; and asked clarifying questions every time he had directed one to Skye. ‘Perhaps you need a li
ttle backstory here.’
The man rubbed his shiny head, and Lou was sure she saw a look cross his face that suggested he knew something bad was about to happen. She wondered if the scalp-rubbing was some kind of good-luck ritual.
‘I don’t need any money, from my mother or anyone else. I make …’ She leaned forwards delicately, trying to manage this carefully, conscious that jobs like hers easily alienated men like him, especially when performed by skinny girls who still looked the wrong side of thirty. ‘More than enough to keep myself very comfortable without Skye’s help.’
She waved a hand at Skye, who was looking bored but not fooling Lou for a moment. Her right hand picked at a thread on her denim miniskirt, and she kept turning to glance at the younger detective who was prowling the living room as though sniffing out a smoking gun. Or perhaps a smoking match.
‘And,’ Lou went on, drumming her fingers on the table and pushing up her glasses, ‘even if I did need money, my mother and I are not …’ She avoided looking at Skye as she tested the words in her brain before speaking them. ‘… On great terms. Until a few days ago, I hadn’t been back to Stone Mountain since I left home to go to uni twenty years ago. And that’s the way I –’ She waved a hand at Skye but avoided looking at her. ‘The way we like it.’ She nodded to underline her point.
The younger detective suddenly seemed interested. He returned to the dining table and leaned one skinny hip against it, close to where Lou was sitting. ‘Maybe you just don’t like small towns?’
Lou pushed her chair back so she could move away from the two men. ‘No,’ she said, folding her arms across her chest. She’d loved this small town, once upon a time. ‘I don’t like playing happy families.’ She jabbed a finger at Skye. ‘And if you think for one moment that Skye thinks leaving me some play money is going to endear her to me in her dying days …’ She whistled softly. ‘You’re a thousand kinds of wrong.’
Hostility rose from Skye in waves, but Lou couldn’t think about it right now. If this was their angle, these overbearing cops, they needed to know they were mistaken.
It was time to put this shit to bed. ‘Detectives,’ she continued, ‘do you have some evidence that this fire was deliberately lit?’
The bald one sucked his lips in against his teeth. ‘Well now, I’m not sure we can go into the evidence the police service …’
‘Yes, you can,’ Lou said. ‘And I would like to know. Do you? Or is this just some really crappy fishing expedition?’
The bald detective shrugged. ‘The forensics could sure support a case, if that’s what the rest of the picture led us to believe.’
‘So let me tell you something,’ Lou said. ‘This is how your story is going to look, should you be brave enough to try to press it. A very sick woman, a woman with terminal cancer, whose doctor will testify to the pain she is currently experiencing, dropped a joint on the way to bed. Her house burned down and the whole community rallied around her.’ Lou tried not to overtly cross her fingers behind her back – if any rallying was to be done in Stone Mountain, it would not be for Skye Samuels. ‘The police, on the other hand, decided to launch a witch hunt.’ Lou looked at Skye at this point, and had to admit the analogy worked. There had always been something far away and otherworldly about Skye’s beauty. She could have been a witch. Lou pressed on, pushing her nails into her palms against the horrors of what she was saying. ‘Your case might wrap up before Skye dies, or maybe not. Either way, I’m going to wheel a very sick woman into that courtroom, to argue with you over – how much did you say your policy was worth, Mum?’
Skye sniffed, her eyes blue like ice as they glared at Lou. ‘Hundred and twenty.’
‘For a hundred and twenty thousand dollars,’ Lou finished, wiping her hands together like she was cleaning dirt from them. ‘I reckon it’s going to look a little mean-spirited,’ she said, flicking her notebook shut. ‘To say the least.’ Her message was clear: Are we done?
Detective Farmer pushed back his chair and stepped closer, indignant lines hardening the soft edges of his body. He bared his perfect teeth at Lou, in what was clearly supposed to pass as a smile. ‘We’ll be in touch,’ he said.
When they were gone (you knew you were unwelcome in Stone Mountain when no-one went out to the veranda to wave you off), Lou sat opposite Skye at the table. They had avoided this. Like a carefully choreographed dance, they had moved around the house, in each other’s orbit, but never quite coming in for landing. After her injury, Lou had spent two days in bed, wrapped in her own pain, both physical and mental, aware that the rest of the house was continuing about its business. Skye had been the soul of motherly caring – not overdoing the Mommy Dearest thing, but checking on her regularly, bringing her meals and medication, and keeping visitors away.
As soon as Lou could move without feeling like her head was going to drop off, she was up and about again, determined that she would get the things done – for both her mother and her father – that would let her leave this town for good. And she and Skye had slipped back into their separate corners. But now the time had come. It was Friday, she had been here for almost a week, and they had to have a conversation.
Skye spread her fingers out on the table in front of her – studying her glittery nails. ‘You hate me,’ she said, her voice flat.
Lou’s legs turned to water and she wanted to run. Skye had it wrong. She could never hate her. Skye had been the softest part of Lou’s heart, even over all the years of managing her fallout. Skye was the most beautiful, the most mesmerising, the most loving. She was also the most careless, hopeless and wild. And people got hurt around her. Lou pressed her eyes shut, remembering Skye as though in a collage – screaming, spinning, skipping, laughing, singing; always in motion, always in pursuit of the next reckless dream. Lou pressed her feet into the floor to remind her legs to get with the program and ordered her brain to switch the slide show off. Because it always ended in a bad, bad place and Lou couldn’t afford to watch it right now.
‘I don’t hate you,’ she said, wishing she could give it more heart. ‘I just can’t be near you too long.’
Skye shut her eyes. She looked so young, the new, chin-grazing hairstyle emphasising her firm jaw and neck. ‘I’m different now,’ she said, and Lou could hear how hard it was for her to say it, to have to say it. ‘It changed me too, you know.’
It might be true, but Lou didn’t care. It was too late for Skye to be different. The time for her to be different was twenty, thirty years ago, when she was a mother.
Lou thought about Gage – he had been nineteen years old when he had gotten some random girl pregnant. He had been a tearaway, a boy used to living hard and following his own rules, but he had still woken up and smelled the coffee. He had raised Piper like she was the most precious and important thing that had ever graced the earth. He had cleaned up his act, and his father’s, and the farm in the process. Skye had been young, sure, but it wasn’t that. Skye had never let the fact of her motherhood break her stride in one single way. She had loved the fact of it, but never let it change her.
But caring for a child did change you. Lou knew that, because she had been a mother too. She’d had no choice. She had been the mother Skye refused to be. But it wasn’t fair, and she hadn’t been good enough and that was why everything was the way it was now. This was not just on Skye. It was on Lou, too.
But Skye needed to own her part of it.
‘I’m glad,’ Lou said, not knowing if it was a lie or not. ‘I’m glad you’re different, and that things are good with you and Bo. But I …’
Skye was dying; could Lou ever find some common ground rich enough to feel anything other than relief when her mother died?
‘But there’s just too much there.’ Lou stabbed at her chest with her finger. ‘Too much here.’ She pointed to her head. ‘And here.’ She passed a hand over her eyes, her head starting to ache again. ‘I can’t see you, can’t be near you, without opening it all up again.’
Skye nodded, her f
ace not angry or understanding, just neutral.
‘You going tomorrow?’ Skye lowered her head so she didn’t have to meet Lou’s eyes. ‘To the grave?’
The room folded in on itself. Lou knew what tomorrow was, of course she did. But something stubborn had made her avoid looking the date in the eye over the last week. She could feel it gathering just over the horizon, like some mean mother of a hailstorm. But this year it was different.
This year she was back where it all happened.
Would it really be possible to follow her usual routine – wilful avoidance followed by a spectacular end-of-day crash, falling into booze and tears and Sharni’s loving hugs before passing out with exhaustion? Something was different this year. And it wasn’t just that she was here. Things were ending. Skye was dying, although it was kind of hard to believe it while her mother continued to look resolutely sexy and biology-defying young. Lou sucked in a breath and felt like the universe was conspiring to make her face her demons. Godammit, it was such a revolting cliché.
Skye raised her face and tears tracked down it in shiny trails. Lou wanted to scream at her that she had no right to cry, but knew better that she had no right to say it. There was a time Lou had wanted to see Skye cry – wanted her to break open and fall apart, smash through the wall of numb regret that had enveloped her at the time. Back then, Lou had imagined striking her mother – hard – across the face, just to see if anything would make her take responsibility. But there was no satisfaction in Skye’s tears now, she looked like the bottom had fallen from her world. Her shoulders rose and fell in rapid, jerky sobs and snot ran wild from her nose. ‘I – I –’ she hiccupped, her eyes wild as she searched for the words.