She was thinking about Julia. And Mitch. And what might happen to the two of them. And how much nicer things might have been for Neesy if someone had been on the lookout all those years of her growing up.
Once the coffee was started, she sat at the dinette table to wait for it to finish. It was the same table she’d eaten every meal at for as long as she could remember. Her mama had gotten it from her mama, who had bought it shiny and new once upon a time. Neesy imagined the gleam of the chrome edge before the gunk of generations had dulled it, the swirls of yellow Formica before the drunken rages had nicked it.
She should have gotten rid of it long ago. She’d heard there were nuts out there who would pay good money for a vintage 1950s kitchen table, cracks and all.
But she’d hung on to it. Like she’d hung on to everything else. At least the pain of the past was familiar. If she sold the table, she’d have to buy a new one. And who knew what they cost these days? Could she afford it? Would anything else look right in this tumbledown kitchen?
She picked at a scratch near the edge. Who said she had to stay here anyway? She had no ties, no one holding her back. Couldn’t she come and go as she pleased? She should have left years ago. Right after Mama died and before Daddy got sick. Before Tommy Joe, before Vernon and Ed Pickett. Before the entire line of worthless men paraded in and out of her life.
Was she stuck on another one?
After what Mitch had told her, she didn’t think so. He’d done a terrible thing, taking that child, but it was also a good thing. A brave thing.
But she was sleeping with him. And that kind of taints your judgment.
But if Julia had needed Mitch then, she also needed him now. Maybe more than ever. Neesy still couldn’t think about that child without an anxious queasiness and a squeeze of guilt. Julia had been her responsibility, and she’d let her walk right out of the house. Neesy hadn’t even hugged her good-bye. If anything happened to Julia, Neesy wouldn’t be able to live with herself.
She must have drunk ten cups of coffee that morning while she figured things out. The cop at her curb was gone. Crick’s was closed.
All the signs were pointing in one direction.
She went into the bedroom where Mitch was holed up. He was wearing the jeans she’d given him and an unbuttoned flannel shirt, studying a map he’d asked for. She stood in the doorway and watched for a few minutes. Just the sight of him made her feel like something was crushing her, creating a languid, liquid heat inside. He had a beautiful body, hard and muscled, and she still hadn’t had enough of feeling it beneath her hands.
But more than that, something happened to her when she was around him. Like a new skin was papering over the old, and it was fresh and warm and beautiful.
He looked up, saw her there. The lines in his face softened. “I heard the phone. Everything okay?”
She nodded and glided over to him, slipping her hands beneath the loose shirt. The bruise from his cracked ribs was angry and broad, and she tried to stay away from it. “It was Loritta. Crick’s is closed ’til after New Year’s.”
“I’m sorry.” He sounded genuinely regretful, and she nodded, accepting his remorse.
He didn’t say anything more, just looked at her for a long time, then ran a hand down her cheek. “I have to go.”
She leaned into his palm, her heart and her head battering her. “I know.”
They stayed that way for whole minutes, leaning into each other as though neither wanted to admit an end was coming.
“You’re going to need help,” Neesy said at last.
“I’ll manage.”
“Every cop in the state is looking for you.”
He didn’t respond. How could he? It was true.
“Old Man Crick isn’t reopening for a while, so I have time. I told Loritta I was going to Lubbock to visit my cousin.”
He gazed at her, the implication sinking in. Then he shook his head and stepped away. “No.”
“Yes.”
“Helping me will get you in trouble.”
“I’m not helping you. I’m in Lubbock. Besides, I can always say you forced me, right?” She went after him, taking his face in her hands. “It’s not for you. It’s for Julia. I’ve seen you with that girl, and she couldn’t ask for a better daddy.”
“Even if it’s not her real one?”
“I would have traded my real daddy for a fake one like you any day of the week.”
They left that afternoon around four when it was dark enough that only the outline of Mitch’s body could be seen. To disguise it during the walk from the front door to the car, he’d put one of Neesy’s long summer skirts over his jeans and a wool beret over his head. If any of the neighbors were watching, he and Neesy hoped he looked enough like a woman to pass.
Earlier, Neesy had made a fast batch of brownies, put them in a Christmas tin, and ran over to Mrs. Tilden’s with them. The older woman was thrilled, and Neesy managed to reveal that she and a girlfriend were off to see her cousin that afternoon.
She spent twenty minutes conspicuously packing the car with bags of empty boxes wrapped to look like Christmas presents and Tupperware containers of what could have been cookies or Chex Mix or both.
Neesy took the first driving shift. To keep up the fiction, she started west out of town, and when they’d gone a good ten miles, she turned around and headed east to New York. From what they could gather from news reports, the authorities were concentrating their search for Mitch on the bigger population centers, so he devised an alternate, back-roads route.
When it was safe, he divested himself of Neesy’s clothes, laid back his head, and closed his eyes. It was a long trip to the East Coast, and once they switched drivers, he’d be up most of the night.
A piece of luck came later that evening when they pulled into a gas station. Mitch had dozed off, and when the rhythm of the car stopped, he woke. Neesy wasn’t there, and he guessed she’d gone inside to the bathroom. He rubbed the sleep out of his face, hoping she’d come back with coffee.
She came back with a newspaper. The front-page headlines were all about him, but Neesy said, “Page three.”
He opened the paper as she drove off. There, on the right side of the page, was a picture of Dutch smiling that Tom Cruise smile, his arm around Julia.
“They’re in Chicago,” Neesy said.
Inset into the column was also a picture of Mitch. He looked hulky and dangerous in the police photo, but he only skimmed over it, devouring the picture of Julia instead. Did she look all right? He couldn’t tell. Something was… wrong. Or different. It took him a minute to figure it out.
She was wearing a dress.
His heart clenched in a stab of pain. He was changing her. He was already changing her.
“Look at the hotel,” she said. He peered at the marquee over the entrance, which was partially obscured. “I think it says… Is that Drake? Do you know a Drake hotel in Chicago?”
He smiled grimly. “Oh, yeah, I know it.” For four generations, the Drake had been the Hanover place of preference—the same grand hotel that ambassadors, presidents, and movie stars chose. His grandparents had dined there with Jimmy Stewart, his mother with Margaret Thatcher. He could show her where Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio carved their initials in the Cape Cod Room or the suite where Princess Diana stayed when she’d visited. The Drake was expert at handling high-profile guests. If Dutch wanted to avoid the press, he could have.
Mitch stared down at the picture. A mistake? Or deliberate?
“What are you thinking?” Neesy said.
But he was done thinking. “Pull over. I’ll drive.”
They switched places, and after a few minutes studying the map, he pressed down on the gas with his good foot. But even speeding, it would take most of the night to get there, and he had to stick to the legal limit—he didn’t want to give the police any excuse to find him.
The junction north turned out to be nearly half an hour away. It was maddening to turn around a
gain. Every minute lost seemed a notch in whatever protection the publicity had given Julia, and it infuriated him to know he’d already wasted so many.
They found the right road and got a couple of hours in before the flurries started. By ten they were in a solid snowstorm, and by midnight it had turned into a full-fledged blizzard. The only way to know they were on the road was the faint blur of the preceding taillights. Traffic slowed and finally stopped. Edgy and anxious, Mitch drummed on the wheel.
The snow was coming down so heavily, neither of them saw the state trooper until he was practically upon them. Mitch froze, and Neesy grabbed his arm.
“What should we do?”
For half a second, Mitch thought about bolting, blizzard or no blizzard. But it was already too late. The cop was at their car.
Mitch’s whole body tightened, ready to be dragged out, arrested, cuffed, sent where he could never get to Julia again. Next to him, Neesy’s breathing was a nervous wheeze of apprehension. Rigid with tension, he gripped the door console and at the last second remembered the gun hidden under the seat.
He rolled down the window.
30
A ferocious blast of wind and chill roared over them through the opening.
The cop leaned in. “We’re clearing the highway,” he shouted over the storm. “Got lights set up. You’re only a few miles from Felton. Follow the markers and they’ll take you to a Red Cross shelter, where you can stay ’til the storm passes.” Then the trooper was gone, disappearing into the white swirl and onto the next car.
Mitch sat there with the wind and snow exploding into the car. Then the realization of what had happened washed over him, and with a shaky hand, he rolled up the window.
He laid his head back against the seat, a little light-headed. When he looked over at Neesy, she was swatting away tears. They caught each other’s gaze, and without warning, they burst out laughing.
And then she was crying, and suddenly he was holding her, swamped by guilt.
“I’m sorry,” he soothed. “It’s all right. We’re all right.” He smelled that sharp lemony fragrance in her hair, and it sent him back to that hot, searing kiss outside the carriage house and how he had ended it. As he looked back, his attempt to keep her at arm’s length seemed doomed, and the reality of her here, in his arms, inevitable.
He held her tight. “Want me to take you home?” He’d do it, too, much as he needed to keep heading north.
“No. I’m all right. I’m fine.” She pushed him away. Hiccupped. “Oh, geez, I’m not usually such a crybaby.”
Mitch wasn’t sure he believed her, but he didn’t have time to probe. The cars had started moving, and it was all he could do to stay on the road from marker to marker.
It took them half an hour to get off the highway and into the Felton High School gym. They rumbled into the crowded parking area, barely able to make out the school’s backlit sign. No one was directing traffic or parking, so once they got there, it was every man for himself. The chaos gave Mitch his first chance to separate from the highway caravan.
He eased around cars that were stuck, at odd angles, or waiting for a place to pull in. Eventually he found a rear entrance and drove back into the storm.
“What are you doing?” Neesy asked.
“We can’t go to the Red Cross. They might want IDs.”
The whirl of thick snow in the headlight beam was the only clear sight as they left Felton behind. Neither one of them breathed. Mitch leaned forward over the wheel, squinting into the night.
How much longer could they go on like this? He had a good half tank of gas left. If he stuck to the road, could they outrun the storm?
Easier said than done. There were no taillights to follow, and visibility was down to nil.
“Maybe we should pull over until the snow stops,” Neesy said.
“We could freeze here,” Mitch told her. He slowed to less than a crawl, making his best estimate on the curve of the road.
“We could also drive off a cliff,” Neesy said.
They remained on solid ground, but twenty minutes later the street turned bumpy and rutted; despite his best efforts, he’d turned off the pavement and onto something else. A gravel drive? A dirt track?
He stopped. Turned to Neesy. “Got a flashlight?”
She opened the glove compartment and handed him one. “But it’s probably dead. I never remember to change the batteries.”
He switched it on. Dim light flooded the car.
“Wow,” she said. “Lucky us.”
“Stay here. I’m going to see if I can figure out where we are.”
He didn’t have much of a coat; Neesy had given him a sweater and a denim jacket. He pulled up the collar, opened the door, and set his shoulder into the wind.
He’d forgotten about his ankle, though; so the first time he put his weight on it, pain shot through him. But he set off at a slow limp, trying not to let Neesy see. In a minute the snow covered the sight of the car, so she wouldn’t have been able to see him in any case.
Because of the blur, he was reluctant to go far. The flashlight was a cheap one without a lot of power, so even with it he couldn’t see much ahead. He counted his steps, took ten, then flashed to his left. Nothing in that direction. He turned the light to the right. Made out a darker shape in the darkness.
Scuttling back the ten steps, he used his hands as well as the light to find the waiting car. He cracked the door. “There’s something over there. A house, a barn. I want to check it out. Take the wheel and follow me.”
She slid over the console, and he placed himself in the headlight spill. Using the flashlight, he picked his way to the building.
The wind was a literal pain, burning across his unprotected face, but it was lucky in one thing: it blew the snow so the drifts were growing only on one side. It would have been impossible to get through otherwise.
When they were close enough, he saw two shapes. The closer one was a barn, or the remnants of one. Shielding his face with his arm, he ran the flashlight over the structure. The roof was intact, more or less, and most of two sides still stood. He signaled Neesy to take the car in.
Once there, it was still colder than it had any right to be. Between the open end and the gaps in the other walls, there was small hindrance to the wind.
He left Neesy to check out the other building, and returned as quickly as he could. “It’s a house,” he told her. “Abandoned, looks like. But it’s got four walls and a roof. It’ll be warmer there than here.”
“Think it’s okay to leave the car?”
“Any car thieves out in this weather would have to be as crazy as us.”
He took her hand and led her through the snow. His feet were soaked by now; hers soon would be. The doors were all locked, so he had to break a window to get in. He used the butt of the flashlight to knock out the glass, then hoisted himself through and unlocked the front door to let in Neesy.
Once inside, she shuddered and held herself, hands working up and down her arms while she looked around. “Well at least it has walls.”
The window Mitch had broken was letting frigid air into the room. “Come on, let’s see what else it has.”
They found a kitchen and two small bedrooms in the back, all empty of furniture. Ancient wallpaper peeled away from the walls, showing layers of even older paper beneath.
He led her to a back room as empty as the rest. “We can stay here. It seems as warm as any.”
He was already attacking cobwebs in a corner of the room. Outside, the wind battered the room’s single window, which was thick with the fog of snow. At this rate, it seemed as if it would never stop.
Neesy wondered what it would be like to be trapped here forever. Her own little island of want and can’t have. Because there was still a world beyond the storm. A world that could explode with a twitch. That moment in the car when the trooper was at their window—what would she have done if he’d been there for less innocuous reasons?
Like the a
ftermath of a punch, the risk she was taking rolled over her. She was in the middle of nowhere, stranded in a blizzard, alone with a fugitive—a situation anyone in their right mind would never have gotten into in the first place. Why had she jumped in feetfirst?
With a wince of pain he tried to conceal, Mitch slid into the corner and waved her over. He got between her and the wall, and she settled with her back to his chest and his arms wrapped around her.
“Okay?” he asked.
“Uh-huh.”
She was more than okay. The hard width of his chest shielded her. His mouth was at her ear, his breath a warm, soft wind. She entwined her fingers with his and found the answer to her question.
Getting onto the floor and into this position had hurt him. But he did it, anyway, to keep her warm. Just like he’d gone after Boyd Collier in the alley—and taken a cuff to the face for it. This was a man who cared more about the right thing than the easy one.
She snuggled against him, and her doubts faded.
It was nice leaning against him. No furious blaze, but a slow, steady burn.
“What took us so long?” she murmured.
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean.”
He took a beat before answering. “Isn’t it obvious? I’m carrying the kind of weight that would crush anyone who gets too close. The last woman I was interested in ended up dead.”
“Julia’s mother.”
The conclusion was so obvious he didn’t bother corroborating it. “You believe me,” he said instead. It wasn’t a question; it was confirmation of what he already knew. But there was an edge to his voice. As though he didn’t understand why or was suspicious of her conviction.
“Why shouldn’t I believe you? That’s what you told me, and I choose to trust you. Can’t say it was especially smart because trusting usually means I end up getting screwed—and not only in the usual way. But I think… I think I’m through being smart. I think I’m through being a lot of things.” She turned around in his embrace so she could see his face. “I’m cold, Mitch. I don’t mean just here, in this run-down place. I’ve been cold all my life. I can’t explain it, but there’s something about you. About me when I’m with you. I suddenly feel like there’s real warmth in the world, and if I can only grab it, I’ll never be cold again.”
Two Lethal Lies Page 17