Clay

by Jennifer Blake

  “Without that money you’d have let Lainey die, regardless of how much she was loved or how desperately she wanted to live.”

  “The choice of who is saved has to be made by someone.”

  Lainey, turning to look up at the doctor behind her, said distinctly, “Only God is supposed to do that. You’re a bad man.”

  “A monster, in fact,” Janna agreed in low tones, then went on because it seemed she had so little to lose. “You’re a vulture, feeding on other people’s pain and misery. You’re the one who doesn’t understand the value of life. You think it’s cheap because it comes and goes so fast. But every single second we spend on this mean and dusty little planet is a glorious joy. Taking it from anyone is a crime, but stealing it from the young who have not yet learned its worth is an atrocity beyond bearing.”

  “I’m disappointed in you, Janna,” Gower said with a sigh. “Of all those I’ve tried to help, I thought you came closest to understanding my vision.”

  “Bull,” Clay said, in heavy disgust. “She tickled your ego because she’s beautiful and was so grateful for the hope you offered. You loved it that she was totally dependent on you.”

  Dr. Gower gave a dry laugh. “You may be right. There was always the possibility that she’d require consoling if the transplant for dear little Lainey failed.”

  “Never,” Janna declared in fierce rejection.

  “No?” The doctor’s voice turned hard. “But I think you considered being very kind to me in lieu of the extra money for your daughter’s surgery?”

  He was right. She might well have succumbed if Clay had not been there, if the bodies of the doctor’s victims had not been found, or if Lainey had not gotten sick. What would she not have done for her daughter’s sake?

  The need to destroy the man who might have manipulated her that way, and who was doing it now by holding her daughter, rose in Janna like a hunger. It wasn’t just his suggestion, though it was sickening enough; it was the casual way he referred to Lainey, his easy dismissal of the fact that she might have died. She’d understood the mothers of the dead teenagers before, but now she grasped their pain and need to retaliate with a visceral and primitive force that rose to her brain in blood-red heat and threatened to crowd her heart from her chest. Beside her, Clay cursed in a soft undertone as he eased forward again.

  “Enough of this,” Dr. Gower declared. “I don’t have the time.” Shifting Lainey quickly to the crook of his right arm, holding the scalpel edge to her neck with one hand, he plunged the other into his pocket and took out a length of nylon cord of the kind used to secure fishing boats. “You will oblige me, Janna, by using this to tie up your lover. You should be good at it, after all.”

  She glanced at Clay. His attention was focused on the kitchen and the bedroom hall that lay behind the doctor and Lainey. Then as if he felt her watching him, he turned his gaze, dark blue and unfathomable, to meet hers.

  Time became elastic, stretching endlessly while they stood in communication that had no words. Finally he said quietly, “Do as he says. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Why? You’re stronger, so a greater threat. Tying you up will make it easier for him to cut all our throats.”

  “Why?” the physician demanded. “I’ll tell you why. Because you value your daughter’s life.”

  Janna’s eyes were clear as she turned back to him. “I don’t see that you can let her live once she’s watched you kill Clay, or me. We might as well let you try to figure out another way.”

  “You can do that if you’d like to observe firsthand exactly where an incision for a kidney transplant is made.”

  “No!” Janna shuddered at the mental vision created by the threat. She said again, “No.”

  “Do what he says, Janna,” Clay commanded in a voice devoid of emotion.

  What other choice was there? She stepped forward and held out her hand for the nylon cord.

  As she moved, a shadow materialized in the room behind the doctor. Alligator Arty crept forward and then eased around the door frame. A flash of silver-blue in his hand marked the razor-edged gleam of his skinning knife. He was near, so near. Still he needed to be much closer before he could jump the doctor without endangering Lainey.

  Then Gower heard the quiet rustle of his clothing, or perhaps caught a shadow of movement. He whipped his head around.

  What happened next was like a kaleidoscope of images, shifting, sliding, changing in a blur of color and motion. No thought or plan moved them but only desperate chance and heart-jarring effort.

  Janna whipped the cord she held across Gower’s face. He released Lainey as he staggered back, grunting, lifting his hand to his eyes. Clay hit him with a hard shoulder in that instant. Even as he struck, he snatched up Lainey, tucking her against his chest. The doctor cursed and struck out with a slicing blow. A red streak appeared across Clay’s back and his swift-drawn breath hissed through his teeth. He hurled himself and Lainey out of reach. They crashed into Janna so the three of them struck the floor in a tangle.

  Then Arty was there, jerking the doctor backward in a chokehold with the point of his skinning knife denting the flesh of Gower’s neck. “Hold, you mangy bastard,” he growled. “Move a muscle and I’ll gut and skin ye like a muskrat.”

  Lainey was crying with great, gulping sobs. Janna reached for her, scanning her body with anxious eyes, but could see no damage. She had only a second to look before her daughter lunged to wrap her arms around her neck. Janna held her, rocking her back and forth. Even so, she was aware of Clay struggling to his feet next to her with the back of his shirt rapidly turning wet and sticking to his skin.

  He turned toward Arty and his prisoner. The old man’s face was as expressionless as a bronze death mask, his arm corded with stringy muscle as he held on to Gower. The doctor was making strangled, wheezing noises while the slick soles of his Italian leather shoes scrabbled for purchase on the polished floor.

  “Let him breathe,” Clay said, the words calm, reasonable.

  “Don’t think so,” Arty said after judicious consideration. He dug the point of his knife deeper so blood welled around it. “He was about to kill our sweet little gal.”

  Gower, his eyes so wild they were mainly whites, gasped as he cried out, “For God’s sake, man!”

  Clay stopped. “Roan won’t like it if you kill him—and I think I just heard his patrol unit drive up.”

  “You did?”

  Janna was almost as skeptical about that as Arty appeared to be. That was, until she heard a car door slam outside.

  “Besides, he’ll get the death penalty anyway,” Clay went on. “I’ll see to it personally. And I think he’ll dread death by lethal injection more.”

  Arty squinted at Clay. “You sure? Wouldn’t take but a second. I could drag him out the back way, drop him out there in the swamp, only hid a lot better than he left them kids.”

  “Not in front of Lainey.”

  The old trapper looked to where the girl was huddled against Janna. Regret crossed his wrinkled features behind the partial screen of his beard. Then he heaved a sigh and loosened his grip. “Reckon not, damn it all. I mean, dang it.”

  “Yeah,” Clay said in laconic agreement.

  Janna knew exactly how they felt.

  20

  The sun was setting by the time the last question was answered for Roan, who had indeed arrived on the track of the doctor. The ordeal was not as bad as Janna had feared it would be. She was treated as a victim of Dr. Gower’s unconscionable scheme and a future witness against him. No hint of her being accused as an accessory was ever raised. For this, she thought, she had Roan to thank, that and her good luck in having the doctor’s last act of madness take place within his jurisdiction. The mantel of Benedict protection had been quietly and efficiently flung around her, though mainly for Lainey’s sake, she was sure.

  Finally the sheriff and his deputies shoved Dr. Gower into the back of a police car and took him away to a cell at the courthouse in Turn-Coupe.
The elderly physician who Roan had called, and who was referred to by everyone as Doc Watkins, followed them soon after. He had taken ten stitches in the deepest portion of the slash in Clay’s shoulder. That had been a trial, since Clay had demanded that Lainey be checked first, even though he was bleeding like a stuck pig, then had tried to refuse the injection that would numb the cut before stitching. But when Lainey offered to hold his hand while he was stuck, Clay took the needle without flinching.

  The last set of taillights disappeared down the driveway. Clay went to his bedroom to clean up and put on another shirt. Rest had been the only prescription Doc Watkins had for Lainey, and Janna gave her a light dinner and took her off to get ready for bed. Since dialysis had been done at the hospital, the process this evening wasn’t a long one.

  Lainey was keyed up from the excitement. She wanted Janna to lie down with her while she went to sleep, as well as having her rag doll and Ringo in bed with her. She also had a tendency to cling. Still, the results of the confrontation could have been worse, Janna thought, much worse.

  “I was scared when that bad doctor came and got me,” she said, her voice muffled against the front of Janna’s dress as she huddled close against her mother’s side.

  “You were very brave. I was proud of you.”

  “I didn’t cry because I knew Clay wouldn’t let that bad doctor hurt me. Or you.”

  “No.” It was strange, but Janna had felt something close to that same confidence.

  “And I knew there was no way that you’d ever let him take me away to his hospital, either.”

  “No, not ever,” Janna whispered, smoothing her daughter’s hair away from her face, pretending that there had never been the least doubt.

  “Clay wouldn’t, either, because he said so. Just like he wouldn’t let that nurse do anything to me.”

  “He’s brave, too.” Janna could barely force the words through her tight throat as she remembered how he had let himself be slashed with the scalpel to save her daughter.

  Lainey nodded wisely. “He told me just a little bit ago that he wouldn’t mind needles and their sticks anymore, not if I’d always hold his hand.”

  “Did he?” Janna felt like crying though she wasn’t sure why.

  “I called him my daddy.”

  Janna closed her eyes, pressing them tight. “I heard.”

  “I know that he’s not, but sometimes I like to pretend.”

  “That—that’s all right, sweetheart. I’m sure he won’t mind.”

  “No, he said he wouldn’t.”

  Janna could think of nothing to say to that. Several minutes passed. She thought Lainey had finally drifted off when she spoke again.

  “Mama?”

  “What, love?”

  “It hurts being sick, but I don’t want to die.”

  “No, love,” Janna whispered against her hair, valiantly swallowing tears while she rocked her daughter slowly in her arms. “None of us do. None of us do.”

  When Lainey fell asleep at last, Janna covered her with a sheet against the coolness of the air conditioning, then eased out of the bed and tiptoed from the room. Nothing moved in that bedroom wing of the rambling house. She wasn’t sure what Clay was doing now, whether he felt like eating or if his shoulder was paining him so much that he’d decided to lie down. She debated going to bed herself; she was certainly tired enough. But she was as wound up as Lainey, much too restless for an early night. In the hope that a short walk in the evening air would calm her, she made her way to the central parlor, then slipped out the back door.

  She stood for a moment on the back porch, searching for some sign of Clay. Nothing moved in the dimness. After a moment, she moved down the steps toward where the lake glimmered among the trees and the large boathouse and dock lay off to one side.

  From the dock’s catwalk, she stared out over the water that reflected the last rose-purple of the dying evening. It should have been peaceful, but there was no peace inside her. She clasped her arms around her rib cage, holding tight because it seemed that otherwise she might fall to pieces.

  Tomorrow or the next day, when Lainey was well enough for the upheaval, she would go away from this place, from Grand Point and Turn-Coupe and the lake with its stately cypresses, its egrets and alligators. She would leave dear old Arty and Ringo, too. And she would leave Clay. She would take her daughter and drive back to the camp where they would pack their few belongings then return to some apartment in Baton Rouge or New Orleans, as she’d planned before. There the two of them would get on with whatever time they had left together.

  She had to go because staying was too painful and no one had suggested that they were to be permanent guests, anyway. If leaving was even more of an agony, it was something she intended to ignore until, perhaps when she was a very old lady alone in some nursing home, she no longer felt the ache.

  She had made no real plan beyond the illegal transplant, as if she’d thought that would solve all her problems. She’d need to work hard, she supposed, to keep up with the continuing medical expenses. If she submerged herself in color and design, perhaps she could forget, and also find the strength to face whatever happened next. She’d discard the swamp fabrics with their soft, grayed lavenders and browns, however. They had too many memories attached, too many hopes and dreams. In any case, the series was incomplete without the elusive blue-green color that she’d envisioned; it needed that spark of difference to lift it above the ordinary. She’d start over, find a new vision. At least she could try.

  Behind her, the back door of the big house closed with a solid thud that echoed from the tree rimmed lake in a dull boom. Janna glanced over her shoulder in time to watch Clay descend the steps, moving with easy grace and one hand tucked into the top of the watch pocket of his jeans. The white shirt he’d changed into was loose fitting and had half the buttons undone over the bandaging for his injury. He paused as if looking for something, or someone. Then he continued down to the ground and started toward her.

  “How is your shoulder?” she asked with determined brightness as he came closer.

  “Fine.” He shifted it experimentally. “Probably be sore tomorrow, but no serious damage.”

  She knew very well that the cut had gone deep, slicing into muscle, but refrained from prying into the details since he made light of it. “I’m sorry it had to happen. I feel so stupid for leading Dr. Gower back here.”

  “Forget it. You didn’t know what he was really like.”

  “That’s just it, I should have.” She shook her head. “Who would have thought he’d go that far. It’s still incredible to me that he really killed those kids.”

  “It takes a certain mindset to accept that kind of thing in people you know,” he said, his features grim. “Be glad you don’t have it.”

  He meant a cynical mind that lacked trust and always looked for the worst in people, she suspected. “I must have been willfully blind. When I think of what he meant to do to Lainey…”

  “Don’t,” he said shortly. “No point in dwelling on things that didn’t happen.”

  “No.” She paused, then said after a moment, “I suppose I should get back to the house and check on her. She might be upset if she wakes up and finds herself alone in a strange place.”

  “No hurry. Arty’s in the house. He’ll look after her.”

  A quick smile came and went across her face. “He’s so good with her.”

  “He’s her slave, pure and simple. I’d hate to have been in the doctor’s shoes if he’d left even a scratch on her.”

  “You really think Arty would have used his knife?”

  “In a heartbeat. The doctor’s hide would have been on Arty’s wall, and his carcass in Beulah’s belly.”

  She grimaced and shook her head.

  “Sorry. That may have been a bit graphic, but it’s true.”

  In an abrupt change of tone, she said, “I was never so glad to see someone in my life when he showed up. Or so shocked.”

  “He br
ought Ringo for Lainey, because he thought she might be pining after her pet. At least that’s what he said. Sometimes people like Arty, those who live close to nature, have an instinct about these things.”

  “Danger, you mean?”

  “Especially when it threatens somebody they’ve come to care about. He’s just as attached to you, you know. You took him in, let him be your friend when most women would have run screaming from him. It means a lot to him. He didn’t like the way you went off, either, without telling anybody where you were going. So he came to see what I meant to do about it.”

  “You?”

  Clay squinted at the fading light on the water. “He has old-fashioned standards. He thought whatever feeling there was between us gave me an obligation to look after you.”

  She looked away. “I see.”

  “The only trouble was, he couldn’t tell me where you’d gone.”

  Was he suggesting that he’d have made an effort to find and protect her if he’d known? She’d like to think so, but didn’t quite dare. She said, “Arty is a grand old guy. I’ll never forget him after this afternoon.”

  Clay looked at her through narrowed eyes, but if he found her choice of words prophetic, he made no comment. After a second, he asked, “Why didn’t you tell me what you meant to do? Why keep it a secret?”

  “You’d have tried to stop me.”

  “Hell, yes. It was a suicide mission.”

  “I know that now. At the time so much had gone wrong that I wasn’t thinking too clearly.”

  “You knew too much. You were in danger from the instant his nurse understood that you were seeking alternate treatment for Lainey.”

  “Maybe, but I never had a chance to tell him. He came into Anita’s office shouting about his contact downtown and how there was going to be a raid. Everything snowballed from there.”

  “Roan was fascinated by what you had to say about this contact, though he and the Baton Rouge police knew Gower had to be paying off somebody. He could hardly have stayed in business so long any other way.”

  “You think they’ll find the man?”