The Novels of Nora Roberts, Volume 4

by Nora Roberts

  They settled, after considerable debate, on a plastic rooster wall clock in vibrant red. Target selected, Ford moved to ticket sales. “Hi, Mrs. Morrow. Raking it in?”

  “We’re doing well this year. I smell record breaker. Hello, Cilla. Don’t you look gorgeous? Enjoying yourself?”

  “Very much.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. I imagine it’s a little tame and countrified compared to the way you usually spend your holiday, but I think we put on a nice event. Now, how much can I squeeze you for? I mean . . .” Cathy gave an exaggerated flutter of lashes. “How many tickets would you like?”

  “Going for twenty.”

  “Each,” Cilla said and pulled out a bill of her own.

  “That’s what I like to hear!” Cathy counted them off, tore off their stubs. “Good luck. And just in time. We’ll start announcing prizewinners over the loudspeaker starting in about twenty minutes. Ford, if you see your mama, tell her to hunt me up. I want to talk to her about . . .”

  Cilla tuned out the conversation when she saw Hennessy staring at her from the other side of the pavilion. The bitter points of his hate scraped over her skin. Beside him stood a small woman, with tired eyes in a tired face. She tugged at his arm, but he remained rigid.

  The heat went out of the day, the light, the color. Hate, Cilla thought, strips away joy. But she wouldn’t turn away from it, refused to allow herself to turn away.

  So it was he who turned, who finally bent to his wife’s pleas to stride away from the pavilion across the summer green grass.

  She said nothing to Ford. The day would not be spoiled. She soothed the throat the silent encounter had dried to burning with lemonade, wandered through the crowd as the sun began to dip toward the western peaks.

  She talked, laughed. She won the rooster wall clock. And the tension drained away. As the sky darkened, Sam climbed up into Ford’s lap to hold a strange, excited conversation.

  “How do you know what he’s saying?” Cilla demanded.

  “It’s similar to Klingon.”

  They announced “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and the crowd rose. Beside her, Ford hitched the boy on his hip. Around her, under an indigo sky, with the flicker of glow tubes and fireflies in the dark, mixed voices swelled. On impulse, out of sudden need, she took Ford’s hand, holding on until the last note died away.

  Moments after they took their seats again, the first boom exploded. On the sound Sam leaped out of Ford’s lap and into his father’s. And Spock leaped off the ground and into Ford’s.

  Safe, Cilla thought, while lights shattered indigo. Where they knew they’d always be safe.

  “GOOD?” Ford asked as they drove down the quiet roads toward home.

  “Very good.” Amazingly good, she realized. “Beginning, middle and end.”

  “What are you going to do with that thing?” He glanced down at the clock.

  “Thing?” Cilla cradled the rooster in her arms. “Is that any way to speak about our child?” She patted it gently. “I’m thinking the barn. I could use a clock out there, and this is pretty appropriate. And I like having a memento from my first annual Fourth. It’ll be way too late in the year for a cookout when my place is done. But after today, I think I’m going to plan a party. A big, sprawling, open-house-type thing. Fire in the hearth, platters of food, flowers and candles. I’d like to see what it’s like to have the house filled with people who aren’t working on it.”

  She stretched out her legs. “But tonight, I’m partied and festived out. It’ll be nice to get home to the quiet.”

  “Almost there.”

  “Want to share the quiet with me?”

  “I had that in mind.”

  They glanced at each other as he turned into her drive. When he looked back, the headlights flashed over the red maple. “What’s that hanging—”

  “My truck!” She reared forward, gripping the dash. “Oh, goddamn it, son of a bitch. Stop! Stop!”

  She was already yanking off her seat belt, shoving at the door before he’d come to a complete stop behind her truck.

  Loose clumps of broken safety glass hung in the back window. More sparkled in the gravel, crunching under her feet as she ran.

  Ford had his phone out, punching in nine-one-one. “Wait. Cilla, just wait.”

  “Every window. He smashed every window.”

  Cannonball holes gaped in the windshield, erupted into mad spiderwebs of shattered glass. As the cold rage choked her, she saw her headlights had been smashed, her grille battered.

  “A lot of good the alarm did me.” She could have wept. She could have screamed. “A lot of damn good.”

  “We’re going to go in, check the alarm. I’m going to check the house, then you’re going to stay inside.”

  “It’s too much, Ford. It’s just too damn much. Vicious, vindictive, insane. The crazy old bastard needs to be locked up.”

  “Hennessy? He’s out of town.”

  “He’s not. I saw him tonight, at the park. He’s back. And I swear to God if he could’ve used the bat or pipe or whatever he used here on me then and there, he would have.”

  She whirled around, riding on the fury. And saw in the car’s headlights what Ford had seen hanging from a branch of her pretty red maple.

  Ford grabbed her arm when she started forward. “Let’s go in. We’ll wait for the cops.”

  “No.” She shook off his hand, crossed from gravel to grass.

  She’d been six, Cilla recalled, when they marketed that particular doll. She wore her hair—a sunny blond that hadn’t yet darkened—in a pair of ponytails tied with pink ribbons above her ears. The ribbon sashing the pink-and-white gingham dress matched. Lace frothed at the white anklets above the glossy patent leather of her Mary Janes.

  Her smile was as sunny as her hair, as sweet as the pink ribbons.

  He’d fashioned the noose out of clothesline, she noted. A careful and precise job, so that the doll hung in horrible effigy. Just above the ribbon sash, the cardboard placard read: WHORE.

  “Optional accessories—sold separately—for this one included a scale model tea set. It was one of my favorites.” She turned away, picked up a whining, quivering Spock to hug.

  “You’re right. We should go inside, check the house just in case.”

  “Give me the keys. I want you to wait on the veranda. Please.”

  A polite word, Cilla thought. How odd to hear the absolute authority under the courtesy. “We know he’s not in there.”

  “Then it’s no problem for you to wait out on the veranda.” To close the issue, he simply opened her purse, pulled out the keys.

  “Ford—”

  “Wait out here.”

  The fact that he left the door open told Cilla he had no doubt she’d do what he ordered. With a shrug, she stepped over to the rail, nuzzling Spock before she set him down. No one had been in the house, so there was no harm in waiting. And no point in arguing about it.

  Besides, from here she could stare at her truck, brood over the state of it. Wallow in the brooding. She’d felt so damn good the day she bought that truck, so full of anticipation when she loaded it up for her trip east.

  The first steps toward her dream.

  “Everything’s okay,” Ford said from behind her.

  “It’s really not, is it?” Some part of her, some bitchy, miserable part of her, wanted to shrug off the comforting hands he laid on her shoulders. But she stopped herself.

  “Do you know how it felt to me today? Like I was in a movie. I don’t mean that in a bad way, just the opposite. Little slices and scenes of a movie I actually wanted to be part of. Not quite there yet, still pretty new on the set. But starting to feel . . . really feel comfortable in my skin.”

  She drew in a long breath, let it out slowly. “And now, this is reality. Broken glass. But the odd thing, the really odd thing. That was me today. It was me. And this? Whatever this is directed at? That’s the image, that’s the mirage. The smoke and mirrors.”

  F
OREST LAWN CEMETERY 1972

  The air sat hot and still while the smog lay over it like a smudge from a sweaty finger. Graves, housing stars and mortals alike, spread, cold slices in the green. And all the flowers, blooming tears shed by the living for the dead.

  Janet wore black, the frame within the dress shrunk from grief. A willow stem gone brittle. A wide black hat and dark glasses shaded her face, but that grief poured through the shields.

  “They can’t put the stone up yet. The ground settles first. But you can see it, can’t you? His name carved into white marble, the short years I had him. I tried to think of a poem, a few lines to have carved, but how could I think? How could I? So I had them carve ‘Angels Wept.’ Just that. They must have, I think. They must have wept for my Johnnie. Do you see the angels that look down on him, weeping?”

  “Yes. I’ve come here before.”

  “So you know how it will look. How it will always look. He was the love of my life. All the men, husbands, lovers, they came and went. But he? Johnnie. He came from me.” Every word she spoke was saturated with grief. “I should have . . . so many things. Can you imagine what it is for a mother to stand over the grave of her child and think, ‘I should have’?”

  “No. I’m sorry.”

  “So many are. They pour out their sorry to me, and it touches nothing. Later, it helps a little. But these first days, first weeks, nothing touches it. I’ll be there.” She gestured to the ground beside the grave. “I know that even now because I’ve arranged it. Me and Johnnie.”

  “And your daughter. My mother.”

  “On the other side of me, if she wants it. But she’s young, and she’ll go her own way. She wants . . . everything. You know that, and I have nothing for her now, not in these first days, first weeks. Nothing to give. But I’ll be there soon enough, in the ground with Johnnie. I don’t know when yet, I don’t know how soon it comes. But I think of making it now. I think of it every day. How can I live when my baby can’t? I think about how. Pills? A razor? Walking into the sea? I can never decide. Grief blurs the mind.”

  “What about love?”

  “It opens, when it’s real. That’s why it can hurt so much. You wonder if I could have stopped this. If I hadn’t let him run wild. People said I did.”

  “I don’t know. Another boy died that night, and the third was paralyzed.”

  “Was that my fault?” Janet demanded as bitterness coated the grief. “Was it Johnnie’s? They all got into the car that night, didn’t they? Drunk, stoned. Any one of them could’ve gotten behind the wheel, and it wouldn’t have changed. Yes, yes, I indulged him, and I thank God for it now. Thank God I gave him all I could in the short time he lived. I would do it all again.” She covered her face with her hands, shoulders shaking. “All again.”

  “I don’t blame you. How can I? I don’t know. Hennessy blames you.”

  “What more does he want? Blood?” She dropped her hands, threw out her arms. And the tears slid down the pale cheeks. “At least he has his son. I have a name carved into white marble.” She dropped to her knees on the ground.

  “I think he does want blood. I think he wants mine.”

  “He can’t have any more. Tell him that.” Janet lay down beside the grave, ran her hands over it. “There’s been enough blood.”

  TWENTY

  Cilla told no one. As far as anyone knew, she’d taken the loaner her insurance company arranged to do a supply run.

  She pulled up in front of the Hennessy house, on a shady street in Front Royal. The white van sat in the drive, beside a ramp that ran to the front door of the single-story ranch house.

  Her heart knocked. She didn’t question if it was nerves or anger. It didn’t matter. She’d do what she needed to do, say what she needed to say.

  The door opened before Cilla reached it, and the woman she’d seen the night before came out. Cilla saw her hand tremble on the knob she clutched at her back. “What do you want here?”

  “I want to speak to your husband.”

  “He’s not home.”

  Cilla turned her head to stare deliberately at the van, then looked back into Mrs. Hennessy’s eyes.

  “He took my car into the shop. It needed work. Do you think I’m a liar?”

  “I don’t know you. You don’t know me. I don’t know your husband any more than he knows me.”

  “But you keep sending the police here, to our home. Again this morning, with their questions and suspicions, with your accusations.” Mrs. Hennessy drew in a ragged breath. “I want you to go away. Go away and leave us alone.”

  “I’d be happy to. I’d be thrilled to. You tell me what it’s going to take to make him stop.”

  “Stop what? He’s got nothing to do with your troubles. Don’t we have enough of our own? Don’t we have enough without you pointing your finger at us?”

  She would not back down, Cilla told herself. She would not feel guilty for pushing at this small, frightened woman. “He drives by my home almost every day. And almost every day he parks on the shoulder, sometimes for as long as an hour.”

  Mrs. Hennessy gnawed her lips, twisted her fingers together. “It’s not against the law.”

  “Trespassing is against the law, cracking a man’s skull open is against the law. Breaking in and destroying private property is against the law.”

  “He did none of those things.” The fear remained, but a whip of anger lashed through it. “And you’re a liar if you say different.”

  “I’m not a liar, Mrs. Hennessy, and I’m not a whore.”

  “I don’t know what you are.”

  “You know, unless you’re as crazy as he is, that I’m not responsible for what happened to your son.”

  “Don’t talk about my boy. You don’t know my boy. You don’t know anything about it.”

  “That’s absolutely right. I don’t. Why would you blame me?”

  “I don’t blame you.” Weariness simply covered her. “Why would I blame you for what happened all those terrible years ago? There’s nobody to blame for that. I blame you for bringing the police down on my husband when we did nothing to you.”

  “When I went over to his van to introduce myself, to express my sympathy, he called me a bitch and a whore, and he spat at me.”

  A flush of shame stained Mrs. Hennessy’s cheeks. Her lips trembled as her eyes shifted away. “That’s what you say.”

  “My half sister was right there. Is she a liar, too?”

  “Even if it is so, it’s a far cry from everything you’re laying at our door.”

  “You saw the way he looked at me last night, in the park. You know how much he hates me. I’m appealing to you, Mrs. Hennessy. Keep him away from me and my home.”

  Cilla turned away. She’d only gotten halfway down the ramp when she heard the door shut, and the lock shoot home.

  Oddly, the conversation, however tense and difficult, made her feel better. She’d done something besides calling the police and sitting back, waiting for the next assault.

  Pushing forward, as that was the direction she was determined to go, she swung by the real estate office to make an offer on the first house she’d selected. She went in low, a fair chunk lower than she felt the house was worth in the current market. To Cilla, the negotiations, the offers, the counters, were all part of the fun.

  Back in the loaner, she contacted the agent in charge of the second listing to make an appointment for a viewing. No point, she decided, in letting the moss grow. She drove back to Morrow Village, completed another handful of errands, including a quick grocery run, before heading back toward home.

  She spotted the white van before Hennessy spotted her. Since he came from the direction of the Little Farm, she assumed he’d had time to go home, talk to his wife and drive out while she’d been running around Front Royal and the Village.

  He caught sight of her as their vehicles passed, and the flare of recognition burned over his face.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” she muttered as she rounded
a curve, “not my truck, since you beat the hell out of it last night.” She shook off the annoyance, took the next turn. Her gaze flicked up to the rearview mirror to see the van coming up behind her.

  So you want to have this out? she wondered. Have what Ford called a face-to-face? That’s fine. Great. He could just follow her home where they’d have a—

  The wheel jerked in her hands when the van rammed her from behind. The sheer shock didn’t allow room for anger, even for fear, as she tightened her grip.

  He rammed her again—a smash of metal, a squeal of tires. The truck seemed to leap under her and buck to the right. She wrenched the wheel, fighting it back. Before she could punch the gas, he rammed her a third time. Her tires skidded off the asphalt and onto the shoulder while her body jerked forward, slammed back. Her fender kissed the guardrail, and her temple slapped smartly against the side window.

  Small bright dots danced in front of her eyes as she gritted her teeth, prayed and steered into the skid. The truck swerved, and for one hideous moment she feared it would flip. She landed with a bone-jarring thud, nose-down, in the runoff gully on the opposite shoulder as her air bag burst open.

  Later, she would think it was sheer adrenaline, sheer pissin -your-face mad that had her leaping out of the truck, slamming the door. A woman ran across the lawn of a house set back across the road. “I saw what he did! I saw it! I called the police!”

  Neither Cilla nor Hennessy paid any attention. He shoved out of the van, fists balled at his sides as they came at each other.

  “You don’t come to my house! You don’t talk to my wife!”

  “Fuck you! Fuck you! You’re crazy. You could’ve killed me.”

  “Then you’d be in hell with the rest of them.” Eyes wheeling, teeth bared, he knocked her back with a vicious shove.

  “Don’t you put your hands on me again, old man.”

  He shoved her again, sending her feet skidding until she slammed into the back of the truck. “I see you in there. I see you in there, you bitch.”

  This time he raised his fist. Cilla kicked him in the groin, and dropped him.