by Nancy Bush
When she opened her eyes again he was collapsed against her, sunk into a comalike slumber, the scent of musky scotch enveloping both of them.
And she remembered he’d called her Laura.
In those few seconds Liz grew up. She leapfrogged into an adulthood she’d only vaguely grasped, but because part of her was still a child, she made the only decision she could: she would make him hers. This Laura person was obviously out of the picture, at least temporarily, and though he was mourning the loss, he’d chosen Liz as the woman to help him put his life back together.
Looking back now, she could scarcely credit her warped thinking, but at the time it had seemed utterly sane, utterly rational, brilliant.
She stroked his hair, felt his warm breath fanning her breasts, sensed the deep beating of his heart, and thought with utterly ridiculous, seventeen-year-old logic, I love him!
For the next two weeks, she came back again and again to the Candlewick Inn to meet with this slightly bemused hunk of a man who spent too much time seduced by alcohol and too little protesting his seduction by Liz. She was a Jezebel, a Siren, a man-eating female with one sole purpose: to have Hawthorne Hart if it were her last mission on earth.
And then, on her eighteenth birthday, she missed her period.
A day late. Two days late. Disaster. Fate. A touch of God’s hands.
With a heart beating fast and furious, she ran home from school and to the Candlewick Inn. The desk manager gazed at her beaming face with a mixture of regret and sly knowingness. “Mr. Hart isn’t here,” he said. “Sorry.”
“He’s not?”
Her worried face only increased the man’s ambivalence. He couldn’t decide whether to be a friend or revel in the scandal.
“You know his address, miss? He lives here in town somewhere. Used to be a cop, you know.”
I studied law enforcement . . . His words came back, and she realized at some level she’d thought of him as a student. Just a few years older than herself.
“Could you give me his address?”
Reluctantly, clearly torn, the manager eventually wrote it down. Liz stared at it long and hard, realizing Hawthorne lived in a moderately nice development. She’d forgotten Woodside was his home. The last two weeks there’d been only the Candlewick. If she thought about it at all, she pictured him living in some faraway and dreamlike place. A castle for her white knight. A lodge above a sparkling stream that glimmered like silver. A cozy cabin with smoke curling from a rock fireplace and blue chintz curtains in the windows. A houseboat rocking gently against barnacle-encrusted pilings with a cat curled on the upper deck.
“You go on now,” the manager told her in a gentler voice. “You’re young and pretty. He’s chosen drink as his mistress and you’re a distant second, honey.”
She stumbled outside. An unusual spring heat had descended, dancing before her eyes, wilting the nodding azaleas, burning through her skin and scalding her soul. No, no, no! It wasn’t true.
She could walk there. Everything in Woodside was within walking distance if you had the motivation.
Twenty-five minutes later she stood in front of Hawthorne Hart’s house. It was a tract home. Natural gray cedar with a navy blue front door. With wide-eyed horror, she read the names painted on the mailbox in a woman’s artistic scroll. Hawk and Laura Hart.
Laura!
Her name had fallen from his lips when he’d taken Liz’s virginity. Her last name was the same as his. They were married. He had a wife!
With the instinct of a lemming charging to its death, she stumbled up the weed-choked walk, dimly noting the neglect and associating it with her, this devil woman who’d come between her and Hawk. She hated her, for she was a phantom witch who’d suddenly reappeared in a puff of evil smoke.
Never once did Liz consider that she, Liz, was the “other woman.” Funny how the mind can rationalize anything.
Instead, she pressed a trembling finger against the bell and waited for Hawk, or Laura, to appear, and when neither did she camped out on the doorstep, placed her forehead on her bent knees, and bawled her eyes out in rage and anguish.
A day later she lay in bed at home, lost in her own world of misery. He was married. The word rang through her head like a death knell. Married, married, married!
She devised scenarios in her head. This Laura was a hag. An ugly, dried-up crone of at least thirty-five. Maybe forty. She made his life such hell that he drank his afternoons away. He needed someone to rescue him. Someone like her.
But all her scenarios couldn’t lift the weight from her heart, and as the week trudged by, Liz came to the very unpalatable conclusion that she’d been a mere dalliance to one Hawthorne Hart.
Bastard. Fucking bastard.
But Liz couldn’t quite forget her own part in that attic bedroom. Covering her face in her hands, she wept until her face was red and swollen, then wept some more.
With dead eyes, she examined her reflection in the mirror, feeding on self-hate. Her mother, ever acute, watched the signs of depression and apathy in her daughter and threw open Liz’s bedroom door one afternoon and announced in her imperious way, “You’re pregnant, aren’t you? God, I knew it! Well, don’t worry, I’ve already made an appointment to take care of it.”
So Liz saw a doctor in nearby Willoughby, a sleepy hamlet compared to bustling Woodside but equipped with one very wizened Dr. Raines, whose lined face and doleful expression said he’d seen it all and then some. He recommended a young doctor in Seattle who ran a women’s clinic. Liz was whisked into a modern office building sporting metal chairs with ice-blue seats and efficient young female personnel with plastic smiles.
The abortion would be quick, relatively painless, relatively cheap, and performed with perfect discretion. The date was scheduled two days before Liz’s graduation from the faux-brick walls of Woodside High.
One tiny glitch. It turned out one of the plastic smiles that worked at the clinic was originally from Woodside, and she’d recognized Liz’s mother as “someone to know” in town. Against all rules, she mentioned the source of Mrs. Havers’s embarrassment to her own husband, who was also a Woodside High grad. Word trickled through town and hit a junior member of the police department and a personal friend of Detective Hawthorne Hart’s, who was currently on leave.
This friend, in turn, just happened to mention Mrs. Havers’s daughter’s problem one afternoon while he and Hawk were having a beer together. He brought the subject up as a means to point out that other people besides Hawk had problems, too. That fate was unkind sometimes, and there was nothing really to do but pick up the pieces and move on.
He started an avalanche.
Hawthorne Hart awoke from his alcohol-induced sleep and threw the Havers’s home into complete turmoil. He wanted his child. He didn’t give a damn about Liz or the Haverses’ position in town or anything else. If Liz had an abortion he would make her life a living hell. He would create a scandal the likes of which Woodside had never seen. He wanted the baby, and if it took legal action on his part, or public humiliation of the Haverses, or whatever, he would have his child.
He scared Liz. She shook from head to toe as the handsome man of her dreams stood, legs apart, head thrust forward a bit, glaring down at both Liz’s mother and father, who sat side by side, chins up, hoping to bluff. But no one could bluff Hawk.
Liz stared openmouthed at a stranger—an intimate stranger—who would have his way come hell or high water.
Of the two, it looked like hell was fast approaching.
Liz’s parents held hands and tried to present a united front. Hawk’s condemning gaze moved from them to Liz who cowered a bit. Her parents flicked her a look. More condemnation. And fury that she’d put them in such a delicate situation.
Hope raced through Liz’s heart. He wanted their child. He did care! She hadn’t wanted the abortion either, but just hadn’t been able to stop the freight train of her parents’ will. She threw him a tremulous smile, but his eyes were cold as the North Sea.
“The baby’s yours,” Liz’s father suddenly declared to Hawk as he rose from his chair with dignity. “Liz will have it and give it up.”
Her mother gaped in horror, a vista of grandmotherhood opening up before her stricken eyes. A moment later she clamped her jaw shut, then decreed to Liz, “You will go to Aunt Emily’s.”
And so she did. Graduation was a fog, the summer a quiet, dullish memory in San Francisco sharing an apartment with Aunt Emily, whose nose was clearly out of joint at this forced babysitting of her niece. Hawk was gone and all hope had departed with him.
Liz’s little boy was born in the dead of winter. She got one glance and he was whisked away forever. By that time, she felt nothing. No pain, no relief, no nothing. She started college in the spring term and threw herself into school like never before. No friends, no fun apart from her relationship with Kristy Smith, whose own love affair with Guy Fielding and subsequent marriage, was Liz’s only connection to romance, and Woodside, at all.
Now, thinking back, Liz alternately cringed at and sympathized with her naïve, ego-involved younger self. She’d been so young, so inexperienced, and so short-sighted. However, she believed now that her youthful mistakes were what kept her from being too judgmental as an adult. When she recalled how virulently she’d hated Laura Hart, it reminded her to tread carefully when dealing with teen emotions. What others considered puppy love Liz knew from personal experience could be as deep, passionate, and destructive as any mature emotion. At seventeen, Liz had been so immersed in her own world, she hadn’t realized that Hawk’s melancholia was because of the death of his wife. She’d only looked at one side—her side. She’d wanted him so much she’d blocked out reality.
In the end, though, Hawthorne Hart had done her a giant favor: he’d saved their child. Liz suspected she would never marry, never have another baby. The son she shared with Hawk was all she had.
Her son. Now sixteen years old . . .
“Tomorrow,” she whispered aloud. She would face Hawk tomorrow.
Staring at the glowing red embers of the fire, she shook from head to toe. The cold breath of reality had blown into her soul, and there was no amount of self-delusion that could protect her from its wintry power. And even that couldn’t rival the freeze that would come when she met up with Hawk again.
Any way you cut it, Liz was looking at the next Ice Age.
Chapter Six
Barney Turgate’s plastic-shrouded body lay on a stretcher beside a small army of emergency vehicles. A carnival of red and white flashing lights illuminated the rain-sloshed grass roadway and surrounding area. Barney’d had to be carried out of the woods about a quarter of a mile by two muscle-bound paramedics before his remains reached the roadway. Now, as the paramedics hefted the stretcher into the van, they both panted as if they’d sprinted a lap around the track in record time.
“Hey, Chief,” a young officer said as he spat onto the ground. “What do you think?”
Perry wrinkled his nose, and his normally good-natured face pulled into a scowl. He glanced at Hawk, who’d arrived on the scene late, having learned of the corpse after his trek to Anita Brindamoor’s.
“I think Barney Turgate took at least four bullets,” Perry replied.
“You know the victim?” Hawk asked in surprise.
“So do you, probably, once you get a good look at him. Barney hung around the Elbow Room and any other watering hole that tickled his fancy. He’s just—a Woodside tradition, if you know what I mean.”
“Nobody hated him,” the young officer said. His name was Bill Smith, but everyone called him B. S. for reasons that were painfully obvious as one got to know him.
Rain ran in a small stream off the bill of Perry’s hat. “Doubt it’s a crime of passion. Barn just didn’t stir up those kinds of feelings.” Perry snorted in regret. “Though he had a string of old girlfriends, or at least acted like he did.”
Perry and B. S. laughed softly, more in tribute than condemnation.
“Maybe he just stepped into something he shouldn’t have,” Hawk guessed.
“He did that all the time,” Perry said with a shrug. “Never got him killed before.”
Hawthorne threw a glance at the body. “Somebody meant business.”
They stood, a silent trio, as the van doors slammed and vehicles began pulling out.
“Meet me at the station; there’s something I want to talk about,” Perry said, climbing into his car. B. S. joined him in the passenger side.
“Sure,” Hawk responded, mystified.
Thirty minutes later, Hawthorne slouched into the chair opposite Perry’s desk, stretching out the kinks in his back. Perry seemed unusually thoughtful, he noted, so he waited with a certain amount of anticipation for his boss to deliver the news, whatever it was.
But Perry was taking his own sweet time: fiddling with a paper clip, rummaging for a toothpick through each and every desk drawer, shuffling and reshuffling the papers on his desk, which Hawthorne knew for a certainty he never looked at anyway.
“Java?” Perry asked him. “Coffeepot’s on the fritz, but I could send B. S. to the Spot.”
“No, thanks.”
“So how’s our friend Mrs. Brindamoor?”
Hawk related what he knew of the yew theft, the missing gun, and his suspicion that Hugo, the dog, had been drugged. Surprisingly, this didn’t seem to interest Perry in the least.
“That gun’s been missing for years. I think her husband sold it before he died, but she won’t believe it,” Hawk finished.
“That’s a lady who doesn’t like hearing she’s wrong.”
“Amen. She’s likely to call and ask for someone else. She practically accused me of protecting my son.”
Perry snorted, but his mind was elsewhere. “Stolen trees don’t make that pressing of a case, do they? Especially when you consider that Barney Turgate’s a corpse now.”
“So, what did you want to talk to me about?” Hawk asked, growing impatient.
“You know how I told you an anonymous caller tipped us off to Turgate’s body? Well, that was a bit of a lie. Actually, Jesse and his friend, Brad Barlow, stumbled over the corpse.”
“What?”
“Apparently, they were out in the woods and there he was. They came in and reported it to me.”
So, that’s what Jesse’s earlier visit had been about. The connection sizzled in Hawk’s brain, and his first reaction was fury. Why couldn’t Jesse have just spit it out? What blockage was there that prevented him from talking to his own father about something so shocking as a dead body?
“I figured you’d be upset, so I thought we’d get the work done first, then I’d tell you.”
“You’re a pal.”
Perry shrugged. “Always have been.”
Hawthorne threw him an ironic glance. Perry had been a junior officer for the Woodside Police Department at the same time Hawthorne was. They’d fraternized a bit, though Hawk’s star had risen faster and higher—until Laura’s death. He’d taken a leave of absence then; more like a drunken binge. Perry had then continued on at Woodside while Hawk had stumbled into a sordid little drunken affair that had miraculously produced Jesse.
Now, while Perry gazed at him with an expression of empathy, Hawthorne reflected on the events that had led to his son’s birth. Rarely did he think back on it; too much emotional garbage. Jesse’s birth, about a year after Laura’s death, would have caused a certain amount of speculation, but Hawthorne had left Woodside for good—or so he’d believed at the time—as soon as he learned he’d impregnated a girl on the verge of high school graduation. Worse, she’d only been seventeen and from a wealthy Woodside family. Worse yet, he barely knew her name because their affair was a dim, dim memory even while it took place because he’d been wallowing in self-pity and grief.
It was Perry, unwittingly, who’d given him the information about young Elizabeth Havers’s pregnancy. Whether he knew now that Hawk was the father, Hawk very much doubted. Nobody paid much attent
ion to dates, or if they did, they didn’t ask, and when Hawk returned to Woodside with his sixteen-year-old son, Perry assumed Jesse was Laura’s son. He either wasn’t doing the math or he just didn’t think about it—probably the latter. As well as he’d known Hawk in those days, Hawk could have had an infant son. What the hell. Who cared anyway?
Hawk was just damn lucky he’d stopped Liz from getting an abortion, which had been the family’s plan to save face. In those days, the Haverses were used to getting what they wanted.
The intervening years may not have been so kind, however, as he understood them; family’s financial resources had significantly dwindled and old man Havers and his missus had moved to warmer climes. Arizona, maybe. Or New Mexico. Hell, they might even be dead. As grandparents, they’d shown zero interest in their bastard grandson, and for that Hawk was glad. Liz, too, was a phantom, just the way he wanted it. He’d heard once that she’d gone on to school—something in the medical profession. Probably was a famous heart surgeon now, or something. If she ever came back, she’d undoubtedly think he’d screwed up as a parent big-time.
If she ever came back . . .
A frisson of premonition slid down his back. Hawk shook it off. Ridiculous.
Perry heaved a sigh. “I don’t think there’s any chance either of those boys knows anything about the murder. They seemed spooked enough just telling about it.”
“I’ll talk to Jesse,” Hawk muttered, lost in his own private thoughts.
“Use a little tact, will ya?” Perry suggested.
“I’m the model of tact.”
A horsey snort was Chief Perry Dortner’s answer to that.
* * *
Tomorrow came a little too fast for Liz. She awakened with a start, her neck squinched painfully. With a groan, she realized she’d fallen asleep in the chair next to the sofa where Tawny was blissfully sawing logs. Liz unfolded her legs and massaged the side of her neck. Squinting an eye at the clock, she stumbled down the hall to the bathroom.
Twenty minutes later, after a bracing shower and popping some ibuprofen for the ache in her neck, Liz emerged feeling almost human. Her ubiquitous jeans and a white, ribbed, sleeveless shirt from Old Navy were today’s uniform.