Body and Soul

by Susan Krinard

  He didn’t consciously plan to take her in his arms. He didn’t even know she was crying until she was against him and he heard the catch of her breath and felt the moisture of her tears. She pressed her face into the collar of his uniform and clutched at his back, making no sound other than the soft gasps of her weeping.

  Once, perhaps, he’d known what love was. But he’d chosen to let the ability die out of him. It was too much work, too confining, too demanding of what he was not strong or wise or good enough to give.

  Jesse lifted her head. “I’m sorry,” she said, scrubbing at her face with her knuckles. “I don’t usually do this.”

  No. She wouldn’t. An unbearable tenderness washed through David. “Do you think I begrudge you, Jesse?”

  He bent his head and kissed the high curve of her cheekbone, catching the salt of a tear on the tip of his tongue. He found another tear trapped in the lashes of her left eye, two at the edge of her jaw and one more nestled in the corner of her lips.

  One by one he disposed of her tears, entranced by the velvet texture of her skin and the scent of her hair and the subtle alteration in her breathing from distress to excitement.

  This closeness was what they both wanted. Mutual solace, a forgetting of sadness and pain. Would it be so terrible to surrender? Would he be risking too much?

  He touched his mouth to hers. Her fingers dug into the back of his jacket, and her lips parted.

  BODY AND SOUL

  A Bantam Book / August 1998

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1998 by Susan Krinard.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information address: Bantam Books.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-57234-9

  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, New York, New York.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Excerpt from Touch of the Wolf

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was too beautiful to be real.

  Jesse Copeland knew that, knew it even as she dreamed, felt a joy so deep that she had no name for it.

  And no name for the place in which she found herself. The garden was filled with roses, lush and not quite tame, as if the hand that pruned and cared for them gave them the freedom to test the limits of their captivity. Birds sang in green trees. A fountain played the melody of running water, and the sky was as blue as an artist’s vision of heaven.

  But that was not the truest beauty of the dream. The miracle of it lay in the child cradled in Jesse’s arms—a child with blue eyes and dark hair, laughing up at her from the security of boundless love.

  Love that filled the garden, overflowed Jesse’s heart. She sang to the child, this child of her own body, born of pain become happiness. The pain had been worth it. The fear, the separation, all was behind them now.

  A gate creaked, and Jesse looked up. Her heart, already so full, made room for another. He walked into the garden and smiled at her—smiled as he’d smiled that day when they’d lain in the long grass and made this child.

  Oh, how she loved him. She had known he would come back because of the child, and now she had everything she’d ever wanted. He was husband, father, master of the estate. And she was his lady.

  Jesse handed his daughter to him, watching the wonder in his eyes. Yes, surely this would be enough. He would never want to go away again. He would be hers forever. He would never leave her. Never.

  He met her gaze. She yearned for him with everything inside her, imprinting him on her heart, memorizing his soul.

  “You will not leave me,” she said. He only continued to smile, unanswering, and it wasn’t for several heartbeats that she saw the sadness in his eyes.

  Sadness she could not bear. She shaped her lips to speak his name. Her mind refused to give it up. She could not remember, no matter how hard she tried. And without his name …

  All about Jesse the garden began to dissolve. She reached for her love, and her hands passed through his body. He was leaving her. Leaving her alone, abandoned, as he always did.…

  In a flash the scene changed, and she was on the edge of a cliff, with the river raging below. The cliff where someone else had died, fallen among the vicious rocks and seething water. And her love was hanging there on the narrow ledge below, little more than a wraith, reaching up to her. Begging her to save him.

  Her love. His fate lay in her hands. She hesitated. She had failed before. Another had died here, only a boy, and she was afraid. But she gathered her courage and extended her hand, straining until it seemed her arm would stretch no farther. His fingers brushed hers. They touched for an instant. And then he slipped free, and was falling … falling endlessly, into the river, to dash among the rocks in absolute darkness.

  He was dead, gone forever, lost. She was alone. She railed against that fearful solitude, beating at the darkness with her fists.

  The darkness gave way and Jesse woke with a start to the bright light of morning.

  She rolled to face the digital clock on her bedside table, grateful to dismiss the dream with something so mundane as the time. She stared at the numbers until the minute changed, until she remembered.

  Bobby Moran’s funeral was two hours away.

  Only a small number of the residents of Manzanita turned out for the service. Jesse stood with a cluster of search and rescue volunteers, men and women from the team that had tried to save Bobby from the river.

  It had been Tri-Mountain Search and Rescue’s first failure in a long time. Jesse’s as well. She hadn’t known Bobby except by reputation. But as she listened to the minister’s solemn words, she remembered her dream of joy and sorrow and utter aloneness. Bobby Moran hadn’t been in the dream, but the nameless man she’d tried to help had died in the very same way.

  She hadn’t been able to save him. Just like Bobby.

  Bobby’s mother was at the graveside, her eyes hidden behind dark lenses, her hand clutching the fingers of Bobby’s younger brother. Bobby’s friends—the “bad boys” of Manzanita, whom Jesse had seen shivering and pale and anything but tough—formed their own tense knot off to the side. There were a few others who might have had genuine regrets at the untimely end of a druggy kid the gossips had always said would come to no good.

  The gossips had been right.

  Snatches of conversation reached Jesse, muffled behind hands as if the bereaved mother wouldn’t notice. The consensus was obvious.

  “I hear they found so many drugs in his bloodstream afterwards that he probably would have died of an overdose anyway,” Mrs. Sandoval said to Mrs. Van de Castle, pulling a long face of spurious sympathy. “Dale Braden told me that he virtually jumped right off that ledge—he was that far gone.”

  Jesse shivered an
d held her body rigid against the inner chill. She still saw it in her mind—oh, so vividly: the darkness before dawn and Bobby perched on the edge of the narrow ledge along the river, giggling at his own cleverness as he swayed over the chasm. He’d seemed unaware of whatever injuries he’d sustained in the initial fall from the cliff above, where his stone-sober friends huddled and watched the rescue.

  Jesse had been the one chosen to go down after him. She was small enough to fit with Bobby on the ledge, unthreatening enough to talk him into cooperation. She was as fit and expert as any member of the Tri-Mountain Search and Rescue team. She’d worked a whole year to prove herself worthy.

  But she’d failed.

  “He wasn’t much use to anyone around here anyway,” Mrs. Sandoval continued, edging past Jesse with a narrow-eyed glance. “His poor mother will probably be better off—”

  “What did you ever do to help him?” Jesse interrupted.

  Mrs. Sandoval and Mrs. Van de Castle stopped and stared. Mrs. Van de Castle turned very red. She made an abortive gesture toward Jesse, let her hand fall to her side. “Everyone knows you tried,” she stammered. “It wasn’t—”

  “No one could have helped him,” Mrs. Sandoval said. Her lips narrowed to a thin line. “Some kids are bad from the day they’re born, and nothing will ever change that.”

  Jesse’s fists ached at her sides. “Maybe the problem was that no one believed in him,” she said evenly. “Maybe that’s all he ever needed.”

  With a snort Mrs. Sandoval grabbed Mrs. Van de Castle’s arm and dragged her away. “Bad blood,” she said. “It always tells.” Jesse could hear her begin a new story for her captive audience as the two women left the false serenity of the cemetery—a story about another woman, long dead, and her crazy daughter.

  Bad blood. Jesse looked across the neatly tended green lawn, beyond the aspens clustered above weathered headstones. Joan Copeland was there, resting beneath a simple marker. The flowers Jesse had left on Saturday were withering, but no one else would care.

  No one in Manzanita remembered Jesse’s mother as anything but an unstable drunk who’d drowned herself in the river seventeen years ago, leaving her orphaned daughter behind. They probably hadn’t even thought of Joan until the prodigal daughter had come home.

  Jesse deliberately unclenched her hands. She’d returned to Manzanita a year and a half ago to make peace with herself, with her past, with the unnamed fears that hovered at the very edge of her consciousness. She’d thrown herself into the search and rescue team, honed her body into a tool that wouldn’t let her down. She taught the city folk who came to the Trinity Alps how to respect the wilderness and meet it on its own terms.

  As she met her fears on her own terms. She’d led countless hiking and kayaking tours, joined in difficult rescue operations that saved lives nearly taken by the mountains and the chill waters of the river.

  Bobby Moran was the exception. And that one exception was a hard, cold knot in Jesse’s heart.

  Mrs. Moran was the last to leave the graveside, and Jesse walked across the lawn to meet her. The words of condolence she intended seemed grossly inadequate in the face of so much pain. But she had to try, to let Mrs. Moran know she wasn’t alone.…

  “Mrs. Moran?”

  The woman looked up, her sunglasses an anonymous mask, her body drawing back as if from something fearful.

  “Mrs. Moran, I wanted to say—”

  Bobby’s mother thrust out her hand, palm out and fingers spread. Her son shrank behind her. “Leave us alone,” she cried hoarsely. “Please go away.”

  The command was biting with panic and anger, and Jesse withdrew immediately. Mrs. Moran almost ran across the lawn toward the road, ignoring those few people who tried to offer sympathy. Jesse stared after her, the knot in her heart more bitter than before.

  “Jesse?”

  Kim Mayhew, the Tri-Mountain Search and Rescue Ops leader, looked at Jesse with concern in her eyes. “I can see what you’re going through,” she said. “Everyone on the team knows how it is.”

  It was the truth, of course. Kim had been in local search and rescue for ten years, and she’d seen her share of deaths. Maybe if she’d gone down to the ledge, Bobby wouldn’t have died.

  “I’m all right,” Jesse said with careful neutrality. “Don’t worry about me.”

  “We all did our best,” Kim said, “but the one thing we can’t control is human nature.”

  “I know,” Jesse said. “We all did our best.”

  “But you don’t believe it yet. I know it’s something you have to work through.” She set a hand on Jesse’s shoulder. “Maybe you should take it easy. Bow out for a bit—”

  “No.” Jesse held Kim’s gaze steadily. “I’ll be fine. I’ll be ready when the next call comes.”

  She prepared herself for Kim’s answer, for her to say Jesse wasn’t good enough, strong enough, skilled enough, that she had screwed up too badly to remain on the team. But Kim only sighed and dropped her hand.

  “Just remember that you only have to give the word, and everyone will understand.”

  Jesse nodded, waited for Kim to leave so she wouldn’t have to hold on so tight; but the other woman lingered, gazing across the cemetery. Toward the grave of Joan Copeland.

  The crowd was scattered now, everyone gone back to his or her daily routine. But there was someone standing over Joan’s plot, someone kneeling to lay fresh roses on top of Jesse’s wilted daisies.

  A man. Tall and well built, dressed in a sober gray suit. A man who didn’t belong in Manzanita, bringing flowers to a woman no one remembered except with pity and disdain.

  An icy sense of recognition seized Jesse even before the man looked up. Vaguely she heard Kim ask her a question, but the roaring in her ears blocked the words. Roaring, racing, like the turbulent waters of the river sweeping her under and sucking her down.

  The man at the grave stood up, brushing off the knees of his trousers, and turned. Slowly, deliberately, he raised his head and stared directly at her.

  And Jesse knew him. No conscious thought put a name to his face. She knew him so utterly, so completely, that she felt it like a fist in her stomach.

  “Jesse?” Kim reached for her again, but this time Jesse jerked away. Her perception narrowed, excluding Kim, excluding the rest of the world.

  She remembered. A blank spot she hadn’t even known was in her mind began to fill with visions too intense to be anything but genuine.

  The man didn’t move. He didn’t take a single step toward her, but Jesse felt a terror so blinding that for a moment she lost even herself. Lost herself in the memories.…

  Another funeral. Another beautiful, sunny day seventeen years ago, and she was eleven years old, watching the earth hit the casket as the minister intoned words of peace and hope. She was looking at Gary Emerson—so charismatic, so handsome, so well liked by everyone in town. Gary Emerson, who’d tried to redeem Joan Copeland and failed, who’d been like a father to her rebellious daughter.

  So everyone said. But Jesse knew the truth. Gary was bad. Evil. He was a murderer.…

  They buried her mother in the ground, and something broke inside Jesse. As the few mourners began to pray, she screamed. She went at Gary with her hands, with her feet, with her whole small body, as if some much vaster and more powerful soul had possessed her own. And she heard herself accusing him, crying out in a voice she’d never heard before: “You killed her! You killed her! You let her die!”

  Then the others caught her and pulled her back, and she saw Gary’s startled face, bleeding from the rake of her small nails—hated, hated face. Like a savage, she fought the ones who held her, and nothing would calm her, not until Doc pricked her arm with a needle. And she heard voices murmuring shocked words like “crazy” and “poor child,” saw Gary bending over her with pity in his eyes.

  Poor, bereaved, crazy Jesse Copeland. She wasn’t right after that. They had to send her to a hospital, and when she got out no one else wanted he
r. When she got out she’d erased from consciousness what had happened that day at the funeral.…

  Some muted sound pulled Jesse out of the past, and she found herself trembling with realization.

  She’d forgotten. She’d packed those memories away just as those who’d sent her to the hospital had boxed up her mother’s things and set aside her childish belongings.

  After all these years Gary had come back to Manzanita, and the images raced through her like a flash flood, tearing at the moorings of her reason.

  The fear. The hatred. The rage and grief that possessed the mind until nothing else was left. They were coming awake within her, spinning her down into chaos.…

  “You’re white as a ghost,” Kim’s voice said beside her. “You’d better sit down—”

  Sit down. Sit down and wait for Gary to come to her, with his easy smile and smooth voice. Wait for the memories to drown her as the river had drowned her mother.

  But Gary wasn’t coming. He only stood and watched her fall apart.

  She clamped down on her panic and glanced at Kim. The older woman was concerned, yes, but Jesse hadn’t revealed too much. Not yet.

  “Who is that guy you’re staring at, Jesse?”

  It was possible to answer Kim as if nothing were wrong. “You wouldn’t know him. He lived here … a long time ago.”

  Kim shaded her eyes and whistled softly. “Good-looking—not that Eric would appreciate my saying so. Sure doesn’t look like a townie.” She cocked a brow at Jesse. “You knew him, huh?”

  There wasn’t any point in hiding it. Kim would hear soon enough, once people started talking. And remembering.

  “When I was a child,” Jesse said. “He … knew my mother.”

  There would be more questions. From Kim, and from others with personal experience of that funeral seventeen years ago.

  Why had Gary Emerson returned?

  She looked at Kim and through her, floating above the fear. “I have to go. Don’t worry about me—I’ll be okay.”

  “All right. Take it easy now, you hear?”

  Jesse nodded, turned and walked away. She felt Gary Emerson’s stare, but she walked instead of ran; that much she could command. She walked, her legs nearly steady, down the narrow potholed lane, over the bridge at Gooseberry Creek and across the empty cement lot behind Manzanita Hardware. She moved automatically, chasing the same thought over and over until she was too numb to feel the terror or the irrational rage.