Kristin Hannah

by On Mystic Lake (v5)

  She stopped dead and turned to him, fighting the completely unexpected urge to laugh. “Nailed me?”

  He shrugged, grinning. “He said it, not me.”

  “Nailed me?” She shook her head. “Bobby Johnson said that?”

  “Don’t worry—he said you were good. And he didn’t even imply a blow job.”

  This time she did laugh, and some of her tension eased. They started walking again, across the wet grass, to her car. He opened the door for her, and it surprised her, that unexpected gesture of chivalry. No one had opened a car door for her in years.

  “Annie?” He said her name softly.

  She glanced up at him. “Yes?”

  “Don’t be sorry. Please.”

  She swallowed hard. For a few moments, Nick had made her feel beautiful and desirable. How could she feel sorry about that? She wanted to reach out for him again, anything to stave off the cold loneliness that would engulf her again the moment she climbed into her rented car and closed the door. “Lurlene told me you were looking for a nanny . . . for Isabella. I could watch her . . . during the day . . . if that would help you out. . . .”

  He frowned. “Why would you do that for me?”

  The question saddened her; it was full of mistrust and steeped in a lifetime’s disappointments. “It would help me out, Nick. Really. Let me help you.”

  He stared at her a long time, that wary cop’s look again. Then slowly, pointedly, he took hold of her hand and lifted it. In the pale moonlight, the three-carat diamond glittered with cold fire. “Don’t you belong somewhere else?”

  Now he would know what a failure she was, why she’d come running back to Mystic after all these years. “My husband and I have recently separated. . . .” She wanted to say more, tack a lighthearted excuse on the end of the glaring, ugly statement, but her throat closed up and tears stung her eyes.

  He dropped her hand as if it had burned him. “Jesus, Annie. You shouldn’t have let me act like such a whiny asshole, as if no one else in the world had a problem. You should have—”

  “I really do not want to talk about it.” She saw him flinch, and was immediately sorry for her tone of voice. “Sorry. But I think we’ve had enough shoulder-crying for one night.”

  He nodded, looking away for a minute. He stared at his house. “Izzy could use a friend right now. I’m sure as hell not doing her any good.”

  “It would help me out, too. I’m a little . . . lost right now. It would be nice to be needed.”

  “Okay,” he said at last. “Lurlene could use a break from baby-sitting. She and Buddy wanted to go to Branson, and since Izzy’s out of school . . .” He sighed. “I have to pick Izzy up from Lurlene’s tomorrow. I could meet you at her house—she lives down in Raintree Estates—you remember where that is? Pink house with gnomes in the front yard. It’s hard to miss.”

  “Sure. What time?”

  “Say one o’clock? I can meet you there on my lunch break.”

  “Perfect.” She stared up at him for another long minute, then turned and opened her car door. She climbed in, started the engine, and slowly pulled away. The last thing she saw, out of her rearview mirror as she drove away, was Nick looking after her.

  Long after she’d driven away, Nick remained on the edge of the lawn, staring down the darkened road. Slowly, he walked back into the house, letting the screen door bang shut behind him. He went to the fireplace and picked up the photograph of the three of them again. He looked at it for a long, long time, and then, tiredly, he climbed the long, creaking staircase up to his old bedroom. Steeling himself, he opened the door. He moved cautiously inside, his eyes adjusting quickly to the gloom. He could make out the big, unmade bed, the clothes heaped everywhere. He could see the lamp that Kathy had ordered from Spiegel and the rocking chair he’d made when Izzy was born.

  He grabbed a T-shirt from the floor, slammed the door behind him, and went down to his lonely couch, where he poured himself a stiff drink. He knew it was dangerous to use alcohol to ease his pain, and in the past months, he’d been reaching for that false comfort more and more.

  Leaning back, he took a long, soothing drink. He finished that drink and poured another.

  What he and Annie had done tonight didn’t change a thing. He had to remember that. The life she’d stirred in him was ephemeral and fleeting. Soon, she’d be gone, and he’d be left alone again, a widower with a damaged child who had to find a way to get through the rest of his life.

  There was a light on in the living room when Annie pulled up to her dad’s house. She winced at the thought of confronting him now, at two o’clock in the morning, with her clothes all wrinkled and damp. God, she probably smelled like sex.

  She climbed out of the car and headed into the house. As she’d expected, she found Hank in the living room, waiting up for her. A fire crackled cheerily in the fireplace, sending a velvet-yellow glow into the darkened room.

  She closed the door quietly behind her.

  Hank looked up from the book he was reading. “Well, well,” he said, easing the bifocals from his eyes.

  Annie self-consciously smoothed her wrinkled clothes and ran a hand through her too-short hair, hoping there was no grass stuck to her head. “You didn’t need to wait up for me.”

  “Really?” He closed the book.

  “There’s no need to worry. I’m a hell of a long way from sixteen.”

  “Oh, I wasn’t worried. Not after I called the police and the hospital.”

  Annie sat down on the leather chair beside the fireplace. “I’m sorry, Dad. I guess I’m not used to checking in. Blake never cared . . .” She bit back the sour confession and forced a thin smile. “I visited an old friend. I should have called.”

  “Yes, you should have. Who did you go see?”

  “Nick Delacroix. You remember him?”

  Hank’s blunt fingers tapped a rhythm on the cover of the book, his eyes fixed on her face. “I should have expected you’d end up there. You three were as tight as shoelaces in high school. He’s not doing so good, from what I hear.”

  Annie imagined that Nick was a delectable morsel for the town’s gossips. “I’m going to help him out a little. Take care of his daughter while he’s at work, that sort of thing. I think he needs a breather.”

  “Didn’t you two have sort of a ‘thing’ in high school?” His gaze turned assessing. “Or are you planning to get back at Blake?”

  “Of course not,” she answered too quickly. “You told me I needed a project. Something to do until Blake wakes up.”

  “That man’s trouble, Annie Virginia. He’s drowning, and he could take you down with him.”

  Annie smiled gently. “Thanks for worrying about me, Dad. I love you for it. But I’m just going to baby-sit for him. That’s all.”

  “That’s all?” It wasn’t a question.

  “You told me I needed to find a project. What am I supposed to do—cure cancer? I’m a wife and mother. It’s all I know. All I am.” She leaned forward, ashamed that she couldn’t tell him the whole truth—that she didn’t know how to be this alone. So, she told him the next best thing. “I’m too old to lie to myself, Dad, and I’m too old to change, and if I don’t do something I’m going to explode. This seems as good as anything. Nick and Izzy need my help.”

  “The person you need to help right now is you.”

  Her answering laugh was a weak, resigned little sound. “I’ve never been much good at that, now have I?”

  Chapter 8

  Annie threw back the covers and stumbled out of bed, the gauzy filaments of a nightmare wrapped around her. It was the same dream she used to have years ago, and she’d begun lately to have it again. She was trapped in a huge mansion, with hundreds of empty rooms everywhere, and she was searching desperately for a way out.

  Her first thought when she woke was always Blake? But, of course, he wasn’t beside her in bed. It was one of the many aspects of her new life to which she would have to become accustomed. There was no one t
o hold her after a nightmare.

  It was getting harder and harder for her to believe that Blake would ever come back to her, and the loss of that transient hope made her feel as hollow as a reed sucked dry by the summer heat.

  Tears stung her eyes. Last night she had broken her marriage vows for the first time in her life; she had shattered the faith she’d made with the only man she’d ever loved. And the hell of it was, he wouldn’t care.

  Nick was just getting ready to sign off for his lunch break when the call came in, a domestic disturbance on Old Mill Road.

  The Weaver place.

  With a sigh, Nick radioed the dispatcher and asked her to put a call in to Lurlene. He wouldn’t make his meeting with Annie and Izzy.

  Flicking on his siren and lights, he raced down the rutted strip of asphalt that led out of town. He followed Old Mill Road along the winding curves that sidled along the Simpson tree forest, over the concrete bridge above the choppy silver rapids of the Hoh River, and came at last to the driveway. A lopsided, dented mailbox, rusted to the color of Georgia mud, hung precariously from an arched piece of weathered driftwood. He turned cautiously down the road, a narrow, twisting swatch cut by hand from the dense black forest around it. Here, deep in the rain forest, no sunlight penetrated the trees; the foliage had a dark, sinister cast even in the middle of the day. At the end of the mud lane, a half-acre clearing butted up against a hillside of dense evergreen trees. Tucked into the back corner of the clearing a rickety mobile home squatted in the mud. Dogs yelped and barked at his entrance.

  Nick radioed the dispatcher again, confirming his arrival, and then he hurried from the squad car. With one hand resting on the butt of his gun, he splashed through the puddles that pocked the driveway and charged up the wooden crates that served as the front steps. He was about to knock when he heard a scream from inside the trailer.

  “Police!” he yelled as he pushed through the door. It swung inward and cracked on the wall. A shudder reverberated through the room. “Sally? Chuck?”

  Outside, the dogs went wild. He could imagine them straining on their chains, snapping at one another in their desperation to attack the trespasser.

  He peered through the gloomy interior. Avocado-colored shag carpeting, littered with beer cans and ashtrays, muffled the heavy sound of his boots as he moved forward. “Sally?”

  A shriek answered him.

  Nick ran through the dirty kitchen and shoved through the closed bedroom door.

  Chuck had his wife pinned to the fake wood paneling. She was screaming beneath him, trying to protect her face. Nick grabbed Chuck by the back of the neck and hurled him sideways. The drunken man made an oofing sound of surprise and stumbled sideways, cracking into the corner of the pressboard bureau. Nick spun and grabbed him again, cuffing him.

  Chuck blinked up at him, obviously trying to focus. “Goddamn it, Nicky,” he whined in a low, slurred voice. “What in the fuck are you doing here? We was just havin’ a argument. . . .”

  Nick holstered a fierce, sudden urge to smash his fist into Chuck’s fleshy face. “Stay here, goddamn it,” he said instead, shoving Chuck so hard he crashed to the floor, taking a cheap Kmart lamp with him. The lightbulb splintered and left the tiny room in shadows.

  Nick rested his hand on his baton as he cautiously made his way to Sally. She was leaning against the wall now, her torn, stained dress splattered with blood. A jagged cut marred her lower lip, and already a purplish bruise was seeping across her jaw.

  He couldn’t readily recall how many times he’d been here, how many times he’d stopped Chuck from killing his wife. It was a bad situation, this marriage, and had been long before Chuck got laid off at the mill, but since then, it had become a nightmare. Chuck spent all day at Zoe’s Tavern, sucking down beers he couldn’t afford and getting mad. By the time he crawled off his bar stool and made his stumbling way home, he was as mean as a junkyard dog, and when he pulled his broken-down pickup into his driveway, he was ready to do some serious damage. The only one around was his wife.

  Nick touched Sally’s shoulder.

  She made a gasping sound and cringed. “Don’t—”

  “Sally, it’s me. Nick Delacroix.”

  She slowly opened her eyes, and when she did, he saw the bottomless well of her despair, and her shame. She brought a shaking, bruised hand to her face and tried to push the blood-matted hair from her face. Tears welled in her blackened eyes and streaked down her battered cheeks. “Oh, Nick . . . Did the Robertses call you guys again?” She edged away from him and straightened, trying to look normal and in control. “It’s nothing, really. Chuckie just had a bad day, is all. The paper company isn’t looking for any employees. . . .”

  Nick sighed. “You can’t keep doing this, Sally. One of these days he’s going to kill you.”

  She tried to smile. It was a wobbly, unbalanced failure, and it tore at Nick’s heart. As always, Sally made him think of his mother, and all the excuses she’d made for alcohol over the years. “Oh, no, not my Chuckie. He gets a little frustrated, is all.”

  “I’m going to take Chuck in this time, Sally. I want you to make a complaint.”

  Chuck lurched from his place at the corner, stumbling into the bed. “She won’t do that to me, willya, honey? She knows I don’t mean nothing by it. It’s just that she makes me so damned mad sometimes. There wasn’t nothin’ in the whole house to eat when I got home. A man needs somethin’ to eat, ain’t that right, Nick?”

  Sally glanced worriedly at her husband. “I’m sorry, Chuckie. I didn’t expect you home s’early.”

  Defeat rounded Nick’s shoulders and washed through him in a cold wave. “Let me help you, Sally,” he said softly, leaning toward her.

  She patted his forearm. “I don’t need no help, Nick. But thanks for comin’ by.”

  Nick stood there, staring down at her. She seemed to be shrinking before his eyes, losing weight. The ragged cut of her cotton dress was too big for her; it hung off her narrow shoulders and lay limply against her body. He knew as certainly as he knew his own name that one day he would answer one of these calls and Sally would be dead. “Sally—”

  “Please, Nick,” she said, her voice trembling, her eyes filling with tears. “Please, don’t . . .”

  Nick turned away from her. There was nothing he could do to help her. The realization caused an ache deep inside him, and left him wondering why in the hell he did this job. There was no success, or damned little of it. He couldn’t do much of anything to Chuck unless Chuck killed his wife, and of course, then it would be too late.

  He stepped over an upended laundry basket and took hold of Chuck’s collar. “Come on, Chuck. You can sleep it off downtown.”

  He ignored Chuck’s whining and refused to look at Sally again. He didn’t need to. Sally would be following along behind them, whispering words of apology to the husband who’d broken her bones, promising to be “better” when he came home, vowing to have dinner on the table on time.

  It didn’t sicken Nick, her behavior. Unfortunately, he understood Sally. He had been like her in his youth, had followed his mother around like a hungry dog, begging for scraps of affection, taking whatever affection she would occasionally fling his way.

  Yes, he understood too well why Sally stayed with Chuck. And he knew, too, that it would end badly for both of them. But there was nothing he could do to help them. Not a goddamn thing except to throw Chuck in jail to sleep off his drunk, and wait for the next domestic disturbance call on Old Mill Road.

  Izzy Delacroix lay curled in a tight little ball on Lurlene’s guest bed. The pillow didn’t smell right—not the right smell at all. That was one of the things that made Izzy cry almost every night. Since her mommy went to Heaven, nothing smelled right, not the sheets or the pillows or Izzy’s clothes.

  Even Miss Jemmie didn’t smell like she was s’posed to. Izzy clutched the doll to her chest, stroking her pretty yellow hair with the two fingers she had left on her right hand, her thumb and point
y finger.

  At first it had sorta scared her, when she’d figured out that she was disappearing. She’d started to reach for a crayon, and halfway there, she’d noticed that her pinky finger was sort of blurry and gray. The next day it was invisible. She had told her daddy and Lurlene, and she could tell by the way they looked at her that it scared them, too. And that icky doctor—it had made him look at her like she was a bug.

  She stared at the two fingers that remained on her right hand. It’s goin’away, Mommy.

  She waited for an answer, but none came. Lots of times, she imagined her mommy was right beside her, and she could talk to her just by thinking the words.

  She wished she could make it happen right now, but it only seemed to happen at special times—at the purply time between day and night.

  She needed to talk to her mommy about what had happened the other day. It had been so bad. One minute, she’d been looking at the pictures in her book, and the next thing she knew, there was a scream inside her. She knew it wasn’t good to scream in school—the other kids already thought she was stupid—and she’d tried really, really hard to keep her mouth shut. She’d clenched her hands into tight balls and squeezed her eyes shut so hard she’d seen stars in the darkness.

  She had felt so scared and so lonely she couldn’t breathe right. The scream had started as a little yelp that slipped out. She had clamped a hand over her mouth but it hadn’t helped.

  All the kids had stared at her, pointing and laughing.

  And the scream had come out. Loud, louder, loudest. She’d clamped her hands over her ears so she couldn’t hear it. She’d known she was crying, but she hadn’t been able to stop that, either.

  The teacher had grabbed Izzy’s gloved hand, squeezing around all that nothingness. It had made Izzy scream harder that she couldn’t feel anything.

  “Oh, pumpkin, it’s not invisible,” Mrs. Brown had said softly; then she’d gently taken Izzy’s other hand and led her down the hallway.

  And the scream had gone on and on and on.

  She had screamed all the way down the hall and into the principal’s office. She had seen the way the grown-ups looked at her—like she was crazy—but she couldn’t help herself. All she knew was that she was disappearing, one finger at a time, and no one seemed to care.