The Waterfall

by Carla Neggers

  But she knew why, and she kept up her pace, hoping the impulse would subside. She ached with the need to act. She couldn’t think, could hardly breathe. She wanted the relief that came, even momentarily, with action.

  No.

  Pain shot up her shins from pounding too hard. She eased up. She was a strong runner, a fit, disciplined woman.

  Did Sebastian Redwing suspect her of toppling him into Joshua Falls? The landslide had worked out even better than she’d anticipated. She remembered her mix of horror and fascination as she’d watched him plunge headfirst over the rock ledge. Oh, God! What if she’d killed a man?

  It would have been Lucy’s fault. Lucy’s fault, Lucy’s fault. She was the one who’d brought Sebastian Redwing to Vermont.

  Barbara turned around at an old one-room schoolhouse, now boarded up, and headed back. Her stomach hurt. She was afraid of throwing up. It was tension, she knew. And hatred. She’d never known such pure hatred, didn’t understand it. Lucy had never done anything to her.

  But, of course, she had—just not directly. If Barbara followed the winding path to where Jack went wrong, where he’d moved away from openly declaring his love for her to this stubborn denial, it landed at Lucy’s feet. She hadn’t seen that Colin had a heart condition. She’d stolen Jack’s grandchildren away. She’d made him give up Barbara, the one woman who loved him totally, unconditionally. Lucy’s fault. It was that simple.

  Barbara abruptly stopped to pick flowers on the side of the road, grabbing them by the handful, pulling them up by their roots. Black-eyed Susans and daisies, a few purple, spiky things she didn’t know the name of. She ran with them, their dirt-laden roots slapping against her shorts and sweaty thighs.

  When she reached her car, she grabbed a pad and pencil.

  No. She had to do this right.

  She dumped the flowers onto her front seat and, panting and sweating, climbed in behind the wheel. She should take time to cool down and stretch, but she didn’t.

  There was nothing from Darren at the rented house. No messages on her cell phone voice-mail. Nothing from Jack. Nothing from anyone.

  She blinked back tears and carefully cut the roots off the flowers. Some were a little beaten up. She didn’t care. She found a piece of string in a kitchen drawer and tied it around the flowers. Downstairs in a closet, she found an old typewriter. She typed a short note. She would have to get rid of the typewriter; it probably could be easily traced. But she didn’t touch the paper directly, didn’t leave a handwriting sample for Mr. Security Man.

  “He should have died in the falls,” she said. “He really should have.”

  Wrapping her hand in a dishtowel, she tucked the typed note into the flowers.

  She smiled. “How romantic.”

  After the sugar and adrenaline of her morning had worn off, Lucy called her father-in-law. She used her portable phone while she deadheaded hollyhocks and daylilies in front of the barn.

  “Jack? Hi, it’s Lucy. Why didn’t you tell me you’d sent Barbara up here to rent you a house? I could have helped! We could at least have had Barbara to dinner.” She kept her tone cheerful, half teasing. “I hope you weren’t afraid we wouldn’t want you.”

  “No—no, that’s not it at all.” He sounded tense and awkward, his sonorous voice unable to mask his feelings. “I wasn’t sure I could find anything at this late date, and I didn’t want to get Madison’s and J.T.’s hopes up. And you know how I love surprises.”

  “Well, Barbara’s found you a great house just up the hill from us.”

  “She told me. That’s wonderful. It’s okay with you?”

  Lucy tossed a handful of wilted blossoms into the dirt and rubbed her forehead. She could feel a headache coming on. Awakened by Sebastian in her room, thrown into fits by his kiss, her daughter acting up, too many pancakes—all had her going. “I’ve told you before, Jack, you’re always welcome here. The kids will be thrilled to have you around.”

  “Barbara’s rented the house for a month. I’ll have to go home a few times—”

  “Jack, she could have rented the house for a year. You’re family.”

  “Lucy…” He seemed to choke up, but rallied. “Thank you. I’m sorry I went off the deep end on you the other day.”

  “Jack, we’ve known each other too long and have gone through too much together to worry about that sort of thing. Look, you sound tired. Is everything all right?”

  “Yes, fine. It’s just bloody hot here. Lucy—there’s something else I should tell you. Sidney Greenburg will be spending some time in Vermont with me.”

  “That’s great. Sidney’s wonderful.” Lucy understood immediately what he, in his almost prudish way, was trying to tell her. “Jack, I’m so pleased for you.”

  “And you? Is everything all right with you?”

  Not by a long shot, she thought. “Nothing a few quiet days won’t cure. Is Barbara heading back to Washington? I can still have her to dinner—”

  “I urged her to take a few extra days to relax. You know Barbara. This place would fall apart without her.”

  Lucy smiled. “Do you mean your office or all of Washington?”

  He laughed, sounding more like himself.

  When she hung up, Sebastian materialized behind her. “How’s the good senator?”

  “Eavesdropping isn’t polite. I had a talk with J.T. about that very subject this morning.”

  “No one’s ever suggested I was polite.”

  She swallowed and pinched off a pale yellow daylily blossom. His mood, she sensed, was not good. He was serious, the teasing sexiness and the depth of emotion of earlier replaced by a kind of dark calm.

  “He was tense,” she said. “This time of year is always hard in Washington. Everyone wants to get home, it’s hot, and the back-channel pressures and deals come fast and furious. Jack’s a plodder. He likes to think through issues, not jump on some half-baked compromise.”

  “I’d like to talk to him.”

  “Jack? Why?”

  He shrugged, but nothing about him was nonchalant. “For the same reasons the local police would want to talk to him if you’d gone to them instead of me. He’s a United States senator. If someone’s bothering you, maybe it’s to get to him.”

  Lucy tossed more dead blossoms into the back of the flower bed. It needed weeding, too, and a shot of organic fertilizer. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “You’re thinking if he’s rented a house here for August, it could mean something’s up.”

  “I’m not thinking anything. I just want to talk to him.”

  She plunked the phone in his hand. “Go ahead. I’ll listen in.”

  “Lucy—”

  “You’re hiding something, Redwing. You’re not here just because someone shot a hole in my dining room window. So, what is it? What do you know that I don’t know?”

  “I don’t like to talk on the phone with someone breathing down my neck.”

  “I don’t, either.”

  “You didn’t know I was there.”

  “If you don’t want to use my phone and have me listen in, you should have brought your own.”

  She yanked at a browned, soggy hollyhock blossom, and the plant, which she hadn’t staked and was already leaning too far forward, fell. She tore it up and flung it onto the driveway. It lay there like a dead animal.

  Sebastian watched her without comment. The man worked on her nerves, got to her senses, made her feel on edge and half-crazy, as if she couldn’t think straight—or could think too straight. Everything seemed more alive, more energized when he was around. Even deadheading her damn flowers. There were no half-measures with him. No peace.

  “You’re a goddamn liar,” she said and marched back to the barn.

  He didn’t follow her. She kicked a wastebasket and stormed over to a side window, one she’d added in her renovations. He was already dialing. The bastard. He’d gotten his way. What did he care if she was in a turmoil?

/>   She picked up the extension.

  “Hang up, Lucy. I’m better at this than you are.”

  “The kids could listen in,” she said.

  “Not and get away with it. Hang up.”

  She heard a voice say, “Senator Swift’s office.”

  Sebastian disconnected without a word. Lucy watched him toss the phone into the flower bed like one of her dead blossoms, then he was coming toward her, taking long strides that put her at a disadvantage.

  She was alone in the barn. J.T. was playing Nintendo in his room, Madison was confined to quarters, and it was Sunday, so her staff had the day off.

  He was there.

  “I was thinking about hiding under a canoe,” she said, “but I figure you’re the expert. You’d just find me and it’d only reinforce the big, bad wolf ideas you have about yourself.”

  “Lucy. Damn it.”

  His voice was ragged, his gray eyes flinty. He caught her around the middle, paused just long enough for her to tell him to go to hell—but she didn’t—and his mouth found hers. His hands splayed on her back. She could feel the imprint of his palms and each finger like a hot spike as he drew her against him. He was fully aroused. She could feel him straining, pressing as his kiss deepened, his tongue probing erotically, telling her, in ways that words couldn’t, just what he wanted.

  He lifted her shirt and slid one hand down her pants, squeezing gently, then easing around the front, between her legs, where she could hide nothing from him. “Don’t stop,” she whispered. “Don’t stop.”

  “I have no intention of stopping.”

  And he didn’t, until she was quaking against his fingers. It happened so fast, so explosively, she was stunned. But she wasn’t embarrassed. He pulled back, let her sink into her chair. She licked her lips, still tasting him. “What about you?”

  “I’ll wait.”

  “I don’t usually—I haven’t—” She cleared her throat; it would take a while before she could think properly. “I’m not usually that reckless.”

  “That wasn’t reckless.” He grinned, kissed her softly. “One day I’ll show you reckless.”

  Impossibly, desire spurted through her again, just as searing and furious. He winked, as if he knew, and headed back toward the door. “Where are you going?” she asked.

  He smiled. “To make my phone call.”

  Jack Swift refused to talk details. “I told Plato all you need to know. As it was, I took a huge risk. You know Darren Mowery. You know he’ll do exactly what he’s threatened to do if I don’t cooperate.”

  “Which is?” Sebastian asked.

  “Reveal his lies and filth.”

  Lies and filth. They were making progress. “Senator, my advice is for you to take everything you have to the Capitol Police. Let them do their job. They can put a round-the-clock security detail on you. Mowery doesn’t have to know.”

  “But he will,” Jack Swift said.

  Sebastian felt fatigue tug at his eyes, settle into the small of his back. He’d done too much today. Kissing Lucy at dawn, chasing after her daughter, damn near making love to Lucy in the barn. He stood in the shade of one of the big old maples in the front yard, her portable phone almost out of range. She was right. He should have brought his cell phone.

  The senator went on. “You know I’m right.”

  “Yes,” Sebastian acknowledged. “I know.”

  “I’m not in any physical danger.”

  “Did you pay him?”

  Jack Swift hesitated. This, too, was more than he wanted to admit. “Two installments.”

  “How much?”

  “Ten thousand each.”

  Sebastian gripped the phone hard. “Twenty thousand total? Senator, Darren Mowery tried to steal millions last year. He’s not planning to settle for twenty grand.”

  No answer.

  “But you already know that,” Sebastian said.

  “I don’t know what he wants. I only know what he’ll do if I don’t cooperate, and I’ve already decided that’s intolerable.” Swift sighed deeply and added, “And now that I’ve already cooperated twice, the bastard knows he’s got me by the short hairs. There’s no going back.”

  “Then what do you want from me?”

  “I want you to stop him.”

  “No, Senator,” Sebastian said. “You want me to kill him.”

  He disconnected while Swift was still gasping. The senator, Sebastian decided, needed a little more time to think over his situation. It was damn cruel to exacerbate his already acute sense of isolation, but from hard experience, Sebastian knew that blackmail victims never liked to divulge what their tormenters had on them. They just wanted all the unpleasantness to go away by itself. Usually, it didn’t.

  Madison joined him on the porch and sat down next to him with a cardboard box. “I found this in the attic. It’s what I do when I’m under house arrest—I poke around in the attic. Look.” She opened the lid. “It’s quilting pieces. Hexagons. Do you think they were your grandmother’s?”

  Sebastian lifted out a stack of the hexagons. He nodded, recognizing the soft, worn fabric of his grandfather’s old shirts. He remembered Daisy cutting them up years after he’d died. Waste not, want not. But she’d never made the quilt.

  “Yes,” he said. “They were Daisy’s.”

  “I guess she never got around to piecing the quilt.”

  “I guess not.”

  “I was thinking about asking Mom to help me—I’ve never sewn a quilt before. You wouldn’t mind?”

  “Why would I mind? Your mother bought the house. She owns everything in it.”

  “But…” She gave an exaggerated shrug. “If it was my grandmother’s, I’d want it.”

  He smiled. “Consider yourself Daisy’s honorary great-granddaughter.”

  She laughed, delighted. “Of course,” she amended, “this is just because I’m bored out of my mind. If I were in Washington this summer, I wouldn’t have to resort to sewing a quilt.”

  “People in Washington sew quilts.”

  “Only because they want to, not because they have to because there’s nothing else to do.”

  “Madison, if you could, tell me everything you and Barbara Allen talked about. Just pretend you’re a reporter and recorded your conversation.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t trust her,” he said, giving it to her straight.

  “You don’t trust anyone.”

  “I trusted Daisy.”

  “What about my mother?”

  “Your mother?” He leaned back against a step and looked out at shaded lawn. “Well, Madison, I’ve loved your mother for a very long time. I don’t know as I trust her.”

  The girl gaped at him. Sebastian was unrepentant. The kid needed to learn that if she asked impertinent questions, she’d better be prepared for impertinent answers. Let her figure out if he was serious.

  “Barbara Allen,” he said.

  “Oh. Right.” And she told him what she and Barbara had talked about. It wasn’t much.

  “That’s everything?”

  She nodded.

  “Good report. Thanks.”

  “You don’t think she’s the one bugging Mom, do you?”

  “I don’t know. I like to keep an open mind.” He glanced at her. “I suggest you do, too.”

  She jumped up with her box of fabric pieces. “I’ve known Barbara forever. She’s worked for my grandfather since before I was even born. She couldn’t do those things to Mom.”

  “Look, under the right set of circumstances, people can do just about anything.”

  She shook her head, adamant. “Not me.”

  Sebastian hated arguing with a fifteen-year-old. “Good. Okay. Not you.”

  She stomped off. She knew when she was being patronized. He considered going after her to apologize, but decided against it. He’d been nice enough until she started talking about forever. What the hell did a kid her age know about forever?

  But he liked her. She was
humiliated, annoyed, grounded, probably at least a little scared, and still she was trying to make the best of it. Quilting. The kid had guts. Like both her parents.

  He thought of Colin and smiled. His dead friend would have been proud of his family and the way they were carrying on without him.

  Lucy found him on the steps. She sat down next to him, folded her hands in her lap. “Looks as if Madison and I will be sewing the quilt Daisy pieced. Madison’s at that age where she pushes me away and then pulls me to her, until I don’t know what to do. Take it a day at a time and keep loving her, I suppose.” She smiled suddenly. “Teenagers really are wonderful.”

  “You have great kids, Lucy. You’ve done well.”

  “So far. Fingers crossed.”

  “I want to go up and talk to Barbara Allen,” he said. “It should only take thirty minutes or so.”

  “Are you asking me if I’ll be okay here by myself? If so, the answer’s yes. I’ll be fine.”

  He stretched his legs down over the steps. “I don’t know. When Daisy left me here alone, I’d get spooked, especially during a thunderstorm. That thunder would echo in the hills. I’d hide under a pillow.”

  “You were just a kid.”

  “Hell, I was scared of thunderstorms until I was eighteen.”

  She laughed and placed a hand on his thigh. “Sebastian, about earlier—I’m not embarrassed, and I have no regrets, except that we didn’t have more time. I knew when I went to see you in Wyoming that inviting you into my life was a risk. I’ve never been neutral about you. I’ll say that much.”

  She started to remove her hand, but he covered it with his, keeping it in place. “After my mother died, Daisy said it was a cruel fate to lose both her husband and only child. She was angry, and she thought it would only add insult to injury if she lived a long life. But she was all I had, and she knew it, and she made the best of it. And after a while, she stopped being angry and started living again.”

  “I was never angry,” Lucy said.

  “Yes, you were.”

  She was silent, her hand still under his. She could have slipped it out, but she didn’t.