by Karen Young
“It was a silly, immature thing to do. I knew it the minute it happened. The worst thing is that I dishonored myself. I betrayed the vows I took eighteen years ago and I destroyed something valuable and precious I had with Michael.” She bravely met his eyes again. “I hope I didn’t destroy something else equally valuable and precious to me.”
For a long moment, the two of them stood frozen in time. The silence thrummed with the things they didn’t say. Both seemed aware that the moment was fraught with danger—for their relationship, for the two of them personally and for the future, if they wanted to spend it together.
Jake moved first. “We’d better find him,” he warned in a level tone. “He’s my son as much as Scotty is whether you like it or not. If I have to comb every inch of this state, I mean to bring him back.”
“I know.” Rachel wanted to find Michael every bit as much as Jake did, but she doubted Jake would believe her if she said so now. All this time Michael had been reaching out to her and she’d been locked in the cold prison of her grief over Scotty and her bitterness over Jake’s betrayal. Still, he’d somehow slipped through her defenses anyway, right into her heart.
“What are we going to do?” she whispered.
“Find him,” Jake said, clipping the words. “From the sound of his letter to you, it appears the two of you were closer than I realized. So you tell me, Rachel, where would my son run to?”
“I don’t know.” Rachel’s eyes flooded with fresh tears. She bent over and picked up Michael’s letter. He was her son, too, she realized suddenly, tenderly smoothing it out. Had she waited too long to admit that?
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE BAR WAS NOISY and smelled of mildew and stale cigarette smoke. A few months before, when Tidewater had received seven inches of rain within a three-hour period, the bar, along with a lot of businesses located on the same ugly strip of Highway 6, had flooded. In Lou’s Bar, long after the mud and water were mopped up, the stench lingered.
Just inside the door, Jake hesitated, squinting a little to see in the dimly lit interior. The crowd was almost exclusively working-class males. A burst of laughter and coarse profanity rose momentarily above the twang of Willie Nelson’s guitar emanating from the jukebox. Jake didn’t expect to learn much. Lou’s patrons played as hard as they worked and stayed healthy by minding their own business. Looking at the rough, hard-bitten clientele, he wondered again how it was that Michael had stopped here. With his thumb, he pushed his hat back a little and made his way across the floor to the bartender.
“Sheriff.”
“Lou.”
Wiping his hands on his filthy apron, Lou Frank eyed the lawman warily. Until three days ago, in the eighteen months he’d owned the bar, Lou had never seen Sheriff Jake McAdam. His deputies always showed up when trouble broke out, but never the sheriff. Not even at election time.
“What’ll you have, Sheriff?”
“Beer.”
Lou filled a mug and set it down in front of Jake. “There you go, ice cold,” he said heartily. “On the house.”
As though he hadn’t heard, Jake peeled two dollar bills from his clip and tossed them on the bar. Settling on the stool, he pulled the beer toward him, cupping it with both hands but leaving it untasted. Reflected in the mirror behind the bar were several tables, all occupied, and the pool table. He studied the two men playing, pegging them as the owners of a couple of the motorcycles parked outside. No one within his line of vision looked familiar. Turning his head, he surveyed the rest of them. A barmaid, a table of bikers, some construction types, a lone drunk, two decent-looking businessmen. All strangers.
“Heard anything about your boy?” Lou asked.
Jake turned and stared directly into Lou’s eyes. “Have you?”
Lou wiped both hands on his filthy apron. “I told you when you come in here a coupla days ago that I ain’t seen him. I thought he might have turned up.”
“I wouldn’t be in here if he had.”
“Yeah, well—”
“He hasn’t turned up, and this pigsty is the only lead I’ve got, Lou.” The door to the toilet slammed, and Jake glanced at the man who emerged, still adjusting the fly on his jeans. Seeing Jake, he looked quickly away and headed for a rear booth, where a woman waited.
Lou wiped off a sweat ring on the bar next to Jake. “Whaddaya want me to say, Sheriff? I run my business legal. I buy my license and I keep my nose clean. I don’t have no hankerin’ to make you mad, but I don’t know nothin’ about your boy.”
“He disappeared three days ago,” Jake said, keeping his tone low and his eye on Frank. “The only information we have is from a beer distributor who was using the pay phone in your parking lot. He said he saw Michael go into this bar. He was on foot carrying his duffel bag. It was three o’clock in the afternoon—the same time it is right now. Somebody in this place had to have seen him. I want to talk to whoever that is.” He placed his hands flat on the bar and leaned slightly forward, pinning Lou with his gaze as surely as if he held a handful of his shirtfront. “Now. Are we communicating, Lou?”
Lou swallowed thickly. “I swear, Sheriff—”
“Just talk!” Jake slammed his fist down, sloshing foam from his beer over his knuckles.
“I’m tellin’ the truth, Sheriff. If that boy come in here, I don’t know nothin’ about it. I didn’t see him, honest.”
“How could a boy, fourteen years old, unaccompanied, clean, come into this establishment, Lou, and not be noticed?”
Lou shrugged, sweating. “It purely beats me, Sheriff.”
“Yeah, well, it beats me, too,” Jake said, sliding from the stool and standing up. “It is so puzzling that I’m not giving up until I’m satisfied that I’ve had the truth from you.”
“I know it sounds crazy, but that is the truth, Sheriff.” Miserably, Lou looked from Jake to his clientele. The jukebox was playing another cheating song. Three overhead fans stirred the stale air, squeaking rhythmically. It wasn’t much of a business, but it was all he had. His customers were hard-ass, hard-drinking types. Many of them couldn’t afford to fall under the scrutiny of the sheriff. None would put up with a hassle from the law. There were plenty of other places to hang out and drink. If Jake cared to, he could ruin Lou’s business. They both knew it.
“I’m coming back tomorrow, Lou.” Jake squared his hat, still looking straight into the bartender’s eyes. “I want to talk with the individual who saw my son.”
“Hey, Lou! We need some service over here.”
Lou wiped his hands on the front of his apron. “Keep your shirt on, I’m comin’!” He gave Jake a sickly smile. “I’ll see what I can do, Sheriff.”
“You do that.” Turning, Jake glanced around the bar again. In the rear, the man who’d been in the toilet was just rising to leave the booth. Catching Jake’s eye, he sat down. Jake frowned, realizing where he’d seen him. He was the ex-con with the pickup at the accident scene on the highway several months ago. A name hovered just out of reach. He made his way to the door still trying to recall it.
Outside, he breathed deeply, needing some air. Of all the bars and dives in the county, Lou Frank’s place ranked at the bottom. He took little pleasure in pushing the owner, but Lou’s and its patrons were his only link to Michael’s movements the day he’d left. He stood for a minute, considering. The facts were confounding. Except for the two notes, Michael had left no clue as to his intentions. Without a car, he would have been forced to rely on public transportation or friends, but nothing had turned up after an exhaustive search. It did not appear that he’d hitchhiked. On his trip from Iowa, he’d relied exclusively on truckers, yet no one appeared to have seen him at any of the truck stops within a thousand miles. Jake stared at the motley collection of motorcycles, pickups and ragtag cars. Why in hell had he stopped at this bar? Fighting discouragement and defeat, he started across the shelled parking lot. He couldn’t face losing Mike as well as Scotty. There had to be something he could do.
But what?
Already he’d tried everything humanly possible to trace him, beginning with an immediate APB and unabashed exploitation of the whole law-enforcement network. He’d leaned heavily on personal contacts from Miami to Atlanta and New Orleans to New York. In Florida and the neighboring states, Mike’s name and physical description were as familiar to the residents as the face of their favorite newscaster.
And still nothing—except for the sighting at Lou’s Bar.
He made his way slowly to his car. Notwithstanding the cloudy circumstances, Michael’s disappearance, like Scotty’s, was producing a flurry of publicity. Ironically, most of it was favorable to Jake, valuable from the standpoint of his candidacy for sheriff of Kinard County, as Liz had pointed out pragmatically. Jake remarked bitterly to Rachel that until he had his sons safe in his house, he couldn’t care less about politics.
Rachel. She had been beside him the first thirty-six hours as he’d combed the county searching for Mike. It had surprised Jake how well she knew Mike and his friends and habits. They’d gotten close in the months Mike had been with them. She was devastated that Mike had assumed their marriage could be mended by the simple act of his leaving. She wore her guilt and remorse like a curse. Her nights were sleepless, leaving her with a bruised look. She seemed as fragile as she’d been during the early days when Scotty had disappeared. If he’d doubted Rachel’s feelings before, he no longer did. Repressing a sigh, Jake opened the car door and got inside. He could probably relieve a lot of her guilt, he supposed, but every time he was tempted, he got a clear picture of her kissing Ron Campbell. Campbell’s hands on her.
He swore as a flood tide of jealousy and pure masculine outrage welled up in him. The thought of any man but him touching Rachel was enough to drive him over the edge. Fumbling in his shirt pocket, he found his sunglasses and shoved them on his face. As always, when his emotions threatened to take hold of him, Jake shut down. He was backing out when his radio squawked. Picking it up, he barked his code into the transmitter.
“Sheriff, we’ve got a situation here at the station. What’s your ETA?”
“I’m headed back right now. Give me eight minutes.” Jake accelerated. Grabbing the portable bubble, he clapped it on the top of his car. “Situation” could mean anything, but the fact that Mavis had not defined it meant it wasn’t something to be aired on the radio. Hope spiraled. First and foremost, he was a father, not a lawman. “Is it Mike?” he said.
He knew when he heard Mavis hesitate. “Uh, sorry, Jake. No.”
He nodded, his eyes bleak. “Six minutes.” He signed off.
RACHEL WAS IN Michael’s room, standing in front of the aquarium, when she heard Jake’s car in the driveway. Hastily she wiped her cheeks with the heels of her hands. Glancing in the mirror, she saw that she looked reasonably together. Not that it mattered. Jake had not looked at her, really looked at her, since Michael ran away.
She reached for the can of fish food and with a shaky hand sprinkled some of it in the water. She was usually calmed by the fish and the soft, gurgling sounds of the water, but when Michael disappeared, most of her peace of mind went with him. At least here, in Mike’s room, she didn’t climb the walls in her guilt and pain and loneliness. In here, she felt close to him. When he came home again—she fiercely refused to think otherwise—she had so much to tell him. It would be difficult to explain to a fourteen-year-old why she had focused so deeply on her resentment and the circumstances of his birth, but Michael was mature beyond his years. He possessed a sensitivity to other people that was rare in a teenage boy. She was counting on his forgiveness and understanding. She wanted to be his mother. He’d started creeping into her heart that first night, the moment he’d looked at her with Jake’s gray eyes and apologized for causing her pain. She blinked rapidly as tears stung her eyes. She was his mother. In every way imaginable, she was Michael’s mother and she wanted to tell him so.
“Hi.”
Rachel jumped at the sound of Jake’s voice. She hadn’t expected him to look for her in the house. Surreptitiously, she wiped her eyes again, glad that it was late. Except for the dim glow of the aquarium, the room was dark.
“Hello.” She searched his face anxiously. “What is it? Have you heard something?”
He shook his head as he came toward her. He stopped at the aquarium, and for a minute, like her, watched the gentle undulations of a fantail weaving among the leaves of artificial ivy. “How was your day?”
“Sort of empty. I still haven’t gone back to work,” she said, her gaze on the fish. “In case he calls…”
“He knows your number at the hospital, Rachel. He knows my number at work. You don’t have to do this.”
“I want to.”
Jake studied her profile a moment. “Are you crying?”
She shrugged mutely, unable to reply. “A little,” she said finally.
He picked up the fish food and stared at it before placing it on the table. Then, inhaling deeply, he looked around the room. “I see this room, his bed, his chest, his desk, and I can hardly tell he lived here.”
“That’s because he took everything.”
“What?”
“It’s the only thing that comforts me.” She waved a hand at the furniture with its cleared surfaces, the desk without a scrap of paper or a single pencil, the naked walls stripped of the posters Mike had tacked up within a few days of moving in. “He ran away, but he took everything from his life with you and me that wasn’t nailed down. So I know he was happy here,” she said fiercely. “Wherever he is, he’s carrying those reminders of us. I’m counting on him missing you so much, he’ll come home no matter what he thinks of me.”
Jake touched her shoulder, just one gentle brush of his fingers. “He loves you, Rachel. That’s part of his reason for running. He understood the problems we had a lot better than most kids would have. I suppose his decision to leave us might even make sense to an idealistic teenage boy.”
“Oh, Jake.” She closed her eyes, and the tension that held her together seemed to disintegrate. She wilted like a sunbaked flower on a stem. “I’m so sorry.”
With his thumb, he stroked her trembling lips. “Don’t be. Maybe we both should have paid more attention. We could have set him straight if we had been aware he was contemplating something so drastic.”
Without thinking, she leaned into him, slipping her arms around his waist. “I miss him so much, Jake.”
Drawing her close, his hands met at the small of her back. “Yeah, me, too.” His eyes fell on the aquarium and he chuckled softly. “He probably would have taken the fish tank if he could have figured a way.”
She made a small, distressed sound.
“I’ll find him, sweetheart. I’ll find him and bring him home.”
With her cheek against his chest and the strong beat of his heart in her ear, Rachel sighed. She was forgiven. She felt it in the warmth of his embrace, in the wordless sound he made as his lips touched her temple.
“I love you, Jake.”
“Ah, Rachel…”
She felt foolish, almost light-headed, her relief was so great. Oh, how the forgiveness of one person could mean the difference between living and dying. Her hands clenched on the material of his shirt at his waist. “I thought…I wondered if I’d ever get to tell you again.”
“Hush.” He kissed her ear and the soft underside of her jaw. Rachel’s breath caught. He was so dear, their love so special and precious.
“Jake…”
He lifted his head to gaze questioningly into her eyes.
Holding on to him, she wondered if she could make him understand. The night in Orlando they’d both needed comfort; trouble shared was trouble halved. But when she’d awakened the next morning, there had been no sense of peace, no feeling that their problems had been resolved. She didn’t want that again. She didn’t think she could bear that again.
“I need to know how you feel, Jake.”
He inhaled, then with a rush of breath, ga
ve a short laugh. Pulling her tight against him, he asked, “How do you think I feel, baby? What does this tell you about how I feel?”
“To tell the truth, not very much.”
“I want to go to bed, Rachel. I want to make love to you. That’s what I feel, Rachel.”
“And then what?”
For a few seconds he just looked at her. Rachel felt a brief pang of sympathy for his confusion. In all the years they’d been married, she’d never asked to know his feelings. It had been enough to know he loved her and showed her often. In a way, it was a testimony to the depth of their devotion to each other that their marriage had endured as long—and as well—as it had, considering that neither of them had been very skillful in communicating the really important things. Now, left with only each other and a somewhat tattered relationship, they needed more than a union of bodies. They needed to share their minds and hearts and souls.
Rachel wondered wryly how the idea would strike Jake. She sensed he was waiting for her to speak. But when she remained stubbornly silent, he drew in a deep breath.
“Okay. Okay. There’s something important going down here, but I’m not sure I know what it is. Help me out, sweetheart.”
Rachel prayed for the right words. “We made love in that motel in Orlando, but we didn’t…it didn’t…”
“Fix everything? We didn’t come home and live happily ever after?”
Sagging a little with relief, she rested her forehead against his chest. “See? You felt it, too.”
He closed his eyes and after a moment, he said, “I know what you mean. I didn’t want to admit it. I figured we could work it out. We’d restored that part of our relationship. And if Mike hadn’t disappeared…”
And my stupidity over Ron Campbell hadn’t come out… She finished the thought for him with an inward flinch.
Jake rested his chin on her head. “I guess one night wasn’t enough to fix everything.”