Keeping Caroline

by Vickie Taylor

  Sighing, he sat next to Mr. Johnson. Deciding to take the offensive, he said, “I told you when I first rented the room that Caroline and I were getting a divorce.”

  Mr. Johnson made a derisive sound. “Don’t look like you’re getting no divorce to me, you going over there and working on her house every day.”

  “I was just trying to help her get the house ready to open her business.”

  “The house finished?”

  “No.”

  “So you’re leaving the job undone.”

  Matt flinched instinctively, recognizing what must seem a cardinal sin to a man with a work ethic such as Mr. Johnson’s. Matt was leaving a lot of things undone, unsaid, but the house wasn’t one of them. “I’ll hire someone to finish it.”

  Mrs. Johnson handed her husband a cup of coffee. He took a sip and grimaced.

  “It’s decaf,” she said. “The real thing would keep you up all night and you know it.”

  Mr. Johnson rolled his eyes, but it wasn’t a rude gesture. More like a familiar routine between husband and wife. Matt and Caroline had once had routines like that, a long time ago. He’d forgotten…

  “Seems like,” Mr. Johnson said between blowing on his coffee and sipping, “that house isn’t the only thing you’re leaving for someone else to finish if you go back to Port Kingston now.”

  “Ed,” Cora said, “leave the boy be.”

  Matt looked up at her, grateful for her intervention, and saw such an abiding compassion in her eyes, that he knew she knew. Everything. Before the rush of surprise had even passed, he figured he should have expected that the Johnsons knew about Hailey. They went to the same church as Caroline.

  He wondered how many other people in town knew. Everyone, he supposed. Feeling like a fool, Matt drained his coffee cup and set it carefully on the table. “I really should go upstairs and pack now.”

  Not long after he’d closed the door to the converted attic behind him, he heard the creak of floorboards from the second-floor hallway below him and knew the Johnsons had called it a night, too. It took him about ten seconds to throw his belongings into his duffel bag. Another three to zip it shut. Fine. Good. That left him about, oh, six hours before daylight.

  Flopping down onto the twin bed under the sloped ceiling, he linked his hands behind his head and shut his eyes. The trouble was, he couldn’t shut his mind’s eye as easily.

  He kept seeing Caroline, moonlight glinting silver off the tear tracks down her cheeks, and the squirming bundle in her arms.

  Don’t you want to see her, Matt? Don’t you want to hold her?

  No.

  He swung his legs over the side of the mattress, the bed springs creaking under his weight. Even if he could somehow accept a baby in his life, the split between him and Caroline was too wide. There was too much pain, too much history, between them. What kind of home would that be to raise a child in? One full of unhappiness and hurt.

  The baby was better off here in Sweet Gum, with Caroline and her house full of misfits. Better off without him.

  For about half a second he wondered if the Johnsons actually kept any liquor in that liquor cabinet he’d seen in the dining room. The moment passed, though, as it always did. He enjoyed a stiff drink now and then, but he’d never had to turn to alcohol to wash away the effects of a bad day. Come to think of it, he wasn’t possessed of a lot of the vices other men fell prey to. He rarely drank. Didn’t smoke. Hated to gamble away good money. He’d never been unfaithful to his wife—felt guilty for a week if a pretty girl so much as drew a second glance from him.

  He was a freakin’ choirboy. A saint. And what good had it done him? It hadn’t saved his son. Hadn’t helped his marriage. And the cruelest joke of all—it hadn’t stopped God from creating a child when a child was the last thing Matt wanted. The last thing he could bear.

  He didn’t deserve this; didn’t deserve any of it, and goddamn it, he was tired of being a saint.

  He tiptoed down the stairs. Alf followed. The click of the dog’s nails on the floors sounded loud as machine gun fire in the quiet house.

  Air. What he really needed was air. What the hell, his bag was packed. It was only eight or nine miles to town. He could walk it and make the first bus in the morning back to Port Kingston. What did it matter? Whether he stayed in the dormer room upstairs with the sloped roof and lace doilies on the tabletops or beat feet on a dusty gravel road in the dark, there wouldn’t be any sleep for him tonight.

  After hastily scrawling a note to the Johnsons, thanking them for their hospitality, he set out, bag in hand and Alf at his side.

  He made it as far as the bottom of the winding drive leading up the hill to Caroline’s house. A dirt path led off the road to the right, toward the pond. In the distance, a host of bullfrogs sang for their mates. Matt hadn’t planned on going to the pond. Never made a conscious decision to do so. All the same, he found himself sitting on the bank beneath the old weeping willow that had sheltered him and Caroline so many times in their youths. Protected them from prying eyes.

  What a pair they had been then, hiding inside the curtain of willow wands, talking about all the perfect things they’d have together—careers, houses, family. They’d been young and idealistic. Foolish.

  Automatically he reached up, searching out the stub of a limb which had been shorn off in a lightning strike years ago. There it was, on the smooth end. He traced the letters with his fingertips.

  M.B. Loves C.E.

  Matt Burkett loves Caroline Everett. He smiled in the dark. He’d been twenty years old when he cut his inscription in the tree. Caroline was barely sixteen. Much too young for what he had in mind. What he wanted, even if she wanted it, too.

  So he’d kissed her. Softly. Chastely.

  He’d be back for her in a few years, he promised. And if she still felt that way, he’d marry her. They’d live together forever. The carving in the tree was his promise.

  He couldn’t help but think how different she had looked earlier tonight than she had then. It wasn’t just age he saw in her—everyone got older. It was more. Something deeper. Something sadder. Maybe a little wiser.

  The memory of her standing in the moonlight in front of the nursery window, tear tracks glinting like veins of silver down her marble cheeks, would be with him a long, long time. He might as well have slapped her in the face, accusing her of betraying him the way he had, and yet she’d asked if he wanted to hold his daughter.

  Hailey. He rolled the name around his mind, then made himself say it out loud. “Hailey.” Again. “Hailey.”

  A slow wave of…something…rolled through him. What? Anger? No, if anyone was innocent in this, it was Hailey. Remorse? Maybe. Sorrow that he couldn’t be the father Hailey deserved. But he’d lived with sorrow for years now, and this feeling tonight was more.

  Longing. That was it. A deep yearning for something that could never be.

  Something he’d never even seen, not up close.

  He looked up the hill at the house. The lights were out. Caroline was probably asleep. It would be crazy to wake her now. It would set expectations that he couldn’t fulfill.

  But Caroline didn’t have to know. She was asleep, alone in her room. The baby in the nursery down the hall.

  He was only torturing himself, he knew. But still he couldn’t stop.

  Just once. Just once he had to see his baby’s face.

  Chapter 5

  Everything looked the same inside the nursery as it had a few hours ago, when he’d first stepped inside. First learned he had a daughter. The ducky night-light still glowed. The clowns dangling from a mobile over the crib still mocked him with their leering smiles and the animals on the wallpaper still looked ready to pounce.

  Who’d pick a jungle print for a baby’s room, anyway?

  Gathering his nerve, he took one step toward the silent crib. He couldn’t hear anything. No soft baby snores. No gurgles.

  God, what if something was wrong?

  In a heartbe
at, his hesitance dissolved. He found himself next to the crib, reaching in, picking up the blanket.

  Empty. The crib was empty.

  His heart threatened to explode. Where—

  The overhead lights snapped on. Matt wheeled, throwing his forearm up to protect himself from the burning onslaught of light.

  Squinting, he spotted Caroline standing in the doorway, a not-quite-sheer sleeveless nightgown flowing over her gentle curves and, to his unadjusted eyes, surrounded by an unearthly glow. She appeared to him like a madonna and a seductress all in one. For a moment the memory of other warm summer nights surrounded him like a soft blanket. How many nights had he come home from a late shift, stopped in Brad’s room to check on him and she’d joined him there, dressed in a nightgown not unlike the one she wore now, her eyes slumberous, but full of desire? How many times had they tiptoed out of Brad’s room to their own, and made love?

  Caught in the web of tangled memories, Matt just stared at her. At the full plump of her breasts he remembered so well. The long length of leg that fit so well around him.

  Caroline, however, didn’t appear to be so delusional. “What the hell are you doing here?” she asked, and Matt’s memories fell away, vanished to nothingness in the still night air.

  He hadn’t worked a late shift tonight. She wasn’t waiting up for him and this wasn’t Brad’s room. Brad was gone forever, as were nights such as the ones he’d been remembering.

  “I asked what you’re doing here,” she said.

  “I—I—” He searched for an answer, found none. How did a man tell his wife that he was leaving, for good this time, but that he wanted to see his daughter, just once, before he did?

  A low growl from the bottom of the stairs saved him from having to say anything.

  Caroline’s head snapped toward the sound, then back to Matt. “Alf?”

  “Yeah,” he said, frowning.

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “I don’t know.” He stepped past her, out the door, then looked back. “Jeb?” he asked quietly.

  Alf growled a bit louder, the sound low and menacing, and Caroline shivered, answering, “Asleep in my room.”

  “Hailey, too?”

  She nodded.

  “Stay with them. Keep them down.”

  He started toward the top of the stairs. Alf’s distress increased. “Hold, Alf,” he ordered quietly. The dog immediately fell silent.

  “Matt,” Caroline whispered from behind him.

  He stopped and turned once more.

  “What is it?” she asked. In the yellow glow of the night-light, her eyes were wide and golden as ripe wheat.

  His hand closed tight around the handrail. He didn’t want to scare her, but she needed to know the truth, especially with children in the house—their child—who needed protecting.

  “Someone is in the house,” he said.

  Surely Matt was wrong; probably Alf was just growling at some nocturnal critter scuttling around outside, Caroline thought as she huddled against the wall under the window that looked from her bedroom out the back of the house.

  But she wasn’t taking any chances. Not with the children.

  Fighting the urge to go see for herself, she wondered what was happening downstairs. All was quiet.

  Then Matt’s cop voice rang out. “Hold it right there!”

  She tensed as if for a blow. Instinctively she bowed her head over Hailey’s and pulled Jeb further into the crook of her shoulder.

  A set of light footfalls tapped across the floor downstairs, headed toward the back of the house. Matt’s heavier steps quickly followed.

  “I said hold it!” Matt shouted. The kitchen door slammed and he muttered a curse. “Go, Alf!”

  Jeb’s fingers clenched in the folds of her gown, and Caroline knew the boy had come fully awake. She soothed one hand over his knobby spine.

  The back door slammed again, and a sound of distress escaped Caroline’s throat. She swallowed hard, not wanting to scare Jeb any further.

  Matt was chasing the intruder, she was sure of it, though she couldn’t hear them outside over Alf’s threatening bark.

  Her lungs burned and she realized she needed to breathe, but when she tried, her chest rattled like an old tree limb in a winter storm. Why didn’t he just let the man go? He was out of the house—that’s what mattered. Why pursue?

  Because Matt was a cop, she thought, though it left a bad taste in her mouth. That was why. It was in his blood, in his nature, to fling himself into the danger, not knowing who or what waited for him in the darkness, without a second thought.

  She raised her head for a peek out the window, but the west Texas plain swallowed up the light of the moon and stars; she couldn’t see more than ten feet beyond the house. Her body so chilled that she had to bite her lip to keep her teeth from chattering, even though it was a warm May night, she waited.

  Waited for the report of a gun. A cry.

  Just when she couldn’t stand it any longer, and she was about to surge to her feet to go after him, she heard the blast she’d been waiting for.

  An engine, not a gun. Someone revving the motor even as the ignition turned over. Tires catching hold and the car roaring away.

  A full minute, maybe more, must have passed before Caroline realized the buzzing in her ears was no longer the sound of the car—but her nerves. Slowly she released her death grip on Jeb and stood shakily.

  “Caroline?” Matt called from downstairs, the door slamming on her name. She sagged in relief. Jeb buried his face against the back of her leg, his fists still curled in her nightgown.

  “I’m here.”

  “Stay put while I check the rest of the house.”

  She mentally mapped his footsteps from room to room, and when he’d covered the whole first floor, she returned Hailey, who’d slept through the whole incident, to the crib in the nursery, gave Jeb a reassuring squeeze as he headed off to bed and went downstairs. All the lights were on. She found Matt in the kitchen and launched herself across the linoleum and into her husband’s arms.

  He stiffened, hesitating for a moment before his arms closed around her, but gradually the hard muscles of his back softened beneath her palms.

  “It’s all right,” he said.

  Caroline felt the fan of his breath against her neck. The scrape of beard stubble against her ear. As he rocked her, she became acutely aware of the press of her breasts against his broad chest. They felt heavy and full, almost as full as when Hailey nursed. Her nipples puckered, and not because she was cold.

  She’d forgotten how big and strong and utterly reliable Matt felt when he held her. Giving in to the sensation for a moment, she rested her head against his chest and listened to the thunder of his heart. Like an approaching storm, his pulse rumbled through her. She felt the beat in her fingers, in her toes. She let herself sway in the winds of his embrace a moment longer, just a moment, then pushed herself away.

  “What did you think you were doing, going after him alone?” she asked. The words came out sharper than she’d intended.

  Matt shuffled back a step, easing her away from him. “Trying to catch a criminal?”

  “Why in heaven’s name? He could have had a gun!”

  Matt twisted an arm behind his back. When she could see his hand again, it held a 9 mm Glock.

  “Where did you—” She never finished the question, because as she spoke, Matt deftly, routinely, checked his weapon. The slide mechanism snicked open in a sound she’d heard a thousand times—and never liked. No cop’s wife did.

  But it was the sound behind her that interrupted her question. A faint gasp, then a high keen cut short.

  Matt stopped in the action of thumbing the safety on and snapped his gaze to a spot behind her. Caroline turned and immediately saw Jeb, clinging to the doorway like a survivor to a life preserver, trembling visibly.

  A second later, he wheeled and ran. His bare soles thunked across the hardwood floors and up the stairs. A door slammed.<
br />
  Sighing, she started after him. In the doorway where Jeb had stood just a moment ago, she stopped and looked over her shoulder. “There was nothing in this house that a burglar could have taken that would have been worth you getting hurt,” she said quietly.

  His eyes shone like polished silver. “I don’t think burglary is what the person who did this had in mind.”

  She raised her brows quizzically. Matt nodded toward the construction area between the old dining room and the new solarium he was building.

  The blood stopped cold in Caroline’s veins. For a moment, she was glad that Jeb had run away, so that he wouldn’t see. A foolish thought, she realized a moment later when her mind unfroze. Jeb couldn’t see, anyway.

  And thank the heavens for that.

  Because on the unfinished wall, the intruder had left a message, spray-painted in big red letters that dripped down the wallboard.

  You Will Pay—Blood For Blood.

  “I could cancel some appointments. Help out here today,” Savannah offered. She’d come by this morning to drop off clean clothes for Jeb, and stayed when she heard what had happened. Caroline was glad for the company.

  Sitting on the back porch steps, Savannah standing next to her with dish towel in hand, she said, “No, you have work to do. Thanks for making breakfast, though.”

  Savannah clucked at her. “As if you ate a bite.”

  She dredged up a tired smile for her friend. “I’ll reheat something later.”

  Hugging her knees, Caroline glanced down the path where Matt, Alf and a tall county sheriff’s deputy in khaki uniform and a broad-brimmed hat hiked back from the pond. They scanned the ground as they walked, searching for anything last night’s intruder might have dropped, she supposed. From the expressions on their faces, especially her husband’s, she gathered they hadn’t found anything more in the morning light than Matt had when he’d searched last night.

  Savannah laid a hand on Caroline’s shoulder and squeezed gently. “There’s plenty for everybody, then.”

  Caroline hated to see good cooking go to waste, but she didn’t think she could stomach solid food this morning, and she doubted Matt would be around long enough to partake of Savannah’s flapjacks and sausage.