“He’s hurting, Rose. He counted on your support, and it wasn’t there. He’s probably also scared to death. He could go to prison for what that girl’s accused him of doing.”
Rose swung around on her sister so suddenly that paint flew from her knife, spattering both of them with tiny blue dots. “Don’t you think I know that? Don’t you understand that every time I close my eyes and picture him, it’s Alan’s face I see sitting on top of his shoulders?”
“Maybe it’s time you stopped and really looked at him, Rose. He’s not Alan.”
Rose turned back to the canvas and attacked it with renewed vigor. “I thought you came here to be supportive.”
“Did it ever occur to you that watching you destroy the best relationship you’ve ever had might not be my idea of supportive?”
“I’m destroying it?” She turned around slowly, her brush held aloft, heedless of the paint that dripped down her forearm, halfway to her elbow. “I’m destroying it? Oh, that’s priceless. I’m not the one who was stupid enough to go out and get into a mess like this with a seventeen-year-old girl.”
“He’s a man. You have to make exceptions for the stupid things they do. Sometimes they just can’t help it. It’s that Y chromosome thing.”
“Right,” Rose said darkly.
“Come on, Rose, you’ve lost your sense of humor.”
“You’re wrong about that, too,” she said, stepping back and focusing on the nearly-finished portrait of her husband. “I never had one.”
***
He spent the night on the couch in the den, watching the hands of the alarm clock turn with agonizing sloth. It was nearly two a.m. when Rose and her sister finally came in from the painting studio, and he was still wide awake. He’d been lying here for hours, running it through his mind, over and over again, trying to sort it all out, trying to figure out what he could have done to make it turn out differently. But no matter what he did, it always turned out the same. Jolene had lied, his life had just blown up in his face, and his own wife didn’t even believe in his innocence.
In the morning, he was achy and exhausted after only a few hours of troubled sleep. Maeve sat at the breakfast table, prattling on about nothing in particular, while he and Rose moved about the kitchen, from stove to toaster to refrigerator, coolly polite as they made a point of avoiding each other’s personal space. Conversation was limited to such scintillating topics as, “Please pass the salt,” and “Are you done with the sports section of the newspaper?” When Rose called in sick to work, he glanced at Maeve and raised his eyebrows. Maeve looked back at him with a steady gaze that was disconcerting, and Jesse wiped his mouth with his napkin, tossed it down beside his plate, and left the table.
Because he had to do something or go crazy, he put on his coat and whistled for Chauncey, and together they went outside and checked the wooden covers that kept his perennials from winter kill. He unlocked the tool shed and examined it for evidence of rodent infestation. Everything was just as he’d left it, tools lined up neatly and in their proper places. Chauncey bounded inside, sniffed the place out thoroughly, and came back out, hindquarters wagging.
Together, they walked the property, man and dog, Chauncey with his boundless enthusiasm, Jesse in Bean boots and his old red and black checked parka. Near the property line, at the edge of the woods, he saw a cardinal perched high in a barren ash tree, trilling out his distinctive song. Chauncey barked, and the cardinal took flight, a flash of brilliant red against the darkness of the fir trees.
He finally settled for splitting wood, because it was the only activity he could think of that came near to expressing his feelings at this particular moment in time. It was good, hard, sweaty work, raising the axe handle and then slamming it down, over and over and over. His arms ached, and his shoulders were in agony, but the pain felt good compared to what he was feeling inside.
When he saw Maeve MacKenzie picking her way across the field toward him, he set down the axe, shoved his damp hair back from his forehead, and stood there watching her wade through the snow wearing three-hundred-dollar boots that were designed for city sidewalks, an expensive wool dress coat that only buttoned as far as the breastbone, and a sprightly but insubstantial red scarf. When she finally reached him, she tucked her hands into her pockets and stood there studying his face as though trying to make up her mind about something. “Mighty cold this morning, Mr. Lindstrom,” she said.
He looked at her for a long moment, then he turned his back on her and returned to splitting wood. “Whatever you have to say—” He dropped the axe with a hard whump that he felt all the way to his knees. “I’m not interested in hearing it.”
“Too bad, because I’m saying it anyway.”
“If Rose sent you here to apologize for her—”
“Oh, shut up, you Neanderthal nitwit. Rose has got nothing to apologize for, unless it’s for being as stupid as you are.”
He gave her a brief glance. “Well,” he said as he raised the axe and brought it down cleanly. “I’m glad we’ve clarified that.”
“You know,” she said behind him, “for some crazy reason, I like you. Even if I would like to smack you upside the head every so often.”
“Is that so?”
“Do you suppose you could stop sweating and grunting long enough so we could actually have a face-to-face conversation? Or is that asking too much?”
He paused with the axe in mid-air. Dropped it heavily to the ground. Rubbed the tip of his nose, and turned slowly to look at his sister-in-law. “Talk,” he said.
She crossed her arms in a gesture that was so like Rose, it threw him for an instant. “Your wife should be telling you this herself, but she’s too damn stubborn. So I’m sticking my nose in where it doesn’t belong, because the two of you are making me crazy. You’ve got a good thing going here, and you’re going to screw it all up because you’re both too pigheaded to communicate.”
“I’ve tried to communicate,” he said grimly. “She’s not interested.”
“Tried real hard, did you, champ?”
He scowled at her, in part because there was a sting of truth to her words. “Look,” he said, “I’m busy here, so if you’d just get on with it so I can get back to work, I’d appreciate it.”
“My God. You’re just like her. The two of you deserve each other.”
“I don’t have time for this.” He turned to pick the axe back up.
“When we were in high school,” she said, “we had an English teacher named Alan Coughlin.”
He paused, turned slowly back to her. “And?”
“Alan,” she said, “was a handsome son of a bitch, dreamy-eyed and sensitive and poetic. He used to read poetry aloud in class, and the girls would swoon. They flocked around him the way Rose tells me they flock around you.”
He pulled off one sheepskin-lined work glove and tucked it into his pocket. “Keep talking.”
“But Alan had a dark side. He had a fetish for teenage girls. He’d single out a girl, fill her head with poetry and empty promises, then entice her into letting him take liberties that no adult man had any business taking with a fifteen-year-old girl.” A spark of anger ignited in her vivid green eyes. “He did it with dozens of girls over the years before somebody got the courage to speak up.”
His throat had gone dry, and his palms were sweating. “Why?” he said. “Why are you telling me this?”
“I’m telling you this,” she said, her eyes meeting his candidly, “because I was one of his victims.” She paused, took a breath, let it out. “And so was Rose.”
***
When he couldn’t find Rose in the house, he looked for her in the studio, but it was deserted, light streaming through the wall of windows that overlooked the mountains. Paints and brushes, rags and newspapers were scattered haphazardly on the shelves and the countertop, and canvases were stacked all around the room. Dozens of charcoal and pencil drawings were tacked to the walls, sketches of familiar places in and around Jackson Falls.
He recognized the town green, the harbor dotted with fishing vessels. In the river of light that flowed through the window, he crossed the room to the easel and lifted the canvas tarp that covered it.
He’d expected another landscape. Instead, his own face gazed back at him.
The impact was like a kick to the stomach. She’d painted him in the rocking chair, his reading glasses perched on his nose and the inevitable book in his hand. Numbly, Jesse stared at his likeness. If he’d been asked, he would have described himself as a watercolor, quiet and pale and formless. But Rose had painted him with bold strokes, strong, crisp lines, and vivid colors. Was this how she really saw him, as a man who was unafraid, a man who was strong, a man who was worthy of her love?
He swallowed hard. From the beginning, he’d believed that Rose was the one who didn’t expect their marriage to last, that Rose was the one who didn’t trust enough. But he’d been as much at fault as she was. She’d asked for a sterile, businesslike arrangement, and he’d given it to her, not because he wanted to please her, but because he was certain that the marriage would blow up in his face anyway. Instead of trying to win her love, he’d deliberately distanced himself, so that when she left him, as she inevitably would, the ending would be a little less painful.
Maeve was right. He was as much of a fool as Rose was.
He walked to the wall of windows and looked out toward the river. At the end of the boat dock, a solitary figure sat huddled against the cold, wild red curls spilling from beneath her hat and billowing around her shoulders as she stared out toward the hazy blue mountains. From this distance, he was struck by the picture she made, the isolation that surrounded her like a dark blue aura. It was the way they’d been living this farce of a marriage, both of them surrounded by isolation, two people running on parallel tracks that never converged.
It was time to put an end to the isolation.
***
When he stepped onto the old wooden dock, it creaked, and Rose drew her scarf tighter around her neck, but she didn’t turn around, didn’t acknowledge his presence. Jesse drew a breath of cold, clean air into his lungs, then moved slowly, deliberately, toward his wife. Without speaking, he sat down beside her, legs dangling over the end of the dock beside hers. In mutual silence, the two of them watched a pair of bald eagles skimming over the river’s frozen surface.
“All this time,” he said, looking at the eagles instead of at her, “I thought it was Eddie who was the enemy.”
Rose clutched the ends of her scarf in her hands. She wasn’t wearing gloves, and her hands were red and chapped. When she didn’t respond, he said to nobody in particular, “I haven’t been much of a husband.”
She continued to stare silently out over the frozen river. “I never really tried to talk to you,” he said matter-of-factly. “I’ve mostly just walked around you these past few months, doing whatever I could to avoid a collision.” He pulled off his gloves, rubbed his tired eyes with the heels of his hands. “You kept pushing me away, and I let you get away with it because it was easier than trying to find out why you were doing it. As long as I avoided a confrontation, that meant it was all your fault that we were nothing more than two strangers who slept in the same bed. After all, I wasn’t the one who’d refused to communicate.”
“We were two strangers,” she pointed out.
“We didn’t have to be. We didn’t have to stay strangers.”
They were both silent for a while longer. “You went out of your way to be nice to me,” she said. “Sometimes I hated you for being so damn nice.”
“I’m nice to the postman, too. What I should’ve done was listen to you a little harder.”
“I wasn’t doing much talking.”
“Sometimes, that’s the most important thing to listen to. What somebody isn’t saying.”
Silence. Above their heads, a crow rasped. “I know you didn’t touch that girl,” she said. “I know better. You’re not like that.”
He reached out, took her icy hand in his. Rubbed at her fingers to warm them. She didn’t respond, but she didn’t pull away, either. “You’re not an easy woman to love,” he said.
She hunched her shoulders. “You’re no walk in the park yourself.”
“So,” he said, “what are we going to do about it?”
Rose rested her cheek against his shoulder. “I’m not sure,” she said. And then she turned into his arms, and he closed his eyes and clung to her. “But it would probably be a good idea if we did it together.”
chapter sixteen
While Rose sat in the Boston rocker, Jesse paced in a maddening circle, from one end of the den to the other, until she was afraid he’d wear holes in the carpet. “Will you please light somewhere?” she said. “You’re wearing me out, just watching you.”
“I can’t help it. My whole life is at stake here.”
“Then why are you pacing instead of doing something about it?”
He paused in his pacing and looked at her as though she’d lost her mind. “What am I supposed to do? It’s out of my hands.”
Rose got up from the rocking chair and moved slowly to where he stood in the warm pool of sunlight that poured through the French doors. “All right.” She folded her arms. “Let’s look at this from a different perspective. What would Dallas Quinn do in your place?”
He blinked. “Dallas Quinn? Dallas Quinn is a fictional character. It’s not the same thing at all.”
She eyed him levelly. “Isn’t it? Where did he come from? And don’t you dare to tell me Detroit.”
Looking confused, Jesse said, “He came from inside my head. What kind of question is that?”
“My point exactly.” She moved closer, lay a hand on his forearm, felt his warmth invading her body through the tips of her fingers. “Jesse,” she said, “you’re his creator. Everything that Dallas Quinn is came from inside of you. His courage, his cunning, his resourcefulness—all that came from Jesse Lindstrom.”
Beneath her fingers, his muscles tightened. “You’re crazy. I’ve spent my entire adult life hiding behind a computer screen and a nom de plume. That really takes a lot of courage.”
“You have to be kidding. You get up every morning, drive to work, and face a classroom full of teenagers. I don’t know about you, toots, but where I come from, if that’s not courage, I don’t know what is.”
He stared at her, opened his mouth, closed it. “It’s not the same thing.”
“Of course it is. Tell me something. If Dallas Quinn were in your position, right now, would he be pacing the floor and moaning? Or would he be out there kicking ass?”
She waited patiently for him to come to the conclusion she’d already reached. The moment the truth broke through, she read it in his eyes, felt the response in her gut. Slowly, with dawning comprehension, Jesse said, “He’d be out there kicking ass.”
She stepped into his arms, felt a thrill as they closed around her. Taking his face in her hands, she placed a tender kiss on his lips. “Then get out there,” she whispered, “and start kicking.”
***
When Paula answered the phone, he jumped in feet first. “I need you to do a favor for me. It’s a big one, and if it backfires, we could all end up in hot water. You, me, and Chuck. If you don’t want to do it, I’ll understand.”
“If there’s one thing I love,” Paula said, sounding as cool as a tidal pool on a summer day, “it’s a challenge. Will it get me disbarred?”
“Not if we get away with it.”
“Well, then, suppose you tell me what we’re getting away with before I commit myself.”
“Chuck has a free period right now. I want you to call him at school and ask him to borrow Jolene Hunter’s student file. Then I want you to bring it to me.”
“My, my,” Paula said. “We are walking on the wild side today, aren’t we? Is there any particular reason that you’ve stooped to pilfering the academic records of your students?”
“It’s only one student, and we’re only borro
wing it.”
“I’m sure,” she said dryly, “that the court will take that into consideration at your sentencing.”
“I want to do a little investigating into Jolene’s past. Find out just what she’s been up to for the past couple of years.”
“Just remember, pookie, if we get caught, your ass will be in an even bigger sling than it’s already in.” She paused, then said bluntly, “How’s Rose?”
He met his wife’s eyes across the room. She smiled at him, and he smiled back. “Rose,” he said heartily, “is just fine.”
“That’s the best news I’ve heard today. By the way, Jesse? Welcome back.”
***
He had the file in his hands within a half-hour, and while Rose and her sister drank coffee in the kitchen, he sat in his study and read it cover to cover. In her first two years of high school, Jolene had pulled a straight 4.0 average, taking a number of heavy-duty courses that included calculus and advanced biology. Then, between the first and second quarters of her junior year, her grades had taken a serious slide. She’d barely made it through third-year German, and her English and math grades had dropped significantly. The only course in which she’d maintained an A had been stage band.
Jesse drummed his fingers on the desktop and gazed thoughtfully at Jolene’s transcript. Something had happened during her junior year to cause this near-fatal downward spiral. But what? A family crisis? A serious illness? A thwarted love affair? He leaned back in his chair, swiveled around to look out the window. Outside, on the hard crust of snow, a pair of mourning doves pecked at the seeds scattered beneath the bird feeder. A girl like Jolene, he thought, absently tapping the pen in his hand against the folder in his lap, wouldn’t have a lot of friends. Too plain to be sought after by the boys, too brainy to be popular with the girls. A mutant to her peers who walked the hallowed halls of Catherine McConaughy High School.
But her teachers, at least the good ones, would have respected that mind of hers. Male and female alike, they would have made friendly overtures, encouraged her to learn, presented constant challenges to her intellectual ability. Chances were good that she would have been somebody’s pet. And if that somebody had been a man, it wasn’t much of a stretch to imagine that she might have overstepped the boundaries with him.
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