After You Were Gone

by Alexis Harrington

  The ugly brown curtains that separated the back room from the main store parted, and Cade poked his head in. “I thought I heard you back here. I expected to see you earlier.” He stared at her bare legs and strappy white sandals. “Wow, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in a skirt. You look great.”

  She breathed a weary sigh. “Thanks.”

  “Hey, are you all right?”

  “It’s been a tough day. A very tough day.”

  “Huh, we could all use a few less of those. I had a couple myself over the weekend with my folks yammering at—”

  “Mitchell Tucker is back in town.” She hadn’t meant to blurt it out, but her problem seemed far more critical than Cade’s ongoing family squabbles.

  “Oh man.” Cade didn’t know him. He hadn’t come to Gila Rock until long after the trial. But he knew the part Mitch had played in Julianne’s past. Well, he knew some of it. He pushed through the curtains and sat on a case of canned peaches opposite her. “How did you find out?”

  She told him the story of her day, leaving out the details about her finances. Giving him a shaky, humorless laugh, she said, “I was standing outside the bank. I looked up and there he was, coming down the sidewalk. For a second, I thought I was wrong, that maybe it was his brother James, or that I was hallucinating. I wish I had been. But it was him.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “I thought he was going to, but I just looked past him and hurried over to Diller’s.”

  Cade leaned against the wall behind him and fiddled with a pencil attached to a string that hung next to the old wall phone. Apparently Uncle Joe had never seen the need for note paper—faded names, phone numbers, and notes were written on the unpainted sheet rock in his scribbled printing.

  “Does he look like a mangy ex-con?”

  She shifted on the chair and shook her head. Mitch looked none the worse for the years he’d spent in prison. Older, of course—different, especially around the eyes. But none the worse. He was still tall and lean, still attractive, damn him, but he seemed to have lost the swagger he’d had as a teenager.

  “Is he here to stay or just passing through?”

  “Mary Diller said he’s living with his dad and brothers again. And the foreman at Benavente’s gave him a job. It sounds permanent to me.” She wound a long strand of blonde hair around her finger. It was a habit that came out when she was worried or nervous, one she’d had since childhood. Sighing, she told him about the phone call she’d gotten. “Maybe Mitchell was the one behind it—the timing certainly works. I never thought he’d come back. I don’t know why, but I figured he was gone for good. And he should have been for what he did.”

  Cade studied the teeth marks on the pencil. “Well, maybe I can do your errands and running around for you. That way, there’ll be less chance that you’ll run into him.”

  She suppressed a sigh. “Thanks for the thought, really, but it’s too much to ask. Besides—”

  “I’d do anything for you, Julianne,” he said, dropping the pencil and leaning forward. “If I could, I’d change everything . . . I mean, well . . .” Color rose in his face, and he dropped his gaze to the floor. “I can’t change the past, but maybe I can do something about your future.”

  Cade Lindgren had been a good friend to her, and looking at him now, with his mild expression, and his brown eyes and hair, she couldn’t help but think of a childhood friend or a distant cousin. He came whenever she needed him, was always willing to pitch in, always going the extra mile. No hired hand on the farm had ever been more helpful.

  She released her hold on the strand of hair and dropped her hands to her lap. “Cade, I appreciate it, but I have to live my life. I can’t let the Tuckers keep me from doing that.” Looking around the storeroom, she added, “Anyway, I have plenty of work to keep you busy right here. That’s what I need from you—help getting this place up and running again. Oh, and tomorrow, I need you to deliver those last two hogs to Benavente’s for me. That will help. What with Mitchell working there—well, I’ll just have to hope that he’ll leave me alone now.”

  “Julianne, I wish . . .”

  She waited. “Wish what?”

  He paused as if trying to get his words out, then simply said, “I hope he leaves you alone, too.” He stood. “If I’m going to help, I guess I’d better get back to it.”

  Dumb jackass.

  Cade berated himself as he tossed packages of expired aspirin and allergy pills into a galvanized garbage can. Most of the over-the-counter remedies in the store were sun-faded and dusty with age. Joe Bickham seemed to have done his briskest business in tobacco, magazines, and sundries. Diller’s had the market cornered on nonprescription medicines.

  The world’s dumbest damned jackass.

  He continued to chew himself out as he worked. Every time an opportunity came up to talk to Julianne on a personal level, to maybe even tell her how he felt, he either stuck his foot in his mouth or waved bye-bye to the chance like a kid watching a train pass. Of course, this time the sight of her had sucked all the plans out of his head as neatly as a shop vac. She was dressed up, her long blonde hair loose and curled, her face all pretty with makeup. Not that she wore much besides mascara and a little lipstick. She didn’t need to.

  There she was right now, alone in the back, trying to shoulder the burden of this new enterprise and the bad news about Mitchell Tucker. It was a prime moment to offer his support and begin to, well, court her. The term was old-fashioned, but Cade had grown up in an old-fashioned home.

  He’d been a late child and probably something of a surprise to his parents. After all, they were as old as some of his friends’ grandparents. They’d drummed into him a sense of rigid responsibility, didn’t take much guff, and they wanted him to get married and settle down. But not with Julianne Emerson. They didn’t like the fact that he worked for her; they’d never even met her, and they seemed to resent her. Whenever he said he was going to Gila Rock, he faced the tight line of his mother’s mouth and the lowered, barn-owl brows of his dad. Just escaping their suffocating disapproval gave him a sense of freedom. He had one sister he’d never met. She had taken off when he was little, and he thought he understood why if they’d kept the same tight rein on her as they did on him and the rest of his siblings. He should have moved out on his own a long time ago, but they managed to keep him around with excuses that they needed him close by. Oh man, if they knew how he felt about Julianne—

  If only she knew how he felt about her, and had since the first day he’d met her.

  He’d dropped some pretty broad hints to her. That comment he’d made about wanting to do something for her future was as bold as he’d ever gotten. But plainly, she didn’t see him as more than an employee.

  He wanted to change that in the worst way.

  He wanted her to see him as a man. As her man.

  His mom and dad were always after him about working in their feed store. But his older brother and his whole family—wife and kids—were running the place, and they liked it. There wasn’t even enough room for all of them in the store at the same time. Cade loved the land and would rather live on some acreage than be stuck behind a counter.

  He’d do it here for Julianne, though, and maybe someday, if everything went right for them, they’d have their own land again. He could marry her, give her the children he suspected she longed for. If . . .

  As he tossed a dusty box of old laxative into the garbage can, a thought occurred to him. He didn’t know Mitchell Tucker, but he knew what he’d done to her. He’d made a young woman a widow. Even though she’d put on a brave face in the back room, Cade had seen how upset she was. She needed someone to turn to. Someone to look after her and defend her.

  Because Mitchell Tucker was back.

  Smoke.

  She smelled smoke.

  And out back, the night was lit as bright as noon. Fire—dear God, the barn was on fire.

  Wes was in the barn.

  Julianne tried to r
each the back door, to run to him, but her legs felt as if she were wading hip-deep through molasses. She saw the flames through the kitchen window, white-hot, searing, blinding.

  Suddenly, the back door flew open by itself. A tall, muscular man stood there, holding Wes in his arms. Her husband’s face was burned as black as charcoal. She recognized the scorched remains of his clothes, but not his features.

  Whose fault? Her fault, Mitchell’s fault, hers . . .

  Julianne wrenched herself from the nightmare and found herself half out of bed in her apartment bedroom, trying to run. Her heart thudded like a hammer on a rock, almost painfully, and sweat glued her nightshirt to her skin. She sat down on the mattress with her head in her hands and stared at the slice of moonlight on the floor, waiting for her pulse to slow to normal.

  She used to have this nightmare three or four times a week. Sometimes more than once a night. The details never varied. It had been torture, but after enough years passed, the bad dreams had finally left her. Now, apparently, they had returned with Mitchell Tucker.

  She massaged her damp temples. That horrible night Mitchell had carried Wes into the house, smelling of gasoline and whiskey, a scared, blank expression on his face. His own hair and skin had been singed from the flames, and Julianne had believed him to be a hero who’d rescued her husband. At least until she’d found out he’d started the fire.

  Whose fault? Her fault, Mitchell’s fault, hers . . .

  She folded her legs up under her, as if trying to shrink away from the very real fact that she had once loved Mitchell Tucker with all her youthful, emotional heart. And he had loved her—he’d told her he had. It had been an exciting, forbidden, despairing, nerve-racking affair, filled with all the angst two lovers from enemy families could have imagined. His hands on her body had made her feel as if her insides had turned to hot honey drizzling through her, warming her heart and every nerve till she’d thought she might die of the love and passion he’d roused in her. It was a feeling she’d never known before or since. Had they been caught, the consequences would have been dire.

  She lifted her head from her hands. They had never been found out, because she had become Wes’s wife. Hah, if only she had known what catastrophe really meant back then. She’d learned soon enough, though.

  Mitchell had never understood or even believed her reasons for breaking off their relationship to marry Wes. He’d barely listened to her, and they’d parted in fury and tears.

  Seven months after she and Wes had married, Mitchell had set the barn on fire.

  Wes had lived for two agonizing days in the ICU in Alpine. The doctors had hoped to stabilize him, then airlift him to a burn unit in Dallas. He’d died before that could happen.

  At the trial, Mitchell had claimed with all sincerity that he hadn’t known Wes was in the barn and in fact had meant only to set fire to the nearby shed. She had wanted to see him convicted for murder, but manslaughter and arson had been the worst the criminal justice system would mete out.

  Just then, she heard a noise at the back door downstairs that broke in on her thoughts. She straightened, listening, gripping the sheet in her fist. The door—had she locked it? Yes, yes, she was sure she had, even though no one around here usually bothered. She always had. There it was again, a hard thump this time, followed by a grunt, and her throat seemed to close.

  She glanced at the green display on her clock radio. It was almost two in the morning. Wes’s shotgun was downstairs, and the shells for it were somewhere amid the hodgepodge of unopened moving boxes. Trying to decide what to do, she stood and tiptoed to the window that overlooked the back of the store and the empty lot behind it. The moon provided faint light, but there was no other illumination back there. She saw nothing. She worked her way to the stairs and crept down them on rubber legs, one step at a time, gripping the railing as she went. She felt a little like the typical dumb heroine in a horror movie who insisted on going to the basement of a haunted house, while the audience groaned, Don’t go down there, you idiot!

  But Julianne refused to live in fear, even though adrenaline made her armpits prickle and her palms sweat.

  She reached the back door and pushed aside the faded gingham curtain to look out the window. Still nothing. Her lungs paralyzed, she flipped open the dead bolt, then closed her hand around the knob to turn it. Opening the door no more than a crack, she was hit at once by the odor. It was the smell of enamel paint.

  She flung open the door to read the warning painted on it in clumsy, dripping block letters.

  IT’S NOT FINISHED

  Below this was a crude but effective grinning skull.

  She slammed the door again, locked it, and leaned against it, the smell of paint lingering in her nose and at the back of her throat.

  Oh God, it had begun again already. Was Mitchell so bent on revenge that he’d taken up his old ways? A hundred thoughts collided in her head at once.

  She should call the sheriff.

  She should get a sturdier door and new locks.

  She must have a floodlight installed on the back of the building.

  That Remington shotgun—

  Which was worse—or better—living in town or on the farm?

  A dog, she ought to have a big dog.

  At last, she corralled her galloping thoughts and forced herself to take several deep breaths.

  When the strength returned to her legs, she went upstairs to the small bathroom to splash cold water on her face. She switched on the light, which sputtered to life on either side of the old medicine cabinet above the sink. The fluorescent tube fixture was ancient and ugly, giving her an unflattering, pasty-green tint. At least she thought it was the light. Maybe the memories of days past, now unearthed from the back of her mind and laid bare, contributed to the appearance of the haggard, weary-eyed woman who stared back at her in the mirror.

  After Wes had died, Julianne’s world began to crumble. And no matter what happened or how long she lived, she knew she would never be the same again.

  Mitchell had seen to that.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Mitchell lay awake in his stifling bedroom in the single-wide that he shared with the slat-sided mutt named Knucklehead he’d seen hanging around outside. He noticed that whenever Darcy was around, the dog made himself scarce, which led Mitch to suspect his brother had given the dog more than a kick or two. Despite being too thin the dog was big—maybe a little bit yellow Lab and some kind of shepherd—and before Mitch had come back, this old double bed had been Knucklehead’s alone. The dog seemed very happy with the new arrangement, although the two of them on the small mattress were a tight fit. Earl said that James had picked up the stray somewhere and given him that name, but he’d latched onto Mitchell with a desperate devotion that had him underfoot most of the time. Mitch didn’t really mind—the dog seemed starved, not only for a decent meal but also for the attention. At least Knucklehead didn’t care about his past or offer an opinion about everything from politics to the weather, like Earl did. Neither did the dog constantly remind Mitch about what a lousy deal he’d gotten from The System.

  Mitchell knew better. He’d deserved worse.

  He’d done a terrible thing, setting fire to that shed, and fate or God or man usually exacted some kind of punishment for terrible deeds. The fact that he’d been too drunk to remember actually pouring the gasoline or lighting the match to burn the barn didn’t change matters—he’d gone to the Boyce farm with that intention. Wes Emerson had been in that barn, and even though Mitchell had been eaten through with jealousy every time he thought of the man, he’d never wanted to kill him. He hadn’t known that Wes wasn’t safe in the house with the woman who should have been Mitchell’s wife.

  Julianne had looked different when he’d seen her today, but just as pretty as he remembered. She’d also looked startled upon seeing him, and he’d been almost as surprised, although he’d been on the lookout for her. He’d wanted to say something to her, but his throat had closed up, and she
’d raced by him, a deep frown creasing her forehead, before he could get out a single word. He hadn’t supposed it would be so difficult.

  Outside in the darkness, the brush rustled with the passing of some nocturnal animal. Knucklehead lifted his chin from Mitchell’s chest, gave a halfhearted woof, and settled down again with a loud, contented sigh. There was just enough moonlight in the room to reveal the stained acoustic tile overhead, and Mitchell stared at it as if it were a movie screen, while the events of that other, long-gone night replayed in his mind.

  James and Darcy had been with him at the Boyce place. They’d all been drinking, passing around a bottle of their daddy’s bargain-label whiskey, but Mitchell had swallowed the most. After only a few months, he’d still been bitter about losing Julianne. He couldn’t even bitch about the situation to anyone, because their love affair had been a horrific secret. But what had pushed him over the top and led him to hatch his plan was what had happened earlier that day. Julianne had come to town, and he’d seen her going into Dot’s Fashion Corral. She’d been wearing a dark-blue T-shirt with the words UNDER CONSTRUCTION emblazoned across the front. Below that was an arrow pointing down toward her slightly rounded belly. Julianne had been pregnant already with Wes Emerson’s baby. The baby that should have been his.

  He’d meant only to set fire to the shed—not an admirable prank under any circumstances—but somehow things had gone so wrong. His brothers had been young and still had futures back then. At least that had been one of the few coherent thoughts that had passed through his booze-soaked brain. So he’d told them to run—after all, they’d just been kids—and he stayed behind to save Wes.

  The case had seemed so hopeless to him that he would have pleaded guilty right up front if his court-appointed attorney hadn’t talked him out of it. Despite what his father said, Mitchell believed the lawyer had done his best given the circumstances. Much later, after most of the truth had come out and the guilty verdict had been rendered, he’d chosen to let the judge impose his sentence. A man had to face his responsibilities. That judge, he’d given him seven years. Even now, he sometimes wondered whether it had been a kindness or a curse—guilt still burrowed into his soul like a cancer, comfortable with the residence it had taken up inside him. Seven years in prison hadn’t killed it. A year of freedom hadn’t budged it.