Ghost of Summer

by Sally Berneathy

  Actually, it still hurt. A little. Not much. Okay, a lot. It was her own damn fault for letting him get through her defenses.

  "I said I'm sorry. What else do you want me to do?"

  He paced the width of the small office then back again, running his fingers through his dark hair that somehow seemed even darker this morning as if to match his mood. "Do you have any idea what kind of a problem you've caused?"

  Had her spying somehow messed up their legal case against the would-be robbers? She couldn't stand it if she'd caused problems for Papa. She shook her head. "No, I don't have any idea. Luke, what's wrong? What did I do?"

  He stopped in front of the desk and glared at her. "You really don't know, do you?"

  She stood up with such force that the chair slammed back against the wall. "No, damn it, I don't know! I just said that! If you'll tell me, I'll try to put it right, but if all you're going to do is shout at me, I can't do anything!" Kate was humiliated to hear her voice crack. She wasn't going to cry in front of Luke. She hadn't cried in years, and she certainly wasn't going to start now.

  For an instant Luke's gaze softened. He'd heard the crack, too.

  "Back off," she snapped, reclaiming her pride. "If you have something to say to me, say it and get out of here. I have work to do."

  "Yeah, right." He slammed his hands onto the desk top and leaned on his arms. "Work like sending e-mails under other people's names, stirring up things that have nothing to do with you. You may be the computer expert, but I'm the law, and in my book, what you did is just plain illegal!"

  At least Papa's delusions were charming. Luke's were rude. "Illegal?" She slammed her hands onto the desk, too, and leaned toward him, her face inches from his, then ground out her words. "I don't have any idea what you're talking about. We didn't send any e-mail messages yet, so I certainly don't think any of those nonexistent messages could be illegal. E-mail and the internet are on my training agenda for later today. Unless you just time-traveled back from the future, it hasn't happened yet!"

  For a long moment they glared at each other.

  The room was small, the air conditioning inadequate. With the door closed and Luke's temper blazing so close to her, the atmosphere was stifling. Every breath Kate sucked in was an effort. Every breath brought her the earthy, familiar scent of a man she'd known all her life, a man now furious with her. If she still cared about him, if she still considered him her friend, this would be extremely painful. Fortunately, she didn't. Not really, anyway.

  Finally he pulled back and so did she.

  "You didn't send an e-mail to my mother's husband?" he asked quietly.

  Kate shook her head to try to clear it. There must be something in the water in Briar Creek that made people act strange and have delusions. So far it had affected Papa, her and now Luke.

  "Even if I had something to say to your step father, I don't know his name, much less his e-mail address. You can't just address something to Luke's mother's new husband and expect it to get there. You have to have an address that's exact down to every letter and every dot."

  "You don't need to take that tone with me. I'm not completely ignorant about computers. I've lived in the big city, too."

  Kate threw up her hands. "Fine. Then you should know that I didn't and couldn't send any e-mail to your step father, so what is this discussion all about?"

  Luke collapsed into the chair in front of Papa's desk and again tunneled his fingers through his hair. His distress was obvious.

  Well, he ought to be distressed, acting like a jerk two days in a row.

  "Somebody sent an e-mail message to Jeffrey Hudelson at his address at the college. He's a professor. School's out, and if he hadn't had some kind of meeting to go to this morning, he wouldn't have even gone in and picked it up, but he did. The message is signed with my name and it came from this office."

  Kate frowned. "What did it say?"

  Luke leaned his head back and blew out a long breath. "It was an invitation for them to come visit me," he said quietly. "It said I'd missed them both and wanted them to see what I'd done with the old house."

  "What's so horrible about that?"

  "For one thing, I don't have any furniture in the house! Remember I told you I only have a bed. But Mom called a few minutes ago. She's thrilled, and they're coming to spend a few days."

  "Well, you'd better start shopping for furniture."

  "That's not the point. I don't like the idea of somebody interfering in my personal business."

  "I don't understand this. The only people with the password to get onto these computers are you, me, Evelyn and Papa."

  Their gazes locked, and Kate knew Luke was thinking the same thing she was.

  "He doesn't know how to use the program," Kate defended.

  "He's smart. He could figure it out. I never told him I wasn't thrilled about this marriage, but he's pretty sharp about reading between the lines. It would be just like him to try to get Mom and Jeff down here."

  "Yes, but it's not like Papa to be deceitful. If he sent a message, he'd sign his own name."

  She pulled the chair back to the desk and sat again, then booted up the internet program while Luke came around the desk to look over her shoulder.

  "I don't see any copy of a sent message but that would be easy enough to delete. Let me check the log."

  Even though she knew on a logical level what she had to find, Kate was still amazed to see the indication that a message had gone out at two minutes past six the evening before.

  "After I left," Luke said.

  "I was gone by then, too." She stared at the screen. "I know Papa can be manipulative, but he's usually pretty straight forward even in his manipulations."

  Nevertheless, the proof was staring her in the face.

  At least that was the only message that had gone out. At least he hadn't sent a message to Mama.

  She supposed she ought to be proud of him, that he'd figured out the e-mail thing all by himself. She'd left him in the word processing program.

  Without thinking, she booted up that program and checked the list of most recent files to see what else her creative father might have done.

  The universe stretches into infinity? She didn't remember that one.

  She pulled it up.

  The universe stretches into infinity, filled with moons and stars and planets and streaking comets. Rainbows decorate the heavens above the earth after a storm and every day begins with the miracle of a sunrise. But loving you, Jerome, and watching our little Katie grow, is still the best of all miracles and wonders.

  I love youu Emma Fallon. You and Katie are teh only miracles I neeed. Lets go home sweetheart.

  Kate stared uncomprehendingly at the file that most certainly had not been there yesterday. Her first absurd thought was a wistful yearning to know the kind of love these people had.

  But even as she told herself what a stupid reaction that was, it hit her that Jerome was Papa and Emma Fallon was Mama.

  Though she couldn't imagine Papa composing such flowery language, he must have. The second part of the message sounded more like him...short and to the point with three typos and two punctuation errors. But that first part had her completely stumped.

  Evelyn?

  No way.

  That left Luke and her with access to the system.

  Belatedly she remembered that Luke was standing right behind her.

  "Katie?"

  The one word held a thousand questions, and suddenly she was relieved that she had to tell him, that she was forced to share her secret with somebody else, somebody who wouldn't condemn Papa. On a subconscious level she must have known all the time that Luke was there.

  She sagged back in Papa's big chair and gazed into the eyes of the stranger who'd abandoned her all those years ago, who'd hurt her again as soon as she'd let down her guard even a little, but who had once been her friend. Maybe he no longer ranked in that category, but she had no doubt that he loved Papa almost as much as she
did. She could count on him for that.

  Maybe he'd even be able to help her remember exactly how Papa had talked about Mama when they were young, if this aberration was new or something he'd always done.

  "I need to talk to you," she said quietly. "About Papa."

  "I'm listening. I have been since you came to town."

  "Not here. I don't want to take the chance of anybody overhearing."

  "We'll go somewhere."

  Kate closed down the program and walked out back, her entire body stiff and numb. As much as she'd held back from telling Luke, just so much she wanted to tell him now, to release the tension of carrying this secret alone. He'd always had an answer when they were younger, and a part of her wanted to believe he would now. It was probably a foolish hope, but it was her only hope at the moment.

  This wasn't like she was becoming emotionally dependent on him again, she assured herself. Certainly after the last few days, she wouldn't have any trouble maintaining her distance from him. She just knew she could count on him to want the best for Papa. She simply needed his input and his knowledge, and if he failed her with that, well, she'd be no worse off than she was right now.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Luke supposed he ought to feel good as he drove with Katie beside him, out to the creek where they'd spent so many hours as children, a place where they'd be guaranteed the privacy she'd requested. This was what he'd wanted, for her to trust him, to tell him her problems, to resume their friendship.

  But it wasn't the same thing. He and Katie weren't the same people they'd been all those years ago. If he had to put a name to what he felt right now, he wasn't sure he could. A little bit of anxiety about this new twist in events, a little curiosity about what Katie had to tell him and a little bit of fear that she was going to tell him something bad about Sheriff's health.

  When he'd first read that message over her shoulder on Sheriff's computer, he'd thought Sheriff had a lover. He still wasn't sure. Could that be Katie's problem? Would she get this upset if her father had found somebody else after all these years?

  He hadn't handled it very well when his mother remarried, though he'd had enough sense to keep his mouth shut, to know it was his problem, not his mother's. And it wasn't so much that she'd remarried, just who she'd married.

  He had the top down on his car, and Katie rode beside him silently, facing forward, seeming not to notice as the wind whipped her bright curls into her face.

  When he finally parked, she got out and looked around. He'd deliberately chosen the opposite side of the creek from their cave, but there was no way to avoid all the places they'd played as children, all the places that might hold unhappy memories for Katie. The two of them had pretty well covered the entire creek area...the entire town, for that matter.

  He watched her as she surveyed the rocky bank tufted with grass and weeds, the trees and field behind them. The sun bounced sparks off her hair just like it used to, and after that ride, her curls had the same tangled wildness. If she stayed in this sun very long, she'd have freckles across the bridge of her nose again.

  Seeing her in this familiar setting recalled the reality that his friend, Katie, was gone forever. The slender woman who stood a few feet away, her legs long in the tight blue jeans she wore today, her bottom rounded enticingly, was a stranger, a woman with a body he longed for and lips that could drive him crazy, but a woman he didn't know.

  She looked at him and he saw that her eyes were bright with that same intensity she'd always had. Katie never did anything halfway.

  A grasshopper whirred past them, and she jumped as if startled, then laughed. "Remember when we'd catch them and make them spit tobacco? Yuck!"

  "I remember. Poor grasshoppers!"

  "That old, burned-out house we used to make up stories about, it's just over that rise, isn't it?"

  "Yeah, I think so."

  She started to walk, and he followed. What the heck? He was too antsy to sit still anyway.

  They almost missed the house. The remnants of charred wood had fallen or rotted away, and weeds had overtaken the stone foundations.

  "There's the chimney," Katie said softly, almost reverently, parting the tall weeds to expose the last few crumbling inches of the structure. "It's still here after all, just hiding." She stepped closer, pushed down the weeds and began making stirring motions over an invisible fire. "Abigail Bonner was making soup from the last longhorn steer the day the Indians came. Remember that?"

  Luke grinned. "I left my bow and arrow at home. Sorry. I can't kill you today."

  Katie turned to him, smiling into the sun, and for a brief instant Luke thought he saw the little girl who'd caught crawdads with him, gotten covered with mud when they'd gone sliding down the big hill after a rain, dug for buried treasure along this very creek bank.

  But it wasn't really her. They weren't children anymore. Things weren't the same. He couldn't retrieve the past.

  "I don't have my gun to shoot back at the Indians, either," she said. "I guess we can't play that game." She moved over to sit on a large rock under a nearby tree.

  He followed and leaned against the tree trunk.

  She plucked a blade of grass and twirled it in her fingers, watching the motion as if it were something really important.

  "Can you recall, when we were kids, if Papa ever talked about Mama in the present tense, as if she wasn't really dead? I don't mean that thing he always did with your mother would… I mean something like, your mother said five minutes ago."

  It was an odd question, and before he could answer, she began to speak again, the words pouring out like a flood gate had been opened.

  Leaning against the rough bark of the oak tree he and Katie had once climbed, Luke listened while Katie, her gaze on the piece of grass that was disintegrating into fragments from her twirling, told him a rambling, disjointed story about Papa getting cooking advice from Mama, putting her on the phone, dancing with her and the note she'd found on the computer that morning.

  Finally she tossed away the shredded blade of grass and looked at him. "I don't see how Papa could have written the first part of that note. You know him. Even besides the fact that the grammar and punctuation were perfect, that doesn't sound like him at all, does it?"

  "No, it doesn't." Luke walked a few feet away, folded his arms and turned to look at her. "So what are you saying? You think Sheriff's senile? You think he should be committed or put on drugs or something?"

  "No! Of course not! I think—" She spread her hands in a helpless gesture. "I don't know what to think. At first I was worried that he was losing his mind. That's why I followed you all to the liquor store. I was afraid he might see imaginary robbers or something. But he was great. You were great. And then I started trying to remember if maybe he'd always talked about Mama as if she was still alive. I mean, I know he did, but not in the same sense he does now. And he doesn't do it when you're around. I'm the only one who gets to hear what Mama's been up to in recent years."

  She looked completely defenseless and vulnerable as she sat there on that rock, her eyes the same color as the sky overhead, the barriers he usually saw in them gone. He wanted to go to her, take her into his arms, assure her that everything was going to be just fine.

  He shoved his hands into his pockets instead. He didn't have that right. They weren't friends. They certainly weren't lovers. She was nobody he knew anymore.

  "I haven't seen any evidence of your father having problems. When I came back to town, it was kind of a shock to realize how old he is, but he doesn't act it. He never forgets things. His reflexes are unbelievable, as you saw at the liquor store. Katie, I don't know what to tell you. Have you talked to him about going to a shrink?"

  She shook her head. "Can you imagine Papa going to a psychiatrist? He'd just chuckle and pooh-pooh the whole idea. If I did make him go, he'd soon have the doctor talking to Mama, too. You know how persuasive he can be."

  Luke smiled. "I do know all about that."

  He
reached overhead and wrapped his fingers around a tree limb. Katie expected answers from him. It had been a lot easier to give them when he was seven and she was six and the toughest question she came up with was why there was no f in elephant or how to explain to her father about the rip in her new shorts from that nail in the tree house they tried to build.

  "Katie, I think you have to stop worrying about it. I promise to keep a close eye on Sheriff. If he starts doing anything funny, I'll let you know immediately. In the meantime, if he gets comfort from talking to your mother and even if he thinks she answers him, it doesn't hurt anything."

  She nodded and folded her arms under her breasts. "I told myself that. Last night I was all ready to go back home tomorrow, as soon as I had a chance to do a few final things on that computer system. Then this morning I went in, and you jumped me about an e-mail I didn't send, and I found that note. Suddenly it was just all too much."