I Promise

by Joan Johnston

  His eyes scanned the large parlor. He had never seen it before. He had been in through the back door to the kitchen once, and the study, but had never made it to the front of the house. Delia’s father had thrown him out when he came to ask permission to take her out. He hadn’t been good enough for Carson’s daughter. He felt acid in his throat as the humiliating memory rose. He forced the acid, and the memory, back down.

  He perused the Victorian sofa, wing-back upholstered chairs, and Tiffany lamps on the end tables, all left over from the nineteenth century. Framed daguerreotypes from the Civil War sat on the mantel above the stone fireplace, a Turkish rug on the hardwood floor. The furnishings were surprisingly shabby. But spotlessly clean.

  You had to wonder what Hattie was trying so desperately to wash away. He thought he knew. He was there to find out for sure.

  It wasn’t an impulsive visit. He had thought a lot about his life in the six months since Ginny’s accident, about all the mistakes he had made with her and Billie Jo . . . and Delia Carson. His return to the home he had fled so many years ago had forced him to relive memories of all that had happened, all he had felt and said and done. He thought of all the things he could have done differently. Of all the things he had lost.

  He was older now. He knew more about himself and what was missing in his life. He acknowledged there was a hole inside him where something precious had been ripped out. His heart, to be precise.

  Though he had not seen her for twenty years, he had never gotten over Delia Carson. He could live the rest of his life without her if he had to, but he would rather not. He wanted another chance to fix what had gone wrong. Or get her out of his system, once and for all.

  It wasn’t going to be easy. Not after letting the past lie unresolved for so long. That was why he had come to the Circle Crown. To confront Hattie Carson and ask for the truth.

  “What is it you want?” Hattie said.

  Marsh turned the brim of his Stetson in his hands. He had faced a gun-toting Bosnian Serb with less nervousness than he felt facing this tiny woman. She had known him as a boy, inexorably altered his life, was maybe even responsible for him becoming the wanderer he was.

  Hattie sighed at his continued silence. “Sit down, North,” she said, gesturing him toward the sofa.

  He took one of the chairs instead, leaving the narrow-seated Victorian sofa to her. He kept his hat in his lap, because it gave him something to do with his hands.

  “Out with it,” she said, once the two of them were seated.

  “I know everything,” he said. “Everything he did. And how you ignored it.”

  Hattie’s face turned chalky. Her silvery blue eyes disappeared as eyelids crepey with age slid closed. Her hands—he noticed the joints were swollen with arthritis—threaded together in her lap. When she opened her eyes again, he saw she was angry.

  “Why couldn’t you have stayed gone? Why do you have to drag all this back up?”

  “It was all waiting right here for me when I came back, Mrs. Carson.”

  She rose in agitation and paced away from him. “You were no good for Delia. You ruined her life.”

  “If Delia’s got problems, I didn’t cause them.” He rose and crossed to stand in her path. “You’ve got that shoe on the wrong damn foot.”

  She whirled to face him, fury making her eyes spark. “Everything was fine until you came along. We were a family. We were happy. It was only after Delia met you that everything went wrong.”

  “I didn’t rape her, Mrs. Carson. I didn’t get her pregnant.”

  Hattie took a couple of hitching breaths. At first he thought she was expressing indignation. It was only after she grabbed at her chest and said “Help me” that he realized she was having some sort of attack.

  She collapsed in his arms.

  Marsh bawled like a branded calf for help, and the housekeeper, Maria, came running.

  “Dios mio!” the old woman cried. “Her pills. Give her one of her pills!”

  “What pills?” he bellowed back.

  Maria reached into Hattie’s jeans pocket to get a bottle of nitroglycerin pills, shook one out, and handed it to him. “Put it under her tongue.”

  Marsh did as she ordered while she raced to call 911.

  The pill didn’t work.

  Marsh’s heart was barging around inside his chest like a moose in a tepee. Which was more than Hattie’s heart could manage. It wasn’t beating at all.

  He pressed his fingers to her carotid artery. No pulse. No sign of her chest moving up and down. He leaned down to see if he could feel breath coming from her nostrils. Nothing.

  He had performed CPR twice in his lifetime on war victims in the field when there was no other help available. His success rate wasn’t high. He flinched from the thought of pressing his mouth over Hattie Carson’s and breathing his air into her lungs. Not when he felt the way he did about her. Not when she felt the way she did about him.

  If she dies, the truth dies with her.

  “Help her, señor,” Maria begged. “The ambulance is on the way.”

  Reluctantly, he tilted Hattie’s head back, checked the airway, and lowered his mouth to cover hers.

  He performed CPR until he thought he was going to keel over himself, Maria crying over his shoulder the whole time, before the paramedics arrived. They shoved him out of the way, asking questions and issuing orders with the kind of efficiency people learn if they want to have any hope of saving lives.

  They had revived Hattie in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Overnight she had stabilized, and this morning she would have surgery. Hattie Carson had damn well better make it, Marsh thought. He wanted her alive so she could spill the secrets that had been kept for too many years. The secrets that would free his life.

  Marsh huffed out a breath and stepped down from the pickup.

  Delia’s probably inside.

  His heart did a flip-flop in his chest. An image of Delia as she had looked the first time he met her formed in his mind.

  It was a hot summer day in June. A bunch of kids had gotten together to go floating down the Frio River on huge tractor tire inner tubes. He had driven his ’57 Chevy pickup—not quite as bad a rattletrap in those days—downriver several miles to where they would take their tubes out of the water and gotten a ride back to the starting point with Joe Taylor. When he stepped out of Joe’s pickup, he gave a wolf whistle at the crowd of girls wearing skimpy swimsuit tops, indecently cutoff jeans, and Keds without socks.

  He might not have noticed Delia, except at that moment she pulled off a baseball cap and about a yard of silky black hair fell to her waist. The sight of all that hair captivated his imagination. What would it be like to make love to a girl with hair like that? he had wondered. Unfortunately, the owner of all that marvelous hair wasn’t much to look at from the back. Skinny as a bed slat. And way too short for someone as tall as he was.

  Then she turned around.

  Her blue eyes caught on his gray ones and remained. She smiled at him tentatively, shyly.

  He couldn’t have said what it was about that look, about that smile, that surged like a raging river into the gaping hole inside him and filled it up. It was as though she knew all of his fears and desires and offered solace and satisfaction.

  He forced himself to step back mentally from her, to look at her objectively.

  She had a small bosom, the bare hint of a waist, and good legs, but not much of them. It was her face that drew his gaze and compelled it to stay.

  Her eyes were wide-set, wise beyond her tender years, understanding, compassionate. Her nose was short and straight, her chin a little square. Her mouth was wide, her upper lip slightly bowed. He felt an uncomfortable urge to press his mouth to hers, to put his tongue inside her and taste, to join himself to her in a way most nice girls wouldn’t allow.

  He wanted her to say something, so he could hear her voice. But she remained silent.

  One of the other girls called to her, and she hurried to g
rab her tractor tube and join the others. She gave him a fleeting look over her shoulder. But it wasn’t an invitation to further their acquaintance, as he might have expected. More like a sad farewell.

  Looking back, he recognized the melancholy in her eyes. But he hadn’t seen it then. He had only been thinking of himself, of how he could get her pants off and get inside her. He had set out to do exactly that.

  Marsh sighed. If only he had known then what he knew now. Would things have turned out differently? No sense wasting the energy to speculate. He couldn’t go back. He could only go forward. He and Delia had once belonged together. Did they still?

  He headed inside the hospital to see the woman he had fallen in love with at twenty. A woman who had urged him—begged him with tear-filled eyes—to lie and confess that he had raped her.

  Life ain’t in hold in’ a good hand but in playin’ a poor one well.

  Chapter Three

  June 1976

  As Delia Carson stood on the bank of the Frio talking to her best friend, Peggy Voorhees, she felt her neck hairs rise. She turned and caught a tall, broad-shouldered young man staring at her. She looked right back from beneath lowered lashes and felt her lips curve into a reassuring smile. He seemed to need it. He appeared to be a couple of years out of high school, but he knew most of the others. She wondered who he was.

  She turned away reluctantly, wishing things were different. She was far older in experience than a boy like him could possibly imagine. And she was damaged goods. Not that anyone knew, not even her best friend.

  “Last one in is a rotten egg!” Peggy yelled as she dragged her tube into the thigh-deep water and dropped spread-eagled back onto it.

  “You cheated!” Delia shouted back as she lugged her tube toward the river’s edge.

  “Here, let me help you with that.”

  The young man had come up behind her and taken hold of the huge tractor tire tube.

  “I can manage,” she said.

  “I’ll keep it steady while you hop on,” he said, taking the tube from her and setting it in the water.

  “All right,” she agreed, because she didn’t see a courteous way to avoid his help. She stood in the shallow water, getting used to the cold, then settled back gingerly onto the tube, shivering as the water soaked her fanny. Her tennis shoes hung over the front edge in the water, and her elbows rested on either side. “You can let go now.”

  He gave her a little push into the center of the river, and she began drifting downstream.

  “Watch out for barbed wire,” he warned as she floated away from him. “It’s strung across the water along the Johnson property line. Only one strand shows above the water. If you’ll wait, I’ll—”

  “I’ll be careful,” she shouted back to him as the current carried her away. She and Peggy, along with everyone else, would have to get out of the water and go around the barbed wire before continuing the trip downriver.

  Peggy had settled her feet on the stony bottom to stop her forward movement until Delia caught up to her. She lifted her tennis shoes out of the water, and they rafted down the river side by side. “Who was that you were talking to?”

  Delia shrugged. “I don’t know. I saw him for the first time today.”

  “He’s really cute. Too old for you, though. Your dad would go bonkers if somebody like him showed up at your door.”

  Delia made a dismissive sound in her throat. “There’s no chance this guy is going to show up at my door, so don’t get your drawers in a knot. I don’t plan to worry about a thing for the next three hours. I’m going to settle back and enjoy the ride.”

  As she floated lazily down the Frio, lying stretched out in the sunshine across the tractor tube, her fingers trailing in the frigid water, Delia wondered what the future held for her. She knew she couldn’t stay here, couldn’t continue her outward role as a dutiful daughter. So far, no one had guessed her awful secret. But she was afraid if anybody really looked close, they would see the truth.

  “Penny for your thoughts?”

  Delia glanced at Peggy. “They aren’t worth that much.”

  Peggy laughed. “You’re so funny, Delia! ‘They aren’t worth that much’—and you the smartest girl in the junior class. That is so funny!”

  “I’m a barrel of laughs, all right,” Delia agreed. Especially late at night, when her father came to her room.

  Because everyone was strung out for half a mile along the river, Delia didn’t see the young man again until after the float. Everyone was gathered around a rusted-out pickup, throwing their tractor tubes in the back and tying them down, when she caught him staring at her.

  She turned her back on him, knowing Peggy was right, that there was no point in getting to know him. The bed of the pickup was crowded, between teenagers and tubes, and she was one of the last trying to cram on when she noticed him standing beside her.

  “Come sit up front,” he said, barely touching her elbow.

  The touch of his fingers on her flesh was electrifying. Her body drew up tight inside with pleasure. She automatically fought back the feeling, the way she did when such feelings came when her father touched her, because they were wrong. Only this wasn’t wrong. Or shouldn’t have been. Nevertheless, she flinched away from his fingertips, confused and upset.

  The young man gave her a questioning look, and a flush crept up her throat. Thankfully, he didn’t ask for an explanation, and the awkward moment passed. He waited for her to join him, and Peggy said, “Go ahead, Delia. There’s no more room back here, anyway.”

  The ancient pickup had a red leather bench seat, but the four-speed gearshift took up the middle of the floor, so she sat by the passenger door with her elbow perched out the open window. Once they were moving, the breeze whipped the hair slipping from beneath her duckbill cap into a frenzy. “Darn this hair,” she said, dragging it away from her mouth and eyes. “I hate it!”

  “It’s beautiful,” the boy said.

  The compliment surprised her. She stared at the young man openly before she realized what awful truths he might see if he looked back into her eyes. She lowered her lids protectively.

  “You can roll up the window,” he said, “if the wind’s bothering you.”

  “It’s too hot for that.” She yanked off the Dallas Cowboys cap and threw it on the seat between them. She gathered her hair, twisted it several times, and tied it in an ugly knot at her nape. She snugged the billed cap back down on top of it and said, “That ought to keep it tamed for a little while.”

  “If it gets in your way so much, why don’t you cut it?”

  Because my father likes it this way. She stared out the window. “Maybe I will someday.”

  “Would you like to go to the movies with me tonight?”

  She turned to look at him in stupefaction. “I don’t even know your name.”

  He shot her a charming grin. “I thought everyone knew me.” The grin cocked up on one side into something more cynical. “Or about me. I’m Marshall North.”

  He said it almost defiantly. She raised a skeptical brow. He was right. She did know about him. No kid in town had a worse reputation. The North Ranch bordered the Circle Crown, where she lived, but her parents and Mr. North weren’t on speaking terms, which helped explain why she and Marsh had never crossed paths.

  “Well? How about it, Miss Odelia Josephine Carson?”

  “You know my name!”

  His eyes twinkled. “I asked.”

  She laughed. She admired his boldness. Oh, how she wished she could get to know him better. But it was impossible. “I’m sorry,” she said. “My father doesn’t allow me to go on dates.”

  “If you’re worried about what your folks would say, I could meet you at the theater.”

  She glanced sideways at him. He was so very good looking, with sun-streaked brown hair, a smile that created a single dimple on his left cheek, and a straight nose with a slight bump on the bridge. His gray eyes were shuttered against her in a way she recognized beca
use she did it so often herself.

  She wanted to go out with a boy close to her own age, like other girls. She wanted to pretend she wasn’t . . . what she was. And Marsh North was far from perfect himself, which made her deceit seem less profound. “All right,” she said. She felt her heart speed up slightly.

  “I’ll wait out front for you. Seven-thirty?”

  She nodded.

  And felt guilty. Even though she didn’t have any intention of letting North touch her. She was only going to the movies with him. There wasn’t anything wrong with that.

  She wasn’t able to dress up for the date, because that would have given away the game to her father, and she had been forced to bring Peggy in on her secret.

  “I won’t lie for you unless you tell me who he is,” Peggy said.

  “It’s Marsh North,” she admitted.

  “Oh, geez, Delia! Marsh North! Oh, geez! He’s so—”

  “Nice,” Delia inserted before Peggy could finish. “He’s been nothing but nice to me.”

  “That’s not what Tricia Stewart said about him.”

  “I don’t want to hear any gossip about Marsh. Will you cover for me, or not?” Delia asked.

  “Of course I will,” Peggy said. “Oh, Delia, this is so exciting. Geez. Marsh North! Just be careful, okay?”

  “I’ll be fine,” Delia said.

  “You have to promise to call me later and tell me everything!”

  At the supper table Delia said casually that she needed her dad to give her and Peggy a ride to the movies. She said Peggy’s mom was picking them up, figuring North could take her home in his pickup. She held her breath until her father said, “That sounds fine.”

  As Delia stood at the curb in front of the El Lasso next to Peggy, waving good-bye as her father drove away, her heart was pounding.

  “He’s here, Delia,” Peggy whispered in her ear.

  North was standing behind her and to her right by the Coming Attractions poster, a cigarette dangling from his mouth.

  “Thanks, Peggy,” she said. “You can go in now.”

  “Call me later.” Peggy gave Marsh one last surreptitious glance before she hurried over to buy her ticket.