CLAY YEAGER'S REDEMPTION

by Justine Davis

  He seemed to shiver. "God, Casey, don't say that."

  "Why? I didn't think that would ever happen. I thought I'd be frozen forever after what Jon did to me."

  "Sometimes it's better that way, to be frozen," he said, his voice harsh.

  It hit her then, what she realized she should have seen long ago. "You, too," she breathed. "That's why else you left, isn't it?"

  He turned away from her, sharply, abruptly. He took two steps, and then he stopped. For a long moment he just stood there, and she could almost feel the tension radiating from him. Then he spun back to glare at her.

  "Yes, damn it." It came out as a hiss. "You welcomed the thaw, and I … ran from it. I'll always run, Casey. Sooner or later. You'd better remember that."

  How had she missed it before? she wondered. How had she not seen that the coldness she'd felt was aimed inward, that it was himself he was furious with, that it was himself who was the target of the aversion in his own voice?

  "I'm not asking for forever, Clay," she said.

  "What are you asking for?" His voice sounded hard, cold, but Casey could see his eyes and knew it was only a sign of the battle going on within him. "Sex? Is that all you want?"

  She winced at the coldness of it, even though she knew he'd done it intentionally.

  "Because that's all you'd be getting," he continued warningly. He was pacing now, as if he had to have some physical outlet for the turmoil inside him. "You'd just be getting a body, because there's no heart left to give."

  She didn't believe him. Oh, she knew he believed it, knew he'd meant every word of his warning. But he didn't seem to realize that the very earnestness with which he warned her proved him wrong.

  "You're wrong, Clay," she said softly. "If you didn't have a heart, you wouldn't care about my feelings, wouldn't care if I got hurt. You'd figure it was my own fault if I got in over my head."

  He stopped his pacing and looked at her. She could see his breathing quicken and his jaw set, the outward signs of that inner tumult. "Maybe I just don't want any more guilt to carry, all right?"

  And again he unwittingly proved she was right. "If anything," she said, meeting his glare levelly, "you have too much heart. No one could hurt so much without it."

  He made a low sound deep in his throat, a sound of protest, of pain. "God, Casey, stop trying to defend me. Stop trying to make me something besides what I am."

  "Just what is it you think you are?"

  He turned on her then, staring at her with an intensity that would have rattled her if she hadn't been so certain that was exactly what he wanted. She made herself go on, guessing, trying to read between the lines of what he was saying.

  "Or is it what you think you aren't that's dogging you?"

  He looked away, dodging her gaze so abruptly that she knew she'd struck deep.

  "What is it, Clay?"

  He turned again. Started moving again. Quickly, like a man escaping. He was at the rear door to the screen porch in two long strides.

  "Whatever you're trying to run from, it won't work," she said, stopping him in the doorway. "You can't outrun a memory, Clay. Believe me, I've tried."

  He moved again. Stepped out into the screen porch. Reached for the outer door. And stopped.

  Casey watched him, barely aware of holding her breath. Somehow, based on some deep, gut-level instinct she didn't understand but couldn't question, she knew that this moment was crucial. Not just to their relationship, whatever that was, but to something even more important. She knew that what he did now could set the pattern for the rest of his life. That if Clay ran now, he might never stop.

  And whatever he was running from, she thought, it couldn't be bad enough for that. Even she had managed to find some semblance of peace; surely there had to be some for him, too.

  She hardly dared breathe as, for what seemed like an eternity, he stood there, as if teetering on the edge of a precipice. Which, perhaps, he was, Casey thought. There was a tightness in her chest that she recognized, although it had been a while since she'd felt it. In fact, not since those days of the trial, when she'd spent so many long, dark hours wondering if Jon was going to get away with it, if there truly was no justice in the world.

  But Clay looked as if there were not only no justice, but no mercy. He looked like a man who had given up on both long ago. A man who didn't believe in anything. Most especially not in himself.

  And finally, as if bending under the pressure, he sank down to the porch bench. Elbows on his knees, he buried his face in his hands. Casey heard him take a gulping breath, and then another.

  She took a deep breath of her own to steady herself, then quickly stepped out onto the porch. He didn't look up, even as she sat beside him. Slowly, tentatively, she reached out and touched him, laying her hand gently on his shoulder. She felt a tremor go through him, felt the heat coming off him, as if the conflict within were creating a literal friction.

  "Remember what you told me?" she asked softly. When he didn't answer, she went on, pressing harder against his shoulder, wanting to do more, wanting to somehow take away his pain. "You have to let it out, or it will eat you alive."

  "Better that than for it to come out. You don't want to hear it, Casey. Believe me, you don't want to hear it."

  "I'm sure you didn't want to hear my story, either. But you listened. You listened and comforted me in a way no one's ever been able to. Let me give back that support, Clay."

  His head came up then, but he didn't look at her. "That's different."

  "Why?"

  "You were the victim. And you were still strong enough to do what had to be done."

  "So … what? I deserve absolution and you don't?"

  He turned to face her then, and she almost wished he hadn't.

  "Exactly."

  His voice was cold, flat. Unforgiving. She studied him for a long, silent moment, trying to read in the taut planes of his face the reason for his own harsh judgment. She found no clue there, nothing that told her what he was unable to forgive himself for, what made him so implacable in his self-hatred.

  "What is it, Clay?" she asked softly. "What did you do that makes you so hard on yourself?"

  He looked away again, muttering something barely audible to her. "Didn't do."

  "What?"

  "What I didn't do."

  Didn't do? she wondered. What was it he hadn't done that could leave him so deeply guilty that he couldn't forgive himself? She tried to think of possibilities, but the only ones that came to her were from her own experience: she wished she had stayed here in River Bend; wished she had come home to see Aunt Fay more often, especially after Uncle Ray had died.

  But that didn't seem enough, not to cause the kind of guilt Clay was feeling. It didn't seem enough that he might have made some wrong choice, or decided not to do something that he now wished he had. It had to be something worse, something specific, she thought. Had he left the scene of an accident? Had he not tried to stop something he could have? Not stopped to help someone when he could have?

  She had no idea and knew she wasn't going to find out this way. Perhaps she should try his favored tactic and hit him with something unexpected; maybe it would come out then. She didn't stop to analyze why she was so determined to get it out of him; she only knew that if he could feel half as relieved as she did, it would be worth it.

  His words as he'd left her that night came back to her, and she found her question in them.

  "Who did you let down, Clay?" she asked softly, gently.

  A sound broke from him then, strained and harsh. It was a painful sound, the sound of a man pushed beyond recovery.

  "Why can't you forgive yourself?" she asked. "I'm sure they've forgiven you, whoever it is."

  He laughed. He laughed, and it was an awful sound, as cold and desolate as the Iowa plains under six feet of snow. His eyes were wide and unfocused, his expression agonized in the fading light. She didn't know what he was seeing, what memory was playing out before his blank eyes,
but she didn't have to to know it was horrible. And she wondered if she could bear to hear the truth, if she could stand to know what had made a strong man look so broken.

  "She was so little," he said. "So helpless and so little."

  He stopped, and suddenly Casey wanted to run. She didn't want to hear this. She'd been a fool to push; she had no right.

  "I loved her so much. More than my life," Clay said, and she felt a tremor go through him.

  Instinctively she put her arms around him as if it were cold that made him shiver. And she quashed the urge to run. She'd begun this; she had no right to back out, now that she'd pushed him to the brink, just because she was suddenly afraid she was going to hate what she heard.

  "I would have died for her," he whispered. "But I killed her instead." He shuddered then, violently.

  "Clay, no…"

  Her shocked protest seemed to make him angry. He turned on her, pulling free of her arms. "I did," he insisted. "I closed my eyes to what was happening, pretended not to see all the signs. Me, of all people, who should have known, should have seen, should have recognized how close to the edge she was."

  Casey's brow furrowed; something in his tone made her think this was a very different "she." "How close who was, Clay?"

  She felt the tension flood out of him, saw his normally straight body slump, as if all his resistance had drained away.

  "My wife," he said dully.

  Casey's eyes widened, but she managed not to let the words that leaped to her lips escape. She held her breath, and after a moment, in that same flat, dull voice, Clay went on.

  "I was a cop. In Marina Heights."

  A cop? He'd been a cop? She tried to get her mind around it. It fit, she thought, as image after image came to her. The way he'd calmed her. No wonder Clay had known just what to say, what to do that night when she'd told him her horrible story. The scars, especially the one that looked like a bullet wound.

  "But then … why did you let them arrest you for that silly thing the other night? The deputy said it was bogus. Surely all you had to do was tell them who you were?"

  "I didn't want anyone to know. Didn't want them calling Trinity West, my old station."

  "Why?"

  "I don't have any right to claim that badge anymore. And they don't want to hear from me."

  "What happened, Clay? What made you … cut your ties so completely? Was it when you were shot? Did you stop wanting to be a cop?"

  His mouth twisted into a grimace. "I loved it. Too much. I became a cop who got totally wrapped up in the job, who spent all his energy on the scum of the planet, until there was only a little left to give his family."

  He had shifted to the third person, she realized, as if that were as close as he could bear to get to what he was saying. As if he'd realized it himself, he went on in the first person in a tone of utter condemnation.

  "I knew Linda—my wife—was … troubled. She was up and down all the time. Moody. But I thought it was just the tension of being a cop's wife. It's not an easy thing, the worry, the crazy hours…"

  "It must be awful sometimes," Casey said softly, afraid of breaking the flow of words. "Never knowing, each time they leave, if they'll come back again."

  "I thought that was what it was. I didn't understand it was something more. Something worse." He took a deep, shaky breath. "She got … painful to be around. And she didn't seem to want to be with us."

  Casey's breath caught. Us?

  He caught the sudden sharpening of her attention, the holding of her breath.

  "My little girl." His voice was an aching, raw thing. "Jennifer. Jenny. The sweetest, smartest, prettiest…"

  He broke off. Casey's throat was tight, her eyes stinging; she knew she didn't want to hear the rest, but she could hardly stop him now.

  "It hurt. Linda withdrew, and I couldn't reach her. But worse, neither could Jenny." He shivered anew as he said the name, and Casey wondered how long it had been since he'd spoken it. "I kept trying to confront her but she'd insist everything was all right, get angry at me. But it got worse, she got moodier. She never went out, she slept all the time. Eventually it was like she was just sort of there, in the background, in our lives, but not part of them."

  "What about Jenny?"

  "Linda barely managed to take care of her. I tried to make it up to Jenny, to be mom and dad, but she was only four, and she needed more time than I had. So did Linda. But my job took so much, and I was in the middle of several big cases—" He cut himself off abruptly. "No excuses. There are no damn excuses."

  "Clay—"

  "I should have known. Damn it, I was a cop, I was trained, I should have known!"

  For a long moment he sat there, staring down at his hands, as if their strength had somehow betrayed him. Casey knew the worst was yet to come. Knew she didn't want to hear it, wanted nothing more than to tell him to stop, to keep his demons safely locked up, that she could barely deal with her own.

  But he'd dealt with hers. Even carrying this, whatever it was that was bearing down on her like an oncoming jet, he'd helped her deal with hers. She owed it to him to return the favor.

  "What happened, Clay?"

  "It was a Saturday night. I'd been working late on a stakeout all week. Undercover, plainclothes. Got off it early that night. So I could see Jenny before she went to bed. Stopped to pick up a stuffed toy she'd been wanting. Proceeded home."

  He was talking so oddly that it took Casey a moment to realize that he was speaking in the cold, detached phrases of a police report, as if that were the only way he could stand to talk about it

  "It was sunny. Bright. Summer. I was going to take time off. Take Jenny to the beach. Try to get Linda back to normal. Not this … shadow of herself. Thinking about that when I hit the driveway. Hit the garage-door opener. Light should have come on, but don't remember it. It was dark inside."

  He was breathing quickly now, not looking at her, not looking at anything. Except perhaps whatever awful images accompanied the memories he was describing. She glanced at his hands; the right was clenched into a fist, the left wrapped around it so tightly his knuckles were white.

  "They were there. Garage floor. Linda on the left. Still. Very still. Dead still. Two-foot pool of blood under them. Growing. Spreading." The knuckles got whiter. His face was nearly as pale. "My gun. My service revolver. In her hand."

  "Oh, God, no," Casey whispered.

  "Both of them. She'd killed both of them. Jenny first. Then herself. There. In the garage. Where I'd see them first thing. Because I'd failed them. Both of them."

  For the first time, Casey understood the deadness in Clay Yeager's eyes.

  * * *

  Chapter 12

  « ^ »

  Casey didn't even try to stop the tears. They streamed down her cheeks as the horror of Clay's story formed a too vivid picture in her mind. Even imagining it was too awful; she couldn't comprehend what it must be like to live with a reality like that every day of your life. Her own horror story seemed almost sanitary by comparison.

  She wanted to comfort him, but what could she possibly say? There were no words for something like this, nothing that could ease that kind of pain.

  Or, she realized slowly, that kind of guilt. Because she couldn't doubt that that was what he was feeling. It was pouring out of him, almost palpable.

  "Jenny was the best thing I'd ever done," Clay said, his words more natural now, but his voice still dead and flat. "She was the one bright spot in an ugly world I had to work in every day, the one thing that was still good about my personal life. She was what kept me going, the reason I didn't quit, because I wanted to make the world a little safer for her. But instead I—"

  "Clay, stop it. It wasn't your fault."

  He shook his head, slowly, like a mortally wounded animal. "It was. I should have known. I did know. But I kept hoping it would go away, that it would get better."

  "She pulled the trigger, Clay. Not you. She made the choice. Not you."

&
nbsp; His head came up sharply. "Did she? Did she make the choice? Or did I make it for her, by being too blind, too busy, too damn obsessed by my job, to give her what she needed?"

  "You said you tried to talk to her—"

  "I should have done more. Made her get help."

  "I don't think it works that way. You can't make someone get help, they have to want it. Or at least not object."

  "I could at least have gotten her in a hospital for observation, something."

  "Would she have gone?"

  He let out a long breath. "Willingly? No. We fought over it. I wanted her to go to a counselor, but she insisted she was fine, and that she didn't want to talk to some stranger."

  "Are you saying you think you should have forced her? Handcuffed her and dragged her?"

  "If I had," he said flatly, "maybe my daughter would still be alive."

  Casey didn't know what to say to that. In fact, she didn't know what to say to him at all. What she'd been through had been awful, but she was alive, able to fight the memories, able to go on, and getting better at it every day. But there was nothing that could change the finality of what had happened to Clay. He couldn't fight death, couldn't run away from it, no matter how he tried.

  And he'd apparently tried rather hard.

  "What did you do? After, I mean."

  "I left. The day of their funeral, I turned in my badge, packed up my truck and hit the road."

  "With Mud."

  "Yes." His mouth twisted. "He was Jenny's. I almost had him put down, because it hurt so much to just look at him, to remember how she played with him. To remember how she named him when I brought him home and the first thing he did was plop in a mud puddle."

  Casey smiled, but her heart wasn't in it; it couldn't be, not when he looked so devastated.

  "I told my dad to sell the house and everything in it, do whatever he wanted with the money."

  "When … did it happen?"

  He took a long breath and expelled it before telling her, "Five years ago."

  It seemed like forever. Sounded like a long time. But when dealing with death, especially the death of a child, it was no doubt yesterday.