One True Thing

by Marilyn Pappano

“Actually, to be fair to Paulette, I just moved out here a couple of months ago. I haven’t seen her since then.”

  “Lucky me,” Cassidy murmured.

  He pretended not to have heard. “Not that she wouldn’t have lied to you if it meant renting this place. No one’s stayed there in years—not since Junior’s kids put him in the nursing home.”

  “Too bad for Junior.”

  “Nah, he doesn’t know the difference. His mind’s gone. He doesn’t even know his kids when they come to visit—which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.”

  He was probably right, especially when those same kids had seen fit to put their father in a home the minute he’d become trouble. She couldn’t imagine doing such a thing to one of her parents…if she had parents. At least, in the real world.

  Shoving away the thought—the regret—she glanced at Jace. “I’ve got to go. I’ve got work to do.” When he showed no intention of returning to his side of the bridge, she deliberately went on. “That’s why I’m here. Not to relax or make small talk with the neighbors. To work.”

  Her first lie of the day. There had been a time when the only lies she’d told were harmless little fibs. I love the gift… Yes, that dress looks wonderful on you… The cake was to die for… No, you don’t look like you’ve gained five pounds. Those days were long gone. Now the number of lies she told was limited only by her exposure to people to tell them to. Ask the same question ten times and she would give ten different answers. That was how she lived her life these days.

  Correction—that was how she lived, period.

  “What kind of work?” Friendly curiosity again.

  It shouldn’t have annoyed her, but it did. She wasn’t the type to become chummy with someone just because they happened to live in the same building or on the same block. It had taken some time, but she’d learned not to become chummy with anyone. Leaving wasn’t such a big deal if there was no one special to leave behind.

  “The kind that requires a great deal of privacy. Nice meeting you,” she said in a tone that made it clear she’d found it anything but nice. Then she turned toward the house as if she hadn’t just been rude to a friendly stranger. She didn’t look back as she let herself in, and didn’t peek out the window on her way to deposit the computer on the dining table and the suitcase in the bedroom. She did glance toward the bridge when she returned to the car for another load and saw that he’d gone, but not far. He was sitting on his deck in a metal chair that matched her own, a bottle of water in hand, and watching her. She pretended he wasn’t there.

  It was harder than it sounded.

  Within an hour she’d unloaded and unpacked everything. Cheap aluminum pots and pans, cheaper plastic-handled cutlery, an off-brand boom box with a box of CDs. White sheets and pillowcases, a yellow blanket and a blue print comforter. Clothes that came from Wal-Mart, Kmart and Target, shoes from Payless. Her days of upscale retail experiences were long over. She’d been a world-class shopper, and some days she missed it a lot.

  Other days, when she got overwhelmed by the enormity of the life that had been taken from her—twice—she couldn’t care less about shopping.

  With nothing left to do, she walked through the cottage, out of the bedroom, past the bathroom and into the living room/dining room/kitchen. “Well, there’s three seconds out of my day,” she said aloud. Only eighty-some thousand to go.

  Finally she let herself wander to the window. There was no sign of Jace Barnett. Good. Life was safer without the complication of people.

  And lonelier, her inner voice pointed out.

  She turned away from the window and gazed around the room. Her monthly two hundred dollars’ rent included furnishings—sofa, chair, coffee and end tables, dining table with three chairs, bed and dresser. All of it was early-impoverished American, all of it ugly enough to make her wonder what in the world the people who’d created it had been thinking. It was a far cry from the leather, stone and luxurious fabrics of her old home, and for one instant it made her want to cry. It was so shabby. Her life was so shabby.

  This wasn’t the future she’d envisioned for herself twelve years ago, or five, or even three. She’d intended to follow in the footsteps of every blessed female in her family for generations. She’d planned to be so middle-class, married-with-kids, minivan-PTA-soccer-church-on-Sunday average that she would bore to death anyone who wasn’t just like her.

  Odd how easily a little curiosity, greed and bad luck had changed everything.

  Her sigh sounded loud and lonesome in the big room, and galvanized her into action. She fixed herself a glass of instant iced tea, then sat at the dining table and opened the laptop. “I am a writer,” she announced as the machine booted up. “I am a writer.”

  When she was a yoga instructor, she’d practiced affirmations daily, but it was easier to believe I can do this when “this” was nothing more complicated than the Salute to the Sun routine. Writing a book was a whole other business, and one she knew little about.

  “Failure is just another chance to get it right,” she murmured as she clicked on the icon for her word processing program. She had a million such lines. Work is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration… Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right… You can’t win if you don’t play the game… Today is the first day of the rest of your life… If you can dream it, you can do it.

  Not one of them helped her when faced with a blank screen. She thought maybe a candy bar would help, so she got up and rummaged through her purse until she found one. Music might help, too, so she detoured past the boom box and put in her favorite Eric Clapton CD. Finding the screen still blank, she decided a few games of Free Cell might get her creative juices flowing.

  Two hours later, the screen bore a heading that read Chapter 1 and nothing else. Oh, she’d typed a few lines, then mercifully deleted them. After the third wipeout, her fingers seemed to pick out keys on their own.

  I am a writer. I AM a writer. I am a WRITER.

  “So write, damn it!” she muttered under her breath.

  Frustrated, she pushed away from the table and went to stare out the window, refusing to let her gaze stray to the southwest. The bulk of the lake lay to the north, the rental agent had told her. This section was just God’s afterthought, so it had the peace and quiet Cassidy had told her she needed.

  Except for Jace.

  She wondered why nosy Paulette didn’t know he was living next door. Why would he want to live all the way out here? Of course, she’d passed houses along the dirt road on her drive out from Buffalo Plains that morning, but mostly they were ranch or farm houses. Naturally someone who earned his living off the land would live here, too.

  But the lake was surrounded by thousands of acres of woods. No pasture for livestock, no fields for crops and, as far as she could tell, no other means of support. She would certainly never choose such a place if she had to drive into town to a job every day.

  The idea of going to a job every day—the same job—made her melancholy. She’d done that for a lot of years and had never really appreciated it until she’d found herself working for a week here, ten days there—if she was lucky, three weeks someplace else. As soon as she’d learned a job and started to fit in, she’d had to move on. Finally she’d quit fitting in. This time she didn’t intend to even try. She would pass her time here at Buffalo Lake just as she’d passed it at a hundred other places and, when it was up, she would move on, just as she’d moved on from everywhere else.

  Just once, though, she would like to settle down, to call the same place home next week and next month and next year. She would like to think in terms of forever instead of right now, to make friends, to have a life…but that was impossible. Like the shark, if she stopped moving, she would die.

  But knowing that didn’t ease her longing. It made it a little more bearable, but nothing, she was afraid, would ease it.

  Besides death.

  Though Jace had gotten his first official job when he was fifteen, he’d b
een working years longer. His parents had believed that taking care of the house and the livestock was a family responsibility, so he’d started pitching in as soon as he was old enough. He’d worked his way through college, taken three days off after graduation to move to Kansas City, then gone straight to work for the department.

  He liked not working for the first time in his life. Not having to get up at five-thirty to run before work, not spending more time at the shooting range each week than he did on dates, not dealing with lowlifes and lawyers, not carrying a gun with him everywhere he went. He liked not being a target for scorn and disdain, or for nutcases with weapons, and not spending more time frustrated than not.

  He liked being a bum, sleeping until noon and not seeing a solitary soul unless he wanted. He’d told his parents, Reese and Neely so repeatedly. They didn’t believe him, but that didn’t make it any less true. They thought he was burned out. Brooding. Bored. In serious need of a badge and a gun.

  Burned out? Maybe. Brooding? Nah, he’d gotten over what happened in Kansas City. Now he was just bitter. In need of another cop job? Never.

  What about bored?

  His gaze shifted to the window and the Davison place. Cassidy McRae had pulled up out front around ten-thirty. It was now six-fifteen, and he’d spent way too many of those hours watching the place, even though he hadn’t caught more than a glimpse of her passing a window. It wasn’t as if he didn’t have other things to do, like…clean house. Take Granddad’s old john boat out on the lake and catch some fish for his mother to fry. Drive into town and replenish his supply of frozen dinners. Mow the little patch of grass out front that he hadn’t yet managed to kill.

  But why be productive when he could kick back on the couch and watch the neighbor’s place during commercials on TV? Being curious took little energy and less incentive and, as a bum, he considered the less energy and incentive expended, the better.

  Besides, she was the first woman he’d really looked at since Amanda had moved out of his apartment and his life. She was the first woman he’d noticed as a woman, with all the possibilities and risks that entailed—the first who had reminded him of how long he’d been alone. Granted, he didn’t know anything about her—whether she was married, where she was from, what she did, whether she was aloof because she was shy or preoccupied or disagreeable by nature.

  What he did know was minimal. That she drove a red Honda with Arizona tags and a heavy coat of dust—a two-door that blended in easily with thousands of other little red two-doors on the road. There were no bumper stickers, no college affiliations or radio station advertising on the windows, no American flag or novelty toy flying from the antenna, no air-freshening pine tree hanging from the inside mirror. It was about as unremarkable as a car could get.

  He knew she was far from unremarkable. She was pretty, slender, five-eight, maybe five-nine, with short blond hair and pale golden skin. He hadn’t gotten close enough to identify the color of her eyes, but hoped they were brown. He’d always been a sucker for brown-eyed blondes, especially ones with long legs and full lips and an innocent sensuality about them.

  He knew next to nothing, but affairs and relationships and almost-engagements had been built on nothing more. As long as she wasn’t married, a cop or too needy, he could enjoy having her next door. He didn’t lust after married people, he’d had enough of cops to last a lifetime and enough of people who needed something from him to last two lifetimes.

  He couldn’t help but wonder, though, what had brought her to Buffalo Plains, and why she was staying all the way out here. She’d said she was here to work, but people didn’t come to Buffalo Plains to work. They came for reasons like Neely’s—hiding out from an ex-con who’d thought killing her was fair punishment for his going to prison. Or her sister, Hallie Marshall, escaping a life that had become unbearable. Or Hallie’s stepdaughter, Lexy, who’d run away from home to find the father she’d never known.

  But to work? When any work she could do over there in Junior’s cabin could just as easily be done someplace else? Someplace better?

  Maybe she was hiding, escaping or running away, too.

  He wouldn’t even wonder from what.

  He was debating between SpaghettiOs and a sandwich for supper when the sound of an engine drew his gaze to the window. Reese parked his truck under the big oak nearest the cabin, then he and Neely got out, each carrying a grocery bag. By the time they reached the deck, Jace was opening the screen door. He stood there, arms folded over his chest. “Hey, bubba. Don’t you know it’s rude to drop in on someone without calling first?”

  “We tried to call,” Reese replied, “and all we got was voice mail. You have your cell phone shut off again, don’t you? And you don’t check your voice mail, so you leave us no choice but to drive all the way out here.”

  In spite of his scowl, Jace wasn’t really pissed. Reese was his only close cousin, and they’d been raised more like brothers. They’d been buddies and partners in crime since they were in diapers. They’d gone to school together, kindergarten through twelfth grade, and attended the same university. When a shoulder injury had ended Reese’s pro baseball career, he’d gone into law enforcement in part because Jace was doing it.

  Now Reese was the sheriff hereabouts…and Jace was a disgraced ex-cop.

  Though he hadn’t invited them in, Neely nudged him aside and crossed the threshold. “We come bearing mail and food, and we’re staying for dinner.” Retrieving a rubber-banded packet of letters from the bag, she handed them over, then continued to the kitchen.

  Stepping back so Reese could enter, too, Jace thumbed through the mail sent in care of his folks. Bills for the necessities of life—electric, gas, cell phone, car insurance. He didn’t have to pay rent because he and Reese had inherited this place when their grandfather died. He’d never relied on plastic much even in Kansas City, and had even less use for it holed up out here. His only other expenses were groceries and an occasional tank of gas, plus his one luxury—satellite TV. A man had to do something day after day.

  Reese left the grocery sack in the kitchen, then helped himself to a beer from the refrigerator—fair enough, since he’d brought them the last time he’d visited. After brushing his hand against Neely’s shoulder, he returned to the living room and dropped into a chair. “What have you been up to?”

  Jace shrugged. “The usual.”

  “Exciting life,” Reese said, his tone as dry as the Sahara in summer.

  “I’m not looking for excitement.” Truth was, he wasn’t looking for anything, and he wasn’t sure that would ever change. For as long as he could remember, all he’d ever wanted to be was a cop. Since he couldn’t be that anymore, he didn’t have a clue what he could be.

  “You give any thought to coming to work for the sheriff’s department?”

  “Nope.”

  “You give any thought to anything?” Now there was an irritated edge to Reese’s voice that had appeared somewhere around the tenth or twentieth time they’d had this conversation. Reese thought Jace had had plenty of time to get his life back on track, and he wouldn’t accept that Jace’s only plans for the future dealt with sleeping, eating and fishing. He didn’t believe Jace could walk away from being a cop.

  The hell of it was, Jace couldn’t even accuse him of not understanding, because Reese had been through it before. All he’d ever wanted to do was to play baseball, and he’d lived the dream—made it to the big leagues—then had it taken away from him.

  But Reese had found something else he wanted—two other things, Jace amended with a glance at Neely. The only thing Jace wanted was for life to go back to the way it had been a year ago. And since he couldn’t turn back the clock…

  “You looking for an answer that doesn’t suck or just ignoring me?” Reese asked.

  “I think about a lot of things.” But being a cop again wasn’t one of them.

  Reese watched him for a moment, his gaze narrowed, then apparently decided to drop the matter for the tim
e being. “Whose red car is that out there?”

  “Her name’s Cassidy McRae. She’s renting Junior’s cabin.”

  “Oh, yeah, I heard about her from Paulette.”

  “What did you hear?” Jace could find out anything he wanted to know about his neighbor with a little effort. But he knew from experience it was better to keep Reese’s mind on something other than him, or the conversation would inevitably drift back to old discussions they were both tired of having.

  “Not much. She’s from Alabama, she’s a writer, and she’s working on a book. Wanted someplace quiet where she wouldn’t be bothered.”

  Alabama, huh? That wasn’t a Southern accent he’d heard this morning. But living someplace at the present time didn’t mean she’d been born there. He’d lived nearly half his life in Kansas City even though he’d been born and raised right here in Canyon County. Most of the people he knew had gotten where they were from someplace else.

  What kind of book was she writing and why had she come all the way to Oklahoma to do it? Surely she had an office at home where she wouldn’t be bothered. And why did she have Arizona tags on her car if she was from Alabama?

  He let the aromas from the kitchen distract him for a moment. Tomatoes, onions, beef and cheese…his mother’s lasagna. For an Osage married to an Okie, Rozena made damn good lasagna. That for supper, along with leftovers for tomorrow, was worth putting up with Reese’s bitching.

  “Want to eat inside or out?” Neely asked, standing in the kitchen doorway with plates and silverware. When both men shrugged, she made the decision by heading for the door. She returned for a clean sheet from the linen closet, disappeared again, then came back once more for a bowl of salad. “Why don’t you invite your neighbor over for dinner?”

  Oh, yeah, that would go over well with Ms. I’m-not-here-to-make-small-talk-with-the-neighbors. Dinner with said neighbor, his cousin the sheriff, and his cousin-by-marriage, who would need only one look at her to start visions of matchmaking dancing through her head.