Russell smiled at me in a way that made me want to lie down on my back and open my arms to him.
“You’re good for my ego, Miss Maxwell.”
“Jackie,” I said, trying to stay upright. I made myself look back at the camera. “Okay, I’ll keep your secrets but I need to know all of them.” I was trying to be lighthearted, sophisticated even. I fiddled with the zoom lens, making it go in and out, then flipped the switch to screen view and looked at the few photos he’d taken. All landscapes, all perfect.
After a while he looked back at the roses and I relaxed.
“I wrote a bad review of one of Dessie’s shows,” he said. “I earn a little money on the side from writing reviews, and I wrote an honest opinion, but no one in Cole Creek has ever forgiven me.”
I didn’t do a little dance of joy, but I wanted to. It was, of course, downright mean-spirited of me to want Dessie to get a bad review, but still…
“That’s it? The town dislikes you because you gave a bad review to one of its citizens?” I asked, looking up at him.
He gave me a little one-sided smile that nearly made my socks curl off my feet. If I were in a Disney film, bluebirds would have flown down and plucked at my silk gown.
“That and the fact that I’m an outsider who knows they crushed a woman to death,” he said.
I nearly dropped the camera. If I’d fallen off a cliff I probably would have held whatever camera I had protectively to me, but what Russell said nearly made me drop that beautiful instrument.
“Shocked?” he asked, looking at me hard, but all I could do was nod. “Shocked at what I said or shocked that I know?”
“Know,” I said, and my voice was so hoarse I had to clear it.
He seemed to study me for a moment before he finally looked away. “Let me guess. Newcombe got wind of the story somehow, but when he asked questions, no one in Cole Creek knew anything about it.”
I was ready to run away with this man, certainly to have a mad affair with him, but I wasn’t ready to reveal what I’d found out since I’d arrived in this town. If I did that, I might slip and start telling him about my visions and that I remembered too many things. I decided to say as little as possible about what I knew.
“Exactly,” I said. “Miss Essie Lee.”
Russell smiled. “Ah, yes. The inimitable Miss Essie Lee. She was there, you know. She heaped stones on that poor woman.”
I tried to stay calm. I’d read newspaper accounts of horrible things happening, hadn’t I? But my stomach lurched at the thought of having been near someone who had done such a vile thing. “Was anyone prosecuted?” I managed to ask.
“No. Everything was hushed up.”
I asked the question that Ford loved so much:“Why? Why would they do such a thing?”
Russell shrugged. “Jealousy would be my guess. Amarisa was loved by many people—and hated by a few.”
“Amarisa?” I asked.
“The woman who was crushed. I met her when I was just a kid and I thought she was very nice. She…Are you sure you want to hear this?”
“Yes,” I said. I set down the camera, drew my knees to my chest, and prepared to listen.
“Amarisa’s brother, Reece Landreth, came to Cole Creek to run a small factory that made pottery. There’s a lot of good clay around here and tourists were coming into the area so I guess the owners thought it would be a good business to get into. Reece opened the factory and hired some locals to work in it. The trouble came about because the prettiest girl in town was a Cole—”
“One of the founding families.”
“Yes,” Russell said. “Harriet Cole. She was young and beautiful, and Edward Belcher wanted to marry her. I remember him, too. He was a pompous bore. But Ms. Cole wanted to get out of Cole Creek, so she latched onto a man who was free to move around.”
“The young and handsome potter.”
He was silent for a moment. “Did I mention ‘young and handsome’?”
“Must have heard it somewhere,” I mumbled, cursing myself for giving too much away.
“Anyway,” he said, “the problem was that after Harriet and Reece were married, he found out she was the town bitch, and she made his life hell. The irony was that she’d married him to get away from Cole Creek, but afterward she refused to leave her parents. By the time poor Reece found out his wife wouldn’t leave the town, they had a daughter he was mad about, so he was trapped.”
I didn’t say anything. There was no reason whatever for me to believe that I was that daughter. Because my memories fit the story exactly wasn’t enough evidence. “How did Reece’s sister, Amarisa, fit into all this?” I asked.
“Her husband had died and left her well off, but she was alone, so when her brother asked her to move to Cole Creek, she gladly accepted. I remember hearing my mother—who despised Harriet Cole—say that Amarisa knew her brother was in trouble so his rich sister came to Cole Creek to bail him out. And it was true that by the time Amarisa got here, the pottery works had gone out of business and Reece was working for his father-in-law. My mother used to say that Reece worked fourteen hours a day, but old Abraham Cole stole all the profits.”
“So Amarisa saved her brother,” I said.
“Yes. Amarisa supported her brother and his little family.” Pausing for a moment, Russell looked at me. “But the problem wasn’t money. The problem was that everyone in town liked Amarisa. She was a lovely woman. She listened to people and, as a result, they told her their secrets.”
When he didn’t say any more, I looked at him. “Do you think she knew too many secrets?”
Russell began to clear away the food. “I don’t know exactly what happened, but I do remember hearing my mother say that people in Cole Creek were jealous of Amarisa and it was causing problems.”
“So they killed her out of jealousy,” I said. Even if I didn’t know the details, I could imagine the strong emotions.
“That’s what my mother said,” Russell said. “One night she was crying hysterically, ‘They killed her! They killed her!’ I was in bed pretending to be asleep but I heard it all. The next day my father put my mother and me in the car and we left our home, never to return.”
I felt a tightening of my skin. I had a kinship with this man. I, too, had been bundled up and taken away from my home. Only I had also been taken away from my mother. Had she been Harriet Cole, the “town bitch”?
“But you came back to Cole Creek for visits.”
“After my mother died when I was eleven,” Russell said softly, “my dad and I returned here for visits. Not often and we never stayed in the old house. I don’t know why. Maybe it had too many memories for him. I do know that my mother was never the same after that night when she came home crying.” He was silent for a moment, and when he looked at me, his eyes were dark with pain. “I think that on that night they killed my mother as well as Amarisa. It just took my mother longer to die.”
We sat in an intimate silence for a while, and I’m not sure what would have happened if it hadn’t started raining. Never in my life had I met anyone who’d been through what I had. I’d been younger than Russell when I’d “lost” my mother, but we shared the trauma of having been whisked away from everything we knew.
But perhaps what really bound us together was that maybe we had been through the same tragedy. Maybe Amarisa’s death—murder—had disrupted both our lives.
We sat on the tablecloth, watching the fading light on the roses, saying nothing, thinking our own thoughts, but when the first raindrops fell, we went into action. Protect the equipment! was an unspoken command. I grabbed my yellow poncho out of my bag as Russell grabbed a blue one out of his. We tossed the big ponchos over our heads and clutched our precious equipment to our bosoms.
When we looked out the head holes and saw each other, we began to laugh. The canvas bag containing what was left of the food (not much) was in the rain, and Russell had a jacket slung across the bench—but our camera equipment was safe and dry.
Scooting over to me, he raised the front end of his poncho, then lifted mine so that we were sitting under a little tent, our bags of equipment between us. The rain was coming down hard, pelting the plastic over the top of us, but it was cozy and dry inside our little tent. Too cozy, actually.
“I want you to take these and play with them,” Russell said, holding out the little camera and the tiny printer. The camera had five million pixels. Gee. Funny how your scruples disappear when something becomes free. Had I been disdainful of digital photography merely because I couldn’t afford a digital camera?
“I couldn’t. Really,” I began, but he was slipping both items into my bag.
“It’s just a loan.” He was smiling, and at this close range I could smell his breath. Flowers would be jealous. “Besides, to get them back I’ll have to see you again.”
Looking down at my bag of camera equipment, I tried to smile demurely. What I really wanted to do was tattoo my address and phone number across his upper thigh. “Okay,” I said after what I hoped was a suitable interval.
“That is, if you’re sure there’s nothing going on between you and Newcombe.”
“Nothing whatever,” I said, grinning. I didn’t add that there might have been, but Ford had dropped me the second he saw Miss Dessie’s cleavage. And her talent, I thought. I didn’t want to be fair, but I was cursed with the ability to see both sides of a problem.
Russell peeked out of the ponchos. The rain didn’t seem to be letting up. “I think we better go or we’ll be caught in the dark.”
Wouldn’t that be a tragedy? I wanted to say, but didn’t. I was feeling a bit frantic that we hadn’t exchanged telephone numbers, but I didn’t want to appear anxious.
Russell solved the problem by opening a pocket on the side of his bag and removing a couple of cards and a pen. “Could I possibly persuade you to give me your telephone number?” he asked.
I would have said that I’d give him the number of my bank account, but I’d done that with Kirk and look what had happened. Oh, well, that was water under the bridge. I wrote the phone number for the house I shared with Ford on the back of one of the cards, but before I handed it to him, I turned the card over and looked at it. “Russell Dunne” and a telephone number in the lower left corner was all that was on the card. I looked up at him in puzzlement.
He understood my unspoken question. “When I had them printed, I was about to move and I couldn’t decide whether to put my new address or my old one on it.” He shrugged in a way that I found endearing. “Ready?” he asked. “I think we should try to get out of here while we can.”
If we couldn’t spend the night together, I guess I’d have to follow him to wherever he was going. Minutes later we were on the trail, heads down against the driving rain, camera equipment safe under our ponchos, mud clinging to our shoes. Somewhere along the way, I told myself that I needed to ask him what his address now was. Was he staying nearby? Or had he driven here all the way from Raleigh? When would he return to his job and his real life?
But the rain and our fast pace kept me from asking anything. I just kept my head down and followed him, watching his heels, not looking ahead, and having no idea of the direction he was taking to get us out of there.
After a while we came to pavement, but it was still raining too hard for me to look up. It was odd that even though I’d just met this man, I had complete faith that he knew where he was going. I followed him as though I were a child with its father, unquestioning.
When he halted, I almost ran into the back of him, and when I did look up, I was surprised to see that we were in front of Ford’s house. The rain was making such a racket that I knew we couldn’t talk. I looked up at Russell and made a gesture for him to come inside for something warm to drink.
Lifting his poncho-covered arm, he pointed to where a wristwatch went, and shook his head. Then he used his finger to do a pantomime of tears running down his cheeks and sniffed. Like most people, I hated mimes, but he was making me change my opinion.
Turning the corners of my mouth down, I imitated great sadness. Pretended to imitate. Actually, I wanted to take him inside, tell Ford I’d found him in the forest, and could I keep him? Pretty please?
Smiling, Russell leaned forward, put his beautiful face inside the hood of my poncho and kissed my cheek. Then he turned and was gone from my sight in seconds.
For a moment I stood there looking into the mist of the rain and sighing. What an extraordinary day, I thought. What a truly extraordinary day.
Turning, I went down the path, up the porch stairs, and into the house. Like something in a 1950s teen movie, I floated up the stairs. I just wanted to take a hot bath, put on dry clothes, and dream about Russell Dunne.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Ford
I’m sure a psychic experience in which you see a couple of little kids go up in flame wasn’t what a normal person would label as “fun.” But saving those children had been.
Sometimes Jackie had a way of looking at me that made me feel like I could solve all the world’s problems. At other times, she made me feel old and decrepit. Whatever she thought of me as a physical specimen, she certainly looked surprised when I grabbed her backpack and mine and headed back down the trail. It was easier going on the return because, if nothing else, the cobwebs had been cleared away.
Then there was the ride in the truck. As we bounced along the trail, the look on her face reminded me of something my cousin Noble liked to do. He was blessed—or cursed as one of my female cousins said—by not having the Newcombe looks. In other words, Noble had a face girls love. He’d go into town, do his “shy-little-me act” as a cousin called it, and a girl would inevitably sashay over to him. Noble would eventually treat her to a “Newcombe special” which was a fast pickup ride across deep ruts. Afterward, he’d come home and entertain us all with vivid accounts of the indignation and fear of the girls.
Back then I never appreciated the humor or the appeal in what Noble did. I’d always wanted to spend time with a town girl—namely, one who wasn’t likely to give birth at sixteen—but my looks and my shyness didn’t attract those twinset-clad girls with their perfect pageboy hair and single strands of pearls. It wasn’t until I was at college and away from the stigma of the Newcombe family that one of those girls paid any attention to me. When I met Pat she was wearing a sky blue twinset, a darker blue skirt, and a strand of creamy white pearls. “Fake,” she told me later, laughing when I asked her to leave the pearls on while we made love.
On that day when I was driving the truck across the ruts, I finally understood why Noble had so loved scaring those town girls. Jackie’s face bore a combination of fear and excitement that did things to me in a sexual way. She looked at me in horror, true, but she also looked at me as though I were a magician, a race car driver, and a rescuing hero all in one.
After the exhilarating experience of saving the kids was added to the thrill of the drive, I don’t know what would have happened if Dessie hadn’t shown up. While Jackie and I had bought pizza and beer, my mind was tumbling all over itself with images of a naked Jackie with little rings of black olives scattered over her nude body. I could imagine myself drinking beer and trying to decide which delectable little ring I was going to eat next.
I was trying to figure out how I was going to make this vision a reality when we arrived home and Dessie was standing there waiting.
Since the last time I’d seen her and she’d unveiled the sculptures, I’d had some time to think and—Well, okay, Jackie’s sarcastic, albeit painfully true, remarks had dimmed some of the stars in my eyes. Maybe it hadn’t been so tasteful of Dessie to unveil a statue of a man’s beloved, deceased wife in front of guests. And, yes, Jackie was right that that sort of thing pretty much always produced tears. I didn’t, however, agree when Jackie said, “Especially in someone as soft and sentimental as you are.” That didn’t sound very masculine, so I protested. Then she pointed out that I had written some books that were “pret
ty weepy.”
Okay, so she had me. Jackie had a way of seeing to the heart of a matter, which was a good thing. But, sometimes, I really wished she’d keep her mouth shut about what she saw.
By the time I was to leave for Dessie’s house on Sunday, I wanted to call her and tell her I wouldn’t be able to make it. At breakfast Jackie made a remark about which of the little statues that Tessa and I had bought Dessie would replace first. I was determined not to let Jackie see what was in my mind, so I began reading the nutritional content on the back of the box of that cereal she eats. “Amazing,” I said. “This stuff has more vitamins and minerals than three of those green pills you take.” I’d read the label on those, too.
When Jackie narrowed her eyes at me, I knew she knew I was avoiding her comment.
The night before, Dessie had stayed until a little after midnight. I’d had to give a couple of huge yawns to get her to leave. Of course I knew what she wanted. She was after a trip to my bedroom.
But I couldn’t do it. A couple of hours before I’d been lusting after Jackie, and I wasn’t the kind of man who could change from one woman to another in the course of an evening.
Besides, Jackie made me laugh. Her sarcasm and black humor nearly always amused me. When I was around Jackie I felt alert, and as though something exciting was about to happen. Jackie was interested in things in the same way I had been before Pat died. I was finding Jackie’s photography fascinating, and I had a good time when she invited people over.
So I sat there that night and tried my best to talk to Dessie, but I couldn’t seem to get into it. For one thing, the conversation always seemed to go back to her and her sculpture. If I mentioned a movie, that would lead to her remembering some movie that was the inspiration for a bronze she’d made for some really famous man. “Not as famous as you are,” she said as she looked over her wineglass at me.
Of course I knew she was hinting that I buy a bronze from her. But that didn’t bother me. What bothered me was that she didn’t ask a word about what Jackie and I had been doing when we’d called and asked for her help. Wasn’t she curious about why we’d needed to find a specific house, and why we’d had to find it fast? But Dessie never mentioned the incident.
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