Ritual Sins

by Anne Stuart

  She cried out again against his mouth, as a second orgasm tore through her, and he was helpless to resist the pull of her body, the pull of her soul. He surrendered to it, coming inside the tight pulsing need of her, and his last conscious thought was that he had just made the worst mistake of his life.

  She couldn’t walk when he released her, and he had to brace her against the wet metal side of the van until she could pull herself together. He understood the feeling. His own legs were shaky, and it had nothing to do with physical exertion and everything to do with sex.

  Rachel closed her eyes, leaning against the trailer, her face tipped up toward the rain. At least this time she didn’t cry. She probably didn’t have any tears left after that bout in the back of the van. He waited until it looked as if her knees wouldn’t collapse under her, and then he pulled up his jeans and zipped them, ignoring the fact that he was already half-hard again just from watching her face.

  “Get back in the van and get your clothes on,” he said in a low, flat voice. “You’ll catch your death out here.”

  She opened her eyes to look at him. “It’s not cold.”

  “Get your goddamned clothes on,” he said. “Or get on your hands and knees in the mud and we’ll try it that way.”

  She slammed the door behind her. He reached for his cigarettes again, but they were squashed, and besides, he didn’t really want them. He tossed them into the underbrush with a muttered curse, and rubbed his back. It was sore, and he could feel scratch marks. Claw marks. And he grinned a small, sour grin.

  He gave her five minutes before opening the van door again. She was sitting in the front seat, her T-shirt and the bra she didn’t need back in place, her jeans tightly fastened. He climbed in beside her, turning to roll down the window and let some of the steam out, when he heard her horrified gasp.

  He glanced back at her out of hooded eyes. “What’s wrong?”

  “What happened to your back?”

  He didn’t think she could still be that naive. “You did, sugar.”

  “Oh,” she said in a small, shocked voice.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said in a calm voice. “I like it.” He reached down and started the old van. “So where am I taking you?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “You always have a choice,” he said lazily. “I can take you back to your car. You can even run in and tell Esther what I did, and I bet she’d get me with a shotgun before I could get away. Course there’d be a big scandal, but apart from everyone knowing you had sex in a swamp with me I think you’d survive. I wouldn’t, but that would suit you just fine, now wouldn’t it?”

  “It wouldn’t get me my mother’s money.”

  He grinned. “Good point. You got to keep your priorities straight. Money’s more important than my head on a platter any old day.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Or I can take you up to Mobile and put you on a plane.”

  “You forgot my rental car. With my purse and my credit cards.”

  “Coltrane can see to that.”

  “I think I’d rather get there under my own steam.”

  “Then again, you can come with me.”

  “Where?”

  “The next town over. Thirty miles away, with a big, fancy, discreet motel with big beds and dirty movies on the television, I could continue your sexual education.” He glanced at her, half expecting her to start screaming at him.

  He’d underestimated her. “No, thank you,” she said, sounding like an aristocratic bitch, just like her horny mother. “I think I’ve learned enough for one day.”

  He shrugged. “It’s up to you. Anytime you feel like experimenting …”

  “I’ll come right down to Santa Dolores and ask for you,” she supplied sweetly.

  “I bet you would.” He muttered it, half to himself, rousing himself enough to be amused by the very notion. He could just imagine what the Grandfathers would do. Calvin would shit a brick.

  The dirt road was a mass of rain-filled potholes. He drove carefully enough, when he really wanted to slam his foot down on the accelerator. Or the brake. In the misty post-storm light she looked pale and drained. The rain had washed the tears from her face, and she’d managed to finger-comb her short hair into some semblance of neatness. If it weren’t for the spectacular love bite on the base of her throat you might never know what she’d just been doing.

  She’d hate that hickey when she saw it. At the moment she was too worn out to hate him, but that would come back again as well. With luck he’d scared her away for good. But the way his luck had been running lately, he could expect more disaster to follow in her wake.

  They were already at the edge of town, driving past the old graveyard. He glanced at his mother’s grave automatically, then kept driving. “You put flowers on my mama’s grave yesterday.”

  She didn’t say anything, and he didn’t expect her to. He didn’t bother asking why she hadn’t put any on Jackson’s. She knew things without asking, without listening to whatever lie he felt like telling her.

  “Let me off here,” she said suddenly. They were a block away from Esther’s old house, and even from that distance he could smell the dank, lifeless air in the polished hallways.

  “Why?”

  “I have an aversion to the sight of blood,” she said.

  “You don’t want her to kill me?”

  “I don’t want to watch.”

  “Careful, Rachel. I might start thinking you had feelings for me.”

  She looked at him, her eyes still and calm, her mouth swollen from his. “Oh, I have feelings for you, all right, Luke Bardell.”

  “But you think cold-blooded murder is a sin?” he suggested.

  She shook her head. “No,” she said. “Just in poor taste.”

  She managed to surprise a laugh out of him. “Far be it from me to be déclassé enough to be murdered. Your mother would be horrified.”

  He didn’t miss the sudden blankness in her face as he pulled the truck to a stop. “Maybe she wouldn’t be that surprised,” she said. And she slid out of the cab of the truck before he could stop her.

  He was half-tempted to go after her, but Esther was already standing in her doorway, peering down the street with those nasty little eyes of hers. Good thing she was nearsighted and too damned vain to wear glasses. He probably could have walked Rachel to the front door after all.

  What the hell had she meant by that? Stella had died of cancer spreading like wildfire through her body. He couldn’t remember whether she was one of those who’d asked to be helped at the end. He doubted it—she hadn’t been in much pain, and Stella had been nothing if not strong-willed. She wouldn’t have shuffled off this mortal coil a moment before she had to.

  Why did Rachel think there was more to it? Was it part of her bizarre need to destroy him, so that she’d think him capable of anything? Or had someone been filling her with doubts and lies, feeding her anger and distrust?

  She wouldn’t listen to Esther—she was too smart for that. And everyone at Santa Dolores worshiped him to a nauseating extent. Except, perhaps, Catherine Biddle. But even though she tempered her adoration with a refreshing cynicism, he had no doubt she was as devout a follower as anyone.

  It must just be some sick fantasy on Rachel’s part. Part of her need to reclaim her mother, and cast him as the villain. She was going to have an unsettling time in the next few days, coming to terms with the fact that he’d gotten her in bed and made her enjoy it. With any luck it might drive her away completely. It was what he’d hoped for, planned for. That by giving her the royal screwing she so richly deserved, he’d finally get her off his back and send her screaming back to her safe, celibate little world.

  But something told him it wasn’t going to work out that way. As he watched her walk down the neatly trimmed sidewalks of Coffin’s Grove, he knew the battle was over. But the war was far from won.

  The van was a little big for a U-turn on the narrow residential streets
, but he didn’t give a shit. He drove up over one curb, knocking a trash can into the gutter, and drove off like a bat out of hell. He didn’t want to see Rachel and Esther together. He didn’t want to see Rachel again.

  Not until he made sense of his own tangled agenda.

  Not until he didn’t want her.

  Not until hell froze over.

  * * *

  The old woman was peering at her from the front door. The car was parked at the end of the walkway, where she’d left it the night before. The keys were in it, her purse lay on the passenger seat, her suitcase on the back. It wasn’t locked.

  Esther wasn’t the only one watching her. Heading down the highway with a rolling gait was Mayor Leroy Peltner in his rumpled white suit and impressive belly, and he was coming straight for her.

  She wondered whether she’d have time to dive into the car and get the hell away from them. Coward, she berated herself. Just because she felt stripped raw, vulnerable, didn’t mean she had to forget why she’d come.

  “Afternoon, Miz Rachel,” he said.

  “Hello, Mr. Peltner,” She kept her hand on the door handle, ready to move.

  “Leroy,” he corrected her, wiping his sweating brow with a crumpled white handkerchief. “Helluva storm we had a while ago. I was hoping you wouldn’t get caught in it. Us natives are used to it, but a Northern gal like yourself might run into trouble.”

  That was exactly what she’d run into out at the old Bardell place. The worst trouble she’d ever met in her twenty-nine years. “I was fine.”

  “Coltrane said he found your car abandoned out at the Bardell place, with no sign of you.”

  “He didn’t look very far.”

  “Hell, did you have to walk all the way back here?” He glanced at her wet hair, her dry clothes.

  “I got a ride.”

  “Who from, sugar?”

  She looked at him. “A nice man in a big black van.”

  “Now ain’t that sweet. I was plumb worried about you.”

  He was lying, and she knew it. He knew where she’d been as well as Coltrane did. He probably knew what she was doing. Her face felt flushed, but she kept her expression calm and innocent. “You were going to tell me about Luke Bardell, Leroy,” she reminded him, leaning against her rain-slick car. Even with the sun out the water still beaded heavily on the finish, soaking into her cotton clothes. She didn’t care.

  Leroy blinked. “I was? I can’t imagine what I was gonna say, missy. We’re proud of our native son. He’s proof positive that there’s redemption in all of us.”

  “What did he need to be redeemed from, Leroy?”

  “We’re all sinners, Rachel,” he said serenely.

  “What’s going on out there?” Esther called, peering nearsightedly down the walkway.

  “I’ve got a plane to catch,” Rachel said, pulling open the car door. “If you’ll excuse me, Mayor, I need to get going.”

  He stared at her, obviously torn between delight and the dictates of proper social behavior. “You sure I can’t talk you into staying a few more days?” He sounded less than eager.

  “I think Luke’s accomplished what he wanted,” she said, climbing into the driver’s seat. “Check with him if you don’t think it’s okay to let me leave.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, sugar,” he protested, sweating even more profusely.

  “You don’t really have any deep dark secrets to tell me, do you?” she said. “You’re just trying to keep me distracted so I won’t find out anything.”

  “There’s nothing to find out. We’re a clean-living, God-fearing town,” Leroy said.

  “Does Esther know that Luke’s really your good buddy? She’s a mean old lady—I bet she wouldn’t think twice about taking a shotgun to you and Sheriff Coltrane if she thought you were in league with the devil.”

  Leroy looked like he wanted to vomit. “You’ve been out in the sun too long …”

  “It’s been raining,” she said. “Think about your sins, Leroy. And watch out for Esther.” And she took off into the late afternoon with a satisfying squeal of her tires.

  17

  It was late, and he should have been bone-tired. But all Luke could think of was Rachel. The way she looked, the way she smelled, the strange, choking noise she made when she cried. The way she screamed when she came, ripping into the skin on his back like a wild woman.

  He was almost ready to get the hell out of Coffin’s Grove, this time for good. He’d already taken care of Leroy and Coltrane. They were ready to forget they’d ever known him, hadn’t seen him in over a dozen years. Which suited him just fine.

  He supposed, when it came right down to it, he was a forgiving man. Maybe the messiah business was wearing off on him. He never used to be softhearted, to think about anyone but himself.

  There were very few people in the town of Coffin’s Grove who’d ever given a rat’s ass about him. Most of them had known about Jackson Bardell, but no one had done anything to help him. He’d been trash, a motherless child who sassed the adults, stole when no one was looking, and deserved every beating he ever got.

  Coltrane had kept an eye out for him. So had sweet Lureen, who’d initiated him into the joys of sex at age fifteen. There were a few others who’d worried, who’d tried to do something, but mostly they’d just wrung their hands and let him hurt.

  And he was leaving their goddamned town with enough money to keep the city coffers solvent, the tax rate low, and cushion life a bit for the likes of Lureen.

  Hell, he was an absolute savior, he thought with a sour grin. He was even letting an old troublemaker like Leroy Peltner benefit, when it had been Leroy himself who wanted Luke sent to a juvenile detention center when he was caught stealing cigarettes from Peltner’s general store. He was headed for prison, Leroy had always said. Might as well get him started.

  But there was one person left in Coffin’s Grove who wasn’t going to benefit from Luke’s ill-gotten gains. One vicious old lady who wasn’t going to get one goddamned thing.

  He liked his money easily transportable. He had money scattered in various bank accounts in Switzerland, stashes of bearer bonds and hundred-dollar bills piled in various obscure places near the Retreat Center. Calvin had his own stash as well, which Luke kept supplementing. Calvin had been the only one he ever trusted, and he figured he owed him.

  He owed Esther Blessing as well. She’d buried three husbands, and they were all probably relieved to get away from her. Harry Blessing had run the local hardware store, and rumor had it he liked to look at pictures of naked children, so Luke figured they were a worthy match. He was still alive when Luke made his first return visit to Coffin’s Grove. And it had seemed somehow fitting to stash two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of bearer bonds in the crawl space beneath Esther Blessing’s old house.

  He had to be careful, knowing the old lady’s penchant for cleaning everything. But over the years, when he’d made his surreptitious visits back, the initial stash was always untouched, hidden beneath the house, and each year he added to it.

  It was still there when he came for it that night. In the darkness Luke could hear the television blaring, but to his amazement it sounded like the news. Esther had never listened to anything more mentally taxing than game shows, unless she thought she was going to hear something gory.

  The lights were odd too. The downstairs was pitch-black, when he knew for a fact that Esther was paranoid enough to leave lights burning. There was a light in her bedroom, but none in the bathroom.

  He still hated Esther with a childish passion that he’d never outgrown. More because of the way she treated his mama than the pain she’d inflicted on him. He hadn’t done anything about it, afraid that his rage went so deep he wouldn’t be able to control himself, and the idea of strangling an old lady didn’t sit well. He was going to kill again, he knew it, deep inside, no matter how much he tried to deny it. He didn’t want to, but it was going to happen, one more time.

&n
bsp; He just wanted to avoid situations where he’d be sorely tempted.

  But the house was too strange. Esther paced at night, but he could see no sign of her wizened old body at any of the windows.

  It was easy enough to get back into the house the same way he had just last night. He moved through the rooms silently, unerringly aware of every little gewgaw and knickknack she had littering the place.

  Despite the noise of the television the house felt still as death. He moved like a ghost, through the rooms where Esther had pinched him and slapped him and beat him, and ignored the cold sweat that crept between his shoulder blades.

  He saw her silhouetted in her huge old bed, propped up against the pillows. He was ready to disappear, back into the shadows, when something struck him. She wasn’t hacking and coughing.

  He moved into the doorway, and she didn’t turn. She was facing the TV, her frizzy gray hair standing up all over her head. For a moment he thought, he hoped, she was dead. But he saw the rise and fall of her shallow chest, the clutching movements of one clawlike hand, and he knew she was still alive. At least partially.

  He walked into the room then, directly into her line of vision. She didn’t move, but her eyes grew dark with silent rage. She must have had a massive stroke. He could see her life draining away even as he stood there, even as she tried to summon the ability to speak.

  “What’s wrong, Esther?” he murmured. “Aren’t you happy to see your long-lost grandson?”

  Her mouth worked, but no words came out.

  “Well, never you mind,” he said. “There wasn’t any love lost between the two of us, was there? I was kind of hoping I’d be able to get some revenge, but it looks like fate has already taken care of it for me. Even if you recover from this stroke, another one will hit you, sooner or later, carrying you off. You’re a dead woman, Esther. And there’s not a damned thing you can do about it.”