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No Limits

Page 14

by Alison Kent


  “Meaning, neither one remembered what happened.”

  “And Bear wasn’t going to buy an amnesia defense. The only thing he considered reasonable doubt was who poured the gasoline and who lit the match.”

  She pulled up her legs to cross them. “Do you think neither one really remembered, or one didn’t want to confess and the other didn’t want to rat him out? I mean, you said Simon’s a pretty straight-up guy.”

  “And King might be a little more questionable?”

  “Yeah, well, straight-up isn’t exactly an adjective I’d use to describe him. I’m not saying he’s a criminal at heart, no matter his record, but, well, you know.”

  Terrill knew. He wished he didn’t. But King Trahan was almost as familiar with the workings of the sheriff’s department as Terrill himself. “To tell you the truth, I doubt anyone but Simon and King will ever know the truth, and since both did their time, I don’t see how it really matters anymore.”

  “Except for the fact that they’re finally here in the same place after all these years. You’d think they could let it go, bygones being bygones and all that.”

  Terrill didn’t have anything to add and really had no investment in whether the cousins ever kissed and made up. The two had been a source of gossip for years, the mysterious fire one more element feeding local curiosity. Had any families ever suffered as much as the Baptistes and Trahans and not provided a town with fodder for years?

  “I guess all families have to deal with their baggage in their own way,” he finally said, getting back to work.

  “How are you dealing?” she asked after a couple of minutes spent watching him. “Not with baggage, just with things?”

  He wasn’t eating, was barely sleeping, turning into a grieving cliché. But he wasn’t lying down and giving up. He was working it, living and breathing it. He knew Lisa was waiting for him to find her, to come get her and take her home. And that tore at his heart like nothing else, leaving him feeling like 180 pounds of raw meat.

  What he said to Paschelle was, “Not great, but it could be a whole lot worse.”

  She nodded toward the table. “Are the boxes helping? Or are they mostly trips down memory lane?”

  “My memory doesn’t go back as far as some of this stuff, but there is a lot here that I’d forgotten about. My kindergarten award for perfect attendance. A book of coupons I made Bear for Father’s Day one year.” He snorted softly. “None of them redeemed.”

  “Save them. Give them to your son and you can redeem them for him.”

  He loved the idea, the hope for the future it gave him, the assumption that he would have a son, that Lisa would return soon and safely, that they could get back to the discussion they’d been having the night before she’d vanished about how much longer they wanted to wait before starting a family, and whether or not they wanted to do it here.

  He stuck the coupon book in his shirt pocket, pushing away the fleeting thought that he’d never have need of it. It was Bear’s voice in his ear, hurtful and negative, a voice Terrill had heard often as a child but thought as an adult he had learned to ignore.

  He needed to go back to work, move away from this past that Lisa had found fascinating, but that gave him a burning and heavy heart. “I’ve got to get to the office, but I’ll probably be over again tonight.”

  Paschelle hopped down, dusted her hands over the back of her skirt. “No problem. I can even throw dinner together if you’d like.”

  “That’s too much trouble,” he said, folding in the box flaps, then stopping as a loose piece of parchment caught on one corner fluttered to the garage floor.

  “It’s no trouble at all. Trust me. I have to eat anyway, and fixing enough for two doesn’t take any more time and effort than fixing enough for one.”

  Terrill knew she was saying something and he was probably supposed to respond. He had no mind for anything but the document in his hand, the one that didn’t explain everything in clear-cut details, but sure as hell raised his eyebrows and gave him enough of a charge that he knew he’d found exactly what he’d been looking for—a solid place to start.

  He opened the box back up. He even pulled up a folding chair. “On second thought, food sounds good, since it looks like I’ll be here a while. Just be warned that I’m a starving man and might eat you out of house and home.”

  For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

  —Matthew 6:21

  Like the code sheet pointing to the words in the Bible that spelled out the treasure’s location, the newspaper story alone wasn’t telling. A man’s body had been found. The sheriff’s department in a neighboring parish had asked for the public’s assistance with the identification. He had a remarkable tattoo on his chest and a uniquely shaped wound from the assault that had cost him his life. They were hoping someone would recognize one or the other and come forward.

  After discovering the existence of the gold, I dug up what I could about coins, trinkets, and historical artifacts found in the area. One coin that everyone seemed to remember and was mentioned several times belonged to Harlan Baptiste. He carried it everywhere, considered it a lucky charm.

  Unfortunately, his family’s luck was far removed from charming. They’d suffered more tragedies and disasters than anyone I’d ever known. According to Mr. DuPont down the street, Harlan Baptiste made sure the entire town of Bayou Allain knew once Simon and King graduated, he’d be hitting the road. He’d kept to his word and hadn’t been seen since.

  It was the sketch of the wound accompanying the article about the dead man that drew my attention, though it took days before I again ran across the photo with what I thought might be the murder weapon. I was curious why the judge would have saved the article when the others he’d clipped all referred to cases he’d been involved in.

  My mistake was to ask him about it. His reaction was the polar opposite of the joy he’d displayed when I’d shown him the letter from Ruth Callahan Landry. His hostility quickly turned to a mask of insult and hurt, but I’d seen the other before he’d squelched it.

  And then I saw the truth.

  Twenty-five

  “W ait here,” Simon said as he parked the truck. Heclimbed out, slamming the door hard enough to jar Micky’s arm. The stitched-up gash began to throb beneath the tape and gauze, and the pain guaranteed she wasn’t about to take orders to stay put. Not that she’d ever planned to. The minute she’d recognized Simon’s cousin on the steps, she’d glanced to the side to check out Simon’s reaction as he drove. It had not been pretty.

  She’d been thinking of him as a fictional hero, an ex-military man guarding bodies in Afghanistan before assigning himself to guard hers. He’d become her make-believe version of who he really was, the same way he’d known her face on a billboard. But watching him watching King proved him both human and vulnerable.

  He could’ve been a living rubber band, a coiled spring that breathed. She didn’t think she’d ever witnessed that much tension without it resulting in a volatile blast. She didn’t know King well, didn’t really know him at all. She’d only met him two nights ago, and their conversation had been short.

  Convicted felon or not, she didn’t have to know him to want to warn him of what was to come. She was the one who could see Simon’s knuckles as he gripped the steering wheel, the cords in his neck as he now held his chin high, the way his long dark lashes came down to hide the tempest in his eyes.

  It was when she looked from Simon to King that she realized she didn’t need to warn him of a thing. He knew what was coming. He’d been waiting. He was ready. Being here was his choice, one alpha wolf calling out another, one defending his territory from a challenger with the power to take it away.

  Simon hadn’t taken three steps before she opened her door. She saw him hesitate, but he didn’t turn or look back. She was on her own, and for the first time wondered if she was being reckless, if she should be scared.

  She was out of her element. A stranger in a strange land
. There were rules here, unspoken laws she had no idea existed. One wrong step and she might find herself in over her head, water rushing up to swallow her whole….

  She loved it. The adrenaline.

  The untamed beat of her heart.

  She had never felt more alive.

  “Kingdom,” Simon said when he was four feet from the porch.

  The other man pushed his body away from the steps and rolled to his feet, stepping down so they were on even ground. “Simon.”

  Micky wished for a video recorder, a phone with a digital camera; even a Polaroid would do. She wanted to capture the bravado that she knew in her heart wasn’t a show but the truth of each man. They were so similar in size, in stance, Simon a hair taller, King ropier, rangy. Simon darker. King bronzed.

  These two were the ones who deserved a billboard on East Houston Street. The thought of women unable to pass without shopping…what the cousins could do for Ferrer’s line of male fragrances…The heart of Micky’s creative genius began to race.

  “I didn’t know you knew the little lady here, cuz,” King said, inclining his head toward her, offering her a wink. “Nice to see you again, Michelina.”

  Micky’s, “Back atcha, Kingdom,” earned her a scowl from Simon, who told his cousin, “I’ve known her about as long as you have, cuz.”

  “Are you keeping her hostage here, or feeding her bread and water or something? Because when I last saw her, she wasn’t lookin’ this haggard and worn. Should treat a gorgeous woman better than that, Simon.”

  “I’ve been through a lot since you last saw me.” She opened her mouth again to explain about Lisa and the accident but only got as far as holding up her bandaged arm before Simon intervened.

  “She’s fine. She needs to get her packages out of the truck—”

  “I’ll be happy to get them for her,” King cut him off to say as he moved toward her.

  Simon blocked him before he took a second step. “She can get them herself.”

  Micky looked from one Neanderthal to the other. Neither one spared a glance for her. This time their posturing was too macho-macho man for her taste. Whatever issues had kept them at odds all these years, they could duke it out without using her as another point of conflict.

  She moved to stand between them and said to Simon, “I can get them myself, but I’m going to let you do that,” then turned to King and said, “If not for your cousin, there’s a good chance I wouldn’t even be alive to tell you that I don’t give a flying fig what you think about the way I look.”

  And then she walked up the steps and let the screen door slam in punctuation behind her.

  Twenty-six

  A t that moment, Simon couldn’t really care about hurting Micky’s feelings, but he was more than damn glad she had taken herself out of the way. He didn’t know his cousin anymore. He’d often thought he’d never known him at all. But he did know he wouldn’t be able to give his full attention to King with Micky around.

  “She said you saved her life.”

  Simon gave a single nod.

  “She get into some kind of trouble after leaving Red’s?”

  “She did.” He understood King’s curiosity. Micky wasn’t from around here. She didn’t fit in. But he didn’t have to like the other man’s attention.

  “And you just happened along to save her.”

  “She saved herself, but I was here when she needed me to be.”

  King gave that some consideration before asking, “What was she doing here?”

  “What business is that of yours?”

  “Did you know her already? Before you saved her life?”

  Enough. Micky was off-limits. Simon crossed his arms and faced his cousin directly. “Why are you here, King? Because if it’s to talk about Micky, you can go.”

  “Micky, huh? Not Ms. Ferrer? Or Michelina?” King’s mouth twisted into a nasty grin. “Staking your claim, cuz? Is that it?”

  Simon took a step toward the porch. “Go home, King. This isn’t getting either of us anywhere.”

  “You say that like we’ve got somewhere to go.”

  Simon kept walking, King calling after him, “What’s going on with Le Hasard?”

  Simon stopped, glanced back, hid the sense of loss he felt behind disinterest. “You’re the last person I expected to care.”

  “I don’t care,” King said, then shrugged. “I’m just asking.”

  “If anyone should be asking questions, it’s me. Not you.”

  King flung out both arms. “Then ask. It’s not like I’ve never been willing to talk. You’re the one who insisted we go through the lawyers for everything. Twenty years paying that retainer? I can see how that would turn your puss sour when you could’ve just picked up the phone. Of course, that wouldn’t have done a lot of good considering how many times my service has been cut for nonpayment.”

  That did it. Simon walked back down the steps. “You mean the ninety grand I sent you for the well workover you never did wasn’t enough to pay your phone bill?”

  “Is that why we stopped speaking? Because I misappropriated funds for the well?”

  Simon laughed humorlessly. “Boo, we stopped speaking long before you stole my money.”

  “Oh, right. That happened about the time you stole my land.”

  Simon hadn’t been given the deed until his father had been declared dead, seven years after he’d gone missing. “Look back further than that.”

  King rolled his eyes. “This can’t be about me making the touchdown that saved our asses from your butterfingers and won us state.”

  Yeah. That was it. “I haven’t thought about high school since, oh, high school. I moved on.”

  “I hear the army’s good about helping with that.”

  “You had the same choice I did.” Simon found himself grinding his jaw. This wasn’t getting them anywhere, but it was pretty much the way he’d seen their reunion going down.

  “You’re right. And I chose to stay close to home and keep an eye on the property your parents left to you.”

  “Making amends for burning what you could of Le Hasard to the ground?”

  “You still think I set that fire?”

  “I know it wasn’t me.”

  “We weren’t the only two there that night, boo. You were the one getting your pipes cleaned. You should remember.”

  Finally. He’d thought he was the only one not happy with Lorna’s involvement. “What reason could Lorna Savoy have possibly had for setting your house on fire?”

  “You tell me. And while you’re thinking up a reason, think up one to explain what she got out of testifying against us.” Then King added when Simon would have stopped him, “Besides immunity.”

  He had honestly put the whole incident behind him when he’d stepped off the bus into boot camp. Whether intended or not, Judge Terrill “Bear” Landry had given Simon the new life he would never have given himself—or recognized that he needed.

  If not for the choice to enlist or serve time, he would’ve stayed in Bayou Allain, carrying on in his father’s footsteps, working to make a go of the four thousand acres his mother’s family had owned.

  The obligation had hung over both him and King, yet King had been the one to come back, while Simon—the sole legal owner of Le Hasard—had paid the taxes and financed the improvements King’s income couldn’t meet.

  It should have been the perfect and equitable setup, each cousin doing his part to keep the place in the family. Simon had never examined too closely his need to put what distance he could between himself and his Louisiana roots. So, no. Until coming here to settle the past, he’d never thought about Lorna Savoy’s part in the trial—or in the fire itself.

  He looked his cousin in the eyes, saw the toll the years had taken, saw how old King had become while Simon had been doing his own aging from a distance. “You’ve been here all this time. You know her better than I do.”

  “Are you asking for my theory?”

  Simon nodded, he
aded back to his truck. “Want a beer?”

  “Sure,” King said, twisting the top from the longneck Simon offered. He sucked down a quarter of the brew before speaking again. “Doesn’t it strike you as odd that Lorna and the judge are still thick as ticks on a hound?”

  Bear Landry was a land man, Lorna a real estate broker. If their association went beyond business, Simon wouldn’t know, but the business connection made perfect sense to him. “Not especially. I’m obviously missing something here.”

  King looked at him as if he were daft. “Lorna would never have been as successful as she has without Bear’s help.”

  “Okay. And?”

  “Why her? He could have chosen to help out either of the Callahan girls. Both were a hell of a lot smarter than Lorna. Or Marie Picard. Her family had connections Bear could’ve used. Even Cindy Robichaux would have made a better assistant. Who could look that girl in the tits and say no?”

  Simon didn’t say anything, just waited for King to go on—though he wouldn’t deny his cousin had run a reasonable flag up the pole.

  “Think about it. Lorna wasn’t the brightest bulb in her class. The only connections her family had were to some very bad dudes I met in Angola. But she was malleable, and vulnerable, easy to manipulate. With the right clothes, hair, and makeup, she’s hot enough, but it takes a lot of work to get her there.” King took another long drink, wiped his mouth on his wrist.

  Interesting. “She would’ve been desperate enough to jump at anything Bear offered.”

  “It would’ve been her only ticket to a better life.”

  “Kinda hard to believe she wouldn’t have fucked up somewhere along the way, though. If she’s been doing his dirty work all this time.” That was a sticking point for Simon. Like King had said, Lorna wasn’t all that bright.

  “She knows how to do what she’s told. And she knows how to keep quiet.”

  Two traits that would make her invaluable to anyone needing a fall guy. “What could she have gained by setting the fire? What could Bear have gained, for that matter?”

 

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