Blue Bayou

by JoAnn Ross

  “Thirteen years,” she murmured. She was silent for a moment. Pensive. “I thought of you. I didn't want to, but I did. I didn't want to want you, either. But I did. Even after what I believed you'd done.”

  “I thought about you.” He caught her chin in his fingers, brushed his thumb over her soft, love-swollen lips. “Too much and too often. Walking away from you, was one of the few regrets of my life.” Jack had never spoken truer words.

  She pressed her fingers to her eyes. “I would have hated you going to jail on my account.”

  “Hell, that's not why I left,” he said on a surge of heated resentment he'd believed he'd left behind in the past. “Whatever it was we had together back then, did together, was worth risking a jail sentence. But the decision about Maman was tougher.

  “The only job she'd ever had in her life was being a wife and mother. She didn't have any career skills. Finn was in college, and Nate was just turning seventeen; neither one of them was in a position to take care of her.

  “I didn't really believe your father would actually follow through on his threat to fire her, but I couldn't take the chance. Can you understand that?”

  “Of course I can.” She was steadier, her eyes clearer. “My father understood it, too. So damn well.” When she bit her bottom lip, Jack could see the wheels turning in her head and sensed what was coming next. “But you could have always come back, when I was of legal age, and my father wouldn't have had any say about what I did. Or with whom. I didn't marry Lowell for another five years.”

  “By then I was in the navy. Working shore patrol, which was damn ironic for a kid who'd spent a good part of his teens getting busted himself. You still had another year of high school. There was no way I was going to drag you around the country to wait stateside with the other wives in military housing or even worse, some tacky little trailer while I was off on cruises. You needed to get your education and grow up a little and I needed to become a man who could offer you something worthwhile.”

  “I always thought you were worthwhile.”

  “Bet you didn't think that after I took off. Bet you thought I was a real SOB then.”

  “Perhaps,” she allowed. “But after a while I realized that you reacted like a lot of eighteen-year-old boys would when a girl told him that she loved him and wanted to have his babies.” Tears began swimming in her eyes again. Jack couldn't remember a time when she'd appeared more fragile.

  “Babies definitely weren't in my plans back then.” But, while it was surprising the hell out of him, since he'd never envisioned himself as a father, Jack was finding the mental image of Danielle ripe and round with his child more than a little appealing. Just as appealing was the idea of being a daddy to her son.

  One step at a time.

  “That summer was a long time ago.” Wanting to get past this, so they could get on with a future the judge had denied them, Jack lifted their joined hands and touched his lips to her knuckles. “It's all water under the bridge, and as sorry as I am about having to hurt you, with all that's happened, it just doesn't seem real important in the big scheme of things. So, how about I make you a proposition? We'll just consider it kid stuff and move on.”

  If only it were that simple, Dani agonized. Tell him, a little voice of conscience urged. You'll probably never get a better chance.

  There was so much more to say, more secrets to reveal, more truths to confess. But it was so much easier to allow herself to be lifted into his arms and carried back to bed, lovers long ago lost, but found again.

  Giving herself up to the glorious feelings, to Jack, Dani tried not to think about what he'd do when she told him everything that had happened after her father had driven him out of Blue Bayou that summer.

  A slow, steady anger was still simmering in Dani as she made Matt French toast for breakfast the next morning. She pretended interest as he read her last night's sports scores from the paper, forced a smile at the latest Get Fuzzy comic strip which usually made her laugh out loud, and managed to wave him off on the yellow bus without either bursting into tears or imploding.

  Then she returned to the kitchen where her father was drinking a cup of coffee.

  “You're not supposed to be drinking that,” she reminded him of Dr. Ancelet's instructions.

  “One cup isn't going to kill me.”

  “True enough. But I may.”

  “Ah.” He glanced at her over the rim of the mug, his expression revealing not a bit of guilt that she could see. “Can I infer by that comment that you've been talking to Callahan?”

  “You don't sound surprised.”

  “I'm not. He gave me a deadline to tell you myself, but I decided to let him handle the matter in his own way.”

  “Too bad you didn't use such restraint that summer. When you ran Jack out of town.”

  “He didn't have to leave. I gave the boy a choice,” the judge said, somewhat defensively.

  “Between me or his widowed mother losing her job. What the hell kind of choice is that?”

  “Watch your language, Danielle. There's no reason to talk like a sailor.”

  “After all you've done, you're actually worried about my language?” Her voice rose up the scale; she stared at him and shoved her hair back from her face with both hands. “I'm just getting started, Father. What on earth made you think you could play God with our lives that way?”

  “I had to do something to protect you after Jimbo Lott came and told me he'd found the two of you screwing out at the camp.”

  “The person I'd needed protection from just happened to be Lott. Did the horrid perverted man tell you that he kept his patrol car's spotlight on me the entire time I was getting dressed?”

  “No.” His voice stayed steady, but a muscle jerked in his cheek.

  “How about the fact that he knocked Jack out with the butt of his service revolver when he tried to defend me?”

  “No. But I'm not surprised at either behavior. Lott redefines slime. It's a crime he's still sheriff. And Jack always has been too impetuous for his own good.”

  “He was protecting me.”

  “Which wouldn't have been necessary if he hadn't taken you out there in the first place,” the judge said on the same reasonable tone he'd used to convince her to give up her child. Having disliked it then, Dani hated it now.

  “I was trying to protect you, too. Besides, Callahan's mother wasn't any more happy about the two of you together than I was.”

  That hurt. “I thought Marie liked me.”

  “She did. But she was concerned about her son's future. She didn't want him to pay for foolish mistakes, become a daddy at eighteen, and ruin his chances to make something of his life.”

  He'd been a father. And had never known it. Guilt settled heavily on Dani's shoulders. Guilt and a sorrow that had become so much a part of her it had seeped deep in her bones.

  “Think how you'd feel if Matthew came home some day when he was still a teenager and told you he'd gotten some girl in trouble. I'll bet you won't be so sanguine then.”

  “I'd be concerned. Probably even upset,” she allowed, saying a small mental prayer that they'd be spared that experience. “But I sure wouldn't sweep it under the rug and pretend it never happened. And I'd never, ever be ashamed of him.”

  As you were me. She didn't need to say the words out loud; they hovered in the still morning air between them.

  Dani wanted to rant. To rave. To throw things. For the sake of her father's health—for that reason only—she forced her temper down.

  “Even if you thought you were doing what was best for me, you still had no right to threaten Jack.”

  “I didn't have any choice. The boy wouldn't take money to leave.”

  She drew in a sharp breath that burned. “You offered him a bribe?” This just kept getting worse and worse.

  “Not a bribe. An incentive. You were too young to know your own mind.”

  His gray eyes turned to steel. Despite the way his heart disease had physically wea
kened him, Dani had no problem envisioning him back on the bench, literally wielding the power of life and death.

  “You still had a year of high school,” he reminded her. “Your entire life was ahead of you, and I damn well didn't want you throwing it away on a juvenile delinquent like Jack Callahan.”

  “He wasn't really a delinquent. He was just angry. If his father hadn't died—”

  “I would have been the one lying dead on the courthouse floor. Is that what you would have wanted?”

  It was an impossible choice. Just like the one he'd given Jack. She shook her head and stared unseeingly out the window. “I don't believe you would have followed through on your threat. I cannot accept the idea that the man I've respected my entire life would have tossed the woman whose husband saved his life out onto the street.”

  “I didn't believe it would come to that.” The judge shrugged. “After all, for all Callahan's faults, no one could say he didn't love his mama. Especially since even if I didn't fire her, we both knew it'd break her heart if he'd been jailed on a statutory rape charge.”

  “That's one of the more disgusting aspects of this.” Her stomach twisted at the idea of having something as beautiful as what she and Jack had shared turned into a public disgrace. “Did Marie know what you did?”

  “Not the specifics. But she must've figured I'd done something because afterward she came and thanked me for helping her boy stay on the straight and narrow. The Navy was good for him, made a man out of him.

  “If he'd stayed here in Blue Bayou, he would have been just one more troublemaker, mad at the world and taking it out on everyone around him. Even those who loved him. Most especially those who loved him.”

  “That's not true. That boot camp you'd sent him to had changed him. It made him realize that anger never solves anything.”

  “So you say. But that wasn't a chance I was prepared to take.”

  “It wasn't your chance to take.”

  “You were under age,” he reminded her. “And he sure as hell wasn't showing a lot of sense—or honor—sneaking around with you in the first place. If he'd wanted to date my daughter, he should have come to me and asked my permission like a man.”

  “Your permission? We weren't living in the Middle Ages, Father. And for your information, Jack wanted our relationship out in the open. I was the one who begged him to keep it a secret. Because I knew you wouldn't approve.”

  She shook her head, shuddered out a painful breath. “But I never, in my wildest imagination, believed you'd stoop so low.”

  “Don't be so fast to judge, little girl. You're a mother. The day will come when you'll understand I did what I had to do to protect you.”

  “No.” About this, Dani was very clear. “I'll always be concerned about Matt's future. And that of any other children, if I'm fortunate enough to have them. But I would never, ever, manipulate them the way you did Jack and me.”

  “It never would have worked out between the two of you anyway.”

  “Wasn't that for me to find out? Besides, your choice of a husband for me wasn't exactly stellar.”

  “Point taken. But you did end up with a wonderful little-boy.”

  It was the same thing Jack had said.

  As emotions welled up inside her, choking her, Dani reminded herself that it was control she needed now. Cool, calming control. It would not do either of them any good if she started screeching at her ill father, no matter now much he may deserve it. No matter how badly she needed to do it.

  “As much as I love Matt, that still doesn't excuse what you did, Father. It could never make it right.”

  She turned to walk away.

  “I'm not the only one with secrets,” he called after her. “If you're such a stickler for honesty, why don't you tell Jack where you spent your senior year of high school? And why?”

  Refusing to admit that about this, at least, he had a point, Dani walked out of the room without responding.

  Like many bad days, this one just got worse. Needing a chocolate boost after her confrontation with her father, Dani stopped off at the market on her way to the library, where a clutch of women were gathered around the cash register, blocking her access to the Hershey's bars.

  “Did you see this, Dani, dear?” Bessie Ardoin, an eccentric, octogenarian spinster who'd claimed to have been beamed aboard a spaceship that had landed outside Blue Bayou one night back in the sixties, waved a supermarket tabloid. “It's so exciting.”

  “Let me guess. Elvis has been found on an ice floe with a survivor from the Titanic.”

  “It's not nice to jest about the King, dear,” Edith Ardoin, Bessie's twin sister, chided. While Edith hadn't experienced her sister's alien adventure, she had worked as an extra in Elvis Presley's movie King Creole when location shooting had been done in New Orleans. The way she'd continued to talk about it for more than forty years suggested it remained the high point of her life.

  “I'm sorry, Miss Ardoin,” Dani said.

  “That's all right, dear,” Bessie answered for her sister. “No harm done. Edith knows you didn't mean any disrespect. After all, how would you have any way of knowing that Beau Soleil's ghost is now famous all over the country?”

  “What?” Dani snatched the paper from Bessie's outstretched hand. “Oh, no,” she groaned as she read the screaming double headline: Things that go bump in the Bayou. Thriller writer haunted by Confederate ghosts.

  “Oh, my God,” she murmured as she skimmed the outrageously exaggerated story, then looked at the byline. “I can't believe this. It's that man who came into the library looking for information about Beau Soleil.” He'd lied to her, she thought furiously. Dallas Chapman was no more a parapsychologist than she was a rock star.

  “Well, he certainly went to the right place,” Edith said. “How nice you were able to help him with his story.”

  “I didn't help him. I merely pointed him to some books.” To think he'd sucked her in with that story about he and his wife falling in love at some haunted Scots castle!

  “It's a lovely picture of the house,” Edith said.

  “And you can see the ghost,” Bessie said.

  “Where?” Charlotte Cassidy, the day checkout clerk, leaned over the counter and peered at the paper over the top of her glasses.

  “Right here.” Bessie tapped her finger against a blurry white spot that at first glance did appear to be hovering above the house.

  Dani looked closer. “That's no ghost. It's only the camera's flash.”

  “I can understand how one could think that,” Bessie said. “But it's obvious to those of us who've experienced a paranormal event that it's an apparition. That white light is an obvious energy source, and everyone knows that spirits refuse to allow themselves to be photographed.”

  Ever since returning from the Mothership, Bessie had alleged to have the “Sight.” She'd been supplementing her Social Security checks by doing tarot card readings down at the Shear Pleasures beauty parlor every first Saturday of the month for as long as Dani could remember.

  “I've heard ghosts tend to be camera shy,” Charlotte allowed.

  She should have checked him out, Dani thought. At least done a database search for that Tennessee witch story he'd alleged to have written with his probably fictional wife. “He said he was a parapsychologist.”

  “One can be a parapsychologist and a reporter, dear,” Bessie pointed out.

  “I wonder if Jack's seen this yet,” Edith mused.

  “Won't he be pleased?” Bessie pointed to a paragraph toward the end of the story. “Look, it even lists the titles of his books and mentions the movies.”

  “I bet he won't be all that happy about the suggestion that the books are being ghostwritten by a dead Confederate soldier,” Charlotte offered warily.

  Dani briefly closed her eyes upon hearing that ridiculous piece of tabloid journalese. Not only would Jack be less than pleased at the story that was far more fiction than fact, she feared he was going to blow sky high.
/>   Are you going to marry Jack?” Matt asked later that afternoon.

  Dani looked up from dropping chocolate-chip dough onto a cookie sheet. Not sure she could trust her voice, she spooned up more dough, tried to decide how to handle the question that had come from out of the blue, and decided to hedge. “Where did that come from?”

  He shrugged and snitched a scoop of dough from the blue mixing bowl. “You go on dates with him.”

  “They're not exactly dates. I'm merely helping him decorate Beau Soleil.”

  “You're going to that wedding. The one you bought a new dress for.”

  It had been an extravagance, bought on a whim, and she couldn't really afford the expense. It was also made of silk spun as soft as a whisper that rustled when she walked, with a garden of tropical flowers blooming on the short, flirty skirt. She'd tried it on for Orèlia, who'd taken one look at it, whistled and said, “That Jack's gonna be a goner for sure, he.”

  The older woman had also insisted on taking her into the city where she'd located what she'd declared to be the perfect shoes to match. The bright poppy color was highly impractical, since it wouldn't go with a single other thing in Dani's closet, the heels were so high she feared getting a nosebleed, and pencil thin, which was just asking for a broken ankle, she'd complained to Orèlia while the salesman was in the back of the store, looking for her size.

  They were an impossible hue, ridiculously high, and dangerously thin. But as she'd taken the strappy, glovesoft leather sandals out of the box, Dani had also known that once again Orèlia was right. They were absolutely, positively perfect.

  “It's not really a date,” she said, dragging her mind back to the conversation. “An old friend of Jack's is getting married, and he didn't want to go to the wedding alone, so he asked me.”

  “Oh.” He reached for one of the cookies already cooling on a nearby rack. “I'm glad you're not getting married.”

  That surprised Dani, since it was obvious that her son thought Jack Callahan hung the moon. “Well then, I guess it's good I'm not.”

  “Yeah. Because I like Jack a lot,” he said around a mouth of chocolate chips. “But if you two got married, then he'd be my dad.”