by Nora Roberts
“It is indeed.” Clare kissed her. “How was the drive down?”
“We only got one ticket.”
“Jean-Paul must be mellowing.” She watched him haul two suitcases and a leather tote from the car. “We’ll go in and have some wine,” she told him, and took the tote. She started up the drive, pausing beside Bob’s truck to make introductions. “Bob Meese, Angie and Jean-Paul LeBeau, friends and art dealers from New York. Bob owns the best antique store in town.”
“Ah.” Jean-Paul set down a suitcase to offer a hand. “We must be sure to see your shop before we leave.”
“Open ten to six, six days a week, twelve to five on Sunday.” Bob took note of Jean Paul’s alligator shoes and gold link bracelet. Imagine, a guy wearing a bracelet—even if he was a foreigner. Bob also noted his exotic-looking wife. His black wife. These were the little details he would dispense over the counter until closing time. “Well, got to get back.”
“Thanks for bringing the lamp by.”
“No problemo.” With a quick salute, he climbed into his truck and backed out of the drive.
“Did someone say wine?” Angie wanted to know.
“Absolutely.” Clare hooked an arm through Angie’s and started to steer her around to the walk leading to the front of the house. “In your honor, I went all the way into Frederick and stocked up on pouilly-fuissé.”
“Wait.” Jean-Paul headed in the opposite direction. “You’re working here, in the garage?”
“Yes, but why don’t we go in and get settled? How about these petunias? I just—”
Angie was already following her husband, pulling Clare with her. Clare blew a little breath between her teeth, closed her mouth, and waited. She’d wanted to put this moment off-foolishly, she supposed. Both Jean-Paul’s and Angie’s opinions meant a great deal. They loved her, she knew. And because they did they would be honest, even brutal if necessary. The pieces she had done here at home were vitally important to her. More than anything else she’d done, these had been ripped cleanly from her heart.
In silence she stood back, watching them study and circle. She could hear the gentle tap tap of Angie’s foot on the concrete as she examined the wood carving from every angle. They didn’t exchange a word, hardly a look. Jean-Paul pulled on his lower lip, a nervous habit Clare recognized, as he studied the metal sculpture Bob Meese had recently frowned over.
Where Bob had seen a tangle of metal, Jean-Paul saw a pit of fire, the flames boiling and streaking. It was a hungry and dangerous fire, he thought. It made his skin prickle. It made him wonder what had been consumed by it.
Saying nothing, he turned to the clay arm Clare had fired only the day before. Young, defiant, he mused. With the potential for brutality or heroics. He pulled on his lip again and continued on to the next piece.
Clare shifted from foot to foot, stuck her hands in her pockets, then pulled them out again. Why did she put herself through this? she wondered. Each time, every time, it felt as though she had ripped out her feelings, her fantasies and fears and put them on public display. And it never got better, never got easier, she thought, rubbing her damp palms against the thighs of her jeans. If she had any brains, she’d be selling appliances.
The LeBeaus huddled over the metal sculpture that had sprung from Clare’s nightmare. They had yet to exchange a word. Whatever silent communication they shared was potent but was lost on Clare. She was holding her breath when Jean-Paul turned. His face was solemn when he put his hands on her shoulders. Bending, he kissed her cheeks in turn.
“Amazing.”
Clare’s breath whistled out. “Thank God.”
“I hate to be wrong.” Angie’s voice was taut with excitement. “I really hate to have to admit I might be wrong. But coming here, working here was the best thing you could have done. Christ, Clare, you stagger me.”
Clare put an arm around each of them, torn between the urge to weep and to howl with laughter. In her heart she’d known the sculptures were good. But her head had taken over with nasty, nagging doubts.
“Let’s have the wine,” she said.
Bob Meese hurried back to his shop, entering through the rear to avoid customers. He locked both the outside and inside doors before picking up the phone. As he dialed he tried to work up some saliva. Facing in the light of day what he did at night always dried up the spit in his mouth.
“I saw her,” he said the moment the phone was answered.
“And?”
“She’s thinking about her old man all right. You can see it.” Bob took a moment to thank any deity that he’d been too young to be initiated when Jack Kimball had taken his last fall. “I don’t think she knows what he was into—I mean, she acts too easy about it. I was right about that statue, though. I got a better look at it today.”
“Tell me.”
Bob wished he’d taken the time to get himself a nice, cold drink. “It looks like—I told you.” He pressed his lips together. Here in his office, with the pictures of his wife and kids standing on his cluttered desk and the smell of linseed oil stinging his nostrils, it was hard to believe he was one of them.
Enjoyed being one of them.
“The ceremonial mask, the robes. A beast on a man’s body.” His voice lowered to a whisper, though there was no one to hear. “It could be any one of us—just like she’d seen. I don’t think she remembers, exactly—or she doesn’t know she remembers.”
“A part of her does.” The voice was flat and ice-cold. “And might be dangerous. We’ll watch her. Perhaps give her a gentle warning.”
Bob was only marginally relieved by the word gentle. “Listen, I don’t think she remembers, really. Nothing to hurt us. She’d have told the sheriff. And from the look of things, those two are too busy squeaking bedsprings to talk about much of anything.”
“Eloquently put.” The cool disdain in the tone made Bob wince. “I’ll take your opinion under advisement.”
“I don’t want anything to happen to her. She’s a friend.”
“You have no friends but the brotherhood.” It was no statement, but a warning. “If she needs to be dealt with, she will be. Remember your oath.”
“I remember,” Bob said as the phone clicked in his ear. “I remember.”
Sarah Hewitt strolled down Main Street, delighted with the balmy evening. The mildness gave her a good excuse to wear shorts and watch the old farts in front of the post office go big-eyed. The thin denim was so tight she’d had to lie down on her bed to pull up the zipper. The material dug seductively into her crotch. Her full, firm breasts swayed lightly under a cropped T-shirt with WILD THING scrawled across the chest.
She’d doused herself with an Opium rip-off and painted her mouth a dark, dangerous red. She walked slowly, lazily, knowing that all eyes were trained on her jiggling ass. There was nothing Sarah liked better than drawing attention, and it didn’t matter a damn to her if it was the shocked or approving kind.
She’d been drawing it since sixth grade, when she’d let Bucky Knight take off her shirt behind the bushes during the school picnic. Since Bucky was three years older, he’d gotten the brunt of old Gladys Finch’s wrath. A fact that had amused Sarah no end, since the little experiment was her idea in the first place.
Three years later, she’d let little Marylou Wilson’s daddy do a lot more than look. Sarah had baby-sat for Marylou most every Saturday night for fifty cents an hour. But when horny Sam Wilson drove Sarah home, he’d given her an extra twenty to keep her mouth shut if he copped a few feels.
She’d enjoyed the money but quickly got tired of Sam’s sweaty hands and flabby belly. So she’d seduced a boy her own age, one of the Hawbaker boys—damned if she could remember which one.
It didn’t matter, she thought. They were all married now to eagle-eyed, wide-assed women.
She was beginning to think of marriage herself—though not of fidelity. The idea of being stuck in bed with one man for the rest of her life was revolting. But she was past thirty, had less than
three hundred dollars in the bank, and was tired of living in the single cramped room over Clyde’s.
She liked the idea of having a house and a joint checking account. If she was going to take the plunge, she wanted it to be with someone who could stay hard long enough to bring her off and whom she could stand to look at in the morning. Barring that, she wanted it to be with someone who had pleasant things like stocks and bonds and a pocketful of credit cards.
With a little smile, she paused outside the sheriff’s office. Inside was a man who filled all her requirements.
Cam glanced up as she came inside. He acknowledged her with a little nod and kept on talking into the phone. Her heavy perfume overwhelmed the smells of coffee and dust. He supposed he wouldn’t have been human if his stomach hadn’t clenched—if his gaze hadn’t trailed along the naked length of her leg as she perched on the corner of his desk. She smiled, combed a hand slowly through her mane of hair—her roots shot through the platinum like dark snakes—then lighted a cigarette.
“It’s registered to Earl B. Stokey, Route One, Box Twenty-two eleven, Emmitsboro. That’s right. A forty-five-caliber Colt. I’d appreciate that, Sergeant.” He hung up and glanced at the clock. He was already running late for dinner at Clare’s. “Got a problem, Sarah?”
“That depends.” She leaned over to toy with the badge pinned to his shirt. “Parker used to keep a bottle in the bottom drawer there. How about you?”
He didn’t bother to ask how she knew what Parker had kept in his desk. “No.”
“You sure are running straight these days, aren’t you, Cam?” Her eyes, sharp and mocking, met his. “Here you sit, so serious and official.” She rubbed the top of her foot along his thigh. “It sounds like you’re actually investigating Biff’s murder.”
“That’s my job.” He didn’t wince when she blew a light stream of smoke in his face, but waited.
“People are wondering if you might let a few things slide this time around.” As she reached over to tap her cigarette in a glass ashtray, her breasts swayed beneath her shirt.
There was a flicker of anger in Cam’s eyes, quickly controlled. “People can wonder what they want.”
“Now, that sounds like the old Cam.” She smiled, looking at him from beneath long, heavily mascaraed lashes. “Nobody knows better than me how much you hated Biff.” She took his hand, set it on her thigh close, very close, to the edge of denim where her skin was firm and smooth and hot. “Remember? We’d sit in the woods, in the dark, and you’d tell me how you hated him, how you wished he was dead. How you’d kill him yourself. With a gun. With a knife. With your bare hands.” She felt herself getting wet just thinking of it. “Then we’d have sex. Really incredible sex.”
He felt something stir in his gut. Old memories. Old needs. Old lusts. “That was a long time ago.” He started to remove his hand, but she laid hers on top of it, pressed it against her flesh.
“You never stopped hating him. The other night at Clyde’s, you wanted to kill him. I got so hot watching you.” She shifted so that his hand was caught snug in the vee of her thighs. “Just like old times.”
“No.” The heat was seductive, but he had a flash, a vivid one, of her vagina edged with teeth like a bear trap, ready to spring closed over an unwary penis. He kept his eyes on hers as he pulled his hand away. “No, it’s not, Sarah.”
Her eyes hardened, but she smiled as she slid over into his lap. “It could be. Remember the things we did to each other, Cam?” She reached down to cup him in her hand and felt a shudder of triumph when she found him stiff and throbbing.
He clamped a hand over her wrist. “Don’t embarrass yourself, Sarah.”
Her lips drew back over her teeth. “You want me. You bastard.”
He took her by the shoulders, moving her up and back as he rose. “I stopped thinking with my dick ten years ago.” But because he remembered, because he had once thought himself in love with her, he gave her a quick, impatient shake. “Why the hell do you do this to yourself? You’ve got looks, you’ve got brains. Do you think I don’t know about the business you run upstairs in Clyde’s? Twenty bucks to have some sweaty, cheating husband bounce on your bed? You don’t need this, Sarah.”
“Don’t tell me what I need.” For the first time in years, she felt a flush of shame. And hated him for it. “You’re no better than I am, and never were. Just because you’re screwing Clare Kimball for free, you think you’ve got class?”
“Leave her out of it.”
That only made it worse. Fury flared, negating all the carefully applied cosmetics. In that instant she looked exactly like what she was—a slowly aging small-town hooker.
“Rich bitch Kimball with her fancy car and fancy house. Strange how money makes it all right that her old man was a drunk and a thief. She strolls on back into town, and the ladies cluck all over her with cakes and Jell-O molds.”
“And their husbands come to you.”
“That’s right.” Her smile was small and bitter. “And when Clare Kimball heads back to New York and leaves you dry, they’ll still be coming to me. We’re the same, you and me, we always have been. You’re still Cameron Rafferty from the wrong side of the tracks, and you’re as stuck in this stinking town as I am.”
“There’s a difference, Sarah. I came back because I wanted to, not because there was no place else to go.”
She shrugged off his hands in two edgy moves. She wanted to pay him back, make him suffer. It didn’t matter for what. “Must be handy, wearing that badge right now, when even your mother wonders if you were the one who beat Biff to death.” She watched the heat leap into his eyes and fed off of it. “Won’t be long before people start remembering that temper of yours and bad blood.” She smiled again, eyes narrowed. “There are some who are going to want people to remember. You think you know this town, Cam, and all the good, solid citizens in it. But there are things you don’t know. Things you couldn’t even imagine. Maybe you should ask yourself why Parker picked up and ran. Why he moved his fat, lazy ass out before he even collected his pension.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
She was saying too much. It wouldn’t do to let pride or temper push her further. Instead, she walked to the door, put a hand on the knob, then turned back. “We could have been good together, you and me.” She gave him one last look, thinking that with a little help from her, he was already on his way to hell. “You’re going to regret it.”
When the door closed behind her, Cam rubbed his hands over his face. He already regretted it, he thought. Regretted that he hadn’t gotten out of the office ten minutes sooner and avoided her altogether. Regretted that he hadn’t handled the encounter better. Regretted that he remembered, all too clearly, those nights with her in the woods with the smell of pine and earth and sex.
She reminded him too well of what he had been at seventeen. What he could still be if he hadn’t learned to strap down the more vicious of his impulses—of what he had nearly become again after his partner had been killed and the bottle had seemed the best and easiest answer.
Absently, he lifted a hand to touch the badge on his shirt. It was a small thing, something—as Clare had once said—he could pick up at any dime store. But it meant something to him, something he wasn’t sure he could explain even to himself.
With it, he felt he belonged in the town, to the town, in a way he hadn’t since his father had died. Sarah was wrong, he thought. He knew the people here. He understood them.
But what the hell had she meant with that remark about Parker? Suddenly tired, he rubbed the back of his neck. It wouldn’t do any harm to put in a call to Florida. He glanced at the clock again, then picked up his keys.
He’d do it in the morning—just to satisfy his own curiosity.
He was too tired, Cam decided as he drove to Clare’s, for putting on company manners and socializing with strangers. He would go by, make some excuse, then leave her alone with her friends.
Sarah’s comments were
rubbing against him, abrasive as sandpaper. He was stuck here. It might have been through choice, but it didn’t change the bottom line. He could never again face living and working in the city, where every time he strapped on his gun or walked into an alley he’d be chased by his partner’s ghost. Clare would go back to New York. In a week, a month, six months. He couldn’t follow her. He remembered how empty he’d felt when he stood in the cemetery and watched her walk away.
It scared him right down to the bone.
Cam pulled up in back of a Jaguar, then stopped by Clare’s car to pull out her keys before he walked through the garage to the door leading to the house. Music was blaring—jazz—hot and slick and sophisticated. He saw her standing at the counter, tearing open a bag of chips. Her feet were bare, and her hair was pulled back with a shoestring. Long amethyst wands swung from her ears, and her T-shirt was ripped under the armpit.
He realized he was desperately in love with her.
She turned, spotted him, and smiled as she poured chips into a cracked blue bowl.
“Hi. I was afraid you weren’t going to—”
He cut her off, pulling her against him and savaging her mouth. Her hands went to his shoulders as her body absorbed the shock waves. She held tight—he seemed to need it—and let him feed whatever hunger gnawed at him.
Relief. Simple. Sweet. Stunning. It washed over him, flowed through him. Slowly, without even being aware of the change, he gentled the kiss, softened it, and savored. Her hands slid from his shoulders to cling weakly to his waist.
“Cam.” She was surprised the sound was audible in the thick, syrupy air.
“Shh.” He nibbled on her lips, once, twice, then slicked his tongue over hers. There was a lingering zip of wine overlaying the deeper, richer flavor he’d discovered was uniquely hers.
“Clare, Jean-Paul’s not having any luck with the charcoal. I think we should—oh.” Angie stopped, her hand still holding the screen door open. “I beg your pardon,” she said when Cam and Clare drew a few inches apart.
