Silk and Stone

by Deborah Smith

  “His mother? Aunt Alex? Did he say what he meant by that?”

  “Told us,” Ben said, mushing the words with his drugged, elegant drawl, “told us he’s glad Jake is punishing her.”

  “Jake … what?” Sammie’s voice rose desperately.

  “I don’t understand it all,” Charlotte interjected, looking at her sister’s horrified face with sympathy. “Just that he thinks Jake is behind some kind of terrible investigation that’s being done. He mumbled about his mother, and Orrin—how they deserved it. How he deserved it, because he’d never had the courage to fight back.”

  “Jake hasn’t done anything to him, Aunt Alex, or Orrin,” Sammie said, shaking Charlotte a little. “There’s no reason for him to care about them.”

  “Oh, Sammie, you know how it’s always been. You know it hasn’t changed. Ben and I … a few days ago … we found some things in Jake’s tent. Newspaper articles about Aunt Alex and the others. He’s been involved in some sort of revenge against them, Sammie. And they’ve figured that much out.” She shook her head wildly. “Tim said that, and then he just walked out. Just left us on the floor and calmly walked out, got in his car, and drove off.”

  “Hey, hey, look at me,” Ben mumbled with moon-eyed determination. He tugged at Charlotte’s hands and winced, but kept tugging until she clutched his arm to make him stop hurting himself. “It wasn’t your fault,” he said, apparently unconcerned with making sense or nonsense of anything other than his own train of thought. His voice was hoarse, loving. “You didn’t do anything wrong. With Tim. He’s insane. You understand? No more … embarrassment. Promise?”

  Charlotte broke down, sobbing softly and squeezing his hand with infinite care. “I love you. I didn’t want you to know.”

  “It’s all right. When I can walk without my bones squeaking, I’ll … kill him. Kill him for hurting you.”

  “No!”

  She was so intent on soothing his lovely, violent attitude that it took her a moment to realize that Sammie had left them.

  Jake was gone. Gone. Oh, God, he hadn’t needed to hear the details. He’d gleaned the basics when he touched Charlotte. Sam realized that now.

  And he’d encouraged Sam to go into the examining room so he could leave before she followed him. She stumbled into the parking lot and retched when she saw the empty space where their car had been. He’d been keeping so much more from her than she’d ever imagined. What it was, she still didn’t know precisely. But it was deadly.

  He had gone to take care of business without her—shut her out, just as he’d done ten years ago.

  But this time she would find a way to save him from himself, and from the past, no matter what secrets it harbored.

  Jake found Tim’s car on an old logging trail deep in the lap of the Razorbacks. The cluster of high, thin ridges flanked the more rounded peaks north of Pandora. Jake had followed him there by memory as much as instinct. Tim had staked out one of the Razorbacks during high school; he had claimed the highest peak as his personal territory, the place he retreated to after football games, usually with a girl and case of beer in tow.

  Jake climbed a narrow trail up the mountain. The pale half-moon barely crept down to the forest floor shielded by towering fir and spruce. He sidestepped boulders and rotting tree trunks with long, sure strides. The forest ended abruptly, and he stopped at the edge of the vast, ancient bald at the mountain’s summit. Mysterious natural forces had stripped the forest away and created a meadow there. Its knee-high grasses and flowers were tinted silver under the moon.

  Tim stood at the distant rim, looking outward, silhouetted against a canopy of black sky and stars.

  Jake crossed the meadow soundlessly, walking in centuries of long-erased footprints. Hunters, shamans, explorers. Wanderers searching for the edge of forever. He halted a dozen yards from his cousin, and for a fleeting moment remembered the nervous towheaded boy who had been no threat to anyone. But then, they had both been helpless children once.

  He called Tim’s name.

  Tim pivoted. “I thought you’d come after me,” he said. “I knew I’d provoke you to make a move. How do you do it, cousin? What’s your secret? You and Ellie—you were always odd. I looked up to you both. And I hated you for the power you had over my mother. You saw her for what she was. You were the only people I’ve ever known who frightened her. Ellie’s gone, but my mother is still afraid of you. You’re the one, aren’t you? You used me to get to her.”

  Jake stood as Tim did—legs braced apart, quietly posed with the same moonwashed calmness. “I felt sorry for you,” Jake told him slowly, “until the day you turned on Samantha.”

  Tim’s bitter laugh echoed across the bald. “She and Charlotte got their ounce of flesh from me. You couldn’t let it go? Hell, I didn’t want anything more to do with them or you.”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “Oh? Congratulations, cousin. You’ve set the stage. My mother’s hovering over Orrin and her lost ambitions right now. Hell, don’t worry about me causing any more trouble. Worry about her—you’ve ruined her in the only way anybody could. She was a starmaker. Now she’s just the mother of a criminal and the wife of an invalid. You did that to her. Cold-blooded. I still admire you, cousin.”

  Jake took several steps closer, then stopped again. “You don’t know as much about her as I do,” he said softly. “But you’ve always known what she did to your father.”

  The night wind moaned across the bald, enveloping Tim’s long silence, settling on him, slumping his shoulders. Jake couldn’t separate its mourning sound from the roar of his own pulse in his ears. “You’ve had to live with that,” he went on. “Afraid to admit it, pretending it didn’t happen, but never forgetting what you saw that night. Hating yourself because you couldn’t stop remembering, because you still wanted her to love you, even if she’d killed—”

  Tim threw his head back. A guttural shout of pain and fury rose from him. He stared at Jake. “My whole life has been about revenge. I’m the one who made it possible. Don’t forget that.”

  He turned and stumbled the last few feet to the bald’s edge. It cut the meadow off at a stony precipice. He whipped around and balanced there, arms outspread. Jake moved quickly toward him, reaching out. “Don’t,” Tim yelled. “By God, if you try, I’ll pull you over with me. You want to live. You want to go home to Samantha.”

  Jake halted. Tim’s face was a mask of white moonlight with eyes slashed in black shadow. “This isn’t how it has to end for you.”

  “It’s exactly how it has to end,” Tim replied. He smiled—another slash of blackness in the mask. “There’s an old Cagney gangster movie. He’s lost everything. He’s surrounded. Up on some roof … something like that. He knows he’s going down. And all he can think about is what his mother wanted for him. Top of the world, Ma” Tim’s voice dropped to a drone mingled with the tugging wind. “Top of the world.”

  He leaned back. The wind and the mountain took care of the rest.

  Chapter

  Thirty-Two

  Clara lay, sleepless and alert, in a sagging recliner in her tiny, cluttered living room with the lights off and the door open. Beds were for young bodies undisturbed by aching joints and insistent bladders; beds were for people who hadn’t begun to measure the years left to accomplish their tasks.

  She was as secure in her place as the creatures who crept through the dark, secluded hollow around her house, peering through her unlatched screen door with their wild, curious eyes.

  And when people called on her in the night for instruction and comfort, as they often did, she rocked herself out of the recliner and saw to their needs.

  Tonight she was waiting for trouble.

  Patsy Jones, a good girl who’d become a good woman, had gotten that degree in social work. She’d been at the hospital, looking after one of her cases, when Ben Dreyfus came in with Sammie’s sister. Ben Dreyfus had gotten busted up in an accident, Patsy said. Then Jake and Sammie showed up. Ja
ke had walked off. Sammie was trying to find him.

  When her dogs began to bark, Clara rocked forward and stared into the yard beyond her front porch. A car pulled in.

  A few seconds later Sammie was knocking on the screen door’s wooden frame.

  “I’m right here,” Clara said from the darkened room. She turned a lamp on beside her chair. Sammie bolted into the house and dropped to her heels beside Clara’s recliner. Clara frowned at her ashen face and red-rimmed eyes, her rumpled shirt and jeans.

  She held out a gnarled hand and Sammie gripped it gratefully. “Jake’s disappeared,” Sammie said. Her voice was hoarse and weary. “I’ve looked everywhere I can think of. Have you heard from him?”

  “No.” Clara leaned forward and listened intently as Sammie explained. Each word weighed heavier than the last. Clara had watched Sammie and Jake walk toward this crossroads their whole lives, had seen it looming on their horizon like a thunderhead. There was no turning away.

  “Help me,” Sammie begged. “You know what he’s after. I can see that in your eyes. The ruby. My aunt. Tim. The fire at the Cove. The man Jake went to prison for killing. It all fits together somehow, doesn’t it? Please, talk to me, Clara. If you keep it to yourself, he’ll be all alone out there, the way he was ten years ago. If something happens to him”—Sammie clutched Clara’s hand harder. Her eyes were wild and desperate—“we’ve run out of second chances.”

  Clara sighed. Her purpose in the journey had become clear to her. It was hard duty; she would gladly have shut her eyes and not recognized it. But she couldn’t. She had promised Granny Raincrow she’d do her best.

  The sun was rising at the tops of the mountains on the Cove’s eastern edge in an apron of angry orange and red, promising another stormy summer day. Jake hoped for rain as he drove into the Cove. Clear the air. He wanted to wash the night’s vivid stains from his mind, think, consider what to do next, what to tell Samantha about Tim, and what had happened on Razorback Bald.

  He could no longer deny how he tracked people, or how he knew their ugly secrets. With that understanding bridging the past, he could tell Samantha how Alexandra had destroyed his uncle William. She would see how that had been enough to breed revenge in him—that, combined with Alexandra’s cold-hearted greed and manipulation ever since, and Tim’s violence.

  It was enough. More than enough to explain himself to Samantha. She would never have to share the far more painful reasons behind his actions.

  But she wasn’t waiting for him at the Cove. Instead, he found Joe’s Cadillac in the yard. Joe and Clara sat side by side on the porch steps. Bo lumbered out to greet him happily after a long night spent locked in the house.

  Something sharp and terrible twisted in Jake’s stomach as he walked toward the porch. He didn’t have to touch Joe or Clara to sense their dark mood. Where was Samantha?

  Clara hoisted herself from the step with Joe’s help. She shuffled to Jake with one fist knotted over her broad middle and grim scrutiny in her eyes. “Did you push your cousin off Razorback?”

  “No. But I went looking for him. And I was there when he jumped.”

  After a moment Clara nodded. “That’s what I figured.”

  Joe stepped forward. “Everybody’s heard about Tim. This has gotten to the point where it can’t be stopped by you. The law is looking for you, boy. People haven’t decided yet whether Tim jumped off that bald or got pushed. You seem a likely party to it. They want to take you in and ask you questions. Like where you were all night.”

  “I climbed down and found him, where he lay. I couldn’t leave him there if he was alive. But he wasn’t. I went to a pay phone over at Cawatie and called the sheriff.” He started past them. He couldn’t feel Samantha’s where-abouts, and the emptiness froze his blood. Joe blocked his way.

  “She’s not here.”

  “She come to me in the middle of the night,” Clara said. Jake pivoted toward her quickly. “She was searchin’ for you, afraid you’d got yourself into awful trouble again.” Clara peered up at him steadily. “I told her, Jake. It was time. I told her everything about her aunt.”

  Her announcement tore the breath out of him. He stared at her while a savage, gnawing fear hollowed him to the core. “Why?”

  “ ’Cause I’ve always meant what I said to you. You can’t finish this alone. Much as you tried, it ain’t possible. Hiding the truth ain’t gonna stop no ravenmocker. Sammie’s got to deal with the shame, now or sometime.”

  Clara took one of Jake’s hands, stuck her clenched fist into it, and relaxed her fingers. The cool, smooth ruby dropped onto his palm. He stared at it in sick silence. “She told me where she hid it,” Clara explained. “She’d buried it beside your granny’s spring. You never even had an inkling, did you, boy? That’s how I know I did right to tell her everything. ’Cause you’re still deaf and blind.” She closed his paralyzed fingers over the stone.

  Samantha had returned it to him. Her apology. A lifetime of love glimmering like the star, but trapped, like it, inside the bloodred grief and shame he’d fought so hard to keep from her.

  “She went after Alexandra?” His voice shook. “You let her go?”

  “I told her it’d take both of you, but she wouldn’t hear that.”

  “I’ve got to find her before she gets to Alexandra.”

  Joe clamped a hand on his arm. “The law’s lookin’ for you. If you go off half cocked, they’ll pick you up before you get far.”

  “I have to take that chance.”

  Bo lifted his head suddenly and began to bark. Jake spun toward the narrow driveway. A car on the Cove road. The knowledge came swiftly, the silent, unmistakable song turning into a hideous shriek in his mind. It wasn’t Samantha.

  “Get in the woods,” Joe yelled. “Go on. Wait out of sight. Me and Clara’ll do the talkin’.”

  Jake heard himself utter a guttural sound of frustration. He didn’t have time for hiding. He hadn’t done anything to deserve blame. Just like ten years ago, but you couldn’t prove it. Can’t prove anything now. Clara tugged fiercely at him. “You won’t be any good to Sammie if the sheriff latches onto you. Git.”

  That sharp point cut his hesitation. He told Bo to stay, then walked swiftly into the forest. The ruby felt like a hot coal in his hand. Useless, burning his skin.

  “Ain’t seen him or Sammie,” Clara told the deputy. “Joe drove me over so I could feed ol’ Bo. I reckon Sammie and Jake are keepin’ company with Sammie’s sister. Her boyfriend got banged up in a accident. He’s at the hospital.”

  The deputy scowled at Bo, who lay in the yard, looking toward the woods and whining. “What’s wrong with him?”

  “There’s a yellow-jacket nest in a log over yonder,” Joe said quickly. “They been after him.”

  “Well, I have orders to wait here until Jake shows up,” the deputy said, frowning harder. “Sheriff wants to find out where Jake was when Senator Vanderveer took the short way down from Razorback.”

  Joe grunted with disgust. “Jake’s got no reason to throw his cousin off a ledge. They went separate ways before either of ’em was grown. Probably haven’t even crossed paths since Jake got out of prison.”

  “The governor keels over with a stroke and his state-senator stepson goes sky diving without a parachute. Maybe it’s just a damn bad run of luck, but it’s got every honcho in the state government running around like chickens with their heads cut off, looking for explanations.”

  “I say Tim Vanderveer did himself in,” Joe said. “He always was a moody soul. Probably grieving over his stepfather. I heard the doctors aren’t giving the governor good odds.”

  The deputy threw up his hands. “Look, we’re just rounding up anybody who might’ve seen the senator last night. Anybody who has a clue about his state of mind. Somebody found his body and reported it. We want to find out who that was.”

  “You got the call on tape, don’t you? The sheriff knows Jake’s voice. Did he think it sounded like Jake?”

  “A
w, hell, the dispatcher was half asleep and havin’ trouble with the system. It didn’t record. For all we know, she could’ve been talking to Barney the purple dinosaur.”

  Clara fixed something akin to the evil eye on the deputy. “Jake’ll come in and talk to you folks. He’s got nothing to hide. We’ll send him along when he gets here. You go on back to town. Jake don’t deserve to be carted off in a patrol car.”

  “Probably not, but I’ve got my orders.” He settled on the porch steps and stared at Bo suspiciously, then turned the same intense glare on Joe and Clara. “So I’ll wait. Y’all have a seat and wait with me.”

  Watching from the cover of the woods, Jake broke into a cold sweat. He was alone, trapped, with only the unforgiving stone as a guide. It would not help him. He turned away from the house and began the long trek across the beautiful, merciless terrain, thinking, planning, praying.

  His mind was filled with the soft, deadly whisper of a ravenmocker’s wings.

  “Mrs. Lomax? Is there anyone you want me to call?”

  When Alexandra didn’t answer, Barbara slid closer to her on the couch. Alexandra was vaguely aware of the low hum of voices outside the waiting room’s closed door and the silent scream of loss and disbelief inside her own mind. Tim was dead. And less than an hour ago, she had held Orrin’s limp hand and watched the doctors turn off machines that could no longer keep him alive.

  Her secretary was crying for her; Alexandra was too numb to shed tears.

  Barbara repeated the question. Alexandra shivered. “Who is left for you to call?” She stared blindly into space. “Who is left for me?”

  Barbara gave a tearful cry. “There are reporters downstairs. Our people want your permission to issue a statement. Everyone from the governor’s staff is waiting in the hall.”

  “They should tell the media that my husband died an hour ago and my son died last night. Nothing else is important.”