“I’m damned well not in denial, Dr. Thomas,” she said through gritted teeth.
“I’ve seen those photos. Your eyes are never open. Your limbs are—”
“You mean the porno chick’s limbs,” Rachel insisted, though she had refused to look at the photos herself. Bad enough she’d had to face the last lot in the courtroom—to see what others had imagined was her. “I’m telling you, Kyle grafted my face on all those—”
“The arms and legs are slack in every shot. As if you—or I should say, the person photographed—was unconscious.”
Tears threatened, burning her eyes. “I won’t have this conversation. I came out here to get away from what happened in Philadelphia.” To get away from all of it.
“And how’s that working for you?” he asked, but the question was infused with kindness.
When she refused to answer, he left her his contact numbers—including his home phone for after hours. She pretended to take them down, then told him she would call him back when she was feeling better….
Or when hell froze over, whichever came first.
She ended the call and turned her frustration to buzzing the nurses’ station and demanding to know why Dr. Franconi hadn’t shown up to discharge her.
“It is the weekend, Ms. Copeland.” The woman sounded tired—probably worn down from answering the same question Rachel had already asked at least four times. “I’m sure he’ll be along soon. Now if you don’t mind, I need to deliver afternoon meds to other patients.”
Rachel fumed, wondering what it would all cost: the hospitalization, the ambulance ride, the visit to the ER. Why would no one tell her the price of things when she asked? Her father had told her she was as bad as her grandmother. “Quit fussing,” he’d ordered, “and help me rest easier by staying until the doctor gives you the all clear.”
Whatever her problems with Patsy, Rachel didn’t want her father jeopardizing his marriage to bail her out again, nor did she want to throw up her hands and declare bankruptcy.
You’re running out of other options. The flurry of interest in her photos had begun to generate some income, but she sensed it would be far too little, too late.
Mrs. Mary Dixon, this morning’s volunteer, knocked, then swept into the room, a Pollyanna smile dimpling her apple cheeks. With her bottle blonde French-braided hair and the arrangement clutched before her, she looked like a sixty-year-old cheerleader or a slightly addled bridesmaid. “Look what I’ve brought for my number-one patient,” she chirped as she set the vase down on the bedside table. “Somebody’s sent flowers. Now where would you like me to put these?”
Though Mrs. Dixon’s voice was worsening Rachel’s headache, she resisted the first answer that sprang to mind. “Are you sure those are for me?”
Earlier, she’d been surprised to receive a huge fruit basket from Antoinette Gallinardi, which included a message expressing her—but not Terri’s—best wishes, and Lili had brought her a hilarious get-well card, which she and Bobby had both signed. Who else would send her anything, especially so soon?
At the volunteer’s nod, Rachel added, “My family’s really not the flower type.”
Her father might be sweet, but he’d be more likely to buy her a subscription to Plane & Pilot than a bouquet, while Grandma thought cut flowers an extravagant waste of money for something doomed to die. And as for Patsy…Rachel eyed the pure white mix of lilies, irises, and roses, but didn’t spot a single stem of poison ivy, though the lack of color did put her in mind of funerals.
“Here’s the card with your name.” Mrs. Dixon plucked it from the greenery to pass it to her. “Perhaps you have a gentleman admirer.”
Zeke Pike’s name skated across Rachel’s mind, but she couldn’t picture him sending flowers, either. After pulling out a little card printed subtly with fern leaves, Rachel decided the volunteer’s eager hovering was too much. “Thanks for bringing these, Mrs. Dixon. But I wouldn’t want to keep you from your duties.”
Once the volunteer left, Rachel flipped open the card. And stared, forgetting how to breathe or swallow. “Looking forward to seeing you again soon” was not the problem. It was the “Love & kisses, Kyle” that had her climbing from her bed and shouting down the hallway for the woman she’d just sent out.
Concern replaced the cheerfulness of the volunteer’s expression. “Shall I call the nurse? You’re white as paper.”
“No nurse,” said Rachel as Mrs. Dixon escorted her back to bed. “I’m not sick. I just have to know, who gave you that arrangement to bring in here?”
“What’s wrong? Did he forget to sign the card?”
“It’s signed, all right, but…” The volunteer might be annoying, but Rachel didn’t want to scare her half to death by telling her that her “gentleman admirer” was the young man she’d shot, naked, in her bedroom one dark, cold night. The same pervert who’d put her face on some poor, limp woman to stoke his porn-fueled fantasies. “It’s kind of embarrassing, but back home, I—uh—I dated two guys with this same first name, so I’m not quite sure which—Could be pretty awkward to call and thank the wrong one.”
Since she was rumored to be some kind of femme fatale, she might as well use the reputation to her advantage.
Mary Dixon—who clearly had no idea of her past—laughed with delight and clapped her hands together. “Say no more, dear. I’ll look into it for you. The flowers came from a shop right down the street, and I used to be great friends with the gal who owns it.”
Once she’d left, Rachel sat up in the inclined bed and scrutinized the handwritten note more carefully. It was a woman’s script—it had to be, with those loopy little letters and the empty-circle dots. Girlish handwriting, thought Rachel, but that didn’t mean the sender had been female. For all she knew, the flowers had been ordered on the Internet or by phone. But that would require a credit card—a card that could offer her best chance to track the sender.
Was it the same woman who had called from Marfa, the woman whose desperation for revenge had warped both voice and mind? Rachel thought back again to the last threatening call, received so eerily close to the crash that could have killed her. But so far, the National Transportation Safety Board investigators had given no indication that the canopy failure had been anything other than an accident.
It was a stretch to believe the timing to be anything more than a disturbing coincidence. How could someone—especially an unhinged woman freshly arrived from Philadelphia—sneak inside the hangar and commit an undetectable act of sabotage?
Her train of thought was derailed by an authoritative knock that made her think of the deep-voiced, silver-haired doctor who had promised he would come by to spring her hours earlier.
“About time you finally made it,” she said, unable to contain her annoyance. But her visitor was the last person she’d expected. “Zeke Pike. What brings you—”
“Needed a part for one of my tools.” Wearing jeans and a clean but worn khaki shirt, he looked uncomfortable, too big for the small and antiseptic space. “Would have set me back some, work-wise, to wait for a delivery.”
Her headache ebbed, even if he wanted to let her know he hadn’t made the drive specifically to see her. She inhaled, enjoying the new scents that had entered with him. Of good, clean man and outdoors…and maybe just a whiff of hope.
“I suppose they sell these parts right down in the gift shop?” She gestured toward the plain brown paper bag he was clutching. “That’s handy.”
He glanced down at the bag as if he had forgotten its existence, then colored. “Well, no. They don’t sell drill bits at the hospital, exactly. But the store’s in the neighborhood, so I thought, while I was this close, I might—might as well…”
When he wound down like an old watch, she looked at him, saying nothing. She had the odd sense that if she spoke, he would wheel around and bound off like a startled mule deer. A far cry from the man who had lit up her body like the Vegas Strip at the picnic table two days earlier. Though she’d had
no business kissing anybody, she had to admit she’d enjoyed his take-no-prisoners approach.
But this version of Zeke Pike—hesitant, almost shy—touched her on another level. What could have cost this powerful, incredibly attractive man his confidence?
“Aw, hell,” he said. “How are you, Rachel? I’ve been—I guess you could say I’ve been worried. Patsy said you’d be all right, but—that was a hell of a lot of blood, the other day, and—”
“Facial wounds bleed a lot. Looked worse than it was. It just needed a few stitches.”
“But you have a concussion, don’t you?”
Since nodding had unpredictable results—from nausea to dizziness and more pain—she simply said, “So they tell me, but I’m doing a lot better. Besides, as many people would attest, from my father to my teachers to—first and foremost—my stepmother, I’m the proud owner of one hard head.”
“So they tell me.” His smile lifted her spirits.
“I’m glad you stopped by,” she said. “I need the distraction. I’m so irritated that the doctor hasn’t shown up to release me, I was considering tossing the poor volunteer out my window for excessive perkiness.”
He glanced out the window, toward well-tended landscaping. “We’re on the ground floor, Rachel.”
With a shrug, she said, “Causes too much trouble, killing people. From this point forward, I’m settling for minor mayhem. Though if you start getting all perky on me, I can’t make any promises.”
Though her irreverence would have shocked her family, Zeke laughed, a rich, deep sound that set her tingling in places she’d been trying steadfastly to ignore. Her mind flashed to the way he’d touched her, the heat of their mouths as the two of them explored.
What would it be like to feel that heat on her breasts, to let those big hands run free over her body? But the thought took her uncomfortably close to possibilities she didn’t want to contemplate, so she shivered and buried the idea deep in her subconscious.
“Here,” he said, thrusting the bag toward her. “This is—I had some scraps and such around. Odds and ends really, and I—I thought that you might like—Well, you can have it if you…”
The rest of his words were lost in the rattling of the paper bag and her exclamation of delight. “Zeke. This is—This is incredible. No one’s ever…I can’t believe you made this for me.”
It was a wooden box. Simple, elegant, its planes a rich, red-gold that seemed to glow with the late sun’s rays. In the center of its top, he’d embedded an oval silver concha set with a single, large turquoise. To her untrained eye, the stone was stunning, its brilliant blue-green overlaid with delicate black webbing. Rather than shining brightly, the embossed metal looked worn, like an old nickel.
“This part looks like an antique,” she said, fingering the concha.
“Old Pawn,” he said, “from a Navajo trader in New Mexico. It used to be a part of someone’s belt, years back, on the reservation.”
“So you drive there to do business?”
“Now and again, when the mood strikes. I like taking something old and broken, making it new and useful again. Pleasing.”
“The way you do with your horses,” she said.
He shrugged. “It’s not for everyone. If you’d rather have something all new, I could—”
When he reached for it, she held fast. “I love it, Zeke, and I love that you went through all the trouble to make it for me.”
“It wasn’t any trouble. Like I said, I just had a few odds and ends around, so I thought I might as well—”
She touched his hand and waited for him to look her in the eye. “It’s okay, Zeke. I like you, too. One heck of a lot better than the people I knew back in Philadelphia. Bunch of suck-ups pretending they were concerned while, behind my back, it was a completely different story.”
She had supposed that she’d had good friends. Fun people, artsy types, who shared laughter along with the struggles to establish themselves in a world that all too often turned its back on talent. But when the going got tough, every one of them had disappeared from her life, vanished like so many puffs of smoke fanned by a breeze. A boyfriend, a sweet-natured math teacher she’d started dating a few short weeks before the shooting, had bailed on her, too, scared off by the negative publicity—and his own doubts once he had seen the photos.
“People’ll hurt you,” Zeke said, “disappoint you every time.”
“Not all of them.” Rachel knew instinctively that Zeke was formed of something tougher. Something as solid and enduring as the furniture he crafted.
He looked at her so intently, a thrill slipped down her spine. Fear her words would scare him off; fear they’d bring him closer. The memory of the image she had photographed was overlaid with an image of his fury when he had learned the picture had been published.
“Do you have any damned idea what you’ve done?”
She’d wondered about that, wondered, could the man be hiding, living as he did in Marfa with no phone or computer, no credit cards, and very little human contact? According to Patsy, no one knew his hometown or what he’d done before buying the site of the old candelilla factory. No one knew anything about his former life.
But in small-town Texas, that hadn’t kept people from imagining—and discussing in detail—his history. Some figured he’d ducked out on paying child support or was one of those mad-bomber-type weirdoes with an axe to grind against the government. Others, mainly women intent on becoming the antidote to heartbreak, guessed he’d washed up on shore here following the wreckage of a love affair.
None of these possibilities appealed to Rachel, but whatever his problems, she had far too many of her own to get involved. Yet she couldn’t look away from his face, couldn’t do anything but sigh in gratitude when he finally, finally bent to kiss her.
He moved slowly this time, so much more cautiously than the cataclysmic kiss before her crash. Not wanting to scare her as he feared he had before, he lingered in the soft pliancy of her lips, the sweet earnestness of her response. With callused fingers, he feathered touches from her temple to her jaw, then allowed his hand to drift downward along her slender neck.
As his fingertips traced the gentle inclination of her collarbone, he felt the stony fist inside him loosen, offering him a fleeting look at the man he’d hoped to be, the same man he sometimes caught in sidelong glimpses as he rode into the desert or shaped weather-hardened mesquite into something lasting. Usually, he turned away, devastated by the lost potential, but when he saw it in her warm, brown eyes and heard it in her sweet voice, gratitude welled up inside him.
And maybe something more. Something he had given up the right to when he had stepped away from his past so many years before. He thought he had made his peace with it, thought he knew better than to hope for the possibilities that he’d abandoned, but touching Rachel, kissing Rachel, tore through all the layers of scar tissue and made the old wound drip bright blood….
Blood that took him back to that night, to the boy sprawled bleeding, dying in the old goat pasture where they’d gathered. He could hear the labored breathing, hear those he’d thought of as friends saying, “Langley did it. Was Langley hit him so hard, it laid him out like that.”
Shivering and sweating, Zeke jerked back abruptly, his elbow catching the vase beside the bed. Green ceramic shattered, amid a watery puddle and a blizzard of white petals.
“Damned clumsy,” he said. “I’m sorry for it—”
He was skewered on her sharp gaze.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. “It was so nice, and then—”
“I’ve got no business fooling with you.” He squatted, picking up the larger shards of broken vase. “No right.”
“You’ll cut your hand. Please leave it. Just tell me what you’re thinking. Why you pulled back from me.”
Not knowing how to answer, he went on picking up the pieces—and wishing he could pick up what had been shattered long before.
The door whooshed open, and a blonde wo
man with a pin reading Volunteers Care! swept inside. “I just got off the phone with—Oh, dear.” She glanced down at Zeke. “Sorry, I didn’t see you come in. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“Had a little accident,” Zeke said.
“I’ll have someone come to clean it. You wouldn’t—”
The volunteer flicked a look at Rachel before returning it to him. “—You wouldn’t happen to be a Kyle, would you?”
“Kyle?” Zeke glared, suspecting her of deliberate cruelty.
“Oh.” The woman flushed bright pink. Then, to Rachel, she stage-whispered, “I’ll be back to tell you later.”
“Please stay, Mrs. Dixon,” Rachel pleaded. Turning to Zeke, she explained, “Those flowers have a card in them. It says that they’re from Kyle.”
So this was someone else’s malice. “Another threat?” he asked.
Rachel frowned. “If you can find it in that mess, you’re welcome to read the message for yourself.”
Returning her attention to the volunteer, she added, “Please tell me, what did the florist say?”
As he picked among the broken foliage, Mrs. Dixon shook her head. “A threat? My friend, Glory, would never pass along that sort of message.”
“It wasn’t a threat, exactly,” Rachel clarified. “So are you saying she took the message? Was it a telephone order?”
“She said it came through a national service. It’s a toll-free number that collects the orders and then uses local florists to fulfill them.”
Zeke found the card and stood to read it. Though spotted with water from the vase, the words were clearly legible. And a less than subtle threat, but one that wouldn’t alarm anyone unfamiliar with Rachel Copeland’s history.
“Then the customer must have used a credit card,” said Rachel.
The blonde woman nodded. “Yes, but Glory doesn’t have access to that part, since the person paying opted to remain anonymous.”
“If the order came through the computer, then why’s the card handwritten?” Rachel pressed.
“I asked her that, too. She said her printer’s so low on toner, the note wasn’t legible, so she recopied the message onto the card for you. I also asked her if there was any way she could call the 800 number people and find out for you which Kyle really sent the flowers.”
Triple Exposure Page 13
