Triple Exposure

by Colleen Thompson

  “Found out? I don’t get it. How could she not know?”

  Patsy scowled. “There’s some kind of knock-out drops or pills—date-rape drugs, they call ’em. These perverts dissolve ’em into women’s drinks. The thinking is that Kyle slipped her something and then took advantage later, after the rest of her students headed home. Some private investigators found pictures, different pictures that were really all her. Rachel looked unconscious in ’em—got some high-dollar experts lined up who’ll swear to it in court. And it explains a lot of things that—I hate to admit this—made me wonder, why witnesses said she was acting wild that one night in public, why she says she can’t remember.”

  “Son of a bitch.” Fury burned in him like a live coal, igniting primitive instincts he’d swear he didn’t possess. Archaic impulses to ride forth and wreak havoc, to avenge the woman his heart had no more sense than to claim. With the culprit dead, Zeke didn’t know where to direct his anger. So it was no surprise that some of it slopped over onto Patsy. “What do you mean she says she can’t remember? If she’d known before, wouldn’t she have told somebody? God, Patsy, they took her to that jail in Philadelphia and booked her, didn’t they? Took her prints, strip-searched her—you think she would’ve put up with that ugliness if she’d had any idea of what went on?”

  “No need to chew my liver out,” Patsy snapped. “I didn’t mean it that way. I know she’s been getting messages from the psychologist for weeks, but she didn’t ever call back that I know of. And I can’t say I blame her. Who’d want to face such a thing? Easier to keep what’s past out of sight if you can.”

  Zeke started, suddenly wondering if she had guessed something about him, if she’d known all along. Before he could think of a response, a truck’s door closed behind him.

  Patsy’s gaze darted to look toward the arrival. Lowering her voice, she said, “That’s Walter, and about time. I’d better go see to him. Then we’ll talk to Rachel. Harlan, too, I guess.”

  Zeke was surprised when she handed him her keys.

  “I see you don’t have your truck here, so why don’t you take my car back to your place. It’s too dark to walk back there, and it’s getting chilly. I could have Walter drop me by to pick it up on our way home.”

  Though there was logic in her suggestion, Zeke hesitated, caught between his desire to see Rachel and yet another reason to hurry home and pack to drive south, to the border.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Sometimes our light goes out but is blown into flame by an other human being. Each of us owes deepest thanks to those who have rekindled this light.

  —Albert Schweitzer

  “I need to see him, Dad. Please.” Standing beside his pickup, Rachel looked into her father’s eyes. As upset and exhausted as she was after Harlan Castillo’s questions, she couldn’t go home quite yet. Couldn’t leave without an explanation from Zeke Pike.

  Or whoever the hell he was.

  But her father, freshly filled in on the sheriff’s suspicions, shook his head. “You’re coming home now, Rusty. With us, where you’ll be safe.”

  The fire truck pulled out onto the highway, leaving only Castillo’s car and the deputy’s parked beside her father’s pickup. The two lawmen talked in quiet voices, standing vigil over the dripping, blackened hulk of the burned van. Twisted by the blaze, its original, boxlike shape was barely distinguishable.

  Patsy touched Rachel’s shoulder. “You heard what Harlan said. He’s looking into the possibility that Zeke’s somehow involved in the things that have happened since you’ve come home. And you have to understand that we’re—your father’s worried.”

  Rachel shrugged away from her. “He’s your friend, isn’t he? You’ve known Zeke for years, right? And in all that time, has he ever once caused anybody trouble?”

  “Nobody but Mitch Whiteside about six years ago, when he was beating the hell out of that half-starved yearling colt of his. Took a beating of his own the day Zeke caught him at it. Later on, Mitch groused around that Zeke went and stole that horse from him.”

  “So what really happened?”

  Patsy shook her head. “Not sure.”

  “I heard that story,” Walter said. “The deputy sent out to Zeke’s place to investigate found him treating the horse’s wounds—had all these cuts where he’d been whipped half to death with a leather strap or switch or something. Colt was a walking skeleton, so nervous you could hardly get near him.”

  “Poor Cholla,” Rachel whispered, recalling the old scars she had noticed against the huge animal’s now-gleaming, golden hide. “It must’ve been Cholla.”

  “Harlan himself came out to have a look, too,” her father continued. “The way I heard it, after that, he had a talk with Whiteside, told the man to keep his sorry mouth shut or he’d be charged with every offense the sheriff and his boys could dream up. Whiteside moved on not long after, and that was the last anybody mentioned it.”

  “Have you seen that horse in the pasture?” she asked. “He’s gorgeous. Strong and healthy and well fed. And Zeke has others on his place, too. A mule and this pinto mare somebody was starving. He saves them, Dad. He cares about them. And he cares about the work he’s doing out there, making his furniture. He loves it the way I love taking pictures or you love flying planes.” Her gaze swung to take in Patsy. “Or the way you love feeding people.”

  “Wouldn’t exactly say I love it,” Patsy murmured. “It’s just something I can do.”

  “After what you’ve been through,” her father said, “I don’t see how you can trust a man who—hell, Rusty, you don’t even know his right name.”

  “But I know him, Dad. I know him and…and I think I—”

  “You’re vulnerable now. That’s understandable. But don’t let it make you stupid. Let the sheriff do his job.”

  “We need to take her to Zeke, Walter,” Patsy put in, an uncharacteristic gentleness in her voice. “I talked to him just this evening. Whoever—whatever—he is, he’s no threat to Rachel. If I’d thought that, do you really believe I’d have loaned him my car?”

  Her father stood beside the driver’s side door, his hands jammed in his pockets, his expression doubtful. He looked old this evening, older than Rachel had ever seen him. In that moment, she wished she’d driven right past Marfa, wished she’d found some other place to start anew so as to spare him.

  “If you drop me off at Zeke’s place,” she said, “then I can drive the car back to Grandma’s.”

  Rachel still couldn’t think of it as her house, filled as it was with Benita Copeland’s belongings, with the essence of the woman she had loved so easily and naturally.

  “I’ll call you once I’m home safe, promise.”

  As her father rattled his keys, the look he shot her was suspicious. “You really want to go to him? To a man who could be anybody? Could be anything? After everything that happened with that little pervert and somebody burning your van and—”

  “Hand over those keys, Walter Copeland, and settle yourself down,” Patsy interrupted. “Rachel’s thirty-two years old, and you’re always the one telling me what good sense she has. So trust her on this. Trust her.”

  Bristling, he straightened. “It’s not Rachel I don’t trust.”

  “He loves her,” Patsy told her husband, her voice solemn, or perhaps only astonished.

  Rachel felt the words jolt through her, felt the desert night shift into a new reality. Breath held, she offered nothing, but simply ached for Patsy to offer a crumb more.

  “He’s in love with her. He said that.” Turning to Rachel, Patsy frowned. “From the look on your face, he hasn’t told you. And as tight-lipped as he is, he might never. But I promise you, Rachel, when a man like Zeke Pike parts with words, he means them. He wouldn’t waste his breath lying to me or anybody.”

  Rachel smiled at her, understanding that they both knew the same man. And recognizing that by standing up for her against her father, by spilling this measure of truth like salt across the table, P
atsy had offered her an olive branch of sorts. Fragile and tentative, but Rachel still recognized it for the chance that it was.

  “Thank you,” she said quietly, looking her stepmother in the eye and seeing someone she hadn’t glimpsed before. Someone who had been as afraid of Rachel as Rachel herself had been over the unexpected—and unwelcome—surprise of her father’s marriage, what she’d seen as his unholy rush to fill her mother’s place.

  Perhaps her father, too, saw what passed between them, for instead of arguing any further, he looked down at Patsy’s outstretched palm. “Guess I’ve lost this argument,” he grumbled and dropped his keys into her hand. “Just call when you get home safely. Call me, no matter what time of night it is.”

  When he heard the crunch of tires on gravel, Zeke was grabbing clothes, packing for a journey he should have taken years before. He’d been a damned fool, sinking such deep roots into this dry land. A fool to take on livestock and a bigger one to get involved with, even attached to, people.

  He cursed, hearing a vehicle’s door slam, fearing that his chance to flee had just evaporated, that whatever the interruption, he’d be a sitting duck when the other shoe dropped. As it must, and soon, for he hadn’t bothered constructing the kind of identity that would hold up to law enforcement scrutiny. Hadn’t bothered because some dark part of him had wanted to be caught.

  Caught and punished. Tried, convicted—whatever it took to bring the truth of things to light. Because even if the guilty (or the other guilty parties, he amended) were never brought to justice, he would still have his chance to say in open court what had really happened the night Willie Tyler died for less than nothing.

  But over the course of twenty long years, Zeke hadn’t done a single thing to make it happen, had not been able to, for fear of shattering a heart too fragile to withstand his gamble.

  Never try to come back, his mother had written…I can’t live through it again….

  Couldn’t live through the grief and humiliation of losing Zeke in the same way she’d lost his father. In his mind’s eye, Zeke could see her as she had been, pushing him toward the door and begging him: “Just run.”

  Instead, he stepped out into the thin light of the newly risen moon, where he met Rachel as she climbed down from her father’s pickup. Behind the wheel, Patsy nodded at him while Walter’s expression hardened. Maybe he hadn’t approved of his wife’s loan of her auto. Or more likely, Zeke decided, Castillo had been talking, warning his ex-wife and her second husband about the nature of his suspicions.

  But Zeke’s focus was on Rachel, who stood just outside of the rectangle of light spilling from his open doorway. Rachel, who’d defended him against the sheriff’s insinuations, though she was still reeling from the revelation that she’d been sexually assaulted.

  And just that quickly, he knew damned well that he was going nowhere. That he was no longer the kind of person capable of abandoning the animals he cared for, of running off without a word to Rachel Copeland.

  “Did you come to get the car?” he asked over the rumble of the pickup’s engine.

  As he pulled out Patsy’s keys, Rachel reached forward. But instead of taking them, she merely laid her hand atop his. “I came to talk. Then I’ll drive myself home.”

  Nodding his understanding, Zeke thanked Patsy for saving him a dark walk home and wished both her and Walter a good night.

  “I’ll be checking on her,” Walter warned from the passenger seat. “And if she’s not right as rain, you and I are going to have ourselves a lot of trouble.”

  “Da-ad,” Rachel complained, sounding so like an aggrieved teenager, Zeke might have smiled under other circumstances.

  After passing her the keys, Zeke stepped closer to the truck and nodded. “I’d expect as much.”

  He reached through the window with an offer of his right hand. Walter looked at it suspiciously, but at last he grimaced and returned the handshake.

  “You have my word,” Zeke promised as his grip tightened. “Right as rain.”

  Once Patsy and Walter drove away, Zeke said, “I ever tell you that I like your father just fine? Doesn’t waste a lot of time on games. Doesn’t try to hide the way he’s thinking.”

  “It’s pretty embarrassing at times,” Rachel admitted with a tight smile. “But I wouldn’t have him any other way.”

  Zeke hesitated, wanting to invite her inside where he could light a fire in the woodstove but dreading the moment when she saw the suitcase he’d left partly packed. From the corral, he heard a horse’s nicker. From the dark heart of the desert, a night bird cried out, while close at hand, the Chevy’s engine ticked as it cooled. Rachel, for her part, merely stood there looking at him, as if they had all the time in the world.

  Because it was bothering him, not knowing whether she’d come out here to support him or accuse him, he finally forced himself to ask, “So, do you think the sheriff’s going to find who set that fire—or do you think he’s wasted all his time suspecting the wrong person?”

  Above Rachel’s head, a shooting star formed a bright flash, which quickly faded. She crossed her arms and tucked her hands beneath them. “Are we going to have to stand out here all night, freezing? Because I’d rather talk indoors.”

  “Come on in.” Resigned, Zeke ushered her inside the kitchen. “Want me to make some coffee first or get the heat going?”

  “Heat,” she told him. “I can start some coffee.”

  They both worked in silence, Zeke kindling a good fire. While Rachel rummaged around to find what she needed in the kitchen, he furtively shoved the still-open suitcase beneath his bed. Relief washed over him at the thought that he’d gotten away with it, but when he turned around, he saw her watching.

  “Going someplace?” Her voice was like a shaft of ice, her expression suddenly as suspicious as her father’s.

  “Thought I might. Then it occurred to me there’s no place else I want to be.”

  “Harlan has you nervous,” she ventured, stalking toward him from the kitchen.

  Nodding, he admitted, “Yes. He damned well does.”

  “Nervous enough to make a run for it without your horses?”

  “I couldn’t do it,” he said. “You know I’m no animal abuser.”

  She took a step closer, invading his space. Pushing. “Then what are you? Or maybe the right question is who are you? Because I know you’re not Zeke Pike.”

  There it was, he realized as pain pulsed at his temples. The very thing he’d spent so many years imagining and dreading. Reality, not nightmare, the cold, hard fact of it so overwhelming he could scarcely stay on his feet.

  “I’ve been him longer than I’ve been anybody else,” Zeke managed. “I’m not sure I’d know how to go back at this point.”

  “Go back to what? To where?” she challenged.

  He returned her stare, not daring to blink, scarcely daring to breathe, as if the knowledge were trapped inside his lungs like stale air. He wanted fiercely to exhale, wanted to talk to her as he had talked to no one. But held too long, the secret had burrowed into him like some thorny horror, its barbed tendrils embedded too close to his heart.

  A hiss and crackle marked the progress of the fire he had started. He felt its first heat and smelled its burning wood scraps. From the kitchen, his ancient coffeemaker burbled, and every detail of that moment branded itself in his memory. Because these were the final moments, he suspected, the last, doomed seconds before she turned her back on him forever.

  Rachel stood her ground and waited, her gaze expectant, unrelenting. Until the moment she surprised him by reaching up to run her fingertips along his stubbled jaw.

  “Whatever it is,” she said, “we’ll handle it together.”

  He shook his head. “Not this.”

  “What are you running from?”

  The veiled whisper of her voice cast a spell, igniting his nerve endings. When he shuddered, it was not with cold but the connection that shimmered in the air between them. That and the pressure of
so many words unspoken.

  Time now for that to change. Time now to trust somebody, even if it turned out to be the biggest mistake of his life. Because the pain of doing otherwise was too great. Because he didn’t know if such a chance would ever come to him again.

  “Twenty years ago, I was just a dumb kid. Thought I knew how the world worked, but at eighteen I…”

  When he choked up, she flashed the briefest of smiles, encouraging him.

  He took a step on shaking knees, then sat on the edge of his bed. Because he couldn’t say this standing up.

  “All I wanted was to run with the kids who wouldn’t have me. The ones with the easy money and the fast cars. The ones whose fathers hadn’t gone to prison.”

  She sat down beside him and laid her hand on his knee. He felt the warmth of her palm through the denim, the flow of her compassion. He drew strength from it to go on. “His only real crime was daring to speak up about some county inspectors who had a habit of extorting money from local businesses. Turned out that some of it was being funneled into the hands of law enforcement—so before my dad knew what hit him, our family’s restaurant burned to the ground and he was charged, convicted, and locked up for arson. You wouldn’t have believed how fast, and as for getting a fair trial…”

  Old emotion roiled inside Zeke: resentment, grief, raw fury. And shame, too, that he had been powerless to do anything to help. “My dad didn’t take it lying down, went on speaking out about it, writing state officials, even from prison. Until somebody—never heard who—knifed him in the shower. By that time, we couldn’t even afford to give him a proper burial. Had to settle for an unmarked prison grave since the insurance wouldn’t pay the restaurant claim and my mother had three boys to raise on her own.”

  “Is that why you took off?”

  Zeke shook his head. “No. No, I was the oldest, and I had to help hold things together. We rebuilt the diner by hand, though this time it was more of a shack than a real restaurant. But at least Mom could sell beer and barbecue.”