Triple Exposure

by Colleen Thompson

  So instead of answering her sister, Marlene broke the connection. Then she pulled the battery out of her telephone. Where she was going, she couldn’t afford to be betrayed by the sound of its ring.

  And besides, she refused to take the chance that somehow either her sister, Dan, or the authorities would use it to track her down and stop her from doing what she must.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Or ever the stars were made, or skies,

  Grief was born, and the kinless night,

  Mother of gods without form or name ….

  —Algernon Charles Swinburne

  from “A Lamentation,” section II

  In his workshop, Zeke threw tools into boxes, trying to keep too busy to think about what he was doing. To regret the things he meant to leave behind or fear the future he’d chosen—a risk he knew would horrify both Rachel and his mother. But it was a risk worth taking, he knew, especially when the alternatives, another name, another town, and another hollow shell of false existence, left him feeling as cold and lifeless as a corpse.

  After twenty years, it was finally time to stop the running. He would first contact his brothers—both grown men now, not the raw-boned boys he remembered—and ask for their help. As for his mother, he’d beg her forgiveness and he’d pray for her strength, but he’d no longer be held hostage by her terror.

  Instead, he intended to hire the best attorney he could find—an attorney who hailed from somewhere well beyond the corruption of the East Texas county where he’d grown up—to help guide him through this mess. And if he had to serve time, he would do it. Because he would willingly take that risk for the slightest chance that he could spend the rest of his life in honest freedom.

  Freedom to figure out who he was, to pursue a life outside the invisible bars that had surrounded him. It would mean, too, that he could pursue Rachel, if she were both free and willing. If she hadn’t by that time forgotten all about him.

  He carried a box of tools outside, his muscles straining under the weight. As he set the box down on the pickup’s open tailgate, he looked up sharply at the sound of some commotion from the horses.

  He shoved the box back farther, then reached into his pocket to pull out the folding utility knife he often carried. Not much of a weapon against an intruder, be it human predator or big cat, but since he owned no gun, it would have to do. Recalling the way Gus had been injured, he slipped into the darkest shadows, then headed in the direction of nervous-sounding whickers and the clatter of shod hooves.

  “Shhh, shush. Be quiet, it’s all right,” someone whispered.

  Someone female, he realized. But he didn’t recognize the voice, gleaned no information from it except the speaker’s nervousness. He edged closer to the voice, to a moonlit silhouette that was definitely a woman’s. A small woman, compact and—if he was not mistaken—curvy.

  She was on the move, heading from the corral area toward the building where he’d made his home for so long. Her breathing sounded labored, as if she’d been walking for some distance. Or maybe anxiety was getting to her.

  But that didn’t mean she wasn’t armed. For what woman would wander around such an isolated patch of private property alone, at night, without protection? And what innocent reason could she possibly have to be here, traveling with no light but the moon’s?

  Zeke closed in, attempting to move stealthily but crunching gravel loudly enough that the woman gasped, “Who’s there?”

  She sounded terrified, and when he didn’t answer, she broke into a jog, still arrowing toward the candelilla factory building. In her haste, she stumbled. With a choked yelp, she pitched forward, and Zeke darted close to grab her arm with one hand and hoist her to her feet.

  His free arm locked around her chest, and he pushed the flat steel of his blade against her neck. “Don’t move. Don’t scream,” he warned. “I don’t want to have to hurt you.”

  She struggled, shrieking, too panic-stricken to contain her terror. Zeke tightened his grip and ordered, “Quiet. Or you will end up hurt, and I don’t need the damned trouble. All I need are answers from you, right now.”

  Whether it was his tone or his words, she went still and whispered, “I just—I want to warn you.”

  “Hang on just a minute,” he said. “Hate to do this, but I have to.”

  “What are you doing?” Her voice slid up the register as he ran his hands along her sides and waistband, then slid them along her arms and hands.

  “Sorry.” He let go of her. “But I had to make sure you were unarmed before I turned you loose. Don’t go running off, though. I have a feeling you wouldn’t enjoy a flying tackle.”

  Especially since he suspected he outweighed her by seventy pounds or more.

  “I won’t run.” Her voice shook as she faced him, her features obscured by the darkness. “I was just going to leave this for you. I thought I’d stick it under your truck’s windshield wiper so you’d find it.”

  He heard a paper rattling as she pulled it from her pocket. A moment later, she handed it to him. He peered down at a folded section of newspaper, but he couldn’t make out details in the weak light.

  “We’re both here now,” he said. “So tell me, what is this? And who the hell are you?”

  “It’s a note and your picture,” the woman told him. “From a newspaper travel section I found in her motel room.”

  “Whose room?” he asked, more confused than ever.

  “My mother’s. Willie’s mother. She knows who and where you are. It’s all there in the article—everything she needed to come find you.”

  As Zeke stared down at the illegible print, understanding detonated, unfurling in explosive waves around him. He’d been recognized as he had feared, recognized from that damned photo—which had brought more than customers to irritate him with their orders. Which had brought him this bizarre warning—but why? Why would Willie’s sister care enough to risk coming here alone at night to let her brother’s supposed murderer know about her mother’s discovery? Why hadn’t she simply called the authorities and had him arrested? A thousand questions spun into existence, twisting across the landscape of his thoughts.

  Looking up again, Zeke could only spit out one single, simple query. “Marlene?” he asked. “You’re Marlene Tyler?”

  But his only answer was the sound of swift-retreating footsteps, for the woman had used his distraction to make a break for the dark cover of the desert night.

  “Get your things together, Rachel.” Her father’s tone warned that he was not about to argue. “You’re staying with us to night. We’ve got the guest room ready.”

  Rachel nodded, too emotionally wrung out to care where she laid her head, as long as she could sleep. Besides, the image of her blazing van still burned in her mind, graphic evidence that her stalker was in Marfa. And Zeke, too, had begged her to stay with her father, Zeke, whom she would never see again….

  “Listen, Rusty,” her father said as they walked toward the truck. “I think maybe you should drive to night. My eyes—must’ve gotten some of this cleaning fluid I was using earlier in them. As it is, Patsy’s given me hell about driving on my own tonight.”

  Rachel sighed, hating to call him on his white lie but unable to keep pretending. If she didn’t press him, he—or someone else—was going to get hurt. “I think it’s time to get those eyes checked, Dad. They’re getting a lot worse, aren’t they?”

  “I told you—” He shook his head. “I just got something in them. And it’s late, and I’m tired.”

  Excuses, more excuses. Like the ones he had been making for not reading. The ones leading him to rely more and more heavily on Lili, Bobby, and increasingly on Rachel herself, to handle not only the business paperwork but the flying. But he wasn’t ready to let go yet. Might never be, because flying had been his life for so long.

  “We’ll call the ophthalmologist, the one that Grandma used. It might be something completely treatable. I’ll take you, if you’d like. Or Patsy could—” She tou
ched his hand, and tried not to react when he jerked it from her.

  “I already know what the hell it is. Now are you going to drive the damned truck home or not?”

  “Sure, Dad.” She let the subject drop, and he gave the keys a high toss, so she had to reach to grab them. The house was only a few blocks distant, a drive filled with frail silence.

  As she pulled up, she saw the lights were still on inside the white Craftsman bungalow where Rachel had grown up. A window shade flickered, and a silhouetted form peeked around its edge to watch them pull into the driveway. For a fleeting moment, Rachel saw her mother looking out at her. Her mother…

  “Patsy’s waited up.”

  Her dad spoke with forced cheer, but in Rachel’s throat, a lump formed. She bowed her head, until J.D.—who had jumped into her lap for the ride—licked her chin. How long, she wondered, have I been blaming Patsy for the problems in my life? Her stepmother hadn’t caused the stroke that shut down Jana Copeland’s brain. Hadn’t committed any crime other than rescuing Rachel’s father from deep depression. And if the worst came to pass, if Walter Copeland had to give up flying, Patsy would be the one to see him through the crisis, as she’d been seeing Rachel through hers, in her way.

  Rachel blinked back tears as Zeke’s words sprang to her mind. “That woman loves you. She’s just been too scared to admit it. Scared that you’ll flat-out reject her.”

  “You okay?” her father asked.

  “I’m fine,” Rachel said, willing the words to be true. For his sake and for Patsy’s, for the sake of their shared future as a family.

  A family that could never, for all her foolish fantasies, include the man Rachel loved.

  Zeke went for a flashlight, then skimmed the ground with its beam as he searched for the woman he believed to be Marlene. He still couldn’t believe she had made the trip here, a drive of ten or eleven hours from the East Texas town where both had grown up, simply to warn him that her mother knew his whereabouts.

  It made no sense whatsoever, unless Willie and Marlene’s mother—a well-dressed PTA mom he remembered for her kindness and her brownies—had gone off the deep end because of the discovery. Recalling Rachel’s suspicions about Kyle’s mother and her harassment, he wondered at the power of grief to corrupt a thing as wholesome as a mother’s love, to warp its gentle nature into something terrible and violent.

  From halfway down his long drive, Zeke heard an engine starting, then glimpsed a vehicle’s taillights just before they disappeared from view. It must have been Marlene. She’d probably parked as close as she had dared without letting him hear her approach. But why? Why not simply drive up, issue her warning, and be on her way? Had speaking to her brother’s “killer” made her feel disloyal?

  Though the highway remained out of sight over a rise, he could see the faint glow of her headlights traveling south, toward town. But Zeke decided not to take the time to jump into his truck and chase her. Instead, he went back to his packing, convinced he would be long gone before Willie’s mother either called the sheriff or came out here—something he could scarcely imagine—to confront him.

  Inside, he gathered the essentials, from tools and clothing to those few books he had read and reread so often. He checked inside a cover to assure himself his mother’s letter would come with him.

  Of Rachel Copeland, he would take nothing, except the memory of her offer to come with him and the knowledge that he had done right by turning her down. It was a thin comfort, too tattered and threadbare to afford him any real warmth, but it would have to suffice…at least for the foreseeable future but far more likely the remainder of his life.

  At last, his preparations made, he found himself sitting for the last time at his table, where he’d written notes about the animals’ care and a check covering their upkeep. Outside, the darkness of the desert night enshrouded the place like a cocoon. He thought of all the years he’d been here, his rides out into the desert, the wild things he’d had the pleasure of observing, the countless times he’d lost himself in the work that seemed to choose him as much as he chose it. How it had all felt like enough for so long, more than he deserved. But however lacking or complete that life was, it was time to put it behind him. Time to move on, once he rested his eyes for just a minute….

  Zeke awakened hours later, swearing and acutely conscious of the early morning light. What the hell kind of a fool slept through his own midnight escape?

  As he made quick work of washing up, then feeding and watering Gus and the horses, the answer settled over him like fine dust. The kind who really doesn’t want to leave. The kind who’s too damned attached to this life—and the woman in it—to let go.

  Praying he hadn’t waited too long, Zeke finally climbed inside his old truck and headed down the road.

  Marlene, too, awakened, startled to find that she’d been sleeping in her rental car and even more surprised that her cell phone was ringing; she couldn’t remember replacing the battery last night. She was surprised, too, to recognize the ring tone as her husband’s; he hadn’t called in days. And Marlene had been afraid to call him—afraid of reigniting an argument for which she had lost heart.

  She snatched up the phone to answer, an early morning surge of hope pushing past weeks’ worth of guilt. Outside, pink-coral sunlight washed over a plain dotted with dew-damp grazing cattle. They were red-and-white cows, most of them with young calves by their sides. Some sort of yellow flowers had opened, brightening the grasses on which they fed.

  “Dan, I’m sorry—so sorry we argued.” After readjusting her seat to driving position, she shoved the tangle of her ash-blonde hair from her eyes. “You and the boys, you’re my life, and as for my mom, Dad would understand that I’ve done my best. He’d be the first to tell me to come home and—”

  “I’m sorry, too, Marlene. I have to tell you—this isn’t good news.”

  “The boys.” Her heart contracted at the stricken sound of his voice. Something was terribly wrong—she knew it. Oh, God, what if something had happened because she’d left, because she had abandoned her family for this hellish wild goose chase. “Are Josh and Taylor—”

  “They’re fine, Mar.”

  He’s filed for divorce, she thought. No one they knew—not even her sister—would blame him.

  But he said, “It’s your mother.”

  “Have the police found her? Or was it the sheriff out here?”

  “She’s not in Texas, Baby. The man who called—he was from Tulsa, from the medical examiner’s office.”

  “I don’t understand. Tulsa?” Marlene’s pulse thundered in her ears. Had authorities discovered the carjacking and her brother’s dead friend? Had they found out about the others, too, about the chain of violent deaths? “Mom left Tulsa weeks ago.”

  “No, Marlene, she didn’t. She never left the state of Oklahoma.”

  “What are you talking about? Of course she did. I followed her to Albuquerque. I spoke to people who saw her there.” I saw a man she ran down near a construction site. Marlene kept this part to herself, still harboring a slim hope that she could get her mother help instead of involving the police. “And you saw her picture from that ATM, remember? The one where you spotted that Jeep Commander in the background.”

  “I told you the picture quality was pretty bad, remember? Maybe I thought it was your mother because I was looking for your mother. But it’s impossible, because before that—the police in Tulsa found a body—”

  “No, Dan,” Marlene argued. “My mother used her debit card. To get a cash advance. Who else would’ve known her PIN? Not some random stranger wearing her hat.”

  “They’ve identified your mother. I’m so sorry, Marlene. There’s no gentle way to say this, but she was found—they found the body stuffed inside a Dumpster near that little motel where she stayed. She—she had a gunshot wound. Through the face, into the brain. The person who called—he said it’s likely death was instant, before she had the chance to feel pain.” He sped on, rattling off an
other blow before she recovered. “It’s a pretty rough area, and the police are investigating a string of robberies. They think she might have been shot when answering a knock at her room’s door. In past incidents, people have seen two men running away, both of them dressed in pizza delivery uniforms.”

  “No.” Marlene shook her head, anxiety exploding bright as fireworks in her vision. She had been to that old motor court, had questioned the woman at the desk herself. “My mother wouldn’t have opened her door. You know how she was. Ever since my brother’s death, she was so suspicious of people, especially strangers. Besides, this is all impossible. She doesn’t even like pizza. And the woman I talked to at the motel never said anything about any body being found. She told me my mother paid in cash and left the key inside her room when she left.”

  “Maybe the body wasn’t found until after you were there. Or the clerk had been warned not to talk about the shootings, since that sort of thing can’t be good for business.”

  “Maybe…” Marlene allowed, but she still didn’t believe it. Wouldn’t.

  “Did anyone you spoke with actually see your mother leave?” Dan asked.

  Marlene opened her mouth to blurt Of course, but nothing came out. Because the woman she had questioned hadn’t exactly said that. But Marlene had assumed…

  “The man you talked to, the medical examiner,” she said, “did you get his name and number? Because I have to call him right now, tell him they have the wrong person. If she was shot in the face, then maybe they couldn’t tell—”

  “They waited until they had a match with the dental records before they called us. They wanted to be sure.”

  “But what if her—” Marlene sucked in deep breaths, one after another, until she felt light-headed from the rush of oxygen. “—what if this body’s teeth were damaged too much? Maybe they made a mistake. An honest mistake. Because that body can’t be my mother.”