In the Waning Light

by Loreth Anne White

  Meg made a note to call Emma. She had more questions now. She’d like to speak to Tommy again, too. Because her mother’s journal clearly indicated she’d told both Tommy and Emma that she believed Ty Mack could have been innocent. Her hand stilled at the sound of a crash downstairs. Her mouth turned dry. She sat very still, listening, those screeching tires earlier suddenly taking on new context. She heard another noise, a scratching, then a soft thump.

  Quickly, she grabbed her robe. Belting it across her waist she went to the door and inched it open. It was dark down the passage, moonlight glinting through a window at the far end. She walked quietly along to Blake’s room, rapped at his door.

  “Blake?” she whispered.

  No reply.

  She turned the handle, edging it open. “Blake?”

  His bed was empty, his bedding a jumble. Her pulse quickened. Meg turned and hurried quietly to Noah’s room and edged open his door. He was sleeping soundly. No Lucy in sight.

  She started down the stairs, sliding her hand down the railing for balance, bare feet quiet. She reached the bottom of the stairs, rounded the corner, and screamed as something lunged at her. It was huge. Shadowed. With horns. Her brain folded in on itself, unable to make sense, and she turned to flee … run, Meggie, run …

  The thing grabbed her, spun her around, and clamped a hand over her mouth. Moonlight caught his face.

  Blake!?

  “Shhhh,” he whispered, breath warm against her ear. “You’ll wake Noah.” He released her mouth slowly. She could feel his heart thudding against her body. “What in the hell were you doing sneaking up on me like that?” he hissed.

  She stared up at him, heart jackhammering against her ribs, and she started to laugh. “What on earth is that thing on your head?”

  “Shh!”

  She clamped her hand over her own mouth, snorting as she tried to stifle her own laughter bubbling through her. He yanked the thing off his head and tossed it onto the counter.

  “It’s my dad’s crab hat,” he said stiffly.

  “It stinks.” She giggled again—like the child she’d always been inside—at the way his hair now stood up in comic tufts. A smile began to play over his lips, but it faded as he watched her laugh. A predatory intensity entered his gaze. His pupils turned dark, large, and an electrical heat began to thrum off him in waves. Meg’s laughter slowly quieted. She swallowed. Her heart stuttered as a molten, tingling heat leaked into her belly, and a gentle throb began in her groin, each delicious pulse matching the beat of blood through her veins.

  He reached for her hands, and drew her to him, slowly, inexorably, giving her time to stop him, the question implicit in his pacing, in the darkening pools of his eyes. And when she didn’t resist, he yanked her firmly against his solid frame, his other hand sliding down her hips and cupping her buttocks. He pulled her pelvis up against his groin as he forced his mouth down hard on hers. She felt his erection pressed between them.

  Heat exploded logic from Meg’s mind. She came up onto her toes, arching into him, opening her mouth under the crushing aggression of his hunger, her tongue tangling, fighting with his. He slid his hand into her robe, under her T-shirt, and down into the lace of her panties. He cupped her between her legs. His skin rough, hot. He moved the crotch fabric aside and she felt his fingers against bare skin. A groan slipped free from her mouth. He parted her with his fingers, touched her, and a wave of pleasure washed through her as her limbs began to shake.

  “Upstairs,” he murmured over her mouth, his finger going inside her. “Come with me upstairs.” Her knees turned to water as she sagged against him, aching for him, all of him, inside, down deep. Hard. Desperate.

  Geoff sat in his Jeep facing the ocean. He’d driven around to the state park lot on the spit after dropping Irene off at Chestnut Place. The moon shimmered silver on the swells and phosphorescence danced in the lines of surf that broke along the shore. He snagged his tequila bottle from the passenger seat, swigged, thinking of the look in Meg’s eyes as he’d reached under the table for that knife. It was like she was seeing into him, into the past. It was only a matter of time.

  Wind gusted off the sea, buffeting his Jeep, and he thought he could hear the screams again. He would never erase those screams from his mind. They’d scored into his soul like grooves gouged in vinyl, destined to replay, and replay the same old sound. He took another glug from the bottle, relishing the hot-acid burn down his throat, eyes watering as he swallowed. Wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve, it struck him full. It was reaching the end. One way or another, it would all come back to that day. It would come out. There was no way in hell that genie could realistically be squeezed back into the bottle that Meg had opened.

  Good or bad, maybe it was a relief. He rescrewed the cap onto his tequila, tossed the bottle back onto the seat, and pulled out his cell phone. He dialed Nate in spite of the hour.

  “Hey.” He wiped his nose. “It’s me.”

  “Geoff? You okay?” Nate’s voice was low with concern.

  Geoff inhaled, feeling the warmth of booze flush his chest. “Yeah. Just … wanted to hear your voice.”

  “All going okay with your brother? You told him about the wedding?”

  A sad smile crossed his face. “I should have told him years ago. He was totally fine, relieved almost. Happy for me—for us. I suspect Blake always knew on some level. He must have known. He … he was always good to me.” His voice thickened.

  “You sure you’re okay?”

  “Uh, yeah. Yeah, I’m fine.”

  “Time to come home,” Nate said.

  “Soon. Just need to … speak to a few more people. See you real soon.”

  He hung up, closed his eyes, put his head back. Maybe if Meg had stayed away, if her memory had remained properly buried, or she’d died, he could have skated through and still had it all in the end. Or maybe it would have festered out of him, yet, in some unspeakable way.

  The primal screams. You never, ever forget screams like that. Perhaps the end started for him with the first scream.

  But no matter how he angled it, he could not see a way out now. It was like a glass pane that had been smashed. The damage was done and the cracks were insidiously feathering out, and it was just a matter of time before the whole thing shattered and crumbled to the ground.

  He dialed another number, but the call kicked straight to voice mail.

  “Henge,” he said softly, thickly, using his old friend’s nickname as he left a message. “We need to talk.”

  CHAPTER 21

  Sex with Blake was elemental and it was rough. It was slammed up against the wall, her legs wrapped around him, and it was back down on his bed with her on top of him rocking against his pelvis, milking him, panting, a trembling tension building in every fiber of her body as she clamped his wrists down above his head, and he bucked under her, up into her. He flipped her onto her back, and she tasted blood as his teeth raked and bit her lips, and she responded with equal ferocity. He kneed her thighs open wide, and thrust up into her, impaling her, forcing her to gasp and burn with each push to the hilt of his thick cock. She felt the wet heat of his mouth down her belly, at her groin, his tongue inside her. And she shattered like bridge cables that had held too taut for too many years, suddenly exploding in an almighty crash as rolling contractions seized her body and her mind.

  It was tender, too, when he made love to her again, a little closer to dawn, in the silver moonlight that puddled onto the sheets. It was a coalescence of past and present, and it brought them up to the uncertain maw of the future. Meg felt as though she’d been shattered into a million pieces, and reassembled in a way that was more whole than before.

  They lay there, naked and entangled, skin hot and damp, breathing fast and shallow in the pool of moonlight, wind making shadows of trees outside. And the world felt changed. Uncertain. It felt delicate, and beautiful, and raw, a thing to be taken and molded into a fresh shape, where possibilities were suddenly like shells
scattered on the hard-packed shore, left by the ebbing tide.

  Blake laced his fingers through Meg’s, and inside, she smiled. “Why,” she said softly, “were you wearing that hat?”

  She turned her head on the pillow, met his eyes. Her heart squeezed.

  “I went to look for it, in the old shed.”

  “In the middle of the night? What for?”

  “Because of what you said to Noah about his grandfather. Because of how you and Irene, and Geoff, made me see tonight how this marina could become a home again.” He sat up, leaned back against the headboard, his chest rising and falling, still trying to catch his breath. “Because I want to share some of the good memories of my dad with Noah.” He glanced down at her.

  There was something in the way he said “good memories” that made her ask, “You have some bad memories of Bull, ones you’d like to bury?”

  He scrubbed his hand through his thatch of hair, making it messier than ever, which made Meg feel a hot spurt of affection, and also a sense of trepidation. Feelings that should be contradictory were braiding tightly together into one confusing thing.

  “He was a violent man, Meg. He used to hit us.”

  Shock washed through her. She scooted up into a sitting position beside him, pulling the sheet up over her breasts. “He beat you?”

  “Mostly Geoff. He had a lot of latent rage after my mom died. He couldn’t accept Geoff for what he was.”

  Meg held his eyes. “Do you mean what I think you mean?”

  “Geoff’s gay.”

  Meg leaned her head back against the headboard, and inhaled deeply. “You know, I wondered.”

  “I think we all did, if not overtly. On some level I probably always knew.”

  “And the wedding?”

  “It’s why I wanted him to tell you himself. He’s marrying a guy called Nate Fischer. Geoff came home to come out, to invite me and Noah.”

  “And Bull knew his son was gay, or suspected he was?”

  “That’s my guess, in retrospect. He was always telling Geoff to ‘man up,’ stop being an ‘artsy wuss.’” Blake swallowed, and for a moment silence filled the room.

  Meg’s mind turned to her nightmare, Geoff’s face, the unreliability of memory. How sometimes we could recall things that were never there, or refused to remember those that were.

  “He struck a particularly violent blow early that morning you went missing, cutting open Geoff’s cheek. I suspect my dad had been drinking well into the preceding night. It was the final blow Geoff would take. He left home before the month was out.”

  “I had no idea this was happening,” Meg whispered.

  “No one did.”

  “And you never reported Bull.”

  Blake snorted softly. “Our dad? Christ, no. There was shame. It was our own dark little secret. And perhaps I never understood it fully, because there was also still love.”

  “Classic abuse scenario,” she said quietly.

  “He didn’t hurt me like he hurt my brother. And when Geoff left, it stopped.”

  “He was afraid of losing you, too.”

  “But he did. In the end.” Blake trailed his fingers down her arm, his hand coming to a rest over hers, covering Jonah’s ring. He looked down at her and a sad smile curved his mouth. “But that wasn’t his fault. It was yours.”

  “I made mistakes, Blake. Bad ones.” And that was the biggest one of all—hurting you.

  “So, I got the old crab hat out.” His smile deepened into something genuine and instantly her heart lifted in relief. “I plan to proudly wear it when I reinstate the big annual Crabby Jack boil come November, invite the whole community. Beach bonfire. Lanterns. Live band. Like the old days.” He paused, holding her eyes. And the question rose between them: Will you be there, Meg, come November?

  “I think we need to find you a new hat.” She laughed, sidestepping, but it sounded hollow even to her own ears.

  “Once you’ve done all your interviews,” he said, “and once you’ve gotten all the documents you need, will you return to Seattle to write it, or will you write your book here?”

  Meg looked away, her heartbeat suddenly erratic, a soft panic licking at her belly. “I don’t know,” she said quietly, honestly.

  “You don’t need to live anywhere in particular to do your job, do you?”

  The tongues of panic flicked harder. She swallowed. “Only in that I need to travel to the location of each case I take on, to research.”

  “But the actual writing, I mean, you told me your office was a mobile camper.”

  Her exchange with Jonah curled into her mind:

  “You could get a real office, you know, with foundations and walls and a roof.”

  “I like the mobility.”

  “You can’t put down roots. It’s just a matter of time before one of the monsters you write about will be released from prison. You should consider security. A proper house, a condo—”

  “A job like yours, you could do it anywhere in the world.”

  Meg cleared her throat.

  He laced his fingers back through hers and clasped her hand tight. Almost too tight. “You could do it here, you know, in a nice little marina cottage by the sea. I could convert the boathouse. You’d have a private dock, just the ocean and sky in front of your window.”

  Meg’s heart jackhammered. She could suddenly see it, writing at an old, stripped-down Oregon pine table in front of a window that played out the moods of the bay. The moonlight on a clear night, the lighthouse and foghorns in the mist. The constant crunching sound of distant waves on the reef, the rattling of the February winds. A black potbellied stove for warmth in the winter months, a dog like Lucy at her feet. The knowledge that Blake and Noah, family, worked and played and lived close by. Big crab boils in the chill fall. Emotion pooled in her eyes. Inside she started to tremble.

  A memory suddenly snared her. She was standing outside The Mystery Bookstore in the cold, looking in at a poster of an author holding up her new book. Next to the poster was a line of glossy new hardbacks, the titles bold and shiny in an embossed font—a new mystery tale lurking between those covers, a new adventure for one of Meg’s favorite heroines, and there were only three days left until she got her allowance, and she could buy it. She’d stood there, in the cold wind, imagining that she’d like to be just like that author one day, even when she grew old. Like a Jessica Fletcher in that television show who rode around her small seaside town on her bike with a basket in front while in her cottage, murder she wrote.

  Meg closed her eyes, leaning her head back against the headboard, almost afraid of the power of the image Blake had just conjured for her. The allure of it. She’d forgotten that day in front of The Mystery Bookstore, and she realized in this moment that no, Jonah was not right. She’d not turned to a life of crime writing in an effort to seek justice, or answers because of Sherry’s murder and the attack she herself had endured. It went further back than that. It was rooted in happier times, and this revelation was epiphanic, suddenly liberating. Her heart beat even faster. Was it possible? To make her life here, with Blake and Noah and Lucy?

  “What are you thinking?”

  She smiled and opened one eye. “Remembering,” she said.

  His face tightened. “The attack?”

  “No,” she whispered. “A good memory.” Meg reached for her robe.

  “Where you going?”

  She smiled, kissed him. “Just the bathroom.”

  Inside the bathroom she rinsed and dried her face and stared into Blake’s mirror. She didn’t quite recognize the person who stared back. Her hair was a wild tangle, her lips swollen from his kisses. She had a lambency in her eyes that sometimes she noticed in other women who were incredibly alive and invariably in love.

  As she moved a fall of hair back from her face, her diamond cluster caught light. She stilled, stared at it. Then without trying to articulate her actions, she fiddled it off her finger and slipped it onto the small silver chain aro
und her neck.

  Geoff shut his right eye and squinted through his left in an effort to bring his vision into focus and stay on the road. The tequila was kicking in harder than he’d anticipated. As he rounded the bend on a steep rise above the ocean, veering slightly over the yellow line, his headlights hit a MINI Cooper parked on the opposite shoulder of the road. White racing stripes bounced his beams. Shit. Henry? Geoff slowed, scrunching his left eye tighter as he pulled a squealing U-turn and drew up onto the gravel verge behind the MINI. He came to a stop, shut off the engine. Nothing moved or sounded apart from trees in wind. Fear stuck a dart in his heart.

  Geoff got out of his car, and crunched over gravel to the MINI, his breath misting in front of his face. He rapped cautiously on the driver’s window.

  A face turned to him. White. Eyes in black shadow. Expressionless.

  He hurried around to the passenger side, opened the door. A pistol lay on the seat, beside a black glove. Cocked. He cursed softly and picked up the gun and lone glove. He climbed in and shut the door.

  “Henry?”

  Henry turned to him.

  “What’s going on?” Geoff whispered.

  “Lori-Beth knows. She knows what I am.”

  “Okay, okay,” he said. “That’s not the end of the world. Turn on the engine. Put the heat on. It’s like a bloody refrigerator in here.”

  Henry acquiesced while Geoff clicked on the overhead light, unloaded and de-cocked the SIG. He opened the glove compartment and secured the pistol away.

  “Why are you here, just up the road from the marina? What were you doing with that weapon?”

  “You smell like alcohol.”

  “Yeah.”

  Henry held his gaze, engine purring, the interior finally starting to warm and mist up the windows.