by Fay Robinson
Big brown eyes…a quick smile…even that thick drawl of hers put a twist in his gut. The new hairstyle flattered her wholesome good looks; he thought it made her resemble a water sprite.
He sat on the side of the bed and took off her shorts, sliding them down slender hips and legs until she faced him in nothing but neon-purple panties, a pair of red lips printed above the crotch. Outrageous. But that was Lucky. He peeled them off and tossed them aside.
Given her history, it was a miracle she’d even remembered to put on underwear. She often forgot it and her shoes, or she got distracted while dressing and ended up wearing something crazy, like one rubber beach shoe and one fuzzy house slipper.
Right now only the nails on her right hand had polish, and two of her left toes. She might have done it purposely. Then again, she might have spaced out in the middle of painting them and not realized she hadn’t finished. With Lucky you were never quite sure.
The bed was too small, the room too hot to be comfortable, and the air, as always, held the unpleasant odor of mildew. Outside, a tugboat—or towboat as Lucky called them—chugged upriver toward one of the inland docks, its horn blaring. The pilot checked his position by flashing a search beam back and forth between the banks. With each swoop, the light penetrated the curtains and illuminated the bedroom.
Jack wiped the annoyance from his mind as he hurriedly shrugged out of his own clothes and pulled Lucky down to lie with him. He concentrated, instead, on the taste of her mouth. Sweet. And on the taste of her breasts. Even sweeter. When he entered her it was better than the fantasy he’d been having for the past couple of nights. The fantasy about this very thing…
He began to move with almost cruel slowness, long, controlled strokes that had her writhing beneath him. Again and again he took her to the edge of madness, then withdrew.
Why couldn’t she care as much about him as she did her damn river? He’d expected her to follow when he’d made his ultimatum and rented a place in town. She hadn’t. Over him, she’d chosen mud, fish guts and noisy insects.
Still, fool that he was, he couldn’t stay away from her. And he couldn’t move back. Even if his pride allowed it, they had other problems that proximity alone wouldn’t resolve. Still…anything was better than this sham marriage they’d created.
The tugboat passed, the sizzle of the bugs again invaded the room, and he and Lucky climaxed in near-perfect unison. When he could breathe once more, he took his weight off her and gazed into her eyes. They were dark, unreadable.
“Move to the apartment with me.”
“No. You come home.”
They’d both spoken the same words a hundred times before.
“This isn’t a home, Lucky. It’s an undeclared disaster area. When we married, I never expected you’d want to live here permanently.”
“My family—”
“Hell, I know. You don’t have to tell me. I have it memorized.” Her family had settled this bend in 1837 and a Mathison had lived here every generation since. The original log cabin had long ago fallen in to decay, but this ridiculous place, erected near the same spot by her late grandfather, might as well be the original, considering its condition.
When the winter rains came, the river rose, sometimes to a level that threatened the whole area. The dam downstream couldn’t always handle all the runoff.
Jack hadn’t lived in Potock long enough to see a flood, but he’d heard the old-timers in town talk about how bad the floods could get. This bedroom told the story. The walls had water stains all the way up to the window casement.
Despite that, and even though she knew he was uncomfortable here, she refused to live in town, even for part of the week. They’d tried it for a month and even he’d had to admit the running back and forth had been inconvenient.
So he’d given in and suggested they build another house on the river—a decent house—but this land was too low, and Lucky wouldn’t hear of selling it. They were at a stalemate.
“You have to commit to this marriage if we’re going to save it,” he told her.
“I have to commit?” She sat up, so Jack did, too, propping his elbows on his raised knees. “You’re the one who ran out of here at the first sign of trouble—like a coon with hounds on his tail.” Her hick accent had thickened with her indignation. “You left me, Jack. Not the other way around.”
“Because I felt like a visitor here, or one of your specimens, packed up and put on the shelf to take down every now and then when you felt like it.”
“I never treated you like that.”
“Yes, you did. After giving up everything in Pittsburgh, including my career, to move down here and be with you, I still didn’t get a commitment. You live the way you want. You do what you want. I expected compromise when we married, but I didn’t figure I’d be the only one doing it. Hell, we’ve been married nearly a year and your photo credits in the newspaper still say ‘Mathison’ instead of ‘Cahill.’ How do you think that makes me feel?”
“This is about my job again, isn’t it.”
“Only partly.”
“It galls you that I won’t quit just because you decreed I had to. Admit it.”
“Yeah, it galls me.” And he wouldn’t apologize for it. He worried about her. She ran around at all hours and alone. And she had a bad habit of getting in the middle of the stories she photographed.
“Let me see if I have this right,” she said. “You hate my job. You hate my home. You hate my lifestyle. I guess I should count my blessings that you get along so well with my family.”
“You’re being catty now.”
“And you’re being unfair. You complain about how I treat you, yet I can’t ask you a few simple questions about your past without you shutting me out. That infuriates me.”
“You know everything there is to know. My parents died in a car accident, and I’ve pretty much been on my own since I was sixteen. End of story.”
“That can’t be all. How did you take care of yourself? Don’t you have any other family?”
“Not anyone who matters. I have an older cousin I lived with until I finished school.”
“You never told me that. Why haven’t you ever mentioned him?”
“Because we’ve lost touch. I wasn’t that close to him, anyway. He gave me a room to sleep in and that’s about it. I paid for it a thousand times over by working my ass off in his hardware store after school and on weekends.”
“You don’t have any grandparents? No other cousins? Aunts and uncles? Surely there’s someone.”
“No. The army was my family after high school.”
“What was your childhood like? I find it very odd that you never mention it unless I bring it up. It’s as if, I don’t know, it never happened. You don’t even talk about your life before you lost your parents. Why is that?”
“Because there’s nothing to tell. We were an ordinary family.”
“But why was—”
“Let’s concentrate on the present, okay? Nothing else is really important.”
She slumped and shook her head. “See? You’re closing up on me again. You do this every time and it makes me crazy.” Tears formed. “I’m terrified of what’s happening to us, Jack. We’re not making any progress toward getting back together. We’re not communicating. We talk, but we never resolve anything.”
“Then let’s not talk.”
“We have to. I have things I need to tell you.”
“Later. Let me hold you.”
He kissed her and brought her back down to lie with him spoon-fashion, his front pressed against her warm backside.
It was always the same. They made love, she cried, and he went back to his apartment to lie awake and feel guilty about her tears.
He’d tried to stay away, but he couldn’t. An hour didn’t pass when he didn’t think of her. And nights…God, nights were hell. In the dark, the regrets of his past closed in; demons with faces and names he’d tried to forget rose up to assault him, and only the hot plea
sure of Lucky’s hands on his flesh drove them away.
Maybe he would bite the bullet and move back in. Living with her, even in this hellhole, was better than living without her.
He held her for a long time, until her tears ceased and her breathing began to slow. Quietly he eased from the bed, but she stirred at his movement.
“Don’t leave yet,” she said without opening her eyes, her voice sleepy.
“I’m only going to clean up.” He patted her gently. “Don’t you need to?”
She yawned. “In a minute.”
Padding to the bathroom, he flipped on the light, grabbed a towel and headed for the bathtub.
“Wait, Jack, no!”
Lucky’s panicked cry reached him at the precise moment he pulled aside the shower curtain and saw movement below.
CHAPTER TWO
IN THE GRAY of early morning, cops and firefighters wearing protective gloves searched the railroad tracks, their yellow slickers like strokes of paint on a neutral canvas.
Lucky checked her light meter, then framed a test shot in the viewfinder. She’d lose the effect of the slickers with the black-and-white film, but the rescue workers seemed ghostlike in the mist and that, along with the overcast sky, helped convey the somber tone. The composition suggested the horror of the officers’ assignment without actually showing it.
But she didn’t have the right perspective yet. She slid carefully down the steep grade of the track to where she, police and fire personnel had parked.
With the permission of the fire chief, she climbed on top of one of the pumper trucks and reevaluated the scene. From this slight overhead angle, she could include more of the track. She could also sneak a contributor to the tragedy—the Top Hat Gentlemen’s Club—into the bottom right corner of the frame.
Despite the fancy name, “The Hat,” as it was more commonly known, was little more than a shack; it owed its popularity to the two-dollar drinks served from midnight to closing and a waitress named Ginger. She’d posed for Playboy ten years ago, but her chest still had its fans.
The victim had apparently left the club drunk last night, decided to walk rather than drive, but passed out on the tracks, instead. The three-o’clock freight express to Birmingham had ended his life. Lucky had found the body when she crossed the tracks on her way to work.
Satisfied that she had a good photo for the front page of the Sunday edition, she braced her left elbow against her body, held her breath and squeezed off several shots, bracketing the exposures to compensate for the wavering light levels.
“Hey, Lucky,” called one of the police investigators. Deaton Swain picked through some weeds along the bank about ten yards away. “I dare you to get in the cab and turn on the siren.”
“I’ll pass.”
“C’mon, Lucky, don’t be a girl.”
“I am a girl, Deaton. Haven’t you figured that out in all these years?”
“Yeah, but you’re no fun anymore.”
“I grew up, Deaton. You should try it. We’re too old for pranks.”
He shook his head. “I’ll never be that old.”
Lucky finished up and rewound her film. She climbed down and stuck her camera, meter and film in the bag on the rear compartment of her Blazer.
With these two rolls, a couple waiting at the office and the roll she’d taken yesterday of the twelve-pound squash, she’d have a full morning in the darkroom.
Off in the weeds, Deaton was starting to whine.
“Oh, man, enough of this.” He yanked off his gloves. “I’m outta here. Let the uniforms handle it.” After making his way down the bank, he came over and plopped down on her tailgate. “God, I hate these messy cases. And I do mean messy.”
“Me, too. Give me a ribbon-cutting or a town-council meeting any day. At least those don’t involve dead people.”
Deaton snorted.
“Well, usually they don’t,” Lucky qualified. “That one time was a fluke.”
“Not for you. How many bodies does this make for the year? Three?”
“Four.”
He seemed to think about that. “I remember the kid who crashed his car out on River Road and the old lady who died of hypothermia last winter during that freak ice storm, but what was the third one you found?”
“The floater. You remember. I was fishing for Channel cat and pulled him up, instead. The big guy.”
“Oh, yeah. Wasn’t wearing a ski vest.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Stupid idiot. Ought to be a law against fat people going in the water, anyway.”
She didn’t comment. Deaton couldn’t possibly mean half the things he said. She’d known him since kindergarten, and he was just as crazy and amusing as he’d been back then.
“Damn, Lucky, that’s four bodies in seven months. That’s got to be a record, even for you. What’s your total?”
“Seventeen. Eighteen if you count the one before I started working for the newspaper. Nineteen if you add the one out of state.”
“Seventeen locally in how many years on the job?”
“Twelve.”
He shook his head. “I’ll bet this stuff doesn’t go over too well with the captain.”
No, it didn’t, but she wasn’t about to discuss her personal life. People speculated enough on the reason she and Jack were living apart.
“Where is he?” she asked, instead. “He’s usually one of the first on the scene.”
“We had an earlier call and he took it.”
Good. After the fiasco with Jack last night, at least she wouldn’t have to face him in person this morning.
Or maybe she would. His unmarked police sedan turned in the service road and came around the barricade the moment she counted her blessings.
“Ah, hell,” Deaton said, hastily jumping to his feet.
Lucky took a deep breath to fortify her strength, but her already queasy stomach did a major somersault.
Jack was a formidable presence when he was in a good mood, but when he was all business—like now—he seemed even bigger, his shoulders broader. Lucky felt both overwhelming joy and deep sorrow at seeing him. She’d gone thirty years without losing her heart, but then this man had come along and stolen it within seconds.
One minute she was single and accepting of it, if not content, and the next—bam! She’d looked into deep-brown eyes and started dreaming about wedding vows and waking up next to him for the next seventy-five years.
Regrettably Jack had proved to be more interested in the idea of marriage than the reality of it.
As he approached, he didn’t take his gaze off her. Even as he spoke to Deaton, he didn’t look away. “Swain, have you secured this scene?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then why is there a newspaper photographer inside the perimeter?”
“Uh, that’s Lucky.”
“I recognize her,” he said dryly, the comment so ludicrous she wasn’t sure how he kept a straight face.
She cleared her throat. “I called it in, Jack. I was already here when your people arrived.”
His expression didn’t change, telling her he already knew.
“Wait for me,” he ordered. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
He motioned for Deaton to come with him, and they walked off several yards, then stopped. Jack’s posture suggested forced control as he listened to a rundown of the incident and the procedures followed by his department since their arrival.
He asked Deaton if he’d requested an investigator from DFS, the Department of Forensic Sciences.
“No,” Deaton told Jack. “I didn’t see a need to call. The death isn’t suspicious and we have an ID on the victim from Lucky. Some old guy named Charlie Bagwell. Plus, we found his wallet. His car’s still sitting in the parking lot of The Hat with a flat tire. Guess he was too drunk to change it last night and started walking. He only lives a mile or so up the road in that subdivision on the other side of the tracks.”
“Collect the evidence and don’t spec
ulate. Call DFS and get someone over here. Have them take possession of the remains. I don’t want the funeral home leaving with them.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you get photographs before you moved anything?”
“Uh…no.”
A few seconds passed before Jack spoke again. “Get them now. And get a video of both the scene and the car. Impound the car. I also want you to send someone over to the man’s house and make sure he’s not sitting at his kitchen table eating breakfast.”
“I’ll go myself.” Deaton hurried off.
Jack turned and walked back to her, his face grim. He mumbled an expletive under his breath.
“If I caused trouble, I’m sorry,” Lucky told him. “I grew up with Deaton and most of these people out here, and they’re used to me being around with my camera. They trust me to keep out of the way.”
He shook his head. “It’s not your fault. Did he bother to get your statement?”
“Yes.”
Jack looked at her more closely, and his expression softened. “Are you okay? You’re pale.”
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t look it.” He lightly rubbed the back of his hand against her cheek. “And you’re distinctly green around the gills. What’s wrong?”
“It got to me, I guess.”
“I’ve never known you to let this stuff bother you.”
She shrugged. “I suppose it’s because I knew the man.”
“Do you want to sit down?”
“No, I’ll be all right.” She prayed that was true. She’d hate to embarrass herself by throwing up. Usually she could eat, drink, smell or look at any gross thing and not be bothered. A cast-iron stomach came with the job, and he knew it from experience.
“Can you tell me what you saw?” he asked. “You can come down later and give an official statement.”
“I didn’t see much. I came through about six o’clock on my way to the office and glanced down the track. At first I thought the train had hit a cow again. When I realized it was a human, I called 911.”
