by Myra Johnson
The arrogance faltered for maybe half a second while a sad vulnerability crept into her eyes—a look that reminded me of the young Rennie Pearl holding her baby sister in the snapshot I’d found. Then just as quickly she became stuck-up Renata Channing again. “Why should I explain myself to you? You couldn’t possibly understand.”
Resentment and hurt rose in me like bile acids. “A hick-town girl like me? You’re probably right. Obviously the rich and famous have a whole different set of principles.”
“How dare you pass judgment on my principles! You have no idea what I sacrificed to get where I am today.”
“Oh, I have a pretty good idea. You want something, you go after it, the cost be hanged.” The image I’d tried so hard to erase from my thoughts came surging back in 3D—Renata draping herself around Micah’s neck.
She must have seen it in my face. Something between pity and triumph darkened her gaze. “I certainly never meant to hurt you. If I’d had any idea how you felt about Micah, I’d have explained—”
The clanging brass bells on the front door interrupted her. Both our heads jerked toward the sound, and my heart did a roll and thud as Micah Hobart ambled in. Pausing at the entrance, he slid off his aviator sunglasses. His eyes met mine—briefly—and then he saw Renata. It seemed to my befuddled brain that she melted into a puddle of quivering passion. Nausea rocked me, and I tasted the popcorn and Diet Dr Pepper I’d had for a snack an hour ago. If Micah hadn’t already seen me, I’d have slid beneath the counter to hide.
Grandpa cut him off, his greeting anything but cordial. “Something we can help you with, Mr. Hobart?”
Micah spread his hands. “I’m not here to cause trouble, Mr. Stiles. If I could just have a few minutes with Julie . . .” He cast me a desperate, pleading look, and then I was the one melting into a puddle.
Renata took a tiny step backward and crossed her arms. “Go on, Julie,” she whispered. “He’s here for you, not me.”
Despite Grandpa’s warning look, I edged around the counter. My legs felt as if I were wading through hardening concrete. Four feet away from Micah, I stopped. “What do you want?”
He hesitated until Grandpa cleared his throat and stalked off to help Clifton with something in the snack bar. “I thought maybe you’d call . . . or something.”
The Swap & Shop stood in rapt silence, like a packed auditorium just before the curtain opens for the main attraction. That would be me, obviously. I could tell by the scroochy feeling of several pairs of eyes boring holes through me. I stuffed my hands into the pockets of my plaid capris. “Why? What’s there to say?”
Staring at the floor, he shifted his weight and sighed. “I thought we had something between us.”
“Oh, excuse me,” I said, loud enough for anyone in the farthest corners of the building to hear, “you must have mistaken me for someone else.” I turned to signal Renata. “You were wrong, sister-dear. He’s here for—”
Micah’s hand clamped down on my extended arm. The brass bells jangled, and he jerked me outside into the heat of the July afternoon.
Yanking free of his grip, I stumbled across the gravel parking lot. “You’ve got some nerve, Micah Hobart. Who do you think you are, anyway?”
He closed the space between us and seized me by the shoulders. “I’m the man who’s falling in love with you, that’s who.”
The next thing I knew, I was drowning. Drowning in a kiss deeper and scarier than the deepest swimming pool. And I never wanted to come up for air.
~~~
If, as Shakespeare said, all the world’s a stage, then I must be performing for one wildly entertained audience. And right about now, I ached to get my hands on the author of this script and give him what-for.
Micah steered his maroon pickup toward the picnic area where he’d first told me the story of Jennifer Pearl’s supposed drowning. He drove to the far end of the parking area, away from the Sunday-afternoon picnickers with their laughing children, Frisbee-chasing dogs, and greasy-smelling buckets of fried chicken. When he pulled into a parking space, the drooping branch of an oak tree scraped its twiggy fingers along the roof, sending chill bumps up my arms. Micah lowered the windows and shut off the engine.
And sat there in utter silence until I was ready to climb out of my skin. “Okay, just say what you brought me out here to say. The suspense is killing me.”
He undid his seatbelt and hooked his forearms over the steering wheel. Something beyond the windshield held his gaze. “I’m no good at this, Julie. I’ve got a string of failed relationships behind me, and I have no right to expect this to be any different.”
My heart felt like a lump of raw meat on a skewer. I couldn’t look at him. “Why not?”
“Because of who I am. Because of who you are. Because . . .” He lowered his forehead to his arms.
“Because of Renata.” A lava-spewing volcano erupted within me. I jerked open the door and marched across the patchy grass. Then I swung around and marched right back. I slammed the pickup door with a violent heave, then leaned in the window, breathing hard. “What exactly is going on between you and Renata? Do you even know?”
Micah raised his head and looked at me with the sad eyes of a confused puppy-dog. I bit the inside of my lower lip to keep my heart from cracking in two. No way would I ever again allow any man to manipulate my emotions like this!
“All I know is, I don’t ever want to lose you, Julie.”
Okay, except maybe this once.
I opened the door and climbed into the cab. “Then help me understand.”
He told me then about the string of sleepless nights he’d spent trying to figure out exactly what had happened at Renata’s that day. Coming to the party mainly to see me, to find out if I had, as he put it, “gone over to the other side.” Then Renata in his face, and Larry showing up out of nowhere and lighting into him.
“When Sandy told me the next day that you nearly drowned—again—I wanted to find Larry Channing and throttle him.”
I shivered. “He’s not worth it.”
“But you are, Julie.” His smoky-eyed gaze stabbed me where it hurt. “What I feel for you—it’s—”
That grinding irritation raked through me again. “Don’t even talk to me about feelings, Micah, not until you’re ready to be completely honest.”
Disbelief flickered across his face. “I thought I did a pretty good job of showing you a little while ago outside the Swap & Shop.”
The memory of his lips on mine made me weak. I wanted more than anything to fall into his arms again and lose myself in the taste of his kisses, the scratchy-soft feel of his beard against my cheek. I wanted to forget the past and the future and everything that didn’t include Micah Hobart loving me, me loving him.
But I had to be strong now, strong enough to make him face the truth about himself, about me, about Renata. I drew a steadying breath. “You kiss me like there’s no tomorrow, and then you turn around and tell me our relationship is doomed. I’m already confused enough about my life, so I don’t need another seesaw ride with you. Either you lay it all on the line, or you get this pickup in gear and take me home.”
He faced me squarely, and I could see by the way his throat worked how he struggled to find words. “Like I told you before, something about you started worming its way into my heart the day I learned you’d rescued Brynna. But then I found out you could be Jenny, and it changed everything.”
I laughed out loud. “Hey, if you think it changed things for you—”
“I know, I know. I can’t even imagine what you’ve been going through.”
We fell silent for a moment, while a hangnail on my left thumb suddenly became of monumental importance. “You want to hear the really interesting part? Renata hasn’t let anyone see the DNA results. So I still don’t know if I’m really Jenny Pearl.”
Micah seized my wrist, forcing me to look at him. “You’re kidding, right?”
“It’s the truth.” I swallowed the baseball clogging my
throat. “I don’t even know if Renata has looked at the results.”
“That’s crazy. Can’t you insist she tell you?”
“Her money paid for the test. She gets to decide what she does with the answers.” Once again I itched to get my hands on the report. Renata may not need proof, but now I needed it more than ever.
“It’s getting hot. Let’s walk.” Micah swung open his door and met me on my side of the pickup. Taking my hand, he led me along a well-worn path that wound along the stream under shaggy, shedding pines.
The breeze lifted damp strands from my sweaty forehead. I inhaled the mingled scents of trees, earth, and water. The path followed a steady incline, so neither of us spoke again until we came to a weathered stone bench where the path widened at the top of the hill. Winded from the climb, I brushed aside pine needles and bird droppings before I plopped down.
Micah paced in front of me, sweat sliding into his beard. Half-moons of wetness under each arm darkened his plaid shirt. “My life is turning out like some big cosmic joke. Every time I meet someone I think I could easily spend the rest of my life with, somehow, some way, Renata Pearl Channing manages to mess it up.”
Spend the rest of his life with? Don’t go there, Julie Pearl, not yet. I kicked at a rotting pinecone, and it disintegrated in a puff of brown dust. “You can’t blame Renata for everything.”
“So who should I blame?” He raised his hands skyward and gave an ugly laugh. “God?”
Just hearing him talk like that brought a strange quietness to my spirit and banished the crazies. “Sit down, Micah.”
He stared at me.
“Sit down.”
He did.
I stood and faced him, finger pointed like an exasperated schoolteacher. “You can’t blame God for what goes wrong in your life. But you can believe that everything happens for a reason. Like my grandpa always taught me, nothing is hopeless. No matter how bad things look, something good can come out of it.”
He slid to the other end of the bench. “You can’t convince me anything good has, can, or ever will come out of what happened on the lake that day twenty-five years ago.”
I folded my arms. “Then I guess you lied to me.”
His head jerked up. “What?”
“You lied. About falling in love with me. Because love is a good thing, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but—”
“And if I am Jenny Pearl, then if I’d really drowned, I wouldn’t be standing here right now and we wouldn’t be having this conversation. And you’d have gone right on hating yourself and Renata for the guilt you carried. So even though the truth has confused things between us, at least now you can close the chapter on the past and start writing a new one. You and Renata can both look at life with fresh eyes.”
Micah drew both hands down his face. “And on the off chance you’re not Jenny Pearl? What good can come out of that tragedy? In that case, I will still have let a little girl go to her death at the bottom of the lake.”
CHAPTER 33
October, 25 years earlier
Somewhere in West Texas
“Julie Pearl, don’t you wander off now.” Angie Stiles tilted a smile toward the elfin, wispy-haired toddler playing beneath the roadside picnic shelter. Her own voice clanged like a gong between her ears.
“Let the poor kid have a little fun.” Ray popped the tab on another can of Coors. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he guzzled half the can. He belched long and loud, a staccato, machine-gun sound. “You worry too much, Angie. Loosen up. Get a beer outta the cooler.”
“I told you, beer only makes my headaches worse.” Slowly, carefully, so as not to jostle her exploding brain, Angie stretched out on the concrete bench and rested her head on Ray’s blue-jeaned thigh. On the underside of the metal roof above them, an ugly brown spider circled a wasp caught in its web. Angie watched the spider creep closer to its prey, then begin the slow, methodical process of weaving a cocoon around the struggling wasp.
I know just how you feel. Scared. Trapped. Looking into the jagged, venomous jaws of death.
Dying wouldn’t be so bad, if she could only be sure Julie Pearl would be okay. But Ray had never wanted the child, not like Angie hoped. She moved her head slightly—paying the price with a stab of pain—and found herself staring through Ray’s shaggy yellow moustache into dark, cavernous nostrils. Not a pretty sight.
He wore his tangled mass of sun-bleached hair in a low ponytail that hung halfway down his back. And he had that look in his eye, the one that said he was ready to take off again. Her worsening headaches had put a damper on the fun they used to have, cruising in Ray’s rusty yellow Chevy Nova with the windows down and the stereo blasting, jaunting across the U.S. from one trashed-out campground to the next.
Angie’s favorite was still the little tree-covered island near Hot Springs. Even more so because that’s where her sweet baby Julie Pearl had come into her life. The first time she thought she might be pregnant, Ray had been furious. “No way, Angie! I ain’t havin’ no kid around. They’re dirty and whiny, and they gotta be fed on time. Next you’ll be hounding me to get sober and toss out my weed.”
“I promise, Ray, I won’t let the baby be any trouble. Don’t make me get rid of it. Please!”
Her tears had softened him, but not on one issue. “Okay, okay, keep the brat if you want to. But if this is your plan for getting me in front of a justice of the peace, forget it. I told you when we hooked up, I ain’t about to get conned into marriage. Not by you, not by any woman.”
Then he had left, stranding Angie in Yellowstone Park until she hitched a ride south with a trucker who kept wanting to touch her in places she didn’t want to be touched. She’d been wandering the streets of Phoenix, high on marijuana, when she realized something was wrong. Three days later, she woke up in a hospital charity ward, where a beleaguered intern coldly told her she’d miscarried.
Brokenhearted and alone, she’d found work at a local diner. She stayed only long enough to earn the price of a bus ticket to Arkansas, where she headed straight back to the island in hopes of finding Ray there. He showed up three weeks later with a tattooed redhead hanging on his arm.
“Angie, my woman, you’re lookin’ mighty fine! Hey, you didn’t have the kid already?”
She shot the redhead a suspicious glare. “Something went wrong. I lost it a couple months ago.”
No sympathy, no comfort, just a guttural laugh. “Well, then, you and me got some catchin’ up to do. Angie, meet Donna. Now you two don’t fight over me. There’s enough man here for both of you.”
But Donna wasn’t interested in sharing, so she hadn’t lasted long. Pretty soon it was just Angie and Ray again, back to their rootless, laid-back lifestyle. She wanted it to be enough, but it never was. And she wondered often, as she lay in the crook of Ray’s arm under the starry Arkansas sky, exactly how she’d gotten to this point.
To this aloneness. This estrangement from everything she used to take for granted. Mom. Dad. The daily routine at the Swap & Shop. Her dull, boring, wasted life in Caddo Pines.
Or at least that’s how she used to think of it. How could she ever imagine she’d find anything better beyond the Caddo Pines city limits sign? How could she turn her back on the genuine love of family and friends for . . . this?
Now, after all she’d done, how could she ever go back?
For two years after the miscarriage, Angie had endured Ray’s mercurial moods, his drug- and liquor-induced highs, his frequent absences.
And then Julie Pearl came along and changed everything.
CHAPTER 34
Present Day
One week later, at precisely 5:02 p.m., I watched Renata release a heavy sigh as she flipped over the CLOSED sign on the front door of the Swap & Shop. She turned to me, her nose in the air. “That’s it, Julie. Two weeks, as promised. I’m going upstairs for a long, hot bath. Then we need to talk.”
Not that we hadn’t talked over the past two weeks, but as usual, our conversatio
ns always had more to do with Renata than me. And—as usual—the glimpses she gave me into herself rarely went beyond the superficial. If not for my own observations, combined with insights gleaned from Micah and Aunt Geneva, my sister would have remained little more than a casual acquaintance.
An acquaintance I’d never in a million years ever keep as a friend.
On the positive side, after learning I’d started seeing Micah again, Renata had relentlessly assured me there’d never been anything more than friendship between them. For the most part I believed her, and I fully believed Micah had done his part to keep everything platonic. But I couldn’t shake my convictions that she’d always wanted it to be more, and still would, if only Micah had shown the slightest interest.
Sibling rivalry? The bizarre connection between me and Renata had shifted the concept into a whole new dimension.
After closing out the cash register and tallying a deposit to take to the bank in the morning, I gathered up the puppy basket—getting heavier every day—and trudged upstairs, Brynna and Sneezy at my heels. The squirming pups wrestled and play-growled at each other, making the box even more unwieldy. I couldn’t help but laugh at their clumsy antics. “It’s almost time to find homes for these guys,” I told Brynna over my shoulder.
And then I burst out crying. I sank to the landing outside the apartment door, puppy basket propped on my knees, and sobbed as if I were losing my best friends. One by one, I held each warm, furry body against my tear-streaked cheek, inhaling those sweet, milky puppy smells. Brynna whimpered and stared at me, head tilting one way and then the other. I was glad Clifton and Grandpa had left to deliver an antique table to a customer, so they weren’t here to witness my sentimental breakdown.
“Oh, Julie Pearl, you are a case.” I wiped the back of my hand across my wet face. This wasn’t the first batch of puppies I knew I’d have to say good-bye to, and though I always got a little sad watching littermates move on to their new homes, I’d never reacted quite this irrationally before.
