by Nicole Baart
“You took it off,” he said again, tumbling the words like the sides of a Rubik’s Cube, and all at once everything changed. The act of removing the ring was no longer passive; it was active. She had removed the ring. It seemed to make all the difference to Dylan.
Meg wasn’t entirely surprised when she felt the tip of his finger draw a line from her ear to her chin. But his touch burned all the same, white-hot and tingling, and she stifled a shiver in the dark truck. She closed her eyes as he said her name, again and again and again, until his lips found hers and his whispers sighed their way into her mouth. It was what she had been waiting for, and she kissed him back, arching her neck for the warmth of his tongue and not stopping to think of the consequences.
15
LUCAS
“You don’t like her here, do you?”
The question was so fraught with potential disaster that at first Lucas tried to ignore it. He busied himself by putting his toothbrush and toothpaste away, then gave the bathroom counter a quick swipe with the hand towel. The way Jenna hovered in the open bathroom door made him feel oddly exposed, like he was back in college and had to share personal space with relative strangers. They didn’t use the bathroom together anymore, Jenna smoothing on makeup with a foundation brush while he shaved over the sink. Now they slipped into the intimate space in shifts, almost secretively, as if they had much to hide. Lucas hadn’t closed the door to brush his teeth, but for a moment he wished he had.
“I’m glad she’s okay,” Lucas finally managed, and it was a close approximation to the truth.
He had expected Angela to leave as quickly as she had come, but one week after seemingly materializing out of thin air, she was still claiming his couch as her own. Even after the debacle of their attempt at a happy family dinner, Angela seemed content to dwell amid the thick and stifling hush that had settled over the Hudson house. Coming home from work in the evenings, Lucas had the feeling of wading into a shallow body of still and stagnant water. It was calm, but it was heavy and depressing just below the surface. He set his jaw, tried not to breathe too deeply, and leaned against the bathroom counter since Jenna was blocking the door.
“What is it about her that you can’t stand?” Jenna said softly.
“Nothing,” Lucas said. “I can stand her. I stand her just fine.” Actually, he was surprised that Jenna could stand their houseguest. After all, Angela had more or less committed treason by bringing up Audrey, even if inadvertently. And though Jenna didn’t know what Angela had done in a manipulative moment at the age of eighteen, couldn’t she feel the tension between her houseguest and her husband? The unspoken guilt that filled their interactions with shared shame?
“Well, I think it’s obvious you have something against her.”
“I don’t have anything against Angela,” Lucas said, but he suspected that what Jenna really wanted was a confession. “It’s just hard, having her around. I mean, we don’t have an extra bedroom, she’s practically a stranger . . .”
“She’s practically a family member.”
“That was years ago. We thought she was dead, remember?”
“Well, it’s pretty obvious she’s alive.”
“I just don’t understand what she’s doing here.”
Jenna turned her head to look down the hallway, and although Lucas couldn’t see her face he knew the expression it held.
“At least we didn’t have to go to a funeral,” Lucas said, assuming that his wife was as grateful as he was that Angela decided to have Jim’s body cremated and forgo a traditional ceremony.
“That’s heartless.”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“I think she skipped an important part in the healing process.” Jenna sighed.
“That’s what she’s doing here? Healing?”
“She’s saying good-bye. She’s making amends.”
He didn’t get why Angela had to use their couch as home base for coming to peace with her past, but he was wise enough not to say as much. Instead, he let the silence stretch until Jenna drew her own conclusions.
“But she has to be doing something, doesn’t she?” Jenna eventually said, her voice suddenly thick with sarcasm. “It wouldn’t be enough for her to simply take it all in, work through her past and her relationship with her father in whatever way she feels necessary.”
“That’s not fair.”
“It’s perfectly fair. You’re a fixer, Lucas, you’re hardwired to mend things. But some things just can’t be fixed.”
“Angela can’t be fixed?”
“Don’t be dense.” Jenna turned away from him and started toward the attic stairs.
Lucas flew out of the bathroom behind her. “Why do you want to fight?”
Jenna stopped with her hand on the doorframe of the tiny alcove that opened on the staircase. Her head drooped a little. “I don’t want to fight.”
“Yes, you do. Stop picking fights with me, Jenna.” Lucas was surprised to discover that he was angry, but the fine specter of sorrow walked hand in hand with his fury. “Don’t you want to make this work?” he asked, his voice cracking.
Jenna looked down.
“Have you given up completely? Because I’m not ready to give up.” Lucas closed the space between them and took Jenna by the arm. His touch was gentle, but she flinched as if he struck her. Maybe she was afraid that he would kiss her again. Maybe she hoped he would.
“What happened between us?”
When Jenna looked up at him, her eyes were filled with tears. They were wide, and so stark with pain that Lucas’s fingers tightened on her arm.
“What?” he whispered, drawing her close. She fought his embrace for a moment, but then she softened into him, giving in as he curled his arms around her and held her close.
“You have no idea what I’ve been through,” Jenna breathed against his chest.
Lucas drew back and lifted her chin with his finger, forcing her to look at him. “Unless there’s something that you’re keeping from me, I know exactly what you’ve been through. I went through it, too. Remember?”
“It’s not the same,” she said, closing her eyes. Tears leaked down her cheeks, and Lucas had to suppress the urge to kiss them away.
“I know we deal with things differently, but that doesn’t mean we have to suffer alone. I understand, Jenna. Audrey was my daughter, too.”
“I lost two daughters, Lucas. Two. You can hardly even acknowledge what I lost when Angela left.”
“She’s back now,” Lucas said. “Doesn’t that help? Doesn’t that change everything?”
Jenna dropped her forehead against his chest and squeezed him hard for the span of a single heartbeat. “Yes,” she whispered. “It changes everything. It makes me realize just how far apart we are.” And then she wiggled out of his grip and escaped up the stairs two at a time.
When Lucas woke in the morning, the scent of snow hung about the house in foglike wisps of winter. It was too early for snow, experience had taught him that it would be weeks yet before the first flakes began to fly, but apparently Creation had missed the memo because a lingering chill haunted the Hudson home. The windows were old, the walls poorly insulated, and as Lucas descended the stairs into the living room, he cursed himself for not making the improvements that Jenna had suggested last year. At the time, stretching the rotting siding through one more season seemed frugal. Now he just felt cheap. And cold.
The ladies were huddled in the kitchen around a stainless steel teapot that was just beginning to simmer on the stove. Jenna was a caffeine addict, but since Angela had moved back in, she had followed the younger woman’s health-conscious lead and hadn’t been indulging her early-morning coffee fix. For the reunited duo, breakfast consisted of nothing more than decaf organic green tea infused with jasmine, although Lucas suspected that Jenna still perked herself an entire pot of the black stuff at work and happily dipped into the box of doughnuts that seemed to perpetually adorn the reception desk at Safe House. Jenna was n
ot a green tea sort of woman. And Blackhawk was not a green tea sort of town. He wondered where Angela had bought the smelly leafy stuff in the first place.
“Coffee on?” Lucas asked in greeting, unexpectedly warmed by the fact that he could see a couple inches of dark liquid in the smoky glass pot. He had tossed and turned all night, thinking of Jenna, dreaming of her in brief snatches of sleep, and he prayed that after their tiny breakthrough the night before, she had dreamt of him, too.
“No.” Jenna wouldn’t meet his gaze, but she turned from the stove and narrowed her eyes at the coffeepot in accusation. “That’s probably left over from yesterday.”
Lucas couldn’t stop his chest from knotting a little, but he went to empty the soupy sludge without complaint. “What’s your day look like?” he asked, tossing the question to no one in particular. The kitchen seemed frozen; he chipped away at it with words.
For a moment, the only sound was the rush of the faucet as he filled the carafe and the shrill whine of the teapot just beginning to scream. Then Jenna pulled the pot from the stove and Angela took the lead by answering, “I’m going back to the farm. Same old, same old.”
Lucas was tempted to ask her what she did there, how she could spend hour after hour sifting through the rubble of her father’s depressing life, but after his conversation with Jenna the night before, he didn’t dare.
“And I’m doing the same thing I do every other day,” Jenna spoke up. “I’m working.”
It was obvious from her tone that his innocuous question had annoyed her, but Lucas couldn’t figure out why. He was only trying to be polite. To make conversation. To defrost the air before it became so cold that even his breath formed icicles.
Angela cleared her throat and perched carefully on the very end of a chair, holding her mug of tea in both hands before her as if it offered a certain protection. From what, Lucas couldn’t begin to guess. He found her stance peculiar somehow; the shrinking violet pose didn’t fit her at all. “Say, Jenna,” Angela started, looking at the jade-tinted contents of her cup, “could you drop me off at the farm on your way to work?”
So she wanted something. Thus the ingenuous downturn of her pale eyes.
“Sure. Why?”
The girl shrugged one cashmere-clad shoulder. Lucas doubted she could afford such a sweater on a coffee shop manager’s hourly wage, but he was grateful at least that the garment she wore was her own. It was a vast improvement over his favorite dress shirt.
Angela swirled the contents of her cup and deigned to answer Jenna’s question. “I need a ride because I walked home yesterday and left my car there. I needed a little time alone.”
Jenna didn’t respond, but Lucas’s eyebrows shot up. Jim’s farm was nearly four miles out of town and yesterday had been brittle, enough to make him dig through the cardboard box that contained his winter paraphernalia so he could find a pair of Thinsulate gloves. The wind alone would have been enough to convince anyone who needed a little alone time that privacy could be achieved in the comfort of a warm car. Women were impossible to understand.
Then again, Angela’s frigid trek wasn’t entirely out of character. She had, after all, hiked miles to leave Jim’s farm before. Lucas was mostly upset that he hadn’t been observant enough to pick up the profundity of her distress. It had to have taken a lot of inner turmoil to convince her to strike out across the frigid Iowa landscape with nothing but her two feet to carry her. Of course, he had noticed yesterday that her rental wasn’t in the driveway when he came home from work, but he’d assumed that Jenna had told her to park it in the garage. A clinging frost had crisscrossed the windows like an uneven sprinkling of confectioner’s sugar the last several days in a row, and he had meant to offer Angela the garage as a begrudging courtesy. He felt a twinge of gratitude that Jenna hadn’t beaten him to it and he still had a chance to prove to her that he was trying.
“I’ll bring you.” Lucas heard the words as if he had not said them, and was startled to find the women staring at him with an almost palpable curiosity. He quickly rearranged his features. “I mean, Jenna works on the opposite side of town, and my clinic is only a few miles from your dad’s farm. I mean, your farm. I mean, it’s not far away.” Lucas swallowed. Was it Angela’s farm now? He should have just shut up when he had the chance.
Remarkably, Jenna was smiling at him. It was a little smile, to be sure, faint and one-sided, and yet more than enough to make Lucas grin back like an overeager schoolboy. That was exactly what he had wanted: for Jenna to see that he was trying. Her approval was well worth the cost of a quick car ride with Angela.
“I think that’s a good idea,” Jenna said. “It’ll give you two a little time to catch up.”
“Sure,” Angela consented.
“Besides, I need to run.” Jenna upended her full mug of tea in the sink and gave Lucas a little wave good-bye as she passed. It was brief, perfunctory, but she did it all the same. It carried him through a quiet, standing breakfast, a quick tooth brushing, and even the tedious task of scraping off the windshield of his icy car.
Lucas didn’t regret his absentminded offer until he was actually cocooned in his car with Angela, no way out. He had scratched through the frost to create a peeking hole in the windshield and two matching portholes in the windows of his hatchback. A thin morning light drifted with aimless abandon into the interior, making Angela’s skin glow gray and infusing Lucas with a sense of fleeting melancholy, as if it was all a dream. Maybe it was. Maybe Jim dangling from the rafter, the sad body beneath, and the ring that he still transferred from pocket to pocket as if it were a talisman of great value were all part of a strange, indecipherable nightmare.
In the week since Angela’s appearance, Lucas had spent so much time trying to learn more about the ring, the body, the untold story of Jim’s barn floor secret. He stayed up late at night researching reports of missing persons and wading through the never-ending mire of tragic stories that seemed doomed for obscurity. His little list of nineteen missing women grew to nearly a hundred as his personal search party crossed state borders to include South Dakota, Minnesota, and Nebraska. Lucas red-starred any reports that mentioned a ring, though he never came across a single record that included reference to a Black Hills gold ring.
And when he tired of staring at the familiar glow of the computer screen, Lucas spent hours at the library searching newspaper archives for anything that caught his attention. The Blackhawk paper boasted a column that chronicled visits from out-of-town relatives and friends, and Lucas scoured these seemingly trite paragraphs looking for clues.
Everything turned up empty, like a trio of magician’s cups with the prize secreted away where Lucas could never dream to find it. The futility of it all made him want to turn the ring over to Alex. Maybe the police chief could do something with it. Maybe Iowa DCI would be able to tap into their resource pool of forensic scientists and crime scene investigators and come up with some case-breaking lead. But Lucas clung to one thin hope that stopped him from giving up his piece of purloined jewelry: Maybe the ring didn’t belong to the woman, maybe it was Angela’s, and it rightfully belonged to her.
When Angela sank into the car and clicked her seat belt, Lucas was a tangle of contradictions. He resented her; he was grateful she was alive. He found her beautiful; he thought she was repulsive. He longed to give her the ring and learn once and for all if it was hers; he dreaded the idea of admitting what he had done. With a frustrated sigh, he turned the key in the ignition.
“What do you do there?” Lucas asked, out of the blue.
“What do you mean?” She didn’t sound irritated, but it was hard to tell.
“At the farm. What is there to do? It can’t be a fun place to be.”
Angela snorted. “Very perceptive, Lucas. No, it’s not fun. Not at all.”
He backed out of the driveway slowly, rolling down his window so he could stick his head out and see where he was going. It didn’t bother him that she was being snappish. He waited.
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“You know what I’m doing,” Angela finally offered as they pulled up to the only stoplight in all of Blackhawk.
“I do?”
“I told you. In your office that day. I’m trying to prove that Jim didn’t kill anyone.”
“Good luck with that.”
“You’re being asinine.”
“Good word.”
“You can be such a jerk.”
Lucas glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. “I’m sorry,” he said after a moment. “I’m just trying to understand.”
“No you’re not,” Angela grunted. “You’ve already decided that Jim’s a murderer. You think that I’m wrong, that I’m being ridiculous, and now your only goal is to make me see things your way. It’s not a formula, Lucas. You can’t apply a twelve-step program to my situation.”
He was stunned silent. Did he really do that? Had he bothered to listen to her at all? Did he even want to understand? The questions seeped from his mind as quickly as they formed. He was trying to help. All he ever did in any and every situation was try to help. It was what he did. It was who he was. A swift defense sprung to his lips, but before he could voice it, Angela continued.
“I bet you’ve never done anything crazy. I bet you’ve never even skinny-dipped or drag raced or copied a paper in college. I bet you’ve never followed a passion to its conclusion because you simply couldn’t imagine doing otherwise.”
Passion. For Lucas the word was unexpectedly loaded and immediate. It brought two things to mind simultaneously, and they fought for foreground in his consciousness. Jenna. The Woman. The latter had begun to slowly unearth herself for Lucas, to rise above the shroud of details that seemed to cloak her in mystery so that she was no longer reduced to simply the bones, the pitiful dress, the ring. She was still unnamed, but it seemed cruel to say so, for she bore a name to someone even if the only way that anonymous person could remember her was in generalities. Daughter. Sister. Friend. Beloved.
