Sleeping in Eden

by Nicole Baart

  When Lucas blew into the kitchen, he found Angela alone at the table, draped over the hardback chair as if she owned the place, long hair pulled up in a slipping ballerina’s knot and jeans rolled up to her knees. One leg was tucked snug against her chest, foot flat on the smooth seat beneath her; the other leg arched over empty space like a bridge, heel resting on the edge of the varnished pine table and toes splayed with a tissue woven over, under, over, under, like the first row of a flimsy, handwoven blanket.

  She was painting her toenails iridescent red, a color that shone like the hood of a new car and sparkled, even from across the room, with flecks of glitter. Lucas looked down at his own wool socks, the heavy pants that hung in a clean, straight line from his hip to his heel, and wondered, Why? Who would see the decorated feet, glistening with ten perfect points of ruby like drops of fresh-spilled blood? But he didn’t whisper a word.

  Instead, he called, “Jenna home?” though it was obvious to him that she wasn’t. The house lacked a certain gravity, as if even the walls knew that nothing was quite anchored without her.

  Lucas hesitated in the doorway, uncertain in spite of his earlier impatience, because it felt faintly inappropriate to walk in on Angela in the act of painting her toenails. Her feet were bare before him, the pale skin almost intimate as she cupped her arch, a whisper of pink tongue visible between her lips as she concentrated. And though she had certainly heard him come in, she didn’t look up or acknowledge his presence in any way. Lucas felt as if he should leave, or at the very least, avert his eyes.

  But then Angela finished her pinky toe, capped the tiny bottle, and turned. “No,” she said, her gaze as layered and shiny-hard as her nail polish. She seemed focused to Lucas, at once determined and triumphant as if she knew what she wanted and it was well within her grasp. He fumbled to say something, to ask another question, but she smiled suddenly and the strange spell was broken.

  Lucas let go of a stale breath. “Where is she?” he asked.

  Angela shrugged. “Working late. I stopped by her office this afternoon and she told me not to expect her back until seven.”

  Lucas wished for a moment that he had stayed at work, but as quickly as the thought arose, it evaporated, a wisp of steam that left an unexpected relief in its wake. He could talk to Angela honestly, uninterrupted. Without the phantom of his wife’s growing disappointment hovering over him.

  As if Angela could read his mind, she commanded, “Ask me.”

  “What?”

  She rolled her eyes. “That is quite possibly the most annoying expression in the world, Lucas. Don’t act so stupid. Don’t act like I’ve caught you off guard. You know exactly what I’m referring to.”

  “I don’t know what you want me to ask,” he said flatly.

  “Use your imagination.” Angela smirked.

  Lucas crossed the room slowly and passed around the table so he could stand opposite her. But he didn’t move to sit down, and Angela seemed annoyed again. She kicked out the chair in front of him with one of her newly manicured feet, bumping him just below the knees with the lathed edge of the sturdy seat.

  “I hope you didn’t just make me smudge my polish,” she complained. Then she indicated the chair with a flick of her chin. “Sit. We have lots to talk about.”

  Lucas sat reluctantly. “Tell me about the ring,” he said.

  “That’s not a question, but it’ll do.” Angela grinned, a sudden fierce expression that had nothing to do with joy. She demanded: “Tell me you’re dying to know. Tell me it’s all you thought about all afternoon.”

  “If that were true, it would have been very unfortunate for my patients.”

  Angela blinked. “Are you sure you took the ring from the barn?” she asked after a moment. “I can’t believe you did it.”

  “Neither can I,” Lucas admitted. “And I think I made a huge mistake. I shouldn’t have taken it and I shouldn’t have given it to you.”

  “Too late for that, isn’t it? You want to know, Lucas. I know you do. You’re the one who set me on this path.”

  He did. It was no use denying it, even if good sense continued to wage war in his heart and mind. “Convince me,” he muttered. “You’ve got five minutes to make me believe that I did the right thing in committing a felony.”

  “Is it a felony?”

  “No.” Lucas sighed. “I very discreetly asked one of my patients about it, a retired sheriff.”

  “And? What’s going to happen to you?”

  “He figured my allegedly fabricated scenario would result in a fine. Maybe a theft charge. But it could be dropped if I returned the ring. It would depend on whether or not the investigators decided to press charges.”

  “And me?”

  “I guess you’re an accessory.”

  Angela shrugged. “I’m okay with that.”

  “We don’t even know if it’s her ring.”

  “Of course it’s hers,” Angela said, dismissing his reservations with an irritated wiggle of her fingers. “It’s not my mother’s—he gave all of her stuff to Goodwill after she died. And it’s not mine. There were no other women in Jim’s life.”

  “That you know of.”

  Angela glared at him. “It’s hers. I know it.” Apparently sick of wasting time on the legal particularities, she blurted, “It’s an original. Michael Kane is an independent jeweler who specializes in one-of-a-kind creations. Michael does his own designs, but he also allows clients to describe, draw, or invent their own wearable art using a CAD program. No piece of jewelry is ever duplicated.”

  Lucas laid his hand palm up on the table and Angela placed the ring in it without further comment. It was a unique piece, and though he could see why the original design struck him as distinctly Black Hills gold, there was a difference. The leaves were bigger, less detailed. And they arched off the band, creating hollow spaces and undercuts that seemed too detailed for the pretty but distinctly cookie-cutter charms he had seen before in neat jewelry store displays.

  “How long has he been in business?” Lucas asked.

  “Over twenty-five years.”

  “What makes you think he’d remember this ring?”

  Angela flashed him a sly smile. “He keeps records. I asked.”

  Lucas felt a thrill, a sudden burst of adrenaline that forced him to acknowledge that Angela’s discovery was huge. Michael Kane Designs could hold the key to the Woman’s identity.

  “Did you ask him about it? About this ring?”

  She shook her head, a little wrinkle appearing between her eyes. Picking up the glass bottle of her gleaming polish, she tapped it on the surface of the table in a soft staccato of muted frustration. “He told me that most of the private designs are strictly confidential. Apparently people don’t want their creations copied.”

  Lucas blew a hard breath between his teeth. “Then what in the world makes you think that we’ll learn anything about this ring?”

  Angela continued the careful tap-tap-tap of the bottle, studying the fruitless movement, brow furrowed in concentration. It seemed like she wasn’t going to respond to Lucas’s question, but finally she palmed the small vial and fixed him with an unwavering look. Her eyes were clear and dark, the gray-green color of a river stone, and equally immovable. Then, as he watched in growing discomfort, the corner of her mouth curled the tiniest bit, presaging a change that overtook her beautiful face like a slow sunrise. The smile that she gave him was both innocent and hungry, ingenuous and cunning.

  “He’ll tell me whatever I ask.”

  Lucas didn’t doubt her.

  Though Lucas had serious reservations about Angela’s half-baked plan to interrogate the designer of the ring, the sheer simplicity of her scheme and her determination to follow it through impressed him. Before he had a chance to excuse himself from the impulsive trip to Omaha, Angela categorically dismantled all his watertight arguments.

  Like a child playing her parents off each other, Angela confessed to already bringing up the topic of
Lucas’s short departure with Jenna on the phone. She didn’t provide too many details, but Lucas got the impression that the reason she’d masterminded for needing him on the two-hour drive to the small Midwestern city was something that tugged at Jenna’s already frayed heartstrings. What was it this time? A subtly communicated need for a father figure? A faint suspicion on Jenna’s part that Angela’s tough exterior was nothing more than an elaborate ruse? That inside the controlled, attractive exterior dwelled a sad little girl who longed for stability and love? Either way, it seemed Jenna didn’t even pause to question it. According to Angela, his wife not only granted her permission, she seemed eager for Lucas to make the trek with the confused young woman.

  “We’re going to see my father’s lawyer,” Angela explained, filling Lucas in on the story she had constructed.

  He sighed, hating the thought of lying to his wife, but now that things were falling into place, he could feel the pull of the Woman’s mystery as if it was anchored deep inside. The thought of knowing was intoxicating enough to cloud his vision, even though he believed himself duty bound to deny it. “Why would Jim have a lawyer from Omaha?” he asked, forcing himself to try to poke holes in Angela’s plot.

  “You know he didn’t trust anybody here. Besides, my mom grew up in a little town a few miles northwest of Omaha. My grandfather did all his business there. It’s plausible that my father would follow suit.”

  “It’s plausible.”

  “No, it’s possible. And we just made it so. Act as if it’s true.”

  Lucas gave a barely perceptible nod. “Why isn’t Jenna taking you?” he asked.

  “She didn’t offer.” Angela avoided his eyes. “And she didn’t question it when I asked for you to escort me.”

  He knew that Safe House was currently sheltering two young women, and that Jenna was all but drowning in the mire of their complex problems and the complications of a pair of frightening boyfriends. “She’s very busy,” he told Angela.

  “That works out just fine for us.”

  Lucas didn’t know how to respond.

  Amazingly, getting a day off work proved almost as easy as convincing Jenna that Lucas needed to go. Though his schedule was already nearly full for the following day, Angela persuaded him to call Mandy and beg the long-suffering nurse to clear his agenda.

  “I need a personal day,” Lucas croaked into the phone, thankful that his aversion to lying caused his voice to crack as if he really was in desperate need of a little time off.

  “You haven’t taken a day of vacation in two years!” Mandy exclaimed so loudly he had to pull the phone from his ear. “No sick days either! Are you sick?”

  “No,” he confessed. “I’m not sick. I just . . . I need this.”

  There was a long silence on the line.

  “Mandy?”

  “Yeah.”

  Lucas took a deep breath. “You’ll do it?”

  “Of course I will. But next time it would be nice if you planned your personal day a bit in advance.”

  “Thanks, Mandy. Reschedule everything you can, and be sure to give the patients who need to be seen to—”

  “Don’t tell me how to do my job.”

  “Okay.” He paused. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Lucas clicked the phone off and covered his eyes with a damp hand. Stifling a little groan, he said, “I can’t believe you orchestrated this. It feels wrong.”

  Angela turned from the counter where she was preparing vegetarian wraps for a late supper. Jenna would be home in minutes, and while her impending presence made Lucas’s stomach knot, Angela was leaning against the counter with natural ease, slicing a cucumber into papery rounds like a gourmet chef. “Look,” she muttered, pointing the tip of her knife at his forehead in mock threat, “Jenna’s fine with it, Mandy’s fine with it, and you owe this to me.”

  “I owe you?”

  “You’re pretty free and easy with your false accusations,” Angela reminded him.

  It saddened Lucas a little to think she might be proven wrong. “I’m not sure my entirely reasonable assumption that Jim killed you makes me liable to you,” he muttered.

  “And her. You owe it to her.” Angela set a fist on her hip and narrowed her eyes at Lucas. “You took her ring and now you don’t want to follow through? You started this, I’ll remind you. And you’re going to finish it.”

  “I’m following a passion to its conclusion?” Lucas said wryly, quoting their earlier conversation in the car.

  She winked. “Exactly. We’re in it together, whether you like it or not.”

  “Where does that leave Jenna?”

  Angela’s expression turned serious. “You want to tell her?”

  “What makes you assume I haven’t shared the ring with her already?”

  “You haven’t.”

  It bothered Lucas that she was so certain. “Maybe Jenna would understand. Maybe she’d support us. Or even . . . help.”

  “She’d try to talk us out of it. She might even contact someone about the ring, with or without our consent.”

  It was true. Jenna had a very finely bordered sense of justice, and though Lucas’s own understanding of right and wrong was usually just as harshly defined, the Woman was blurring all his careful boundaries. He didn’t want to give up the ring and he didn’t want Jenna to, either. Even if it seemed like the right thing to do. Maybe black and white weren’t quite as distinct as Lucas had always imagined them to be.

  “You’re right,” he finally sighed. “But if this proves to be a dead end, if Michael Kane Designs has nothing to offer us, we need to turn in the ring ourselves. This woman deserves that.”

  Angela considered his words for a moment, head tilted as she studied the sharp tip of the knife blade. “My dad didn’t kill her, he didn’t kill anyone.”

  It was the first time that Lucas had heard her refer to Jim as her dad. He didn’t agree with her, but he also didn’t want to give her a reason to jump on the defensive. “If we can’t prove that,” he said, trying to placate her, “maybe someone else can.”

  She nodded once. “Okay.” Then her eyes glittered and she turned to carve a red onion in half with one well-aimed sweep of her wide blade. There was a quick snick of sound followed by a dull thud as the length of the knife embedded itself in the worn butcher block. Her shoulders seemed stiff with defiance when she added, “But I have a feeling about this.”

  Lucas didn’t want to admit it, but he did, too.

  20

  MEG

  Jess let Meg go without a fight. It was in him, she could see fire in his eyes. But the flames died quickly, quenched by something inside her that spilled out so soft and slow she wasn’t even aware of its stealthy departure until it was too late. It wasn’t tangible or quantifiable, but it was real, and the unspoken words between them silently acknowledged the truth: Meg was not in love with Jess and probably had never been. The realization made him go pale, and she reached a hand to warm the marble of his cheek.

  He jerked away.

  “I’m so sorry,” she whispered.

  “You said that already.”

  They stood facing each other in the dim, cold light of the porch. It wasn’t where Meg would have chosen to talk, nor when, but her inadvertent apology in the dining room began something that she couldn’t stop. It was a hapless admission, a thought she hadn’t meant to give voice to, but once the words slid from her lips, they opened a spreading fissure along the length of her ongoing lie and it all leaked out.

  There was nothing more to say. Jess seemed to understand this as Meg’s hand fell slowly back to her side. He helped to widen the distance between them by taking a deliberate step back. His face was steely, a chiseled study in hurt, and he didn’t even attempt to temper himself for her benefit. Though he had spent the last two years of his life trying to make her happy, he did nothing to ease the agony of the moment. And then, apparently before he could change his mind, he spun on his heel and walked awa
y.

  Meg opened her mouth to call after him, but what was there to say? Good-bye? Not like this, she thought. It can’t end like this.

  “Your ring,” she blurted, twisting it off her finger though it was strangely painful to do so.

  “Keep it,” he called, not even pausing to look over his shoulder. “I don’t want it.”

  “But . . .”

  Jess turned at the car, and she struggled to read his eyes in the shadows. His chin was severe, his gaze black and hidden beneath the line of his heavy brow. For a second Meg thought he was waiting for her and she took a step toward him. She stopped cold when out of the darkness he said, “I loved you.”

  The slam of his car door cut the lingering sweetness of his confession with a sound of harsh finality.

  Meg had no idea that it would hurt so much to hear him say it like that. Like his love was already gone.

  After having them both, it was difficult to have neither. She was suddenly a map without borders, peppered with holes, directionless. And although she tried to ignore their absence, Jess and Dylan left jagged cracks in her heart that simply refused to fill. She tried to push things deep into the gaps, to smooth them over with friends, classes, and another season of the Girls’ Football League, but as Jess and Dylan continued to take pains to remove themselves even further from her life, Meg felt their loss in all the hidden places that had refused to heal.

  Jess switched to an out-of-state school for his sophomore year of college and took an internship at a law firm in Minneapolis so he wouldn’t have to come home during the summer. While his decision could be considered an investment in his future, Meg felt sure that it had much more to do with severing his past. And when Dylan graduated from Sutton High, he impulsively joined the Air National Guard and left for boot camp at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. She didn’t even know he was leaving until he’d already been gone a week. Meg was heartbroken, but she also felt a grain of satisfaction that Dylan, who had felt so directionless, was doing something.

  When it became obvious that the girl Meg had been was long gone, Linda finally asked her daughter, “What do you want?”