Dead Again: A Romantic Thriller

by Cooper-Posey, Tracy

  He shrugged, looking down at his knees. “Get caught unprepared.”

  She almost laughed. “You’ve got to be kidding! For someone who pulled himself out of a plane wreck yesterday, you’re the most prepared man I’ve ever met. Look at this.” She waved her hand around the twenty-foot long ledge, which looked like a campsite, with all the goods packed around them.

  He was picking at a fold in his jeans now. It was a monotonous plucking, which he concentrated upon closely.

  “We’ll be the most comfortable victims in existence,” Sophie added. “I almost feel like we should offer the rescue team afternoon tea when they arrive.”

  The plucking motion paused for a tiny fraction of a second, before continuing on.

  Sophie bit her lip. “What is it? Something about them coming? What?”

  He glanced at her, then his glance slid away.

  “You don’t think they’re coming, right?” she said. “That’s why you’re setting this up like we’re here to stay.”

  “Of course they’ll come looking for us,” he assured her. “It’s standard procedure with a plane crash. They’ll look for….” He grimaced. “They’ll look for wreckage.”

  He was holding something back. She stared at him, trying to read through his words, her heart thudding uneasily. “Where will they look, though? Are we near where they would look? Or miles and miles away? Is that what you’re not telling me?”

  He shook his head a little. “It’s not that simple. When they don’t find the wreckage, they’ll start spreading out the search. Sooner or later, even if they don’t trip over us themselves, someone will come into this valley and we’ll able to get their attention. That’s not what I’m—”

  Again, he shut his mouth as if he had been indiscreet.

  “Not what you’re afraid of?” Sophie finished. “What is it you are afraid of?”

  He shook his head again.

  “Jesus, Jack!” Quick anger flared in her. “This is a survival situation here, regardless of how much equipment you’ve managed to scrounge up. You have to tell me what I should know.”

  When he remained silent, she thumped the seat between them with the side of her fist. “I’m not helpless, dammit!”

  “That’s the last thing I’d accuse you of,” Jack said quickly.

  Her quicksilver temper faded and her leg throbbed in its place. “Ah, dammit,” she muttered. “I’m so able to take care of myself right now I need someone to help me go to the washroom.”

  Jack was trying to hold back a smile and not succeeding. “Well, I didn’t want to mention that.”

  She found a small smile of her own. Tried it. She realized she was close to tears again.

  Jack tilted his head a little, studying her. “Hey, you’re allowed to depend on people sometimes, you know.” It was an echo of her advice to him a moment ago.

  The tears were getting a little closer now. She bit her lip and swallowed, pushing the tears back. “It’s not something I’m used to.”

  “I can see that.”

  Now it was her turn to stare at her knees with nothing to say. She felt Jack move restlessly next to her.

  “I know you don’t like it this way, having to depend on me. If you knew me better you’d like it even less, so count your blessings.”

  She looked up, startled. Jack’s gaze was steady. He really wasn’t being melodramatic just to reassure her.

  “I don’t believe you,” she said.

  He shrugged. “We may never get to put it to the test, so relax. I mention it because you plainly don’t like being as helpless as you are. You think it’s really bad luck, fate dropping you into such a shitty position, but it could be worse, Sophie. It could be much worse.”

  “We’re lucky, I know—”

  “No, you don’t know. Not really.” He turned then, into the same sideways position he’d slept in. This time, he did it to keep her gaze locked on his face. “Trust me on this. For this one time, you’ll have to let go of the controls and trust me. I will get you out of this. I promise. Regardless of what may happen, I’ll be fighting to get you home, while I’ve got breath in my body.”

  His voice wasn’t particularly loud but she heard the implacable will behind it and marvelled. Jack was a stranger and had assured her she wouldn’t like him if she did know him, yet his promise was enough to reassure her anyway.

  “Why?” she asked at last. “Why is my getting home safely so important to you?”

  He looked away then. “I can’t tell you.”

  “Can’t? Or won’t? How could I possibly think badly of you after all you’ve done in the last twenty-four hours?”

  “Believe me, there are things out there in the world that are beyond your ability to control. You wouldn’t like them.”

  It was an odd answer. Before she could follow up on it, he picked up the plastic sheet he was sitting on and unfolded it. “Rain’s coming,” he said casually, nodding toward the other side of the ravine.

  And so it was—a steady, dark gray curtain of it, moving over the gap between them and the blurred bulk of mountains across the way.

  They pulled the sheet over them like a small tent and Jack lifted a corner of the sheet lying over her legs up and put his own beneath, just as the first drops of rain started tapping on the heavy plastic.

  It was muffled and semi-dark beneath the plastic but light enough to see his face, turned an odd shade by the reflection from the plastic.

  “Okay?” he asked.

  “Floating nicely,” she assured him.

  “Do you want to sleep?”

  “I’ve slept enough.”

  “All right.” He settled his right shoulder against the chair and crossed his arms. “Can I ask you something personal?”

  She laughed. “You’ve helped me use a de facto bedpan. Trying to be coy about personal details after that seems ridiculous.”

  Again, the small smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes, which never quit watching and assessing. She remembered the sudden, almost involuntary full smile he’d given earlier, when his whole face had lightened, humour flooding it. She had preferred that smile.

  “Is that a yes or a no?” he asked.

  “Sure. Knock yourself out.”

  He pursed his lips, considering. Then, “Who was it that kicked you in the guts so badly, Sophie?”

  She blinked. “Excuse me?”

  “You’re independent to the point of phobia. The idea of having to rely on someone else, of asking for help, makes you break into a cold sweat. You’re relieved I rocked up to help you but you hate your own helplessness—you’re skewered and turning over a spit about it. That’s not a natural trait for anyone. Someone, somewhere, hurt you badly enough to bury the lesson deep. I was just curious to know who.”

  “My…my mother,” she said, then stopped, shocked at her own admission. All the usual mental barriers and gates that swung shut on the subject had failed this time. She had spluttered out the truth, even before she’d considered whether this was the one area she’d have to reluctantly define as off-limits to Jack’s probing.

  Jack lifted a brow. “Your mother? That’s not the answer I was expecting.”

  “What were you expecting?” She was suddenly curious to know the thoughts behind his relentless measuring gaze.

  “A man,” he admitted easily. “There’s something in your eyes, an old sadness.” He smiled a little and this one did touch his eyes. “Or maybe I’ve been watching way too much Days of Our Lives these last few weeks. A beautiful woman with tragic eyes. Must be a broken heart.”

  “What were you doing that involved watching Days of our Lives?”

  “Being bored out of my skull, mostly,” he said lightly. “Your mother. What did she do to you?”

  “Nothing.” She pursed her lips, feeling the rest of it bubbling to the surface, for the first time in her life stirring the need to vent it all, to explain.

  He was studying her again. “It was your father…” he said, with the tone of
someone who was slowly seeing the truth.

  Her chest was tightening, hurting. “See?” she said, forcing her tone to stay light. “All that Days of Our Lives wasn’t wasted after all.”

  “What did he do to her?” he asked, his tone gentle.

  “To her? Nothing. For her. Everything. Absolutely everything.”

  He was shaking his head. “I don’t understand.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. You’re a guy and you aren’t a baby boomer.”

  “Baby-boomer? You mean the women who had to give up their jobs so the returning G.I.s could have them? The women who had to go home and have babies?”

  “Yes, those ones.”

  “Then no, I’m not a baby-boomer. And neither are you, unless you’ve discovered the fountain of youth. I don’t think your mother could have been one, either. You’re just not old enough for her to have been one.”

  She shook her head. “She learned from her mother, who was a baby-boomer. She learned it so well she didn’t know how to do anything else. So when she had to do something else she…just couldn’t. Thanks to my father, I had to deal with the fallout.”

  “What happened? What did he do?”

  “He died.”

  He was quiet a minute.

  “Still don’t get it, do you?” she asked.

  “I know the baby boomer thing has something to do with it but it’s not enough to go on.”

  She nodded. “I haven’t explained enough about them, I guess. It’s because I’ve never told anyone before. Makes for bad storytelling.”

  He considered this. “So. You’ve carried it around by yourself long enough. Time to share it.”

  “A trouble shared is a trouble halved? It’s not that simple.”

  He smiled a little. “It is, Sophie. It’s just that simple. Try it. You’ll see. Tell me about what happened when your father died.”

  She stared at him. “Why do you want to know so badly?”

  He had to think about it for a while. “I can see it in your eyes. It’s left its mark there. We aren’t going anywhere so there’s time to get it out.”

  “What do you do for a living? Are you a psychologist or something?”

  “God, no.” He laughed. “It’s nothing sinister, Sophie. I was just curious. You’ve trusted me enough to tell me this much, so tell me the rest. I promise you’ll feel better for it. How long ago did he die?”

  It was a simple question to answer. There was no deep probing in it. “Eight years ago,” she said.

  “You must have been in junior high,” he said.

  “High school but only just,” she admitted.

  “How did it happen?”

  “Heart attack. The second one. We knew it was coming. He’d abused his health most of his life. They became adults after the war. They were too small to understand the war itself—all they remembered was the deprivation, the grimness. They grew up determined to get along and have a good time while they were doing it. My father was a drinker, he smoked and he ate three square meals a day and they were very square. Steak, pork, potatoes—you know the baked ones they cook in the fat that the meat is baking in?”

  “I’ve tried them once or twice but they were too fatty. I grew up eating mashed potatoes with my roast.”

  “Exactly. We had them about every second night and of course, dessert. Mom was English and she made puddings and pies and steamed puddings—his favourite was something called ‘spotted dick’ and it was full of suet, which is a white, solidified fat and really should be called ‘heart attack in a packet’ but he had that every Sunday come hell or high water.”

  She stopped, realizing that quite without intending to, she had begun the tale.

  “How did they meet?” Jack asked.

  “In England. Dad was there for some sort of exchange.” She couldn’t help smiling. The story had been a constant one throughout her childhood and the romance continued to work. “My mother’s family tried their best to scare him away by their upper English snobbishness. When that didn’t work they tried it on my mother, inventing all these horrid tales about my father, how he was a bad seed and had a criminal record. It was all outright lies.”

  “It didn’t work, did it?”

  “They eloped. They ran off to London and were married and on the boat to America before my mother’s family knew she’d left.”

  “They settled in L.A.?”

  “Venice Beach. My father was from San Diego but most of his family had scattered around the state and into Nevada. Los Angeles in the late sixties was a nicer place than San Francisco and my parents…well…” She could feel herself blushing. “They weren’t flower children at all. They were the complete opposite. Very square, very, well, geeky, for that time, I guess. They settled down, in the very traditional sense of the word.”

  “The house, the job, the car, Sunday drives into the countryside, gingham cloth on the Formica table, that sort of stuff?”

  “Yes, except my mother being English, it was a white damask cloth on Sundays and an embroidered calico for every day. Remember those old hand-drawn pictures from the covers of the women’s magazines back in the fifties? The glowing, gorgeous mother, the kids with the rosy cheeks and the upright father in the background, beaming upon his family, looking tall and capable?”

  Jack nodded.

  “That was my mom and dad. I think they bypassed the sixties altogether. They were throwbacks to the fifties. Mom never had a job her entire life. She cleaned the oven every Friday, baked and darned socks. It wasn’t until Dad died that I figured out that she didn’t know how to do anything else. Her family hadn’t trained her for anything, or even assumed that she would need an education.”

  “But lots of women around then weren’t given training,” Jack pointed out. “My Mom was one of them.”

  “Did she work?”

  “Yeah, she had a job at the local supermarket. On the cash registers.”

  “Why did she work? Did she have to? I mean, not that I’m trying to be nosey but—”

  He shook his head. “No, it’s okay.” He frowned, looking inward. “I don’t ever remember that she had to work. She just wanted to. She was proud that she was working, in a quiet sort of way. She would give her pay packet to my father every Friday evening, with a little smile. It was a ceremony.”

  “Perhaps she had soaked up some of the new values,” Sophie suggested “It was hard to ignore all that ‘I am woman’ stuff going around. But my Mom never watched television and she only listened to one classical radio station, usually while she was ironing. Maybe it was because of how she was reared, but she never worked at an outside job. She never even expressed an interest in it.”

  “What was her childhood like?”

  “If she had stayed with her family, she would have married well into a family with money and land. Your mom might have watched her mother work and absorbed some of the work ethic from her family. While my mother was a child she soaked up lessons on how to handle a fretful mare, how to manage a country estate, how to keep the train of your ball gown in place and how to drink champagne like a queen. She didn’t know how to do anything else.”

  “But she kept the house, anyway,” Jack said softly.

  “I think she did that because she loved us and that was what a woman did. So she learned early and young how to do that much. But by the time my father died, she had got set in her ways and convinced herself she was too old to learn new tricks.”

  “She didn’t manage well, did she?”

  Sophie pursed her lips together, feeling the same dull old, sad fury swell in her that she’d felt so often throughout her high school years. “She didn’t manage at all. She couldn’t cope with the checking account, she got flustered even making phone calls. I watched her once—she had to change a specialist appointment and she sat there with the phonebook on her knees and she didn’t even know where to start looking for the phone number. Was there a special doctor section? Did she just look under his last name? She couldn’t do it. In th
e end I had to take the phone book from her and make the call myself.” She stopped, aware that she was on the verge of tears.

  Jack’s hand, big and square, rested briefly on her wrist. “You became the man of the family.”

  “I guess…yes. I did it all. There was a little money left from Dad’s estate and the house was paid for. By then I had a little babysitting business that kept some money trickling in, enough to let me stay on in high school for the last year. Mom died the week after I graduated, the same week that year’s property taxes arrived.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “Lots of medical terms but I think she just gave up,” Sophie said.

  “I’ve heard about it,” Jack said. “Couples who have been married thirty, fifty years. One dies and the other will be dead within a year. It’s like they just can’t go on alone.” He studied her. “I don’t imagine you went on to college after that.”

  “No. Mom wasn’t insured—why bother? She was the stay-at-home wife. I had to sell the house, the car, pretty much everything to clear the debts. I had enough left over to find an apartment and to give me enough time to find a job.”

  Jack shook his head a little. “And from that you decided you were never going to ask anyone to do anything for you ever again.”

  “Is that what I did?” She took a deep breath. “Yes, I think I did. There wasn’t anyone else around to ask. Mom’s family had cut her off. Dad’s family were scattered to hell and gone. It was just me. And…” She bit her lip. “I prefer it that way. It makes me uneasy if someone tries to take over, to…take charge.”

  “I noticed,” Jack said with a smile. “I guess becoming a lawyer is the ultimate power play position, huh?”

  “I’m not a lawyer yet,” she said quickly. “I’m a paralegal. There’s no way I could afford college, let alone law school. I had a job that barely paid expenses and squeezed out enough to go to a technical college part-time. It took a couple of years but I got my certificate and then found the job with Cruickshanks. They actively encourage their paras to study for the bar and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.”

  “And you were on the plane because…?”

  “They wanted me in New York to help a partner there with a case. It was a last minute, get-there-yesterday thing. I got to my desk in the morning, bracing myself for the avalanche of paperwork that would be in my in-tray and by coffee-break time I was heading back out the door with a full briefcase and a travel allowance.”