The Nearness of You

by Dorothy Garlock

  Randall almost shouted her name but then thought better of it; she wouldn’t be able to hear him over the din of the crowd, anyway. But when he started toward her, already practicing what he wanted to say, he noticed that Lily wasn’t alone. A man was with her. They were talking. She was smiling.

  What in the hell is this shit?

  Randall was the possessive type, the sort who quickly got jealous. And he could no more change the way he was than a leopard could change its spots. He wanted to walk over and punch the stranger in the face, to grab Lily’s arm, to drag her away. But he didn’t. Impetuous as Randall could be, he knew that that would surely draw the sort of attention that Leo was hell-bent on trying to avoid.

  Instead, he watched.

  As he waited, Randall grew more impatient by the second. But just when he thought he couldn’t bear it any longer, something between Lily and the other man changed. He saw her shake her head. The guy looked confused. Then Lily started walking in Randall’s direction. He smirked. He must have misunderstood something.

  Whatever. Here was his big chance.

  Randall started toward Lily. Wouldn’t she be surprised to see him? They’d pick up right where they left off, cram as much fun as they could into what little time he had left, maybe do some necking in a secluded doorway, and make plans for more. She was almost close enough to touch.

  Then he heard her name, spoken loud and clear in the autumn afternoon.

  The only problem was, Randall hadn’t been the one to say it.

  Lily turned around quickly at the sudden sound of her name, her blond curls falling from her shoulder and brushing against her cheek. Boone was right where she’d left him, but now he had his camera raised to his eye. A second later he lowered it, smiling slyly at having gotten what he wanted despite her wishes.

  “Sorry,” he told her. “I couldn’t help myself.”

  A spark of anger ignited in Lily’s chest. She thought about marching over and arguing with him, but she didn’t move. She didn’t say a word. Truth was, there was something about Boone that flustered her. Maybe it was his good looks, his quick tongue, or the fact that he was from the city, giving him an air of both street smarts and sophistication. Whatever the reason, Lily knew the picture wasn’t worth fighting about. After all, Boone was a stranger who had come to town for the festival, a man she’d never see or speak to again. This wasn’t some sappy novel or Hollywood romance. They weren’t going to fall in love. By this time next week, he wouldn’t even remember her name.

  Let him have his photograph.

  Without a word, she again started to walk away.

  “Wait, Lily!” Boone shouted, but she kept going.

  Incredibly, Lily had only gone a couple of steps before she ran into someone else. It wasn’t a big bump, more of a brushing of shoulders, but she was so embarrassed that she didn’t even look up to see who she had hit, just mumbled an apology and kept going, making a beeline for the library.

  This time, at least, she had managed to hold on to her purse.

  “Wait, Lily!” Boone yelled, but she didn’t slow. Taking her picture hadn’t gone like he had expected. Not at all. He’d thought she might laugh, give him some teasing grief, and then share more of his company. The one thing Boone hadn’t counted on was her looking angry and stalking away.

  But just as he decided to go after her, a hand grabbed his arm and halted him in his tracks.

  “There you are,” Clive said, looking relieved, a half-eaten bag of popcorn in his other hand. “You were supposed to meet me under the movie marquee, remember? That was five minutes ago. I figured I’d better come find you or we’ll be late for our interview.”

  Annoyed at the interruption, Boone spun back around, but Lily had already vanished into the crowd. She was nowhere to be seen.

  “Damn it,” Boone swore.

  “What’s wrong?” Clive asked.

  “Nothing. Everything,” he said, his words as out of sorts as he felt. “I met this girl, we talked, I took her picture, but then she left.”

  “A girl? Was she pretty?” the writer asked.

  “Shut up,” Boone grumbled. The last thing wanted was to talk to Clive about Lily, or anything else for that matter.

  “You keep this up and you’re going to win our bet.”

  “Bet?” he echoed, still craning his neck, looking for Lily.

  “About whether you’ll kiss a girl while we’re here? Don’t tell me you’ve already forgotten about it.”

  But he had. Boone didn’t give a damn about any wager. Hell, he would have gladly forked over the money if it had meant he could talk to Lily again, to smooth over whatever it was that hadn’t gone right between them. But no amount of wishing was going to get her to come back. She was gone and all he had left was the memory of her face, the sound of her voice, and the feel of her touch.

  And the film in his camera.

  “I hate to cut your romantic moment short,” Clive said, “but we need to get to the mayor’s office. I don’t want to be late.”

  “Go on without me,” Boone told him, already wondering how long it would take to race back to their rented room, scrounge together his chemicals, transform the small kitchen into a darkroom, and develop his roll of film.

  “By myself? But…but you said that you’d go with me…”

  “C’mon, Clive. Grow a backbone. You can handle an interview with a rinky-dink mayor, can’t you? You work for Life magazine, for Christ’s sake!”

  “Well…sure, I do…but…” the writer said, then nodded, looking as unsure of himself as possible. “I just thought we were a team…”

  Boone took a long, deep breath. While a part of him desperately wanted to blow Clive off and develop his pictures of Lily, another knew he couldn’t. Like it or not, just as Walter had told him, he did have a measure of responsibility to the writer and his publisher. It frustrated him to no end, but he had an obligation. Besides, it wouldn’t take long, an hour at the most, and then he’d have what he so desperately wanted. He would be looking at Lily’s face again, this time in a photo.

  “All right, all right,” he agreed. “Let’s go do the damn interview.”

  Clive’s face instantly brightened. “Thanks, Boone!” He held out his bag of popcorn as if in celebration. “Want some?”

  “Not in the slightest.”

  No, what Boone really wanted was to see Lily again, but doing that might not be easy. He didn’t know where she lived, her telephone number, if she had a job or boyfriend. Finding out any of those things would take time…

  Boone suspected he might not be leaving town so fast after all.

  Randall didn’t see a flash, no one told him to smile or say cheese, but the second he looked up at the sound of Lily’s name, he’d known that the man had taken his picture. Stunned, he froze, then turned his head away. His thoughts raced. He was struggling to figure out what to do when Lily bumped into him, their shoulders touching, but Randall paid her no mind. For now, he had to forget about her.

  All that mattered was the man with the camera.

  As casually as he could, trying to be just another face in the crowd, Randall moved closer to the stranger, wanting to get a better look, to see his face, hoping he might find out who he was. But before Randall could make out much, another man approached the one with the camera and the two of them started talking. Leaning against a big blue mailbox, glancing at his watch like he was waiting for someone, Randall listened.

  What he heard stopped him cold.

  “…work for Life magazine, for Christ’s sake!”

  No. No way. It couldn’t be. Was that who these jokers were with? If so, this was a problem. A huge one.

  Shit, shit, shit…

  Standing on the sidewalk, struggling to maintain his composure, Randall felt as if the bottom had fallen out of his stomach. If the guy Lily had been talking to was a goddamn photographer for Life magazine, then that meant the picture he’d just taken could end up in print. If so, then thousands, even millio
ns of people might see it. Once the bank had been robbed, if someone understood that Randall Kane had been in Hooper’s Crossing at the same time, it wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to put two and two together. He’d be on the run for the rest of his life. He tried to calm himself. What were the odds that it would be used? But was it a risk worth taking? No, he had to do something. But what?

  Randall knew the answer.

  As much as he didn’t want to do it, he needed to talk to Leo.

  “…every bit as much to offer as a big city, in our own way, of course. Why, the fall festival has surely already proven to fine young gentlemen such as yourselves that…”

  Stifling a yawn, Boone raised his camera and snapped a picture of Morris Denton. He was only halfheartedly listening to the mayor as he proudly droned on about his town. Over the years, Boone had met dozens of people just like him, men who couldn’t get enough of the sound of their own voice. Government officials, lawyers, clergymen, anyone who had something to sell. Usually when interviewing someone like that, the thing to do was to periodically interrupt, to cut them off and steer the conversation where you wanted it to go, ending in a final question that made it clear that your time together was over.

  But that wasn’t what Clive was doing. Not by a long shot.

  Boone glanced over and saw the young writer scribbling furiously in his notebook, as if every word the mayor was saying was worth its weight in gold. Boone shook his head. He doubted that more than a line or two of this drivel would make it into the magazine, if that. Or any of his photos, for that matter.

  “…and if you’d seen it last year or the one before, you’d know that the festival is only getting bigger and…”

  Normally, having to listen to this nonsense would have driven Boone up the wall. He would have tapped his foot on the floor. He would’ve kept glancing at his watch. He would have yawned or stretched, anything to not-so-subtly voice his displeasure. But not today. Not after what had happened earlier.

  Not after meeting Lily.

  It was hard for him to understand, to explain to himself, but she had captured his attention in ways dozens of girls from all around the world had never done. Since he’d met her, Boone hadn’t been able to stop thinking about her. Something about her had bewitched him, grabbing tight. All he wanted was to look into her eyes again.

  And in a way, that was exactly what he was doing.

  A framed picture sat on the corner of the mayor’s desk. From where Boone was sitting, he could easily make out its subject. Lily was Morris Denton’s daughter, just as she had said. In the image, she was looking directly at the camera; it appeared to have been a professional sitting. Her eyes were bright and there was a hint of a smile on her lips. Blond hair spilled over her shoulders. She was as beautiful as he remembered. Still, Boone was convinced that the undeveloped photograph he’d snapped of her on the street would be even better.

  Before he and Clive had gone to the mayor’s office, Boone had carefully removed the roll of film from his camera. But instead of tossing the canister in with the others he’d already snapped, Boone zipped it up in his jacket pocket. He wasn’t taking any chances that something bad would happen to it. In order to see it developed he just had to keep from dying of boredom.

  “…until you see what happens on Friday night! Everyone together, under the stars, dancing to the music. What a sight! And then there’s the pie-eating contest, the potato-sack races, and the…”

  Clive flipped a page, nodding along as the mayor talked.

  Boone sighed. Staying awake was going to be harder than he thought.

  “So what do we do now?”

  Leo took a deep breath. Well, that was the question, wasn’t it?

  Sitting impatiently behind the wheel of the car, watching the street, his watch, and the surrounding houses all at the same time, Leo had waited for Randall to return. When the younger man finally strolled down the sidewalk, only a couple of seconds before he was to be left behind to fend for himself, Leo had instantly understood that something was wrong. It was in the way Randall carried himself, his shoulders slumped, his pace nervous-quick as he chewed on his lower lip. When he opened the passenger’s door and got in, Leo was on him quick.

  “What happened?” he asked, already dreading the answer.

  To his credit, Randall came clean, even though he had to have known Leo would be angry.

  And he was. In spades.

  For good reason. Over and over, Leo had railed against making this trip to town. He’d worried that something would go wrong, that his meticulous plans would be ruined, but Randall had just kept telling him to relax, that he was overreacting. In the end, it turned out that Leo’s fears had been justified. It was all he could do not to slug the son of a bitch in the face.

  Leo’s instincts told him to walk away. If a photographer from Life magazine had a picture with Randall’s face on it, then to go through with robbing the bank would be a hell of a risk, for both of them; if the police managed to hunt Randall down, Leo doubted the other man could keep from revealing his partner’s identity for long. What had drawn Leo to this robbery was the anonymity the festival would provide. One click of a camera had ruined everything. The younger thief had gambled and lost.

  Still, Leo couldn’t help but think about the crowd he’d seen while driving through town. That many people meant lots of cash changing hands. Just imagining the pile of money that would be sitting in the bank’s vault at the end of the week was enough to make his heart skip a beat. It was the answer to all his troubles, an end to a hard way of life. So was Randall’s mistake enough to make Leo turn his back on all that money?

  No, it wasn’t. Not yet, at least.

  “Would you recognize either of those guys if you saw them again?” he asked.

  Randall nodded. “Sure, but why?”

  The plan was still coming together in his head, but Leo said, “We’ll come back tonight, after it’s dark, look around, and maybe we see them.”

  “And if we do?”

  Well, that was another question, wasn’t it?

  Chapter Eleven

  EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, Boone stood in Marjorie Barlow’s driveway while Daisy did her business, then began sniffing around the bushes, following the scent of squirrels, rabbits, and any other creature that passed by in the night. High above, clouds scuttled across the sky. Birds called from the trees, heralding the arrival of the new day. An autumn chill hung in the air, a reminder that winter was slowly but steadily approaching.

  Boone noticed none of these things.

  He couldn’t take his eyes off the picture he held in his hand.

  When he and Clive had returned to their room after interviewing the mayor, Boone had immediately begun setting up his makeshift darkroom. He laid out plastic trays and lined up the bottles of chemicals he would need. He rolled a heavy wool blanket to butt up against the bottom of the door, making sure that no light seeped in. He screwed in a red lightbulb so that he’d be able to see as he developed his shots. Finally, he poked his head out of the room. Clive was sitting in a chair, leisurely reading a magazine. “If you open this door and ruin my pictures,” Boone warned, “the next place you’re going to visit will be the hospital.”

  The young writer chuckled, then sneezed, then finally asked, “Wait…you’re not joking, are you?”

  “No, I’m not,” Boone said, then slammed the door shut behind him.

  He got to work just as he had done countless times before. It wasn’t long before he was holding the photograph of Lily up to the light, his heart beating faster as he took in the image. She was as beautiful as he remembered, maybe more so. The camera’s lens had captured her just as she’d turned, her expression tinged with surprise at his shouting her name, a few locks of blond hair brushing against her cheek. She looked different than in the photo on her father’s desk, more natural, more real. The only problem with the picture was that a man had wandered into the shot, his face visible off to the side of Lily’s shoulder. But it
was easily fixed. Boone took a razor and cut the stranger away. Standing in the darkroom, holding the picture as if it was a treasure, Boone knew he had to see her again.

  When he finally opened the door, Boone was taken aback to find Clive wearing his coat, all of his suitcases at his feet. “I’m…I’m…” he started before sneezing. “I’m ready to leave whenever you are.”

  “We aren’t going anywhere.” The words came out of his mouth strong and firm, just like his resolve to follow them.

  “Wait…we’re not?” the writer asked, looking plenty perplexed. “But I thought you said that we were—”

  “Not anymore,” Boone cut him off. “We’re staying.”

  “What about Havana?”

  What about it? Just like that, in a matter of hours, his desire to get there had evaporated. “It’ll still be there when this assignment’s over.”

  Clive looked genuinely happy and immediately set about unpacking. Boone had spent the rest of the night thinking about Lily.

  And come morning, picture in hand, he was still doing it.

  Finally pulling himself away from the photograph, Boone whistled at Daisy. The retriever raised her head from a tree trunk and came running. But instead of stopping at her master’s feet, the dog raced past and bounded up the porch steps, skidding to a halt where Marjorie sat in a chair, drinking a steaming cup of coffee.

  “I was wondering when one of you would notice me,” the older woman said as she scratched Daisy’s ears. “Whatever’s in that picture must be mighty interesting.”

  “It is,” Boone told her.

  “Something you shot at the festival?”

  He nodded.

  “Can I have a look at it?” Marjorie asked.

  Boone hesitated. There was a part of him that wanted to keep Lily’s picture private, for his eyes only. If he had to guess, he supposed it was embarrassment to be mooning away over a pretty face, or maybe some odd sort of possessiveness. But in the end, he chose to ignore those ridiculous feelings and handed over the photo.