by Tami Hoag
Dread lying like a lead weight in her stomach, she put the car in gear and headed toward Belle Rivière, never aware of the eyes that watched her with vicious intent from cover of darkness.
The house was dark. Laurel let herself in the front door, feeling a guilty sense of relief. As necessary as it was to talk to Caroline about Savannah, she couldn't help being glad for a reprieve. The day had been long enough, trying enough.
The note on the hall table said Caroline had gone to New Iberia to spend the evening with friends. Mama Pearl would still be down at Prejean's, on kitchen duty until the last of the wake crowd had drunk the last of the coffee.
Laurel leaned against the hall table for a moment, trying to absorb the quiet. The old house stood around her, solid, substantial, safe, giving the odd creak and groan, sounds that were familiar and usually comforting. But tonight they only magnified the hollow feeling of loneliness that yawned inside her.
She felt alone. Abandoned. Guilty for having let her sister slip away toward madness.
Struggling with the feelings, she let herself out the hall door and went into the courtyard. Restlessly she walked the brick paths, staying near the gallery. After a few moments she settled on a bench and curled herself into the corner, tossing her purse onto the seat beside her.
The garden was mysterious by moonlight. Dark shapes that crouched and huddled, long shadows and hushed rustlings. By day it was growing lush and beautiful and in need of a weeding. That was what she had come to Belle Rivière for—quiet days of gardening, Mama Pearl's gruff fussing and fattening meals, Aunt Caroline's unflagging strength and pragmatism, Savannah's support.
“Don't cry, Baby. Daddy's gone, but we'll always have each other.”
How selfish she had been. Always taking Savannah's comfort, Savannah's protection. Too afraid of losing her mother's love to fight on Savannah's behalf. Burying herself in school, college, law school, work, while Savannah was left with bitter memories and her self-esteem in tatters.
Rise above your past. Put it behind you. Forget. She claimed she had, and it had always angered her that Savannah couldn't, wouldn't. Maybe all her sister had needed was someone to lean on, to help her, to support instead of ridicule, but Laurel had been off fighting other people's battles.
“I'm sorry, Sister,” she whispered, tears slipping down her cheeks. “I'm so sorry. Please come home so I can tell you that in person.”
Her only answer was the call of a barred owl from the woods beyond L'Amour. Then stillness. Absolute stillness. The back of her neck tingled, and she sat up straighter, straining her eyes to see into the night, holding her breath and trying to hear beyond the rushing of her pulse in her ears. She imagined she could feel eyes on her, staring in through the back gate, but she could see nothing beyond the iron bars. She thought of her sister running through the night, wild with anger, full of pain.
“Savannah?”
Crickets sang, frogs answered back from the bayou, where a heavy mist crept over the bank.
Malevolence crawled over her skin like worms.
Eyes on the gate, she bent over her purse and fumbled for her gun.
“If you wanna shoot me, you're gonna have to turn around, 'tite chatte.”
Laurel shrieked and whirled around to find Jack standing not three feet from her. Her heart went into warp drive. “How the hell did you get in here?”
“The front door was open,” he said with a shrug. “You really oughta be more careful, sugar. There's all kinds of lunatics running around these days.”
“Yes,” Laurel said, ignoring his wry tone. She was too damned spooked for banter. “I thought I heard one on the other side of the gate.”
Frowning, Jack stepped past her and went to look. He came back, shaking his head. “Nothing. What did you think it was? Someone in the bushes?”
Savannah, she thought, sick that it might have been, relieved that it hadn't been. “What are you doing here?”
Good question. Jack stuffed his hands in the pockets of his jeans and wandered along the edge of the gallery and back. He had spent the evening walking along the bayou, trying to put as much distance as he could between himself and Prejean's Funeral Home. He couldn't bear the thought of a wake, and yet his thoughts had been filled with all of it—the coffin, the choking perfume of flowers, the intoning of the rosary. He could as well have been there for as raw as he felt now.
“I don' know,” he whispered, turning back toward Laurel. Lie. He knew too well. He needed her, wanted the feel of her in his arms because she was real and alive and he loved her. Dieu, how stupid, how cruel that he should fall in love with someone so good. He couldn't even tell her, because he knew it couldn't last. Nothing good ever did once he touched it.
“I saw your car,” he said, his voice strained and hoarse. “Saw the light . . .”
His broad shoulders rose and fell. He turned to pace, but her small hand settled on his arm, holding him in place as effectively as an anchor. He looked down into her angel's face, and the air fisted in his lungs. She had left her glasses on the hall table, and she looked up at him with night blue eyes that mirrored the need that ached in his soul.
“I don't really care,” she said softly.
It didn't matter they had fought or that she had no hope for their future. This was just one night, and she felt so alone and so afraid. She looked up into his shadowed face, taking in the hard angles, the scarred chin, the eyes that had seen too much pain. It wasn't the face of the kind, safe lover she always envisioned for herself, but love him she did, and as they both stood there hurting, she needed him so badly, she thought she might die of it.
“Just tell me you'll stay,” she whispered. “Just tonight.”
He should have said no. He should have walked away. He should never have come to her in the first place, but then he'd never been very good at doing what was right. And he couldn't look into her eyes and say no.
“You shouldn't want me,” he murmured, amazed that she did.
Laurel raised a hand and pressed her fingers to his lips. “Don't tell me how bad you are, Jack. Show me how good you can be.”
He closed his eyes against a wave of pain, leaned down and brushed his lips against her cheek. It was as much of an answer as Laurel needed. Taking him by the hand, she led him up the back stairs and into her moonlit room.
They undressed each other quietly, patiently. They made love the same way, immersing themselves in the desire, steeping themselves in the experience, savoring the tenderness. Gentle touches. Soft, deep kisses. Caresses as sensuous as silk. A joining of bodies and two scarred souls. Straining to reach together for a kind of ecstasy that would banish shadows. A brilliant golden burst of pleasure. Trying desperately to hold on as it slipped away like stardust through their fingers.
And when it was over and Laurel lay asleep in his arms, Jack stared into the dark and wished with all that was left of his heart that he wouldn't have to let her go.
Chapter
Twenty-Three
Chad Garrett tipped his battered Saints cap back on his head and let the sunrise hit him flush in the face. Above the Atchafalaya the sky was aglow with soft stripes of color. Orange the shade of a ripe peach, warm and estival. Pink as vibrant and silken as the underside of a conch shell. Deep, velvet blue, the last of the night, set with a diamond that was the morning star.
He grinned to himself at the image he had painted with his thoughts. He had a natural gift for words. He figured he would write down the description as part of his makeup work for playing hooky from school. Mrs. Cromwell would give him a thundering lecture for missing English class again, but she would melt like butter when he handed in his short story about dawn in the swamp and the peace a man could find on the water. She'd do handsprings over his new word—“estival”—and that was an image that nearly made him chuckle. Mrs. Cromwell was fifty-eight and wore support hose and dresses that had enough fabric in them to clothe a family of four.
She was a good old girl, though, and Cha
d liked her as well as he liked any of his teachers. He was a good student, bright, capable. Hardly knew what a B was. But he didn't really care much for school, and, to the dismay of his teachers and the heartbreak of his mother, had no immediate plans to further his education once he graduated in June. This was where he wanted to be. In the swamp, observing nature, absorbing the beauty, the peace. He supposed he would relent after a year or two, go up to USL and study to become a naturalist or an environmental scientist of some kind or another. But for a while all he wanted to do was just be. He figured he would only be eighteen once. Might as well enjoy it.
He was his father's son in more respects than his big, raw-boned frame and square, good-looking face. Hap Garrett knew the value of contentment. He usually just smiled and turned a blind eye on those mornings when Chad didn't quite make it out of the boat shed without getting caught. As his dad liked to remind him, he'd been young once, too, and hadn't had much use for advanced algebra himself.
Chad steered his bass boat toward the shallows along a shaded bank, where a bit of yellow plastic ribbon marked one of his nets. The catch was good. He would make a couple hundred dollars today if his luck held down the line. The economics would appeal to Mr. Dinkle, whose class at ten he would miss.
He dumped the crawfish into an onion sack, sorting out the contorted body of a drowned water snake, which he tossed onto the bank. Some hungry scavenger would make a meal of it. Nothing went to waste in the swamp. Chad figured, if he was real lucky, he would witness nature's recycling, and that would appease Mr. Loop, fourth-period biology. He didn't figure he would have much of a wait. There was something up on the bank creating a powerful stink, the gagging, curiously sweet stench of death. The scent would act as a beacon.
Curious, he waded ashore and tied off his boat on a hackberry sapling. While he might not have given a fig how the balance of world power worked or how to find the square root of a negative, Chad wanted to know every detail about the life of the swamp.
It looked to him as if something had been dragged up on the bank. The weeds were bent and stained with blood. Might have been a deer that had gotten itself in trouble with a gator while drinking from the stream. It could have pulled itself back up onto the shore only to die of blood loss and shock. Or it could have been that a bobcat had caught himself a coon or a possum or a nutria, ate his fill, and left the rest. There were a dozen possibilities he could think of.
He pushed aside a tangle of branches and stopped cold in his tracks. Of the dozen possibilities he had considered, he hadn't included this. For the rest of his life he would see that face in his nightmares—beauty distorted grotesquely by death and the plain, hard realities of nature, blue eyes forever frozen in a shocked stare that made him think she had witnessed her own terrible fate and had seen beyond it to a terrible afterlife.
A woman lay dead at his feet. Horribly dead. Hideously dead. Naked and mutilated, with a white silk scarf knotted around her throat and a scrap of paper clutched in her stiff, lifeless hand.
Laurel woke alone. She wasn't surprised, so she told herself she couldn't be disappointed. But she was. Her brain told her she was foolish, that it wasn't practical or smart to want a future with Jack Boudreaux. He had too many ghosts, too much emotional baggage. But her brain couldn't do anything to banish her memories of the night—Jack's tenderness, the longing in his eyes, the pounding of his heart beneath her hand. Her heart was determined to hold on to those memories and the slim hope that went with them. Foolish, foolish heart.
He had gone at first light, she knew. Just as she had done before. She swept her arm across the vacant space beside her, finding nothing but a tangled sheet and a twisted spread. Not even his warmth lingered, just the scent of man and loving.
What would she do about him? What could she do? She couldn't change his image of himself. She had enough on her hands as it was.
That reminder brought thoughts of Savannah, and Laurel's stomach tensed like a fist at the thought of the conversation she would have with Aunt Caroline this morning. Restless, anxious, she climbed out of bed, pulled on a T-shirt and panties, and went in search of her pocketbook and the roll of Maalox tablets therein. It lay on the bench in the courtyard, where she had left it, the fine calfskin coated with thick, velvety dew. She wiped it off with the tail of her oversize T-shirt and went back upstairs to sit on the bed.
Careless, Laurel thought, reaching into the bag in search of her antacid tablets. She knew better than to leave a purse lying around, especially one with a semiautomatic handgun in it. Instead of the roll of tablets, she came up with the gaudy heart-shaped earring that had no mate and no explanation. The ear wire had caught the chain of the little gold necklace, and she fished that out as well to untangle the mess and to work at untangling the mystery. It would give her mind something to do besides worry about her sister for a few moments. It would delay her conversation with Caroline.
The chain was twisted and knotted, and there seemed to be too many dangling ends. Strange, she thought, noting dimly that her heart was beating a little faster and her fingers fumbled at their task. She plucked at the gold butterfly and tugged a little harder at the chain, her breath coming in shorter bursts. Tears brimmed up in her eyes, not from frustration, not for any discernible reason. Silly, she thought, scratching at the tangle with the stub of a fingernail.
The butterfly and its necklace came free of the snag and fluttered to Laurel's lap, forgotten as cold, hard fingers of terror gripped her throat and squeezed. Hanging down from her trembling fist was a fine gold chain, and from the chain, swaying gently, a diamond chip winking as it caught the morning light, hung a small gold heart.
Savannah's.
“Oh, God. Oh, my God.”
The words barely broke the silence of the room. She sat there, shaking, icy rivulets of sweat running down her spine. Her lungs seemed to have turned to concrete, crushing her heart, incapable of expanding to draw breath. She stared at the pendant until her eyes were burning, fragmented thoughts shooting across her mind like shrapnel—Daddy standing behind Savannah at twelve, fastening the chain, smiling, kissing her cheek; Savannah at twenty, at thirty, still wearing it. She never took it off. Never.
It swung from Laurel's fist, the tiny diamond bright and mocking, and dread crept through her like disease, weakening her, breaking her down. Tears blurred the image of the heart as she thought back to the night she had gone into Savannah's room. The feeling of stillness, of loss, of an absence that would never be filled.
“Oh, God,” she said, choking on the fear, doubling over. She pressed her fist and the necklace against her cheek as scalding tears squeezed out from between her lashes.
She couldn't deal with this, couldn't face what she knew in her heart must be true. God, she couldn't go to Aunt Caroline and Mama Pearl—She couldn't go to Vivian—She didn't want to be here—should never have come back. She wanted Jack, wanted his arms around her, wanted him to be the kind of man she could lean on—
Selfish, weak, coward.
The recriminations came hard, as sharp as the crack of a whip. She had to do something. She couldn't just huddle here on her bed, half naked and sobbing, wishing someone else would be strong for her. There had to be something she could do. It couldn't be too late.
“No. No. No,” she chanted, stumbling away from the bed.
She repeated the word over and over like a mantra as she tore open her wardrobe and drawers and grabbed a wrinkled pair of jeans, never letting go of the necklace. It wasn't too late. It couldn't be too late. She would go to Kenner and make him see. She would call in the damn FBI. They would find Savannah. It couldn't be too late.
Wild urgency drove her as she tugged on the jeans. At the heart of the feeling was futility, but she refused to recognize it or accept it. The situation couldn't be futile. She couldn't lose her sister. She wouldn't let it happen. There had to be something she could do. Dammit, she would not let it happen!
Frantic, she flung the bedroom door back and ran down
the hall and down the stairs, the railing skimming through one hand, Savannah's necklace gripped tight in the other. Her sneakers pounded on the treads, her pulse pounded in her ears. She didn't register the pounding at the front door.
Caroline came into the hall from the dining room, already dressed for the day in stark black and white. She glanced up at Laurel, concern knitting her brows, her hand reaching out automatically for the brass knob.
As if in a dream, time became strangely elastic, stretching, slowing. Laurel's perceptions became almost pain-fully sharp. The blocks of white in Caroline's dress hurt her eyes, the smell of Chanel filled her head, the creak of door hinges shrieked in her ears. She tightened her fist, and the golden heart burned into her palm.
Kenner stepped into the hall, lean and grim, eyes shaded. The shadow of death. His hat in his hands. His lips moved, but Laurel couldn't hear his words above the suddenly amplified roaring of her pulse. She saw the color drain from Caroline's face, the stricken look in her eyes. Together Kenner and Caroline turned and looked up at Laurel, and the knowledge pierced her heart like a knife.
“NO!!!” The denial tore from her throat like a scream. “NO!!!” she screamed, stumbling down the last few stairs.
She hurled herself at Kenner, striking his chest with her fists.
Surreal, she thought dimly, a part of her feeling strangely detached from the turmoil of the moment. This couldn't be happening. She couldn't be yelling or lashing out at Kenner. This couldn't be the real world, because everything in her field of vision had become suddenly magnified, as if she were shrinking and shrinking. And the sound of Caroline's voice came to her as if through a fog.
“Laurel, no! She's gone. She's gone. Oh, dear God! She's dead!”
Another cry of anguish and shock reverberated against the high ceiling of the hall. In her peripheral vision, Laurel could see Mama Pearl, her face contorted, reaching for Caroline with one hand, the other groping along the wall as if she had gone blind.
