“Thanks.” Rachel stood aside as she waited for Kirk to pay. “Every generation has its own thing. The sixties had flower children, gurus, love beads and long hair,” she reminded him. She looked at some of the more outlandish outfits in the area. “Maybe it’s making a semicomeback.”
Lifting his tray again, Kirk fell into place beside her. “Maybe, but the only rainbow colors that they sported were on their jeans or shirts, not on their hair.”
Rachel located two empty places side by side near the rear exit. She nodded toward them for Kirk’s benefit as she began to move in that direction. Her chef’s salad slid from one side to the other, courtesy of the glob of ice that still clung to the bottom of the plate. “Like the man said, the times they are a-changing.”
And Kirk had changed, she thought. Changed a great deal. She’d felt it almost from the moment she looked into his eyes. He looked like a shell-shocked soldier coming home and not quite knowing where it was that he had arrived.
“How about you?” Kirk held his tray close to himself to avoid collisions as he followed behind her. “Have you changed?” He tried not to make the question sound as important as it was to him.
She didn’t answer until she reached the table and put her tray down. “No, I don’t think so. Not really. Just learned to be a little more skillful with makeup and gained a pound or two in the right places, but on the whole, I’m exactly who I was nine years ago.”
It wasn’t true. She’d lived an entire lifetime in the past nine years. But it was easier saying what she had than going into explanations, even with Kirk—at least for now.
Kirk set down his tray. Cameron had written to him about her marriage to Don Mitchell and her divorce. There were huge gaps he hadn’t filled in, Kirk realized as he looked into her eyes. He wasn’t the only one who had been wounded, he thought suddenly.
For both their sakes he attempted to keep his voice upbeat. “Nice to see that that ex-jock of yours didn’t turn your mind to mush.” He saw something flicker in her eyes as he casually referred to her ex-husband. It was raw, he thought, though she hid the wound well. Protective instincts surfaced. He’d always felt that way about Rachel. Kirk bit back an urge to hit something, preferably her ex-husband, for whatever it was he had done to generate that look. “It would have been a great loss for me. I always liked listening to your opinions.”
Rachel ignored her salad. She rested her head on her upturned hand and looked at Kirk thoughtfully as she slowly stirred the melting ice in her diet drink with a plastic straw. “Did you?”
“You know I did.”
Yes, she did. She’d just wanted to hear him say it. It was comforting, somehow. As she thought back to those years they had shared, a bittersweet fondness flooded through her. Things had been so much less complicated then.
“Yes, I suppose you might have, at that. At least once in a while,” she told him teasingly. She turned her attention to the salad and tried to regain her appetite. It was a lost cause. “It would help if they used fresh ingredients,” she muttered, poking at the dried bits of cheese.
He looked about, trying to get comfortable, searching for a niche that continued to elude him. He folded his hands before him as he turned toward Rachel. She was studying him quietly. Any second now, she was going to ask questions, questions he couldn’t answer. Questions that had no answers. Not yet.
“So tell me, Professor Funny Face,” he said, a little too quickly, “why’d you become a teacher? I can remember when making a speech in class made you sick to your stomach.”
He was trying too hard, she thought. What’s wrong, Kirk? You can tell me.
She lifted a shoulder, then let it drop. “I thought I had something to say, something to give. I realized that I was just as good as everyone else—less than some, more than others. You did that for me.” She smiled into his eyes, remembering. He had been the source of her courage. And other things. “You made me feel important. When I talked, you listened. That meant a lot to me.” She let out a breath self-consciously.
She didn’t want to talk about herself. What she wanted to do was to get some answers about him. And find out the reason for that flat, distant look in his eyes, for the pain that crept into his voice at unguarded moments.
“So,” Rachel began casually as she shifted ever so slightly in her chair, “what have you been doing with yourself for the past nine years, other than winning Pulitzers, dodging bullets and scowling?”
He retired his knife and fork. He wasn’t quite ready to discuss himself or his life just yet. It wasn’t that easy. As much as he wanted to, as much as he thought he should, it wasn’t that easy. He should have realized that it wouldn’t be.
“That sums it up neatly.”
She sensed his withdrawal and felt frustrated. Kirk had never been one to be summed up neatly. She didn’t like him shutting her out. It wasn’t something she would have expected from him.
“Kind of terse for nine years, isn’t it?”
“Terse and empty,” he said, more to himself than to her.
Rachel laid a hand over his, her fingers soft, coaxing, as if attempting to draw words out of him. “Why did you come back, Kirk?”
“I already told you why.”
This time, she wouldn’t let it go. “You gave me a reason that would have fit nicely into a sit-com. Tell me the real reason.”
She saw through him, Kirk thought ruefully. She always had. At times it had irritated him, but it always kept him straight with his own emotions, had always helped him keep his own feet on the ground. But now it didn’t seem to be enough. He still couldn’t manage to open up. Not yet. Opening up was painful. It was like ripping tape off a gaping wound that hadn’t healed.
The smile that touched his lips was cynical. It was a smile he had acquired since the last time she had seen him, she thought. Rachel couldn’t help wondering about the things he had seen and done that had created it.
Flippancy came easily. It was a cloak he used to cover the uglier things in his life. “Is that a polite way of saying get lost?”
Rachel shook her head. When had she ever said those words to him? Why would he anticipate that she’d say them now? “No, that’s a nosy way of trying to find out what you’re doing here after all this time.”
He wanted to tell her.
He couldn’t. What could he say? “I’m looking for answers”? That sounded too vague, even though it was the truth.
It had been so long since he had put his feelings into words that he wasn’t altogether sure that he was able to anymore. Nor that he was even able to feel. For the time being, just listening to her was enough for him. It was all he could manage.
Kirk looked away. “I thought it was time to see if I should sell the house or not.”
The house. His parents’ house. They had been dead for over three years, having died within six months of each other. He hadn’t returned for either of the funerals. It didn’t make sense. Why now, suddenly? There had to be more to it. Why was he being so evasive with her? Had the past nine years done something horrible to him?
She couldn’t get herself to believe that. Not about Kirk. Kirk was a crusader, a crusader with a charmed life. An untouchable. Lancelot had magic in his veins. No wounds were fatal to him. No wounds ever penetrated.
Kirk had been her Lancelot.
But wounds had obviously penetrated. Something, or someone, had hurt him badly. Rachel took a deep breath. For now, she would let him play this game. “I see. So, how long are you staying?”
He knew by her tone that she wasn’t buying it. Kirk was grateful that she wasn’t pushing. “Until I make up my mind what to do.”
That much was true, he thought. But it wasn’t the house that he had to make up his mind about. It was his life. There wasn’t any meaning to it anymore. The things he had seen had stripped him of the carefully swaddled idealism he had managed to preserve, even after the childhood he’d had. He was tired of strife, tired of the cheapness of lives traded and lost. Tired
of bored, beautiful women who didn’t matter. And the solutions he had found at the bottom of a bottle had shaken him so badly that he had taken flight and wound up here.
He’d fled when he saw his father at the bottom of that bottle. Fled because he feared he was turning into the thing he loathed most. His father.
Kirk realized that Rachel had grown quiet and was looking down at his left hand. He looked down himself and saw nothing that could have garnered her attention. “What’s the matter?”
She looked up at Kirk. “I was just looking for a wedding ring.”
A wedding ring. He laughed cynically, thinking that at least he hadn’t dragged anyone else down with him. “I’m not married.”
Part of her was glad, though she couldn’t begin to understand why he wasn’t. Although it would have hurt her to find out that he had gotten married without at least dropping her a line to tell her, she had fully expected him to be. He had always been the kind of dark, brooding hero women fantasized about. She certainly had.
“Never?”
He shook his head and smiled. “Never.”
“Why?”
He shrugged carelessly. There had been a sea of women between then and now, and not a drop of feeling amid all of them. It had been just a way of making it through the night. He hadn’t wanted it any other way. If any of them had, he hadn’t been made aware of it.
“I never met the right person.” It was a nice, safe, pat answer.
Rachel nodded, accepting that for now, as well. They needed to talk, in depth, but the cafeteria wasn’t the place for it. She rose, taking her tray with her. He followed mechanically. Stopping at the conveyor belt, she angled her tray onto it as the damp, dark rubber snaked its way slowly into the kitchen.
He hardly glanced at the belt as he placed his tray on top of hers.
“I’ve got to be getting back,” she told him.
She walked rapidly out of the cafeteria. Kirk had to move rather quickly to keep up. He wasn’t more than five inches taller than she was, and he had maybe a couple of inches on her legwise.
“Now you answer a question for me,” he said. She glanced at him, waiting. “Why did you become a criminology teacher? You never talked about being interested in criminology when we were younger.”
“No,” she agreed, “but I always loved mysteries.”
“Yes, you did at that.” Kirk remembered her obsession. She’d always been reading some mystery or other. It had been around then that he became aware of just how sharp her mind really was. “You were the only one I ever knew who could solve an Agatha Christie mystery. Still have the novels?”
He had given her a leather-bound set of the mystery writer’s novels as a parting gift when he went off to make his mark on the world. It had been a costly gift he could ill afford. The gift had been that much more precious to her because of that.
“Every last one.”
He followed her up a short stairway to another level of the university. A domed building rose into view, like the sun lighting the horizon at dawn. “I thought you’d have tried your hand at writing them, not living them.”
She shook her head. “Writing’s too hard. Trying to solve them is more gratifying.”
As they hurried to her next class, Kirk took in the campus’s peaceful setting. The scenery appeared almost idyllic. It was a sharp contrast to the desolation he felt festering inside of him.
There were only a few people in the hall when Rachel finally stopped in front of a classroom. “Well, this is where my next class is.”
A bell rang, and people poured out of classrooms along the corridor. He knew she had to go. “Scanlon’s tonight?”
“You’re on.” Maybe he’d talk to her then. “Pick me up at eight.”
He suddenly realized that he didn’t know where she lived. He still thought of her as living in that small blue-and-white house on Maple. The house that had seemed to radiate warmth and love. “Where do you live now?”
“Right next door to you.” He looked at her with such a surprised expression that she laughed. “I moved back after the divorce. Mom and Dad live in Arizona now, so I bought the house from them. It seemed a shame to let the house stand empty. Like your house.”
His house. A chill came over Kirk, the way it always did when he thought of the house where he had lived as a child.
Rachel saw the slight shift in his expression, the tiny hardening of his jaw. Speculations multiplied like aphids in the spring, yielding nothing tangible. She felt compelled to shift the mood. “Bring your credit card. I feel a huge hunger coming on.”
He noticed several of her students giving him the once-over as they filed into the classroom. “I’m in between jobs.”
“I have no mercy.” She winked. “See you later.”
“Right.” Kirk shoved his hands in his pockets.
On impulse, she brushed her lips lightly along his cheek. “Stay out of trouble, Callaghan.”
Warmth flooded him at the barest touch of her lips along his skin. “You take all the fun out of everything, Funny Face.” He slid his fingertip down her nose, as if that reinforced their relationship, freezing it in the position it had been in nine years ago.
Kirk turned and walked away.
Rachel watched the set of his shoulders as he disappeared down the hallway. They were almost rigid, as if he were bracing himself for something. As if he had been bracing himself for something all along.
“I’m going to find out what’s wrong, Kirk,” she whispered softly under her breath as the last bell rang. “Even if you don’t want to tell me.”
Chapter 3
At first glance, there was nothing to set the house apart from any of the other homes on Maple Apple Way. It looked as lived-in, as settled, as the rest. It was the way he felt about it that made it different.
Kirk brought the battered minivan to a stop in the driveway. Cutting off the engine, he remained seated where he was, staring at the house. Waiting for the courage to get out of the vehicle and walk up the front steps.
It hadn’t changed in nine years, even though the voices that had once rung out here had been stilled. The outside still looked the same, except that there were daisies growing in the front yard now. There had never been any flowers before.
Until recently, the house where Kirk had grown up had been rented out to a family of five, the Fosters. They had relocated when Mr. Foster had gotten a better job offer in northern California. The real estate agency Kirk had left in charge of the house after his parents’ death had contacted him through his publisher. They’d asked if he wanted to have the house rented out again.
That had been three weeks ago. At the time, it had seemed to Kirk like a call to come home. He had been burned-out, bone-tired, and utterly weary of the life he was leading. All his reasons for leading it had abruptly vanished. On impulse, Kirk had terminated his contract with the real estate agency and returned.
But when he had arrived in Bedford last night, the impulse had already faded, transforming into foreboding and dread. Instead of coming to the house, Kirk had looked Cameron up. His old friend, delighted to see him, had invited Kirk to stay the night at his apartment, which he had gladly done. There was something almost surreal about returning to the house of his youth at night.
If he had returned last night, he thought with the barest hint of a smile, he would have known that Rachel still lived next door. There was a measure of comfort in that. Maybe that had even given him the strength to come here now, knowing that the best part of his childhood still existed next door.
It was time to face the ghosts. Or at least some of them.
Kirk slid out of the cab of the minivan, his eyes on the house. Like a man about to face down an unpredictable enemy in hostile territory, Kirk approached the weathered two-story house with measured steps.
He heard the insistent cry of a crow flying overhead as he took the key from his shirt pocket. Maybe it was an omen, he mused, slipping the key into the lock. He turned it slowly, then
tried the doorknob.
The door opened soundlessly. No telltale creak greeted his ear as if he were opening the door to a crypt. Yet there was no denying that was the way he felt. As if he were stepping out of the light, into a tomb.
The tomb of his childhood.
Kirk squared his shoulders. He hadn’t returned to Bedford to embrace these four walls, these memories, he reminded himself. It wasn’t in this house that he had found the seeds of his strength, the roots of his identity, though it was what had happened in this house, never a home, that had partially formed him.
And perhaps, in an odd sort of way, some of his strength had originated here. Strength to withstand what had gone on behind these walls.
Secrets he had never told anyone.
Certainly not Rachel. Rachel, with her worshipful eyes and her nurturing manner. He’d been too embarrassed, too angry about his life, to tell her.
Not even Cameron, with whom he had shared every other thought.
Fingertips lightly braced against the door, he pushed it open the rest of the way, his movements mimicking those of a gunfighter expecting to be ambushed when he walked into a room.
Sunshine burst into the house over his shoulder, eager to bring life into the living room. There were various pieces of furniture scattered about the room, draped in white sheets like children engaged in a game of impersonating ghosts. He’d called the storage company and had the furniture moved back into the house after the Fosters moved out.
Kirk looked around, then forced himself to step inside. He had no inclination to lift aside a single sheet. It was as if the sheets, left in place, could somehow suppress the secrets, suppress the memories.
Light pushed its way through windows that had only now begun to become dusty. It gave an artificial cheerfulness to the house that he knew wasn’t there. At least it hadn’t been before.
Callaghan's Way Page 3
