She wouldn’t. Unless she hadn’t yet accepted his death.
Rob slammed the door shut and took a look around the room. It was all still here. Cufflinks on the dresser, Danny’s silver-handled hairbrush, his electric shaver still plugged in, just in case.
It was the shoes that did him in, those goddamn size twelves sitting there beside the dresser where their owner had left them, patiently waiting for his return. Just like his loving widow.
Jesus, Mary and Joseph. How the hell could he fill a dead man’s shoes?
Retrieving the empty laundry basket, he fled down the stairs and flung the basket through the door to the laundry room. Two years should have been time enough for any woman. And he would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that what they’d shared had been genuine. But the evidence was all there. She still hadn’t accepted Danny’s death. She was still waiting for him to come home.
And he, Robert Kevin MacKenzie, had made a fool of himself.
***
When she pulled into the driveway, the Ferrari was the first thing she saw. It gleamed blood-red in the afternoon sun, and the pain hit her like a fist. She yanked on the emergency brake and sat there, staring in silence while Trish gathered up her bags. Keep your cool, she told herself. Take a deep breath and try not to lose it.
“Hey,” Trish said, “are you okay? All of a sudden, you’re white as a ghost.”
“I’m just tired,” she said, struggling to keep the tremor from her voice. “Shopping wore me out.”
Trish looked at her oddly, but accepted her explanation at face value. “Get some rest,” she said. “You look like death warmed over.”
On the pretense of rounding up her packages, Casey stayed behind the steering wheel, forcing herself to take deep, relaxing breaths, until Trish had backed her Jeep around and driven away. It was only then that she trusted herself to get out of the car. She skirted the Ferrari, quietly let herself into the house, and dropped her bags on the kitchen table.
She found Rob in his favorite spot, on the porch swing, his feet up, a Heineken in his hand, his jaw set at that familiar angle that told her he was spoiling for a fight. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she said. “Why did you take Danny’s car out of the barn?”
He looked at her blankly. And then something in his eyes sparked and caught fire. “I washed it,” he said brusquely. “It was filthy.”
She took a deep breath, but it failed to stop her trembling. “You should have asked me first.”
Color flushed his face, and he slammed down his beer bottle. “Forgive me,” he snarled, “for defacing a priceless exhibit from the permanent collection of the Daniel Fiore Memorial Museum.”
She took a step backward. “What are you talking about?” she said.
“I’ve been in your bedroom, sweetheart. You’ve turned it into a fucking shrine to His Eminence. Jesus Christ, Casey, his goddamn shoes are still sitting there where he left them!”
“We’re not talking about shoes,” she said. “We’re talking about Danny’s car!”
“We damn well are talking about shoes! And about underwear, and about cuff links, and about his goddamn razor that’s still sitting there, plugged in and waiting!”
Her throat constricted so tightly she had trouble breathing. “None of that,” she said quietly, “is any of your business—”
“Nothing is any of my business! I’m no more than a house guest, am I? Good enough to fuck, as long as I don’t forget my place. MacKenzie’s stud service. You should pass the word around to all your friends. Maybe they’d like to take advantage of my special offer. Two for the price of—”
She slapped him, hard, and they glared at each other. “You just don’t get it, do you?” he said bitterly. “You just can’t see me. You never could. All you could ever see was Danny. The man’s been dead for two years, and he’s still all you can see! No matter what I do, I always come in a poor second!”
“Is that what you think?” she said. “Is that what you really think? Because if you’re that stupid—”
“At least I’m smart enough to get the hell out of here!” He got up from the swing and slammed into the house, stalked to the guest room. Flinging his suitcase on the bed, he began opening drawers and dumping their contents into the open suitcase. “I thought two years was time enough,” he said. “But you know what? No matter how long I wait, it’ll never be time enough. They should’ve put you in the ground right along with him!”
She clutched the door frame. “Where are you going?” she demanded.
“Home.” He closed the suitcase and snapped the locks. “Where I belong.”
In the vicinity of her heart, she felt a dull ache. “Fine, then!” she said. “Go! Get the hell out, because if you’re that stupid, I don’t want you! I don’t love you, and I don’t want you! Go back to your bimbos, and good riddance!”
He glared at her. “Yeah? Well, guess what, dollface? I don’t love you, either. I say that to all the women I fuck. You’re just one of many.”
She picked up a ceramic figurine from the dresser and heaved it at him. He ducked, and it shattered against the wall. “Get out,” she said through clenched teeth. “Get out of my life and don’t come back!”
Rob yanked on his leather bomber jacket and picked up his suitcase. “Send me a bill for services rendered,” he said. “You know my address.”
And he shouldered her aside and slammed out the door.
chapter thirty-four
When Danny had died, she’d gone blessedly numb, and the numbness had held the pain at bay. This time, there was no numbness. When Rob MacKenzie amputated himself from her life, she felt every slice of the scalpel. For fifteen years, the one constant in her life had been Rob. He’d shared her moments of triumph and supported her through her moments of anguish. Danny Fiore had been her love, her heart, her obsession, but Rob had been everything else: friend, mentor, pillar of strength. Sounding board, collaborator, keeper of secrets. And, ultimately, lover. The emptiness he left behind was too vast to be filled. Casey would have welcomed some of that soothing numbness, for she felt as though she’d been scoured with sandpaper and then rolled in salt. It was difficult to remember what her life had been like before Rob. It was impossible to imagine her future without him.
Sleeping was impossible; when at last sleep did come, she would inevitably awaken with her body clenched tight around a hard core of yearning deep in her belly. She tormented herself by reliving every moment of their lovemaking. A part of her had died with Danny, and after two years of a sterile, barren existence, Rob had brought her back to life. He’d unleashed a tide of raging hormones that had lain dormant through two years of sexual starvation, and she hungered after him with a yearning so carnal it astonished her.
He had resumed his tour. One dreary November day as she listlessly thumbed through the newest issue of Variety, she found an ad listing the dates and the cities. Now she had a new method of torturing herself. She knew that he was in Denver on November twenty-seventh, and in Dallas on the thirtieth. He’d picked up twelve extra cities this time around, and a part of her hated him for continuing on with his life, as if the time they’d spent as lovers had never happened.
She spent Thanksgiving with Bill and Trish because she had to eat somewhere or risk undergoing the Spanish Inquisition. That night, Casey went to bed early and lay alone in the darkness, thinking about the man who’d always been her Gibraltar, who’d always known the right words to say and had seemed to carry the solutions to all her problems in the palm of his hand. How could he have been so wrong? Had he really expected her to erase the years she’d spent as Danny’s wife, to just wipe the slate clean and pretend those years had never happened? She’d loved Danny passionately. He would always retain his rightful place in her heart. Rob should have understood that. He should have understood that her love for Danny in no way negated her love for him. She’d loved Rob since the beginning of time. That love had simply ripened into something neither of them had expecte
d, something tender and lusty and beautiful.
On Christmas morning, she exchanged gifts with her father and Millie. That afternoon, she called Travis in Boston and talked to him for a half-hour. Leslie was pregnant with their second child, and they’d just bought a ranch house in Chestnut Hill. It was on a dead-end street in an upper-middle-class neighborhood, and there was a big back yard for the kids to play in. The schools were wonderful. And Casey couldn’t help smiling just a bit at the irony of her rebellious brother’s defection to the suburban bourgeoisie.
It was the first Christmas in fifteen years that she hadn’t talked to Rob, and the significance wasn’t lost on her. She thought about tracking him down, but what would she say once she had him on the phone? They’d both said things that couldn’t be taken back. I don’t love you. I don’t want you. Lies. Every word a lie. They’d deliberately hurt each other, and she wasn’t sure they could ever recover from that. It would be best for both of them if she held onto the shredded remains of her pride and left him alone.
***
It was always the same. Night after night, town after town, until it all blended together into a single, continuous nightmare. He played until his fingers were raw, gave them what they’d come for, but his heart was no longer in it. Onstage, it was possible to maintain a certain detachment, to hide behind his instrument and the physical separation from the audience. Offstage, where life was a perpetual party, it was more difficult. In real life, he was expected to interact with people. So he complied indifferently with their expectations, and if anybody noticed the change in him, nobody had the nerve to say anything.
Then, in Denver, Kitty Callahan fell off the stage during rehearsal and broke her ankle. Rob paid her hospital bill and had her flown home, and then he had to do some serious scrambling to locate a replacement backup singer on such short notice. One of the roadies knew a local girl, a leggy blonde named Kimberly, who had a beautiful voice and didn’t mind giving up her day job to play twelve cities in twenty days. She spent most of her off-duty time making cow eyes at him. After a few days of that, he decided one night in Memphis to exercise his droit du seigneur and take her up on her implicit offer. It might not cure what was wrong with him, but it couldn’t hurt. Through the smoky haze of an overcrowded hotel room, he made eye contact with her. He lifted a shoulder and tilted his head toward the door, and she nodded. He almost laughed at how easy it was. He might be thirty-five years old, but he hadn’t lost his touch yet.
On his way out the door he grabbed a bottle of coffee brandy before guiding Kimberly down the shabby hallway to his room. He set the brandy down on the vanity and got two Dixie cups from the bathroom. He poured a cup of brandy for her, then filled his own, wondering how many he’d have to drink before he could convince himself that this stunning blonde was really a green-eyed brunette.
She had the bluest eyes he’d ever seen, and right now they were looking at him as though he were the big, bad wolf. For the first time, he wondered if she were underage. She looked about sixteen. “How old are you?” he asked, the first words he’d spoken to her, probably ever.
“Twenty,” she said.
He drained his cup of brandy. “You’ll do.”
She came to him willingly, and he relaxed. He might not be much good at polite conversation these days, but getting laid he could handle. It didn’t require polite conversation. It didn’t require any conversation at all. He crumpled his empty cup and dropped it on the floor, drew her into his arms and kissed her. Easy, he thought, as that sumptuous body became pliant in his arms. He’d done this a hundred times before, with a hundred different women. This time wouldn’t be any different.
They fell across the bed, and he peeled her shirt up and off over her head. Her breasts were firm and round and unfettered, and he sampled them, forcing his attentions on first one breast and then the other, wondering as he did so why her ample mammary glands had failed to arouse him. Where was the excitement, the anticipation, the pleasure? If he was going to the trouble of getting laid, he ought to at least enjoy it. He drew back his head and looked at her, and she opened those incredible blue eyes in puzzlement. “Rob?” she said.
And he realized, with utter astonishment, that he didn’t want her.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” he said, rolling away from her to lie staring at the ceiling.
“What is it?” she said. “What’s wrong?”
“I can’t,” he said. “I can’t do it.”
“I don’t understand.”
He looked at her. “I don’t even know your last name,” he said.
“Is it something I did? Something I said?”
“Look at me,” he said. “I’m thirty-five years old. I’m old enough to be your goddamn father.” Those bare breasts staring him in the face embarrassed him. They looked so vulnerable. He bent and picked her shirt up off the floor and tossed it to her. “Put this back on,” he said.
She plunged her arms into the shirt and yanked it down over her head. “What did I do wrong?” she asked in bewilderment.
He would have liked to offer consolation to this young girl who thought she’d been rejected, but he realized with tired resignation that he, who had always been so adept at giving, had nothing left to offer her. Somewhere between Jackson Falls and Memphis, the well had gone dry. “Nothing,” he said. “Just leave. Please.”
When she was gone, the bedside clock ticked in the silence. Rob got up and walked to the vanity where he’d left the bottle of brandy. He stared at his reflection in the mirror, and then he picked up the bottle and uncapped it.
“Well, kiddo,” he said, “looks like it’s just you and me.”
***
The call came from Drew Lawrence at the end of January. “We found something the other day,” he said, “sitting on a back shelf, covered with dust. Masters of some tracks that Danny laid down about three years ago. Do you know anything about them?”
“No,” Casey said, surprised. “Danny never said anything to me about unreleased material.”
“It was an album he’d been working on while you were separated. When the two of you got back together, he shelved the project.” Drew paused. “Casey, we’d like to release it.”
“As an album? Posthumously?”
“It’s not unheard of—”
“No.”
He continued as though he hadn’t heard her. “Danny wasn’t under contract to us at the time these recordings were made. Legally, they belong to you. We want to buy them from you.”
“They’re not for sale.”
“Why not?”
“The man is dead, Drew. But you’re still trying to drain blood from him. What’s wrong? Is your supply of Armani suits running low?”
“That’s unfair. This stuff is dynamite. We owe it to his fans to make it public.”
“Come on, Drew. We both know that for ten years, Danny Fiore was your meal ticket.”
“Casey,” he said, “if we don’t release this material, it’ll die with him. Is that what you want?”
She hesitated. He had her, and he knew it. “No,” she said at last, “I suppose it’s not. Let me hear it. Then we’ll see.”
“Great! I’ll have a copy made and in your hands by tomorrow morning. Call me as soon as you’ve heard it, and we’ll talk.”
The package arrived by Fed Ex around ten the next morning, an anonymous-looking CD in a paper wrapper with Fiore Master, Copy 2 printed on it in pencil. She popped the disc into the CD player, then went to the kitchen to pour herself a shot of bourbon. For this, she was going to need fortification. Shot glass in hand, she returned to the living room and sat in the Boston rocker to listen.
His voice still tore her to pieces. It always had, and it always would. Nobody else could do with a song what Danny Fiore could. That voice was liquid velvet, wrapping itself around the notes, seeping into all the crevices, evoking memory and emotion, light and darkness, heaven and hell and everything in between. For a moment, she was back in that dark cellar in Bosto
n, hearing him sing for the very first time, and her response was the same now as it had been then, the same as it had been every time she’d heard him sing. He’d had the gift of magic, and it broke her heart to know that extraordinary voice had been silenced forever.
Most of the songs she’d written herself, with Rob, and that was a whole different heartache. Memories came back to her in bits and pieces, scraps of conversation, rough spots where they’d had to go back and rewrite, jubilant moments when it had come so quickly they couldn’t write fast enough to get it all down. Some of the material was new to her, but it was impossible to mistake a Rob MacKenzie composition. Like a fine wine or a Monet, Rob’s music bore a signature all its own. She would have recognized his work if she’d encountered it on a mountaintop in Tibet.
She poured another bourbon and ran the whole thing through a second time. This time, she froze her emotions and listened with a professional ear. Drew had been right. This was the best work Danny had ever done. She sat in the rocker with the shot glass, thinking about the words he’d said to her so many years ago: I want them to kiss my ass. I want to prove I’m more than just some bastard wop kid from Boston’s Little Italy. She’d always known he was more, much more than that. But had he ever really believed it himself?
A half-hour later, she called Drew. “Casey!” he said, sounding jovial and paternal. “I didn’t expect to hear from you so soon.”
“Really? I have fifty bucks that says you’re eating a pastrami sandwich at your desk because you were afraid you’d miss my call if you went out to lunch.”
At the other end of the line, he chuckled. “You win the bet,” he said. “Only it’s liverwurst.”
“I’m ready to deal,” she said.
“I knew you’d see it my way. We’re prepared to make a generous offer—”
“I’ve already decided on my price.”
Coming Home (Jackson Falls Series) Page 44
