A Year of You (17 page)

Footsteps crunched over the mat of pine needle debris. He looked up to see Mattie approaching him. Instantly, he recognized Ruth Ellen’s pissed-off look. This woman was a dead ringer for the old woman in her younger years.

Who the hell is she, if she isn’t Elaine?
She wasn’t Elaine. Wasn’t. Wasn’t any way in hell she could be Elaine.

“I need to use your truck,” she said coldly. “And I need some money for groceries.”

“I’ll go with you.”


“You don’t need to. I’m capable of driving to Wal-Mart by myself.”


“Not in my truck, you aren’t. You can’t even get the passenger door open.”

She huffed in irritation and spun around on her heel toward the trailer. “Fine. Whatever. I’m ready to go now, though.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He flicked her a sarcastic salute that ended with his middle finger. She rolled her eyes and turned around.

West followed her down the narrow trail, completely distracted from his mental anguish by the angry sway of her hips. Damn, she was hot when she was mad!

***

The ride to town was tense. West’s face was as hard as rock, as unyielding as the asphalt beneath the tires. He smoked cigarette after cigarette. Finally, Mattie couldn’t take anymore and broke the silence. “Are we even gonna be, you know, just friends?”

He shrugged, staring out the windshield. The wind whipped his longish hair into his face, around his ears. Mattie grabbed his sunglasses out of the console and handed them to him. He slid the snug, sexy, wraparounds on.

Mattie had to suppress a sigh. He was such a hunk of man-candy in those glasses.

“I just...I don’t want to get too involved with you. Mattie, it would be so easy to...I don’t know, fall for you or something, but I don’t want to deal with the emotions. It’ll get dirty and painful when its time for you to leave. I don’t want to deal with that.”

She nodded, looking down at her hands. Disappointed, she said, “I understand. But we can’t exist together like this for a year. It’s unrealistic. We live in the same house, sleep in the same bed, and have to share a bathroom. You owe me at least friendship for that.”

She didn’t miss the little smile that curved his lips up before he caught himself and resumed his stony poker face. “West, we’re mature adults. We can come to some sort of agreement. Whatever happens between us doesn’t have to be all mushy-gushy. Besides, I think I’ll be pretty good at helping you with the nursery and landscaping stuff. You need me as a friend.”

“You honestly think we can be just friends?” He looked at her at last, one eyebrow cocked, rising over the top edge of his slim sunglasses. “With all the stuff that has already happened between us?”

“Did any of that make you fall in love with me?”

Maybe she was imagining it, but she was pretty sure he flushed pink. Might have been the heat, or the sun, though.

“No! It’s complicated, Mattie.”


“No, it’s Emeline.”


“No.” He shook his head and sighed, slouching lower in his seat. “No, it’s not Emeline. Honestly, I’m getting over her. She’s just too immature. We want different things. Out of anybody I’ve ever met, you are the only woman I’ve ever met who wants the same things I do.”

She almost retorted, “How do you know what I want?” before she remembered their conversations in the grand foyer of the McKendrick house, waiting for Emeline. The talks they had in the Navigator while Em was shopping or at a club. The times at parties when they gravitated toward each other. They had talked, about so many things. It wasn’t until she proposed that they even argued.

“We were friends, West,” she reminded him. “Before all this. It was fun. A little bit of relief from everything else going on.”

“Yeah. I just don’t want it to get messy. We have an agreement already.”

“But I can’t live with you and be like this! We’ve got to be at least friends, West. I won’t ask you for anything else.”
The sunglasses slipped down his nose a little, revealing his startling blue eyes.

“Fine. Friends. But whatever else happens is no-strings-attached. No falling in love, no ridiculous stuff like that. Why’s it so important, Mattie?”

It wasn’t a prying question. The lines of his face had relaxed. Even though she couldn’t see his eyes, she imagined they were full of compassion. He had that tone in his voice that he got when he just wanted to talk.

“I’ve never really had many friends,” she said, looking down at her hands. Her cuticles were ragged and her skin was dry. “I grew up pretty isolated. When I tried to reach out to people, I usually got hurt.”

“That sucks.”


“It was my life until Carmen finally left me and I moved in with some friends.”
“

Who’s Carmen?”
Oh shit-balls-damn-hell! She did it again! “Nobody. Just somebody that I stayed with when I was a kid.”


“You’re lying.”

“I am not!”

He tugged his glasses down his nose and gave her a pointed glare. “You fidget when you lie, Mattie. Who’s Carmen?”

“She’s a woman who took care of me when I was a kid.”


“Did she work for the McKendricks?”


Mattie forced her hands to be still, her feet to stop shuffling in the sand on the rubber floormats. “I don’t know, West. She was usually too drunk for me to ask her for a resume.”

“Mattie, don’t insult my intelligence.”


“I don’t know what you want from me.”


“The truth would be nice.”

Mattie heaved a sigh and crossed her arms over her chest. “All you people think I’m a liar and just out for some money. You are all going to be so frickin’ shocked when those tests come back. Then, you know what? You can shove them where the sun don’t shine!”

West slugged her shoulder, taunting her. “Good to see we’re still friends.”


“Oh, bite me.”
West grabbed her arm and did as she ordered, letting go of the wheel. The bent axles jerked the truck sideways where it jolted off the pavement and onto the shoulder of the road. West cursed and snatched the wheel so the truck jounced back to the road. Laughing, he pushed his glasses back up on his nose and lit another cigarette, holding the wheel steady with his knee.

“Jerk,” she growled, slouching down in the seat and rubbing the pleasantly-throbbing spot on her arm.

Chapter Twelve

Mattie dreamed about Elaine and West, as children. She dreamed about them playing around in the old orange grove. A little dog chased them through the vibrant orange trees, nipping at their heels.

They came to the big oak tree in the middle of the grove. West skipped around the tree roots. Elaine started to follow but tripped and fell. A black hole opened up under her and sucked her down. Mattie fell with her, screaming, clawing thin air for a handhold.

Snagged out of midair, she fumbled at the hands of the man holding her upright.

K! He had her by the neck in a chokehold. His hands were hooked like claws, ripping and shredding her T-shirt. Mattie screamed for West. He would save her. He wouldn’t let that pervert hurt her anymore.

K snarled something in her ear and thrust her aside. She fell into the hole again, sobbing.

It took a few moments for the dark bedroom to register in her mind, for her brain to recognize West’s worried features highlighted by moonlight and shadows.

“West?”


“Yeah. You all right?”


Mattie nodded and glanced toward the window. The blinds were up, hanging crookedly because one string was broken. The crank-style windows were open. Bugs hit the screen with soft thumps.
Just beyond a low rise, dead orange trees reached toward the sky, the tops just visible. The oak tree embraced the full moon, surrounded by millions of stars.

West let her go. “You were hollering.”


“Bad dream.”


“I figured that much. What was it?”

She couldn’t think of a way to tell him without opening herself up to questions she didn’t feel like answering. “I don’t even know. It was just scary.” She curled up on her side, facing the window. The oak tree was the only tree visible from the angle she was laying at. The wind made the leafless branches wobble, barely visible against the dark sky.

“You’re freezing.” West pulled her into his arms. “You’re shaking, too.”


“I’m fine, West. Really.”
Part of her wondered why he was being so nice to her. The last few days had been decent. West told her all about running the business and showed her the layout of the land. He had acres of potted trees, shrubs, and flowers. He sold enough to keep himself afloat. Most of the sales were to landscaping companies owned by people that had known his father. His main goal was to get his plants into the garden centers and supply stores. The local discount stores with garden centers always used local growers, but he hadn’t been able to sell any of the managers on his products.

She was making some headway convincing him to move more into his landscaping and lawn maintenance. The nursery wasn’t even breaking even, and most of the money he made in lawn care went to cover the nursery’s costs. It was frustrating, seeing month after month, year after year, of the same things. The man had talent!

He was the kind of guy that needed to hang on to something to sleep; a pillow, a woman, it didn’t matter. During the night he’d always spoon against her, burying his face into her hair, mumbling. As he drifted back to sleep, he looped his arm around her chest and pulled her against him. One hand cupped her breast.

He felt so good like that, cuddled up against her. The two weeks they had been married hadn’t been the nightmare he expected. Battle lines of a sort had been drawn on that first day as man and wife. They kept to their respective boundaries, only lapsing into something a little more than nothing and a little less than friendship when they were in bed. He touched her then, even if it was unconscious. The contact made her suck in her breath and close her eyes against the heady comfort of human contact.

During the day, they worked together, side by side in the nursery or fernery, or out on a job. She had some good ideas for his nursery, and he respected those. Mattie tugged the blanket higher and smiled to herself. Proving herself to him felt good. Maybe sometime soon he’d start to realize that she wasn’t the idiot everybody seemed to think she was.

Tomorrow she would go look around the property to see if she could figure out where Elaine might be buried. The first part of her dream stuck in her head.

West said the night that Elaine disappeared, he saw somebody carrying something he assumed was the little girl past his window. In his childish, sleep-addled mind, he couldn’t identify the man, and he definitely couldn’t say for sure if the thing the person was carrying was a kid.

If he even saw anything that night. He’d only been six years old. How reliable could a sleepy six- year-old be?

Ruth Ellen Carruther believed he’d really seen something. Mattie sighed to herself. Well, whatever. Tomorrow, she’d try to find some clue, although after twenty-odd years, how much of anything would be left?

West grunted in his sleep and dug his elbow into her ribs. “Hey, that hurts,” she hissed, squirming away. The thin veil of sleepiness that had descended over her mind, locking her into her thoughts, dissolved abruptly, dumping her into full awareness.

Aware of how quiet it was in the trailer. How quiet it was outside. West’s slow, heavy breaths puffed against her ear. Other than that soft sound, she didn’t hear anything else.

The nightmare featuring K’s hands digging into her throat resurfaced. A wobbly, cold fear wound around her stomach.

If he found her here, in another man’s arms, he’d kill her. He’d kill West.

No. No. I won’t let him hurt West.

In the dark of the night, Mattie realized she was going to have to find a way to stop K, forever. If she didn’t, he would only keep hurting her. When he couldn’t hurt her anymore, he’d move on to Molly.

***

The store-front office had an old, musty smell, and some of the fluorescent lights in the back of the space flickered continually, lending a sense of disorientation and cheapness to the place. West paced the front of the narrow, deep space, anxious and unsure. Was this the right thing to do?

Of all the private investigators McKendrick could have hired, he’d hired the cheapest one in town. The air conditioner gusted to life. The smell of bologna wafted across West’s face. He grimaced and shifted as far as he could out of the air flow.

He was exhausted. The night before, Mattie had woken him it seemed like every couple of hours, caught in the throes of some nasty nightmares. The last one had been about four AM, and neither one of them had been able to go back to sleep. More than once she’s hollered out in utter panic.

Frank, the P.I., looked up from his desk as he hung up the phone. “All right, Mr. West. What can I do for you?”

“Uh, McKendrick wanted me to check in and see if you’d found anything else. And there’s some new stuff we wanted you to look into.”

Using McKendrick’s name might get him in trouble.
Especially after the bill comes.
There had to be more to Mattie than a perfect credit report. McKendrick wouldn’t care about the extra fees if there were real results this time. West shifted in his chair and heard the rustle of the plastic bag in his pocket.

Mattie would be so hurt if she knew he was doing this. No, she knew he didn’t trust her one- hundred-percent. Mattie was weird. She just accepted mistrust and doubt. Her eyes would go blank and her jaw would set and she would go on with whatever task she was involved in. Wouldn’t speak a word for hours, then abruptly that hard look would fade from her eyes and she’d be her usual self. It was almost like she was used to it, something that had been part of her life forever.
Maybe it had. Maybe he should just trust her. Suddenly he felt bad for betraying her. “Basically, we’re still a little concerned about Matilyn’s identity.”

“I gave Mr. McKendrick all the information I found.”


“I found the same stuff on the Internet when I Googled her name.”
Frank sighed and sat back, eyes narrowed.

“You saying I didn’t do my job?”


“No. I’m saying that we need more. We need you to go way back on her.”