Big Sky Eyes (25 page)

Chapter 40

The masking tape screeched as she pulled it free from the
last cardboard box she had to go through. Old photos, journals, letters and
school papers from her teenage years smiled back at her. She reached in to pull
out pictures of her and Kelly and she couldn’t help but grin at those carefree
days and the easy friendship they’d had. Her smile faded as she remembered how
easy it had also been for that friendship to slip away after high school.

The new apartment was cluttered with empty, broken-down
boxes and items that hadn’t found a permanent place yet. Three weeks into the
new year
, she and Brent finally decided on a new home and
left her parents’ house. They’d not seen or heard anything from Rick since New
Year’s Eve and her anxiety over him faded with each uneventful day. It had
subsided so much that she and Brent felt silly and actually began joking about
how fearful they’d been.

She continued to sift through photos until she came to a
stack from her last summer as a wrangler at the Slanted S. There was a snapshot
of her and Kelly on their first day there. Bev had taken it just before they
went to bed. Each girl had an arm looped around the other’s neck with smiles as
wide as the Montana sky. Mackenna ran her finger over her own face as she felt
Brent embrace her from behind.

“What’s that?” he said before looking himself. “Oh man!
That’s the first day we met. Look how young you were.”

“Ha!” she chuckled. “You mean how chubby I was!”

“You weren’t chubby!”

“Oh, yes I was! That was the most I’ve ever weighed in my
life. I had gained so much weight because I was doing nothing but studying and
schoolwork so I could graduate early. When I got to the dude and saw you
looking so fine, I thought: why did I have to get fat now?!”

Brent laughed. “Well, I didn’t notice you being chubby,” he
said.

“You didn’t notice me at all,” she jabbed. “You only had
eyes for Kelly.”

“Yeah, and you were quick to come to your friend’s rescue,
protecting her from my sexual prowess,” he teased, “only to fall victim to it
yourself.”

“Oh, please,” she returned. “Don’t flatter yourself. I fell
for the part of you that you would have never given to Kelly.”

“That’s right,” he said, kissing her neck below the ear.
“So, remember that the next time you want to tease me about Kelly. I gave you
what I would never have given her…or anyone else.”

She sighed happily against his kisses. “I’d say I earned
it,” she breathed.

“Yep,” he answered, “that and the sexual prowess.”

She chuckled as he continued to nuzzle her neck. She scanned
through the photos until she came to one that had been one of her favorites. It
was the night she’d met Alora, the night of hers and Brent’s first dance. In
the photo, Brent was dancing with Alora, cradling her like a helpless child and
Alora was beaming up at her boy. Mackenna had snapped the shot, not knowing how
good it would turn out.

“Look,” she said to Brent and he diverted his attention from
her soft skin long enough to take in the photo. He reached up and took it, a
small, sad smile playing with his lips and a knot of emotion working its way
into his throat. He missed his mother terribly. He wished that she would have
lived long enough to know that he and Mackenna wound up together.

He hugged Mackenna tightly from behind. He was so grateful
for her. It was because of her that he and his mother shared that dance, and it
was her presence that had helped him cope with her death. He didn’t know what
sort of condition he would be in if she hadn’t come back into his life when she
had.

Mackenna gasped and he looked where she looked. In her hand
was a picture of the two of them, leaning against one of the round corral
fences. She was in mid-laugh, but Brent’s face had been completely scratched
out, almost to the point where there was a hole in the photograph. Brent
flinched.

“Ouch, Babe,” he said. “Tell me what you really think.”

“I didn’t do that,” she said incredulously. He raised a
teasing eyebrow. “I swear I didn’t.”

She shuffled to the next photograph. It was another of the
two of them with the same defect. Brent’s face had been scratched out. She
looked for more and found more. Every single photo of her and Brent in the
stack had his face scratched out. The newly-abandoned fear began creeping back
into her blood.

Brent saw it in her eyes and felt it, too, in his gut. What
exactly were they dealing with? He grabbed the photos from her and tossed them
in the trash, then turned a smile on her.

“There. Problem solved.” Her eyes said she didn’t think so.
“Those pictures have been packed up since before we were together. He probably
did that back in the summer or whenever he read your journals. Let’s not get
carried away again and spoil our new home with thoughts of him.”

She nodded and then shook her head of the fear and turned
back to the box.

“You’re right,” she said. “He probably did that long ago.”

She reached for the journal on top of the stack and began
thumbing through it, remembering old thoughts and feelings. A sequence of
scratches jumped off the pages at her. She turned to the last page of her last
entry and felt an icy shiver crawl through her veins and over her skin. It
spoke of her hesitation about marriage and about her desire to press on with
school and not put it off. Near the end, she admitted that she still loved
Brent and was still torturing herself over not having him in her life. She was
missing him.

“No, he didn’t do it a long time ago,” she called out to
Brent. “I wrote this last entry just before I packed the books myself, and it
didn’t look like this.”

She turned the book around to face him and he scanned the
script, finding that everywhere his name had been written was scratched out and
replaced with the word “Rick.” His skin pimpled with gooseflesh and for the
first time he believed that Mackenna was not the one in danger. It was him.

“That’s the best you can do?
Seriously?”
Brent stared at the police officer with wide eyes. The middle-aged man with the
bulbous belly looked down his crooked nose, puckering his lips impatiently.

“I don’t know what more you think I can do,” he returned
coldly. “All you’ve got there is some old ruined photographs and a notebook
with scratches on it. There’s nothing that points to who did it. Y’all could
have done it for all I know. So, I’ll take a photo and stick it in the file
with the report.”

Brent stood tall, offended by the officer’s accusatory tone.

“Wow,” he said dryly.
“Reno’s finest right
here.
This guy threatens my wife in front of witnesses, then shows up
and punches her in the face in front of witnesses, then somehow manages to
sneak back onto her parents’ property and damage her personal items and you
don’t think this is worth more than a piece of paper in a file?!”

The officer was not amused and he showed it in the way he
crossed his arms over his belly and closed himself off. Whatever ally they
might have found in him was gone.

“You forgot the
in
front of
witnesses
part about the trespassing and
vandalism. Oh wait! That’s because you have no witnesses. As to the other two
offenses for which you do have witnesses, you and your wife chose not to press
charges! So, I’ve got no reason to arrest him.”

Brent shook his head as anger sped through his blood.
Mackenna placed a cooling hand on his forearm. She couldn’t believe how
helpless they were. She turned pleading eyes up to the officer.

“Sir,” she started, “what can we do to protect ourselves? I
understand that you’re bound by the law, but we believe this man could be
dangerous.”

He eyed her somewhat more calmly than he had Brent, and when
he spoke his voice was softer.

“If you really are in fear of your life, then take measures
to protect yourself,” he said. “Do you own any firearms?”

“Yes,” they said together.

“Permitted, right?”

“Of course,” Brent snapped and the officer narrowed his eyes
again.

“Well, make sure you’re real comfortable with your weapons.
Make sure they’re loaded and easy to reach. Get a dog, a security
system,
come up with an escape plan in case something does
happen. Get to know your neighbors. They can be a great help in dire situation.
The police can only respond when the danger is present. You and your husband
are still your best defense.”

Mackenna nodded stiffly. “Thank you, Officer.”

He nodded then left them at the counter.

Brent slowed the truck to a crawl as it moved through the
apartment complex parking lot, looking for building sixteen. When it came into
view, he parked in a spot nearby and shut off the engine. On the seat beside
him was a loaded pistol and he stared at it for answers. How far was he willing
to go?

This was the apartment that Mackenna said Rick had rented
when she moved back in with her parents. She’d never been inside but had
dropped him off plenty of times. Brent could see the second-story door from
where he’d parked. He wondered if Rick was inside, if he was armed, and if he
was sane. Either way, he needed to be confronted. Brent was not going to just
sit idly in his apartment, waiting for the threat to come to him and his wife.

He left the truck and tucked the pistol into his coat pocket
as he climbed the stairs. His heart pounded in his chest, his breath was
heavier than he wanted it to be. He’d faced many wild animals, but none of them
had been human. He wasted no time knocking once he reached the top of the
stairs. No answer came so he knocked again. Finally, the door cracked open and
an elderly black woman peered through the crack at him.

“Yes?” she asked. Brent stammered, taken aback by her
presence.

“Uhh…is Rick home?”

“Rick?” she repeated. “Ain’t
nobody
named Rick here.”

“You mean he’s not home?”

“No, I mean he don’t live here.”

Brent’s shoulders sagged as he sighed. “Sorry to bother
you,” he said. “He must have moved within the last month.”

“Well, if he did, he didn’t move from this place,” she
answered. “
I been
here for two years.”

Brent frowned. Maybe he had the wrong apartment. He
apologized again and bid the woman a good night before he made his way back to
the truck. He drove around to the main office and went inside. Rows of metal
mailboxes lined the area to his left and he went to it, scanning the names on
the outside. He did not find Rick’s. When he began to search again, a secretary
called to him from behind the front desk.

“Can I help you with something, sir?”

“Maybe you can,” Brent said with a smile, walking over to
her. “This is kind of embarrassing. I’m trying to find out which apartment my
friend Rick Boston lives in. We go to school together and I missed class today.
He was supposed to bring some work home for me and I was supposed to get it
here. He gave me the address but I must have written the apartment number wrong
because I went to that door and a nice old lady gave me a piece of her mind!”

He laughed, flashing his make-your-heart-melt smile at the
woman, and she laughed with a blush.

“Let’s see if I can look him up for you,” she offered,
moving to her computer screen.

“Would you? Aah, man, that’d be great.”

The clacking of her keyboard filled the quiet spaces around
them. Her lips pressed together in a determined line, but in the end she just
shook her head woefully.

“I’ve got no record of a Rick Boston living here,” she said.
“That’s odd.”

Brent showed his own genuine surprise. “Isn’t it? Man, I
must not have been paying attention at all on the phone. Jeez.”

“I can’t find him in here as a past occupant either,” she
said. “Sorry you came all the way over here for nothing!”

“Looks like it,” he said. “Thanks for your help.”

“No problem,” she called as he walked out of the door with a
huff of frustration.

Chapter 41

She should have realized what an inconvenience it would be
having only one vehicle between the two of them. Brent was quite happy to walk
and take the bus on his daily quests for work while she took the truck down to
her mother’s, but now that they were deep into February and the snow began to
fall in thick sheets, she felt horrible imagining Brent out in it on foot. He
kept teasing her that he was from Montana, where the winters were real.

He’d called down to her parents’ house to check on her,
something he did each day, and also to tell her that she ought to stay the
night there instead of braving the wind and snow just to be with him. As she
looked at the white fury outside her window, she reluctantly agreed. When it
came time to sleep, she made it up to her room, only to find her bed covered
with dozens of single, long-stem roses.

“Mom,” Mackenna called out in a questioning tone. Soon,
Helen appeared by her side. “Did you do this?”

“No,” she said staring at the pile of roses. She called for
David. He, too, said he’d had nothing to do with the flowers being there. As
the three exchanged worried glances, David checked the room. He looked under
the bed, behind the curtains and in every dark corner he could find. Next, he
ordered the women to stay while he checked the rest of the house.

It took a half an hour for David to check the inside of the
house as thoroughly as he wanted, but he found nothing amiss. No doors were
unlocked, no windows open. Every closet was as it should be. There were no
signs that anyone had been there but them. When he returned to the room with
the confidence that they were safely confined, they all finally decided to go
to sleep.

As Mackenna burrowed beneath the thick covers, she watched
the snow pelt the window angrily. Shadows shook on the walls of her room from
the wind. She felt the coldness of her bed without Brent there. The blankets
still smelled of roses even though they’d thrown them all out. As she finally
allowed her eyes to close, she imagined that Brent was there beside her,
warming her, easing her fears. The vision was so strong that her body literally
began to heat up and she finally drifted off to sleep.

When she awoke, her first thought was of roses. The smell
was so strong. White light was blasting through her window, beckoning her
eyelids to open. She was lying on her stomach, her face toward the pillow
beside her. What she saw as her eyes fluttered open was a single rose laying
across the pillow. Its sweet scent reached her nostrils and she gasped, sitting
upright in the bed.

She looked frantically around the room, tears rushing to her
eyes. There was no one. Her bedroom door was wide open. She screamed for her
parents, who came rushing down the hall to her. Helen mirrored her daughter’s
horror and shock. David looked a mixture of anger and disappointment at his own
inability to protect his daughter.

“I’m getting the locks changed,” he said to his wife.
“Today!”

 
Brent was almost out
of his mind with frustration. Every lead he chased led to nothing but
dead-ends. He went to the dentistry school only to learn that Rick had not
returned for the spring semester in January. None of his classmates had seen or
heard from him since. He visited Rick’s place of work at the rock climbing gym
only to find that Rick had quit months before. The only evidence that the man
still existed and was still in Reno came in the ways he showed them he was
there.

The roses in her bedroom at her parents’ house were just a
start. Mackenna would come out of the grocery store to find a rose on the hood
of her truck. They’d leave the apartment in the morning only to find footprints
and a rose in the freshly-fallen snow in front of their door. Pieces of his
presence ate away at their peace to the point where neither was sleeping well
at night.

Brent finally decided to stay awake, planting himself in
front of the window facing the parking lot in front of their apartment. With
the lights off, he waited all night for Rick to come to their door, to show his
face in any way, but he never did. Not that night.

He was still sitting in front of the window, glassy-eyed and
exhausted when she emerged from bed the following morning. She crept up to him
with a fleece blanket and wrapped it around his shoulders from behind. He
shrugged it off and stood impatiently. She watched as he paced angrily back and
forth. She knew what was wrong but she didn’t know how to fix it. They were
both stressed and wearied to the point of irritation.

“I’m sorry, Brent,” she said and he blew out a sigh.

“Stop apologizing, Mackenna,” he said, his voice rough.

“What do you want me to do?” She spread her arms out wide in
supplication.

“I don’t want you to do anything! I want this chicken-shit
bastard to show his face so we can be done with this cat and mouse bullshit! I
don’t like looking over my shoulder and peering around corners.”

“I’m in the same boat as you, Brent. I’m being stalked just
the same.”

“
You
invited this
into your life when you invited him into your life. I didn’t make that choice.”

He walked past an end table and lashed out at an empty glass,
sending it across the room to shatter against the wall. His actions didn’t
frighten her, but his words wounded her deeply. Tears formed in her eyes when
she thought about what she had to tell him.

“Well, I’m sorry that you regret the choice you made in me.”

“That’s not what I said, Mackenna. Don’t twist my words.”

“That
is
what you
said, Brent. You just said it differently.”

“No,” he drawled impatiently, “what I said is…”

“That it’s my fault we’re in this mess! That’s what you are
saying, Brent, that this is not what you signed up for when you married me.”
She went to the shattered glass and knelt down to start cleaning it up. “I get
it. I was stupid for not having seen this in Rick sooner. I should have never
led him on. Everything we’re going through is because of me. I get it, I get
it,
I
get it!”

She sniffled as the tears flowed freely. Brent groaned in
frustration.

“Here
come
the waterworks!” he said
peering up at the ceiling as he rolled his eyes. “Great! Now, I’m the bad guy
for making you cry with the words that
you
put into my mouth!”

“I’m not crying because of you!” she shot back. “I’m crying
because I’m overwhelmed with the entire situation and I’m exhausted. I’m
afraid. I’m hormonal, and I’m pregnant.” She raised furious eyes at him as she
continued to fill her palms with shards of glass. “And
you
can take the blame for that one!”

All ire melted from Brent as his face went slack. His
breaths felt hollow and insufficient and a sudden lightheadedness took hold. He’d
known it was possible and even likely that she would get pregnant, but somehow
hearing the words from her mouth affected him more intensely than he had
imagined.

A baby.

His child’s heart was beating inside of her. A new life was
burgeoning and all of a sudden his didn’t seem so bleak. There was a hope and a
deeper love for Mackenna taking root inside of him, just as their baby was
taking root inside of her. And there she was, his pregnant wife, on her hands
and knees cleaning up the glass he’d broken in a fit of rage unjustly directed
at her.
Guilt
plunged into him like a knife.
He went and knelt beside her while she continued to sniffle and pick up glass.
He reached for her hand.

“Here, let me do that,” he said,
and she jerked her hands away from him.

“Don’t touch me,” she warned.

“Mackenna,” he said in a plea,
“I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry about what?” she
shot back. “Sorry that you broke one of my glasses? Sorry that you blamed me
for our current hell of a life?
Or sorry that I’m pregnant?”

He reeled back, horrified at the
idea of not rejoicing in her pregnancy.

“No, not at all,” he said on a
gasp.

“Just leave me alone, Brent,” she
wept. “I think I’ve had enough character assassination for the day.”

He stared at her for a long
moment, his mouth filling with words he couldn’t say, words she didn’t want to
hear. With a sigh, he rose, grabbed his keys and left the apartment.

The night was crisp and clear with
a million stars dotting the sky as she made her way home through the Washoe
Valley. She hadn’t told her parents that she was pregnant yet. She didn’t know
exactly why other than that she knew that they would be thrilled and she was
determined that the first elation, the first celebration of this life inside of
her, would be shared between her and Brent. The way they’d parted in the
morning was anything but celebratory and she needed to fix that.

She wiped the wetness from her
eyes, praying desperately that her current lack of emotional control was not a
sign of things to come for this pregnancy. She was disgusted at the idea of
being a weepy woman for nine months. Her fight with Brent had been on her mind
all day. That was not how she had imagined it would be, announcing her
pregnancy to him. She felt terrible for saying it during a fight, but she
couldn’t undo what had happened.

Truth be told, the idea of being a
mother was still very new to her. She’d only found out the day before and she’d
spent all of the time in between shuffling through worry and unpreparedness that
she didn’t allow time for happiness and hope. The timing was awful, admittedly.
Brent hadn’t found a job yet. She was only six months from beginning vet
school. Rick was still a looming plague on their lives. Things were not as they
should be, but deep in her soul nothing felt more right than bringing Brent’s
child into the world.

Whatever it took to make things
right between them, she would do. She’d make them a happy family.
Family!
The word itself teased a smile
from her lips. There was a life inside of her, a product of hers and Brent’s
deep and enduring love. That alone was worth dismissing whatever pangs of
sorrow she’d felt all day long.

As she made her way up the stairs
to their apartment she could see a warm orange glow pulsing from the window. She
went inside and found the interior lit with candles. There was a folded note on
the breakfast bar by the door. It read:
I’m
in the bedroom
. Mackenna smiled wistfully, anxious for the all-night makeup
session. She followed the rows of candles to the room and shuffled passed the
doorway only to find more candles spread throughout. She heard the door shut
behind her and smiled softly.

“Well, you are definitely
exceeding my expectations,” she said huskily until her gaze landed on the bed
and found a rose lying there. The air in her lungs dissipated into panic and
her blood turned to ice as she spun around and saw Rick leaning against the
door, her only way out. He was shirtless and the top button of his jeans was
undone. His hair was overgrown and scraggly, his eyes
an
obsidian pool of insanity. The corners of her mouth curled downward as she
fought the tears gathering behind her eyes.

“Glad to hear that, darlin’,” he
said as he looked her up and down. “That’s all I ever wanted to do.”

A million words rushed through
Mackenna, things she wanted to say, things she thought she shouldn’t say.
Escape plans and lockdowns all seemed a ridiculous defense against the threat
so prominently blocking her path. Her own self-defensiveness riled against his
intrusion into her home, but the beating of her baby’s heart echoed through her
ears and heart, muddling months of well-laid plans.

“Rick,” she breathed. “How did you
get in here?”

“With a key of
course.”

“What key?”

“The key I made an imprint of when
we spent the night together at your parents’ house during the storm.”

Disgust spilled through her.

“You snuggled right up to me,” he
continued. “Our bodies created so much heat that I knew that you still wanted
me.”

“That’s probably because I was
dreaming of Brent,” she jabbed and a flicker of anger lit his eyes at the sound
of the name.

“Ah, yes! Brave Brent, your
faithful hero. That idiot couldn’t find a boulder in a pile of pebbles. He’s
been running himself ragged looking for me when I’ve been right under his nose
the whole time. Man, I couldn’t have made it any easier! I’ve left him plenty
of signs pointing to where I was. Haven’t you gotten my roses? I’ve been
sending one for every day we’ve been apart.” When she said nothing, he carried
on with a look of mild surprise on his face. “Don’t tell me that you haven’t
been expecting me.”

“Not really,” she said bravely. “I
thought you’d moved on.”

He chuckled from deep in his chest
before pushing off of the door and moving toward her. “Moved on to what?” he
asked. “There’s nothing but you.
Nothing but our love.”

Mackenna backed up as he drew near
until she was flat against the wall. He leaned forward and put his mouth beside
her ear. His hand went to her belly where he stroked possessively despite her
cringes. His nose brushed the hair away from her ears and Mackenna shut her
eyes as she fought the urge to vomit.

“And now we’ve made a child out of
our love. I hope it’s a boy with my smarts and your eyes.”

Her eyes flew open. How did he
know she was pregnant when she’d only known for a day? His fingers tickled her stomach,
moving slowly down until they went between her thighs. At the first touch of
his hand she pushed him away from her.