Broken Pieces (4 page)

Somehow in the years she’d been away from Plains Point, she’d remembered only bad things. But now happy memories bloomed in her mind, memories of her and Finn lying in sweet-smelling grass and looking up at the clouds overhead, of making clover chains to wear around their necks and sipping from a bottle of Scotch to try to figure out why Finn’s father loved it so much.

Although Jed had kept a hard thumb on her, there had been moments of freedom made all the more sweet because they came so rarely. There had been the occasional birthday parties and school functions that she’d been allowed to attend. When she was
fifteen, she’d been allowed to go to a carnival in town with a bunch of kids and their parents.

It had been one of the best nights of her life. The thrill of the rides couldn’t compete with the thrill of her temporary independence from her parents and her home.

And when she’d gotten home that night, she’d paid for her good time. Her father had beaten her black-and-blue for not dusting the living room to his satisfaction. But it had been worth every lick of the switch. As he’d whipped her, in her mind she’d gone back on the Ferris wheel with the wind in her face and Finn’s laughter ringing in her ears.

She startled as she realized her purse was ringing. She dug in it and retrieved her cell phone, the caller ID letting her know who was calling.

“Hey, girlfriend,” she answered.

“Ah, you survived your first night in hell,” Janice said.

“I not only survived, but I’ve cleaned a kitchen, bought groceries, seen my old boyfriend and acquired a dog.”

“Wow, you have been busy. How’s the boyfriend?”

“Older, paunchy and a drinker,” Mariah said.

“And the dog?”

“Little, dark gray and with a broken leg.” Mariah explained to Janice about hitting the dog and the rush to get him to the vet. As she talked, a vision of Jack Taylor filled her mind. It had been a long time since a man had crossed her mind more than once.

“How’s everything else? You doing okay? Did you have nightmares last night?” Janice, ever the counselor, asked.

“No, no nightmares and I’m doing fine.” Mariah leaned back in the chair and cast her gaze out the window once again. “There’s a ton of work to get done before I can get this place on the market. I haven’t told Kelsey yet, but I can’t imagine us getting back home for at least a month or so.”

Janice was silent for a long moment. “You going to be okay there for that long? I mean, it’s one thing to have to spend a week or two in a place where bad things happened, but to stay indefinitely is quite another.”

“Actually, right before you called, I was sitting at the kitchen table and remembering some of the good times. You remember me telling you about Finn? He stopped by and we caught up a little bit. It was fun.”

“You sound good,” Janice replied, relief in her voice. “You’ll call me if things get rough.”

Mariah smiled, thanking her lucky stars for such a friend. “You’re on my speed dial.”

“You know, I’ve been meaning to take a vacation. I could come out there and help you with the house.”

“Janice, if you’re going to take a vacation, go to Mexico or to Hawaii. Don’t waste it coming here to work,” Mariah replied.

The two spoke for just a few more minutes, then hung up. The rest of the day passed quickly. Mariah moved from the kitchen to the living room, where she took down draperies, swiped at cobwebs and scrubbed woodwork.

Kelsey and her new pooch, officially named Tiny, moved from her room to the kitchen so Kelsey could work on dinner. Kelsey kept up a running monologue directed at the dog, whose cast clunked on the floor each time he took a step.

Mariah had agreed that the dog could sleep in Kelsey’s room at night, but during the day he would be relegated to the kitchen. An old screen propped across the kitchen doorway provided a workable barrier to keep the dog in the room.

It was after six when they sat down to eat the steak that Kelsey had prepared. Tiny sat next to Kelsey’s chair, looking up to her with big brown begging eyes.

“Don’t you dare give him anything from the table,” Mariah said. “You don’t want to start a bad habit. He has his own food in his bowl.”

Kelsey cast a sympathetic look at Tiny. “Sorry, baby, you have to eat your own food.” Tiny cocked his head to one side, then clumped over to his own food bowl and began to eat.

It didn’t take long to realize that although, according to Jack Taylor, Tiny had been running the streets for several weeks, he was surprisingly domesticated. He responded to simple commands and after he was finished eating went to the back door.

“I think we need to put up some flyers around town about Tiny,” Mariah said when Kelsey came back from taking the dog outside. “It’s obvious he’s been trained and somebody might be missing him.”

Kelsey held the dog in her arms and sighed. “I guess you’re right. But if nobody claims him, then I get to keep him, right?”

Tiny barked, as if to add his two cents to the conversation. Mariah laughed and scratched the dog behind one ear. “That’s right. You can print the flyers on your computer and tomorrow we’ll put them around.”

Kelsey nodded and placed the dog on the floor and then together she and Mariah cleared the table.
There was no dishwasher in the old kitchen and as they washed dishes, they talked about what they’d do when they got back to Chicago.

After dinner Kelsey went up to her room and Mariah moved into her father’s study and sat at his desk. She’d picked up several empty boxes while they’d been at the grocery store and she began to empty the contents of the desk into one of them.

She’d worked about an hour when Kelsey found her and gave her the flyers she’d made. “I think I’m going to go to bed,” Kelsey said. “I don’t know why, but I’m pooped.”

“It’s all this fresh country air.” Mariah got up from the desk and wrapped her arms around her daughter. “I’m going to work a while longer, so I’ll just tell you good night now.” She kissed Kelsey’s forehead. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

As Kelsey headed back upstairs, Mariah returned to the desk. She turned on the desk lamp against the encroaching darkness of nightfall. The sound of crickets drifted in through the open window, a familiar sound from her childhood.

Most of the contents of the desk were trash. Old bills already paid and sermons previously delivered filled the drawers. She threw most of it into a plastic bag, but kept the records of the most recent utility bills that had been paid.

It was after nine when she decided to call it a night. It had been a long day and she was exhausted. She rose from the desk and stretched with her arms overhead, trying to work out the kinks that had tightened her muscles. She wasn’t used to the kind of physical work she’d done that day.

As a third-grade teacher, the most physical thing
she did was occasionally run a footrace with a student on the playground during recess.

She turned off the desk lamp, then glanced toward the window into the face of a man standing outside in the darkness staring back at her.

Chapter 5

S
he kept her scream trapped inside, not wanting to frighten Kelsey. The man was there only a moment, then gone. Mariah remained in the darkness of the office, frozen in place.

Move, a voice screamed inside her head. There was no phone in the office and her cell phone was in her purse in the kitchen. Call somebody. Get help!

She hadn’t recognized the man. What had he been doing peeking in her window? Who was he? Questions crashed inside her head as she backed out of the office.

Had she locked the front and back doors? She couldn’t remember. She ran into the kitchen and checked the door. Locked. She grabbed her cell phone and was about to dial for help when a knock sounded on the front door.

Once again she froze, fingers poised to dial. Would somebody who wanted to harm them knock on the front door? There were a dozen windows open in the house. If he wanted to hurt them, he could have just waited until the middle of the night, slit a screen and crept inside.

She moved to the front door, turned on the porch light and then shouted through the locked door. “What do you want?”

“Finn sent me. Said you had some work. Name’s Joel Clarkson.”

Relief flooded through her. Her fingers relaxed around her phone and she cracked open the door a couple of inches.

“Didn’t mean to scare you none,” he said. “I knocked and nobody answered. I saw the light on and figured I’d look in to see if anyone was around.” Dark hair hung lank around his face, emphasizing hollow, acne-scarred cheeks. He looked thin, but with wiry strength.

“Mr. Clarkson, it’s a little late to discuss anything tonight. If you want to come back in the morning, we can talk then.”

He backed away from the door with an apologetic shake of his head. “Sorry, I should have realized it was too late. I’ll be back in the morning.” He didn’t wait for her reply, but headed for a rusty black pickup truck parked in front of the house.

She watched until his headlights disappeared down the long, dark driveway; then she closed the door and locked it once again.

Until this moment she hadn’t realized how vulnerable she and Kelsey were in this house. Without air-conditioning she’d gone to bed the night before with windows open wide, providing a perfect entrance to anyone who might want to get inside.

She now went around the lower level, closing and locking the windows tight. They could sleep with the upstairs windows open and if necessary she would invest in a couple of fans. Installing central air was
an expense she didn’t even want to consider for a house she wasn’t going to live in.

With everything secure downstairs, she climbed to the second floor, her heart still racing faster than normal. For a moment as she’d stared at that face at the window, she’d thought
he’d
come back for her.

As she stood beneath a hot shower, her thoughts once again raced back in time, back to the night of her rape. She’d always wondered if she’d been raped by a transient passing through town or if it had been somebody she knew, somebody who lived in Plains Point.

There was some comfort in clinging to the belief that it had been a stranger, that it couldn’t have been any of the locals who knew her, somebody who still lived in town, shopped where she shopped and ate where she ate.

There would always be a part of her that wondered why he’d picked her. Had it simply been a horrifying chance encounter or had she specifically been targeted for the brutal attack?

As she got into her nightgown, she dismissed these thoughts from her mind. When she’d left Plains Point as a scared, pregnant seventeen-year-old, there had been little time to think of that night. The mere act of surviving had taken all her energy, leaving none left to obsess about the who and why of her attack.

It was only in her sleep that she went back to that place beneath the trees with the scent of the storm in the air, and the memories seeped into her brain like toxic fumes, creating nightmares that pulled her screaming from her sleep. Many times the horror of the attack had gotten all mixed up with the agony of her mother’s betrayal that night.

But time was a healer, as Mariah had discovered.
The memories, although never forgotten, became less intrusive as the years had gone by and the nightmares became less frequent.

Kelsey had learned at a young age that sometimes Mommy woke up screaming, and when she got older, she solved the issue of waking up to screams by wearing an iPod with earphones or earplugs to bed.

Mariah slept later than usual the next morning and woke up to the scent of coffee and frying bacon drifting up the stairs.

There were times she couldn’t believe how lucky she was to have Kelsey. Although she’d love to take the credit for her daughter’s maturity and caring nature, the truth was Kelsey had been born an old soul with a peaceful nature that had rarely given her mother a moment of worry.

She got out of bed and pulled her comfortable but ratty old robe around her, then went down the stairs to see Tiny staring up at Kelsey adoringly as she flipped strips of bacon in the skillet.

“I’m not sure if that dog has that heavenly grin on his face because he loves you or because he loves bacon,” Mariah said as she shuffled over to the coffeemaker on the cabinet. “But if you see me looking at you lovingly, it’s definitely because you have the coffee waiting for me.”

Kelsey grinned. “I woke up early and figured I might as well get breakfast going.” She raised an eyebrow. “You were a lazy slug this morning.”

Mariah raised her hands over her head and bent her body first to one side, then to the other. “I think maybe I overdid it yesterday. I have aches where I didn’t even realize I had muscles.”

“Maybe you should just take it easy today,” Kelsey said as she removed the skillet from the burner.

“I don’t have time to take it easy,” Mariah replied, and carried her coffee to the table, where she sat and watched as Kelsey broke eggs into a bowl. “I want to finish packing up the things in the office and then start on the master bedroom. The handyman Finn told me about yesterday stopped by last night and is supposed to be back sometime this morning.”

Kelsey began to cut up mushrooms and green peppers. “What’s he like? Could he maybe be the man of your dreams?”

Mariah laughed. “I don’t think so, not unless I like long-haired Peeping Toms.” She explained to her daughter about Joel peeking in the window and scaring her the night before.

Kelsey frowned. “He sounds kind of creepy.”

“I can deal with a little creepy as long as he can do what needs to be done around here.” Mariah took a sip of her coffee, making a list in her mind of all the work she hoped Joel Clarkson could accomplish. “Finn wouldn’t have recommended him to me if he weren’t safe,” she added.

They had just finished eating when the sound of a vehicle’s tires crunching on the gravel drive drifted in through the open window.

“That’s probably Joel,” Mariah said.

Kelsey looked out the window, then looked back at Mariah, her eyes wide. “You’d better go pull on some clothes and do something with your hair. It’s not your handyman. It’s the vet, Dr. Hot.”

Mariah sprang to her feet as she remembered the electric spark she’d felt when she’d looked at Jack Taylor the day before. She had no idea what he was
doing here, but she sure didn’t want to greet him in the robe that was almost as old as her daughter and with her hair, not sleep-tousled, which sounded charming, but rather sleep-tangled, which was definitely not charming.

“Go,” Kelsey said urgently. “I’ll keep him occupied until you’re dressed. And put on some lipstick,” her daughter demanded as Mariah raced for the stairs.

Upstairs in her room Mariah hurriedly changed from her nightgown and robe into a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. As she brushed the tangles from her hair, she heard Jack’s pleasant deep voice talking to Kelsey.

She had the tube of lipstick halfway to her mouth when she stared at her reflection in the mirror and wondered what in the hell she was doing.

The last thing she was looking for was a man. She was here to take care of family business; then she’d go back to her life. Okay, Jack was easy on the eyes, but he was most certainly not here to see her—he’d probably come to check up on their furry little friend.

She threw the lipstick to the side of the bathroom counter and headed downstairs where Jack’s and Kelsey’s voices came from the kitchen.

He’d been hot in his white lab coat the day before, but this morning, wearing a pair of jeans that molded to his long legs and with a white T-shirt stretching taut across his broad shoulders, he positively sizzled.

He smiled as she entered the kitchen and she felt a kick of attraction punching her midsection. “Good morning.” His deep voice felt like a physical caress.

“Dr. Taylor stopped by to check on Tiny,” Kelsey said.

“I didn’t realize doctors in this day and age made house calls,” Mariah replied. She tried not to stare at him, but she was still trying to find some semblance of the skinny young man she had barely known in high school in the handsome, buff man in front of her.

“Only in special circumstances.” He crouched down and Tiny sniffed his hand suspiciously. “He looks like he’s in good hands,” he said as he rose to his feet. “How’s his appetite?”

“Good, and he slept through the night,” Kelsey said. “Would you like a cup of coffee, Dr. Taylor?”

Mariah flushed as she realized her hostess skills had momentarily fled her. “Yes, would you like a cup of coffee?” she repeated.

“No thanks, I’ve got to get to the office, and please, call me Jack,” he said to Kelsey. He redirected his gaze to Mariah. “Kelsey mentioned that there wasn’t a man around the house. I was wondering if maybe she and you would be interested in grabbing some pizza tonight with me. There’s an all-you-can-eat pizza buffet in town.”

“Oh, I don’t think—”

“I love pizza,” Kelsey exclaimed, interrupting whatever Mariah had been about to say. “Can we go, Mom?”

Mariah knew that pizza wasn’t one of Kelsey’s favorite meals, that this was obviously some sort of matchmaking ploy. “Okay,” she agreed. “We’d love to go out for pizza with you.”

“Great. Why don’t I pick you up around six?” He started out of the kitchen.

“That sounds fine and I’m sure you’ll be surprised
by how many pieces of pizza my daughter can eat,” Mariah said with a pointed glance at Kelsey.

“Then I’ll see you at six,” Jack said. His eyes gleamed with a light that once again danced an electric flicker through Mariah. “I’m looking forward to it,” he said, then walked out the front door.

Mariah stood at the door and watched him get into his car, unable to help but notice how fine his butt looked in the tight jeans. As he pulled away from the house, she went back into the kitchen, where her daughter was loading the sink full with their breakfast dishes.

“Since when do you love pizza?” she asked.

Kelsey shot her a wicked grin. “I just all of a sudden got a craving for it.” She turned away from the sink to face her mother. “You were going to tell him no. Anytime anybody asks you out, you say no. You never have any fun. It’s just pizza, Mom. You don’t have to sleep with him. Just go out and have a good time.”

Mariah stared at Kelsey, surprised by the uncharacteristic outburst. “Well, I’m glad you made that clear to me. I was afraid I’d have to strip naked and have sex in the middle of the buffet table.”

Kelsey giggled and bent down to scoop up Tiny in her arms. “I just want you to have some fun, Mom.”

“I do have fun,” Mariah protested. “I have fun spending time with you.”

Kelsey looked at her soberly. “But I’m not always going to be around. Eventually I’ll go off to culinary school and get married and I don’t want you to spend your whole life all alone.”

Mariah leaned forward and kissed her daughter on
the cheek. “You aren’t doing any of those things for several years and you shouldn’t be worrying about me.” Mariah laughed as Tiny licked the underside of her chin. “Now, why don’t you go do something typically teenagerish like make a mess in your room or call one of your friends long-distance and talk too long?”

Kelsey grinned. “Actually, I was kind of wondering if maybe this afternoon I could go to the pool for a couple of hours.”

“I think that’s a great idea. How about I take you and drop you off at the pool right after lunch? You can hang out until about four. Then I’ll pick you up.”

“Cool, and in the meantime I’m going upstairs to mess up my room and make a long-distance phone call.” Kelsey carried her dog out of the kitchen and up the stairs.

At that moment another knock sounded on the door. It was Joel to discuss what work she might have for him to do. He had a faint reek of alcohol but appeared clear-eyed and freshly showered.

They sat at the kitchen table and discussed the various jobs she needed done, agreed on a fair price and decided that the first task for him to tackle was the overgrown yard.

It was twelve thirty when she left to take Kelsey to the pool. Joel was on a lawn tractor, making headway on the front yard, and he waved as they pulled out of the driveway.

“Call me if you want me to come and get you before four,” Mariah said as she pulled up in the parking lot in front of the pool. She handed her daughter her cell phone. “Don’t get it wet and don’t lose it.”

Kelsey rolled her eyes. “I’ll guard it with my life and I’ll see you at four.”

Mariah watched her walk toward the pool entrance, her slender hips swaying beneath the bright pink cover-up she wore. Matching sparkly flip-flops adorned her feet, and Mariah knew beneath the cover-up was a pink and white polka-dot bikini that Mariah thought was half-obscene and her daughter thought was too conservative.

She was growing up so fast and her boyishly slim body now sported a hint of the curves to come. Mariah watched her until she disappeared behind the large fence that surrounded the pool.

What she wanted to do was run after her, wrap her up in a dozen beach towels and tell her to get back in the car. She wanted to lock her in a closet where nobody could ever hurt her, where nobody could ever throw her down in the grass and brutalize her.