Deeper Than Need (34 page)

Now, standing at the foot of the steps, Noah gazed at that big old house, remembered that day when he’d come out here, despite his father’s attempts to keep him from doing it. He’d ignored the police tape and would have barreled inside if old Max hadn’t stopped him.

Max hadn’t been able to keep Noah from seeing the bloody smears on the windows or the rusty stains on the porch. The lingering ache that had haunted him for so long had finally faded. But now he felt raw, exposed, as he stood there, ready to bare himself to the woman who was coming to mean everything to him.

If they were going to have any chance at all, this talk had to happen. It had to happen now.

Closing his eyes, he forced a breath past the band that had wrapped around his lungs, and then he turned his head and stared at her. The soft light of the fading day painted her skin a delicate gold and he reached up, cupped her skin.

“I’ve got things I need to tell you,” he said gruffly. “Things that are almost impossible for me to talk about. But before I do…”

He dipped his head and pressed a kiss to her lips, felt her soften against him, reach for him. He caught her wrists as she reached up to cup his face, felt the maddening beat of her pulse. “The past twenty years of my life have been nothing but a cloud. Everything was just … grey. There was no color, no light, no laughter. All that changed the minute you and Micah came barreling into my life. I don’t want to lose that.”

“There’s nothing you’re going to say that will change what I feel. I…” She paused and blew out a breath. “Sometimes I get a little scared about just
what
I feel, considering that we really haven’t known each other that long. But … you felt right to me the first time I looked at you. Whatever you have to say to me isn’t going to change the man you are.”

The words rested on his heart, almost painful yet still enough to make him catch his breath. Hope could cut deep sometimes.

*   *   *

“Can we go inside?”

Trinity stood at Noah’s side as he stared at her house. It threw shadows across the ground and she felt their weight, like the shadows had been forged into her very soul.

But looking at Noah, somehow, she realized the shadows went a lot deeper.

Swallowing, she nodded. Then she stopped. “I … ah, I don’t have my keys.”

He pulled his key ring out. “I’ve got a set. I had it with me from earlier.”

“Okay.” She went to reach for it, but he was already walking toward the house. Something about the way he moved made her think he was on a mission—he had a focus, one he was bent on carrying out.

Now.

Following along behind him, she watched as he stopped just at the top of the porch’s steps, his head turning just a bit to stare at something along the side. She followed the direction of his gaze, but whatever it was he was looking at, she didn’t see it.

He paused at the door, waiting for her, and they went inside together.

Her heart lunged inside her chest, racing like it was trying to jump completely outside.

“I hate this house,” Noah said quietly after he’d shut the door behind her. “I never did like it, even as a child.”

She looked up at him, but he still had that focused, intent look on his face. “My father did some of the earlier rehab work on it, back about twenty years ago. After…” He stopped and reached up, rubbing a hand across his chest.

She caught it before he could lower it completely.

“After what, Noah?”

He shifted his gaze down and met hers as they twined their fingers. “I don’t know why nobody has told you,” he murmured, lifting his free hand and cupping her cheek. “Why hasn’t anybody told you?”

The knot in her throat was enough to choke her. Some tiny little voice inside her head whispered,
Maybe you should leave.

But the rest of her told her to take another step. So she did. She took another step and slid her free arm around Noah’s waist. “Maybe they were just waiting for you to do it. So why don’t you get on that?”

*   *   *

Waiting for you.

Her voice was a soft, steady murmur over the roaring of blood in his ears. He closed his eyes and tried to focus on her and nothing but her, even as the memories tried to overwhelm him.

Standing there, in the hall of that old house, half the walls stripped, while the shadows of twilight started to wrap around them, he settled back against the wall, keeping Trinity’s weight locked against him.

“Her name…” he murmured, forcing the words out through a throat gone tight. “Her name was Lana. I’d known her pretty much my entire life and I think I’d loved her from just about the minute I saw her. We were in first grade.”

He kept most of it as short as he could. Telling the woman he was falling for
now
about the girl he’d loved
then
was just … strange.

Trinity listened, her arm curved around his waist, her hand slipping under his shirt to stroke his back. It was a slight, welcome distraction, and when the memories took too dark a twist, he would pause and think about how nice that felt, her hand gliding across his skin. It would help. For a minute. Then he’d have to start talking again.

“She was coming here,” he said, and then abruptly he had to move. Trinity’s body tensed against his and he pulled away, gently nudging her aside before he started to pace.

He found himself in the living room, bits and pieces of the police report he’d read circling through his mind.

Pool of human blood—

Floor of the living room along the northern wall—

No weapon found—

Crossing the floor, he knelt down and touched the floorboards. “They took the entire floor in here up after that. My dad helped do so much of the work after that day. Yet they never found the body in the pantry, did they?”

“Noah?”

Hearing the confusion and the fear in her voice, he stood back up and faced Trinity. “Sorry.” He shook his head and blew out a breath. “I never talk about this. Even when I was supposed to, I never did. She was here. Lana. My girlfriend. For the longest time, she was everything. My world. She was…”

He reached for the right words, but they just didn’t want to come. Finally, he said, “Have you ever known anybody who just collected strays? Cats, dogs … you name it?”

“Yeah.” A ghost of a smile curved her lips. “My dad. He never keeps them or anything—he’s good at finding homes for them, but he’s very good at finding strays.”

“That was Lana. But she didn’t just find animals. She found people, too. People in trouble, people who needed to talk to somebody. There was a little girl in second grade—she was being abused, but you’d never think it, because of her parents. Lana, though, she thought something was wrong. She managed to get the girl to talk … to
my
dad. Eventually they got her out of there, but not before the bastard broke her arm. If they’d listened to Lana and my father from the get-go, she never would have been hurt as bad as she was.”

Noah moved over to the window, carefully avoiding looking down. The blood was no longer there. It didn’t matter. He could still see those swipes of blood. Max had all but dragged him off the porch, the wily old goat far stronger than he looked. Those smears of blood, the look of it dried on the glass, had lodged in Noah’s mind all this time, an ugly stain that still loomed larger than life after all these years.

“She was always finding strays … always wanting to save somebody. Everybody. The world.” He blew out a sigh. “Then she found somebody she couldn’t help. Or maybe she
did
help, and she paid too high a price for it. I don’t know.”

Floorboards creaked and he stiffened, then relaxed, as Trinity slid her arms around him. “What happened, Noah?”

*   *   *

He looked back down at the floor.

The look in his eyes was one she’d remember for the rest of her life. Sheer, broken misery.

“What happened in my house, Noah?” she whispered when he just remained silent, staring at the floor like it held him mesmerized.

He finally dragged his gaze away and looked up at her, his eyes half-wild. “I don’t know. Nobody knows.”

“What…?”

He shook his head. “Nobody knows.” His body shuddered and he pulled away, stumbled over to the couch and sank down. He rested his elbows on it and looked around the room like he’d never seen it before. “This place was empty then. It’s been empty most of my life. Judge Max never had much luck keeping renters, even before then. Couldn’t get a buyer. Everybody local knows about this place.” He slid her a look. “The Realtor has to tell you if you asked, but somebody from out of town? Would they think to ask? I guess you were the dream buyer.”

With her heart in her throat she moved across the floor, settled her weight on the edge of the coffee table. “What happened?” she asked again, dread a heavy force inside her.

“Hell. Death. Everything,” Noah murmured, looking away. “This house, it’s got history. Goes way back. Happened back in the fifties or sixties. That’s when it all started. A woman—her husband beat her to death after he caught her in bed with another man. It was the judge’s sister. The husband killed himself in jail and the house passed to Judge Max. He could never sell it. Small town … people talk.” Noah rubbed the back of his neck and sighed, shifting his gaze to the spot on the floor again before looking back out the window. “He’d rent it out off and on, but nobody stayed more than a month or two. They’d talk about weird noises, doors opening. Voices. He almost had it sold once—an out-of-state buyer, once. But it fell through. As time goes by, he started having a harder time even finding renters. Place gets a bad rep, and it’s starting to fall apart.”

Noah shoved up from the couch, hands jammed in his pockets. “I grew up hearing stories about this place. How it was haunted. That if you stood out there, at the edge of the walk, on a cloudy night, you could hear a woman’s screams for help. It was raining the night Frampton murdered his wife. Lots of stories about this place … lots of them.” He swallowed, closing his eyes. “By the time I got to high school, it was getting pretty run-down—had been sitting empty a few years. That old guy couldn’t even
rent
it out. People would move in, then be gone in a few days, claiming all kinds of crazy stuff—thinking they heard people moving through the house at night. People talking. Doors opening. Crazy stuff. Nobody would stay here, and in a town this small once you start talking everybody knows. I guess he gave up. Kept the place up pretty good for the longest time … watched it like a hawk.” A weak grin crossed Noah’s face as he glanced her way. “I think he expected to find some of the kids from school were behind the problems. Called the cops if anybody so much as lingered on the street for more than five seconds.”

Noah turned away and she watched as he crossed his arms over his chest, tilted his head back. Silence fell and she could practically see him bracing himself. Preparing himself.

She tried to do the same, but she had no idea what to expect.

Part of her wanted to just cover his mouth, tell him not to say anything else.
What did it matter? It was twenty years ago.

But whatever
it
was, it mattered to him.

“It was October,” he murmured. “My senior year. Twenty years ago. That night, Judge Max heard something. Again. Typical complaint, from what everybody said. The cops took their time getting out here. I guess they didn’t expect to find anything.”

Didn’t expect.

Trinity’s knees went weak and blood roared in her head, her heart banging against her ribs in hard, heavy beats.

“They get out there and all they find is blood.” Noah turned to look at her. “That’s it. Just blood. Nobody is here. No cars. No sign that anybody had broken in, although they can tell people have been inside. There’s the blood, you see. On the porch and then more of it. Inside the house. They found some fingerprints on the window, the doors. One set is hers. They identified that set and found another set they couldn’t ID, along with some partials, but that’s it.”

“That’s it?”

Dumbly, he said, “That’s it.”

Silence fell, heavy and icy and cold as death, dragging by for long, miserable seconds until he finally shattered it. “She was here.” He closed his eyes and a harsh breath shuddered out of him. “We’d talked earlier that day. I asked her if we were going out, and she said she couldn’t. She had to do something. She didn’t tell me she was coming here, but somebody saw her on the road. Walking this way.”

“Why was she out here? If this place was that much trouble…?”

He didn’t answer at first and she wondered if maybe he’d decided to just not finish this. Whatever it was, Trinity wasn’t sure she
wanted
to know now. Later, if curiosity got the better of her—

“There was this kid,” Noah murmured, his voice thick and rusty. He went back to the couch, sinking down like every bone in his body ached. “A guy from school.”

He paused, and in that brief moment her heart slammed hard against her ribs and she knew. She’d heard this. Softly she said, “David Sutter.”

Noah blinked, his lids drooping low over his eyes, and then slowly he nodded. “You’ve heard his name.”

Trinity moved across the living room and settled her weight gingerly on the coffee table, her knees just inches from his. “Yeah. People usually stop whispering when I walk by, but I’ve got good ears. Who was David?”

“A boy we went to school with.” Noah reached out and laid his hands on her knees, fingers splayed wide, like he desperately needed the contact. “People started talking crazy after they all disappeared—Lana and David wanted to run away together, so they teamed up and killed his folks, crazy shit like that. It’s just crazy. Lana wouldn’t have done anything like that.”

Trinity reached up and brushed Noah’s hair back.

“She made me promise I wouldn’t tell,” he said again, and there was something so lost, so broken, about those words.

“Why were they meeting, Noah?”

He looked down. “I can’t say for certain.…” His shoulders rose and fell on a heavy sigh. “The Sutter family was big here. Influential, important. You probably know what I mean. David was a jock. Seemed nice enough, but he was quiet. Kept to himself, even though he always had a bunch of people following him around. He played football, baseball. I knew him, barely. I played basketball, but that was it. We saw each other some because of church—we didn’t go to the same place, but our dads had mutual acquaintances.” He paused, swallowed. “She told me he was in trouble. That’s all she’d say. She wouldn’t tell me what kind, but sometimes…”