His Very Own Girl (12 page)

Despising both her spinelessness and her curiosity, she yanked on Dixon’s hand as soon as the orchestra struck up “Mexicali Rose.” That same portly man with the rich tenor voice was singing, and Lulu let Lt. Harry Dixon hold her—but not too closely. A sense that she was betraying Joe sliced between her ribs like a knife blade.

She knew Dixon had a penchant for the dramatic by the strutting way he walked and how he kept his mustache trimmed with fastidious precision. He liked to be watched and admired. He liked commanding the attention of those around him. Lulu couldn’t fathom what sort of officer he would be, or how he would lead his subordinates and obey his superiors. She’d heard tales of men transformed by combat, sloughing their egos and forgoing fear in order to become soldiers. But as Lt. Dixon watched her, purposefully drawing out the moment, she couldn’t imagine an alteration powerful enough to make him into a man she could respect.

Then again, perhaps her idea of what made a man worth respecting had been completely corrupted. She knew nothing, really, about either Dixon or Joe. She might have been basing estimations of their character on who was simply more pleasing to be with.

“Out with it,” she said.

“Joe Weber is a nasty piece of work. He was always in trouble with the law. A shame, too.” His face assumed a regretful look, like that of a disappointed parent. “After all, he’d been a really good student. Then his dad died . . . and, well, then he just got mean.”

Lulu gnawed on the inside of her upper lip to keep from arguing. Joe Weber? Mean? She could think of a hundred more apt adjectives. Still, she’d hear Dixon out. He was describing a person from years ago. Maybe Joe really had changed that much. Worse still, maybe he hadn’t changed at all. She could simply be imagining what she’d needed and desired.

“So,” Dixon continued, “I guess it didn’t surprise many when he took on Sheriff Plank.”

“Took him on?”

“Plank was determined to help Joe and his family. He made sure Mrs. Weber’s grocery didn’t close after her husband died, wanted to help Joe fly right and graduate.” He shook his head. “Maybe Joe didn’t like the sheriff crowding in on his dad’s place in the family.”

Lulu couldn’t help but feel drawn into Dixon’s story. His demeanor had changed, growing more serious and subdued. He wasn’t simply telling tales.

“Joe started running off when Plank came by for Sunday dinner. He would steal alcohol and go joyriding with a couple of hoodlums fresh out of lockup.”

“Is that why he was sent to prison?”

The moment stretched into that of a dream, where time dripped past with all the speed of cold treacle. She wanted to believe it had been no more than a couple of lads making stupid mistakes. But even as she asked, Lulu knew the truth would be more difficult to hear.

The song ended. Dixon stopped dancing and released Lulu’s hands. “He was sent to prison for beating Sheriff Plank until the man stopped breathing.”

His words struck like a whip. Lulu held perfectly still, arms straight at her sides.

“But he didn’t die,” Dixon said. “Some neighbor kids pulled Weber off the sheriff before he could finish the job.”

“He didn’t die?”

“No, ma’am. But he hasn’t walked or left his bed or taken a piss on his own ever since. The man’s a cripple, paralyzed from the waist up.”

I was hoping to hear he was rotting in the ground.

Lulu remembered the words Joe had growled with such anger and contempt. She heard them in her mind, pinging around like ricocheting bullets, and she knew Dixon spoke the truth. It was heartbreaking and hideous, but it was the truth.

The lights and smoke in the club became too much to bear, congealing her senses. She grounded herself in the pain of her nails digging into her palms.

“You do believe me, don’t you?” Dixon said.

His odd seriousness hadn’t ebbed, but a tense anger bunched the muscles of his shoulders. Whatever unresolved conflict lingered between Harry Dixon and Joe Weber, it extended beyond Joe’s assault on the sheriff. Lulu wanted no part of it.

“I appreciate your taking the time to reveal these events to me, Lieutenant.” She couldn’t hear her own voice, only the reverberations, as if speaking with her hands clamped over her ears. “And now, if you’ll excuse me.”

She staggered away, exhaling when Dixon made no motion to escort her. It was bad enough to hear his words, words that would’ve been easier to dismiss had he taken any apparent joy in delivering them. But she didn’t want his attention, and she didn’t want to be followed.

At the bar, holding on to the polished wooden surface as if to a life raft, Lulu ordered a gin and tonic. That’s where Betsy found her. “I thought you’d be with Joe,” she said.

“He didn’t come tonight.”

“No, he did.” Betsy nodded to a far corner where Joe sat with Smitty.

Lulu’s panic felt as if someone had set fire to her uniform, flaring over her body with the burning, restless tingle. Had he seen the whole exchange, watching and waiting?

“Oh, Lord.”

Betsy touched Lulu’s arm. “What happened?”

Suddenly too thirsty to bear, Lulu finished her gin. “I learned what I should’ve asked a long time ago. My fault, really. I’m not generally one to live in the clouds unless I’m flying.”

Her halfhearted attempt at a joke only deepened Betsy’s frown. “Why he was in prison?”

“That’s right. That officer of Paulie’s, the one Joe fought with—he told me.”

He told me when I should’ve asked. I should’ve asked Joe.

And now it was too late—too late, even, to leave without him noticing. What sort of explanation had she been expecting from Dixon? She remembered her flare of hope, eager to believe that Joe’d been guilty of nothing worse than bootlegging. Then she would’ve been able to take Joe’s hand and absolve him with the platitude that boys will be boys.

But that wasn’t going to happen.

“Well, this may be my father’s legal background speaking,” Betsy said, “but I’d recommend additional inquiries. Perhaps with the suspect in question.”

Lulu’s head throbbed. The shame of how she’d conducted this whole affair was almost as difficult to bear as Dixon’s revelation. “I couldn’t possibly. What would I say?”

“What we’ve all learned to say during the last few years—what’s on your mind. If you hold back, Lulu, you’ll regret it. Don’t let this be how it ends between you, whatever it was.”

“I can’t. I just want to go.” Lulu knotted her fingers with those of her friend. “Please, Betts, just let’s go home.”

The thin, neat orchestra leader stepped up to the microphone. “And this here’s our last number for the evening, ladies and gents. I hope you have a good night together. Keep safe.”

Last dance.

Lulu’s gaze darted to the table. Joe was walking her way.

chapter ten

One minute Lulu was dancing or flirting. The next minute she was in Joe’s arms.

That’s how Saturday nights had gone since their bet. It had been working as mysteriously as grace and as surely as midnight’s arrival. Harder to admit was that Joe depended on their unspoken promise like the drawing of his next breath.

Until that night. When Harry Dixon brought it to an end.

Joe read it on her face and in the unbending stiffness in her backbone. Dixon had told her.

The orchestra began to play “I Don’t Want to Walk Without You.” A sound like a quiet sigh multiplied a hundred times over eased upward from the crowd. Joe worked his way across the club and didn’t stop until he was standing before her.

“Last dance, Lulu.” He laid his hands between them, palms up, and held them there. Waiting. He sensed Betsy’s curiosity and unease, but he had eyes for Lulu alone.

“Go home, Joe. I was just about to do the same.”

Fed up with everything, angered but unable—unwilling—to expel that toxic rage from his body, he let his hands drop. How many years would he be punished for what he’d done? Long after the last day of his sentence, that was certain. He was on the verge of the Allied invasion of Europe, yet his past dogged him across the Atlantic. Short of traveling through time or peeling away his own skin, he’d never be able to escape it. A clean break was all he’d wanted when he’d volunteered for the army, but even that remained out of reach.

He might as well lock his dreams in a metal box and throw them down a well. At least then he’d be a better soldier, one without any delusions of a good life after war.

“I’ll go.” He didn’t know if she’d be able to hear his quiet words. “Unless you’d like to know my side of it now.”

Her lips twisted and she ducked her eyes, like a child caught misbehaving. “Dixon was telling the truth, I’d hazard. You beat that sheriff until he couldn’t walk anymore.”

“I did.”

And there it was: the disappointment on her face. He knew it would be hard to take from Lulu, but the actual pain surprised him. His guts shriveled up and the old, old shame clamped a stranglehold on his throat. She wouldn’t believe him even if he told her. No one ever had.

The last song of the night ended.

“Why?” she asked quietly.

Her eyes glittered, overly bright as the club’s lights turned up to full power. Servicemen and their dates filed toward the exits, slowly, like sleepwalkers reluctant to abandon a sweet dream.

Betsy slipped away. A quick glance found her joining Paulie near the entryway, with Smitty and a pair of sergeants mingling nearby.

Lulu appeared to make a decision. “Betts? Paulie?” she called to her friends. “You go on. I’ll get home all right.”

They lingered a few moments more, then departed. Joe and Lulu were alone in the Henley, which seemed cavernous now. The club was nearly empty except for the musicians packing up their instruments near the stage. Brighter now, and with the cigarette smoke dissipating, the ceiling appeared much higher.

“So? Tell me. Why did you do it?”

Joe tamped down his reflexive fear of being deemed a liar. He couldn’t take that from Lulu. But her expression had changed. She looked at him with a hope that made his heart ache. Tears pressed at the backs of his eyelids—tears he hadn’t ever shed, no matter how bad things had gotten during the trial and that long first year. Her expression said that she was wishing against wishes for a rational explanation, one that could justify beating a man to the point of paralysis.

He had such an explanation, but no one had ever believed him. Not even his own mother. Suzie had been so afraid and mortified, and then her life had been ruined anyway. So why would this impulsive Englishwoman believe him when no one else had?

But with the clarity of a bright morning, Joe realized he had nothing to lose.

“I caught him raping my sister.”

Lulu’s face went white. She whispered his name and touched two fingers to her lower lip. A heavy swallow contorted the smooth length of her throat.

Her vulnerability didn’t ease his temper. He still felt injured—vindictive, even, when she wasn’t the cause. What he wouldn’t give to have Dixon back under his fists. But that sort of mean temper had been to blame once before. He focused on Lulu’s dark eyes and struggled for calm.

“Did Dixon mention that part?” he asked. “Did he mention how his testimony blackened Suzie’s name? He took the stand and called her loose, right there in court, as if she’d wanted what Plank did. Did he tell you about how she left town because of all the talk—or how our own mother didn’t even believe Sheriff Plank capable of that much evil?”

“Joe, please—”

“Did he?”

“Joe, stop!”

He found himself as near to Lulu as her own scent. His hands grasped her upper arms. He stepped back and spiked his hair with agitated fingers, heart slamming against his ribs. “Sorry,” he muttered. “But, God, Lulu—I wish you’d asked me first.”

“Me, too,” she said, her voice clouded with emotion.

“A little late now.” His sarcasm was made of pure hurt, but he didn’t feel ready to behave like a grown-up.

“Don’t lay this entirely at my door, Joe. You asked if I needed to know. I didn’t—not then, not when I never expected to see you again. You could’ve been the one to press the issue had you really wanted to.”

Lulu touched his arm, then reached up and smoothed his hair. Joe let his eyelids roll shut as he absorbed her touch. Part of him hated the control he’d given to her, the way she could jerk him this way and that. His life was little more his own in the service than it had been in prison. And now Lulu called the shots. All he could do was sit back and wait for her decisions. Would it be scraps or a whole damn banquet?

But she was right. He hadn’t wanted to tell her, not when they’d happily spent weeks living in a bubble of good times and laughter.

“We missed our dance,” she said softly. “I was so looking forward to it.”

“Really?”

“Really. It’s been weeks.” Her fingers curled around the back of his neck, and Joe let his forehead fall forward, gently, until it met hers. “We can talk about this, yes?”

“Talk?”

“About everything. About . . .” Her gaze darted to the side. “About
us
.”

Now his heart was hammering for another reason altogether. He’d never seen her so flustered. It gave him hope when he should’ve been long past the capacity for such a childish feeling. Hope that she believed him. Hope that she’d be his.

Idiot.

But that same blunt truth remained: he had nothing to lose. No one waited for him back home in Indiana, and falling for her was no more dangerous than jumping out of a C-47.

“Yeah,” he said, “I’d like that.”

Kicked out of the Henley by a pair of dour-faced cleaning women, Lulu walked in silence toward the train station with her arm looped through Joe’s. He was so strong—tall and strong and wounded in ways she’d never imagined. She didn’t dare believe his version of events, but how could she not? She’d spent too many nights with him to entirely trust Dixon’s tell-all.

Joe could be riled; she’d seen it. And what man didn’t have his limits? But to beat a lawman to the point of paralysis required either the hideous temper of a maniac or a bloody good reason. Had Joe caught the sheriff raping his sister . . . ? Lulu could imagine that.

Or it was just what she wanted to believe.

No, she
knew
it. She knew the unclean feeling that had crawled along her skin when surrounded by Dixon and his cronies. She knew the difference between men she could trust to know limits and boundaries and truth. Joe wasn’t an animal and he wasn’t a liar. He was as dangerous as a sky full of bombs, but not to her physical well-being. Lulu was very close to not caring a bit.

The train station seemed a ghostly place. Conductors carrying electric torches lined with blue filters directed the way, and overhead, every fourth fixture glowed with that same eerie blue aura. Sometimes Lulu didn’t even notice, but that night, when circumstances had come together to make her needful of sure things, the gloominess and somber voices only added to her despondency. She and Joe certainly didn’t matter, not when the world was ripping itself apart.

The train to Sileby whistled in the distance, far to the south.

“Everything’s a dream here,” he said, his words hushed. “Does that make sense?”

His eyes had taken on a pained darkness. What must it have been like for him in prison? And now, to be in England on the verge of combat? What would it take to make that pain disappear?

Not much. She knew how, if only she were brave enough.

She was brave every time she climbed into an airplane and dodged barrage balloons and monstrous weather systems. That was her job. She loved it. But she’d never felt braver than when she reached up, right then, and kissed Joe.

He caught her in his arms, enfolding her, offering the tall trunk of his body as her anchor. Moving with slow, patient strokes and sweet nips, his mouth was eager but respectful. Still he held back, his upper body rigid and his kiss achingly polite. No matter the hellish petulance she’d inflicted on him, he still welcomed her back. She’d known he would, and a guilty flicker of regret made her desperate—desperate to make it up to him.