Luke (22 page)

“Well,” he said in sleep-drugged sultriness, “what are you waiting for?”

“Not a thing,” she said on a low laugh of delight.

And didn't.

Much later, she took her pen and notebook out
onto the front deck once more and settled on the bench with her feet tucked under her in yoga fashion. Though she was in no real mood to work this morning, she'd discovered long ago that inspiration was a lot more likely to come around if she was ready for it. In an attempt to get started, she did a little automatic writing, just jotting down whatever ran through her head, letting her thoughts flow in black ink onto the page. Sometimes, that was all it took.

Luke disturbed her concentration, however. He was hacking off the low-hanging branches of the oak that were scratching against the fiberglass of the cabin walls and roof. These branches he tied to the rails as additional camouflage. When he finished that task, he brought out a large olive green net that he spread out on the cabin roof and draped over the exposed rear deck. Standing on the roof, he stretched up to snag a high branch to use as a tent-like support for it. Holding its leafy end under one arm, he fastened a rope to the net's grommets and, in turn, knotted the rope around the branch. Then he released both.

The branch sprang back into place with a snap that shook the tree. April looked up at the sound. At that moment, something long and gray-black dislodged from the tree branch above her. It fell heavily. It landed across her lap in a twisting coil of long muscle.

Snake!

April yelled. Her notebook flew in one direction and her pen in another. She surged to her feet, dumping the water moccasin on the carpet. The
snake landed with a thump and whipped to its belly. It hissed, mouth wide open to show the cotton-white lining of its throat. In the same instant, April sprang away, stumbling against the rail.

Movement flashed above her as Luke leaped from the cabin roof. He landed on the balls of his feet, balancing as he countered the violent rock of the boat. His eyes were hard, and the ax he'd used earlier was in his hand.

The snake struck. Luke swung. The snake's head sprang free, cleaved from its body in a single clean stroke. Immediately, Luke moved forward and batted the remains over the side. Then he swung to face April.

She flung herself at him, her body shaking convulsively as she held tight. He closed her in the circle of his arms and rocked her like a child.

“You're all right? It didn't bite you?”

She moved her head in a jerky negative.

“You're sure. I didn't think there was time, but—”

“No—no, I'm sure. I'm just…”

“You're shook. Anybody would be. The damn thing must have been lying along a limb above you. I didn't see it. I'm sorry I—”

“You couldn't help it.” She cut across that hurried explanation with its undercurrent of self-blame.

“I'd have had to inject you with antivenin, and I wouldn't have liked that at all. And we're so far back in here that by the time we got you to a hospital you would still have been mighty sick.”

“It didn't happen. I'm fine.” She lifted her head
to give him a look that was somewhat steadier. “Could you really have done that, used antivenin?”

He shrugged a little, his brown gaze serious. “It goes with the territory.”

“Amazing.” She smiled. “My hero.”

His face changed abruptly, losing all expression. Then he flushed so thoroughly that even his ears turned red. He stepped away from her, saying with awkward humor, “See that you remember it.”

It was a creditable attempt at recovery, still she saw through it as plainly as if he'd accused her. Her secret was out. Luke had discovered what she'd done, what she had been doing for years. He knew that he was the prototype for her heroes. He knew, and he wasn't happy about it.

He was turning away, getting ready to go back to what he'd been doing before the snake intervened. She took a quick step after him to put a hand on his arm. “Wait.”

“What?” He paused, his manner polite but not encouraging.

She couldn't do it, couldn't bring it all out into the open right now. She couldn't confess while they were stuck here together on this boat. His anger and withdrawal would be intolerable if there was no way for them to get away from each other.

She moistened her lips, searching for something, anything, to say instead. “I—wouldn't you like to stop for a while, maybe have something cold to drink?”

He met her gaze for a long, considering moment, then his eyes warmed a fraction. “Don't want me
dropping any more snakes into your paradise, that it?”

“Maybe. And maybe I just feel like company.”

He tilted his head. “That's a switch.”

“A lot of things have changed,” she replied, holding his eyes with an effort.

He was silent while a warm puff of breeze like a lover's sigh stole through the leaves above them and sunspots fell around their feet in shapes like ancient, irregular gold coins. Then he gave a short nod. “You make the drinks while I finish up top. Then we'll talk.”

“Talk?” she asked. “What about?”

He studied her a long second before he turned away. Over his shoulder, he said, “Later,”

April felt the muscles of her stomach tighten. It didn't sound good.

L
uke had the best of intentions, but he wasn't sure where or how to start. He'd been silent so long about what happened that night thirteen years ago that he couldn't seem to find a way to open the subject. The whole point of bringing it up had more to do with April than with himself, however, and that seemed the best approach, maybe the only approach.

“About Frank Randall,” he said finally as he sat thumbing the condensation from the side of his glass of iced pineapple juice. “If he's behind all this, it isn't because he has anything against you. He's been threatening to get even with me for years. Looks as if he's finally figured how to go about it.”

“Through me, you mean.”

April had never been slow on the uptake, he thought in reluctant admiration. “Frank never thought I was sorry enough for what happened to his sister. Maybe he thinks I need another woman on my conscience.”

“Another—Good grief, Luke! Is that supposed to make me feel better? To be told he has no hard feelings toward me, but wants to kill me anyway?”

“I'm not sure how it should make you feel, but I thought you ought to know the reason.”

Her clear golden gaze was intent on his face as she replied, “Yes, well, that's an easy one.”

“There's a little more to it than you might imagine.”

“Meaning?” She waited.

He was quiet, his gaze on a great blue heron that stalked minnows along the water's edge a short distance away. Turning back to her at last, he said, “You never asked me about the night Mary Ellen died. Why was that?”

“I didn't have to. Frank told me.”

“Exactly. Frank told you. But what did he say?”

She lifted a shoulder. “What does it matter? His sister was with you. You'd both been drinking. There was a wreck. You lived and she didn't.”

“God, April, you and I were the next thing to engaged. We had talked about where and how we were going to live together, what we'd do with our lives and how many kids we wanted. We had a future.”

“We were supposed to have a future,” she corrected.

“You were the one who decided we didn't.”

“After you proved it wouldn't work!”

“I was in an accident. I could have been killed. But you didn't even want to see me, didn't want to know from my own mouth what happened.” The old pain was in his voice, but he couldn't avoid that. The things he was saying had festered inside him for years. He might as well get it all out while he was at it.

“You left me at my front door and went off drinking and joyriding with Mary Ellen Randall,” she answered in low distress. “What more was there to say?”

“You might have wondered if I'd really been drinking. Or if there had been any
joy
in it for me.”

Her lips twisted and she refused to meet his gaze. “Don't be any more crude than you can help.”

“There you go again!” he said, thudding a fist down on the padded bench between them. “You're judging me without a hearing, condemning me on the word of a man who may be doing his dead level best to kill us both.”

“I don't—”

“Or just maybe,” he added, “you're putting me in the same category as your dad.”

“We'll leave my parents out of this, if you don't mind,” she said, her lips in a hard line as she faced him.

“I'd love to, but they're part of it because they are part of you. Your father shot your mother in a drunken rage at the end of a quarrel over another man. But the truth is that he was accusing her of what he did regularly himself. In fact, it all began because someone told your mother he'd been seen parked out beside the lake with another woman.”

“That's not so!” she cried.

“It is,” he insisted. “It's all in the case file. A neighbor who heard part of the quarrel told the police. You were there. You knew it back then, so you should recognize the truth now. Somehow, you got it into your head that I was like him, maybe because we looked something alike. You never did trust me,
and when I was caught in similar circumstances, you immediately assumed the worst. You still do.”

“No, you're wrong,” she insisted, but the words were hardly more than a whisper and the look in her eyes was haunted.

Luke gave a stubborn shake of his head. “It's the truth.”

She glanced from him for long seconds. Finally, she said, “He almost shot me, too, my dad. He put the pistol to my head and held it there forever. He was shaking. My mother was—There was blood everywhere, so much blood. I was crying so hard I couldn't say a word.” April set the palm of her hand on her bare thigh, rubbing hard. “I don't know why he changed his mind.”

“Because you were his little girl and he loved you,” Luke answered in low reassurance as he reached to cover her cold fingers with his own.

“He said I was like my mother, all sweet and innocent when I was little but I'd grow up to be false and hard-hearted and—”

“Don't,” he said.

“And tainted,” she finished.

Luke cursed the dead man to himself before he said, “The man your mother was supposed to have been seeing on the side was a lawyer. She was seeing him, all right, but about a divorce. Rumor was that he waived his legal fees for attractive women. That may or may not have been true, but your mother's best friend said there was nothing between them. It's likely your mother was exactly like you back then. In other words, completely innocent.”

A small sound left her that was neither excla
mation, sob, nor sigh, but something akin to them all. “You make it seem so simple. But there's no way to be that certain about something that happened so long ago.”

“I told you, I saw the file. Roan showed it to me. The lawyer your mother was seeing made a statement, as did a couple of neighbors. Your father's statement was there, too, the few words he spoke before he…”

“Before he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head,” she said.

“And grief,” Luke added. “The one thing he said over and over was how sorry he was for what he'd done, how much he wished that he could undo it.”

“Oh, dear God,” she whispered with tears rising in her eyes.

“It hurts, I know,” he said, his voice low. “I'm sorry.”

“No.” She took a deep breath. “I never knew that part, how he felt afterward. I only remember him standing over me saying those things, then the shot. At first I thought that I was—But he'd turned the gun on himself.”

“You were only five.” Luke felt so helpless. He wanted to reach out and dry her tears, but didn't quite dare.

“A lifetime ago, yet it seems like only yesterday.” She wiped the wetness from under her eyes as if she'd noticed his attention centered there. “But we were talking about Frank, weren't we? What reason would he have to lie to me?”

She meant to distract him from her problems,
Luke thought. He was reluctant to let it go at that, but there were still things that needed to be said. “Why? Revenge, in part. To take whatever happiness I had in exchange for what I'd taken from him. Maybe even to put the blame on somebody, anybody, other than himself.”

“You make it sound so personal.”

“It was,” he answered in grim certainty. “It still is.”

She turned toward him on the bench, her gaze searching his face. After a moment, she said simply, “All right. Maybe I didn't ask when I should have. Tell me now.”

Luke felt his heart swell in his chest. It was all he could do to breathe, much less talk, yet he had to make her understand. This might be the only chance he'd ever get.

“Mary Ellen was my age,” he finally began, “which made her a couple of years older than you, a big difference in high school. You may not remember a lot about her, but she was a brown mouse of a girl until she turned fifteen. Then she went over the top—fifties bleached hair, Dracula nail polish, dressed like Fredrick's of Hollywood. The guys were gaga over her, some of them. Of course it was the wrong kind of attention. She turned wild, slipping out at night, showing up in the wrong places, drinking, collecting scalps.”

“If by that you mean she crawled into the back seat with any boy who asked, and some who never got around to it,” April interjected. “I do remember that part. And if you're looking for a nice way to say she used to chase you, I remember that, too.”

“You were jealous,” he said, too amazed by the discovery to be more diplomatic.

“I was not! I felt sorry for her, in a way. She was so obvious, and had so little pride. Besides, even Frank admitted she was after you.”

“She didn't make saying no too easy. The only thing she understood was a downright refusal, yet she had so few defenses. It's hard to get away from something like that without hurting somebody.”

“Something you had a hard time dealing with,” she said with a faint twist to her lips.

“Maybe. She seemed so desperate, always reaching out for closeness but never having enough, never quite expecting anything real, as if she didn't deserve it. She was afraid of Frank, too. She used to try to hide from him, and was always making people swear not to tell him where she was. It didn't work. He usually found her.”

“Frank was overprotective, is that it?”

Luke hesitated. “I don't think any of us gave it much thought at the time. Their folks were dead and there was some aunt who'd lived with them for years, and belonged to one of the fundamental church groups. Part of Mary Ellen's wildness was rebellion against years of never being allowed to wear makeup or jeans and that sort of thing. But looking back, I think there was something else going on, something not quite right between her and her brother.”

“Are you trying to say there was something—unnatural about Frank's attitude?”

“You got it. The way she acted that last night,
some of the things she said, suggested it. Not that we'll ever know for sure.”

April gave a slow shake of her head. “I can't believe it. Poor Mary Ellen.”

“It happens.”

“Yes,” April said quietly. “But what about that last night? How did she wind up with you after you took me home?”

“I passed through town on the way back out to Chemin-a-Haut. When I got to the hangout near the courthouse, I noticed Roan and Kane there with some of the gang, so I stopped. I left my hot rod running while I walked over to tell the guys something—what, I don't remember, though it seemed important at the time. I noticed Mary Ellen with the rest of the crowd, but didn't think much about it. While we were standing there, I heard my car door slam. Mary Ellen had climbed in and was sitting behind the wheel.”

A startled expression appeared in April's eyes. “You mean she—Never mind. Don't let me interrupt.”

Luke was grateful for her forbearance since he'd as soon say what had to be said while he still had the courage. “She was upset. She'd had a few beers and wasn't making much sense, though I gathered that she and Frank had been fighting. She chose my car because it was handy, but also because she thought I might protect her from him. At first, I tried to talk to her. Kane and Roan left me to it and headed for home. After a few minutes, Mary Ellen looked past me and said Frank was coming after her. She yelled at me to come on if I wanted my car
back. I barely made it through the open window before she took off like a missile.”

“Was Frank chasing her?” April asked with a frown.

Luke was tempted to lie. He just couldn't do it. Getting it right this time was too important. “If he was, I never saw him. Nobody was behind us. Before we were two miles down the road, I realized she meant to kill us both.”

“She—but why?”

“What she said was that if I was too good to sleep with her, then maybe I was good enough to die with her.”

“You hadn't slept with her?” Her brief glance was strained and a little skeptical.

“Lord, April. You were the first and only girl I'd been with like that back then. Couldn't you tell?”

“How was I supposed to do that when you were the only boy I'd ever gone out with, much less slept with? But I always assumed the two of you were doing something besides riding that night.”

“So did everyone else,” he said bitterly. “Afterward, it seemed that since I had the name, I might as well enjoy it.”

April apparently didn't care to follow that lead. She said instead, “So, Mary Ellen was driving when you left town. When did you take the wheel?”

“I didn't.”

“Frank said—”

“Frank wasn't there so how was he supposed to know? But everyone else believed him. Even you.”

“Because it made sense. You always drove fast and your car was a hot rod, as you said. It was the
next summer that you and Kane and Roan went on the NASCAR circuit.”

“That doesn't make me reckless. Or suicidal.”

“But Mary Ellen was?”

Luke couldn't tell whether April believed a word he was saying or thought he was lying through his teeth. It didn't matter. He'd come this far, so might as well go all the way to the end. In answer to her question, he said, “It's hard to be sure, now. Sometimes I think it was a suicide mission, and other times I believe she was just crazy wild, hurting inside and mad at the world because of it so she didn't really care what happened. She drove like a maniac, topping hills in the middle of the road, flying around blind curves on the wrong side, taking scary chances. She wanted to see how fast she could go, I think, and how far she could stretch her luck. It was as if there was something she needed to outrun. I don't know, maybe it was her demons.”

“Demons,” April repeated, her gaze unfocused.

“That's Roan's word for problems caused by past mistakes,” he said. “We all have them. They may come in different shapes and sizes, but they're there.”

“Yes. So, Mary Ellen's caught up with her?”