Now or Never (28 page)

She sighed. “You couldn’t just leave it at adorable? And since you’re asking, actually no. No one has ever told me.”

He lifted his head and stared at her, astonished. “Only me?”

“Only you.”

His eyes softened. He tilted her chin with his finger so she was looking at him. “Poor Mary Mallory Malone,” he said softly. “Not even her mother told her.”

“Not even my mother,” she agreed sadly.

He felt the sudden change in her mood, and he wanted to say don’t worry, everything’s all right now. But it wasn’t. He knew if she didn’t talk to someone about what had happened, share her emotions, she would be crippled by her past forever.

“You never did finish telling me about those years in Golden,” he said.

She shrugged, suddenly remote. “I lived there. Then I left.”

She paced restlessly to the big wall of windows, stood, arms folded, gazing out.

“And your mother? What happened to her, Mal?”

Her back was rigid with tension under the sapphire sweater. “What does it matter to you?”

He strode across the floor to where she was standing. He grabbed her shoulders, but she shrugged him off, took a step away from him.

“You have to tell me,” he insisted. “It’s the only way it will ever get better.”

Mal looked at him through suddenly shuttered eyes, hating him for forcing her to remember, hating the memories that lay like dead dogs in the murky depths of her mind.

“Just who do you think you are anyway, Harry Jordan,” she cried, upset.

He looked steadily at her. “A friend.”

Her eyes dulled with despair, and her head drooped. She looked lost, grief-stricken, and Harry knew he had catapulted her into the past and that he was looking at the girl she used to be.

Mal could feel little tremors of panic rippling down her spine as she was forced to think about it again. She could remember every detail of that day. She could hear the desolate whine of the wind and the roar of the waves, see it all as perfectly as if it were a rerun on television.

It was Thanksgiving, and she was eighteen years old. The journey from Seattle to Golden had been long and tedious, and the local bus had rattled her bones and her teeth for the last hour. She didn’t know whether to be relieved or frightened when it finally bounced over the bumps and potholes into the town parking lot and ground to a halt.

“End of the line,” the driver said, removing his peaked cap and wiping his sweaty brow. Without looking at her, he eased his bulk from the undersprung seat and clambered down the steps.

Her eyes, hidden behind thick pale-rimmed spectacles, followed him. Leaning unsteadily into the wind, he walked toward the weathered clapboard shack that served as ticket office, cafe, and tourist information center. She had lived in Golden for six years. She had ridden Chuck Montgomery’s bus a hundred times, and he had never once acknowledged her. It was that kind of town.

“A bitch of a little town,” she remembered her mother
calling it when they first arrived there, with all their worldly belongings piled into the ancient turquoise Chevy with the chrome fins. It hadn’t changed.

Hefting her small black duffel, she climbed down the steps, gasping as the gale-force wind snatched her breath away, wrapping her cheap cotton skirt around her legs and flattening her sweater against her chest.

She glanced anxiously around the parking lot. It was empty—there was just the desolate whine of the wind, and the ever-present boom of the Pacific waves roaring into the silence.

She waited uneasily for a few minutes, but there was still no sign of her mother and the familiar battered Chevy, even though she had written from college to say she would be arriving on the two o’clock bus. She might as well not have bothered. She could never rely on her mother for anything.

“Why couldn’t you have been here, Mom? Just this once, when I really need you?” she murmured, tears prickling her eyelids.

There was no point in waiting. Picking up her bag, head down against the punishing wind, she trudged into town.

The trailer park was up a hill, on the wrong side of Golden’s tracks. At the top she turned and looked back at the ocean view. The huge waves were racing in, crashing so violently onto the shore, she could feel the earth shudder from their impact, hear their desolate, booming echo and the wind drumming in her ears.

She walked slowly toward their trailer. A “motor home,” her mother had always called it, as though the word elevated them to a higher social status. The window boxes that, in their first optimistic year in Golden, were filled with cheerful scarlet geraniums and purple petunias, had been washed out long ago by the violent storms. They hung, lopsided, dribbling rainwater onto the stained
cement. Ruffled net curtains trailed tiredly at the grimy windows, and no welcoming smell of roasting Thanksgiving turkey came from the chimney.

The door was unlocked. She stepped inside and glanced around.

“Mom?” She went into the kitchen.

“Mom?” she called again, dropping her bag. Her letter saying she would be coming home was lying on the table alongside an empty coffee cup.

She strode through the narrow living area to the bedroom in back. Her mother was not there. She checked the bathroom. Nothing.

She hurried back to the kitchen and touched the coffee pot. It was still warm.

Suddenly she knew where her mother had gone: where she always went when the bad moods came on her and depression settled like a black cloud around her shoulders.

Rain spattered in a torrent at the windows. Hastily pulling on her old bright-yellow oilskin poncho, she ran out of the trailer and down the cliff road, battling the wind, until the road turned into a lane leading down to the beach.

She was used to the great winter storms of Oregon, where enormous waves were generated by four thousand miles of traction all the way from Japan. The storm winds would whip them into giant froth-capped monsters, hurling onto the rocks, tearing at the dunes, ripping apart anything in their path.

Wiping the rain from her face, she braced herself against the gale-force wind, shading her eyes with her hands. Then she saw her, a tiny figure standing on the rocks, staring out to sea.

As she watched, her mother took a step forward onto a rock closer to the waves. She paused. Then she took another step. Then another pause. Mary Mallory thought,
puzzled, that it looked as though she were playing a childish game of giant steps.

Too late, she realized what her mother was about to do. “Mom, Mom, don’t,” she screamed.

Another step forward. A great wave was roaring in, building height and power as it came. Her mother raised her eyes to the sky and lifted her arms exultantly over her head as the wave took her. In a second it swept her into its green depths, sucking her down.

Mary Mallory stared numbly at the place where her mother had been. She watched in stunned silence as the great wave came surging back. She could see her mother’s slender body, trapped high in its curl, as it took her higher and higher. Ten, twenty, thirty feet, until it seemed to touch the lowering gray clouds. Then the wave curved into a magnificent crest of foam and hurled her mother back onto the rocks.

Mary Mallory screamed as the eddying wave sucked her out again, out and under into the raging gray-green depths.

They never found the body.

Harry stroked Mal’s bent head gently. Pity for her wrenched at his heart as he remembered his own idyllic childhood at Jordan’s Farm. She glanced up at him, her eyes blurred from unshed tears. He caught something in her expression—hesitation, longing—and then it was gone again.

He held her in his arms, and she huddled into him, like a stray cat seeking warmth and protection. It was as though her mother had died yesterday. The wound was still that raw.

“I always thought she did it because of me,” she whispered. “The letter was there on the table, saying I was coming home. I told her I needed her, and she didn’t want that.
She didn’t need me.”

He said gently, “It wasn’t your fault. There was nothing you could have done to save her.” But she just hid her face against his chest. “It’s over, Mal. It’s the past, and you have to let go.”

“I know.”

Her voice sounded as bleak as the scene she had just described.

Harry sensed she was keeping something back. He wanted to ask her to tell him all her secrets and finally free herself from the past. But she had gone through enough emotion for one day.

The dog bounded in, bringing the fresh scent of the forest and the wind on his thick silver coat. Squeeze stopped and looked at them, his head on one side. Then he gave a little bark and came over and nuzzled Mal’s hand.

She lifted her head and looked at Squeeze. She was still choked up as she said, a touch enviously, “Oh, God, Harry, you are really a man who has everything.”

But she was smiling as she caressed the dog’s head, and he knew the worst was over. For now.

H
ARRY STILL HAD
M
AL
on his mind when he showed up for work that night. He had driven her to the airport, escorted her to the check-in, and kissed her discreetly on the cheek as they said good-bye. He was dimly aware of other people’s stares; he had almost forgotten that she was a celebrity, her face as well known to most of the people shuffling wearily through the departure gates as their own. After this weekend she was simply Mal to him: a maddening woman who got under his skin and who fought with him all the time; a beautiful woman who made love to him as though she meant it; a woman who seemed inextricably bonded to her mysterious and tragic past.

“Shall I see you next week?” he asked as they walked to the departure gate.

She gave him that wry, cool look. “Think you can put up with me?”

“I might. Just.” He grinned at her, then kissed her on the cheek again. He breathed deeply, inhaling her elusive scent. “That’s not Bactine,” he whispered. “I swear it.”

She was laughing as she waved good-bye and strode off to the gate. “Call me,” she said. Then she turned and looked back at him. “Harry.”

“Yes, ma’am; Malone…. Mal.”

“Thanks.”

He lifted his arm in salute. And then she was gone.

Why was it, he thought, staring at the empty space where she had been, that he still had the uneasy feeling she had not told him everything?

He dropped the dog back home and left him curled contentedly under the bed, no doubt dreaming of rabbits and squirrels and raccoons. Then he took off for the precinct.

It looked like it was going to be a quiet night. Sundays were often like that—the public seemed to prefer to destroy each other on Fridays and Saturdays, giving him a break on God’s day.

It was ten o’clock when the call came through. A woman had telephoned, worried about her sister. They were supposed to meet; a strange interrupted message had been left on her answering machine; and now the machine didn’t answer. A squad car had gone to check the house. The sister had a key, and what they had found when they opened the door was not pretty.

“We’re on,” Harry said to Rossetti, unfurling himself from the chair and heading for the door.

Rossetti grabbed his coffee cup and headed after him to the car. Harry got behind the wheel, and they took off, sirens wailing, through the quiet streets.

“What a way to end a great weekend,” Harry said glumly.

“It was that good, huh?”

“I had fun, Rossetti.” The car rounded the corner, then shot the red light, sirens still blasting the peaceful night.

“Vanessa said don’t forget the party. She’s only gonna be twenty-one once.”

“I won’t forget.”

The street in front of the little clapboard cottage was cordoned off with yellow crime-scene tape. Three squad cars were already parked outside, and an electric-blue Dodge Neon was in the small forecourt. A little knot of
curious neighbors hovered nearby, and two burly uniformed men stood guard outside the door.

A young woman was crouched in the backseat of one of the squad cars, weeping. Harry shook his head sadly. He figured her for the sister and knew he would have to question her later. Murder was never a happy event.

He greeted the uniformed officers, asked a few questions, then opened the door and stepped inside. Rossetti followed him.

The smell of blood and two-day-old death hit them like a blow. They shone their flashlights around. Nothing had been touched by the cops—the lights had not even been turned on, in case the killer had left a print on the switch. Something squished as Harry took a step forward, and he shone the flashlight down.

“Peas,” Rossetti said, astonished. “Maybe she was caught in the middle of fixing dinner.”

A huge pool of congealed blood lay immediately in front of them, mixed with what looked like the peas. And blood was spattered on the walls, on the coat thrown over the small chair, and on the door.

“Jesus,” Rossetti muttered, “it’s a fuckin’ bloodbath.”

Harry played the flashlight over the trail of blood that led to the body, slumped in the bedroom doorway. She was on her knees, her face pressed into the bloody carpet, and she was naked except for her underpants. Her long, vibrant red hair shone under the light, and a black cat crouched beside her, his tail twitching as he stared back at them.

“This is not going to be nice, Rossetti,” Harry said quietly. “Where the hell is forensics?”

“Right here, detective.” The first of the crime team stepped in the door, glanced around, and gave a low amazed whistle and then a sigh. “What can I say,” he said with a shrug as the medical examiner shouldered past him.
It was Dr. Blake, one of the forensic pathologists employed by the city.

“They had to drag me out for this one, Detective Jordan,” Blake said testily.

“Careful where you step,” Harry warned. “This is a clean crime scene so far.”

“I know, I know,” the doctor said. “Goddammit, detective, I’ve been doing my job for twenty years. I don’t need you to tell me my business. And can anyone tell me why the hell people have to get themselves killed on a Sunday night, when a man is enjoying a peaceful nap in front of the evening news?”