On the Ropes (7 page)

“Give me some time to make up a good enough lie.” He leaned onto the railing beside her and looked down the beach. The neighboring houses were dark. For most homeowners, that would have been unusual for the time of the year, but Stephen happened to know the owners were retirees that tended to turn in early. Lights were on farther up the beach. Rentals. Those folks might be up all night.

At the very thought of another all-nighter, he yawned.

“Stephen, you should turn in,” Jan said, gripping his bicep. She must have realized she grabbed him, because she pulled back. Had he made her think that touching him wasn’t okay? These weren’t bedroom games. He wasn’t going to stop her from enjoying the comfort of touch when she needed it. He’d have to make that clear.

He took her hand and kissed the back of it. “I’m not going to fight you on that. I’ll get the rest of the bags out of the truck and lock up. Which room are you taking?”

“Oh.” She shifted her weight and looked away from him. Until today, she’d never seemed to have so much trouble making eye contact with him. “Do you think it would be…suspicious? To Megan and Seth, I mean. If we’re in separate rooms… I imagine they would assume we’d be prepared to share.”

So had he up until that evening, but when he’d picked her up at that airport curb, he decided the last thing he wanted to do was overwhelm her more.

“It doesn’t really matter where we sleep. There is no way Meg and Seth are going to be here before we get up. Like I said, it’s a four-hour drive for them. If we have to shuffle luggage in the morning, that’s fine.”

“Okay. I guess I’ll…be in the end room upstairs. The one without the balcony.” She crooked a thumb toward the door. “I’m going to go shower. Airplanes always make me feel like my skin has acquired a sticky film.”

“I’ll get your bag.” He followed her in, hauled her heavy, hard-sided suitcase up to the bedroom Meg called
The Laura Ashley Room
, and returned to the truck to get the rest of his bags. He’d packed for two weeks, and hoped he’d manage to stay for a full one. He had one mind to turn off his cell phone or ignore any calls originating from a Boston area code, but the folks at the firm had other ways to reach him. They’d been known to dispatch couriers out to the house with a single page of paper for him to look over.

Ridiculous. He had something like six weeks of vacation time per year, and yet he couldn’t go four days unmolested. He was damned good at his job, and he knew it, but he was stretched too thin.

A robot most days.

He took his time clearing out the food wrappers and paper coffee cups his backseat had accumulated during the drive. The fresh air was a balm for his soul and being on his feet helped clear his mind. As he tossed a fast food bag into the rolling trash bin, he realized that what he’d eaten at The Sandbar was the first hot meal he’d had in days. “Unbelievable.”

Slamming the truck’s back door, he recalled what Jan had said about buying fresh food and cooking for herself. He wasn’t much of a chef. Never had been, but there was something very compelling about sitting down at a dinner table every night for an hour and doing nothing
but
eating and talking.

He imagined that Jan would be sitting across the table from him, and every night he’d pepper her with questions. Pull more of those precious words out of her. Finally decipher her.

Something in her was broken, and she’d done a bang-up job of covering it up, but because of Meg, he knew how to recognize it. Strangers always thought Meg was cold and standoffish, but she wasn’t. She was a soft thing who crawled into a tough outer shell and stayed there until she was certain it was safe to come out. Seth could pull her out.

Stephen didn’t know what would lure Jan out, though. All he could do was keep giving her space and letting her come to him. If he didn’t, she’d withdraw back to where she was and he’d never learn why she’d built her emotional walls up so high.

He carried his toiletry bag, his second suitcase, and the tote bag of whisky his dad sent down for Seth into the house and locked up. He left the whisky in the kitchen. Everything else, he took up to the bedroom with the balcony.

Shutting the door, he decided to leave the light off. The moon was bright, and he didn’t need extra light to undress anyway. He sat at the edge of the bed and lay back. He closed his eyes and rubbed them. “I wonder which of those bags I put my pajamas in. Fuck, if I even packed them.”

He fully intended to get up and look, but, just like the last time he’d come to the beach house, his body had other ideas.

Janette pulled on her pajamas and opened the door between the bathroom and Stephen’s room just a crack. She peered into the darkness and found him asleep with his knees bent over the end of the bed and his shod feet still on the floor.

Smiling, she padded quietly into his room and knelt at his feet. In the past year, he’d continuously disabused her of the notion that he didn’t work hard for his money, but seeing him like this really drove the point home.

She untied his Oxfords, pulled them off, and stood up. “What now?” she whispered. He had to outweigh her by more than fifty pounds. There was no way she could get the rest of him onto the bed without waking him up.

Maybe she should wake him?

His forehead furrowed and he grimaced in his sleep.

Yes. Wake him
.

His sleep couldn’t have been all that restful if his body was responding in that way.

She put a knee on the bed and leaned over him. “Stephen,” she whispered, and nudged his hair out of his face.

There was a little jut just beneath the bridge of his aristocratic nose. Not a natural bump, but a ridge that created a slight crook at the top.

It’d been broken.

She sighed. “Boxers. I see why your mother was so opposed to it. Why would you do that to your face?”

With him asleep, she could really study it. She’d always found him attractive. That had never changed. But, experience had taught her not to trust men who were too good-looking.

Her mother had told her that when Janette was four. At the time, Janette had no idea what her mother was talking about, but she learned from experience later.

She was tired of saying no to Stephen, though. Tired of not connecting to anyone.

Tracing her fingertip along the outline of his lips, she thought back to all the promises he’d uttered through them. “
I can set your body on fire and make you forget which way is up. I’d make you let down your hair and lose control
,” he’d said during his last trip to the resort. He’d walked away from her counter with a stack of SCUBA excursion brochures, and she’d stood there with clamped teeth, burning cheeks, and pantyhose that had suddenly become damp at the crotch.

She toyed with her curls and sat back. She must have subconsciously taken that
let down your hair
admonition to heart.

A buzz sounded in the next room. It had to be her phone rattling against the dresser top. She was on a leave of absence from work, and no one ever called her except—

“The investigator.”

She eased off the bed and hurried into the room. She snatched the phone up on the fourth buzz and returned to the door to softly close it before whispering, “Hello?”

“Miss Hinson?”

“Yes, it’s me.”

“Dell Skinner here. Sorry to call you so late, but you said to give you a call the moment I had any info about what happened to your mother before the accident.”

“No need to apologize. I’m in North Carolina right now, so I’ve gained an hour.”

“Excellent. Well, here’s what I was able to root out. Your mother was a flight attendant, right?”

“Yes, I have a vague recollection of that.”

“A few years before the accident, you moved from Philly to Baltimore, and she changed her airport home base. People move all the time for different reasons, but to me, those are red flags I like to investigate, especially when they’d been otherwise stable. I got a buddy to dig into Philly police reports, and he found not one, but
two
disturbances reported by your mother. The first one was a break-in. Seemed your apartment got tossed, but nothing of value was taken.”

Janette had a vague recollection of that. She was around three, about to turn four. She and her mother had returned from a day trip, had taken one step into the apartment, and then her mother whisked her right back out. Janette had spent the night with the neighbors while her mother cleaned up.

“The second one,” Dell continued, “was a lot different. You got home and locked up as usual, and got into bed. About an hour after that, a person who’d been hiding in your mother’s closet showed himself. He and your mother had an altercation, and it got so loud the neighbors started beating on your door. The report says that you let them in. They called the cops.”

“I let them in?”

That
she didn’t remember. Not at all.

“You did. You didn’t say anything to the police, though. Just sat there all zoned out. I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing that you don’t remember. That’s something for you to hash out with your therapist, should you happen to have one.”

Maybe she should get one, and soon.

“What happened after that?”

“You and your mother packed up and moved to Baltimore.”

“What happened to the man who broke in? Was he caught?”

“Nope, he got out through the fire escape window when the neighbors barged in and then left the country. Your mother didn’t want to press charges for a variety of reasons she didn’t disclose.”

“So, let me get this straight.” She closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. “She could name the intruder and chose not to press charges against him. Instead, she moved. Why would she do that? And how did she know him?”

“I’ll answer the second question, and you can speculate on the first. She knew him because she had a daughter with him and left him.”

It took a moment for all the pieces to settle into her brain. “You mean, my father?” That would just be too twisted. He’d taken her in after the accident. Why would he have been harassing her mother?

“Mm-hmm. You could have knocked me over with a feather when I found that out, but that’s what the records say and I’m sure your mother had no reason to lie. I can tell you with a hundred percent certainty that your parents were never married.”

“She did list him on my birth certificate, though.”

“He was probably at the birth. How long they were together after that, I can’t speculate on, and I don’t know why they fell out. Your father never talked about your mother?”

“Oh, he talked about her plenty when he thought I wasn’t in earshot.”

“In unflattering terms, I bet.”

“Bingo.”

He’d called her mother every synonym of the word “harlot” that existed in English and several other languages as well.

She’d always hated him for that. She’d only been four, going on five, when the accident happened, but she’d always found her mother to be a woman of impeccable character. She was sweet and smiley. She
doted
on her little girl, and never spoke a word of ill about Janette’s absentee father.

What must she think of Janette now? She probably hated her for not coming. For not calling. For abandoning her when she could have come back. But, Janette hadn’t known she was still alive. Hadn’t known
anything
.

A tear slid down her cheek and she wiped it away before it reached her chin.

“You still gonna go see her?” Dell asked. “I can ask around and find out what her mindset’s like. Sometimes, long illnesses change people.”

She had one mind to say no, because she was scared and not going would be easiest, but she didn’t want to have this on her conscience one day as a regret.

“I’m going to go,” she said, and pulled her shirt up to dry the tears that were now falling freely. “Just tell me where to go.”

“I’ll get you the info and who you need to talk to. You don’t want to just drop in unannounced. I’ll find out who her primary caregiver is and we’ll work something out with that person.”

“Thank you.”

“No sweat. I’ll call you.”

He hung up.

She stood there a while longer with the quiet phone pressed to her ear, and just cried.

How fucked up was her life? She’d become a woman who wouldn’t allow herself to feel anything, because the people in her life hadn’t felt anything for
her
. She’d been traumatized and couldn’t even remember it, and as a grown woman, didn’t feel safe in her own home.

And now here she was, using the only man who had ever been able to spark anything in her as a crutch without even being able to tell him why.

That wasn’t fair for him, but what else could she do? She didn’t have anyone else to trust.

She set the phone on the dresser, locked the bedroom door, and moved through the bathroom to the adjoining room.

As she locked his door, she noted that Stephen hadn’t moved a muscle during her call. He was still flopped at the end of the bed, though his expression was more peaceful now.

She picked up an afghan from the basket near the dresser, unfurled it, and covered him.

Then she picked up another and curled onto the club chair near the bed with it. She watched the rise and fall of Stephen’s chest, and meditated on it.

She pushed everything else out of her mind until she slept.

“Uncle Stephen, I can’t get into my room!”

The words permeated Stephen’s dreams and settled into his brain in fragments.
Toby
.

Meg and Seth had arrived.

Shit
.

Stephen rubbed his eyes and opened them slowly, groaning as he forced himself into sitting position. His legs and feet were numb. Fuck, he’d fallen asleep at the end of the bed.

He rolled his ankles to wake them and laid his head to one side then the other to work out the kink. “Too old for this shit.”

“Uncle Stephen!” Toby knocked again in that oh-so-patient way exhibited by five-year-olds and adult psychopaths. “I’m locked out of my room!”