One Summer (22 page)

Rachel froze, staring at his leather-clad back. She had forgotten she had revealed so much of herself to him all those years ago, when he was her star pupil.

“I’m surprised you remember that,” she said slowly.

He had her books in his arms now, and he turned back to face her. “Are you? You shouldn’t be. I remember every single thing I ever knew about you, teacher.”

Their gazes locked for an instant. Then Rachel, more flustered than she could ever remember being, turned and
laden with her books, he followed along behind her—and just as conscious of the wide-eyed gazes of the three girls, who watched every move they made. Fortunately, the teachers’ parking lot was nearly as deserted as the students’. She would have hated to face the prospect of introducing censorious colleagues to Johnny.

Rachel took several deep breaths to recover her equilibrium, then started the car as Johnny set her belongings in the back. He shrugged out of his jacket and threw that in, too, to reveal one of his regulation cotton T-shirts, then slid in beside her. She would have liked a moment alone with the lipstick and powder compact in her purse, because she knew from experience that by the end of the day any makeup she might have started out with was long gone. It didn’t really matter, she supposed. A little lipstick and powder would not erase so much as a day of her thirty-four years, nor would they make her one whit more beautiful to him. Her outfit, which consisted of a short-sleeved white cotton sweater with deep pink roses across the bosom and matching calf-length pleated skirt of navy cotton strewn with the same pink roses as the sweater, might not be the last word in chic, but it was eminently practical for her job. So were her low-heeled navy pumps and the small pearl studs she wore in each ear. Even her hairstyle was chosen because it required no fuss. She looked what she was, a small-town thirtysomething teacher of high school English. Johnny was as out of place beside her as his motorcycle would be parked next to her conservative blue Maxima.

They both waved at the gaping girls as they drove past them out of the parking lot.

“You shouldn’t have come to school,” Rachel said as she pulled out onto the road, knowing gossip would dog her every step on the morrow.

“If Muhammad won’t come to the mountain …” Johnny said with a shrug. In a carefully light tone that did
not quite mask the seriousness of the question, he added, “Ashamed of me, Rachel?”

Rachel glanced over at him, touched by something in his voice that told her that her answer mattered very much indeed. Seen in three-quarter profile against the bright sunlight pouring in through the window, he was so handsome that he stole her breath. She had never realized before just how perfect his features were. The proud forehead, the high cheekbones, the long, straight nose with its narrow bridge, the clean, square lines of his jaw and chin were classic in their elegance. Add to that his beautifully shaped, sensuously curved mouth, the smoldering vitality of smoky blue eyes set beneath thick, straight black brows, and he was extraordinarily good-looking. And not only because she was mentally comparing him with every other man in Tylerville.

“Stop!” Johnny bellowed without warning, his eyes shifting from her face to the road ahead, his hands flying up to brace against the dashboard. The shout broke Rachel’s train of thought and made her slam on the brakes so hard that only their automatically tightened seat belts kept them from being flung forward.

“What?” Rachel asked, aggrieved. She looked around to discover that they had screeched to a halt at the four-way stop in front of the 7-Eleven not far from the school. Traffic, including a school bus and a coal truck, coming from every direction zoomed past, answering her question.

“It’s a miracle you haven’t gotten yourself killed,” Johnny said between clenched teeth. “Here, slide over. I’m driving from now on.”

“This is my car, and—”

“Slide over.” He was already out of the car, slamming the door behind him as he walked around the hood. Rachel, glaring at him through the windshield, bethought herself of all the watching drivers in the cars around them, bit her lip, unfastened her seat belt, and scooted over, maneuvering over the console with something less than
grace. If Johnny stood in the road arguing with her while she stubbornly clung to her seat, some busybody would probably call the police.

“Want something to drink?” Johnny asked as he got in, nodding at the 7-Eleven. They had missed their turn to go, and behind them indignant cars started to honk.

“No, thanks.” Rachel, resentful at being deprived of command in her own car, was determined that he should realize it.

“Well, I do.” It was their turn again. Johnny shot across the road into the parking lot of the 7-Eleven and stopped. The speed of the maneuver was enough to make Rachel clutch the armrest beside her.

“Talk about my driving—” she began indignantly, but he was already getting out of the car. Seething, Rachel watched as he disappeared inside the store.

Minutes later, she saw him through the glass as he stepped up to the counter to pay. He was exchanging pleasantries with the male clerk as she watched, and a great deal of her annoyance faded as she admired his tall, athletic build and the skin-tight fit of those jeans. Then some indefinable tension in his stance appeared. Whatever he was exchanging with the clerk now, it was not pleasantries.

He threw something down onto the counter, picked up his groceries, and stalked out to the car. Rachel silently accepted the items he thrust at her through the window—a couple of cans of Coke and two packages of Twinkies—and refrained from saying anything at all until the car was in motion again, zooming backward in a wide, fast turn, then pulling out into traffic with a squeal of tires that made Rachel wince.

“What happened?” she asked when they were more or less safely rocketing down the road, which fortunately was a straight stretch at that point.

“What makes you think something happened?” This was accompanied by a glittering sideways glare from a man
whose jaw was clenched so tightly, she could see the muscles bunched below his ear.

“Call it woman’s intuition.”

Her dry tone earned her another sideways glance, a little less fierce than the first one.

“Asshole wouldn’t take my money.”

“Oh.” She realized suddenly that the clerk had been Jeff Skaggs. Rachel would have recognized him immediately if she had really looked at him, if all her attention hadn’t been concentrated on Johnny. Not that she meant to inform Johnny that it was Jeff, if he didn’t already know. Johnny was a proud man, already bitter at the townspeople, with a hot, ferocious temper that she had seen fully aroused only once or twice years ago. The treatment that was being meted out to him on all sides was atrocious, though he’d accepted it without much apparent rancor so far. But she was beginning to be afraid that he was near to reaching the limits of his tolerance. There was going to be an explosion one of these days, she feared, and she only hoped that she was nearby when it happened, to undertake what damage control she could.

“I didn’t kill Marybeth,” Johnny said savagely, his eyes fixed on the road. “I am as innocent as that asshole in the grocery, and you know what? Whether I’m innocent or not doesn’t matter a damn to anybody. Did you know I earned a college degree while I was in the can? Yep, in comparative literature, much good may it ever do me. I ran a hell of a successful business while I was inside, too. Remember I used to smoke? Well, I quit, because cigarettes are the hard currency that the joint runs on. I hoarded my cigarettes and sold ’em, and I bought some more with the proceeds and sold those, too. Pretty soon everybody was calling me the Smoke Man, and I was doing all right. I made money, and I saved it, so that when I got out I’d have something to fall back on. I survived what they did to me. But it shouldn’t have happened, and it wouldn’t have, except that people don’t ever look any further than the
ends of their noses. I am a Harris, therefore I’m no good, therefore I’m capable of murder, therefore, since I was the last person who will admit to being with Marybeth, I must have killed her. Only I didn’t.”

He was pulling off the road, onto a narrower lane that twisted and dipped as it cut through a thick woods. In only a few minutes they emerged from beneath the overhanging trees to park with a jerk at the edge of a small, shimmering lake with ducks paddling placidly on its surface. The cool, changeable blue of the water, the iridescent green and brown of the ducks’ feathers, the bright apple-green of the sun-drenched treetops, and the deeper, mysterious pine of the shadows lower down made for a vista so lovely that it was a shame neither of them noticed it beyond the most cursory of perusals.

Johnny continued to stare straight ahead, his hands clenched around the steering wheel. Rachel, silent beside him, watched him with her heart in her eyes, but he never so much as glanced her way.

“I was nineteen years old when I went in. A boy. A cocky, scared boy, so scared that I was afraid I’d throw up the first time I walked down the block and heard all those metal doors clanging shut behind me, all those cons calling at me and whistling and stomping their feet as I passed, like I was fresh meat. Did you know I used to get fan mail while I was inside? From women. I got offered everything, including marriage. One chick who signed herself ‘yours eternally’ wrote me every week. Apparently they thought that being thrown in the joint for murder was glamorous. I think some of them had me confused with a goddamned rock star.”

He paused and took a deep breath but continued to stare out unseeingly over the lake. Rachel bit her lip but said nothing, knowing that there was more he wanted, no, needed, to tell her.

“You know the worst thing about being inside? It was the regimentation. From the time we got up till the time
they locked us in our cells and turned out the lights, there was a certain time for this and a certain time for that and some jerkoff always telling us what to do. And no privacy. Never any privacy, not for anything.”

This time the pause was longer. Just as Rachel was about to reach over and lay a hand on his shoulder or knee or anywhere just so that she touched him, just so that he remembered that she was present, that she cared, he sent her a swift, shuttered look. Then he once again shifted his gaze away, focusing on the lake.

“Hell, no, that wasn’t the worst thing. You want to know the worst thing? I thought I was tough when I went in. I thought nobody would mess with me. Well, I was wrong. Third day I was in, four guys cornered me in the shower. They held me down, sodomized me. Told me afterward that I was gonna be their fucking woman from then on out. I was hurt bad, because they beat the crap out of me first, you know? And I was sick, sick to my soul, in the way only a kid can be sick when something happens that knocks all the pride, all the manliness, out of him. And I was scared.

“But as I healed up, I made up my mind that it wasn’t going to happen again, that they’d have to kill me first. When I did that, all the fear kind of drained away. I would prevail, or I would die. It was as simple as that, and at that point I didn’t much care which it was. I stole a spoon from the kitchen and sharpened it and sharpened it until it had an edge on it like a razor’s. Then I waited. When they cornered me again—they were laughing, the bastards, calling me sweet thing, and dear—I was ready. I carved ’em up like jack-o’-lanterns. And those particular assholes never bothered me again.”

He took another of those deep, almost shuddering breaths. Then he glanced over at Rachel, his hands still curved around the wheel.

“So now you know.” He spoke simply, but what was in his eyes was not simple. They were full of pain and shame, and a kind of weary, wary pride. Rachel looked and
felt her heart break for him. All her common sense, all her instincts for self-preservation, vanished in that instant.

She unfastened her seat belt, drew one knee beneath her, rose on it, and turned at the same time. With one hand on his shoulder for balance, she tilted her head and pressed her lips to his in a soft, clumsy kiss.

When his hands came up to hold her, when he would have pulled her into a deeper embrace, she lifted her head to look him squarely in the eyes.

“So now
you
know,” she said.

23

“S
o what do I know?” There was humor in his question and a certain tension, too. They were so close, they were practically nose to nose, their eyes locked, in a posture that should have felt ridiculous but didn’t because what was happening between them was so serious.

“That I’m crazy about you.” Rachel almost whispered the confession. The steering wheel was gouging her in the back, but she never even noticed it. The console between the seats cut into the side of her thigh, but she never felt that, either. Her entire being was focused on deciphering what was going on behind the opaque screen of Johnny’s eyes.

“In spite of everything?” The slight huskiness to his voice told her that he wasn’t sure what his revelation had meant to her.

“Yes.”

His hands found her waist, lifted and pulled, and suddenly she was over the console, sitting on his lap, her back against the door, her arms draped loosely around his shoulders.