One Summer (9 page)

Sometimes, in prison, when he’d been lying awake at night staring at the bunk over his head, Johnny had thought that he missed Wolf most of all.

Wasn’t that a damned sad commentary on his life?

The dog whined again. Knowing he was being ridiculous, that he was liable to lose the hand at the wrist when the animal charged, Johnny nonetheless took a step forward, holding out his fingers for sniffing.

“Wolf? Come here, boy.”

Incredibly, the huge animal sank to its belly and slunk forward, behaving as if it wanted to believe but feared a cruel trick. Johnny dropped to his knees to greet it, his hands reaching out, burrowing in the coarse hide, stroking and scratching as the dog whined and licked and pawed him and butted him with its head.

“Ah, Wolf,” he said as he accepted the truth at last, that this one thing that he had loved had been spared in order to greet him. Then, as the big head snuggled into his lap, he wrapped his arms around the dog’s thick neck and buried his face against the animal’s side.

For the first time in eleven years, he wept.

8

“R
achel, we got a problem.”

So what else was new? Rachel thought wearily as she shifted the kitchen phone to her other ear. In the forty-eight hours that had passed since Johnny Harris’s return to Tylerville, her life had been filled to bursting with problems, all directly attributable to him. Just as this one would be, as sure as God made little green apples.

“What is it, Ben?”

“You know that bunch of kids we’ve had our eyes on? I finally caught one of ’em shoplifting. Only Harris won’t let me call the police.”

“What? Why not?”

“I guess because, as a criminal himself, he has sympathy for other criminals. How the heck should I know? All he’ll say is that if I call the police, he’ll kick my—well, I won’t repeat it.”

“Oh, lord.”

“I tell you, Rachel, I don’t think I can take this guy much longer. He’s a real pain in the butt.”

“Put him on the phone. I’ll talk to him. No, on second thought, I’ll come down to the store. Just try to keep the shoplifter there till I arrive, will you?”

“I’ll try. But, Rachel—”

“Talk to me about it when I get there, Ben.”

Rachel hung up the phone. Unfortunately, her mother, who stood at the stove making her daddy’s favorite hot-water cornbread in a bid to tempt his failing appetite, had heard every word of her side of the conversation. That was obvious from the moment she turned around and saw unmistakable signs of tension in Elisabeth’s expression.

“You never will listen to me, will you, Rachel? I told you from the get-go that you were making a big mistake offering that boy a job. How you came to be so headstrong I can’t imagine. Why, I can scarcely hold my head up in town, what with what my friends are saying about you befriending that boy. As for having to try to come up with some explanation for Verna Edwards when she called me in tears—”

“I know it’s hard on you, Mother, and I’m sorry. I’m sorry for Mrs. Edwards, too. But I don’t believe Johnny killed Marybeth. He—”

“Johnny?” Elisabeth stiffened alarmingly. Her posture reminded Rachel of a hunting dog that has suddenly scented rabbit. “Rachel, there’s nothing to this talk about you and that boy, is there? I hope I know my own daughter better than to think you’d fool around with trash like that, particularly as he is a
convict
, Rachel, and years younger than you to boot, and—”

“I hope you do, too, Mother,” Rachel said gently, and fled.

It was late Saturday afternoon, Rob was supposed to pick her up at her house in an hour. Thank goodness she had already done her hair and makeup, Rachel reflected as she ran up the stairs. She had only to pull on her dress—a short, figure-hugging garnet red knit with a scooped neckline and tiny puffed sleeves—struggle into sheer black pantyhose, step into her black pumps, and clip on a pair of black button earrings, and she was ready.

Quickly pulling a brush through her hair to the tune of “Jailhouse Rock” drifting down from the third floor, Rachel checked her appearance one last time in the mirror.
Exiting her bedroom, she ran into Tilda, piles of clean, folded sheets in her arms.

“Woo! Don’t you look nice?” Tilda nodded with admiration as she surveyed Rachel from head to toe. “You goin’ out with that handsome pharmacist?”

“Yes.”

“Thought so. You’re wearin’ your red lipstick. Us women know about red lipstick, don’t we?”

“It matches my dress, Tilda,” Rachel said primly, but at Tilda’s droll look she had to grin. With a wave she left the other woman, running with as light a step as she could manage down the stairs. She was out of luck. Elisabeth awaited her at the front door.

“Don’t you be too late, Rachel. You know how I worry about you girls. Especially now that that boy is back in town.”

Rachel stifled an urge to remind her mother that she was thirty-four years old and a perfectly competent adult capable of deciding when to come home.

“I won’t be late, Mother.”

Had she ever been late? Rachel reflected wryly as she drove through the stone gates and headed toward town. All her life, she’d been the very model of the dutiful daughter, much good had it ever done her. Becky had been the one who had gone to every dance and party, staying out late with one boy after another and coming home drunk on more than one occasion, to their mother’s dismay. Quieter and less popular than her younger sister, Rachel had been content to spend her nights at home with a book. “You’ll dream your life away!” Elisabeth had warned her, but at the time Rachel had had no suspicion that her mother’s words might actually prove true.

When the time had come, Rachel had gone away to college, though not too far away. Her good grades had enabled her to get into Vanderbilt, which was about a three-hour drive from Tylerville. But Nashville, where Vandy was located, was light years away from Tylerville in
outlook and opportunity. Nashville had excited her, and she had been a little sorry to return home upon graduation, teaching certificate in hand, to take on the job of educating Tylerville’s youth. Not that she meant to remain a high school teacher forever. She had been absolutely sure that life had something wonderful in store for her.

Then had come that fateful summer—the long, smoldering summer of eleven years ago, when there must have been some sort of astrological cataclysm to cause so many disastrous events. She had returned to Vandy to take some graduate courses, with the thought that she might get her master’s degree at some point in the future. One afternoon she had been walking along a brick path that cut across campus with her head in the clouds as usual. She’d been mentally composing a poem for her writing class assignment when a runner had knelt in front of her to tie his shoe. She hadn’t noticed, of course, and had tripped over him and fallen headlong. He had picked her up, full of apologies, and she had been instantly smitten with his dark good looks. For the rest of the summer they’d been inseparable. Rachel had fallen in love. She’d been so happy when she’d brought him home to meet her family. They had talked of marriage, and she had expected to make the engagement official during that summer’s-end visit.

But Michael had taken one look at lovely, vivacious Becky and tumbled head over heels. Rachel could do nothing but watch with growing agony as the only man she had ever loved was charmed effortlessly away. Not that Becky had meant to hurt her. Rachel knew that. It was just that Becky, being Becky, had never considered the matter from Rachel’s point of view. Like her older sister, Becky had fallen madly in love with Michael on sight. They had been engaged within a month, married within three. Rachel had stepped aside with outward grace, even acting as Becky’s maid of honor. But had it not been for the distraction of Marybeth Edwards’s murder at about the
same time, Rachel thought she might have died from the agony of losing her boyfriend to her sister.

To make things worse, Michael took Becky back to Vandy with him to finish out his third year of law school.

Rachel had never been able to face Nashville again.

So she had stayed home, to the delight of her parents, who had dreaded the thought of losing both daughters at once. It had been a temporary thing, she had thought, maybe a year at most, to give her time to recover her balance. She had gone back to teaching at the high school, and gradually, as months passed, the worst of the pain had gone away. She dedicated herself to her job and her students and waited for the shining bright excitement that had died with Michael’s defection to return to her life.

Only it never had. Then her father had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and any thought she might have harbored about escaping Tylerville had been put on hold. With Becky married and gone and her mother distraught at the fate facing her husband, she’d been truly needed. Too, she had wanted to spend every available minute with her father while she still could. But sometimes she felt that life was passing her by while she waited for him to die.

And that, she scolded herself, was a terrible thought for a loving daughter to harbor. Now Rachel pushed it right out of her mind and concentrated instead on the evening to come.

Just as he had done for the past two years, Rob was taking her to Heart Beat, the open-air concert designed to benefit the Heart Society that was held the last Saturday in August on the grounds of Tylerville Country Club. In fact, they’d gone to Heart Beat on their first date.

She would have to call Rob from the store and ask him to pick her up there. No—outside the store, so as not to
series of four phone calls and one lunch date over the past two days.

Why was life never simple? Rachel thought with a sigh. She had done only what she had felt to be morally right in offering Johnny a second chance, and as a consequence her entire existence had been thrown into turmoil. How much easier it would have been simply not to answer Johnny’s terse letter—but, Rachel acknowledged, she could not have lived with herself if she had not. Hadn’t someone said once that the seeds of one’s own destruction are sown by one’s character? That single act of kind-heartedness (or soft-headedness, if Rob was to be believed) was the seed that was destroying the even tenor of her existence. Her life had been smooth up until she had met that bus. Ever since then, she’d had scarcely a peaceful moment.

The fact was that Johnny Harris was trouble, plain and simple. He always had been, and in that if nothing else, he had not changed.

Rachel parked in the lot in back of the store and, squaring her shoulders, went in through the rear door. Olivia was at the cash register, ringing up what looked like a sackful of nails and some woodworking tools for Kay Nelson, a plump, pretty woman of thirty-one who’d been a close friend of Becky’s since they’d been in grade school together. Unlike Becky, Kay had never married. She ran a florist’s shop and seemed quite content with her single state.

Olivia glanced up, saw Rachel, and indicated the storeroom with a gesture. “Oh, Rachel, they’re back there.” Rachel nodded. Ben’s office was at the back of the storeroom, which seemed a logical place for a shoplifter to be detained.

“Thanks, Olivia.” Though Olivia’s worried tone would have indicated unmistakably to any intelligent listener that something was amiss, Rachel’s reply was offhand. There was no sense in letting the whole world in on what
was essentially a store problem. If word of it got out, the current standoff would just provide more grist for the gossip mill, which was already working overtime.

Determined to appear carefree if it killed her, Rachel smiled with deliberate cheerfulness at Kay. “Hello, there. I missed you at church last Sunday. How are you?”

“I’m just fine, Rachel. It was one of those twenty-four-hour bugs. The question is, how are you?” There was more concern in Kay’s voice than the courteous question normally invoked, and Rachel understood that Kay had heard about and was commiserating with her over the presence of Johnny Harris in her life. The unspoken sympathy made her want to gnash her teeth, which of course, if she wanted to continue to appear untroubled, she could not do.

“Just fine. Planning on building something?” Nodding at the other woman’s purchases, Rachel smilingly changed the subject.

Kay glanced down at the items on the counter and gathered them up almost defensively. “Oh, no, these are for my brother. He’s the family carpenter. Have you heard from Becky lately?”

Et tu, Brute
, Rachel thought, realizing that like most of their customers over the past two days, Kay must have come to the hardware store out of curiosity. “Last week. She’ll be home Thanksgiving, I think, with Michael and the girls.”

“I’ll have to come see her.”

“You do that,” Rachel said, and with a wave passed beyond the counter into the storeroom. As she had expected, the door to the manager’s office stood ajar. The phone was affixed to the wall at her left, and she paused only long enough to make a quick, quiet call to Howard’s Drug Store, which Rob owned. She left a message for him, then hung up. Realizing she could delay the inevitable no longer, she walked toward the open door. On the threshold she paused, surveying the scene before her.