Ropes and Revenge (20 page)

“Apparently it’s all over town that you’re sleeping over,” John said, sounding tired. “I should have known it would be, but I just wanted to be happy. And I didn’t want to ruin the rest of your visit.”

“My visit. Does that mean you want me to leave?” Percy’s ribs contracted as she turned to him, wishing she could see his face. But the porch light behind him cast his features in shadow, giving her no clue what he was thinking.

“John?” she urged when he remained silent, her voice strained.

“Of course I don’t want you to leave…” He ran his hands through his hair, threading them together on top of his head as he took a breath.

“But what?”

“But…you’ll be safe in New York,” he said. “I’m glad you came to stay with us this week, but I have to go back to work on Monday and I can’t just move you in.”

“Why not?” Percy asked, throwing caution to the wind. “We’re happy. Who cares what the rest of the town thinks?”

“I care,” John said, rising from the swing to pace toward the opposite side of the deck. “The kids have been through enough this year, they don’t need to hear people talking about their daddy living in sin on top of it.”

Percy tried to laugh, but it emerged as a strangled sound. “What’s sinful about this? I care about you and you care about me. And I adore Peyton and Carter. I would be so sad to leave them. And you and I can’t…” She took a shaky breath, trying her hardest not to cry. “I can’t imagine never seeing you again.”

John’s shoulders bunched, but he didn’t turn to face her. “We can try it long distance. If you want.”

“If I want,” she echoed, anger rushing in to mix with the pain fisting around her heart. “What about what
you
want? What about what you said Tuesday? About caring about me so much it put things in perspective?”

“It does put things in perspective.” He turned, breath rushing out. “But that doesn’t change anything. I thought maybe it would. I thought if I relaxed and enjoyed the week it would resolve the situation, but it hasn’t. I still feel the same way I felt before.”

“And how’s that?” Percy said, tears rising in her eyes. “That I’m not enough?”

John crossed the deck in three long steps, his hands closing around her upper arms. “Of course you’re enough. You’re beautiful and sexy and sweet and I’m falling more in love with you every day. I love you, Percy. Don’t you know that by now?”

Percy’s face crumpled and the tears in her eyes streamed down her cheeks. “I love you, too. So why are you asking me to leave?”

“Because I still love her.” John’s hands slid from her arms and his head drooped in defeat. “I still love her and I always will. It will never be only you in my heart. I can’t let her go, and I don’t want to. I can’t imagine not being in love with her. It’s part of who I am.”

“I’m not asking you to stop loving Lily.” Percy tightened her grip on the front of his tee shirt, holding him close when he tried to step away. “She was a wonderful wife and mother and her memory is precious to you and the boys. I understand that and I would never try to change it. Love isn’t greedy, John, and neither am I.”

“But how can that work?” he asked, voice breaking. “How can I love two women at the same time? What kind of man does that make me?”

“A good man,” Percy said, hating to see him in such pain. “Who understands that there is always more room in the heart.”

“But what if…” He trailed off before continuing in a whisper, “What happens after? You said you saw your parents when you were little. What happens if I see her…and you?”

Percy’s fingers relaxed, spreading out across John’s chest as understanding hit. “Oh, John. I saw my parents in the land between, but souls don’t stay there. I haven’t seen them since I was twelve. As soon as I was ready to let them go, they left.”

“Where did they go?” he asked.

Percy shook her head. “I don’t know. But I imagine it’s a place where there is no sadness or pain.” She reached up, cupping his scruffy face in her hands. “Where there is no fear. No body or self or distance between us. Where there is only love.”

His breath shuddered out. “I want to believe that. So much.”

“Then believe it,” she said, leaning into him. “And let me love you. Let me love you and the boys and let’s be happy.” But even as the hopeful words left her lips, she could feel him pulling away, his heart retreating though his body remained solid against hers.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t. Not yet.”

Percy fought to swallow past the lump rising in her throat. “Not ever?”

“I…I don’t know.” He shook his head. “I’m just so damned confused.”

“All right.” She took a step back just as a gust of wind swept across the porch, banishing the warmth that had gathered between them. “Then I’ll go back to New York.”

“I’m sorry,” he said again, but when she started toward the back door he didn’t follow her. She stepped into the kitchen alone. The kitchen where, just this morning, she’d made two little boys pancakes and marveled at how good it felt to belong, to be part of something alive and vibrant and on its way to being whole.

A moment later, John stepped in after her, reaching out to touch the small of her back. “I don’t want this to be the end, Percy. I just need some time.”

“It’s okay,” she said, fighting the tears making her forehead ache. “This crept up on both of us. Maybe you’re right and it’s best to take some time and think things through. But right now, I’m tired. I’m going up to bed if that’s all right.”

“Of course it is. Whatever you need.” He hesitated, and for a moment, Percy thought he was going to say something that would change the terrible course of this conversation, but instead he said, “Good night.”

He said “good night,” but Percy heard “goodbye.” She heard “the end” and “it’s over” and a dozen other things that made her body feel weighed down with misery and her heart ache more fiercely with every step she took away from the man she loved.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

John

John waited until he heard Percy’s bedroom door shut before going upstairs. He forced himself to move mechanically through his before bed routine, lay down, and turn out the lights, but he’d barely been under the covers for five minutes when he acknowledged that sleep was going to be impossible.

He didn’t want to sleep. He wanted to head down the hall, open Percy’s door, and join her in the guest bed. He wanted to kiss away her tears and promise he’d never make her cry again. He wanted to make love to her until she fell apart in his arms and be there to hold her while they drifted back to their separate bodies after.

But he couldn’t make those kinds of promises and making love wouldn’t solve their problems. Making love would only make it harder to say goodbye.

And so, after he threw off the covers and stepped out into the hall, he kept walking past the closed door to Percy’s room and down the stairs. He headed into the kitchen, pulled his laptop from the hutch, and sat down to return to the obsession that had started everything.

Comforting torture, soothing despair.

That’s what it was to type in a combination of search terms he hadn’t checked yet and troll through pages of results that inevitably led to more dead ends. He still couldn’t find anything new on Preston or Dirk. He still couldn’t figure out what role Chad Cutter’s pass on Lily played in the mystery. He still couldn’t understand why Wayne had seemed to know that Lily’s death was a murder in a way no one else did. But returning to the familiar focus, to the familiar rage it stoked to life inside of him as he hunted for answers he might never find, felt normal. Safe.

This obsession was a cage that shut happiness out of his life, but the bars kept pain out too. Soon, Percy would be gone and he wouldn’t have to worry about her safety anymore. He wouldn’t have to worry about letting her down, not being able to give her the kind of relationship she deserved, or being too stuck in his ways to learn to love in a way he never had before.

He didn’t even like trying new foods, for God’s sake. How was he supposed to learn to twist his head and heart into the creative knots it would take to move forward with that magical, amazing, one-of-a-kind person asleep upstairs in his guest room?

“Better to let her go,” John muttered aloud as he logged into the email account he’d neglected during his week of sticking his head in the clouds with Percy.

It was time to get his feet back on the ground and face reality. Time to face the fact that he was still stuck, still living in the past, and might remain that way for the rest of his life.

The thought was so damned depressing, he decided to break out the bourbon he hadn’t touched in months and have a tall glass. He was pushing away from the kitchen table to open up the liquor cabinet when his login page finished loading, revealing a promotion folder full of spam and two new primary inbox messages. One was from his bank, alerting him that his monthly balance sheet was available to view. The other was from Constance Partridge.

The name didn’t ring any bells, but the subject line—
Wayne Wheeler asked me to email you
—sent his butt back into his chair.

He clicked the message and leaned forward, breath speeding as he began to read and the gut feeling that this email was the break he’d been waiting for became a certainty.

Dear Mr. Lawson,

I know we don’t know each other, but I remember reading your birth announcement in the paper when I lived in Lonesome Point. I’ll confess that when Wayne contacted me I was hesitant to open the email. It was the first time I’d received an email from an inmate and it was unexpected, to say the least.

But when I read his words, I felt an immediate connection to you and thought you would be the kind of person who would understand my search for answers, even though it’s been many long years since anyone in the law enforcement world took me seriously.

I’m so sorry to hear about the loss of your wife under mysterious circumstances. Though my daughter, Hope, has been missing for nearly twenty years, I still hope to solve the mystery of her loss and Wayne seemed to think you might be able to help me.

He didn’t give many specifics, but he said you had been looking into Lonesome Point’s missing persons’ cases and had come up with some interesting leads. He encouraged me to send you the details of Hope’s case and the last picture taken of her before she left on the spring break trip where she later disappeared.

I didn’t realize Wayne still thought of our family, but his older brother, Preston, and Hope dated for many years so perhaps he has fond memories of my daughter. In any case, I was saddened to hear…

The email went on for another four paragraphs, but as the picture attachment scrolled into view, John’s eyes were drawn to the lightly faded image.

In it, seven twenty-somethings in cutoff jeans and brightly colored tee shirts posed in front of a truck with a boat hitched to the back. There was a grinning blonde making a peace sign, two brunettes posing back-to-back with their hands held up like guns, Charlie’s Angels style, and four boys. Two of them were toasting the photographer with fresh Coronas, one was playing air guitar on his knees in front of the brunettes, and the last was giving the blonde bunny ears as he grinned for the camera. The man was twenty years younger, clean-shaven, and thinner than he was now, but John latched on to that lone familiar face quickly.

It was Clint Holcombe, who tended bar down at the Blue Saloon.

Frowning, John jumped back to the email and picked up reading where he’d left off. But Mrs. Partridge’s plea for help locating her daughter who had fallen overboard one night during a spring break party on a boat and whose body had never been found, offered no clues.

That meant the clue had to be coming from Wayne Wheeler, who was trying to send him a message through this woman. Wayne, whose big brother Preston had dated this girl before she disappeared and who Wayne had all but admitted had something to do with Lily’s death. Wayne, who was clearly trying to help John make a connection between one woman’s disappearance and the other’s murder.

Wayne, who would have known who was posing in this final picture and realized that John would only know one of the men—Clint.

Clint must have something to do with this. Maybe he’d heard something incriminating the day Lily was attacked by Chad Cutter and then rescued by Jenner and didn’t realize it. Or maybe he had been close enough to Hope Partridge that she would have confessed to feeling threatened by her boyfriend before she disappeared. Or maybe Clint wasn’t the kind, protective, looking-out-for-the-little-guy man he seemed to be.

The last option seemed like a long shot, but isn’t that what people always said when they learned a well-loved member of their community was guilty of murder? He seemed so nice. So normal. He was the kind of person who would give you his umbrella so you wouldn’t have to walk to your car in the rain.

The thought made him simultaneously guilty and mad as hell, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep until he made a visit to the Blue Saloon.

He stood, heading back upstairs to change out of his pajama pants and back into jeans. Thanks to his and Percy’s fight and early retreat to their separate bedrooms, it was just barely nine o’clock. The saloon wouldn’t close for hours. He would have plenty of time to get there, have a beer, and observe Clint with new eyes before he asked any questions.