Secrets Rising (22 page)

Lorraine compressed her thin lips. "Charles Morton is evil. Of course he wanted to corrupt my daughter. Darkness hates the light and wants to stamp it out so darkness can rule. If somebody doesn't stop him, he's going to spread that dark evil of his over this entire country just like he did—like he tried to do to my Janelle."

Jake nodded and leaned slightly forward, silently encouraging Lorraine. He was good, Rebecca thought. Definitely good at manipulating people—a skill doubtless made easier since had he no personal involvement in any of it.

"He met her at a bake sale," Lorraine continued, "and you could tell right away he was up to no good. Came to our church a few times. I'm surprised God didn't strike him dead when he walked in. He went to some of the socials we had for our young folks, but Janelle didn't want anything to do with him."

Lorraine returned with a framed picture and handed it to Jake. Rebecca leaned closer to peer at the family portrait, to search for familiar features.

"That's my husband." Lorraine pointed to a dumpy man, a couple of inches shorter than his wife. Except for having darker hair in the picture, Lorraine hadn't changed much over the years. "And that's Janelle."

The woman standing beside Lorraine was short and slim with dark hair pulled back from her face in a style identical to her mother's. Janelle's features were unremarkable and would have been, Rebecca thought, attractive with a different hair style and a little makeup...and with a smile.

Was it possible this sad, colorless woman had given her life? Even in the picture, which was far from being a close-up, Janelle exuded sadness, loneliness, uncertainty. She would have been easy prey for a man like Charles.

"Some say there was talk of them getting married," Jake said.

Lorraine took back her picture and resumed her seat, her thin lips becoming thinner with tight white lines around the corners. "Times were different then. If a single man came sniffing around a single woman, people assumed he had honorable intentions. Not like now with women crawling into bed with every man they meet."

The older woman's narrowed gaze indicated she suspected Jake and Rebecca of doing exactly that. Rebecca had to suppress an urge to shock the woman, to assure her they hadn't crawled into any bed but had done the deed half-on and half-off an old table in the shed in the park.

"Yeah. Who was crawling into bed with who back around 1979? I'd say it's a pretty safe bet Rebecca's parents weren't joined in holy matrimony or they wouldn't have given her up for adoption. If we know who was fooling around with who, that would give us a place to start."

Lorraine Griffin set her family picture on the coffee table and folded her hands primly. "I'm not one to gossip."

"This isn't gossip, Mrs. Griffin. This is a very serious investigation."

It was all the encouragement she needed. "Well, Kay Langley and Murray Johnson were awful thick, holding hands and kissing in public. And Bob Horton and the Wilson girl. Let me see...what was her name?"

"Thank you very much for all your help, Mrs. Griffin. And allow me to express my condolences on the death of your daughter. I know it was a long time ago, but wounds like that don't heal."

Lorraine's mouth twisted. "No. She was having a hard time sleeping, and that fool doctor, Sam Wilcox, gave her a prescription for drugs. I didn't know about it or I'd have taken it away from her and flushed it down the toilet stool."

She drew herself up and Rebecca felt a moment of sympathy for her. Even this insensitive woman had loved her daughter. Perhaps the loss had hardened her. Perhaps she hadn't always been like this.

"She didn't know how strong those drugs were. She took too many. The doctor said sometimes people woke up in the middle of the night and didn't remember how many they'd already taken and took some more. Janelle must have done that. She went to bed one night and didn't get up the next morning."

She looked at Rebecca, bestowing her full attention for the first time. "Any mother that would give up her child isn't worth looking for. I don't believe you're sick except at heart and finding somebody who'd do that kind of thing isn't going to help you."

"I'll keep that in mind." Even the woman's good advice had a cruel edge to it.

Jake thanked Lorraine Griffin again, and they left.

At the end of the sidewalk, Jake stopped and turned to her. "You want to go pick up some chicken or something and go to the park to eat it? I don't know about you, but after that house, I'm not anxious to be inside anywhere for a while."

"Sure. Sounds good to me." He'd mentioned the park as casually as if yesterday had never happened, as if they'd never made love in the park.

Or even had sex.

***

The day was still comfortable when they reached the park a little after noon, though Jake suspected it would soon be hot and muggy with the humidity from the rain the day before.

He set the sack of fried chicken on the picnic table closest to the shed where he and Rebecca had made love yesterday. Not because he wanted to be as close as possible to the reminder of their encounter but because he needed to desensitize himself to the memory. He needed to associate it with mundane things such as eating fried chicken, talking about the case, watching squirrels play in the trees...anything but that mind-bending episode that replayed itself in vivid detail every time he was near Rebecca or even thought about her.

Pretty much continuously.

She sat across from him now in a white sundress that gave the fair skin of her neck and shoulders a creamy glow by contrast. Her slim fingers moved gracefully as she peeled the paper off a straw and stuck it through the plastic lid of her soft drink.

Damn! He'd be hard pressed to find something more mundane than that action yet she seemed to be moving to music...erotic music. Even over the strong smell of fried chicken, he caught her scent...summer flowers...along with the essence of the rain-washed grass and trees, all imbedded in his brain as a part of making love with Rebecca.

He jabbed a straw into his own drink, ripped open the sack of food, pulled a drumstick out of one of the boxes and bit into it.

Rebecca took out a wing and separated the sections then stared down at it. "That was a waste of time, wasn't it? Talking to Lorraine Griffin. We didn't learn anything new."

They ate for a few minutes in silence except for the lyrical chirping of birds and the occasional raucous call of a blue jay. Jake noticed Rebecca was doing more picking at her food than eating it. She munched on a fry, holding it between thumb and index finger while slowly sucking it between her lips and into her mouth. Her gaze was unfocused and he knew she was probably thinking about Lorraine Griffin, but her actions with the fry struck him as intensely sexual. Of course, most things she did struck him as intensely sensual.

They were going to have to find a different motel in a different town tonight, and he was either going to have to see that they got rooms on opposite sides of the place...or one room with a big bed. Avoid it entirely or dive in completely.

"My adoptive grandparents were wonderful people," she said, and Jake made an effort to wrench his thoughts away from his lust. "They're all dead now, but I adored them when I was a little girl. My dad's parents were the more stereotypical, I guess. They lived north of Plano, in McKinney, and when I'd go to see them, Grams would do the cookie thing and Gramps would take me fishing. Mom's parents were more like her, always busy, involved with the community, doing volunteer work. They'd take me to Six Flags Amusement Park and the zoo but also to visit people in hospitals and nursing homes."

With her straw, she stirred the crushed ice left from her drink. "And all that time, everybody knew about me, that I wasn't really a part of the family."

"Doesn't sound like it made any difference that you weren't born into it."

"How can I ever know how they'd have treated me if I'd been their real daughter and granddaughter?"

Jake gave an unamused bark of laughter. "Let's hope it wouldn't have been the way somebody—maybe your real parents—are treating you now...a threatening phone call, a snake in the bathtub. I think I'd prefer the homemade cookies, trips to Six Flags and even visits to nursing homes."

She leaned forward, her arms on the rough wood of the tabletop, her hands clasped tightly together. "How did your grandparents treat you?"

This time his burst of laughter was from genuine amusement. "Which ones? The real ones or one of the sets of steps?"

She didn't laugh. "All of them," she replied.

Jake shifted on the bench that had suddenly become hard and uncomfortable. He forced himself to smile. "It's tough to keep them separated, remember which was which. My family tree, especially with the grafted on sections and the sawed off branches, is too complicated."

"Like the way my family tree is turning out." She waited, watching him intently, her chameleon eyes a mixture of the sharp green hues of the leaves overhead and the blue of the sky.

He'd always felt there was little point in recalling the past. It was over and dead and had no bearing on the present. But now it did. Rebecca needed a comparison, and he had all varieties of relationships to give her. He sighed and folded his arms.

"Okay, let me think. Grandparents. One set—I'm pretty sure this was my mom's parents—used to send me really inappropriate gifts. Like one year when I was five or six, I asked for a guitar and they sent an electric one with so many attachments, I didn't have a clue what to do with it. Or when I wanted a set of weights, something small that I could take along when I moved from one place to another, they had a full size home gym delivered."

"They had money," Rebecca guessed.

"Several of the branches had money. Some handled it better than others. I remember one set of grandparents that didn't bring me a lot of gifts but the ones they did bring were neat. Like a baseball and bat. They lived in the country, and I thought it was great fun to go out and pick tomatoes that we'd eat for dinner. They even let me have a go at milking a cow. I got one little stream of milk, and you'd have thought it was pure gold the way I carried on. The way they carried on, for that matter. But they belonged to my dad's second wife, and when he married his third or maybe it was his fourth...anyway, she went ballistic when she found out her husband's son was hanging out with the ex-wife's parents. So we got a divorce and they got custody of the cow." He chuckled at his own humor.

She frowned, a vertical crease marring the smooth skin between her eyebrows. "Why did you laugh? That's not funny."

"You don't see the humor in that? I guess you had to be there."

She still didn't laugh or even smile. In fact, her eyes had gone a soft blue as if with compassion...something he neither needed nor wanted.

He leaned forward, covering one of her hands with both of his, turning the compassion back to her where it belonged. "You know how when you exercise really hard, to the point of exhaustion, of physical pain even, you gradually build up muscles. Pretty soon you're much stronger, and the same exercise that used to wear you out and make you ache all over is a breeze. Well, that's the way it is with life. You had a good life. You didn't have to exercise your emotional muscles. Until now. One day you'll wake up and realize that you're stronger, and even somebody like Lorraine Griffin won't be able to cause you so much as a moment's discomfort."

Her gaze flickered over his face then down to their hands. Gently she pulled her hand from beneath his and laid it on top. "I'm not sure I believe that or even want to believe it."