Sins of the Storm (6 page)

“You have everything?” she asked.

Their eyes met. Silently Camille flipped open her purse and revealed the handgun tucked inside. A Beretta. She’d picked it up several years before, when her research had made a killer a little too uncomfortable.

He’d been arrested two months later, but the gun had stayed.

With a slow smile, Camille ignored the pounding of her heart and pushed open the door. “Give me fifteen,” she said, turning, and for the first time since the car had emerged from the heavily treed road leading to the house, Camille allowed herself to look.

It still stood. Surrounded by beautiful oaks and set back from the drive, the rustic two-story home that had been in her father’s family for generations still stood. No one had lived there for years, but her mother had been unable to sell it—and Katrina had been unable to destroy it.

Both had tried.

Around Camille the familiar hymn of her childhood whispered on the breeze, the cicadas and the crickets, the toads. But the house was still, quiet. No dog bounded to greet her—and no laughter rang through the trees.

Her throat tightened, but she moved forward anyway, slipped her hand into her pocket and closed her fingers around the key her mother had given her.

Closure, she remembered saying. She wanted all those doors closed and locked…even if she had to walk through them first.

Three steps brought her to the veranda. Where petunias had once crowded clay pots, now shadows slipped and fell.

Slowly she turned. But there was nothing slow about all those little fissures inside her, the ones she’d damned up and walled away. They shattered the second she saw the old swing on the far side of the porch swaying with the breeze.

And the man sprawled against the seat.

“W
elcome home,
’tite chat.
”

Her heart slammed hard, but for a moment everything else just…stopped. Sometimes he’d come to her like this, barge into the darkness of her dreams with an intensity that stole her breath. If she was being chased, it was Jack who stepped into her path and opened his arms. If she was hiding, it was Jack who reached for her, promised everything would be okay. And if she was making love—

If she was making love, it was Jack who wiped the tears from beneath her eyes, who held her hand and carried her into oblivion.

His movements were slow, almost lazy as he came to his feet, but the predatory stillness quickened through her. “Jack.”

“Just like old times,” he said quietly, but Camille recognized the deceptive tone. She’d heard it before. From cops. Sometimes lawyers.

But never Jacques.

Through the shadows he moved toward her, much the way he did in the darkness of her dreams. And even as she’d come home to prove nothing remained except those shadowy images that had her twisting in her sheets, part of her had wondered.

Part of her had wanted.

But as he closed in on her, his limp barely noticeable, the wondering ended. The years could be taken away, the goodbyes taken back. The mistakes could be fixed.

But this man, this tall, isolated man who’d been waiting for her in the darkness was not the boy who’d kissed her on the forehead all those years before.

“Cami!”

Saura’s voice. Camille twisted toward her, saw her cousin hurrying toward her. But before Camille could call out a man stepped from behind a tree—and Saura froze. “Hang on there, Thelma.”

“Tell her it’s okay,” Jack said. “Tell her she can go on home with her fiancé.”

Her fiancé. The tall man dressed in black with whom Saura was having a heated conversation was her fiancé, Detective John D’Ambrosia.

“I’ll take you home,” Jack said. “You don’t need her anymore.”

The words swirled through Camille, slipped and slid against places she knew better than to allow them to touch. “I’m not hurting anything,” she protested.

But Jack merely lounged against the door frame. “And I’m going to make sure no one hurts you.”

“No one’s going to hurt—”

“Finally, something we agree on.”

This time the rush was softer and far, far more dangerous. She glanced toward her cousin, couldn’t quite stop the smile that curved her mouth. “He called her Thelma?”

“Fits, wouldn’t you say?”

It was the wrong time to laugh, but the sound slipped free anyway. “It’s okay,” she called to Saura. It took a little convincing, but finally Saura and D’Ambrosia headed toward the little black convertible. He reached for the keys, but she snatched her arm away and climbed into the driver’s seat.

D’Ambrosia stalked to the other side.

“Wow,” Camille murmured, but the second the red taillights vanished down the road, Jack was stepping closer, his lazy, good old boy act replaced by the hard-eyed cop from earlier that day. He took her by the elbow and turned her toward him, all but scorched her with the dark glow in his eyes.

“Mind telling me what you think you’re doing?”

“You said it yourself,” she said simply. “Coming home.”

“Here,” he shot back. “Alone.”

“I wasn’t alone.”

The wide planes of his face tightened. “I could have been anyone, damn it. I could have been on you before—”

She twisted away. “But you
weren’t,
” she said. “You weren’t just anyone, and you weren’t on me.” But the words, the image they brought, burned through her. “You’re
Jack,
” she said while the night pulsed around them, all those sounds and the muggy air, the breeze moving through the trees. “And you promised nothing would happen on your watch.”

He stiffened. “Damn it, Camille—”

She stepped closer, stepped into him, stopped him with a finger to his mouth. “This isn’t what I want,” she said, but the words came out rough and hoarse and…broken. And again, the image taunted, of Jack…on top of her. All alone. In the darkness. With no one to hear or see…no one to know. “I don’t want to be on opposite sides,” she said, quieter this time. “I don’t want to pretend—”

She broke off and looked beyond him, toward the empty porch swing.

“Pretend what?”

There was a note to his voice she didn’t understand, an ache she’d not heard since she’d turned around to see him holding a gun on her. “Pretend you’re the enemy.”

Nothing prepared her for him to move. Nothing prepared her for him to lift a hand to her face and ease the hair behind her ear. “I’m not.”

And with the words, something inside her shifted. “But you’re not Jacques, either,” she said. “When I look at you—” at his dark edgy eyes and the lines of his face, the hard mouth that had once been impossibly soft “—when you look at me…it’s like the past isn’t even there.”

Except for then. It was there in that moment, glowing in his eyes like one of the candles on that long-ago night, when she’d wanted nothing more than for him to see she wasn’t a little girl anymore—and she wasn’t his sister.

“We can’t live in the past,
cher.
”

The crickets still sang. She knew that. The cicadas and the toads, they were there. They always were. But Jack’s words echoed through her, drowning out everything else.

“No,” she said. “We can’t.”

Stillness breathed through the old house. Outside the glow of twilight had faded into night, leaving only darkness. She walked on anyway, moving from room to room as if not a day, a year, had passed.

Jack followed. He’d known she would show up here just as surely as he’d known he would be waiting. But the change rocked him. He’d come to expect secrets from her. He’d come to expect determination. During those dark years after her father’s death she’d spun so far and dangerously out of control….

He’d tried to bring her back. Every time he’d looked at those desperate, devastated eyes, every time he’d heard the whispers, the allegations that his father had been the one to pull the trigger, that that’s why Gator Savoie vanished…it had been like a knife twisting in his gut.

But in the end, the responsibility he’d felt for Camille had led him to violate a line that should never have been touched, much less crossed.

Now he watched her walk down the long hallway of her childhood, this woman she’d become, all grown-up with a woman’s body and a woman’s smile, the slow burn of a woman’s eyes….

And the enormity of his mistake burned.

She wasn’t a stranger. The girl was still there, buried beneath countless layers of scar tissue. She was still there…and she still ached for all she’d lost.

At the second to last room she hesitated, glanced back for a long heartbeat before stepping inside. And even before he followed, even before he lifted his flashlight, he knew the walls would be pale yellow, and that he’d find her crossing the matted carpet. On the far side she stopped and lifted a hand to the mural her mother had painted. It was a garden scene, Jack remembered, and Gloria Fontenot had immortalized Camille’s kittens chasing a butterfly through daffodils.

“I’d forgotten,” she whispered, and then she turned, exposing him to the saddest smile he’d ever seen. “I’d forgotten about the flowers.”

He looked away.

“How does that happen, Jack? How do we just…forget?”

The question pierced.

The answer pierced deeper. People forgot, because they had to. People forgot, because remembering was too brutal.

“Time goes by,” he said. “Things that aren’t important just…fade.”

Something dark and jagged flickered in her eyes. “But this
was
important. This room, these flowers…” She went down on her knees, and before she even lifted a hand, he directed the beam of light to the daffodils. “Sugar and Spice,” she said, tracing the images of the two black-and-white kittens with her forefinger. Sugar had died young of undetected heart disease, but Spice…Spice had still been alive when Jack left for the Air Force. That would have made him six or seven.

“Mama still has him,” she whispered, and Christ, through the shadows, he saw the moisture in her eyes. “And
he
remembered…” Her voice broke, and Jack couldn’t do it one second longer, couldn’t do nothing while she knelt on the floor of her childhood bedroom, and talked of the kitty who’d once slept against her chest.

He crossed to her, went down on one knee. “Camille…don’t.”

“He licked me,” she said, somehow still smiling despite the tears in her eyes.

Jack’s throat tightened. “Come on.” He reached for her hand. “This was a bad idea—”

“No.” She pulled back with a near violence that stunned him. “This is why I’m here…to remember.”

He knew that. He knew she wanted to remember. For some crazy reason, she wanted to go back, to walk through those final days once again.

But the memories swimming in her eyes had nothing to do with the crime that had been committed at the other end of the house.

“Do you?” she asked. “Do you remember?”

He’d fought in two wars. He’d flown combat. He’d faced death—and buried a wife. Her question should not have twisted through him…should not have made him feel as if he stood on a sheet of very thin ice and the thaw was coming.

He thought about lying. That was the right thing to do. It was kinder, more merciful.
No.
He didn’t remember.
Anything.
Because that’s what he’d trained himself to do. That’s what he’d demanded of himself. What he expected. The past was the past, and just like the furniture that had once occupied this house, it was gone now. Over.

But the house still stood, strong and sturdy, a placeholder against a world that tried to move on. Not even a category four hurricane had changed that.

“Yes.” With the word he swiped at the tears beneath her eyes. “I remember.”

Marcus says you kiss with your mouth open…That’s not true, is it, Jacques?

She’d been seven or eight at the time, her hair in pigtails.

Marcus had never talked to her of kissing again.

Teach me, Jacques…pleeeease. Teach me how to kiss….

She’d been sixteen then. Her father was dead. Crazy Cami, the kids at school had called her…sweet sixteen and never been kissed. Because no one wanted to kiss a freak.

He hurt me, Jacques….
Her lip had been swollen, bruised. Her eyes dark. Because he’d told her no. Jack had turned her down as gently as he could, told her he wasn’t the one to teach her how to kiss. So she’d asked someone else. She’d asked Shawn Paul…and spinning on a six-pack of old Dixie, he’d been happy to oblige.

He hadn’t been so happy after Gabe and Jacques got through with him.

Jack looked at her now, kneeling in the shadows with her hand on his knee, his hand still against her face. Her eyes were huge, dark, not with fear and pain, but a longing that fired through his blood.

“Jacques.”

A stranger, he tried to tell himself. God, he wanted her to be a stranger. But her voice wrapped around his name the way it always had. Hero worship, Gabe had once called it.

But Jack was nobody’s hero.

If he were, he would have pushed to his feet and taken her hand, led her out of that house, that place, led her back to New Orleans and deposited her with her mother. If he were, he would never have let her lean into him, would never have slid his hand to the back of her neck as she looked up at him…would never have crushed his mouth to hers.

T
each me, Jacques…

He’d said no. He’d smiled gently and put his hands to her shoulders, pushed her back. She’d gone shopping that day. She’d gotten Saura to take her to a department store, had Saura pick out something trendy. Her jeans had been faded, her top black with a plunging neckline.

Jack hadn’t even noticed.

He’d pushed her away, told her it wasn’t his place. He’d turned then and walked away, gone back to Gabe’s room, leaving Camille sitting on the edge of her bed…humiliated.

Over the years, she’d forgotten. She’d forgotten the way her body had burned, wanted. She’d forgotten how crushed she’d been the next day when she’d climbed up into the tree fort and found Jack and Lauralee sprawled on the floor, rolling around, kissing.

But here in this room, kneeling on the floor, the years had fallen away, and she’d wanted again. When he touched her, when he put a hand to her face and wiped away her tears…Like the naive sixteen-year-old she’d been, she’d leaned into him.

But this time he didn’t pull away.

His mouth moved against hers, soft and seeking, tentative kisses giving way to harder, deeper. In some foggy corner of her mind she was aware of the way he shifted and pulled her into his lap, the way his hand cradled her face, holding her, tenderly, gently, despite the urgency of his kiss.

Sensation swirled in a dizzying rush. Her breasts ached. Inside…she burned. She opened to him, went willingly as he lowered her to the ground and hovered over her. From the moment she’d walked into the old house, there’d been only cold. But now heat seeped from his body into hers. She could feel the strength of him, not refined and contained as she’d observed since coming home, but…broken, driven, needy in a way she’d never expected from the isolated man she’d come home to.

This, a little voice reminded. This was what she’d tried to blot from her mind. To erase. The way he’d kissed her that long-ago night before he’d left for active duty. She’d been…devastated. He was going away. He wouldn’t be home for a long time, if ever. He was ending his life in Bayou d’Espere, finally getting away from the demons, the whispers that followed him everywhere.

Finally being the man his own father never was.

Camille had understood, and she’d tried to be happy for him. But she’d been unable to imagine life without him. She hadn’t meant to seduce him that night. That’s not why she’d brought the wine and the candles. She’d just wanted…

She didn’t know what she’d wanted. She never had. But Jack had come to Whispering Oaks as she’d asked. He’d found her, found the candles, had tried to leave.

To this day, she didn’t know why he’d changed his mind. And to this day she didn’t know how it had started, how the roles they’d always known had…shattered, leaving only the two of them and a clawing need that had carried them into the night.

It was the same desperation she tasted now, as if he wanted to absorb her. As if he
needed
to…

“Jacques…” She shifted against him, drinking in the feel of every hard line, the strength of his hands as they moved down her arms, his legs against hers, the ridge pressed against her thigh. She could feel—and she wanted. “Jacques.”

And then it…stopped.

He ripped away with a violence that rocked her. His flashlight had fallen to the floor, leaving shadows to play against his face. His eyes were remote, shuttered, the line of his mouth hard, the whiskers at his jaw dark, the ones that had scraped so gently against the side of her face.

He might as well have driven a fist into her solar plexus.

“I’m sorry,” he said, the way he had that morning, and part of her wanted to shove against him, to scream, to do something, anything, to destroy that wall of icy control that fell down around him. “Those aren’t the memories you came home for.”

Oh, but maybe they were. Sometimes memories destroyed, but sometimes they taught. And sometimes they strengthened.

With a quiet dignity she hadn’t possessed when he’d left her kneeling on the floor, naked except for the quilt wrapped around her, she pushed to her feet and reached out a hand.

“No,” she said, not the least bit surprised when he ignored her gesture and stood on his own. “They’re not.”

He retrieved his flashlight, jerked the beam away from the mural on the wall. “Come on,” he said, heading toward the door. “We should—”

“No.” With one last glance at the room she’d slept in for eighteen years, she turned and joined him in the hallway. “Not yet.”

He’d been in Gabe’s room. They’d been listening to the debut album of a new Irish rock band. Gabe had been sitting on the edge of his bed. He’d just broken up with his girlfriend. Jack had been on the floor, munching on the popcorn Camille had brought them.

The gunshot barely sounded above the lyrics.

I will follow…

But the scream had stopped his heart.

They’d been on their feet and running, racing through the darkness toward the scream that just kept echoing. And within seconds, they’d found her, Gabe’s mom, kneeling in blood and draped over Gabe’s father.

It had been obvious Mr. Troy was gone.

Jack watched her now, watched Camille kneel in the same spot her mother had. With mechanical movements—and absolutely no emotion—she ran her hand along the scarred hardwood floor, where the shattered remains of the stained glass had been found.

“I didn’t hear the argument,” she said, but he wasn’t even sure she realized he was there. That kind of control, he’d seen it before. In combat. Soldiers were taught to suppress feeling, to shut it all out. That if they didn’t, it could destroy.

“I didn’t see the stained glass,” she said. “I slipped in when they were fighting…”

The gun had gone off. Troy had fallen.

“Camille.” He saw her flinch, saw her jerk. She twisted toward him, exposed him to eyes as horror-drenched as the morning he’d found her, two days later.

“No.” Her voice was remote, controlled. “Not yet.”

The sight of her reliving it all ripped through him. He knew better than to move, knew better than to touch, but something drove him to crouch beside her.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said roughly. Sister, he told himself. She was Gabe’s sister, for God’s sake. Once she’d trusted him. “It can’t be healthy—”

“It’s not about healthy.” Very little light leaked from the windows into the room, but her eyes glowed. “It’s about unlocking doors,” she said. “About coming to terms with what happened here.”

“Closure.” He realized.

Her answering smile surprised him. It was sad…reflective. “I’ve been running a long time,” she acknowledged in that same quiet voice, the one that sounded grown-up and like a little girl all at the same time. “It’s time to stop.”

“And then what?” he asked, but did not let himself touch, not even to slide back the hair that had slipped from her ponytail and stuck against her mouth. “What happens when you stop?”

Her smile faded. She looked away, toward the windows, and stood. She crossed the room and lifted a hand to the pane. But she didn’t say a word.

Somehow, he still heard.

She didn’t know. She didn’t know what would happen when she stopped.

But he did. He knew what happened when you stopped, when the stillness seeped in. The quiet. He knew what happened when the memories were scraped away and cataloged, when the past was laid to rest and the future stretched like a long road in front of you. He knew what happened when the dreams died and the nightmares went quiet. He knew what the silence sounded like.

“You don’t need to do this,” he said. Watching the way she stood without moving, looking into the backyard where the fort had stood, he crossed to her. She stiffened, but he put his hands to her shoulders anyway.

“Do what?” she asked.

“Make yourself remember.” With the words, the truth formed. “Torture yourself.” As some sort of misplaced penance. “To make up for your perceived sins…to do what you couldn’t do before.”

There was nowhere for her to go, captured as she was between his body and the window.

She took a step back anyway. “This isn’t about penance.”

“Isn’t it? Are you sure? Because it sure seems that way to me. You were there,
’tite chat.
” The flare of her eyes touched him in ways he refused to let himself feel. “You were in the room. And you’ve always wondered, haven’t you? You’ve always wondered what would have happened if you’d walked in a minute or two earlier? If you’d made your presence known.”

Slowly, she shook her head.

“What if you’d screamed? You could have stopped them.”

“No.” The word was sharp…broken.

“So here you are now, ready to testify, to immerse yourself all over again, to go back and live that night again and again and—”

“He’s lived like a king!” The words erupted from her as she came alive and shoved hard against his body.

But Jack didn’t move, just kept standing there, sandwiching her between his body and the window.

“He acts like he owns the city,” she hissed as Jack took her wrists and simply held her. “Do you have any idea what it was like, any idea at all, seeing him all these years? Seeing him on television, being treated like a celebrity…a god? Seeing him smile as he fakes his Cajun accent, seeing his face smirking at me from cookbooks? Everywhere I looked—”

“Then why now?” The question ate at him. “Why not before? Why wait all these years to make your move? You could have stopped—”

“No!” She twisted away, stared off into the darkness beyond the window.

Jack told himself to step away, that he’d pressed enough. But the cop he’d become joined with the boy he’d been—and for the first time since Camille had come home, he felt fear.

Hers.

“Hey…” The cop told him to give her space. The man he didn’t want to be urged him to turn her in his arms and take her face in his hands, press his advantage.

But it was the boy who won, the boy who guided his hands around her waist. “Talk to me,” he murmured. “Tell me…”

Everything.
He wanted it all, every last detail. Why she’d gone away—why she’d stayed away. Why she’d severed ties with her family. Why she’d let them worry that she could be dead when all the while she’d been watching from afar….

“The tree house is gone.”

The words, so soft and out of the blue, slipped through him like an unexpected shot of whiskey. He looked through her reflection toward the sprawling old oak fifty feet from the house, where he and Gabe had once built a fort.

“Katrina,” he told her. “She hit us hard.”

Beneath his hands, Camille’s shoulders, normally tense and squared, dropped. “I tried to find out,” she said, and in her voice, he heard the same agony he’d felt halfway around the world. “For days I searched the Internet…went to the news sites, the television stations and newspapers….”

In those first few days, solid information had been impossible to come by. The images captured on film, those of entire neighborhoods under water, of citizens trapped and abandoned, had chilled.

“You were still there, weren’t you?” she asked, and in the window’s reflection, she lifted her eyes to his. “In the Middle East.”

He closed his eyes, could still feel the sting of the sand. He’d been in Iraq. Well to the north of Baghdad, Kirkuk had been relatively secure. The insurgency had been in its infancy. But only two weeks before, a female pilot had been picked off while walking to get mail.

Jack’s wife of eighteen months, Susan, had been in Louisiana.

“Yeah.” The images slammed in from opposite directions, the ugliness of the war, and the destruction of his home. Maybe that’s why he’d let the young children lull him into complacency a few weeks later. Maybe that’s why he’d trusted…when he should have been alert.

Maybe that’s why he’d damn near lost his leg—and had lost his career.

“I always knew it could happen,” she said. “I remember Dad talking about the levees and that New Orleans was shaped like a bowl and if the big one ever hit, she’d go under.”

His dad had predicted the same thing. But human nature was funny that way. Folks tended to wallow in horrible possibilities, but never really thought anything bad would happen. Not to them.

“I remember watching the cable news shows and seeing the satellite imagery, the track straight for New Orleans. And I remember…”

Her voice trailed off, and through the silence, another voice sounded. Susan’s. She’d called him, terrified. She’d told him she was evacuating, that she wanted out, to go far. That she didn’t want to be there anymore….

He should have let her go then. He should have realized how miserable she’d become, that being the wife of an airman was not the glamorous life she’d craved. That after the adrenaline rush faded, reality began. And that just because Jack could put on a flight suit and fly combat, that didn’t mean there weren’t skeletons in his closet. That there wasn’t murder…secrets.

He’d been wrong to bring her to Louisiana. Wrong to think she’d be happy there.

“What?” he asked, dragging his mind away from Susan, and back to Camille. Without thought, his hand found his thigh.

“My friends didn’t understand why I was uneasy. Folks in California didn’t really understand how devastating the big one could be.”

California. It was the first time she’d mentioned a place.

“No small irony there,” he muttered.

Her smile was brief, fleeting. “No,” she said. “Everyone loves to talk about the big one, that part of California will fall into the Pacific, but no one actually thinks it will happen.”

Her words, so close to his thoughts moments before, had him drawing her closer.

For the first time, she didn’t resist. “But I knew,” she said. “I knew what would happen and when it did…”

“When it did, what,
’tite chat?
” He wanted to hear her say the words.
Needed
her to.

“I was half a country away, but…
I felt it,
” she whispered. “I felt it all…
everything.
”

He didn’t want to believe her. He didn’t want to think of her that way, thousands of miles away and hurting, worrying….