The Scent of Rain and Lightning (6 page)

“What will happen to him? What about his family?”

“His family is better off without a man like him.”

She nodded, feeling on the verge of tears for their sakes.

“We’d all be better off without Billy Crosby,” Hugh said, and Annabelle recognized his tone. It was the one he used when he came to a hard and irrevocable decision.

“People will say we never should have tried to help him.”

“Let them say it,” Hugh snapped. “Maybe we stopped worse from happening.”

“Maybe we did.” Annabelle felt a little comforted by that possibility, because who knew what Billy might have become, even before now, if they hadn’t stepped in to try to push him along a better path. Yes, they had failed this time with this one boy. But there had been success stories, like Hugh-Jay’s best friend Meryl Tapper, who had found love and inspiration among the Linders. Meryl was going to be a lawyer, and maybe marry their daughter, which could never have happened without their intervention in his troubled life.
He
wasn’t out setting fire to pastures, and none of the other boys they’d helped had done anything like this, either.

“
This
could have been worse,” she murmured, thinking of the burnt patch.

They were a few hours away from finding out what “worse” could mean.

S
HORTLY BEFORE NOON
, and unaware of what was going on at the ranch, Hugh-Jay drove his silver truck up his driveway in town and parked in the gravel behind his own home.

His and Laurie’s house could hardly have been more different from his parents’.

Out on the ranch, his mother and father had an attractive, practical, two-story frame home, unpretentious and perfect for its hardworking functions. Here in Rose, Hugh-Jay and Laurie lived in an inherited mansion that was almost 120 years old and rose out of the ground as if nature had shoved it up from below. Over years spanning two centuries, the elements had barely softened the edges of the enormous limestone rectangles that formed it, or the hand-laid stone fence around it. It was a showplace, a nineteenth-century vault, impenetrable unless he and Laurie left the doors unlocked, which they always did, just like almost everybody else in Rose left their cars, trucks, and houses unlocked. There just wasn’t any such thing as a home invasion, or a murder, or car theft in Rose, although tools had been known to disappear from open garages now and then, which people put down to neighbors forgetting to return them.

Hugh-Jay and Laurie could have built a house out on the ranch, near his folks—or at some distance from them, because the ranch was big enough for that—but Laurie was a town girl. She’d had covetous eyes for the huge house that Hugh-Jay’s grandfather had built for his grandmother. It had sat empty for a long while—because Annabelle never wanted to live in it, and there was nobody else in the family to take it—and the family would never consider selling it. With its exterior of foot-thick native limestone, and hand-hewn beams and massive antique walnut furniture within, it had been a fight for them to keep it off the National Register of Historic Places. They wanted to preserve it; they just didn’t want other people telling them how to do it. Hugh-Jay’s great-grandfather had designed it to warm, cool, protect, and impress, not necessarily in that order.

Hugh-Jay had resisted Laurie’s pleadings, at first.

He preferred a simple house on the ranch, like his folks’, only smaller.

“Give your bride what she wants,” Annabelle advised him before his marriage to Laurie. “That’s what your father did for me when I said I
didn’t
want to live there, and look how well that’s turned out!” His father, overhearing that, laughed. “Yes, all I had to do was build your mother a brand-new house,” he’d teased. But he also put his arm around Annabelle and gave her waist a squeeze, which she returned with affection. Hugh-Jay felt he would give anything to have a marriage as good, as
alive
, as his folks’ was, so he let himself be moved into a house that felt uncomfortable and pretentious to him. His wife scoffed, “Hugh-Jay, it was built for men your size!” But he felt it was built more for big egos than big bodies; it embarrassed him to live there when most people he knew were scrambling to make a living.

Hugh-Jay stepped out of his truck and squinted west, where clouds were building.

His pair of black Labrador retrievers came trotting up, their tails wagging and their tongues hanging out, to sniff him and to slobber their welcome onto his fingers, his jeans, and his boots.

“Looks like rain toward Colorado,” he told them. “We sure need it.”

The dogs trotted back to the shade of a tree and flopped down again.

A couple of days earlier he had witnessed an idiot toss a burning cigarette out of a car window. He chased the car down on the empty highway, squeezing it to the side of the road and forcing the driver to stop, scaring the four people inside half to death, so he could give them a piece of his mind about the danger of flipping live butts out of windows.

“You like barbecue?” he’d shouted as he approached their car.

Four hard-looking city faces stared back at him.

He knew he looked imposing. He meant to be.

He hoped the sight of a six-foot-two-inch cowboy rushing at them out of nowhere would scare the hell out of the ignorant fools.

“’Cause if you like your beef barbecued,” he said as he came closer, “you’re going to get it when that cigarette of yours catches that grass on fire and burns up all my cattle.”

Later, thinking about it, he realized he was lucky they hadn’t shot him. There could have been guns in that car. They looked like the types who’d carry firearms, and not for hunting deer or pheasant, either. There was no mounted gun rack; the guns these types would carry would be tucked into dark places under seats or in the glove compartment. One of them could have popped him out of sheer self-defense, because he looked and acted like a crazy man. But
they
were also lucky, he thought, that he hadn’t jerked open the door closest to him, hauled the driver out of there, marched him back up the highway to where his cigarette lay smoldering and made him stamp it out with his forehead.

Instead, Hugh-Jay had gotten back into his truck, thrown it into reverse, and performed the grinding out—with the leather sole of his boot—himself, while they sped away down the isolated highway as fast as they could escape from him.

He hadn’t told his wife Laurie about the incident.

He hadn’t told anybody. Well, almost no one. Soon afterward he telephoned the local veterinarian to discuss the lame horse, and was still so full of adrenaline that he’d spilled the story. The vet sounded surprised, not at the stupid behavior of human beings who would throw burning butts onto dry grass, but at Hugh-Jay’s high dudgeon about it. It wasn’t a reaction anyone expected from him. And now he’d had two such incidents in just the past forty-eight hours, first with those strangers and then with Billy Crosby and his stupid beer can.

Hugh-Jay shook his head at his own volatile behavior.

He placed his gloved hands on the roof of his truck and sucked in a deep breath, trying to locate the calm, reasonable man that everybody thought he was, that
he
thought he was. Even through the gloves, the heat forced him to lift his hands back up. When he did, he saw that the palms of the yellow calf leather had turned gray-white, which told him that dust had traveled from the salt flats and rock monuments west of town. In the thick layer of dust on the metal, he saw his own clear glove prints, from his palms to the ends of his fingers.

“Bad weather for criminals,” he thought wryly.

He slapped the dust off his gloves, then turned to look toward the back door of his house. Suddenly, he felt heartburn and tasted bile. He wasn’t sure he could eat anything that Laurie fixed for him. While he was at his parents’ home, or doing ranch errands, he could distract himself from what he didn’t want to think about, but now he couldn’t avoid it any longer.

He was headed home for lunch, without calling ahead to let her know he was coming.

This also wasn’t behavior she expected from him, which was why he was doing it.

It was his third uncharacteristic act in forty-eight hours, he realized.

Hugh-Jay thought of what his mother had asked him—oddly, out of the blue—that morning:
Are you all right?

No, was the honest answer to that, he wasn’t all right.

He was far from all right. He was worried as hell and sick about it.

And his father’s order—also out of the blue—for him to check up on the ranch in Colorado, hadn’t made him feel any better. When he heard it, he felt his bowels go loose and he got an awful feeling in his gut. Somehow he managed to cover up his reaction so his dad didn’t notice anything, but he hadn’t fooled his mother. He never had been able to put anything over on her, not like Chase could by charming her, or like Bobby and Belle could by just refusing to talk about stuff. Hugh-Jay wondered how long his mom would wait to ask him again.

A sudden gust of wind preceding the rain jangled the wind chime on the porch.

Wishing it didn’t take courage to walk up to his own back door, Hugh-Jay forced himself to get going. He took off his boots before walking into the kitchen in his stocking feet, so quietly that he had a moment to take it all in before Laurie even knew he was there.

T
HE BIG OLD-FASHIONED KITCHEN
was fragrant with baking pies.

Hugh-Jay saw his wife dressed in her favorite yellow sundress, with her dark pixie hair stuck sweatily to the back of her neck, and he saw her bare arms, shapely bare legs, bare feet. The bones at the backs of her ankles were so slim they looked as if he could break them with a pinch. Her painted toenails—red—made his heart hurt, they were so sexy and perfect. He could have held her feet and played with her toes all day long, if she would let him. Such longings used to make her laugh and tease him; now, they would probably make her run and put on shoes.

He stared at her in silence while she worked at the sink.

She was twenty-two to his twenty-four, and so lovely that when he married her he could hardly believe she was supposed to be his for the rest of their lives. She’d left college to marry him, which sounded like a sacrifice except to anybody who’d seen her grade average. Laurie Linder was far from stupid, but she’d never had any interest in learning about much of anything beyond makeup, clothes, and gossip. Hugh-Jay hadn’t cared; he’d loved her from afar for years, awed by her beauty, admiring her sexy walk and exuberant spirit, while he waited until she was old enough for him to ask her out on a date. He knew perfectly well that if he weren’t the son of the wealthiest people around Rose, and if he didn’t have things like this house to offer her, she’d never have looked at him.

He hadn’t cared, not really. He was happy just calling her “my wife.”

His parents didn’t like her, considered her shallow and self-centered; he knew they did. They tried to hide it for his sake, but when Hugh Senior or Annabelle Linder disapproved of someone, that fact was hard to miss despite their outward show of warmth. It made him feel protective of Laurie, who might not be “deep,” but whom he loved deeply.

“Daddy!” three-year-old Jody squealed, and rushed at him from the hallway.

The child leaped at him with both arms up, trusting him to catch her in midair and sweep her into his arms. In an instant she was cuddled against him with her head tucked onto his left shoulder, and she was chattering away about her day. She had on a blue sundress and was sticky with little girl sweat, which told him she’d been busy that morning, probably hopping up and down the stairs, her current favorite indoor pastime when she wasn’t twirling to make her skirts fly out around her. Like her mom, her feet were bare, and like her mom, her toenails were painted red. They also made his heart hurt for love of them and her.

“Hey,” he said gently, to both of them, when she paused for breath.

Laurie had whirled at the sound of “Daddy!” dropping her paring knife.

“Daddy’s home!” Jody told her, with joy in her lilting voice.

“Hugh-Jay, you scared me! What are you doing here?”

He smiled, hoping it didn’t look as forced as it felt.

“I can’t have lunch with my wife and daughter?”

“Yes, Daddy!” Jody chirped, and hugged her arms around his neck.

He looked over at Laurie to hear her say so, too.

She turned her back and continued dicing carrots.

Hugh-Jay set his daughter on the floor and gave her behind a gentle swat as she ran off to get something from her bedroom to show him. Then he took a shaky breath and moved purposely toward his wife.

I
T SCARED
L
AURIE
that Hugh-Jay had come home without any warning.

She counted on him to be predictable, as he was every time he came in the house. First he’d scrape the soles of his boots on the shit-catcher, a little metal bar attached to two other bars, then he’d pick up his boots, knock them together to dislodge more dirt and cow shit, and then set them neatly side by side beside the back door. Laurie knew that if she looked out there now, she’d see them paired like that. Before he walked into the house, he took off whatever hat he was wearing—today it was a Kansas City Royals baseball cap instead of a cowboy hat—and he knocked it against his jeans to clean it, and then hung it on a hook above the boots, leaving his blond hair plastered down and sweaty where the cap had been. His big square face was reddened, and rivulets of dirty sweat ran down it. That meant that he would come to the sink to wash off.

The routine of his thoughtfulness drove her crazy.

She also depended on it, however, especially lately.

“I missed you,” he said, answering her question about why he was there.

“
Missed
me!” she scoffed, still without turning around. “You’ve been gone, what, five hours?”

She heard the old wood floor creak as he walked toward her.

She tensed as he hovered like a huge tent closing around her, darkening the space, exuding heat from his big body. She expected him to grasp her arms and move her aside so he could rinse his face and arms. Instead, she felt his big arms come around her, felt him bend down to kiss the back of her neck. When he kissed her right ear, she shuddered reflexively. She felt his surprise as he discovered she was naked under her sundress.

“Are you sure you weren’t expecting me?” he teased.