With Every Breath (17 page)

swollen from crying. He slammed the back of the truck and walked slowly up the drive.

"You knew, Joe," she said wretchedly.

He hesitated on the steps and nodded. No sense in denying that one.

"Why didn’t you tell me? How could you just ... just let me repeat Aunt Susan’s story like some kind of fool? You asked me what I remembered about that day, and I told you what she’d told me, and you didn’t say a word!" The betrayal, she realized, swaying a little, was almost as bad as everything else.

She’d trusted him.

"I thought the truth would do this to you," he said finally. "I didn’t want to hurt you unless it was necessary."

She shuddered once, long and deeply, because she realized she had been hiding just like that all her life. Through twenty-five years, since the day she had left here, she had never asked, had never thought, had never questioned the story of what had happened to her parents. She hated them for what they’d done to her, and it hadn’t seemed necessary to get through the pain of their abandonment to know all the details.

Twenty-five years of resentment couldn’t evaporate with one brutal revelation, she thought tiredly. No, that resentment had been a part of her for far too long ... whether it was founded or unfounded.

She held the door open a little wider. Joe moved the rest of the way up the deck, and, once he was inside, she closed the door behind him.

"Josh is still sleeping," she said.

"Yeah. Sounds like it."

"I’m going to need Leslie’s help with him whether I want it or not," she realized, feeling overwhelmed again.

He let her keep working her way through it.

"In the meantime, I guess I have to pull myself together. For his sake."

Joe hesitated. "Need any help?"

She started crying again.

He moved before he knew he was going to, taking her in his arms. He stroked his hands down her back, and wondered how in the hell he had come to care like this, in a few short days and in spite of his common sense. God, he didn’t want to see her hurting. He tightened his arms around her and found himself brushing his mouth over her hair, and the scent of wildflowers filled his head. He closed his eyes, in pain, and asked himself what the hell he was doing. Was he out of his mind?

But the real wonder of it was how good it felt.

Chapter 13

Such strong arms, Maddie thought.

The tension in her muscles unclenched; the pain in her stomach uncurled. She was the one who finally pulled away, feeling much steadier.

"You don’t need to worry," she said finally, softly. "Leslie is wrong. It’s Rick."

He watched her move into the kitchen, her head down, her expression thoughtful, but still with that smooth grace. He rubbed a hand over his jaw and thought her nerves must be as fragile as glass just then, but it didn’t show. He followed her and found her making coffee.

"I’ll take some," he said shortly.

She looked at him, surprised. "It’s still instant."

"Beggars and choosers and all that. It’s been a long night."

Her mouth twisted. "It has."

She turned back to the counter. She finally let herself think, really think, about what Leslie had said, prodding at the knowledge gingerly, like a sore tooth.

She didn’t remember.

None of it rang any bells or shook anything inside her. Which was just as well. She couldn’t deal with it yet.

But she wondered why Aunt Susan hadn’t told her. She wondered if Aunt Susan even knew. She understood then why everyone on the island knew who she was right off the bat. Something like that would have been talked about on a place like Candle for a long, long time.

Later, she thought again. She would deal with it later, after Rick was finally found.

She turned once more and gave Joe one of the mugs. "What no one has ever acknowledged before," she began quietly, "is that I know Rick Graycie probably better than anyone else on earth. His family is dead. He has no close friends. I lived with him for six years. I know him.

"They say he killed Ronnie Sanchez because he panicked," she went on. "He didn’t. He killed him because he stood between Rick and me—between Rick and his plan. Once Rick got away, he could continue haunting me, tormenting me, wearing me down, which is precisely what he’s doing now."

Joe found himself believing her, or wanting to. It more or less went, with what the Fort Lauderdale cop had said.

He thought of telling her what that cop had said about a man named Steve Singleton, and decided he would wait on that. At least he would wait until he had talked to his people the next morning, until—possibly— he knew a little more.

"So you’re saying Graycie’s a cold bastard," he said finally.

Maddie shook her head. "No. That’s just it. He’s

heated, Joe. Emotion runs through him like molten lava. Everything is intense with him. He wants me fiercely, so he did what he had to do that day to get away. Even a few days of being in jail, of being unable to watch me, was intolerable to him. He told me once that he had never loved anyone the way he loved me."

She said it without satisfaction or pride. Joe felt something squirm in his gut as he realized that he could understand a man feeling that way about her. He realized he was sweating a little, though it was still chilly outside.

He managed to nod.

"When you love someone like that," she went on, "it’s impossible to let go. It’s hard for anyone to let go, much less someone as emotionally intense as Rick always was."

Joe put his mug down on the counter. "Actually, I’ve got a theory about that," he heard himself say. And then something inside him recoiled, and he swore.

"What?" Maddie asked, then she repeated herself when he hesitated. "What’s your theory?"

They had never been exceptionally popular with women, he thought. He was actually full of them, and his theories always brought a look of disbelief and horror to women’s faces.

"Love can be evil, twisted," he said finally, reluctantly. "Any emotion that strong has the potential to turn around right before your eyes, to slide into something dangerous. Love travels a thin line. When it falls over the edge, it becomes obsession, and that has very little to do with love at all."

Something flared in her eyes. Maddie nodded slowly.

"I mean, what is
it?" he asked. "What’s love? Chemical attraction? Christ, that happens to a man every day. You see some woman walking down the

street and she looks damned fine and
wham
!—your body reacts even though your head doesn’t really give a damn if you ever lay eyes on her again. It’s just physical. Love’s not chemical attraction. And it’s not slow and steady, either, growing like some kind of goddamned flower out of mutual like and respect, the way the poets would have us believe. People want to call those things love, but the feeling I mean is . . . you know, that one-two punch that’s overwhelming and immediate."

"Love at first sight."

He nodded, eyeing her. "Yeah."

She realized her heart was hammering. "What then?" she asked. This sounded an awful lot like the ideas behind so many of her pictures. And that spooked her.

"Love slams you. It’s irrational, making no goddamned sense. It’s not sweetness and light and flowers. It’s dark and it rides you, drives you. With every heartbeat, with every breath, nothing matters but that consuming obsession with the object of your desire. And that can easily fall over the line. It can easily become dangerous."

"That’s bitter, Joe," Maddie whispered.

He winced, already regretting his honesty. He had needed her to understand.

And then he looked into her eyes, and he realized that she did.

"Anyway," he said, pacing away before he could touch her again, "when it crosses over, when it falls over that line, you stop caring about how the other person feels, how anybody feels, except you. You don’t do things
for
the person you love, but rather to possess them. To claim them, to hold them, to keep them for your own. And if anybody gets in your way, then too goddamned bad. You don’t care who you hurt, how you hurt them, just as long as you possess your beloved."

Maddie leaned back against the counter. She was overwhelmed, a little by what he had said, but mostly by the poetic way in which he’d said it.

"But it’s not always like that," she said softly.

His eyes narrowed on her. "No. It’s just that the potential is always there for the love to twist, turn, and become something nasty. Not the slow and respectful kind, the mutual-interest kind. Not something that’s purely physical—I have a whole separate bunch of theories for that," he admitted with a self-deprecating twist of his mouth. "Like I said, I don’t think either of those things are love. I’m talking about that sudden-impact thing."

"But that’s still just . . . sexual. A male-female thing. There’s the love of a parent for a child, that sort of thing. That’s different."

He flinched again. Yes, it had been different with Lucy. But not so very different. "Would you kill to save Josh?" he asked evenly.

She didn’t miss a beat. "Yes."

"For him, as much as for yourself. Because your heart couldn’t bear to lose him, or have him harmed."

She nodded slowly.

"I rest my case."

Joe drained his coffee, trying deliberately to shake off the strange mood that had settled over him. "Anyway, I believe you about Rick. I’ve been thinking about it, and I can understand a man being unable to let go." And there was one other reason, he thought. He needed to eliminate suspects so he could figure out who he was watching out for. If it wasn’t Rick who was taunting her, then he wanted to find out in short order so he could start watching the other faces on the island.

Maddie hadn’t realized how desperately she had needed someone to believe her until her knees almost gave out. "Thank you." She hesitated. "So what do we do now?"

"A few things. First of all, I’ve got No-Name in my truck."

"In your truck?"

"I’m going to take him over to the mainland for an autopsy." Maybe he wasn’t as good, as experienced, as a city cop, he thought, but he was going to take a stab at not acting like a small-town one. "You’re coming with me," he went on flatly. "You and Josh. I don’t want you here alone while I leave the island."

Maddie turned for the hall. "I’ll wake him."

"Wait," he said, snagging her wrist, then letting it go just as quickly because her skin was so damned smooth and warm. "One other thing. I need to drop your house key off at the station. I’m going to have somebody drive up here and dust that back window for prints, the one that was open last night."

"The rain ..." she began.

"Yeah, I know. But it's worth a shot. Whoever came in went out that way, too, because your door was locked. Maybe they left some prints on the inside. I’ve got Rick’s file coming in from Fort Lauderdale. Maybe we’ll be able to match them."

Maddie nodded urgently. "He left his car behind, with Josh in it. His prints would have to have been in there. And he was in the service. They’d have a copy of them, right?"

"Either way, we’ll get them," Joe agreed. "In the meantime, I’ve got three patrol cars on the island. I’m going to have them cruising up here today." It was going to mean logging in some overtime, and city council was going to be pissed, but he knew those guys fairly well, and he thought he could probably push it past them. "I’ve told them to stop and question anybody they don’t know," he finished.

Maddie gave a strange, pitched little laugh. "I knew coming here was a good idea."

"How so?" he asked almost warily.

"It’s so small, so isolated. A strange face would probably stand out here like a sore thumb, right? And there’s no way a strange face could even get
here without you knowing about it."

He gave a small, twisted grin. "Theoretically." Then he hesitated. "Listen . . . don’t get your hopes up, okay? It could be Graycie, or it could be ... anybody."

She flinched. "I guess you’ve got to think that way." "Yeah. I do."

She went to wake Josh. Joe went to the back window, the one that had been open last night. He studied it without touching it, trying to remember where and exactly how he had closed it last night. He wanted badly to believe that there were invisible prints all over the sash, just waiting to tell their story. But he knew, in his gut, that it wasn’t going to be that easy.

Gina Gallen fidgeted in the last pew in the back of the Methodist church. She found it almost impossible not to dance her foot, and she heard not a word of the

sermon.

It wasn’t her church anyway. She was Catholic. She normally attended St. Matthew’s, three blocks to the north and over by the beach. But Cassie Diehl was Methodist, and if anyone knew what had happened last night up on The Wick, it would be Cassie.

After an interminable length of time, the service ended. Gina stayed seated as people streamed up the aisle on their way to the door. She had spotted Cassie when she had come in, and she had been way up at the front. Gina waited for her.

Cassie was hard to miss. She wore the most horrendous, burnt orange suit, with a bolero jacket that had gone out of style eons ago. The skirt was too long, in Gina’s estimation, and it made Cassie’s knees seem even bonier than usual. Her calves stuck out from beneath the hem like a bird’s legs.

When Cassie reached Gina’s pew, Gina stood up, smiling widely. "Hi there."

Cassie almost jumped. She was that startled to see her. "What are you doing here?"

Gina fell into step beside her. "I just wanted to see how the other half sins. And I wanted to talk to you. What happened up on The Wick last night? Have you heard?" Cassie stumbled. She hadn’t heard much of anything of interest lately. "The Wick?" she repeated carefully. She’d heard sirens, but they had been going south.

"With Maddie Brogan," Gina persisted.

"I haven’t—"

"Somebody killed her cat," said Mildred Diehl, coming up behind them. Both Cassie and Gina whipped around to look at her.

"Mama!" Cassie was furious. "When did you hear that? Why didn’t you tell me?"

Mildred ignored her, thumping heavily with her cane. "Somebody killed her cat," she repeated. "Broke in a window to do it. Leslie Mendehlson says it’s the same person killed her folks. Now things’ll happen." She seemed very pleased by that prospect.

"Just a cat?" Gina asked, disappointed. "Joe was so angry."

"You saw Joe?" Mildred asked. "He coming around again finally?"

Gina flushed. "He just stopped by real quick to ask me if I knew anything. He knows I try to keep my eye on things for him."

"Well," Mildred said with a huffy sniff. The cane thump-smacked
from the carpeted aisle onto the vinyl-floored anteroom. "You’d better get him doing more’n that, girl, or you’re gonna lose him now for sure."

"She’s already lost him," Cassie snapped.

Her mother gave her a pitying look. "Don’t be stupid. Ain’t seen him marrying nobody else, now have you? He don’t even date nobody." She leaned-her cane against the wall and struggled into her coat. "Yet," she added.

"Yet?" Gina aped. "What do you mean, yet?"

"He was up at her house last night and bright and early this morning, too." Mildred shook her head. "Girl’s been trouble ever since Annabel hatched her. Never did know enough to just accept she was a Wick kid and leave it at that."

"Pictures," Cassie sneered. "Like we all don’t own a camera."

"She went to Florida. You know what they do in places like that," Mildred said darkly. "Wouldn’t surprise me a bit if there wasn’t no husband around, if she made him up to cover her sin, if you get my meaning." "Joe was there this morning?" Gina repeated helplessly. "Next thing, he’ll be spending the night up there," Mildred went on as though she hadn’t heard her. "Mark my words. You’re running all out of time to get him back, girl."

Gina turned away from them. She began pushing her way past the people still blocking the door, and several turned to look at her, startled and angry. Cassie took off after her.

"Gina! Wait! What are you doing?"

Damn her! Damn that Brogan bitch! Gina cried silently. She had been nice to her, taking her that cake, asking about her stupid kid. She’d known she wanted