After Dark (27 page)

    She wanted to tell him that she loved
him. That she had never really stopped loving him, not even when she had
hated him. But instead she said, "Was it… was it…?"

    He kissed her temple and caressed
her naked hip. "My fantasy come true."

    "Mine, too." She sighed
and cuddled close, refusing to think about anything, except this one
glorious moment.

    Lillie Mae watched them as they came
through the garden. Miss Lane in her gown and Johnny Mack with his shirt undone.
They had been down by the river, down by the old boathouse. Alone at
dawn. With a wispy breeze still stirring and the softness of night barely
dissolved into the harsh light of day, they stood at the far edge of the
patio, arms wrapped around each other, and kissed. Lillie Mae glanced
away, down into the kitchen sink, not wanting to intrude on their private
moment.

    She had known this would happen,
sooner or later. Once Johnny Mack returned to Noble's Crossing, there
had been no denying that the old attraction was still there between Lane
and him. Lillie Mae sighed. Only now, he and Lane were adults, not kids,
and what happened between them would be all the more powerful, especially
since they were dealing with fulfilling the fantasies of first love.
Even if Johnny Mack still might be unable to properly label what he

    had felt for Lane fifteen years
ago, Lillie Mae knew. That boy had loved Lane.

    Without glancing back out the window,
she prepared the coffee machine, then opened the pantry door and walked
inside to get a new bag of flour for her homemade biscuits. When she heard
the back door open, she peeped out into the kitchen and saw Lane heading
up the back stairs. Before Johnny Mack could follow, Lillie Mae scurried
across the kitchen and grabbed his arm.

    "Wait up a minute," she
told him.

    He whipped around to face her.
"Damn! Scare the daylights out of a man, would you?"

    "I want to talk to you."

    "You're up awfully early,
aren't you?"

    "Not as early as some
folks," she replied.

    "Meaning?"

    "Meaning I saw you and Miss Lane
walking up from the river."

    "Never thought you were the
nosy type, Lillie Mae."

    "I'm not," she replied.
"And under normal circumstances whatever went on between you and
Miss Lane would be none of my business, but these aren't normal circumstances,
are they?"

    "What are you trying to tell
me?"

    "I'm giving you a warning,"
she said. "That gal has gone through more than anybody should have
to go through and her not even thirty-five yet. If you hurt her, you'll have
to answer to me. Don't make her no promises you don't intend to keep."

    Johnny Mack buttoned his wrinkled
shirt and stuffed the ends into his damp jeans, then ran a hand through his
disheveled hair. "Lane told me that you'd once issued Kent a warning.
Want to tell me about it?"

    Lillie Mae lifted her eyebrows in
a speculative glare. "So, she told you about what Kent did to
her."

    "Yeah, she told me that when
she refused to sleep with him, he raped her. And she also told me that you
threatened to kill Kent if he ever touched Lane again."

    "He never raped her again,"
Lillie Mae said. "But I sure didn't ever forgive him for the misery
he put that gal through. He was a mean, hate-filled drunk, and he deserved
to die. And I would have killed him. Gladly. But I didn't. And neither did
Miss Lane."

    "But she would have, if she'd
had to, to protect Will, just as you would have and just as Will would have
in order to protect Lane."

    "You've got that right. It's been
just the three of us against the world for a long time. And now, you're here.
Finally. Where you belong. With Lane and Will."

    Lillie Mae broke eye contact, then
turned and walked across the kitchen and into the pantry. After retrieving
a sack of flour, she came out to find Johnny Mack waiting for her at the door.

    "Breakfast won't be ready for
another hour," she said.

    "Why didn't you send for me sooner?"

    She sidestepped him and carried
the flour sack over to the counter, where she opened it and dumped its
contents into a large canister. "I was tempted. More than once,"
she admitted. "But of course those first five years, I didn't know
where you were. After that, when you started sending me those money orders
and I saw the envelopes were marked Houston, I asked Miss Lane if she
would want to know where you were and if she did, would she ask you to come
back to Noble's Crossing."

    "And what did she say?"

    "She said no. By that time,
she'd started hating you. And she was convinced that you'd never come
back. I guess I figured she was right." Lillie Mae opened a top cupboard
and brought out a large mixing bowl. "Besides, I knew that if you came
back, you and Kent would have wound up trying to kill each other."
Using a cup nested inside the bowl, she measured out flour from the canister.
"I had no way of knowing that you had enough power to fight Miss
Edith's rule over Noble's Crossing. And to be honest, I thought I was protecting
Will from the ugly truth. I knew how Kent would react if he ever found out
Will wasn't really his child."

    "I didn't do much to earn your
trust or Lane's, did I?" Johnny Mack pulled out a chair from the kitchen
table, turned it backward and sat, his legs straddling the seat. He crossed
his arms over the back of the chair and rested his chin on his arms.

    "I don't blame you for the
kind of boy you were." Lillie Mae retrieved milk from the refrigerator
and shortening from a cabinet under the counter. "What chance did
you have to become a decent human being, with no father and Faith Cahill
for a mother? You and my Sharon were a lot alike, both growing up with no
fathers, both of you wild and dirt poor and hungry for what you couldn't have.
God knows I tried to be a good mama, but I couldn't give Sharon nothing
she wanted and very little of what she needed."

    "Sharon was damn lucky to have
had you, to have had someone in her life who loved her, who cared what
happened to her."

    "She was a lot like her father,
that gal of mine." Lillie Mae's chest heaved with the deep breath she
took. Thinking about the life Sharon had chosen, about the depths to
which she had sunk, broke Lillie

    Mae's heart. If only Sharon had taken
the fifty thousand dollars Miss Lane had given her and done something
worthwhile with her life, she might still be alive. But no, she had
blown that money, used it up quick as a wink on a car and clothes and drugs.
The drugs were what killed her, long before the HIV ever entered her
body.

    "Didn't you ever worry about
Will?" Johnny Mack asked. "I mean with Sharon for a mother and me
for a father-"

    "Didn't worry much. Most of
what was wrong with you and with Sharon was being poor nobodies from the
wrong side of the Chickasaw River. If you two had been raised by two loving
parents, with a little money and a lot of discipline, y'all would have
turned out all right." "And that's what you wanted for Will, wasn't
it?" "I don't deny it." Lillie Mae cut the shortening into
the flour and added a little milk. "Sharon didn't want her baby, and
you were long gone. Of course I wanted my grandchild to be raised in
the lap of luxury, for his daddy to be a Graham and his mama a Noble."
"Didn't it ever bother you not being able to tell Will that you were
his grandmother?"

    "Maybe it did. Sometimes.
But mostly I was just grateful that Miss Lane loved Will so much. And in
the beginning, Kent was different. He adored Will, and in his way, I think
he loved Lane. I had no idea what a cruel, hurtful man he could be."

    "If you had it to do over again,
would you? Would you help Lane perpetuate a lie?"

    Lillie Mae began working the dough
with her hands. "If I didn't know what I know now, I suppose I would have.
But if I'd realized…" How could she even begin to tell Johnny Mack about
how difficult Lane's life had been, how much sorrow and pain she

    had endured? But he should know.
The only way he could ever truly know Lane, the woman she was today, was to
understand what she had lived through. "These past fifteen years
haven't been easy for Miss Lane."

    "Because she married
Kent." Anger tinged his voice.

    "Yes, in great part because
she married Kent." Lillie Mae sprinkled flour on a wooden board
and up and down the rolling pin. "But there were other things. Her father's
sudden death in that car accident. And nearly two years of watching her
mother die slowly." She dumped the dough onto the board and patted
it out until the entire surface rose to about half an inch high.
"And realizing how little money her father had left took Lane by
surprise. With only the income from the Herald, she had to figure out
ways to keep up tins big old house and the grounds and to pay for nurses
for Miss Celeste."

    "Why didn't Kent help her financially?"
Johnny Mack lifted his chin from his arms and ran a hand over the beard stubble
covering his jaw.

    "Kent didn't have any money.
It hadn't taken him long to go through the trust fund Mr. John left him. And
you might recall just how tight Miss Edith is with the purse strings. She's
known for her stinginess."

    "And naturally, Miss Edith
refused to help Lane."

    "Miss Lane never asked her
mother-in-law for help. I reckon she knew Witch Edith wouldn't part with any
of her money, except the child support for Will." Using a round cutter,
Lillie Mae formed the biscuits and laid them out on a greased pan.
"For a girl who grew up without a care in the world, Miss Lane wasn't
prepared for reality. Marrying a man she didn't love. Raising a child,
while protecting the truth about his true identity. Dealing with an abusive
husband, a crazy sister-in-law, a bitch mother-in-law and an invalid mother.
And growing to hate the man she had once loved. Hard days. Sad days. More
than most could have endured. Many a time I thought that girl would come
unraveled, but somehow she kept it all together."

    "For Will."

    "Yes, mostly for Will."
Lillie Mae placed the pan of uncooked biscuits into the oven.

    "You truly love Lane, don't
you?" Johnny Mack; stood, walked across the room and placed his hand
on Lillie Mae's shoulder.

    She looked him square in the eye.
"I sure do love her. And I admire her. And I want to see her happy.
Can you do that for her? Can you make that girl happy?"

    "I don't know," Johnny
Mack admitted. "But I promise you that I'm going to try."

    Lillie Mae smiled, a sense of relief
washing over her. She had done the right thing sending for Johnny Mack. She
wiped her hands off on her apron and patted him on the cheek. "You'd
better go upstairs and get a shower and shave before breakfast. You
don't want Will coming down and seeing you looking like a bum who's been
out tomcatting all night."

    Lillie Mae winked at him. He winked
back at her before he kissed her on the cheek and then headed I up the
back stairs.

    Lillie Mae laid the silverware
at each place setting on the kitchen table just as Will bounded downstairs.

    "Good morning. Am I the first
one up?"

    "Looks that way."

    "I'm starving," he said.
"I think I'll go ahead and eat and not wait on Mama and our guests."

    ''Mind if I join you for that early
breakfast?" Quinn Cortez halted halfway down the stairs.

    Will watched as his mother's lawyer
entered the room.

    "Come on in, Mr. Cortez,"
Lillie Mae said.

    Will glowered at the man who smiled
cordially at his grandmother. What did Cortez think of him? After his
confession to Johnny Mack and his mother's hysterical reaction last
night, he had escaped to his room and shut himself off from the world. But
a guy could hide out only so long before he had to face his accusers, before
he had to face himself and admit the truth. But what was the truth? Had he
really murdered Kent? Was he capable of brutally bludgeoning to death
the man he had once believed was his father?

    He knew that his mother feared the
worst. And so did Lillie Mae. They had lied to protect him, but now what would
happen since Johnny Mack knew the truth? He wasn't sure why he'd told Johnny
Mack what had happened the day of Kent's death, why he'd been honest with
him. Maybe it was because the man was his father. Or maybe it was because
he had finally begun to trust him a little bit. He sure seemed sincere
when he said all he wanted to do was help them.

    What about Quinn Cortez? Did this
man think he had killed Kent? The last thing he wanted right now was to be given
the third degree, without his mother and Johnny Mack around for support.
Maybe he should act like a man, confess the truth to the police and accept
the consequences. But God help him, right now he didn't feel much like a
man. He felt like a kid. A kid who was scared to death and wanted his mama.

    "I'm not going to cross-examine
you, Will, if that's the reason you're looking at me that way," Quinn
said.