Carnal Innocence

“The other night, the first night I was here… I thought I heard a woman scream. Then I remembered where I was, and about the owls. Those screech owls.” Caroline closed her eyes on a flood of guilt. “I went back to sleep. It could have been her, calling for help. I just went back to sleep.”

The sheriff pulled out a cigarette. “You haven’t noticed anyone poking around here? No one’s come by to see you?”

“As I said, I haven’t been here long. I did run into someone the first day. He said my grandmother let him come down to watch the water.”

Burke kept his face impassive, but his heart began to sink. “Do you know who that was?”

“His name was Longstreet. Tucker Longstreet.”

Bantam Books by Nora Roberts

HOT ICE

SACRED SINS

BRAZEN VIRTUE

SWEET REVENGE

GENUINE LIES

CARNAL INNOCENCE

DIVINE EVIL

PUBLIC SECRETS

To
the Colonel
and
his Yankee

T
he air was raw with February the morning Bobby Lee Fuller found the first body. They would say he found it, when in truth what he’d done was trip over what was left of Arnette Gantrey. Either way, the end was the same, and Bobby Lee would live with that wide white face floating into his dreams for a long time to come.

If he hadn’t broken up with Marvella Truesdale— again—the night before, he’d have been hunkered over his desk in English lit, trying to twist his brain into coping with Shakespeare’s
Macbeth,
instead of dropping his line into Gooseneck Creek. But this last fight in his rocky eighteen-month romance with Marvella had worn him down. Bobby Lee’d decided to take himself a day off, to rest and reflect. And to teach that sharp-tongued Marvella that he wasn’t no pussy-whipped wimp, but a man.

The men in Bobby Lee’s family had always ruled the roost—or pretended to. He wasn’t about to break the tradition.

At nineteen, Bobby Lee was long past grown. He was six one and gawky with it, the filling-out years still
to come. But he had big, workingman’s hands, like his father’s, on the ends of long skinny arms, and his mother’s thick black hair and luxuriant lashes. He liked to wear that hair slicked back in the style of his idol, James Dean.

Bobby Lee considered Dean a man’s man, one who wouldn’t have tolerated book learning any more than Bobby Lee did. If it had been up to him, he’d have been working full-time in Sonny Talbot’s Mobile Service Station and Eatery instead of hacking his way through twelfth grade. But his mama had other notions, and nobody in Innocence, Mississippi, liked to cross Happy Fuller if they could help it.

Happy—whose childhood name was appropriate enough since she could smile beauteously as she sliced you off at the knees—hadn’t quite forgiven her eldest boy for being held back twice in school. If Bobby Lee’s mood hadn’t been so low, he wouldn’t have risked hooking a day, not with his grades already teetering. But Marvella was the kind of girl who pushed a man—a man’s man—into doing rash and reckless things.

So Bobby Lee dropped his line into the sulky brown waters of Gooseneck Creek and hunched in his faded denim jacket against the raw air. His daddy always said when a man had powerful things on his mind, the best cure was to take himself down to the water and see what was nibbling.

It didn’t matter if you caught anything, it was the being there that counted.

“Damn women,” Bobby Lee muttered, and peeled his lips back in a sneer he’d practiced long hours in the bathroom mirror. “Damn all women to hell and back again.”

He didn’t need the grief Marvella handed out with both pretty hands. Ever since they’d done the deed in the back of his Cutlass, she’d been picking him apart and trying to put him back together her way.

It didn’t sit right with Bobby Lee Fuller, no indeedy. Not even if she made him dizzy with love when they weren’t scrapping. Not even if she had those big blue eyes that seemed to whisper secrets just for him
when they passed each other in the crowded hallways of Jefferson Davis High. And not even if, when he got her naked, she near to fucked his brains out.

Maybe he loved her, and maybe she was smarter than he was, but he’d be damned if she was going to tug him along like a pig on a rope.

Bobby Lee settled back among the reeds along the skinny creek fed by the mighty Mississippi. He could hear the lonesome whistle from the train that was heading down to Greenville, and the whisper of the damp winter breeze through the limp reeds. His line hung slack and still.

The only thing nibbling this morning was his temper.

Maybe he’d just take himself down to Jackson, shake the dust of Innocence off his shoes, and strike out for the city. He was a good mechanic—a damn good one—and figured he could find work with or without a high school diploma. Shitfire. You didn’t need to know nothing about some fag named Macbeth, or obtuse triangles and the like, to fix a dinky carburetor. Down to Jackson he could get himself a job in a garage, end up head mechanic. Hell, he could own the whole kit and kaboodle before too long. And while he was at it, Marvella I-told-you-so Truesdale would be back in Innocence, crying her big blue eyes red.

Then he’d come back. Bobby Lee’s smile lit his tough, good-looking face and warmed his chocolate eyes in a way that would have made Marvella’s heart flutter. Yeah, he’d come back, with twenty-dollar bills bulging in his pockets. He’d cruise on back into town in his classic ’62 Caddy—one of his fleet of cars—duded up in an
I
-talian suit, and richer than the Longstreets.

And there would be Marvella, thin and pale from pining away for him. She’d be standing on the corner in front of Larsson’s Dry Goods, clutching her hands between her soft, pillowy breasts, and tears would be streaming down her face at the sight of him.

And when she fell at his feet, sobbing and wailing and telling him how sorry she was for being such an
awful bitch and driving him away from her, he might— just might—forgive her.

The fantasy lulled him. As the sun brightened to ease the stinging air and danced lightly on the dun-colored water of the creek, he began to contemplate the physical aspects of their reunion.

He’d take her to Sweetwater—having purchased the lovely old plantation from the Longstreets when they’d fallen on hard times. She’d gasp and shiver at his good fortune. Being a gentleman, and a romantic, he’d sweep her up the long, curving stairs.

Since Bobby Lee hadn’t been above the first floor in Sweetwater, his imagination shifted into high gear. The bedroom he carried the trembling Marvella into resembled a hotel suite in Vegas, which was Bobby Lee’s current idea of class.

Heavy red draperies, a heart-shaped bed as big as a lake, carpet so thick he had to wade through it. Music was playing. Something classic, he thought. Bruce Springsteen or Phil Collins. Yeah, Marvella got all gooey over Phil Collins.

Then he’d lie her down on the bed. Her eyes would be wet as he kissed her. She’d be telling him again and again what a fool she’d been, how much she loved him, how she was going to spend the rest of her life making him happy. Making him her king.

Then he’d run his hands down over those incredible white, pink-tipped breasts, squeezing just a little, the way she liked it.

Her soft thighs would spread apart, her fingers would dig into his shoulders while she made that growly sound back in her throat. And then …

His line tugged. Blinking, Bobby Lee sat up, wincing a little when his jeans bunched against the bulge at his crotch. Distracted by the hard-on, he flicked the fat fish out of the water, where it wriggled in the silvering sun. With his hands clumsy and slippery with arousal, he thumped his catch into the reeds.

Imagining himself about to pop it to Marvella had him tangling his line in the reeds. He hauled himself up, swearing a little at his carelessness. Since a good fishing
line was as valuable as the fish it caught, Bobby Lee waded into the reeds and began to set it to rights.

The perch was still flopping. He could hear its wet struggles. Grinning, he gave the line a quick tug. It resisted, and he muttered a half-hearted oath.

He kicked a rusted Miller can aside, took another step into the high, cool grass. He slipped, his foot sliding on something wet. Bobby Lee Fuller went down on his knees. And found himself face-to-face with Arnette Gantrey.

Her look of surprise mirrored his—wide eyes, gaping mouth, white white cheeks. The perch lay quivering with its last breaths beneath her naked, mutilated breasts.

He saw she was dead—stone dead—and that was bad enough. But it was the blood, frosty pools of it, soaking into the damp ground, turning her limp, peroxided hair into something dark and crusty, drying hideously from where it had spilled out of dozens of jagged holes in her flesh, necklacing her throat where a long, smiling gash spread—it was the blood that forced the harsh, animal sounds out of him and had him scrambling back on his hands and knees. He didn’t realize the sounds came from him. But he did realize that he was kneeling in her blood.

Bobby Lee struggled to his feet just in time to lose his breakfast grits all over his new black Converse Chucks.

Leaving his perch, his line, and a good portion of his youth in the bloody reeds, he ran for Innocence.

S
ummer, that vicious green bitch, flexed her sweaty muscles and flattened Innocence, Mississippi. It didn’t take much. Even before the War Between the States, Innocence had been nothing but a dusty fly-speck on the map. Though the soil was good for farming—if a man could stand the watery heat, the floods, and the capricious droughts—Innocence wasn’t destined to prosper.

When the railroad tracks were laid, they had stretched far enough to the north and west to tease Innocence with those long, echoing whistles of pace and progress without bringing either home. The interstate, dug through the delta nearly a century after the tracks, veered away, linking Memphis to Jackson, and leaving Innocence in the dust.

It had no battlefields, no natural wonders to draw in tourists with cameras and cash. No hotel to pamper them, only a small, painfully neat rooming house run by the Koonses. Sweetwater, its single antebellum plantation, was privately owned by the Longstreets, as it had been for two hundred years. It wasn’t open to the public, had the public been interested.

Sweetwater had been written up once in
Southern
Homes.
But that had been in the eighties, when Madeline Longstreet was alive. Now that she and her tosspot, skinflint of a husband were both gone, the house was owned and inhabited by their three children. Together, they pretty nearly owned the town, but they didn’t do much about it.

It could be said—and was—that the three Long-street heirs had inherited all of their family’s wild good looks and none of their ambition. It was hard to resent them, if the people in that sleepy delta town had churned up the energy for resentment. Along with dark hair, golden eyes, and good bones, the Longstreets could charm a coon out of a tree quicker than you could spit.

Nobody blamed Dwayne overmuch for following in his daddy’s alcoholic footsteps. And if he crashed up his car from time to time, or wrecked a few tables in McGreedy’s Tavern, he always made smooth amends when he was sober. Through as years went on, he was sober less and less. Everyone said it might have been different if he hadn’t flunked out of the fancy prep school he’d been shipped off to. Or if he’d inherited his father’s touch with the land, along with the old man’s taste for sour mash.

Others, less kind, claimed that money could keep him in his fancy house and in his fancy cars, but it couldn’t buy him a backbone.

When Dwayne had gotten Sissy Koons in trouble back in ’84, he’d married her without a grumble. And when, two kids and numerous bottles of sour mash later, Sissy had demanded a divorce, he’d ended the marriage just as amiably. No hard feelings—no feelings at all— and Sissy had run off to Nashville with the kids to live with a shoe salesman who wanted to be the next Waylon Jennings.

Josie Longstreet, the only daughter and youngest child, had been married twice in her thirty-one years. Both unions had been short-lived but had provided the people of Innocence with endless grist for the gossip mill. She regretted both experiences in the same way a woman might regret finding her first gray hairs. There
was some anger, some bitterness, some fear. Then it was all covered over. Out of sight, out of mind.

A woman didn’t intend to go gray any more than a woman intended to divorce once she’d said “till death do us part.” But things happened. As Josie was fond of saying philosophically to Crystal, her bosom friend and owner of the Style Rite Beauty Emporium, she liked to make up for these two errors in judgment by testing out all the men from Innocence to the Tennessee border.

Josie knew there were some tight-lipped old biddies who liked to whisper behind their hands that Josie Longstreet was no better than she had to be. But there were men who smiled into the dark and knew she was a hell of a lot better than that.

Tucker Longstreet enjoyed women, perhaps not with the abandon his baby sister enjoyed men, but he’d had his share. He was known to tip back a glass, too—though not with the unquenchable thirst of his older brother.

For Tucker, life was a long, lazy road. He didn’t mind walking it as long as he could do so at his own pace. He was affable about detours, providing he could negotiate back to his chosen destination. So far he’d avoided a trip to the altar—his siblings’ experiences having given him a mild distaste for it. He much preferred walking his road unencumbered.

He was easygoing and well-liked by most. The fact that he’d been born rich might have stuck in a few craws, but he didn’t flaunt it much. And he had a boundless generosity that endeared him to people. A man knew if he needed a loan, he could call on old Tuck. The money would be there, without any of the sticky smugness that made it hard to take. Of course, there would always be some who muttered that it was easy for a man to lend money when he had more than enough. But that didn’t change the color of the bills.

Unlike his father, Beau, Tucker didn’t compound the interest daily or lock in his desk drawer a little leather book filled with the names of the people who owed him. Who would keep owing him until they plowed themselves under instead of their fields. Tucker
kept the interest to a reasonable ten percent. The names and figures were all inside his clever and often underestimated mind.

In any case, he didn’t do it for the money. Tucker rarely did anything for money. He did it first because it was effortless, and second because inside his rangy and agreeably lazy body beat a generous and sometimes guilty heart.

He’d done nothing to earn his good fortune, which made it the simplest thing in the world to squander it away. Tucker’s feelings on this ranged from yawning acceptance to an occasional tug of social conscience.

Whenever the conscience tugged too hard, he would stretch himself out in the rope hammock in the shade of the spreading live oak, tip a hat down over his eyes, and sip a cold one until the discomfort passed.

Which was exactly what he was doing when Della Duncan, the Longstreets’ housekeeper of thirty-some years, stuck her round head out of a second-floor window.

“Tucker Longstreet!”

Hoping for the best, Tucker kept his eyes shut and let the hammock sway. He was balancing a bottle of Dixie beer on his flat, naked belly, one hand linked loosely around the glass.

“Tucker Longstreet!” Della’s booming voice sent birds scattering up from the branches of the tree. Tucker considered that a shame, as he’d enjoyed dreaming to their piping song and the droning counterpoint of the bees courting the gardenias. “I’m talking to you, boy.”

With a sigh, Tucker opened his eyes. Through the loose weave of his planter’s hat, the sun streamed white and hot. It was true that he paid Della’s salary, but when a woman had diapered your bottom as well as walloped it, you were never in authority over her. Reluctantly, Tucker tipped the hat back and squinted in the direction of her voice.

She was leaning out, all right, her flaming red hair peeking out from the kerchief she’d tied around it. Her broad, heavily rouged face was set in the stern, disapproving
lines Tucker had learned to respect. Three strings of bright beads slapped against the sill.

He smiled, the innocent, crafty smile of a boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “Yes’m?”

“You said you’d drive into town and bring me back a sack of rice and a case of Coca-Cola.”

“Well, now …” Tucker rubbed the still-cool bottle over his torso before bringing it to his lips for a long swallow. “I guess I did, Della. Figured I’d ride in once it cooled off some.”

“Get your lazy ass up and fetch it now. Else there’ll be an empty plate on the table at dinner tonight.”

“Too damn hot to eat,” he mumbled under his breath, but Della had ears like a rabbit.

“What is that, boy?”

“I said I’m going.” Graceful as a dancer, he slid out of the hammock, polishing off the Dixie as he went. When he grinned up at her, the hat tipped rakishly on his sweat-curled hair, and the light of the devil in those golden eyes, Della softened. She had to force herself to keep her mouth pursed and stern.

“You’re going to root to that hammock one day. See if you don’t. A body’d think you were ailing the way you’d rather lie on your back than stand on your feet.”

“Lots more a man can do lying down than nap, Della.”

She betrayed herself with a loud, lusty laugh. “Just make sure you don’t do so much you end up getting hauled to the altar with someone like that slut Sissy, who snagged my Dwayne.”

He grinned again. “No, ma’am.”

“And bring me back some of my toilet water. It’s on sale down at Larsson’s.”

“Toss me down my wallet and keys, then.”

Her head withdrew, then popped out a moment later just before she flung both objects down at him. Tucker snagged them out of the air with a deft flick of the wrist that reminded Della the boy wasn’t as slow as he pretended to be.

“Put your shirt on—and tuck it in,” Della ordered, as she would have had he been ten.

Tucker lifted it from the hammock, shrugging into it as he walked around the front of the house, where a dozen Doric columns rose from the covered porch to the lacy ironwork of the second-story terrace. His skin was clinging to the cotton before he reached his car.

He folded himself into his Porsche—an impulse buy of six months before that he’d yet to grow tired of. He weighed the comfort of air-conditioning against the excitement of wind slapping his face, and opted to leave the top down.

One of the few things Tucker did fast was drive. Gravel spat under the tires as he slammed into first and streaked down the long, meandering lane. He swung around the circle where his mother had planted a bounty of peonies, hibiscus, and flashy red geraniums. Old magnolia trees flanked the lane, and their scent was heavy and pleasing. He flicked by the bone-white granite marker where his great-great-uncle Tyrone had been thrown from a bad-tempered horse and had broken his sixteen-year-old neck.

The marker had been set by Tyron’s grieving parents to honor his passing. It also served as a reminder that if Tyrone hadn’t chosen to test himself on that mean-spirited mare, he wouldn’t have broken his stubborn neck, and his younger brother, Tucker’s great-great grandfather, wouldn’t have inherited Sweetwater and passed it down.

Tucker could have found himself living in a condo in Jackson.

He was never sure whether to be sorry or grateful when he passed that sad old piece of stone.

Out through the high, wide gates and onto the macadam was the scent of tar going soft in the sun, of still water from the bayou behind the screen of trees. And the trees themselves, with their high, green smell that told him, though the calendar claimed summer was still a week away, the delta knew better.

He reached for sunglasses first, sliding them onto his face before he chose a cassette at random and punched it into its slot. Tucker was a great lover of fifties music, so there was nothing in the car recorded after
1962. Jerry Lee Lewis shot out, and the Killer’s whiskey-soaked voice and desperate piano celebrated the fact that there was a whole lot of shakin’ going on.

As the speedometer swung toward eighty, Tucker added his own excellent tenor. His fingers drummed up and down on the steering wheel, looking like piano keys.

Barreling over a rise, he had to swing wide to the left to avoid ramming into the back side of a natty BMW. He tooted his horn, not in warning but in greeting as he skidded around the elegant maroon fender. He didn’t slack his speed, but a glance in his rearview mirror showed him the Beemer was stopped, half in and half out of the lane leading back to Edith McNair’s house.

As Jerry Lee switched into his raw-throated “Breathless,” Tucker gave a passing thought to the car and driver. Miss Edith had passed on about two months before—around the same time that a second mutilated body had been discovered floating in the water down at Spook Hollow.

That had been sometime in April, and a search party had been whipped up to look for Francie Alice Logan, who’d been missing for two days. Tucker’s jaw clenched when he remembered what it had been like, trudging through the bayou, carrying a Ruger Red Label and hoping to hell he didn’t shoot off his own foot, or find anything.

But they’d found her, and he’d had the bad luck to be with Burke Truesdale when they did.

It wasn’t easy to think about what the water and the fish had done to sassy old Francie, the pretty little redhead he’d flirted with, dated a time or two, and had debated sleeping with.

His stomach clenched and he bumped up the volume on Jerry Lee. He wasn’t thinking about Francie. Couldn’t. He’d been thinking about Miss Edith, and that was better. She’d lived to be nearly ninety and had passed on quietly in her sleep.

Tucker recalled that she’d left her house, a tidy two-story built during the Reconstruction, to some Yankee relative.

Since Tucker knew that no one within fifty miles of
Innocence owned a BMW, he concluded that the Yankee had decided to come down and take a peek at his inheritance.

He dismissed the northern invasion from his thoughts, took out a cigarette, and after breaking a thumbnail-length piece from the tip, lighted it.

Half a mile back, Caroline Waverly gripped the wheel of her car and waited for her heart to slide back down her throat.

Idiot! Crazy bastard! Careless jerk!

She forced herself to lift her trembling foot off the brake and tap the gas until the car was all the way into the narrow, overgrown lane.

Inches, she thought. He’d missed hitting her by inches! Then he’d had the gall to blast his horn at her. She wished he’d stopped. Oh, she wished he’d stopped so she could have given that homicidal jackass a piece of her mind.

She’d have felt better then, having vented her temper. She was getting damn good at venting since Dr. Palamo had told her that the ulcer and the headaches were a direct result of repressing her feelings. And of chronically overworking, of course.

Well, she was doing something about both. Caroline unpried her sweaty hands from the wheel and wiped them against her slacks. She was taking a nice, long, peaceful sabbatical here in Nowhere, Mississippi. After a few months—if she didn’t die of this vicious heat—she’d be ready to prepare for her spring tour.