Carolina Moon (15 page)
Authors: Nora Roberts
Tory reared up in the seat, eyes wide, sucking at air like a swimmer surfacing from a long, lung-bursting dive.
“She got in the car. She tossed her pack in the back and got in the car.”
“Tory?” Cade pulled to the side of the road, shifted to take her shoulders. “It’s all right. You just fell asleep for a minute.”
“No.” She shoved at him, sick and desperate, and yanked at her seat belt. There were hands squeezing her heart so it beat in hitchy strikes. “No.” She wrenched open the door, leaped out, and began a stumbling run along the shoulder. “She’s hitchhiking, to the beach. He picked her up, back there, somewhere back there.”
“Wait. Hold on.” He caught up with her, had to drag her around. “Honey, you’re shaking.”
“He took her.” It was sliding into her head, images and shapes, sounds and scents. There was a burn in her throat, a smoker’s rasp from pulling deep on one too many cigarettes. “He took her, pulled off the road, pulled off and into the trees. And he hit her with something. She doesn’t see what it is, she only feels the pain, and she’s dazed. What’s happening? What’s the matter? She pushes at him, but he’s dragging her out of the car.”
“Who?”
She shook her head, fighting to find herself in the confusion, in the pain. In the terror. “That way. Just up that way.”
“All right.” Her eyes were huge, unfocused, and her skin had gone clammy under his hands. “You want to walk up there a little ways?”
“I have to. Leave me alone.”
“No.” He wrapped an arm firmly around her. “That I won’t. We’ll walk. I’m right here. You can feel me right here.”
“I don’t want this. I don’t want it.” But she began to walk. She opened herself, overriding her instinct for self-preservation. She didn’t struggle when the images shifted, solidified.
The stars wheeled overhead, blindingly bright. Heat closed around her like a fist.
“She wanted to go to the beach. She couldn’t get a ride. She was angry at her friend. Marcie. A friend named Marcie, they were supposed to drive together, spend the weekend. Now she’s going to hitchhike because, by God, she’s not going to let that stupid bitch ruin her trip. He comes along, and she’s happy. She’s tired and she’s thirsty, and he says he’s going all the way to Myrtle. It’s less than an hour by car.”
She stopped, held up a hand. Her head lolled back, but her eyes stayed open. Wide open. “He gives you a bottle. Jack Black. Blackjack. You take a drink, a long one. To kill your thirst and because it’s so cool to be riding along and drinking whiskey.
“It must’ve been the bottle he hit you with. Must’ve been, because you passed it back to him, and were laughing, then something crashed into the side of your head. Christ! It hurts!”
She staggered, and her hand flew to her cheek. The taste of blood filled her mouth.
“No. Don’t.” Cade pulled her against him, surprised she didn’t slide out of his arms like smoke.
“I can’t see. Can’t. There’s nothing in him. Just blank. Wait. Wait.” With her hands fisted, her breath in rags, she pushed. Sickness rolled in her stomach, but she slipped through, and saw.
“He took her in there.” She began to rock. “I can’t. I just can’t.”
“You don’t have to. It’s all right now. Come on back to the car.”
“He took her in there.” Pity and grief overwhelmed
everything else. “He rapes her.” Now she closed her eyes, let it come, let it burn. “You fight for a while. He’s hurting you, and you’re so scared, so you fight. He hits you again, twice, hard in the face. Oh it hurts, it hurts, it hurts. You don’t want to be here. You want your mother. You just cry while he grunts and pants and finishes.
“You smell his sweat and his sex and your own blood, and you can’t fight anymore.”
Tory lifted her hands, ran them over her own face. She needed to feel the lines of her own cheeks, nose, mouth. She needed to remember who she was.
“I can’t see him. It’s dark and he’s just a thing. There’s nothing from him for me to feel that seems real. She doesn’t see him, either, not really. Not even when he uses his hands to strangle her. It doesn’t take long because she’s barely conscious anyway and hardly struggles. She hasn’t been with him more than half an hour, and she’s dead. Lying naked in the shadow of the trees. That’s where he leaves her. He—he was whistling on his way back to the car.”
She stepped back from Cade then, in that deliberate way of hers. All he could see was her face, pale as the moon, with those eyes swirling smoke.
“She was only sixteen. A pretty girl with long blond hair and long legs. Her name was Alice, but she didn’t like it, so everyone called her Ally.”
The strain and the sorrow swallowed her up.
Cade caught her, lifted her. She was limp as the dead. Shaken as much by her utter stillness as the story she’d told, he carried her away quickly. He thought, hoped, if he got her away from that spot, that place, she’d be better.
Even as he bent to lay her back in the car she stirred. When her eyes opened, they were dark and glazed.
“It’s all right. You’re all right. I’m going to get you home.”
“I just need a minute.” The queasiness came on, and the chill. But they would pass. The horror would take longer. “I’m sorry.” She shrugged helplessly. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?” He skirted the hood, got back behind the
wheel. Then just sat. “I don’t know what to do for you. There ought to be something I could do. I’m going to get you home, then I’ll come back and … I’ll find her.”
Confused, Tory stared at him. “She isn’t there now. It happened a long time ago. Years ago.”
He started to speak, then stopped himself. Alice, she’d said. A young blond girl named Alice. It stirred his memory, and a kind of sickness in his gut. “Does it always come on you like that? Out of nowhere?”
“Sometimes.”
“It hurts you.”
“No, it wears you out, makes you a little sick, but it doesn’t hurt.”
“It hurts you,” he said again, and reached down to turn the key.
“Cade.” Tentatively she touched a hand to his. “It was … I’m sorry to bring this back to you, but you have to know. It was like Hope. That’s why it came so strong. It was like Hope.”
“I know it.”
“No, you don’t understand. The man who killed that poor girl, left her there in the trees, it was the same man who killed Hope.”
Would you realize what Revolution is, call it Progress; and would you realize what Progress is, call it Tomorrow.
—
Victor Hugo
I didn’t want to believe it. There were—are—dozens of rational, logical reasons why Tory is wrong. Small points and major ones that make her claim about the teenager killed along the roadside impossible. The girl couldn’t have been murdered by the same monster who killed my sister.
Little Hope with her flyaway hair and eyes full of fun and secrets.
I can list those reasons here in a straightforward manner, the way I couldn’t seem to relate to Tory last night. I know I let her down. I know by the way she looked at me, by the way she slipped back behind that barricaded silence of hers. I know I hurt her by the way I turned aside her claim, the way I suggested, no, insisted, that she let it alone.
But what she told me, what she let me see through her eyes, the horror she relived right in front of me, and later spoke of with such quiet restraint, brought it all back. Brought me back to that long-ago summer when everything in the world changed.
Maybe it’ll help more to write of Hope than of that doomed young girl I never knew.
As I sit here at my father’s desk—for it will forever be my father’s desk in everyone’s mind, including my own—I can turn back the days and months and years until I’m twelve again, still innocent enough to be careless with people I love, still seeing my friends as superior in every way to family, still dreaming of the day when I’m old enough to drive, or to drink, or to do any of the magical things that belong to the coveted world of adulthood.
I’d done my chores that morning, as always. My father had been a stickler for responsibilities, and for hammering what was expected of me into my head. At least he was before we lost Hope, I’d gone out with him, midmorning, to look over the fields. I remember standing, looking over that ocean of cotton. My father stuck mostly with cotton, even when many of the neighboring farms turned heavily to soybeans or tomatoes or tobacco. Beaux Reves was cotton, and I was never to forget it.
I never did.
And that day it was so simple to see why, to stand and look out over that vast space, to see the magic of the bolls burst open by the straining lint. To watch the stalks bend with the weight—some of them carrying what must have been a hundred bolls, all cracked open like eggs. And that late in the year, with the fields so rich with it, the very air smelled of cotton. The hot smell of summer dying.
It was to be a good harvest that year. The cotton would spill into the fields, be picked and bagged and processed. Beaux Reves would go on, even with those who lived in it little more than ghosts.
I was set free shortly after noon. While my father expected me to work, to learn, to sweat, he also expected me to be a boy. He was a good
man, a good father, and for the first twelve years of my life he was everything solid and warm and fine.
I missed him long before he died.
But when he cut me loose that day, I took my bike, the streamlined twelve-speed I’d been given for Christmas, and drove through the thick, hot wall of air all the way to Wade’s. We had a tree house, back of Wade’s yard, up in an old sycamore. Dwight and Wade were already there, drinking lemonade and reading comic books. It was too damn hot to do much else, even if we were twelve.
But Wade’s mama never could leave us be. She was forever coming out and calling up asking didn’t we want this or why didn’t we come in and have a nice cold drink and a tuna fish sandwich. Miss Boots always did have a sweet heart, but she was a royal pain in our collective asses that summer. We were on the cusp of manhood, or so we considered ourselves, and it was more than mortifying to be offered tuna fish and Pepsi-Cola by a mother wearing a starched apron and an indulgent smile that turned us back into children again.
We escaped, headed down to the river for a swim. I believe, out of duty, we made rude, and to us, brilliantly clever insults regarding Dwight’s plump white ass. He, in turn, retaliated by comparing our male parts to various unattractive vegetables. Naturally, such activities kept us all in hysterics for an hour.
It was very easy being twelve. We discussed important matters: Would the Rebel Alliance come back and defeat Darth Vader and the Evil Empire? Who was cooler—Superman or Batman? How would we con one of our parents into taking us to see the latest Friday
the Thirteenth
movie? We would never be able to face our schoolmates if
we hadn’t seen the insane Jason slaughter his annual quota of teenagers.
Such were the vital questions of our lives at the moment.
Sometime after four, I suppose it was, after we’d made ourselves half sick on wasp-stung peaches and underripe pears, Dwight had to get home. His aunt Charlotte was coming in from Lexington for a visit, and he was expected to be clean and on time for supper. Dwight’s parents were strict, and it would not pay him to be late.
We knew he would be forced to wear pressed shorts and a bow tie for the evening, and with the generosity of friends, we waited until he was out of earshot to snicker about it.
Wade and I left soon after, parting ways on the road. He for town and me for Beaux Reves.
I passed Tory on the way. She didn’t have a bike. She was walking home, toward me. I imagine she’d been up playing with Hope. Her feet were bare and dusty, and her shirt was too small. I didn’t really notice any of that at the time, but I remember now just how she looked, that heavy brown hair pulled back from her face, those big gray eyes that stared right into mine as I zoomed by without a word. I could hardly have taken a moment to speak to a girl and maintain my manly dignity. But I recall glancing back, and seeing her walking away on strong legs tanned with summer.
The next time I saw her legs, there were fresh welts scoring them.
Hope was on the veranda when I got there, playing at jacks. I wonder if young girls still play at jacks. Hope was a terror at it, and could whoop anyone she persuaded to challenge her. She tried to get me to play, even promised to give me a handicap. Which, of course, insulted me beyond bearing. I think I told her jacks were for babies
and I had more important things to do. Her laugh, and the sound of the ball bouncing, followed me inside.
I would give a year of my life to go back to that moment and sit on the veranda while she beat me at jacks.
The evening passed as others had. Lilah shooed me upstairs to bathe, saying I smelled of river skunk.
Mama was in the front parlor. I knew because the music she liked was playing. I didn’t go in, as I knew from experience she didn’t care much for smelly, sweaty boys in the front parlor.
It’s funny, looking back I see how much we were, Wade, Dwight, and I, ruled by our mothers. Wade’s with her fluttery hands and warm eyes, Dwight’s with her bags of cookies and candy, and mine with her unbending notions of what was tolerable, and what was not.
I never realized that before, and don’t suppose it matters at this point. It might have mattered then, if we’d understood it.
On this evening, what mattered was avoiding my mother’s disapproval, so I headed straight up the stairs. Faith was in her room, putting some fancy dress on one of her pack of Barbie dolls. I know because I took the time and trouble to stop at her door and sneer.
I had a shower, as I had, shortly before, decided baths were for girls and old wrinkled men. I’m sure I put my dirty clothes in the hamper, as Lilah would have twisted the lobe of my ear if I’d done otherwise. I put on clean clothes, combed my hair, likely took a few moments to flex my biceps and study the results in the mirror. Then I went downstairs.
We had chicken for supper. Roast chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy, and the peas that were fresh from the garden. Faith didn’t care for
peas and refused to eat hers, which might have been tolerated, but she made an issue of it, as Faith often did, and ended up sassing Mama and being sent from the table in disgrace.
I believe Chauncy, Papa’s faithful old hound who died the next winter, got what was left on her plate.
After supper, I poked around outside, devising a way I would talk Papa into letting me build a fort. Thus far my efforts in this area had been a dismal failure, but I thought if I could locate the right spot, one that would conceal the proposed structure so that it wouldn’t be the eyesore Papa imagined, I would succeed.
It was during this reconnoiter that I found Hope’s bike where she’d hidden it behind the camellias.
I never thought of tattling. It just wasn’t the way we worked as siblings, unless temper or self-interest outweighed loyalty. It didn’t even concern me, though I imagined she planned to sneak out and meet Tory somewhere that night as they were thick as thieves all that summer. I knew she’d done so before, and didn’t blame her. Mama was much more strict on her daughters than she was on her son. So I said nothing about the bike and set my mind on the fort.
One word from me, and her plans would have been shattered. She’d have shot me one of her hot, angry looks under her lashes, and likely have refused to speak to me for a day, two if she could hold out.
And she’d have been alive.
Instead. I went back into the house around dusk and planted myself in front of the TV as was my right on a long summer night. Being twelve, I had a powerful appetite and eventually wandered out to hunt up some appropriate snack. I ate potato chips and watched
Hill Street Blues
and wondered what it was like to be a policeman.
By the time I went to bed, with a full stomach and tired eyes, my sister was already dead.
He’d thought he could write more, but he couldn’t manage it. He’d intended to write down what he knew about his sister’s murder, and the murder of a young girl named Alice, but his thoughts had veered away from the facts and the logic and had left him steeped in memories and grief.
He hadn’t realized how completely she would come alive for him if he wrote of her. How the pictures of that night, and the horrible images of the next morning, would run through his mind like a film.
Was that, he wondered, how it was for Tory? Like a movie playing in the mind that would not be stopped?
No, it was more. Did she know that when she’d been caught in that vision the night before she’d spoken
to
the girl rather than about her? Perhaps the girl Alice had spoken through her.
What kind of strength did it take to face that, to survive it and build a life?
He picked up what he’d written, started to lock it in a drawer of the old desk. Instead he folded the pages, sealed them in an envelope.
He would need to see Tory again. Need to speak with her again. He’d been right on that first day when he’d told her the ghost of his sister stood right there between them.
There would be no going forward or back until they’d each come to terms with what they’d lost.
He heard the old grandfather clock call the hour with its hollow, echoing bongs. Two lonely beats. He would be up again in four hours, dressing in the pale light, eating the breakfast Lilah would insist on fixing, then driving from field to field, eyeing the crops with all the faith and fatalism every farmer was born with, checking for pests, studying the sky.
Despite, or perhaps because of, all the science he studied and implemented, Cade’s Beaux Reves was more plantation than the farm of his father. He hired more laborers,
stuck with more handwork than the generation before him. He put more effort, and more of the profits, into the ginning and the compression and storage and processing than his father, and his grandfather, had been willing to do. It made Beaux Reves a self-contained antebellum plantation, and at the same time, a kind of busy, diversified factory.
And still, with his charts and his science and his careful business plans, he would stand and study the sky and hope nature cooperated.
In the end, he thought, as he picked up the envelope, it all came down to fate.
He switched off the desk lamp and used the moonlight spilling through the windows to guide him down the curving stairs and out of the tower office. He’d need those four hours’ sleep, he told himself, because after the morning work he had afternoon meetings at the plant. He reminded himself to pick up some samples for Tory, and work up a proposal.
If he could pull all that together, he could go see her the next night. As he stepped into his room, he weighed the envelope in his hand, then switched on the light and tucked the envelope into the briefcase that sat beside his field boots.
He was unbuttoning his shirt when the faint breeze and the drift of smoke it carried had him glancing toward his terrace doors. He stepped over, noted they were open a chink, and through the glass saw the red glow of a burning cigarette.
“I wondered if you’d ever come down.” Faith turned. She was wearing the robe she favored these days, and spreading her arms on the stone, struck a kind of pose.
“Why don’t you smoke out your own window?”
“I don’t have this fine terrace, like the master of the house.” That had been another bone of contention. And though he agreed that she’d have made more of the master suite than he, it hadn’t been worth fighting their mother over her insistence he take it after his father’s death.
She lifted the cigarette, drew slowly. “You’re still mad at me. I don’t blame you. That was a lousy thing to do. I just don’t think when my temper’s up.”
“If that’s an apology, fine. Now, go on and let me go to bed.”
“I’m sleeping with Wade.”
“Jesus.” Cade pressed his fingers to his eyes and wondered why they didn’t just bore through his brain. “You figure that’s something I need to know?”
“I found out one of your secrets, so I’m telling you one of mine. We’ll be even.”
“I’ll make a note to take an ad on it out in the paper. Wade.” He dropped down into the iron chair on the terrace, slumped. “Goddamn it.”
“Oh, don’t be that way. We’re getting along just fine.”
