Cry Wolf (39 page)

“I haven't, either. Nor has Aunt Caroline or Mama Pearl.” She fiddled with her spoon as the nerves in her stomach quivered. She fixed her gaze on Jack's belly button and the dark hair that curled around it. “I'm a little concerned.”

He shrugged. “She's with a lover.”

“Maybe. Probably. It's just that . . .” She trailed off as the suspicions and theories tried to surface. She wished she could share it all with him, but he wasn't in a sharing mood, and faced with the stony expression he was wearing, she couldn't bring herself to tell him any of it. She felt alone; the one thing she had come to him to avoid. “. . . with all that's been going on, I'd feel better knowing for certain.”

“So what do you want from me, sugar?” he asked bluntly. “You know for a fact she's not in my bed.”

“Why are you doing this?” she demanded, setting her cup aside on the counter. She halved the distance between them, hands jammed on her hips.

“What?”

“Being such a bastard.”

Jack arched a brow and grinned sharply. “It's what I do best, angel.”

“Oh, stop it!” she snapped. “It's too early in the morning for this kind of bullshit.” She dared another step toward him, peering up at him in narrow-eyed speculation. “What did you think, Jack? That I was coming over here to ask you to marry me?” she said sarcastically. “Well, I'm not. You can relax. Your martyrdom is safe. All I want is a little help. A straight answer or two would be nice.”

He scowled at her as the martyrdom barb hit and stuck dead center. Giving in to the need to escape her scrutiny, he abandoned his coffee and sauntered across the room to pull a beer from the fridge.

“What do you want me to say?” he asked, twisting off the top with a quick motion of his wrist. “That I know who was screwing your sister last night? I don't. If I were to hazard a guess as to the possible candidates, I could just as well hand you a phone book.”

“Oh, fine,” Laurel bit back. She stalked him across the room like a tiger. Fury bubbled up inside her, and she wished to God she were big enough and strong enough to pound the snot out of Jack Boudreaux. He deserved it, and it would have gone a long way to appease her own wounded pride. “You're a big help, Jack.”

“I told you, sugar, I don' get involved.”

“What a crock,” she challenged, toe to toe with him now, leaning up toward him with her chin out and fire in her eyes. She might have been uncertain treading the uneven ground of their suddenly formed relationship, but she knew what to do in an argument. “You're dabbling around the edges everywhere, Jack—with Frenchie's, with the Delahoussayes, with Baldwin, with me. You're just too big a coward to do more than get your feet wet.”

“Coward?” He gaped at her, at the sound of the word. He described himself in many ways, few of them flattering, but “coward” was not on the list.

Laurel pressed on, shooting blind, fighting on instinct. Her skills were rusty, and she had never been good at keeping her heart out of a fight, anyway. It tumbled into the fray now, tender and brimming with new emotion. The words were out of her mouth before she could even try to rope them back. “Every time it starts looking like you might have a chance at something good, you turn tail and run behind that I-don't-give-a-damn facade.”

“A chance at something good?” Jack said, his gaze sharp on hers, his heart clenching in his chest. “Like what? Like us?”

She bit her tongue on the answer, but it flashed in her eyes just the same. Jack swore under his breath and turned away from her. Struggling for casual indifference, he shook a cigarette out from a pack lying on the counter and dangled it from his lip. “
Mon Dieu,
a couple' a good rolls in the sack and suddenly—”

“Don't!” Laurel snapped. She held a finger up in warning and pressed her lips together hard to keep them from trembling. “Don't you dare.” She gulped down a knot of tears and struggled to snatch a breath that didn't rattle and catch in her throat. “I didn't come here to have this fight,” she said tightly. “I came here because I thought you might be able to help me, because I thought we were friends.”

Jack blew out a huff of air and shook his head. “I can't help anybody.”

Laurel tugged her composure tight around herself. Damned if she'd let him make her cry. “Yeah? Well, forgive me for asking you to breach the asshole code of conduct,” she sneered. “I'll just go ask Jimmy Lee Baldwin flat out if he had my sister tied to his bed the past two nights. I'll just go knock on every goddamn door in the parish until I find her!” She held up a hand as if to ward off an offer that was not forthcoming. “Thanks anyway, Jack,” she said bitterly, “but I don't need you after all.”

He watched her storm out of the kitchen and down the hall, a frown tugging at his mouth, a lead weight sinking in his chest. “That's what I've been tellin' you all along, angel,” he muttered, then he turned and went in search of matches.

Coop stared into his underwear drawer, frowning at the array of serviceable cotton Jockey shorts and boxers and the little silk things Savannah had bought him. He lifted out a white silk G-string, dangling it from his finger, shaking his head. He'd felt stupid as hell wearing it, too big and too old and too set in his ways. But as he dropped it in the wastebasket beside the dresser, he felt a little twinge of regret, just the same.

She wouldn't be back this time. The fight to end all fights had been fought. It was over, once and for all.

Too bad, he thought as he stared out the window. He had loved her. If only she had been able to take that love for what it was worth and find happiness. Of course, that restless, insatiable quality had been one of the things to draw him to her in the first place. So needy, so desperate to assuage that need, so utterly, pitiably incapable of filling that gaping hole within her heart.

He sighed as his mind idly drew character sketches of Savannah, and his gaze fell through the window, taking in the details of the setting. The bayou was a strip of bottle green beyond the yard, and beyond the banks lay the tangled wilderness of the Atchafalaya. Wild and sultry, like Savannah, unpredictable and deceivingly delicate, fragility in the guise of unforgiving toughness.

He thought he ought to write the image down, but he couldn't work up the ambition to go and get his notebook. Instead, he let the lines fade away and tended to his packing. Five pairs of shorts, five pairs of socks, the tie bar Astor had given him the Christmas before she forgot his name.

Astor. God, how different she had been from Savannah. She had always worn her fragility like a beautiful orchid corsage, as if it were the badge of a true lady, a sign of breeding. Her toughness had been inside, a stoic strength that had borne her through the stages of her decline with dignity. She would have disapproved of Savannah—silently, politely, with a tip of her head and a cluck of her tongue. But he imagined Astor would have forgiven Savannah her sins. He wasn't so sure the same could be said for his case. He had made his wife a pledge, after all.

The doorbell intruded on his musings, and Coop abandoned the closet and his shirt selections to answer it, never expecting to find Laurel Chandler standing on the stoop.

“Mr. Cooper, I'm Laurel Chandler,” she said, all business, no seductive smile, no gleam of carnal fire in the eyes behind the oversize, mannish spectacles.

“Yes, of course,” he said. Remembering his manners, he stepped back from the door. “Would you care to come in?”

“I'll be blunt, Mr. Cooper,” Laurel said, making no move to enter the house. “I'm looking for my sister.”

Coop sighed heavily, wearily, feeling his age and the weight of his infidelity bearing down on his broad shoulders. “Yes. Do come in, Miz Chandler, please. I'm afraid I'm in a bit of a hurry, but we can talk as I pack.”

Determined to dislike him, Laurel stepped past him and into the entry hall of a lovely old home that held family heirlooms and an ageless sense of loneliness with equal grace. Everything was in its place and polished to a shine, with no one here to see it. A grandfather clock ticked the seconds away at the foot of the stairs, marking time to the end of a family. Cooper and his wife had no children. When they were gone, so would be the memories the family had made in this house over the generations.

She cast a hard glance at Conroy Cooper. Behind the lenses of his gold-rimmed glasses, he met her gaze with the bluest, warmest, saddest eyes she had ever seen, and he smiled, wistfully, regretfully. It wasn't difficult to see what had attracted her sister. He was a big, strong, athletic man, even at an age that had to be near sixty. His face had probably taken young ladies' breath in his hey-day. A strong jaw and a boyish grin. Now it was a map etched with lines of stress and living. No less handsome; more interesting. He stood there in rumpled chinos with one leg cocked, his head tipped on one side. A gray T-shirt with a faded Tulane logo spanned his shoulders and hung free of his pants.

“I am certain you are well aware of my relationship with your sister,” he drawled, that smooth, wonderful voice rolling out of him, rolling over Laurel like sunwarmed caramel. She steeled herself against its effects. “And you think less of me for it.”

“You're an adulterer, Mr. Cooper. What am I supposed to think of you?”

“That perhaps I loved Savannah as best I could while trying to keep a promise to a woman who no longer remembers me or anything of the life we once had together.”

Laurel pressed her lips together and looked down at her shoes, dodging the steady blue gaze.

“Savannah once told me you thought in absolutes,” he said. “Right or wrong. Guilty or not guilty. Life isn't quite so black and white as you would like for it to be, Laurel. Nothing is as absolute in reality as it is in our minds in our youth.”

“Loved,” Laurel repeated, seizing on the thought to fend off any pangs of contrition his words may have inspired. She raised her head and looked at him sharply again. “You said
loved
. Past tense.”

“Yes. It's over.” He ran a hand back through his blond hair, glancing at the clock as it ticked away another few seconds. “I don't mean to be rude, but I have to be in N'Awlins this afternoon. If you'll excuse my back, I'll lead the way.”

As she followed him into his bedroom, a feeling of something like déjà vu stole over her. The furnishings were big and masculine. The smell of leather and shoe polish underscored the faint woodsy tang of aftershave. Like Daddy's room back home before Vivian had dismantled it and given it over to Ross.

A duffel bag sat open on the white counterpane on the bed, giving her a peek of white cotton and polished wingtips. Cooper went to the closet and selected three shirts, which he hung neatly in a black garment bag on the closet door.

“She wanted to go with me on this trip,” he said. “Of course, I had to tell her no. She knew very well the boundaries of our relationship. If you think she took the news well, I should point out to you that I used to have a collection of fine antique shaving mugs left to me by my grandfather. I kept them in that cabinet next to the bathroom door.”

The curio cabinet stood, an empty frame with no glass in its sides and no antique shaving mugs within. All signs of the destruction had been vacuumed away, but Laurel could very easily picture her sister hurling mugs at Cooper's head. She had that kind of rage in her, that kind of violence.

Fingers of tension curled around her stomach and squeezed.

“When did this argument take place?” she asked, turning to face Cooper once again.

He hung a pearl gray suit in the garment bag and smoothed the sleeves. “Tuesday. Why?”

“Because I haven't seen her since Tuesday morning.”

He pulled another suit from the closet and added it to the bag, frowning as his mind rushed to plot out scenarios. “Then she's probably gone on to N'Awlins. I wouldn't put it past her to think she could disrupt my stay.”

“She didn't have a car.”

“She may have caught a ride with a friend.” His mouth compressed into a tight line as he zipped the bag shut. “Or another man. You might check with the Maison de Ville. She likes to stay in the cottages there.”

“Yes,” Laurel murmured. “I know.”

They had stayed there the spring before their father died. A family outing, one of the few she remembered happily. She could still hear Vivian going on about how movie stars sometimes stayed there. She could still see the thick-walled cottages and the courtyard, could still hear the noise and smell the ripe smells of New Orleans as she had perceived them then, through the senses of a child.

Cooper pulled the garment bag down from the closet door, folded and latched it securely. Laurel watched his hands. They were thick and strong with square-cut nails. The hands of a farmer or a carpenter, not a writer. A gold band, burnished with age, circled the third finger of his left hand.

“How is your wife?”

His head came up sharply, eyes shining with interest and surprise as he studied her. He swung the bag onto the bed beside the duffel.

Laurel picked at her ravaged thumbnail absently, uncomfortable with the topic and his scrutiny. “I heard about the incident at St. Joseph's. I'm sorry.”

Coop nodded slowly, finding it interesting that Laurel would apologize for the actions of her sister. They were two sides of the same coin—one light, one dark; one driven by angst to acts of justice, one to strange fits of passion. Laurel subdued everything feminine about herself; Savannah flaunted and magnified. Laurel held everything within; Savannah knew no boundaries and no control.

“She's doing well enough,” he said. “One of the few saving graces of her illness is that she forgets unpleasantness almost as quickly as it happens. It's the rest of us who have to go on with bad memories lingering like the smell of smoke.”

The past was gone, but its taint was stubborn and pervasive. An apt analogy, Laurel thought as she left the house.

She slid behind the wheel of her car and just sat there for a moment, her mind trying to go in eight directions at once. Cooper thought Savannah had gone to New Orleans. It didn't feel right. Savannah had always treated a trip to New Orleans as an event, something to fuss over and pack and repack for. She would have told Aunt Caroline, promised to bring back something outrageous for Mama Pearl just to hear the old woman huff and puff. She wouldn't have slipped away like a thief in the night, regardless of who she had gone with.