Darkness & Shadows (40 page)

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“I don’t think she likes me very much,” Marybeth said as they unloaded their belongings from the car. Tristan had already stormed into the trailer.

“It’s okay,” Patrick said and smiled. “She just takes a little getting used to.”

“A little?”

He tried his best to shrug it off.

“Where’d you dig her up, anyway?”

“It’s a long story, but she’s good people.”

“Good for what?” Marybeth laughed. “Entertainment?”

Patrick felt his face go expressionless.

“Oh, baby, I was just kidding,” she said with a placating grin. “I’m sorry, she just put my back up a little. She’s your friend, so of course I love her.”

He forced a smile.

“Jeez,” she said. “Did you leave your sense of humor behind all those years ago?” She slapped him on the rear, grinned some more. “It’s me, remember?”

Tristan came out of the trailer just in time to catch the playful swat. She didn’t look pleased, but to her credit, did her best to ignore
it. As she walked toward the car for her belongings, the two women crossed paths without so much as a word or glance toward one another, but it was abundantly clear to Patrick: there was some bad energy going around, and he had a problem. He felt caught between two women and two worlds.

“This is great,” Patrick said as he stepped inside the RV. And it really was much better than he had expected, more spacious and a lot cleaner than the one Tristan had taken him to. Tristan shot him a quick, dry look as if his comment were a direct insult, then went on about her business.

“Look here, baby!” Marybeth called from the rear, pointing and grinning. She disappeared through a door.

Patrick followed her inside.

“Our own room!” She hopped onto the bed and lay back, her smile teasing and playful. “I can’t wait for tonight.”

Patrick couldn’t see or hear Tristan, but he could sense her listening, and he could feel her angry vibes shooting through the walls like missiles. He said, “We’d better get unpacked. I’ll get the rest of our things.”

When he moved into the other room, Tristan was hefting her bags, her face emotionless.

Awkward. Patrick felt terribly awkward.

“You okay?” he asked, grabbing her bags.

“Yeah, fine.” She jerked them back.

“Tristan—”

“I’m fine,” she said repressively. “I’m just tired. It’s been a long day.”

Patrick raised his voice toward the bedroom while holding an appraising gaze on Tristan. “Baby, why don’t we go for a walk on the beach and give Tristan a chance to rest?”

“Okay,” Marybeth yelled gleefully from the bedroom. “Just give me a minute to change into something more comfortable.”

It was more than a minute—actually about fifteen—before she surfaced in the doorway, makeup freshened, wearing a white
button-down blouse tied at the stomach above a pair of festive red shorts. “How do I look?” she said, spinning around, smiling.

Tristan muttered something that sounded like
BeachBlanketBingo.

“You look great,” Patrick said. “Ready to go?”

She nodded, then flittered ahead of him and through the door.

Patrick looked at Tristan one last time before leaving. She was still unpacking, still resolutely avoiding his gaze. He started to say something, then stopped, headed out.

They walked along the shoreline, and Patrick was finally able to relax, feeling as though he’d just managed to separate two feral cats. The waves crashed in, and the turquoise skies spread for miles, reminding Patrick of that time so long ago where it all began for them. Being by her side again as their past sprung into real life was strange, but also strangely wonderful.

He closed his eyes, breathed in the sea air, and let it out slowly. When he opened his eyes again, his tension was almost completely gone. He was beginning a new life, and it was euphoric.

Marybeth wrapped her arms around his neck, pulled him close, and gave him a strong passionate kiss, sending him into a state of weak-kneed weightlessness. She smelled exactly as he remembered; in fact, everything about her, about this moment, was so familiar and so wonderful. It was like coming home. It was heaven.

“Patrick?” she said. “You okay?”

He couldn’t wipe the stupid grin off his face. “I’m better than okay. I’m fantastic.”

Running a finger across his lips, she said, “I want to spend the rest of my life with you, Patrick Bannister. I don’t want to live another moment without you. I don’t care if we have to run deep into the jungle and live there forever. I don’t care what we have to
do, as long as we’re together. I love you, and with every minute that passes, I just keep loving you more.”

Loving you
.

Patrick was beaming, every part of his body feeling electric, parts that for all these years had seemed locked up, off limits.

“What are you thinking right this minute?” she asked, gazing into his eyes, running her fingers through his hair.

Still grinning, he said, “How amazing this moment is. I want to feel every bit of it, remember it forever, because I know I’ll look back on it as the happiest day of my life.”

She lowered her arms over his shoulders, drew her lips to his, and they kissed.

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C
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They sat on the rocks, holding hands, staring at the ocean. The sun was sloping downward, barely touching the horizon, an eruption of color decorating the sky: a final prelude to the fall of gathering darkness. Out on the water the surf stirred restlessly, waves chasing their way to a fading shoreline. Patrick felt his emotions shifting as well, his internal tide rising to even higher levels. Now they were talking about spending the rest of their lives together, even about having a family—he could barely fathom the thought, let alone understand the feelings that came with it. He wondered if that was because what had never seemed remotely possible was now suddenly coming true. All these years, all that pain. It felt like his life was just beginning.

He turned to look in her eyes, liquid green waves rolling through them. The most beautiful eyes he’d ever seen, and now more than ever.

Marybeth ran a hand over his leg, smiling. “I can’t believe I’m sitting here with you. I can’t believe this is real.” She rested her head on his shoulder.

“I still have so many questions.”

She looked up at him. “Ask them. I want you to know everything.”

He looked at her scarred earlobe with sadness. Marybeth noticed and self-consciously put her hand over it; Patrick reached up, gently pulling it away. Softly, he reassured her. “It’s okay.”

“He was trying to force me to admit I’d broken into his office,” she said through a distraught and shattered voice. “He wanted to know what I found.” She wiped a tear away. “Patrick, he tortured me. That was when I knew I had to get out of there. I had to get away before he killed me. So I killed myself—or made it look that way—but I knew that making myself dead wouldn’t be enough. I’d tried that before. Making him the killer would keep him away for good. So I took the earlobe and left it in the garage with Wesley’s car, knowing it would seal his fate.”

A few moments of silence lingered, then Patrick said, “And the body I saw that day, being rolled out of the sciences building?”

The lines on her face grew deeper and harder. “It was a cadaver from the biology morgue. I brought it into the room before I started the fire.”

“Your fear of fire…”

She shook her head, more tears falling down her cheeks. “I didn’t want to deceive you, Patrick, I swear. I didn’t want to use you that way, but I had to. I had no choice.”

He nodded, now realizing why the medical examiner had declared there was no victim. They’d probably later realized where it came from—but by then, Patrick was already long gone. “And the body here in Mexico?”

She frowned and shrugged. “You can buy just about anything in TJ if you’ve got enough money. I had plenty of it. I paid off someone at the morgue. The right sex, the right build. I put some of my jewelry on her…”

“And your wallet just a few feet away.”

She nodded. “And I was dead.”

“Once again…” he said, his voice trailing.

“The things he did to me all those years, Patrick. I can’t even talk about them. Sometimes I felt like there was nothing left after he was done, like he’d…”

“Taken away so much of who you were,” he said.

She nodded. “I was so scared.”

He swallowed around the lump in his throat. “And your mother?”

Her expression soured. “She was no better. She let it happen, and I hated her for that.”

He’d had similar feelings about his uncle Warren while growing up. The man’s cowardly denial had only made the pain that much worse because Warren had the power to stop his mother’s abuse but never did. He remembered feeling nothing when his uncle died: nothing but anger. He reached for Marybeth’s hand, looking down, rubbing his thumb across it as if soothing a wound. “You didn’t feel badly when she died?”

She put her head on his shoulder again. “When I saw her hanging there, logically, I knew it was an awful thing, but all I could feel was anger. She was gone, and I was all alone… with him.”

Patrick gradually straightened his posture. She lifted her head to look at him as he studied her.

“Hanging there…” he said.

“It was terrible. Her face… They say death brings peace, but she didn’t look peaceful at all.”

“I imagine she didn’t,” Patrick said, and then the words fell slowly from his lips: “I did a very bad thing.”

She frowned.

“That’s what you meant.”

She shook her head.

“No bruising on the body…”

“What are you talking about? Baby, you’re scaring me.” She shook her head faster. “I don’t understand.”

“But I do.” He stood straight up and took a long step back. He couldn’t be near her, couldn’t even stand to look at her. All he could do was start walking.

“Patrick! Wait!” she shouted, starting after him. “Please!”

Shaking his head, quickening his pace, speaking through clenched teeth, “They pulled her body down before you ever got home. I talked to the detective. He told me. So how the
hell
could you possibly remember what she looked like hanging there?
How the hell?
”

“Baby, wait!
Please!
It’s not what you think!” She grabbed his arm.

He yanked it away hard, spun around—and suddenly the beautiful, complex woman he thought loved him vanished, and she appeared now exactly as she had always been: a scared and broken little girl. He’d refused to see it then, but he saw it now, and it was clear, and it was so sorely obvious.

Patrick seized her by the shoulders, squeezing them tight, glaring into her eyes. “You saw it because you were there when it happened! You helped kill her!”

“No!” she said, shaking her head, flat-out fear in her eyes, voice breaking apart. “That’s not true!”

He shook her harder, screamed louder, tears falling down his face. “
No more lies! No more fucking lies!
”

She opened her trembling mouth and tried to speak, but there were no words. This was one lie she couldn’t undo. He knew it; so did she. He watched her for a moment longer, disgust brewing inside him, so powerful, so real, he could taste it on his tongue. Then he turned and walked away, afraid of what his rage might bring him to do otherwise.

“Where are you going?” she shouted through her sobs, following after him again. “Don’t do this! We belong together. Patrick, I need you. I love you!”

Don’t let Camilla’s legacy be a life without the one thing you want most… to love and to be loved. Don’t give her that power. She doesn’t deserve it. Neither does anyone else.

Dr. Ready’s words boomeranged through his mind—and now so too did their true meaning. Camilla and Marybeth: both the same. Pain had robbed them of the ability to love until there was nothing left of them but empty human shells, and Patrick had almost let them do the same to him. He’d traveled to the edge, but now he was stepping away from it.

He turned to her, and in a low growling tenor, one he barely recognized as his own, said, “You don’t know what love is.”

His words stopped her cold.

And through her sobs, in the small, bewildered voice of a child, she said, “Please don’t leave me!”

And he did.

Without looking back, he left Marybeth behind on the beach.

This time for good.

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C
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“How could I have been so blind?” Patrick said. “How could I have not known?”

“Because love is in fact blind,” Dr. Ready said.

“I don’t feel blind. I feel blindsided. And stupid.”

“You are not.”

He fell back into the couch, closed his eyes.

“Patrick,” she said, “this has nothing to do with intelligence.”