Nightmare Country (33 page)

Then he lifted her to her feet and off them, held her up against him as effortlessly as Augie Mapes had done at Jerusha's party, and kissed her on the lips and then down her neck. Her head kept calling for Adrian, but every other traitorous, aching cell in her body responded to Backra.

34

“All I can tell you is I don't have your daughter, don't know where she is. I do have some idea of how you feel, though.” They walked along the beach away from San Tomas. Tamara had practically to run to keep up with his long strides. “I've dreamed of her as I have of you, a large girl, likes to eat in the middle of the night, gives you a rough time.” He spoke rapidly, as if he were more used to keeping silent. “But I don't have any evil way of transporting sleeping children here from anywhere. And I don't know any Jerusha Fistler, and …” He stopped suddenly, and she ran into him. He pulled her around in front of him and wouldn't let her move away. “And I'm having one hell of a time believing in you, lady.”

“It's Tamara.”

“Tamara. But you must be right about there being some connection between this place and Iron Mountain, or we wouldn't know each other.”

“Please stop walking. I'm out of gas.”

Humor etched a trace of lines around his eyes and then spread inside to take away the protective leaden quality. “Not used to the heat.”

“It was snowing this morning. I came to find my child. You tell me she isn't here. Which means I'm supposed to believe she's dead.”

“They do die, you know.”

“She's missing! Not … dead.” Tamara sank to a sitting position in the hot sand and stared at his knees.

“'Least you can say the word. When was the last time you had a meal?”

“I don't know. What are you, a doctor or something?”

“Or something. But not a witch doctor like you've been treating me. Let's see, lunch is over at the Mayapan … if we sprint, we could just make it back to the Hotel de Sueños in time for scraps at least. Roudan's notoriously relaxed about schedules.”

Tamara wasn't up to sprinting, but did manage to walk back along the beach. She recognized the unfinished church as they passed it. Just before they reached the cemetery, he guided her into a cool dark barroom and through it to a dining room with long tables. It was about half full, and the very smell of spice and tomato and other things she couldn't name almost took the last bit of starch from her legs.
What am I doing sitting down to eat with this man?

Steaming bowls of fish stew were set before them, and brown bottles of beer.
How can I enjoy food when Adrian
…? Guilt and all, Tamara ate and drank everything offered. Her grateful body sent back rounds of zipping-good feelings to equal any she'd known running. She didn't pause until they sat over coffee.

Backra, who'd managed to put away a second lunch, smiled a smile she'd never forget. “You wonder how you can still feel hunger, pleasure—anything but pain when you've lost somebody. Makes you want to punish yourself.”

“She's not dead. I'd know.”

“Still think I have her hidden away?”

“Maybe that was just an easy answer.” The coffee was half hot sweetened milk, but still thick with flavor. It and the food were so revitalizing she began to enjoy the heat, the bright colors around her, and the man beside her. She had the urge to compare dreams with him, but there was still something guarded in his manner, as there should have been more in hers.

“Why am I a dream you wished would never come true?” she asked him.

“I'm about to embark on a new life, carefree and unattached, and you look like a little bundle of responsibility and strings.”

“Gee, where have I heard that before?”

As they entered the bar, a big parrot turned upside down and wished Tamara a “Hoppy burday.”

“What I really want to do,” Tamara said when they were once again out on the beach, “is to search every house, run up and down the streets screaming her name. Anyway, thanks for the lunch.”

“I owed it to you after, uh … treating you that way when we met.”

“You don't look sorry about it.”

“I'm not.”

“We probably don't even like each other. It's just the dream-fantasy.”

“That's got to be it.”

“I followed you one night, when you were sleepwalking—at least I dreamed I did. And when I woke up, I'd been sleepwalking too. And a snake wound down from a vine onto your shoulders.” Somehow they'd angled back to his door.

“You're lucky. That was one of the nights I was wearing pajamas.”

I remember a few when you weren't
.

He opened the door, and she stepped in. She noticed the boxes now. The Sahsa Airline folder on the table. “You're going somewhere? Moving?”

“This is my father's house, and that's a long story. I'm flying home tomorrow—Anchorage.”

That stifling disappointment she'd felt when she stepped off the plane returned.
Over a man?
“What kind of a mother am I?”

“I don't know.” He reached into a cupboard for a tube, smeared sun cream on her nose, forehead, shoulders—without asking or explaining. As she would have done for Adrian.

“Would you have time to take me into the place with the snakes?”

“If that's what you want, Tamara.” He reached back into the cupboard for a spray can, and she stood docilely while he sprayed sickly-smelling bug spray all over her skin and clothes and hair. “Sand fleas have probably eaten you alive by now, but there's ticks and such in the jungle.”

“Do you have to go home so soon?”

“I think it's for the best.” He sprayed his front, handed her the can, and turned around for her to spray his back.

She should have returned to the Mayapan long enough to explain her absence to those she'd dragged down here, but she just followed him through San Tomas. By a different route than the dream walk, but they came to the chain-link fence and the source of the background rumble.

“This is the island generator.” He pointed to the building behind the fence.

“You walked this way, feeling the fence till you could walk around it.”

“In my dream I was inside your mountain.”

He led the way into the jungle, and it looked even more foreign with the sharper edges of day color.

“The snake didn't hurt me,” he reassured her when she paused so long he had to come back for her. “But someone else did. Did you see anybody else here?”

“No. I rushed forward to save you from the snake, and woke up in the snow.”

“And I came to back at the generator with a whacked-up head. Snakes don't whack. Do you realize how this conversation would sound to anybody who wasn't us?”

“I haven't had an intelligent conversation since the day I drove into Iron Mountain. What happened to you when you were all scratched and bruised and hurt your nose?”

“I had a diving accident and decided it was time to go home. And I can't find my dad. So he must be dead.” Thad explained he'd come to Mayan Cay to search for his father.

“If he's missing too, maybe he and Adrian are together somewhere.” She followed him again, and remembered that dream day on the beach when she'd first seen him. She'd followed him then too, reached out to touch his back, hadn't been sure if she really felt it or not … realized now she'd just done it again. This time she could feel his warmth through his shirt. This time he turned and caught her up.

They stood holding each other in the steamy place with the sun pressing down on their heads and the rank growth all around them exuding odors so dense they almost overcame the chemical smell of the bug spray. Tamara buried her face in the sandy mat of hair that formed a T on his chest, the bar stretching over his breasts and the tail extending down as she'd traced it with dream eyes the night he'd come to Miriam Kopecky's bedroom in Iron Mountain. She stood on tiptoe to kiss the dip in his throat beneath his Adam's apple, and pushed herself away, his salt still on her lips.

“Good thing I'm leaving tomorrow.” He turned back along the path.

They entered the relative coolness of a shaded place, and she recognized the wall of vine even in daylight and with the blossoms closed. The scent that had so overwhelmed her the night of Jerusha's party was now a faint, muted reminder of the last time she had seen Adrian, her sleeping head on the pillow next to Vinnie's.

“Chomp down on it. Think of other things.”

“You must have been very close to your father—to pick up on my feelings so fast.” She looked up at him, her head cocked to one side, and sweat squeezed into the crinkles that formed in her neck.

“My son died a little over a year ago. He was twelve.”

“So is Adrian. What do you think about to take your mind off your hurt for your son?”

“Once or twice I thought of you.”

“Did it help?”

“Yes and no.” He turned away, parted the vine to peer through.

For a moment Tamara heard a sound that reminded her of traffic on a distant highway, the roar of engines and the angry buzz of tires on pavement. Even as she concentrated on it, it faded away. Insects swarming, perhaps. This was, after all, a jungle.

Thad led her to an opening in the vine wall, next to the trunk of a palm tree.

“I thought of you sometimes even before Adrian … vanished. Once I visualized you riding into Iron Mountain on a horse.”

He laughed. The first time she'd heard that sound. It had a raspy, husky quality, like his voice. “My legs are too long. I look silly on a horse.” There was a cone-shaped hill on the other side of the wall, and a slight but refreshing breeze. A few trees angled drunkenly from the sides of the cone. Several grew on top. “This, I think, is a Mayan stela.” He gestured toward a mossy rock, long and narrow, with a corner sliced off. “They used to write on them, like a book made out of stone. And that”—Thad stared up at the hill—“is, I'm guessing, the tiniest of Mayan temples or pyramids, all grown over.”

Her running shoes sank into ooze, and she stepped sideways to firmer ground.

“The snake seems to have moved on. Or he's hiding in the foliage.” Thad looked from the mound to her and said softly, “Even predators are sneaky when afraid, or hunting, or both.”

Tamara knew they weren't talking about snakes.

The mound rose behind him, an intense jade framing his silver head. A breath of breeze nudged broad-leafed plants and separated palm fronds, changing the light-and-shade patterns that played across his body and his face, highlighting pale eyes one moment, hiding them the next.

Backra waited.

Bugs hummed on the dense air, causing a vibrating sensation in her ears. A bird shrieked some exotic message and drew an echoing reply from deep in the jungle. It was a little like Jerusha's party. But Tamara lost track of only seconds rather than minutes. She did not forget about Adrian, but she did experience a certain feebleness in her legs, a wilting of her self-control. Twinges in her lower stomach set off aching spasms like the onset of menses and lit up cravings she thought she'd forgotten the name of.

She shook her head no, but then just sort of crumbled into him when he reached for her.

35

The cool, slimy feel of the stela beneath her, the hot damp feel of Backra above. The massaging of his body against her.

And after all the cautionary words she'd flung at Adrian about this very thing, Tamara didn't even put up a flimsy resistance to his needs or hers. He was leaving tomorrow, and she was powerless. And ashamed.

Not even the fear of unknown creatures lurking in the shadows of tangled leaves and grasses or preparing to swoop down from trailing fronds and dipping branches above could dilute the drugged feeling spreading over her. Not even the thought of crawling furry insects creeping out of the weeds that choked the base of the stela to walk across her bare flesh and probe for a place to bite or sting or poison—in fact, these fears made the act all the more erotic and urgent.

She'd gone past the point of caring about anything more than the man and the moment, knowing that within minutes all the responsibilities of the adult world would return and she'd regret this act as she had few others in life.

Meanwhile Tamara Whelan savored the forbidden just like a dumb kid. His breath. The stab of sharp bone in her back as his forearm forced her to arch under him. The pressure of his entry, which sent pleasing little cramps throughout her pelvis and a shower of sensations flowing along her thighs. The press of his weight on her stomach. Even the harsh prickling on the length of her backside as carved edges in the alien rock cut through its moss cover when Backra crushed her down into it. Just the enveloping touch of him in this breathless muggy world.

Sensual memories of his naked form approaching her on Iron Mountain, the way his muscles had tensed all along his body as he'd held Dixie in much the same position in Tamara's dream floated unbidden but unhindered through her mind. And the little shock of realization that she wouldn't have to fantasize to reach orgasm because she was living her fantasy and with the man who'd haunted her dreams and in a setting exotic beyond anything she could have created.

“I don't believe you're real,” Backra whispered.

Tamara wrapped her legs around him, tightened herself against him, and drew him in so deep it hurt. His release came before hers, but not long. Even as she twisted and the narcotic effect streamed through her, the image of how ridiculous they must look to an outsider invaded her pleasure. And when he withdrew, pulled her up to sit beside him, she wished she could cry.

He kissed the top of her head, stroked down her arm and along her hip, picked his shirt up off the ground, and wrapped it around her as if he understood. “It's all right.”

With her eyes closed, she could shut out everything but sounds, smells, and thoughts. She could think of nothing to say to this man that wouldn't sound as ridiculous as they looked. He must think her an adolescent. And what would Adrian think if she saw them now? Tamara couldn't face any of it so she stayed hidden in his shirt and his chest and his arms.