One Summer (11 page)

This tumbled confession pierced Rachel’s heart. She crouched again, wanting to hug the child tight but knowing better this time. She touched his blue-jeaned knee, about to tell him that he could have the clock and anything else he wanted. Johnny’s hand closing over her shoulder stopped her, and she glanced up at him. He shook his head warningly at her. Rachel, acknowledging the justice of that warning, shut her mouth and removed
her hand. To be too soft with the boy now would undo all the good their warnings might have done.

“You don’t want to cause your mom any more grief by getting caught stealing, now, do you?” Johnny’s voice was stern and gentle at the same time.

Jeremy glanced swiftly up at him. “Cain’t nobody prove—” Something in Johnny’s expression must have gotten through to him at last, because after a single swift glance at Rachel, he hung his head. “No, sir.”

“Good boy. Then nobody will have to say anything to your mom—this time. If there ever is a next time, then we’ll tell her, and we’ll see she hears about this episode, too. Now you say sorry to Miss Grant and scoot on out of here. There’s a door in the back here that you can use so you won’t have to see anybody else from the store.”

“You mean that man? He don’t like me.”

Rachel assumed he was referring to Ben.

“No,” Johnny answered. “You don’t have to see him. Now, what do you say to Miss Grant?”

“Sorry,” Jeremy said with another of those quick glances at Rachel. “I won’t do it no more.”

Then, at a nod from Johnny, Jeremy got up from his seat and bolted past her out the door. For a moment they could hear the sound of sneakered feet pounding over the hardwood floor. The heavy metal delivery door creaked open and banged shut, and Jeremy was gone.

Rachel stood up. She was disconcerted to discover that that put her so close to Johnny that her shoulder was practically touching his chest, and her skirt brushed his jeans. Uncomfortable, she stepped away from him, covering the sudden awkwardness she felt by scooting the desk chair in which the child had been sitting back into its cubbyhole. The faint squeal of its wheels was jarringly loud in the sudden silence.

“Thank you for not calling the police,” Johnny said, and she had no choice but to look at him again. There was that gentleness in his eyes again, and anyone who was acquainted
only with the swaggering, cock-of-the-walk side of his personality would have found it surprising. But Rachel had always sensed it was there. If things had turned out differently for him, if the circumstances of birth and fate had not conspired against him, he might have been a very nice man. “The kid’s going through a hard time.”

“If he does it again, I’ll have to.” In her heart she knew that wild horses couldn’t force her to turn that child over to the police after the glimpse he’d given her into his life. It had been all she could do not to beg him to take the clock with him when he ran off.

“If he does it again, I’ll personally tan his backside until he can’t sit for a week,” Johnny said. “That’ll make more impression on him than calling the police, believe me.”

“I don’t believe in spanking children.”

He smiled at her. The smoky eyes were suddenly very blue, and their vividness dazzled her. Looking into them for a moment left her feeling as dazed as if she’d stared too long at the sun. “You’ve got a soft heart, teacher. I knew you wouldn’t call the police. Just like I knew, when I asked you for a job, that you wouldn’t be able to turn me down.”

“Why did you want to come back here, anyway?” The question had been troubling her for the past two days, after the grateful penitent she had imagined herself aiding had never arrived. Instead, the real-life Johnny Harris who had stepped off that bus was as insufferable as ever he’d been as a trouble-making adolescent. His presence had stirred up a hornet’s nest of resentment in town, as he must have known it would, and it had turned her life on end. Clearly he had not, as she had supposed, come back to try to make his peace with the community. It seemed more as if he had come back to declare war on it.

His eyes narrowed, and some of the brightness left them. “Because this is my hometown, and I’ll be damned if people are going to run me out of it until I’m good and ready to leave.”

“If you would just …”

“Just what?” A mocking note entered his voice as hers trailed off. Rachel blinked unhappily at him, unable after the recent debacle over his table manners to find the words to tell him that if he would just change his attitude, the townspeople might change theirs.

But it seemed as if he read her thoughts pretty accurately without her having to say a word. His face hardened as he looked down at her. The gentleness was long gone from his eyes. What Rachel was coming to think of as his mask had slipped once again into place. It made her wary.

Without warning, he reached out to grasp her arm, sliding his eyes boldly over her as he turned her for his inspection before she even thought to resist. “I like that dress on you, by the way. It does great things for your ass.”

Rachel jerked away, bright color rising into her cheeks, but before she could annihilate him as he deserved, the sound of heavy footsteps outside the door warned her of someone’s approach.

It was Rob. Struggling for composure, she managed a smile at him as he entered. Apparently, judging from his sudden frown, her smile left something to be desired.

“Are you okay, Rachel?” he said, his eyes moving from her face to fasten on Johnny with dislike.

“You got here in the nick of time,” Johnny said, grinning insolently at him. “I was just about to start ripping off her clothes.”

“Why, you—” Rob bristled with hostility.

“Of course I’m okay.” Rachel quickly laid a restraining hand on Rob’s arm as she cast Johnny a glare that should have scourged him. Annoyance at Rob’s assumption that just being alone with Johnny put her at risk, combined with aggravation at Johnny’s behavior, made her voice sharp. “Johnny is teasing. Aren’t you?” The faint emphasis she put on the question said that he had better answer in the affirmative if he knew what was good for him.

“Oh, absolutely.” But the very way he said it was provocative.
Rachel frowned fiercely at him. Why must he go out of his way to make people dislike him?

“Are you ready? We’ll be late for the concert.” Rob’s words were abrupt as he took her hand from where it rested on his arm and entwined his fingers with hers.

Rachel hesitated, glancing from one man to the other. Animosity crackled in the air between them, and clearly such courtesies as reintroducing them would be unwelcome to both. There was such a contrast between them that they would probably have disliked each other on sight, even if neither knew a single thing about the other. Divorced three years before, Rob was forty, well educated, sophisticated in his expensive gray suit and maroon silk tie. His medium height and slight stockiness added to, rather than detracted from, his air of solid, upper-middle-class respectability. His light brown hair was cut short and impeccably styled, and he made no effort to hide the bald spot that was growing at the back of his head. If he was not as handsome as the younger man, or as dangerously appealing, he certainly had more long-term potential. And that, of course, was what mattered to a woman of sense.

“I’m ready,” Rachel said, returning the slight pressure of his fingers. “But I need to talk to Johnny for just a minute before I leave. Would you mind very much waiting for me in the store?”

Rob looked down at her with a frown that said he would mind very much indeed. She smiled coaxingly at him.

“Please? It will only take a second, I promise.”

He didn’t return her smile. Instead, his eyes shot to Johnny in a clear warning.

“I’ll wait in the storeroom,” he said, with the obvious if unspoken implication that he would be within calling distance if she should need him. Rachel sighed inwardly as he released her hand and walked out the door. Getting respectable Tylerville to regard Johnny with anything but extreme suspicion was an uphill fight.

“I didn’t know you had it in you to be so sweetly feminine,
teacher.” Johnny was smiling, but the jut to his jaw spoke of anything but good humor. “ ‘Please,’ she says, batting those big eyes, and he just melts. Do you sleep with him?”

“One day,” Rachel said with precision, “someone is going to shut you up by burying his fist in your smart mouth. I just wish I could be the one to do it.”

“Answer the question: Do you?” The smile had faded.

“That’s none of your darned business. And if you don’t do your best to get along with Ben, I am going to fire you, and without a job they’ll cart you straight back to prison. So how do you like them apples, tough guy?”

Johnny’s lip curled at her. “Never make threats you don’t mean to carry out. You could no more fire me than you could call the police on that boy.”

“Don’t count on it.” Thoroughly ruffled, Rachel turned her back on the source of her annoyance and started for the door. She could feel his gaze on her, and the notion that he was watching her made her suddenly self-conscious. On her teetering heels, she could not help but sway.

Just as she reached the door, he made an odd sound that caused her to glance back at him, startled.

“Rachel,” he said in what was scarcely more than a husky whisper, while his eyes drilled into hers, “don’t sleep with him. Sleep with me instead.”

Her breath caught for a moment as the words coiled around her like a seductive snake. Only by forcing herself to keep walking was she able to escape.

10

T
he concert, held under a huge tent by the small lake that bisected the club grounds, was a success. Or so Rachel was later told. So busy was she with her thoughts that she heard scarcely a note of it.

The unwanted heat engendered in her by Johnny’s words had largely dissipated by the time the well-dressed patrons filed out of their three-hundred-dollar seats. To Mozart and Chopin, her wayward imagination had conjured up sweaty images of what it would be like to sleep with Johnny Harris. It had taken considerable mental effort to banish the shamefully explicit acts that, through no conscious effort on her part, were played out on the screen of her mind. The sudden sexual awareness that had made her breasts swell and her loins quicken was even harder to get rid of. She had managed it to the extent that her body was now only slightly achey, but only by clear-sightedly focusing on things as they were and not as she wished them to be. Johnny Harris as a bed partner was out of the question, however sexy she found him. She had never been promiscuous, and she would never sleep with a man, no matter how temptingly attractive, just to scratch a bodily itch. At her age, with the example of her sister’s three girls to lure her, when she thought of a man she
should be thinking marriage and babies. Johnny Harris’s potential in that area was effectively zilch.

Though she was as convinced as it was humanly possible to be that he had not committed the crime for which he had been sent to prison, the fact remained that he was a convict, as her mother had pointed out. The stigma of that could never be erased. Nor could the town’s conviction that he was guilty. Only the revelation of the identity of the real murderer could change that, and Rachel acknowledged that such a denouement was extremely unlikely. After Johnny had been arrested, she had spent much time mentally constructing alternative scenarios to explain Marybeth Edwards’s death, with all possible suspects in the lead role of murderer. The fact was, she couldn’t imagine anyone she knew committing so dreadful a crime, and each villain she came up with was more improbable than the last. Her preferred theory was that the girl had fallen victim to a killer who happened to be passing through. A serial killer, a nut, someone who preyed on young girls.

But in sleepy Tylerville, that seemed pretty far-fetched, too.

When she replied to his letter, she had been responding to the Johnny Harris she remembered. Her student, one of the few who had responded to books and poetry as she did, no matter how he tried to hide it. Reading of any kind was not macho, and reading poetry was downright sissy. As a teenager such proclivities had embarrassed him to the point that he’d hidden his addiction to the printed page like a secret vice. But sometimes, when she’d come upon him away from his unruly friends, she’d been able to coax him into talking of books and poetry, and from there their conversations had wandered down all manner of paths. Personalities, politics, religion—they had discussed them all. As he had talked, Johnny had grown animated, revealing a side of himself that she thought few others had ever seen.

Something in him had drawn her even then, a glimmer
of unusual intelligence and sensitivity that shone like a flickering candle through the mask of sneering toughness that was his everyday wear. Johnny Harris, she had been convinced, was worth exerting herself for. At the time, she had hoped to save him from the life he seemed locked into by birth and grinding poverty. Later, she had wished she could save him from a fate that was far worse.

But wishes did not always, or even very often, come true. His wildness, for which she had reprimanded him more than once in those long-ago days, had been as much a factor in his conviction as had any hard evidence, because there’d been very little of that. The most damning piece was that he had been the last person to admit to seeing Marybeth Edwards alive. Against her parents’ wishes, the girl had sneaked out to meet him that night. He had admitted it, had even admitted to making love with her in the back seat of her father’s Lincoln, which was parked in the driveway. Johnny claimed she had gone in around two
A.M
., and he had watched her walk toward her back door. He had not seen her enter; instead, he had climbed onto his motorcycle and ridden away.