One Track Mind (3 page)

When Kane left the office, she made herself look carefully at the contract, which seemed to contain the best of all possible offers. But her temples pounded, and her lungs burned as if she’d run a long and grueling way.

When Kane had first appeared, it was as if he’d forced most of the oxygen out of the room and now it came seeping back. Slowly her breathing became almost normal again.

But she still didn’t feel normal. Her heart beat too hard, her stomach fluttered in a way she’d forgotten it could flutter. She felt as if she’d opened more than a physical door when she’d answered Kane’s knock.

She’d opened a door that seemed almost supernatural in its power. There, beyond it, was a lost world, the past, as clear and vibrant and vital as if it were happening for the first time.

S
HE REMEMBERED
that first time, that summer day when she’d been sixteen…She and her parents and older brother lived
in the big, beautiful house on McCorkle Avenue. Her father, Andrew Jackson Simmons, was one of the most influential men in town, his speedway one of the most prosperous businesses.

The Victorian house in Queen Anne style had an elaborate porch and small second-story balcony with a delicate spindle-work frieze extending round it. There was a similar balcony in the back, between Lori’s bedroom and that of her brother. A.J.

The lawn was slightly more than two acres and meticulously landscaped, with Lori’s mother’s prize rose garden near the patio, and beyond the roses, flowering shrubs and an octagonal swimming pool.

It was summer vacation, a warm but mildly breezy Saturday, and the rest of Lori’s family had gone to the speedway to watch a qualifying race. Lori had opted to stay home and read by the pool.

She loved being outdoors, but with her red hair, she never tanned, only burned or added to her freckles, so she sat in a lounge chair under a big green-and-white striped umbrella. She wore a modest two-piece green bathing suit that she hated, but it was the closest that her mother was going to let her get to a bikini.

She had a gauzy white cover-up she wore unbuttoned and white flip-flops for padding to the pool for her very short dips to cool off. Her hair was heaped atop her head to keep it from getting wet, but the breeze had loosened long tendrils that danced on her cheeks and the nape of her neck and played games with her oversized sunglasses.

But Lori sat, happy to be alone at home as only a sixteen-year-old could be, and feeling
quite
grown-up. And she was reading a quite grown-up book, one her parents probably wouldn’t want her to read. She’d secretly borrowed it from her Aunt Aileen’s private library. If Aileen noticed frequently that books would disappear then reappear from her shelves, she never mentioned it.

Lori was paging solemnly through the book, when the
back gate opened. She barely looked up. Her mother had told her that old Mr. Merkle, the man who owned the lawn service, would be over to tend the rose garden sometime this afternoon. So Lori paid him no attention, for Mr. Merkle liked plants better than people and never talked if he could help it.

Except, from the corner of her eye, she noticed the figure heading toward the garden shed moved too fast to be Mr. Merkle. She stole a furtive look over the top of her sunglasses and was unpleasantly surprised to see
that
boy.

She knew little about him except that he went to her high school and he didn’t fit in. He was one year ahead of her and had seemed to appear out of nowhere at the beginning of the spring semester.

Her friend Shana said he was poor white trash, that he came from a broken home and his mother was a barmaid, and “was no better than she ought to be,” whatever that meant. Worse, his father was in prison for fraud. The boy’s name was Kane Ledger.

Lori had secretly thought he was very handsome, and she suspected she wasn’t the only girl who did. But he had none of the things that most people in school had—no nice clothes, no stylish haircut, no car, no decent house or respectable family and apparently not even lunch money.

He could’ve eaten the government-assisted free lunch with the other poor kids, but he didn’t. He sat alone in the lunch room, his nose in a library book. He looked like a hoodlum, and he never smiled or acted friendly. When he walked through the halls, he radiated a fierce solitude. It was as if he were the only real person in a teeming hoard of ghosts.

Lori thought he was strange and probably no good. As her mother would say, he wasn’t one of “their kind.” That meant many things, including that he’d be lazy, slipshod and undependable.

But he went straight to work, got the wheelbarrow and pruning shears and lopping shears out of the garden shed, leaned the leaf rake next to its door and then set out to work with an energy it was hard to ignore.

He certainly didn’t move like Mr. Merkle, who plodded through the plants like an elderly tortoise, slowly going snip, snip, snip. No, Kane Ledger moved with speed and strength, so much that Lori suspected he didn’t really know what he was doing.

She decided she should watch him carefully, because if he ruined her mother’s roses, there’d be hell to pay. Lori knew something about pruning because people couldn’t live in the same house with Kitty Simmons and not know more about roses than they ever wanted to.

She narrowed her eyes to focus on him harder. She was almost disappointed that he
did
seem to know what he was doing. Was he Mr. Merkle’s apprentice or trainee or something?

Well, it was good he was learning a trade. Shana had said she’d seen him digging ditches with some workmen along the highway during spring vacation. If he applied himself, he could be a gardener instead of a common laborer.

The sun beat down harder. His dark hair was long and hung nearly to his shoulders. He took off his garden gloves, reached up and tied his hair back neatly with one of its own strands. It was a strange, efficient movement, and made him look rather like a young Native American brave.

She was growing hot and wanted to go into the pool, but she wasn’t sure she should take off her cover-up. Her mother had let her have the two-piece bathing suit on the promise she wore it only at the family pool and that she didn’t “parade around” in front of members of the male sex.

This particular male, however, hadn’t so much as glanced in her direction. It was as if she were so unremarkable that he didn’t realize she was there. But as the sun blazed down more hotly, he stopped, stripped off his damp white T-shirt, and she certainly became more aware of
him.

He was almost too lean, but his shoulders were surprisingly wide. He was totally snake-hipped, and his bare torso was all muscle, no fat. He was tanned, so tanned that she felt disgustingly pale.

But she noted all this almost subconsciously because what struck her most about his bare skin was that he had
tattoos.
They covered his upper arms, his shoulder blades, and when he turned in her direction, she saw he had some kind of small tattoo above each of his nipples.

She ducked her head, embarrassed, but fascinated, too. No respectable boy at Halesboro High had tattoos, but he had half a dozen or more. What kind of person was he?

Not a person she should give a second thought, she decided, especially since he gave none to her. She stood up, put on her flip-flops, laid down her book and sunglasses, and slipped off her cover-up. She flip-flopped to the pool with as much dignity as possible, kicked off her footwear, and climbed down the ladder into the water.

She secretly watched to see if he saw her, but he wasn’t looking at anything but roses, roses and more roses. She swam for about five minutes, until she could feel the burn of the sun on her tender skin, then climbed out again, dripping. She went back to the lounge, and for all he noticed, she might as well be invisible.

She patted herself as dry as possible, taking her time. She put her gauze shirt back on, but didn’t button it. She tried to smooth her hair a bit.

He threw a batch of canes and twigs into the wheelbarrow. She jammed on her sunglasses and sat on the lounger again, determined not to look at him, either.

But she did. He had an uncanny smoothness in his movements, and he radiated a quiet intensity. He was a man in his own world. So she tried to be in
her
own world and concentrate on her book. She almost succeeded.

The shadows lengthened, although dusk was still far off. Kane Ledger did so much work in so much less time than Mr. Merkle that she almost wanted him to slow down. After all, he was probably being paid by the hour and needed the money. It must be awful to be poor. His jeans were faded and raggy, but not at all in a fashionable way.

He saved the hardest chore for last, tending the big wooden trellis loaded with the Don Juan roses. A windstorm last week had made the trellis tilt unpleasantly to the left, and the climbing vines covered it so thickly they were pulling it over further.

Really, she thought rather disapprovingly, this didn’t seem like a job for just one man, even one as agile as Kane Ledger. But his tan, his long, tied-back hair and tattoos gave him a look of primitive strength, so she trusted that he could probably handle a couple of overgrown rose plants.

He trimmed the red roses so the mulch around him was littered with green leaves and withering petals. But just as he was straining to heave the trellis upright again, something in it snapped loudly. He tried to wrestle it back into place, but she could see it was useless, it was bearing down on him, and he couldn’t stop it.

It fell halfway over, and he went down to his knees, still fighting to hold it in place. But it had fallen as far as it could, with only the vines themselves managing to hold it up. Kneeling, he tested it, made sure it would fall no further, then stood up and began to limp toward the shed. He held one hand against his ribs, and blood oozed between his gloved fingers.

Lori, snatching off her sunglasses, sat straight up, horrified. Red scratches, red as the roses themselves, lacerated his arms and torso. Blood ran down the side of his jaw.

She leaped to her feet and dashed toward him. She reached him just as he was opening the shed door.

“What are you doing?” she demanded, trying to keep the door shut. “You’re hurt. Sit down.”

She wasn’t strong enough to stop him. He yanked the door open. “I need stakes and twine to prop up that trellis till it can be fixed,” he said from between his teeth. “Lemme alone. Go ’way. I’ll take care of this.”

She tugged at his arm and felt the slick of his blood beneath her fingers. “You need to take care of
you,
” she insisted furiously. “Stand still. Let me see your side. You’re bleeding like a stuck pig.”

“The stuck pig is busy,” he said, trying to shake her off. “Let go. You’re going to get your shirt dirty.”

She looked down. Scarlet already flecked her cover-up, but she refused to be shaken off.

She hung on tighter. “Come over to the hose, wash those cuts,” she ordered.

He looked down at her. His dark hair had come loose, his face shone with perspiration, and a deep scratch ran along the edge of his mouth, seeping red drops that mixed with the sweat. His eyes were so dark they seemed black, and they flashed in anger. “Let go of me, you little pip-squeak.”

Pip-squeak?
Nobody talked to her like that. Nobody. She yanked at him harder, trying to drag him back from the door.

“Ouch!” he said involuntarily. “That hurts, dammit. You’re pushing a thorn right
into
me.”

She lessened her pressure. “Then stop fighting. Look. The stupid trellis isn’t moving. It’s not going to fall any farther. So get over to the hose and wash off.”

His mouth took on a warning twist, and he brought his face closer to hers. “Just who do you think you are, short stuff?”

She squared her chin. “You work for my father, and you’re bleeding all over his lawn,” she shot back. “And you’ve got blood on his shed door, and if you don’t do what I say, you’ll get more blood on me, and you’ll never work in any yard in this town again.”

“Oh,” he said with an indignant toss of his head, “the princess of the manor has spoken. All right, all right. I’ll wash off. Now leave me alone. And let go.”

Again he tried to jerk away, and again she held fast. His arm was warm to her touch and knotty with muscle.

“Ouch!” he cried again. “You’re pressing on that thorn, for God’s sake. What do you
want?
”

“I want to see you do this right,” she said stubbornly. “Stop being so macho.”

“Stop being so bossy,” he countered, but he allowed her to lead him to the hose coiled up on its holder beside the faucet.

She let go of him and unscrewed the nozzle, then turned on the water. “Come here,” she ordered.

“I can do it myself,” he said contemptuously. “Who are you? Florence Nightingale? Give me that.”

He snatched the hose from her and began to let the water run over his chest. He kept his left hand pressed to his side, and the blood still dripped from under his fingers.

“I’ve studied first aid,” she said. “I’ve got a certificate.” Actually, this was a white lie, because she only had a Girl Scout badge in first aid, but she knew telling him that would only make him sneer. She could already see that he was a master of the sneer.

“Whoopty-do,” he muttered, letting the water run down his arm.

“Let me see your side,” she commanded, trying to pry his hand loose.

“Quit!” He smacked at her fingers, but lightly, as if shooing a butterfly.

She glared up at him as imperiously as she could. “You did this to yourself on my father’s property,” she said. “What if you’ve got internal injuries? A…a severed artery? Or get blood poisoning? Or gangrene? Then he’d be liable, and I won’t stand for that. I will not. I demand you show me that cut.”

He rolled his dark eyes in disgust. “Yes, my lady.” He drew away his hand and held it, bloody in the air. “Look. Does it make you happy?”