One Track Mind (9 page)

When they came to the house where her family had lived, Kane surprised her by not slowing, not taking the sidewalk that led to the front porch. The house stood in the moonlight like a gleaming ghost, but he passed it without mentioning it, not even seeming to notice it.

He knows,
she thought. And he did seem to be heading straight for where she lived now, on the edge of his old neighborhood. In her bones, she felt the presence of her own old home, tall, white, and spacious—and lost to her forever. She supposed she’d always miss it.

She remembered lounging by the pool, not guessing how privileged she’d been. And, of course, she could not help remembering Kane, the hired help, sweating in the garden, his bare chest and back and shoulders gleaming in the sunlight.

Memories came back, unbidden but stronger than ever. How he’d kissed her the first time and how, when she stole out by night to meet him by the carriage house and the brook, he’d take her in those strong arms and kiss her again and again. The tree frogs sang down from the darkness. Everything was perfect—until, spoiled and willful, she’d betrayed him.

Although he was silent as they walked, she wondered if he, too, was thinking back to those days and those nights. Did he relish that they’d traded places? That now she was the poor one, he the one with money and influence?

He turned down another side street without her prompting. Her heart beat faster and her throat tightened.
He knows exactly where I live. He said he’d done his research. Had it included her?

“We passed where Roman lived,” he said. “Did you notice? Do you remember him back when he was actually little?”

“I can remember his mother pushing him in a stroller,” she replied. “This long, skinny toddler with hair like fire. And I
remember when he was in fourth grade, he was already taller than I was—and I was a senior in high school.”

He gave a short, cheerless laugh. “And I was pushing a broom in Charlotte in the daytime. Nights I waited tables at a pizza place.”

He paused at the edge of her yard and looked at her little house. A cloud had covered the moon, and the house’s off-white paint looked drab and gray.

“This is it, right?” he asked, no emotion in his voice. “Where you live now?”

“This is it. Thanks for keeping me company. I’ll be fine now. Good night.”

“I’ll walk you to the door,” he said, and he touched her elbow to show her he wasn’t leaving until he saw that she was safely inside.

The contact, brief and perfunctory as it was, made her oddly giddy, as if she really were sixteen again. And from somewhere, a tree frog started to sing. Lori damned its beady little eyes. It seemed that wherever they went tonight, the old music came back to haunt her.

She speeded her pace, wanting to get inside as fast as possible. But he stayed close to her side, and together they ascended the three concrete steps to the small porch. She already had her keys in hand.

“Well,” she managed to say, thrusting the key into the lock. “Home at last. Thanks again. I’ll see you tomorrow?”

She wouldn’t even mention asking him in; it was a dangerous idea. Besides, her landlady lived across the street and always kept a careful and suspicious eye on Lori.

“No,” Kane said in a low voice. “I have to get back to Charlotte. I’ll have breakfast with Aileen, then leave.”

“Oh,” she said, which was the best substitute for a response she could think of. She wished the tree frog would get severe laryngitis and shut up. But it caroled on, and now another answered it—were these mating calls?

Don’t even think of it,
she warned herself, and she realized at the same instance that Kane had eased uncomfortably close
to her. His nearness made her skin prickle and set off unwanted tickles in her stomach.

“So it’s not just good night,” he said, almost whispering. “It’s goodbye. But I’ll be in touch. And I’ll see you again before the Cargill-Grosso tests.”

“Oh,” she repeated. “Yes. Well. Fine. Thanks.”

“Thank you,” he said. “I probably won’t be back for the title signing. I’ll appoint a proxy.”

“Oh. Okay…”

Her hand was on the doorknob; she twisted it and the door creaked, opening inward. She started to step inside, eager for escape.

“And Lori?” he said.

“Yes?”

“Don’t worry. I’ll take care of your speedway. I promise you.”

She nodded, feeling helpless.

“Sleep tight,” he said, and stepped backward. Then he turned, and in a blink, it seemed, he was striding back down her walk. He didn’t turn to look at her again.

She slipped inside, turning on the light. She felt both relieved and strangely empty now that he was gone.

He hadn’t tried to kiss her. Thank heaven. Or should she be disappointed? Did he still resent her? Perhaps no longer felt any desire for her and was glad of it? He probably thought she was too provincial, too prickly, and—she had to face it—too old.

She should be glad. Very glad. It made things much simpler and promised a kind of security.

As if to emphasize that security, she locked the door from the inside. She told herself to enjoy the solitude. And the safety. Yes, he was leaving, and she could again tamp down all those unsettling and sensual memories of him.

But even though the door and all the windows were shut, she could still hear, from the lush Carolina night surrounding her, the serenade of the tree frogs courting in the darkness.

“I
GOT BAD NEWS
for you,” Clyde told Lori the next morning. “Replacing that transmission won’t be cheap. The lowest price that Eddie and I could figure is eight hundred dollars.”

Lori pressed her lips together so she wouldn’t swear. But after the closing, she’d have money again.

“I can put it on my credit card, I guess,” she said reluctantly. She’d fought to keep her credit card debt to a minimum. She’d ridden A.J.’s Vespa to the speedway this morning. She had helmet hair and rumpled clothes, but at least she had wheels.

“Fine,” said Clyde. “And Kane’s gone back to Charlotte?”

She nodded, nearly sure of what Clyde would say next. And she was right.

He looked her in the eyes. “It’s gonna be Kane buying this place, isn’t it? And not Devlin.”

“It’s not a done deal yet,” she said evasively.
When I sign over the title it will be a done deal.

“I hope it gets done,” Clyde offered. “Give the old place a fightin’ chance. Devlin gets this property, and Halesboro’s doomed. Kane’s a smart guy. Always was. Sharp as a tack.”

Lori gave a half-hearted nod. Was Kane also a good man? An honest one? A realistic one? The day of the independent speedway was almost over. He might
think
he could revive the track, but could he actually do it?

“Yes,” she admitted. “He was always smart.”

“And a hard worker,” added Clyde. “Even your daddy said that. ‘That kid’s tireless and efficient. Never wastes a move, and he learns quick. He could go far.’ That’s what he said.”

Lori found herself gritting her teeth. Her father had thought that way—once. Until he found out that Kane was secretly seeing Lori. Didn’t Clyde remember how her father’s admiration had turned to disgust?

Or was Clyde slyly reminding her that once Andrew Jackson Simmons had thought Kane was a young man of high promise. And he had, until things suddenly became more personal.

As a worker, Kane was a prize. But as a potential suitor for Lori? That was different. Her father quickly adopted a double standard. Then he saw Kane as an insolent piece of trash.

“I’d better get down to work,” Lori said, cutting the conversation short. “I’ll see you later. I need to have some things moved out of the main office. I’m moving down the hall.”

Clyde looked at her curiously. But she forced a bland smile and left without explanation.

A
T TEN O’CLOCK
, a woman called, saying that she was Kane’s secretary and she had some information for Lori and a list of requests. Her name was Susan Haversham, and she sounded young, sexy and sure of herself.

Madly, Lori scribbled down what the woman told her. The Grosso-Cargill testing would begin next month. The tests would last two days. Dean and Kent Grosso and Kent’s team would attend an open-to-the-public barbecue.

Lori’s job was to arrange for the barbecue, publicize it locally, order posters for the teams to autograph, as well as contact vendors who’d bring souvenir caps, T-shirts and other merchandise for fans.

The list of Things To Do grew longer, and Lori started to feel overwhelmed. She’d never been part of a project so large. And she still had to start composing a letter to her employees about Kane’s buying the speedway.

Lori knew that rumors were certainly already circulating about the sale and that people who worked at the speedway would be nervous about keeping their jobs. Kane had said that
all of them would get a six-week grace period and a professional evaluation.

“And,” Susan said, “Mr. Ledger’s lawyer will call to give you more details about the closing. It should take place in about thirty days. Mr. Ledger says you’re not using a Realtor?”

I couldn’t afford to,
Lori thought. But her friend Liz had been generous with advice.

“He says you may want to have a lawyer with you at the closing. I’ll send you some information about inspections, fees, deeds, interim interest, PMI, transfer taxes…”

Lori resisted a strong urge to scream or whimper. She wrote even faster and thanked heaven for Liz. Susan of the Sultry Voice might as well be speaking in ancient Greek.

K
ANE’S CONDO
was a penthouse suite atop a forty-story tower in uptown Charlotte. He’d paid a ridiculous amount of money for it, and now he supposed he should sell it. It was worth twice what the speedway was, and it had been an extravagance.

It had been fun to own, but the novelty had quickly worn off. A decorator had recommended a lot of fancy furnishings that weren’t his style. So he kept his old furniture, a motley collection of stuff that was comfortable and that he was used to and that was probably still giving the decorator screaming nightmares.

Now he sat on his rat-gray sofa, drinking beer from a can. He guessed you could take the boy out of the rental house, but you couldn’t take the rental house out of the boy. He liked his small luxuries, but the large ones had come to bore him.

He remembered how disdainfully Lori had looked at his sports car. As if he drove it to show off. Face it: she was right. He’d wanted to roll into town and impress the hell out of everybody. He’d wanted to generate envy. Hey, look everybody, the bad boy made it big time. Much, much better than any of you did.

He’d trade the car down for something less flashy. He liked cars, and he talked about them with the NASCAR people
he knew, Dean and Kent Grosso, Justin Murphy, Sid Cochran, all of them and the guys on their teams. Maybe he’d buy a real stock car, a regular production model.

He thought of Lori, still driving her brother’s car. Kane had no love for A.J., for he’d been a bully and snob. But that Lori would keep the old Mustang touched him. Being touched was a dangerous feeling, and he tried to block it.

He finished the beer, crumpled the can, went to the kitchen and threw it into the recycling bin. And he found himself, on the way back, pulling an old Halesboro High yearbook from his shelves.

He’d picked up the book at a flea market, opened it, and there was Lori’s junior portrait. She was smiling her great smile. Her head was tilted, her chin up, her face lovely.

He was thirty-two years old when he found the book, but his heart had quaked and he felt dizzy, weak in his knees. He should have slammed the thing shut, because he knew what else it contained, but instead, like a fool, he’d bought it. And sometimes, like a really dim-witted fool, he’d open it and look at the pictures of her. Tonight, he couldn’t help doing it again.

He sat on the worn gray sofa and started paging through it: Lori, the prettiest girl in the choir, the most desirable girl in swim club, even though her mother made her wear that super-modest tank suit, the smartest girl in the forensic club, the candid shot of her in study hall, showing her perfect profile as she gazed dreamily out a window.

And the other candid shot that still made him feel sick, her at the spring prom with Scott Garland, who’d been homecoming king. She was in Garland’s arms, looking up at him almost impassively. Garland stared back, his expression adoring and possessive.

That spring, Kane, tired of hiding in the shadows, was starting to wonder if Lori was ashamed of him. He had actually asked her to that dance. They loved each other; why not be open about it? He’d got a suit at the Salvation Army. He’d trimmed his hair shorter. He’d learned to dance from
Irma, a middle-aged waitress at the Piney Woods Café. Everybody on the staff teased him that he must have a girl.

He was acting completely out of character, but he was tired of hiding their relationship. He asked Lori to go. She refused. She said her father wouldn’t let her and that he’d get suspicious. She said her mother would have a fit. And when he asked if she was ashamed of him, she got mad and said she was just being sensible.

He accused her of being too frightened to face her parents’ shock and her friends’ ridicule. She got angrier still and what she said next cut his heart in two as painfully as if she’d wielded a cleaver.

She’d already been invited to the prom by Scott Garland. And she said she’d told Scott yes. Why? Scott’s mother had told her mother that he was asking Lori. Her mother and father and A.J. encouraged her to accept and were suspicious she hadn’t said yes immediately. She couldn’t refuse, she needed to throw her parents off track. She couldn’t go with Kane because…well…she just couldn’t, and he should know that. And besides that, she
wanted
to go to the prom.

His princess had become imperious. She was willful and defensive, insisting she’d done the right thing and that she’d been going to break it to him gently. This was the perfect way to defuse her parents’ concern about her never dating. And she was worried that her brother, A.J., a senior, suspected something.

“At school, you shouldn’t look at me the way you do,” she complained.

“At school,” Kane countered, “you might recognize that I exist. You act like I’m not even there.”

She refused to listen to him. She was used to having her way, and she intended to do as she pleased. They parted in anger.

The next day at school, he slipped a note to her as she passed. She stuck it in her algebra book. A.J. saw, and before she could stop him, Kane watched as he snatched it out and read it.

Kane had written, “I love you, and you love me. Just don’t
go
to the damn dance. Meet me tonight at the carriage house.”

A.J. threw Lori a look of contempt, ripped the note in half and stuffed it in his pocket. Lori looked horrified, knowing he would tell their parents.

Kane didn’t see her the rest of the day. After school, he went to work a five-hour shift washing dishes at the Piney Woods Café. He was taking a short cut up a back alley to get home and change clothes, when he realized a car was following him.

“Hey, Ledger, stop!” He recognized the voice: A.J.’s.

Kane kept walking. “Hey, Ledger. I got the note you slipped my sister. You gonna talk to me, man to man? Or you gonna run off like a chicken?”

Kane knew then that he wasn’t going to run even if A.J. had a baseball bat and intended to crack open his skull. He turned and faced the car. It moved slowly toward him and stopped, only twelve inches away. A.J. got out. And so did two of his football teammates. They beat him half-senseless.

But he remembered the messages they’d delivered with their blows.

“Stay away from my sister, trash boy.”

“Stay away from her, punk.”

“Go back to the gutter where you belong.”

“Go away…”

“Stay away…”

Finally A.J. stood over him and growled, “It’s over between you and her. I had a talk with her. She won’t be seeing you again. And I told my folks. They’ll ground her. Until prom night when she goes out with Scott. I mean it is
so
over for you, scumbag.”

They left him lying in the gravel, his mouth full of blood. He got up and limped home. He’d fought back and hard. He’d landed some good punches, but he couldn’t fight off three. His face was battered, but no teeth broken and only one black eye. His body hurt from being kicked. He cleaned himself up as best he could.

He looked at himself in the mirror and repeated A.J.’s words. “It’s over.”

Maybe Lori was even grateful. Maybe she wanted to rejoin her own kind. Maybe she was destined for somebody like Scott Garland, and always had been. And Kane was nothing but a fool.

But A.J. was right. It
was
over. Until he’d fallen for Lori, he couldn’t wait to leave Halesboro. Well, there was no time like the present. He was sick of the town, the people, his mother and her drunkenness and her ham-fisted boyfriend. He was going to split, and nobody could stop him.

His mother, Brenda, tried. She screamed at him, his little half-sister, Stacy, cried; the boyfriend hit Stacy, Kane hit the boyfriend, Brenda, hysterical, called the police, and Kane simply left, made his way back to the carriage house, and slept there till morning.

As soon as the bank opened, he got his money out and planned to hitchhike out of town. If nobody gave him a ride, he’d walk to Charlotte.

And that’s what he did, walk to Charlotte, not looking back.

Now he gazed a long time at Lori’s yearbook photo and closed the book. He tried not to think back, just as he hadn’t looked back. But he didn’t have a lot of success.

A
ILEEN HAD INVITED
Lori over for supper. They sat at the table, Lori nervous, certain that Aileen was not going to beat around the bush. She’d quickly bring up the subject of Kane.

She waited only until they sat down at the table. “What a strange day,” Aileen said, filling their wineglasses. “Breakfast with Kane Ledger. Supper with you. He’s really buying the speedway. True?”

“True,” Lori said.

“So he saved your behind, did he?” Aileen was outspoken and thought for herself. Her brother, Lori’s father, always warned Lori not to take after her so much.

“Yes,” Lori admitted. “He saved my tushy. I don’t know why, but why care?”

“Hmmph,” Aileen returned, the hint of sarcasm in her
voice. “But tell me. Does he really think he can turn the speedway around?”

“He seems to.”

Aileen passed her the lasagna. “Well, I suppose if it can be done, he’ll do it. Did I ever tell you he had the highest IQ of any student I ever taught?”

“You’ve told me,” Lori said.
Too often,
she thought.

“I know it was because of you.”

“I know that you know.”

“And that A.J. and two of his friends beat the hell out of him,” Aileen said.

“Yes. A.J. told me. He wanted me to know they hurt him.”

“But I don’t think for a minute that they scared him out of town.”

Lori agreed. Kane would never run out of fear. He’d left because of her. She said, “I was crazy about him. But I treated him like dirt at the end. It was getting harder and harder to hide that we were seeing each other. It was getting harder and harder not to…uh…”

“‘Go all the way’ was the quaint phrase we used in my day.”