Passion (17 page)

Feeling a little blue, she turned her attention to the girl. Janie, no doubt. She bore a strong resemblance to both brothers.
Her hair was golden blond, her eyes the same blue as John’s, and she was about five-ten, Teryl estimated, maybe a little taller.
She was built like an athlete—not just slender but muscular, strong. The clearly defined muscles in her legs suggested a serious
runner, one who ran long, hard miles every day, who could set records in both distance and time, one who didn’t simply work
out but who
trained
in every tough, aching sense of the word.

She didn’t have to ask John any questions. Gazing at the photo, upside down from his perspective, he volunteered a little
information about his sister, confirming Teryl’s guess. “She was a world-class runner. When she was seventeen, she was the
fastest woman in the state of California. She used to run five or ten miles a day, sometimes more, then lift
weights, swim, ride her bike. She held all kinds of track records—regional, state, national, world. She was a shoo-in for
the Olympic team. The only way she could not make it was to not show up for the trials.”

“And she didn’t show up for the trials,” Teryl said slowly, “because she was in the car with Tom when he died.”

John nodded.

“But she survived.”

“More or less.”

She continued to look at the picture, but she saw little now, her vision blurring it into a smudge of colors, of shapes and
indistinct faces. She had learned not to ask for details of other people’s tragedies, but if she let this conversation continue,
she was going to learn the cause behind one of John’s greatest sorrows. She was going to ask the wrong question, and he was
going to give the wrong answer, the answer she didn’t want to hear, the answer she knew he would hate giving. She should close
the wallet, give it back and ask about something else—Colorado. The Liberian freighter. Simon Tremont. She should ask about
anything else in the world but this.

Damned if she wasn’t too foolish to take her own advice. Her voice soft and unsteady, she stared at the photo that she held
in both hands and asked what she didn’t want to know. “And you, John? Where were you when Tom died and Janie got hurt? Were
you in the car with them?”

Reaching across the table, he pulled the wallet from her hands, closed and clutched it tightly. With a look as bereaved as
any she’d ever seen, he met her gaze and bluntly, brutally answered, “In the car with them?
I
was driving the damned thing. Tom died because of me. Do you understand?”

She lowered her gaze, made uneasy by the intensity in his eyes, unwilling to witness such grief. She knew too much already
about this stranger; she didn’t want to know this. She didn’t want to face what a terrible burden of guilt he’d been carrying
all these years. She didn’t want to know that if he had, indeed, lost his grip on reality, he’d certainly had a hell of a
good reason for it.

Because she wasn’t looking, when he touched her, she
wasn’t prepared for it. He reached out, lifting her chin, raising her face until she felt compelled to meet his gaze again.
There was a horrible sort of acceptance in his expression, as if nothing he ever did could possibly make this all right. His
family would hate him for it forever—
My mother wishes I were dead. My father wishes I had never been born
—but he would hate himself more. He would punish himself more severely, more mercilessly, than they ever could.

“Do you understand what I’m saying, Teryl?” he asked, his voice quiet and empty of emotion, his fingers gentle against her
skin, almost a caress.

She wanted to pull away, wanted to break the contact with him, to change the subject or get up and walk away, wanted to do
anything that would bring this conversation to an end
now.
But she could do nothing. She couldn’t raise her hand from the tabletop to push his away. She couldn’t make her brain put
together a rational thought. She couldn’t give the commands to her body to move, to slide out of the booth and stand up.

She couldn’t do anything but sit there and listen to damningly bleak words she didn’t want to hear.

He made her hear them anyway.

“
I
killed my brother.”

G
eorgia looked like Alabama, John thought, which looked like Mississippi, which looked much like Louisiana. After only a few
days back in the South, he remembered why he’d left the freighter in New Orleans and settled in Colorado to work on the first
book. He had come to hate the heat and the humidity, had despised the steaminess of summer and the sameness of winter. He
had grown tired of the Southern landscape, the oaks and magnolias, the azaleas and the Spanish moss, and especially the pine
trees and the kudzu that crept over everything. He had loathed the lushness made possible by the temperate climate, had found
it suffocatingly close, an overwhelming reminder of a South American jungle he had once traveled through. He had craved space,
had needed a place where nature wasn’t so rich and ripe and threatening to overrun.

He had thought he could find peace in the mountains. After all, many of the best times in his life had taken place in the
mountains that ranged through California.

But so had the worst time in his life.

At least he’d found the space he needed. He had found a life he could live.

But it wasn’t his life anymore.

In the last fifteen miles he had watched in the rearview mirror as the sun set, turning the western sky shades of
lavender and pink that gradually darkened to deep purple. He liked sunsets. He liked sunrises, too. Endings and beginnings.
He hadn’t had enough of them. When Tom had died and Janie had wound up in a wheelchair, so many possibilities had ended. So
many beginnings had been cut off before they’d started.

It was time to stop for the night. He dreaded it—dreaded sharing a room and nothing more with Teryl, dreaded the discomfort
and the awkwardness. Most of all he dreaded a repeat of those miserable minutes with the telephone cord. If only there were
some other way… If only he could trust her…

But there was no other way to get the few minutes of privacy he required, and he couldn’t trust her. If he left her alone
and unbound, she would escape. No matter what he piled in front of the door, she would somehow manage to get out, and without
her, his chances of ever proving anything would drastically decrease.

He wasn’t sure they were very good
with
her.

They were on the outskirts of Atlanta, traveling a wide thoroughfare bordered on both sides with gas stations, fast food,
convenience stores, and an abundance of cheap motels. On his occasional trips into Denver, he usually stayed at the nicest
place in the city, with valets to park his truck, bellmen to carry his luggage, and a concierge to fulfill his every request.
What a step down the Heart of the South Motel was. They checked in at the office, then went across the street to buy a box
of fried chicken with all the trimmings to take back to the room. This time, since Teryl had the food, he carried both suitcases
inside.

For a moment they both simply stood right inside the door. The outside hadn’t been too promising, he admitted as he gazed
around, but this room was, if possible, even smaller, uglier, and drabber than the one last night in Mississippi. The walls
were paneled in dark brown, the carpet was threadbare, and one of the two mattresses sagged into a clearly visible crater.
There were only two lights in the entire room, neither exceeding forty watts, and even those dimmed when he
turned on the air conditioner, which ran with a tremendous amount of noise but produced very little cool air.

Teryl sighed and automatically turned toward the bed farthest from the door. He wouldn’t blame her if she complained about
the fact that her sandals stuck just a little to the damned carpet or about the heat that the air conditioner was doing little
to relieve, but she didn’t say a word. She simply sat down on the bed, removed her shoes, drew her feet onto the bed, and
began unpacking their dinner on the nightstand.

As meals went, this one was nothing to brag about. The chicken was greasy; when they wiped their hands, little bits of paper
from the napkins stuck to their fingertips. The mashed potatos were instant and the gravy tasted as if it came from a package,
too, but the cole slaw was good and the biscuits were buttery and just a little bit sweet.

After a while, he broke the silence. “You like legs, huh?”

She glanced down at the napkin in front of her, where the remains of three drumsticks were lined up. “It’s my favorite piece.
Mama used to fry chicken every Sunday for dinner; she would do a whole fryer, plus a couple dozen legs so there would be enough
for all the kids.”

“What do your parents do?”

The look she gave him was on the blank side. “I told you. They raise kids.”

“But doesn’t one of them work?”

Disdain sneaked into her expression and her voice. “You try raising a dozen or more kids who aren’t your own, who have been
mistreated or abandoned or abused since they were babies, and see if that’s not work.”

“I know that’s work,” he said, his patience exaggerated. “I just meant something outside the home—you know, something that
pays a salary and helps support all those kids. Or does foster parenthood pay better than I realized?”

“They get some money from the state to help cover expenses, but it’s not enough. They don’t do it for the money. No one does.”
She made an impatient gesture. “There’s not enough money in the world to make taking in someone like D.J. or Carrie or Rico
worthwhile.”

He assumed Carrie and Rico were two of her adopted or
foster siblings. He focused on the one he was already familiar with. “What’s wrong with D.J.?”

“Nothing.”

But she answered too quickly, and there was too much avoidance in her gaze, to be telling the truth. “Was she mistreated,
abandoned, or abused when she was a kid?”

Ignoring his question, she reached for the box of chicken, sorting through it until she found the fourth and last drumstick,
but once she had it, she merely picked at it—peeling off strips of crispy skin, then long slivers of dark meat. He watched
and waited for her answer while she scooped a spoonful of mashed potatos onto her paper plate, then claimed one of the last
two biscuits from the smaller box.

Finally she looked at him again, her eyes dark, her expression serious, the set of her mouth regretful. “Let’s just say D.J.’s
parents had a strange way of showing their affection and leave it at that, okay?”

For the first time in months longer than he wanted to remember, his writer’s curiosity was piqued. If he spent much time thinking
about it, it wouldn’t be long at all before he’d created an entire background for her friend, a history starting before her
birth and extending through the present and on into the future. He would create evil—people who should have loved her, people
who should have helped her—and balance it with good—people who
did
love her, who
did
help her, although possibly too late—and soon he would have the bare-bones outline of a story. It would be a story of revenge,
he thought. A story that everyone appalled by the horrible things people did to their children could relate to. A story of
a hurting, helpless, innocent child grown into a strong, powerful woman who could make the people who had once hurt her very,
very sorry.

But right now he wasn’t interested in D.J.’s story—not the real-life horrors she had lived through or the fictional background
he could make up for her.

Right now he was interested in Teryl, in learning everything he could about her.

“So neither of your parents has an outside job. How do they manage?”

“My mother has some money.”

“You told me Wednesday that they didn’t,” he reminded her. It had been shortly after she’d finally realized that she’d been
kidnapped, and they had been sitting on the shoulder alongside Interstate 10. I’m not worth anything to you, she had said.
I don’t have any money. My family doesn’t have any money.
She had been scared and pleading.

So had he.
Don’t make me hurt you, Teryl. I need you.

Now he watched her flush and shift uneasily, obviously fearful that she’d just made a major mistake. “Not ready cash,” she
said, studying her food intently. “It’s in a trust. It’s all tied up in taking care of the kids.”

He could tell her that he wasn’t interested in money, not her mother’s or anyone else’s. If she didn’t believe him, he could
even open his suitcase and show her the cash he’d stuffed in a zippered black shaving kit. Last week in Denver, after hearing
the news about Simon Tremont and his new book, after discovering that no mail—other than a few cards from Janie—had been delivered
to his box in the last four months, he had gone to the bank and closed out the two accounts where he kept ready cash. Unsure
of what the problem was and how long it would take to resolve it, he’d taken the money in cash—all $130,000 of it.