Somewhere Between Luck and Trust (7 page)

Chapter Seven

ON MONDAY AFTERNOON
at the Goddess House, rain fell in great silver sheets that washed the porch floor. The rain would have saturated the glider cushions if Cristy hadn’t dragged them inside an hour before when the wind had picked up. A gloomy morning had changed to sullen, and now, in the late afternoon, to hostile. Through the window she could see trees bending under punishing winds. Even though the sun didn’t officially set until sometime after six, there was no sign the sun remembered.

When it had become clear the storm might be significant, she had hunted for candles and flashlights, since losing power seemed like a good possibility. She had found both, plus an oil lantern filled and ready in case of emergencies. A larger problem was what to do with herself.

Even with electricity the day had inched along like molasses in January. Yesterday she had inventoried the cupboards and refrigerator. Samantha had made sure she knew all the food was to be eaten, and there were a variety of canned and packaged foods as well as fresh vegetables and fruits, frozen hamburger and chicken.

Samantha had left cash, as well. While living and working in Berle, Cristy had saved what she could, but every bit of it was gone now, spent for necessities at the prison canteen, along with the extravagant forty cents a day she had earned working in the kitchen. She didn’t want to use Samantha’s money, but she knew she would have to dip into it until she found some way of earning her own. If nothing else, she had to have gas to make trips to see Michael.

Thinking about Michael had the same effect on her spirits as the storm.

She could have gone to see the baby yesterday, as planned. Her son was already four months old, older than Harmony’s Lottie. Berdine had sent photos while she was in prison, but Cristy had only glanced at them, not willing to look closely. What hair he had seemed to be an indeterminate color. His face wasn’t shaped like hers, and his eyes were brown, like the Reverend Roger Haviland’s.

And Jackson’s.

If she waited too long to visit, Michael might be frightened to let her hold him. She knew babies often developed something called
stranger anxiety.
She had paid attention in Samantha’s class, although being there hadn’t been her choice. But she was used to listening, used to paying attention to everything that was said to her and around her. She remembered almost everything she heard, and most of the time she could recite whole conversations verbatim.

Not that having that talent had done her much good on written exams.

She was out of prison now. She had paid her so-called debt to the citizens of the great state of North Carolina, but she was still the loser she had always been, only this time, she was a loser with a baby she was afraid to see.

This morning she had cleaned the house from top to bottom, although there had been little to sweep or wipe away. Then after lunch she’d tried to watch a DVD, but she hadn’t been able to concentrate. Now she tried to nap to soft music from the CD player, but when she found she couldn’t, she leafed through a couple of fashion magazines from a neat pile on an end table. The clothes looked as if they belonged to women from a different planet. After prison’s blues and pale greens, the variety, the colors, were overwhelming, and she was sure the prices were, as well.

In a cabinet in the living room she found a stack of jigsaw puzzles and pulled out what looked like the hardest. She wondered if all the pieces were in the box, then wondered why she cared.

She hoped tomorrow would be sunny. She might not feel comfortable outdoors by herself, but she had to learn to be. She would make herself take a walk, make herself take her car from the barn and park it below the house.

She had to get out. She had to try. But for whom? For what?

Right now a real life seemed as unattainable as a pardon. She had no high school diploma, no skills except floral design, no money except what a kind young woman had given her. She would scour the immediate area for a job, but even if such a thing existed, she was still an ex-con, a felon who had tried to steal a diamond ring. What business would feel confident allowing her to operate a cash register or work on a sales floor?

And so many jobs were beyond her skills, anyway.

She dumped the puzzle on a small table by the living room window and began to turn over the pieces so she could see what she had. Outside the wind howled and the sky grew darker, until lightning briefly illuminated the landscape. She rose to retrieve one of the flashlights, just in case, and to turn off the CD player and unplug it. Then she settled herself again with the flashlight at her fingertips.

She found the straight-edged border pieces and set them around the perimeter, and easily found the four corners, which seemed like a good sign. After she’d hooked half a dozen pieces together, she got up to make some tea, adding just a little milk so the carton in the refrigerator would last longer. Back at the table she glanced outside. She froze when she saw a figure silhouetted against the tree at the base of the path up to the house. She blinked in disbelief and stared harder into the storm, but now she couldn’t make out a thing.

Nobody would be outside in this weather, at least nobody with any working brain cells. She held her breath and waited for the next flash of lightning, but when it finally came, nothing looked out of the ordinary. She told herself she just wasn’t comfortable in the house, that her first days here had taken a toll and she hadn’t yet slept well. She seated herself and began to move puzzle pieces back and forth.

Until somebody banged on the front door.

Her heart thundered, and she leaped to her feet. Frantically she tried to think of something to do. Before she could, the door opened and a figure in black slipped inside.

The door closed behind him, and a familiar male voice cut through the silence. “They didn’t teach you anything in prison? Don’t you know better than to leave a door unlocked when you’re in the middle of nowhere, Baby Duck?”

Cristy didn’t speak. She didn’t even chide herself for forgetting to lock the door after dragging the cushions inside. For once in her life there was no time to remind herself she was worthless. She was too busy figuring out how best to survive this encounter.

“Now, is that any way to greet me?” Jackson Ford stripped off a dark hooded jacket, then he stamped his boot-clad feet, as if to shake off the worst of the rain.

She made herself speak and hoped she could sound as calm as her words. “Isn’t there usually a pause between knocking on a door and trying the doorknob?”

“I figured if you didn’t want a visitor, you would be locked up tight. You have to be careful of the messages you send. Didn’t your mommy and daddy teach you that?”

He stepped out of the doorway and into the glow of a floor lamp. His black hair was slightly longer than she remembered, but not unkempt. Of course that made sense, since Jackson paid close attention to the way he looked. The stubble on his cheeks was carefully trimmed to appear rugged but neat, and he was tan enough to look as though he spent time tramping through the woods or casting flies in a mountain stream. He wasn’t thin, but there wasn’t any useless padding, either. Jackson started every morning with fifty push-ups, and even though he had only lasted one season on an Atlanta Braves farm team, he was still the star pitcher in an amateur baseball league.

He was strong and quick and, if he wanted to, he could hurt and even kill her without breaking a sweat.

“I’d like you to leave,” she said. “The unlocked door was a mistake, not an invitation.”

“Oh, I will. Maybe not right away, but I can take a hint. First tell me how you’re doing? I came all this way through that storm just to find out.”

She didn’t challenge him. She knew how foolish that would be. “How did you find me?”

He laughed a little, almost fondly. “Cristy, come on, I could find you anywhere. Streets of Shanghai, some Aborigine’s cave in the outback. Makes no difference.”

Jackson looked as though he was enjoying himself. She was sure he knew how unstrung she was by his sudden appearance, and she also knew any outward reaction would make him that much happier.

“I’m settling in,” she said.

“Are you planning to move back to Berle eventually? Come back to the old hometown where you were so well liked?”

“I don’t have any plans to move back, no.”

“And the baby? He’s doing all right with your cousin?”

Jackson knew everything, and he was here to make that clear. Where she lived. Where their son lived. Who was taking care of him.

She steeled herself. “He’s doing fine. You met my cousin’s husband. You know Wayne’ll make sure the baby’s got everything he needs.”

“A good choice, I’d say. Considering you had so few, what with you going to prison for all those months. Were you glad it was a boy?”

She shrugged.

“Michael—that’s a good name. You have my vote on that one.”

She took a deep, shaky breath. “You should go, Jackson. The storm’s only going to get worse, and you know how treacherous mountain roads can be.”

“Oh, I’m in no hurry. I’ve been driving roads like these my whole life.”

He moved closer as he spoke. She was glad the table was between them, except that she knew it wouldn’t help if Jackson lunged.

“What do you really want?” She was surprised there was only the faintest tremor in her voice. “You know if you try anything, you’ll be the first person they suspect. Everybody knows our history. Even
you
can’t cover up everything you do like it never happened.”

He stopped at the table’s edge. “I don’t know why you’d say something like that. Me? I’m an open book. It still hurts that you tried to frame me for stealing that ring. You got caught with it, and what did you do? You blamed it on the man who’d been thinking about buying it for you. Did you have time to think about
that
while you were in prison? Did you wonder if I would have stood by you if you hadn’t told those cops who grabbed you in the parking lot that I was the one who dropped the ring in your shopping bag?”

The scene hadn’t happened that way. At first Cristy hadn’t even considered that Jackson had put the ring in her bag. She’d been sure it was an accident, that someone had unknowingly brushed it off the counter, and it had fallen into the shopping bag filled with socks and dish towels from the Dollar General. Then, when that had seemed like too much of a stretch, she’d blamed the incident on the sales clerk, who must have hidden the ring there for some dark reason of his own. Later, though, with nothing but time to face everything that had happened, she had realized how hard that would have been for the clerk, how nearly impossible from his side of the wide display case.

Only then, sometime later in her first full day in jail, had she finally faced the truth. And only after a sleepless night had she realized that she had to
tell
the truth to everybody who would listen.

Jackson had never intended to marry her, even though he’d known she was carrying his child—something she had tearfully told him the previous morning. He had taken her to the jewelry store to look at rings, and then he had used her enthusiasm against her. While she had been trying on one ring, he had swept another off the counter, then easily slipped it into the bag she carried, since he was standing right beside her. He had wanted his pregnant girlfriend out of his life.

And now, months later, she finally understood
all
the terrible reasons why.

Her hand closed over the flashlight she’d set beside her. As a weapon it was probably useless, but the barrel was something to grip and steady her.

“There’s nobody here to hear this conversation except us,” she said. “We both know what happened. But it’s over. I’ve paid the price and it’s behind me.”

“It just confounds me, that’s all. After everything we were to each other, that you could do something like that...” He shook his head slowly. “And now I have to ask myself how I could make so many big mistakes choosing my friends. You, Kenny...” He shook his head again, as if he really couldn’t believe he had ever been such a fool.

Cristy knew better than to respond, but her hands began to shake. That he would use Kenny Glover’s name so calmly, as if it meant nothing that his best friend since childhood was about to stand trial for the murder of another of Jackson’s closest friends. Kenny, a sweet, goofy country boy who’d been known to miss a clear shot at a five-point buck just because the deer looked him in the eye.

Kenny, the man who would have given his right hand without flinching if Jackson had ever said he needed it.

“Please go,” she said.

“I just want to understand, that’s all. How I could have been so wrong. How you could have tried to destroy my name in my own hometown. How you could have thought you might get away with it.”

“That’s the hardest part for me to understand, too,” she said. “I really should have known nobody would listen.”

“But you went ahead and said those things anyway. And now sometimes I think people look at me different, you understand? Like they’ve lost a little respect. Of course maybe that’s just because they know you and I had a little fling before you got thrown in jail. And that lessens me in their eyes, because they know I made such a bad choice.”

“A little fling?”

“I never promised you anything, did I? You call it whatever you want to, Baby Duck.”

“How about a stupid mistake?”

Jackson’s brown eyes narrowed a little. She’d known women at NCCIW who had that same ability to mask their feelings, women with curiously unlined faces because they were so often expressionless. Jackson always looked pleasant, happy, even engaged. But now she saw what she hadn’t been able to see when she was so hopelessly in love with him. Jackson couldn’t show feelings he didn’t have. He could look sad, even contrite, if necessary. But on those occasions he was simply an actor demonstrating emotions for his audience.

He
did
feel rage, though. She’d seen that more than once and knew that rage, at least, was real for him when someone dared to cross him. A cold, thoughtful rage that was the most frightening kind of all.