The Man She Once Knew (2 page)

Callie stooped and started to pick up the Bible but faltered, her fingers instead drifting over the cracked leather binding, the gold cross worn nearly transparent.

Then she spotted the grocery list begun but not finished in that familiar spidery handwriting. She felt an urge to give way to grief she hadn’t expected to feel for an old lady she hadn’t seen since she left Oak Hollow.

Darkness encroached in this place of haunted memories, chipping away at Callie’s carefully built defenses.

She leaped up so suddenly she stumbled. Quickly she
righted herself and charged through the house, flipping on the lights in every room.

Hoping to chase away the ghosts that still lurked.

O
N HIS WAY TO WORK
in his mother’s ancient sedan, David took a detour. How many nights had he driven past the little house after Callie had left.

He turned the corner and saw light blazing from all the windows in a profligate display Miss Margaret would never have indulged—

No. She could not be staying.

Go away, Callie.
He’d seen at the chapel that she hadn’t known about him, but she would by now. Someone, probably lots of someones, would eagerly spill all the gruesome details to her.

He’d borne a lot, would have to bear more until his mother was gone and he was free at last. But seeing Callie, having her look at him the way everyone else did—

That, after all he’d survived, might finally break him.

Please, Callie. Go away and let me be.

M
ORNING’S LIGHT BANISHED
the night’s foolishness. Callie went about her preparations to leave, careful not to focus on any more details of this place in which she’d spent seven life-altering months. Other than the severely cut black suit she’d worn to the funeral, she had only the slacks and blouse she’d traveled in. Last night she’d washed out her lingerie and spread it out to dry on a towel bar while hanging up her suit in the closet of the room that was once hers.

She’d had no sleepwear either, and bare skin in Miss Margaret’s house felt like a serious breach of manners. She couldn’t bring herself to don anything as personal as one of the worn, soft nightgowns bearing the scent that was uniquely Miss Margaret’s, however. Callie had compromised on a light robe and had dropped off to sleep early, surprising herself.

Now she combed through the cabinets looking for coffee she knew she wouldn’t find. With a pang for the giant red-eye coffee—strong regular coffee spiked with espresso—she normally grabbed on her way to work in Philly, Callie had to settle for Miss Margaret’s beloved
Earl Grey. No tea bags were tolerated in this house, so Callie found herself preparing tea Miss Margaret’s way. There was something surprisingly soothing about engaging in the ritual she’d seen performed so often.

Miss Margaret didn’t hold with mugs; a proper china cup was a must. When Callie opened the cabinet door, still painted cream and hinged with the hammered copper dating from the fifties, she spied the familiar china with its moss rose pattern, and for a second, Miss Margaret was all too real again. Callie ignored the tug, poured herself a cup, then carried it outside.

How many mornings had she awakened to find Miss Margaret in her garden wearing the old-fashioned sunbonnet made by Miss Margaret’s mother from flour sacks? How many conversations had they conducted there, the older woman’s hands never idle while Callie fumbled to identify vegetable from weed?

She shook her head in amazement that at her age, her great-aunt had still planted, still managed to weed and water.
Gardening is life
, she’d say to Callie.
You learn everything you really need to know about the world right here.

Who would wind up with this place? Who would care for it, love it and baby it as Miss Margaret had?

Callie bent to pluck one weed from the row of—Her brow furrowed. What were these plants? She rose abruptly. What did any of it matter? She would be gone this afternoon at the latest.

Oh, crap. Her stilettos were getting wet in the dew. Wouldn’t her coworkers howl if they could see her
beloved Manolos damp—wait. Was that dirt on the toes? She quickened her stride, lifting her foot high as she sought to spare the one indulgence in a sober wardrobe bought to ensure that, at only thirty, she was taken seriously in her position.

The reminder was a good one. She did not belong here, and it was no business of hers what happened with anyone or anything in Oak Hollow. Her life was elsewhere. She’d fought to make it so.

Thus resolved, she went inside, washed her cup and did a quick, impersonal check of the premises to be sure everything was squared away. Then, with a moment’s hesitation over leaving the door unlocked, she got into her car and started it. In less than five minutes, she was parking across the street and down a bit from Albert Manning’s law office. She walked swiftly, preoccupied with thoughts of what she would do first when she got back to Philly.

As she passed the post office, the door swung wide, and she nearly smacked right into it. A quick dodge to the side, and she tripped over a crack in the sidewalk.

A hand grabbed her arm and steadied her.

She lifted her head. “Excuse—” Every last thought vanished as she stared into a face she had once known intimately.

“David,” she finally managed, her arm still tingling where he’d touched her, even through the fabric of her jacket. Whatever she might have meant to say dried up at the sight of him.

He only stared down at her, his face a mask.

He was big, so tall. She wasn’t the tiny girl he’d known—she’d grown three and a half inches after she’d left here, five seven now. With her stilettos, she was an inch or so shy of six feet.

But he’d grown, too—six four, six five now at a guess—but it wasn’t his height or even the layers of muscle that made the biggest impression on her.

It was his eyes. Once they had been mossy-green and soft, had spoken volumes to her, whether of love or heat or amusement. Patience had often lingered there, as well, far beyond what anyone would expect from someone so young.

When Callie had been exiled to Oak Hollow by a mother who wanted freedom to play with her latest sleazy boyfriend, she hadn’t tried to hide her contempt for the hick ways of the locals. In return, she’d been ridiculed by the kids for her Goth attire and disliked by adults for her bad attitude. She’d pretended she didn’t care, but David had found her in the woods one day, crying her eyes out. A compassionate soul, he’d talked to her and begun coming around, even though the other kids gave him a hard time.

She could accept all the changes she now saw in his frame, the new angles to his face, even the lines time and misery had carved into it.

But his eyes were a stranger’s, hard and blank. Flat as though he and she had never met. As if they were nothing to each other.

Then astonishingly, he stepped around her without a word.

“David—” She reached out to stop him.

He shrugged her off and kept moving.

Callie turned and stared at his back. He’d once been so kind to her, so gentle. They’d shared something profound, yet he was pretending not to know her? Fury rode to the rescue. How dare he? She hadn’t asked him to show up yesterday and set tongues wagging. She’d tried not to think of him last night, but he’d been one of the specters haunting her dreams. Now he disappeared from sight without a single glance back, as though she had no meaning to him.

Nothing could have put her back up quicker. She’d been judged wanting for too much of her life, and she had spent years of painstaking effort making sure she excelled, that no one could ever find her lacking again.

She stared in the direction he’d gone.
Fine. We’re done. Good riddance
.

One hour. She would give the attorney one hour for whatever he needed to say.

Then Oak Hollow and all it had meant to her was over and done with.

K
EEP WALKING
. Get the hell out, get away from her before it’s too late.
David’s long strides ate up the ground, the day’s promising beauty lost on him as he barely kept himself from breaking into a run.

While her touch, that too-brief clasp, burned his skin like a brand.

When he was completely out of sight, he looked around to note that he’d wound up outside the fence of
Mickey Patton’s welding shop, a junkyard of discarded pieces of farm equipment and rusted cars and trucks. Frantic barks pierced the air as the pit bulls Mickey kept for security lunged at the fence as though David were meat and they hadn’t eaten in weeks. The pipe fence posts sang as they slammed into them, teeth bared, mouths foaming.

“Killer, Cutter—shut the hell up!” Patton emerged, face screwed up in displeasure.

Then he caught sight of David. “What are you doing here? Get your ass gone before I call Sheriff Carver on you and have you locked up again. You should be in there for life, you worthless son of a bitch.”

David was no scared boy now, and though Patton was pure mean, David had faced down men in prison who made Patton look like a first-grader. He knew he could take the man in a fair fight, but Patton would never put himself in that situation. No, he made sure that his taunts were the most vicious only when the bar was crowded, when there were plenty of witnesses, everyone aware that David was on parole and didn’t dare touch him.

His fingers formed a tight, hard fist as he battled the urge to give back some of what he’d been forced to take. He wanted to hurt this bully, wanted to take back his dignity, to stand tall and not back down to anyone ever again. He’d swallowed a bellyful of humiliation and shame, and some days his insides were stained black with self-loathing.

At those moments even thoughts of his mother, so
fragile and needy, were barely enough to pull him back from the edge. He forced himself to go when every fiber of him craved to stay. To avenge.

“That’s right, you candy-ass coward—run. Run like the spineless murderer you are,” shouted Patton.

Each word was a spike driven into his brain, a lash on his back, a barb worming its way into what remained of his self-respect.

When Patton began laughing, David truly understood what it was to hate.

He just wasn’t sure who he despised more, Patton or himself.

A
SMALL, NEAT WOMAN SMILED
as Callie entered Albert Manning’s reception area, formerly the living room, she imagined, of the frame house this building had been. The furnishings were slightly shabby, but the space carried an air of welcome she appreciated right now after the bruising encounter with David.

She felt strangely vulnerable, robbed of the dream that out there somewhere in the world was a decent, honorable teen grown into an even better man.

That couldn’t matter; she was strong on her own. She didn’t need anyone. She had made herself.

Finally the sweet-faced little woman looked up. “Mr. Manning can see you now.” She rose and escorted Callie through the door behind her desk.

“Good morning.” The older man crossed to her. “I hope you slept well.” He gestured her to a chair. “Would you care for anything? Coffee? Tea?”

“No.” She had to force herself to slow down, to return the courtesy. “But thank you. It was nice of you to provide food at Miss Margaret’s. I’m afraid I didn’t do justice to it.”

“My wife will be sorry to hear that. She enjoys feeding people. Perhaps you could join us for dinner tonight instead.”

“I’ll be halfway to Philadelphia by dinnertime.”

He studied her as if measuring her, clearly disappointed by what he found. “I suppose you’d like to get on with it, then.”

“I would.”

“Very well.” He opened the folder in front of him. Scoured his desk for something, then felt the top of his head where reading glasses perched. He put them on, then spent time picking up pages, thumbing through them, setting them back down so slowly Callie thought she might scream.

Then he sighed. “Miss Margaret was not generally a sentimental woman, with a few exceptions. One of those—” he looked at her over the top of his glasses “—was you.”

“Me?”

“My conversations with her, in drawing up this will as well as knowing her over the years, led me to believe that she considered you to be a great failure on her part.” At Callie’s quiet gasp, he shook his head. “I do not mean you were the failure, but rather that she considered herself to have failed you.” He paused to clean his glasses on the end of his tie. “I apologize, Ms. Hunter.
Miss Margaret was an old and dear friend of mine, and something more in our youth. I confess to having a difficult time dealing with her loss.”

Callie realized that his eyes were slightly reddened, and couldn’t help being touched. She’d always wondered why Miss Margaret never married, and it was on the tip of her tongue to ask, except that this nice gentleman was already distressed. So she merely nodded in sympathy. “She was a special lady. But why on earth would she think she’d failed me?”

“She told me once that you reminded her of herself.”

Callie blinked. “I can’t begin to imagine how. Or why. Surely Miss Margaret was never a rebel.” She tried to imagine the sweet older woman in Goth black and chains, spike-tipped hair. Though there had been those earrings…Callie found herself grinning.

“You have a lovely smile,” he said, returning it. “Actually, you’d be wrong about that. Miss Margaret was very forward thinking for her time. If she’d been born twenty-five years later, she’d have been burning her brassiere with the rest of the feminists.”

For some reason, the word
brassiere
, so old-fashioned, was surprisingly embarrassing to hear from a man who could be her grandfather. “Really?” She thought back to some of Miss Margaret’s conversations and realized that she’d only looked at the older woman through the eyes of someone who’d been certain anyone over twenty-five was ancient. “Now that you mention it, she was her own woman, wasn’t she?”

“Very much so. She did things her own way, always.
I believe she would have liked a family of her own, but—” His eyes grew sad again. “It wasn’t meant to be.” He lifted his gaze to hers. “She enjoyed her time with you very much.”

“I can’t see why. I was a major pain in the behind.”

“You were young and vulnerable. She felt that if she had handled you better, perhaps you wouldn’t have sought comfort in David Langley, and then you wouldn’t have—”

Gotten pregnant
, she finished silently for him. “She was kind to me, and I liked her, too, but I’m not sure there was an adult alive I would have listened to.”

“When you lost the baby,” he said gingerly, watching her reaction, which she carefully kept neutral, “she was devastated. It only pointed out what a poor chaperone she’d been, she believed, and your mother certainly emphasized that when she returned to take you back to South Carolina.”

“My mother wasn’t fit to raise kittens.” Her mother had used sex as a currency, trading out boyfriends like some women changed hair color, and some of them were slimier than others. That particular one had begun trying to get Callie alone, and he wasn’t the first to make her skin crawl. Her mother never put Callie first, though, and when she’d tried to speak up this time, her mother had sent her away rather than protecting her.

“Miss Margaret knew that, and she tried everything to get your mother to leave you here permanently. She even offered your mother money.”

Callie’s eyes popped. “I’m astonished that my
mother didn’t take it. I ran away from her three months later and never went back. She could have saved herself a lot of aggravation.”