They (14 page)

It worked. Tracy smiled. It seemed to lift her spirits a little. “I…I guess I just had to talk about it, you know? I had to tell somebody what happened, and that I was okay. It made me feel better.”

“I’m sure it did.” He took her in his arms again, holding her close to him. It felt good holding her. He felt the presence of somebody behind him and turned around. It was a uniformed officer, a young man in his mid-twenties with a black crew cut and piercing brown eyes. “You’re our ride home?”

“I’m Officer Ruiz,” the cop said. They shook hands and detective Staley approached them, dragging Vince’s luggage. Vince thanked him, taking the handle. “I’m taking you to Ms. Harris’s place, right?”

The officer stowed the luggage in the trunk and drove calmly while Vince and Tracy sat in the back seat, listening to the squawks of the police radio. “There’s an unmarked car following us to make sure we aren’t being tailed,” Officer Ruiz said as they headed down the 55 Freeway to Newport Beach.

“How long will I have to be in hiding?” Vince wondered aloud. He traded a glance with Tracy, who still looked worried.

“Hopefully not for long,” Officer Ruiz answered.

Tracy Harris lived in a gated community of luxury town-homes. She punched in the code in the security gate, and Officer Ruiz drove through the complex according to her directions. He parked in the guest parking area near her town home and Officer Ruiz opened the trunk. He escorted them to Tracy’s town-home and stood at sentry duty as she unlocked the front door. “I can check the place out if you want.”

Tracy nodded her approval, and Officer Ruiz searched it quickly. He emerged from upstairs a moment later. “You’re fine.” He nodded at Vince. “You have detective Staley’s card?”

“Yeah.”

“Does he know where to reach you?”

“His partner has my phone number,” Tracy said.

“Good. Anything happens, you know how to reach us.”

When Officer Ruiz was gone, Tracy went to Vince. He held her for a moment. “I can’t believe what happened.”

“Neither can I.”

They moved to the sofa. Vince stretched out, suddenly feeling the weariness in his bones. Tracy couldn’t seem to stop touching him, as if she realized she’d almost lost him and that keeping in contact with him physically would keep him there with her forever. It was something Vince could understand and he welcomed it. “Did they question you?” he asked.

They compared notes as they sat on the sofa. Tracy had been questioned as strenuously as Vince had. No, she couldn’t tell them why somebody would want them dead. “I thought he was shooting at
both
of us,” Tracy said, holding his hand. “But the more I think about it, the more it seems that—”

“
I
was the target.”

Tracy nodded. She looked fearful again. “Why would someone want to kill you, baby?”

“I don’t know.” And now, for the first time since the horrifying event, Vince almost
did
break down. He felt himself beginning to collapse emotionally and Tracy sensed it. She took him in her arms and kissed him, holding him, offering soothing words of comfort to him. Vince clung to her, wanting to lose himself in her.

He found her lips and kissed her, tenderly, softly. She kissed him back, her green eyes deep and reflective. He looked into those eyes and he could feel himself getting lost in their depths, and then she kissed him again and this time he
did
get lost.

He didn’t know how long they sat on the couch in each other’s arms; it might have been minutes, it might have been hours. Tracy broke the kiss, a look of yearning on her face. She rose to her feet, pulling him up. Then she led him to the stairs.

Once in her bedroom she pushed him playfully onto the queen-sized waterbed. “Wait there for a minute.” She disappeared in the bathroom.

She emerged in black lingerie that was so tantalizing that he practically got hard right there. The brassiere pushed her breasts up provocatively. Her panties were black and slinky, the stockings clung to her legs like they’d been dipped in ink. “Well? What do you think?”

“I’m…speechless,” Vince said. Tracy smiled at him and he felt his heart thudding in his chest. The sexual tension between them had been building over the past week or so, and it was now finally leading to this.

He went into it with as equal a passion as she, kissing her tenderly, hungrily. His skin tingled as her fingernails traced down his chest to his belly, exploding in feathery sensations as she ran kisses down his belly. He leaned back, his mind reeling as she fumbled with the buckle of his slacks. And it was at that moment when panic set in and he thought this moment would be doomed to failure.

As she took him in her mouth, his penis withered like a shriveled stalk until she finally stopped and looked at him with those remarkable green eyes. The minute they’d started with foreplay he began thinking that, one, this was the first time he had made love to another woman since Laura’s death and, two, for all he knew, whoever had tried to kill him could be setting them in their sights now. Tracy seemed to read his thoughts. “You need to relax,” she said, moving over him and pushing him back down on the bed gently. She straddled him, running her hands softly along his chest. “Just relax,” she whispered. “Everything is all right. It’s over now. We’re safe. I’ll take care of you.” She whispered this over and over until he closed his eyes, listening to the sound of her voice, feeling her fingernails tracing across his chest lightly, creating a tingly feeling.

She got out of bed and headed to the bathroom again. When she came back she was holding a red candle. She placed it on the bureau and lit it. Then she joined him back in bed. “Turn over on your stomach.”

He complied, and with the cinnamon scent of the candle perfuming the room, she gave him a long, slow massage. Her expert hands kneaded the tension out of his muscles. When she’d worked over his entire body, she told him to flip over on his back. He complied. She massaged him from head to toe, avoiding the genitals, telling him to just lay back and relax, drift in the pleasures of the flesh, empty your mind.

He closed his eyes, the candle creating a waft of scent that was both pleasurable and relaxing. In no time he found himself floating in ecstasy. He felt so good that he barely noticed when she started on the blowjob again.

He stayed hard. And when he’d maintained his erection for three minutes she stopped working him with her mouth and mounted him. He felt himself slipping into her warmth effortlessly. She moaned, moving over him, and he lay back, enamored by the scents, the sensations, the sounds. He stayed hard and as her passion grew wild he began to meet it. When his orgasm came it was with sweet release, plunging him into further depths of pleasure.

They lay in each other’s arms as it ebbed. Vince cupped Tracy’s face in his hands and kissed her deeply. “You are so beautiful,” he said.

“No,
you’re
beautiful,” she said, grinning.

Vince could feel his heart racing in his ribcage. “That was so intense,” he said. “I think my chest is going to explode.”

“Gave you a run for your money, eh?”

“You can say that again,” Vince said, sitting up against the headboard. Sweat dotted his chest.

“There’s more where that came from,” she said. She kissed him. “But for now, how about a break? Let’s talk. Tell me more about the trip.”

They started talking about what happened to them at the airport. Tracy seemed to be dealing with it better. They both wondered aloud why somebody would want to have him killed, and Vince voiced his own opinions. “I didn’t tell the police because I thought it was crazy,” he said. “But…I keep thinking that…suppose the same people that killed my mother also want
me
dead?”

“Why would you think that?” Tracy asked. She was holding his hand as they lay in bed. “What makes you think your mother was even…well,
targeted
for murder?”

“I don’t know.” Vince shook his head, trying to think of the right way to approach this. “Reverend Powell wants me to come back in a few weeks to help him get to the bottom of this. What
this
is, I don’t know. We had a long talk after the wake was over. And he didn’t have much more to tell me than Lillian did. But he gave me his impressions on what he first thought about my mother and when he originally met us.”

“And that was?”

“He thought that Mom was running from something,” Vince said, reflecting on that long night of conversation that had kept him up late last night. “Mom never actually came right out and said this, but whenever anybody brought up a question as to what she did before she became a Christian, or what our past lives were like, she evaded the subject entirely. Didn’t even attempt to answer it, much less lie about it. Just evaded it. Changed the subject. And the way she did it was, I suppose, not so subtle. Reverend Powell said he got the strong impression that whatever life we led before mom joined the church was shameful to her. But something so shameful that it pales in comparison to what most people would
consider
shameful.”

“Don’t most born-agains think that about their past lives?” Tracy asked.

“Yes, in a way,” Vince said. “The shame comes from the sudden knowledge that you’ve led your life without walking with the Lord, and that you lived the kind of life that He would find displeasing. You have lived a life that has offended Him and because the act of being Born-Again is more or less an act of becoming aware of the order of the universe as spoken through God—that He has created us because He loves us, that He offered His only son Jesus Christ up for sacrifice to redeem us—reinforces a sense of …sorrow I guess is the best way I can put it. You feel sorry to God for having lived in such ignorance and sin. And part of that shame comes from the fact that you are so overwhelmingly happy to be saved that you’re ashamed that you’d ever lived the life of a heretic.”

Tracy’s green eyes seemed to glimmer as she grinned. “I can’t believe you were actually a born-again!”

“You say that as if I were once a leper,” he exclaimed, an embarrassed smile on his face.

“It just doesn’t seem like
you
,” she said. She snuggled against him. “You’re just so….not like that.”

They laughed and kissed again. And they didn’t resume their conversation. Instead, they made love again.

After climax and a brief resting period where they lay in bed, basking in the afterglow of their pleasure, Tracy got out of bed and went to the bathroom. Vince sat up, noting for the first time that the hours had breezed by. It was dark outside now. He rested against the headboard and let his mind drift.

His thoughts returned to the discussion he had with Hank Powell after the wake. They’d talked about plans for Vince to return to Lititz to assist him in investigating the mysterious box that Hank assured him he would find. “I didn’t find it last night,” he’d said, “but I’ll find it soon. I’ll find it if I have to dig up that whole backyard.”

Reverend Powell had appeared nervous and fearful the whole time they’d talked after the wake. He’d appeared nervous, twitchy, and he kept glancing around the room, as if he were afraid their conversation was being overheard. Everybody had left the wake three hours before, so Vince didn’t know where the man’s nervousness came from. He thought of asking him but decided not to. Might just make him more nervous.

Something about that nervousness bothered Vince.

He voiced this to Tracy as she came back into the bedroom. “He was probably just shaken up about facing two deaths in the space of only a few days.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right,” Vince nodded. He really hadn’t stopped to consider how the deaths were affecting Reverend Powell’s sanity. Maggie Walters and Lillian Withers had been very close to him. Reverend Powell’s nervousness, his almost stark fear, could be interpreted as a subconscious way of dealing with their deaths.

Tracy grabbed his hand and tugged him gently. “Want to take a shower?” she asked playfully.

He grinned at her, Reverend Powell, the mysteries of his mother’s past, and his own brush with death forgotten for now. “Of course. Lead the way, my fair maiden.”

And as they continued with their lovemaking in the shower, Vince never thought that Tracy would be able to divert his mind from the horrible events of the past week, much less turn his mind away from Laura. But she did.

HE IS IN a large room in a huge mansion.

The room is dark and he’s seated on a table set low to the floor, which appears to be a cold, polished wood. The room is bare save for the impression of paintings on the walls. A large chandelier hangs from the ceiling over the room, the glass beads trailing down like drops of dew from a heavily misted forest. The lights of the chandelier are off, but the room is illuminated by dozens of glowing candles. The candles are black and white. He sits on the table in the center of the room as the air grows warm. It is then that he is aware of the shapes grouped around the walls.

They move forward, surrounding him slowly. They are dressed in black flowing robes and hoods. They step forward slightly but remain in shadow. The air in the room intensifies, grows leaden. And then the chanting starts.

He snapped awake and blinked, the sounds and smells of the dream fading away as consciousness set in. He shook his head to clear his fogged mind, then glanced to his left. Tracy was lying on her side, her back turned to him, her legs drawn up slightly. He glanced at the digital clock on the stand by his side of the bed. It was 3:35 a.m.

He leaned back into the pillows and sighed. The dream had not only come back, it was more intense now, more
real
. Shortly after Laura’s death, he’d revealed both the dreams to a therapist he saw for grief counseling. The therapist had been very interested in them. After Vince told him the whole dream, Dr. Smith asked him if he felt any blame for Laura’s death. Vince had mulled this over. He’d told Dr. Smith that consciously he didn’t blame himself for her death, but it hurt him just to think about it. Dr. Smith suggested that this particular dream might be his subconscious’s way of heaping the blame on himself. The toddler in the dream represents how he feels now—alone, childlike, fragile in the face of grief. And the people in the room represent his friends and associates. They appear the way they do—a throwback to the hippie era—because he feels different from other people. Laura’s death has made him feel this way, and the unseen man who grabs him and holds the knife to his throat represents self-destruction as a result of guilt. “We need to explore this further,” Dr. Smith said that first day when Vince spilled the beans about the dream. “If we can get past these feelings your subconscious is holding, you should be able to relax more and go on with your life.”