Tonight You're Mine (3 page)

“Look, man, I told you—”

“I said hold her! Do it now, or I swear to God I'll kill you, too.”

“Me?” the younger one squeaked.

“If something goes wrong, I'm not gonna be the only one guilty of murder. You're gonna be—what they call it? An accessory. That way you won't talk.”

“
Talk?
You think I'm gonna tell anybody about this?”

“Who knows? You get all crazy on your wine and meth and you could say anything. I don't trust you. Now do what I say. Hold her down.” Nothing happened. “Hold her
down
. I mean it, Zand. Hold her or I'll kill you, too. You know I will.”

“Okay, okay,” the younger one said shakily. “Just cool it. I'll hold her, man. I'm with you all the way.”

During this exchange a tiny flame of encouragement had flickered in Nicole's ravaged body and mind. But when she heard the fear in the young one's voice, the flame died. Hadn't she known all along that the experience would end this way? The best thing to do would be to send her mind somewhere else, somewhere beautiful and far away where she wouldn't feel the pain, wouldn't feel the frightening darkness of death descend.

But when hands pressed on her shoulders again, unexpected desperation flowed into her. She began to flail with the strength of a madwoman, her right hand connecting with an eye socket. The man's scream was followed by a spate of cursing as her knee sank into a groin. Writhing with all her strength, she fought grappling hands and efforts of strong bodies to pin her to the rough ground. A fist connected with her temple, and another punched into her abdomen, forcing the air from her.

During it all Nicole had been aware of noise—the men's voices, one high-pitched, the other growing even more guttural than before in its fury. Then, as the excruciating pain of the blows overwhelmed her and her surge of strength dissipated, she heard another sound. She slowed her weak attempt at fighting, straining to listen. Could it be? Could it
possibly
be?
Yes!
A car.

Both men stiffened as the car drew nearer. “Stay low,” the rough-voiced one she knew as Magaro ordered. “They'll go by and never see us.”

But the car didn't whiz by as Nicole expected. It slowed. She heard gravel crunch as it pulled off the road. Then headlights swept over them. In the shock of the brightness, Nicole's eyes snapped open. In five seconds she saw two faces clearly—one in its early twenties with blue eyes, clear skin, a slightly broad nose, and shoulder-length light brown hair. The other was at least ten years older, acne-scarred, the dark eyes narrow and mean, the lips so thin they were almost nonexistent.

A car door opened. “Hey, what's going on here?” a man demanded.

“Run,” the younger one quaked.

“It's not the cops. Gotta kill her!”

Nicole flung herself to the left, missing the slash of the knife aimed at her throat. She screamed with all the strength she could muster.

“I've got a gun!” the man in the car shouted.

“He's lyin',” Magaro hissed.

Suddenly the sound of a shot tore through the night.

Hands released Nicole's shoulders. “I'm gettin' outta here!”

The knife swept past Nicole's throat again, this time nicking the skin. She shrieked frantically and another shot rang out.

Then she fainted.

Fifteen Years Later

“Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower…”

Nicole Chandler stood motionless, staring at the coffin holding her father. Bright sunshine played over the stiff funeral flower arrangements she knew he would have hated. She'd told her mother he would have preferred a donation made to charity in lieu of flowers, but Phyllis Sloan had flatly refused. “It's bad enough that he gave up his faith and made us all promise he wouldn't have a religious funeral service,” she'd snapped. “I'm honoring that promise, but he didn't say anything about not having flowers, so we're haying them.”

Countless arrangements rested around the coffin. Clifton Sloan had a lot of friends in San Antonio. Most of them were at the funeral. But there were many others, people Nicole had never seen before, and she wondered how many had come out of curiosity just to view the funeral of a man who for no apparent reason had put a .38-caliber revolver in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

A wave of queasiness swept over her, and she shut her eyes, still hearing the funeral director's voice:

Oh, Dad, how could you do such a thing? she cried mentally.
Why?
The simple word had echoed through her head a thousand times since the Wednesday morning just three days ago when her mother had called her, her voice a stunned, thin monotone, saying that Clifton was hurt, he needed an ambulance, but she was feeling a bit faint from all the blood, would Nicole make the call?

Shrill with horror, Nicole had asked over and over
how
her father was hurt. Phyllis finally managed “shot” and “store” before she uttered a ragged moan and hung up. Nicole touched the reset button on the phone, then punched out 911 for help, certain that her father had been shot by someone trying to rob his music store downtown. Only later did she learn that sometime in the night he'd left his home, gone to his office in the back of the store, and killed himself. She couldn't have been more surprised if someone had said the world was going to end in a week.

Pressure on her hand forced her to open her eyes again. She looked down at her nine-year-old daughter Shelley, whose clear forehead was furrowed in concern. “Okay?” she mouthed, her periwinkle blue eyes, so like Nicole's, looking troubled and watery from unshed tears.

Nicole squeezed Shelley's hand and gave her a slight smile. The girl had been so close to her grandfather. It was Clifton who'd always made her eyes light up with joy, who could make her laugh in spite of almost anything, who could bring perspective back to her young world when things went wrong, just as he had with Nicole. Phyllis, autocratic and critical, elicited the same response from Shelley she always had from Nicole—dutiful attempts at affection and an inevitable stiffening with repressed resentment when the complaints began in spite of all attempts to please.

Am I supposed to find strength in years that bring the philosophic mind? Nicole wondered as the funeral director's surprisingly eloquent voice concluded the stanza of Clifton's favorite poem. Will I ever feel philosophic about my father killing himself without leaving so much as a brief good-bye note to me, especially now when I need him so much?

Immediately she felt ashamed. Obviously her father had been deeply troubled to do something so drastic, so seemingly irrational, and all she could think about was that he'd deserted her when her life was such a mess. Well, according to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, wasn't anger one of the stages of grief? Which one? The second or third? She was sure her husband, Roger, could tell her. Or rather, her soon-to-be ex-husband.

She glanced across her father's coffin at Roger Chandler, standing tall and distinguished and properly solemn. He didn't look much older than he had when they'd met at a graduate student party twelve years ago. She'd just begun work on a Master's degree in English while he was finishing his doctoral dissertation in psychology. They'd married a year later. He'd always been so strong, so sure of himself, so certain of what she needed, and if his dominance had sometimes gotten on her nerves, she'd still been grateful she could always depend on him and his unwavering love.

Then, a few months ago, she'd noticed that he seemed to be away from home more than usual, spending time in his office at the university at night working on his book, or so he claimed. After three months of this diligent writing, one evening he'd lit a few candles around the living room, put on a Debussy CD, fixed her a snifter of very good brandy, and after some pointless small talk abruptly announced he'd fallen in love with another woman and wanted a divorce. Nicole had stared at him for approximately thirty seconds, then begun to giggle. The whole scene was so dramatically staged, Roger's expression so lugubrious, his voice so tender and tragic, that the only thing penetrating her brain was how ludicrous they would appear to a sophisticated theater audience. She'd laughed until tears ran down her face, and Roger's stiffening posture and his expression of bruised dignity mixed with fear that she was going into hysterics made her laugh even harder. It wasn't until the next day that her tears no longer streamed from laughter.

At least he'd had the decency not to bring the little twit to the funeral, she thought. The girl, one of his students, was twenty years old, exactly half Roger's age. Naturally all her friends assured her this was just a midlife crisis, that he'd never go through with the divorce but simply expend his passion in a rather embarrassing show, then slink home, repentant.

Nicole knew better. Roger's need to be needed was overwhelming. He felt that she'd outgrown him, that the days were gone when she hung on his every word, that in a room full of people he was no longer the only person who existed for her. In a way, she felt rather sorry for him. For all Roger's intelligence, he'd never realized that while for several years her dependence on him had been abnormally strong, and that she'd always cared deeply for him, he'd never been the center of her life as he thought.

He looked up. She saw the flash of guilt in his eyes before he managed a tight, awkward smile she knew was meant to be bracing. Nicole merely stared at him, and a moment later his gray gaze dropped. She supposed she could have been more gracious, but she was too shaken and heartsick to worry about Roger's feelings right now.

Suddenly Nicole became aware of her mother moving forward to place a rose on Clifton's coffin. Phyllis sniffled into a lace-edged handkerchief, but Nicole's eyes were painfully dry as she laid a red rose atop the casket. She knew the grief would hit her swiftly and violently, but so far she'd been outwardly calm, her hurt throbbing inside her like a heartbeat, steady and invisible. She held Shelley's hand while the girl reached forward with her own rose, murmuring, “Bye, Grandpa.”

The three of them stepped back, and others began moving as if a silent bell called them forth. Nicole couldn't look at the many hands dropping already wilting flowers onto the coffin. Her father had always said funerals were ghoulish affairs. “They're lovely ceremonies where people can say good-bye,” Phyllis had argued heatedly. “Say good-bye to what?” Clifton had shot back. “A corpse full of formaldehyde?”

Nicole knew the retort was calculated to get a reaction out of the high-strung, traditional Phyllis, and it always worked. Although she'd told her mother a hundred times that if she wouldn't respond so fervently to Clifton's teasing, he'd stop it, she nevertheless usually found herself smothering smiles as her mother let out a loud hiss of disgust and stomped out of the room, appalled by her husband's apparent irreverence for all she considered sacred.

A slight breeze blew up, catching a lock of Nicole's long hair and sweeping it across her face. She pushed it aside, looking beyond her father's coffin to the grounds of the cemetery rolling beyond. It was February, an, unusually warm seventy-five degrees, and the breeze that blew her hair skimmed over the short green and brown grass and blew the small, many-limbed junipers abounding in the cemetery along with the masses of bright artificial flowers decorating the graves. When she and Roger had lived in Ohio, she'd noticed that only on Memorial Day did the Northerners decorate as abundantly as they did in San Antonio year-round.

Suddenly her gaze stopped at the figure of a man standing nearly a hundred feet beyond beside a sprawling Pinchot juniper. He was tall and slender, wearing jeans and a jacket, and beside him sat a dog—a Doberman, its black coat gleaming in contrast to its red collar, its ears clipped to alert points. Even from such a distance, the dog's dark eyes seemed to meet and hold hers. The moment was almost hypnotic, as if the dog were trying desperately to convey a message. Abruptly the world narrowed for Nicole, becoming nothing but the sleek, shining canine. Then, slowly, the dog turned its narrow head, looking up at its master. Nicole's own keen eyes followed. The tall man stood as still as the dog and gazed at her just as unflinchingly. For a few seconds she boldly stared at him in return. Then the outlines of his face sharpened in her vision. She could clearly see the line from his high cheekbones to his strong jaw, the hair as black as the dog's, and the intense eyes that never left hers….

Nicole's heart slammed against her ribs. She swayed, her vision darkening, cold beads of perspiration breaking out all over her face.

“Mommy? Mommy?” Shelley's voice floated toward her from far away. “Mommy, are you okay?”

“Wha…” Nicole had the desire to speak, could even hear herself trying to mouth a word, but her voice seemed to be coming from underwater.

“Grandma, something's wrong with Mommy!”

“What? What
now
?” Phyllis hissed, grabbing Nicole's hand. “What's wrong with you? Everyone's looking.”

Slowly Nicole's vision cleared as Phyllis's voice hit her like a dash of icy water. The brightness of the day hurt her eyes. She blinked, frowning into the sun, her gaze seeking the tree. The man and the dog were gone.

Phyllis's gaze searched her face. “You're pale as a ghost. Are you going to faint?”

“No.” Nicole's voice was thin and breathy.

“Well, get hold of yourself,” Phyllis ordered
sotto voce
. “All we need is for you to pass out and fall head first into the grave.”

Nicole looked at her mother in shock, then almost burst into one of her nervous laughing fits at her mother's sadly preposterous response. At a time when Phyllis should be stricken that she'd lost her husband of thirty-six years, all she could think of were possibly embarrassing scenes. Suddenly, Nicole realized her mother was furious with Clifton, and she didn't believe Phyllis was going through Kübler-Ross's stage of grief labeled “Anger.” She was livid that Clifton had killed himself, had made people wonder about his sanity, had drawn unseemly speculation down on her family.

Again. First it had been she, Nicole, fifteen years ago, who'd been the talk of the town, the victim of a gang rape followed only weeks later by the suspicion that she'd instigated or at least inspired the double homicide of the rapists. Now the attention was focused on Clifton, the man who'd blown off his head in his own store. Sorry we keep embarrassing you, Mom, Nicole thought bitterly. Sorry Dad and I have compromised the pride of the daughter of General Ernest Hazelton.

“Are you all right?”

Beside Nicole stood Carmen Vega, her best friend since grade school. Carmen's depthless dark eyes showed worry. “I'm fine.”

“What did you see?” Carmen asked quietly.

Nicole looked at her sharply. “I didn't see anything. It's just the occasion.”

Carmen's eyes turned from worried to knowing. “No it isn't. I was watching you. You saw something.”

When had she ever been able to hide anything from Carmen? She muttered, “Tell you later,” as Phyllis turned curious, reproving eyes on her.

“What are you two whispering about?”

“Nothing, Mom,” Nicole said tiredly. “I think we should be going back to the limousine.”

Shelley clutched her mother's hand as they walked toward the long black car, her small face pale, her eyes sad. Safely inside the cool confines of the limousine, Nicole gave her a firm, encouraging hug.

“Well, that was a dreadful service,” Phyllis declared.

“I thought it was nice,” Nicole said.

“It wasn't. And Shelley's dress is inappropriate. Too short. Too gay. She looks like she's going to a party, not like she's in mourning.”

“Mom, this isn't the nineteenth century when children went to funerals swathed in black.”

“She could have worn
navy
blue, not light blue.”

“Who cares what color it is?”

“
I
do.”

“You're being absurd, Mother.”

Phyllis's face assumed a devastated look. She sniffled into her handkerchief. “I know we don't get along, Nicole, but do you have to attack me even on such a tragic day?”

Oh, God, Nicole thought, sighing as she leaned against the back of the seat, her head beginning to pound. Please let this awful afternoon be over soon. I need time to rest. I need time to think about Dad.

And I want to think about who I saw in the cemetery today, she added mentally with a shudder and a rush of chills down her arms as she pictured the lean, handsome face. Or who I
thought
I saw because it
couldn't
have been…

“We're home,” Phyllis announced. Nicole had been so distracted, she hadn't even noticed the limousine turning onto their street. “Now comes the
really
hard part,” Phyllis went on. “Nicole, I hope you won't desert me. I simply
cannot
handle all these people by myself.”