Triple Exposure (4 page)

When Patsy had carefully raised the subject of the medication mix-up that had sent Benita to the hospital the month before, Rachel’s father had accused his wife of wanting to stick his mother in a nursing home so the two of them could travel. Clearly furious, Patsy had dumped her dinner in the trash and left the house for a long walk.

Rachel grimaced, considering the first fault line in a marriage that had until now appeared rock solid. Despite her ambivalence toward her father’s wife—who had been quick to insist Rachel would be more “comfortable” in one of their Spartan and poorly heated guest casitas—it made her stomach hurt to witness the two of them squabbling.

She had volunteered to drive her grandma to the ophthalmologist today, partly to get a handle on her physical and mental state, but mostly to relieve Rachel’s own tension. It occurred to her that before That Night, she could have coped with such a skirmish easily—could have told her dad to chill out and listen to what sounded like a legitimate
concern. She and her father might have even raised their voices at each other, both of them secure enough in their relationship that it felt safe to do so.

She wondered if her dad or Patsy had noticed the ways she’d changed. No one had mentioned anything, not even her grandmother, who didn’t know about the trial. Presumably.

“Still boycotting the TV news?” Rachel asked. A few years back, her grandmother had sworn off it, saying she’d lived through enough heartache for one lifetime without taking on the whole world’s. Interfered with her appetite, she’d claimed, and kept her from sleeping. Had turned her into a door-locker, too—an aberration in a town with almost no crime.

“You betcha. Stopped the paper, too, while I was at it.”

Rachel understood the attraction of her grandmother’s decision to insulate herself from others’ pain. To remain oblivious to terror’s black moths chewing holes in the world’s fabric. To live in ignorance of the cruelest of murders, rapes…and trials. “Doesn’t it make you feel sort of…disconnected?”

Her grandmother shot her a surprisingly shrewd look. “If you’re fishing around to find out if I know about your trouble, the answer is yes. Of course I do, in spite of your father’s ridiculous attempts to shield me. I might have my struggles with small print these days, but I’m for doggone sure not blind.”

“You—you’ve
known
? For how long?” Rachel glanced over at her. “Why haven’t you said anything?”

Her grandmother’s look turned pouty. “When I first heard over at the Hair House, I was madder than a wet hen. I’m an old woman, not a child, and I’ve weathered tougher things than you can imagine. Buried a husband and my first son, when he was just a tiny baby. Watched boys go off to wars they hardly understood, some of ’em never to come home. Grew up poor enough to know hunger on a first-name basis. Lost both my sisters in the last five years. I know
how to stand things, Rachel, and I might have had a thing or two to say to you about it. But no one wanted an old woman’s opinion. So I kept it to myself.”

No wonder her grandma hadn’t invited her to stay at her house. Rachel winced as moisture blurred the green splotches of juniper among the dry, gold grasses and rocky soil that lined both sides of the road.

“I never meant to hurt you.” Rachel wished she’d considered how the woman who’d stood by her after her mother’s sudden stroke would take being “spared” her granddaughter’s pain. “I’m—I’m so sorry, Grandma. I just didn’t know how—how to say the words. And Dad thought—”

“You know your daddy.” A smile softened her grandmother’s expression. “He could tell you anything you’d want to know about those contraptions he’s always zooming around in and not a durned thing worth knowing about how a woman’s mind works. But you, Rachel…You might have—”

“I was so ashamed.” Rachel blinked hard to clear her vision. “You had such high hopes for me. Without you, I don’t think I’d have ever imagined seeing my photographs in galleries, or making a living doing what I love. You’ve always meant so much to me—especially after Mom died.”

“This—this boy that ended up killed. Was there anything to those stories he was spreading to his buddies?”

As worn, tan mountains rose before them, Rachel struggled against starkly ugly memories. Explicit voice mail messages and e-mails, the disgusting discovery of a used condom hanging on her doorknob—made worse because the culprit had removed the bulb from the security light above. She remembered it all in horrifying detail—everything except the evening at the restaurant that had supposedly set it all in motion.

That’s because nothing happened worth recalling,
she reminded herself,
nothing but a perfectly forgettable outing with my students.
No matter what a few liars claimed or her own psychologist had suggested.

“No, Grandma,” Rachel insisted. “I would
never
do that.
Not with anybody I was teaching and especially not with—He was just a big kid to me, that’s all.” Before he’d become a monster, anyway. “A little more polished than some—I understand he’d been kicked out of the finest prep schools. But still, he was my student, just an overgrown boy I thought had talent. The rest—”

Her grandmother shook her head. “I got into quite a fight with Tally Sue Ryan, over at the Hair House. Told her I wouldn’t believe you’d do a thing like that and if she meant to argue, her stylist was going to have to tease that fuzz of hers over a couple of new bald spots.”

Rachel’s tension dissolved into laughter at the image. “I am Grandma, hear me roar. So, you
didn’t
believe the gossip.”

“That boy wouldn’t be the first to run bragging to his friends about escapades he made up. The same thing used to happen back when I was in school. That sort doesn’t think about the girl’s reputation, only his own.”

Rachel lapsed back into silence, thinking how far beyond mere boasting the tall and model-handsome Kyle had gone. How he’d used skills learned in her class to graft her face onto pornographic photos, how he’d added his own image to make it look as if she were on her knees before him, open-mouthed for his erect… 

How those photos had been so skillfully manipulated, it had taken the defense’s own set of experts to discern the trickery, a finding that had proved false those disgusting messages Kyle had sent her—messages whose contents intersected with the yawning gap in her own memory.

Pain twisted through her midsection, so overwhelming she had no choice except to pull the van onto the stony shoulder. She bailed out without looking, barely noticed the blare of a semi’s horn at her flung-wide door or the swirl of her loose hair in the chill wind of the truck’s passage.

In an instant, she lost the breakfast Patsy had insisted on feeding her that morning. A short time later, she heard the crunch of orthopedic shoes on gravel and felt her grandma’s hand, a warm and steady presence at her back.

“It’s all right,” she crooned, her voice soft and comforting as faded denim. “It’s all right, Cora.
I’ll
drive.”

Her grandmother’s slip of the tongue pulled Rachel back from the brink of another round of sickness. Great Aunt Cora, Grandma’s older sister, had died four years before.

But it was the offer to drive that most concerned Rachel, as her grandmother, who hadn’t been behind the wheel in years, attempted to tug the keys from her hand.

“We’d better get going.” Rachel led her back to the passenger side. “Wouldn’t want to be late for your eye doctor appointment.”

“But the baby’s making you sick. You should let me drive you, Cora.”

Rachel stared at her, heart sinking, wondering if Patsy had seen this confusion. And if her father had refused to.

“I’m okay. I promise, Grandma.”

But as she helped her grandmother back inside the old van, Rachel wondered if either one of them would ever be all right again.

“She’s back to sleeping in his bedroom, Kathy.” Marlene’s younger sister lived in Phoenix, but the two of them talked by phone once or twice a week. Though both had husbands and families of their own, they had mothered each other for so long, the sibling bond had grown as strong as steel.

Marlene recognized the clunk of her sister’s coffee mug as she set it on the counter.

“I
knew
it,” Kathy burst out. “I offered to stay after the funeral, but she practically shoved me out the door—”

“It wouldn’t have made any difference. As soon as we turned our backs, she’d have been inside. She’s…she’s sleeping in that bed again.
His
bed.” Marlene was not referring to their father.

“Lord. Probably hasn’t even washed the sheets.”

Marlene made what her sons laughingly called her Primzy-Prude face. “Or dusted—”

“But those could be
his
actual skin cells.” Though Marlene was the one who most closely resembled their mother, Kathy could do an impression of her that was so dead-on, it raised gooseflesh. “You can’t think I’d just allow the maid to
dust
them up. Or
vacuum.”

Despite the chill zinging up her spine, Marlene laughed. They both did, though it felt a little on the mean side. But laughter helped, more than either the therapy or the antianxiety medication Marlene had tried, more even than the massage sessions her husband, Dan, had paid for—bless his
heart—to ease the tension knotted in her neck and shoulders.

“We’re going to have to do something,” Marlene said anxiously. “It isn’t right, letting her live like that.”

“Who cares how she lives?” Kathy’s voice went bitter, but Marlene heard hurt there, too. Since Kathy had been tiny, she’d done her best to cover her pain with anger.

“It’s not like she worries over how
we’re
doing—or gives a damn about poor Daddy,” Kathy accused. “Do you think she ever said she loved him? After she called for the ambulance, when he was sprawled there, dying, on the bedroom floor? Do you think she held his hand then, even for an instant?”

A tear broke free, but Marlene couldn’t let herself be drawn into that conversation. Couldn’t allow herself to think about their father’s final minutes. “But she’s our
mother,
Kathy. What will people say if we don’t take care—”

“You know what? I don’t give a shit what people have to say about it.”

Marlene thought that was easy for her sister, who had moved so far away. Kathy didn’t have to face the family friends, the neighbors—everyone who knew what excellent care their father had taken of their mother since the baby of the family had been murdered. She could simply leave it all to Marlene, the way she had so often.

Stupid of her to get mad over it again, when she’d been certain they’d gotten past the longstanding issue. But that was the way of old squabbles between Marlene and her sister. They always squeezed out under pressure.

“What would Daddy say about it?” she couldn’t stop herself from demanding. “I promised him, we both did, that we’d see to her if he was the first to go.”

Marlene heard her sister’s indrawn breath, felt her vacillation. When she finally answered, Kathy’s voice held a strength that Marlene both envied and resented.

“Our father was a loving man. So loving, he couldn’t imagine a woman drained of everything that made her human.
So he made excuses for her, babied her instead of demanding that she stop this nonsense and get back to her old self.”

“You can’t
force
a person to get better. You can’t just demand that she snap out of it.”

“I’m finished with her, Marlene. My own kids need me here now, and my boss—I could get fired for taking off more time after coming back.”

“Fired? I thought things were going so much better at this new place.” Marlene, who had worked in the same office more than ten years, had lost track of how many times her sister had changed jobs. She was beginning to suspect that Kathy herself was the problem, not the “crazy bosses” and “bitchy co-workers” she blamed.

“Well, I didn’t mention it,” said Kathy, “but I took off kind of a lot back when Bryce and I were separated. So between that and the funeral, I’m going to have to work through my vacation to catch up on the backlog. Besides, the price of flights is ridiculous on short notice.”

“What if I helped you with the ticket?” Marlene knew her husband wouldn’t like it, but she had some money squirreled away toward a new sofa and recliners for the family room.

“It’s not just the cost. It’s—it’s Mother. After all this time, all her rejection, I’m finished pretending I feel something for her when I don’t.”

Her sister still cared. Marlene knew it. But there was nothing to be gained by arguing. Once Kathy dropped into Mule Mode, nothing short of dynamite could move her. “So I’m on my own in this?”

“I’m really sorry. If I could do it for anyone, Marl, it would be for you. But I can’t. I just—
can’t.”

Marlene’s temper flared as she wished that, for once in their lives,
she
had the luxury of refusing. “You mean you won’t.”

She banged down the phone in a rare display of temper, but the two sisters’ estrangement didn’t last long.

Only a few short hours later, Marlene called Kathy from
the house where both of them, along with their dead brother, had grown up.

The place stood empty, every door and window open. Only a few things were missing. The bedclothes, stripped from one bare mattress. A photo album, and a macabre collection of news clippings. A purse, cosmetic bag, and a few articles of clothing.

And the woman herself, their mother, who had left without her Cadillac…or a word to anyone to explain where she had gone.

The morning’s clouds had long since rolled back by the time Rachel returned to Zeke Pike’s place. She parked behind his pickup, a dust-covered blue Chevy even older than her van, then climbed out, leaving her leather jacket tossed across the passenger seat. For a minute, she stood beside the corral in the late afternoon sunshine, allowing it to warm her through her cotton blouse and jeans. Or maybe she was stalling, dreading another meeting with a man as jarringly abrupt as his name.

He might have startled her at first, in the wake of the unexpected phone threat, but Rachel suspected Mr. Personality was more afraid of her—of everyone—than she was of him. Despite his attempts to alienate her, she found herself wondering what would drive such a man to a solitary life on the high desert.

As the pinto mare nickered and stretched her neck forward, Rachel figured that, gruff or not, Zeke didn’t lack for offers of companionship. She rubbed the mare’s neck while her mind conjured a green-eyed man whose thick hair was dark, wavy, and just long enough to look disreputable, and whose skin had been bronzed and weathered by the elements. A man like that with a build like his could have his choice of women.

If women were his choice. She considered, then immediately discarded any other possibility. Zeke Pike was definitely a hair-on-the-chest, beef-in-the-belly, scratch-where-it-itches
sort. Which probably meant his antisocial tendencies were the only factor keeping him alone.

With a final pat for the mare, Rachel said, “Anybody who would save a bag of bones like you
has
to be more bark than bite, right?”

Since the pinto gave no answer, Rachel told herself to quit being a wimp and go to Zeke’s workshop to get her pictures. Taking a deep breath, she strode toward the building. This time she noticed that its concrete-block sides still bore the faded outline of the words
Superior Wax Co., Candelilla Unit
No. 1.
Barely visible was the shadowy image of a burro, looking ecstatic beneath an enormous load of bundled sticks. Or more likely, it was gritting its teeth instead of grinning.

Gritting her own, she made for the center of the building, where someone, probably Zeke, had installed a modern garage door. It was halfway up now to let in both air and a measure of late sunlight, rich and golden. In return, the workshop issued the canned music of cheap speakers, which bleated a twangy, old-time instrumental that made her itch to move her feet.

Yet she stood rooted to the spot, for inside, working on a piece of furniture, was a sight to make a nun weep. Even Rachel, who would rather have a root canal than a naked man in her life at the moment, gaped dry-mouthed as she watched the shirtless Zeke lean forward to oil a heavy tabletop. As the sun’s rays gilded him in profile, the cloth in his hand glided like a lover’s over curves and natural imperfections. While muscles moved beneath the surface of his skin like restless spirits, he expertly stroked the brilliance from the reddish wood.

Knowing she could never reproduce this moment—that the instant he saw her, he would don his shirt and growl another warning to stay clear of his private rooms—she lifted her camera and clicked away, losing herself in the play of light and shadow filling her frame.

Even as she took the photos, she knew they would be special. Just as she sensed that Zeke Pike would pitch a fit
if he had any inkling she was photographing him and not his work.

He did say you could take pictures of anything inside the workshop
or the showroom.
Lame or not, the excuse got her through to the moment she recapped her camera lens and cleared her throat loudly to be heard over Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire.”

Sure enough, everything changed as soon as Zeke looked up. Grabbing a denim shirt off his workbench, he said, “Sorry. Gettin’ a little hot in here.”

You ain’t whistlin’ Dixie,
she thought, but instead of confessing to her stealth photo session, she dropped her gaze to the table’s central base as she moved closer. “You used the tree’s stump for the base.”

He shrugged into the shirt. “Liked the way it twisted, so I buffed it some and attached it underneath.”

“It’s perfect,” she said, resisting the urge to skim her palms over the table’s polished surface, to lose herself in the swirls and faint eyes hidden in the wood’s grain. Natural flaws formed narrow rivers he had inlaid with some beautifully striated blue and copper stone. “This is
amazing,
Zeke. Just gorgeous. If I had a pile of money, I’d buy it out from under whatever rich customer commissioned it.”

“Be better if I made one just for you. Something you’d want, in particular.”

“But I want
this
one, in particular.” Smiling, she laid her fingertip on the heavy wood, where she imagined she felt the lingering warmth of his touch. “Too bad I don’t have a dining room to put it in. Or a house. Or that pile of money.”

“First two’re strictly optional. You come up with the last one, then we’ll talk.” Zeke’s eyes smiled, though otherwise, he kept a straight face.

And what a face it was, with those light green eyes set off by the thick, seal-brown brows above them. It occurred to her that she could be falling into lust with something far more problematic than a piece of handcrafted furniture.

He shut off the radio and jerked a nod in the direction of an interior door. She’d noticed it this morning but hadn’t gone snooping. Maybe she’d been put off by its red paint, a less than subtle warning that danger lay behind it.

“I’ll be in my room,” Zeke said, “until you’re done taking pictures.”

What kind of furnishings had he made for his own use?
She tamped down the image of an immense bed, carved with the lines of wind and flowing water and covered with striped Mexican blankets.

“I—um, I don’t need quiet for my work.”

He shrugged again, looking as remote and unassailable as the sheer face of a mountain. “Well,
I
need it, so just honk your horn to let me know you’re leaving.”

He went inside without a backward glance, a dismissal so abrupt, she grumbled, “Maybe you
don’t
bite, Mr. Zeke Pike, but I’ve had just about enough of being barked at.”

The Spirit Guides had grown impatient, and the lights had ways of making their disapproval known. By refusing to appear, for one thing, and depriving the observer of their wisdom.

Over the years, the lights had come at strange times and even stranger places. Not only to the viewing area where the freaks and tourists went to gawk each night or among the shadowed plains at the feet of the Chinati Mountains, but to private places where they revealed their true selves to the observer.

The first time, it had been a crawl space, hot and filthy beneath a trailer. It stank of cat piss and writhed with centipedes, spiders and a nest of buzzing, stinging wasps, but The Child didn’t dare cry out, and leaving—leaving was unthinkable. Sent there for some long-forgotten transgression—most likely stealing food meant for The Others, The Child was forgotten, left all night.

Until the Spirit Guides slipped in through a crack in the rusted metal skirting, then danced about the space as they

flashed blue, then white, then yellow. Terrified, The Child finally succumbed to the need to cry out, weeping while scrambling into the darkest corner, breaking tiny fingernails in blind desperation to dig free.

The twin lights followed, blinking out a pattern beyond human comprehension. But The Child, looking up through tears at first, decided they seemed friendly. And over the years, as the glowing visitors returned to darkened bedrooms, closets, and even once, the bottom of a dry cistern still echoing with high-pitched screams of panic, their code revealed itself, along with the messages they brought.

Messages of hope, imparting wisdom that helped The Child understand that sniveling and screaming would never stop The Others, for sniveling and screaming had been what they wanted all along.

When The Child listened, things grew a little better. So when the lights flashed dark instruction, they were eagerly attended.

Even on those occasions when they called for a death.

Occasions such as their last visitation, after which the observer had allowed witnesses, logistics—and pure cowardice—to heap on delay after delay.