Unforgivable (33 page)

“Silas,” she whispered, drawing out the word.

Her fingers tightened on his bare back, and she took a quick series of breaths. He felt the build of pressure, felt her surrender to it, and let himself go right along with her.

He braced himself with his arms as they drifted down to earth. Every time she inhaled, her breasts pushed against his chest. He could smell her sweat, a sweet, light smell that he’d never forget. Her neck was damp, and he nuzzled that place where her birthmark adorned her skin.

She slid her arms around his neck and pulled him closer, until their combined heat made them part. He lay on his side, his head propped up with his hand, and looked at her.

She looked away for a moment, making him realize how long her eyelashes were. She wore no makeup, and didn’t need any. Her cheeks were flushed, her skin glowing. He brushed his fingers down her hair.

“I like your hair like this,” he said, letting the bottom curl around his finger.

“It was impulsive. Like doing this.”

He lifted the corner of his mouth in a smile. “I liked this, too.”

That stole the glow from her face. “I’m sorry if I wasn’t very good.”

“Katie, you’ve got to be kidding.” He tipped her face to make her look at him. She wasn’t kidding. “You were great. And it wouldn’t matter anyway. This wasn’t about sex.”

She finally met his gaze with eyes so full of vulnerability, it nearly broke him. “What was it about?”

He swallowed hard. “Don’t ask me to define it. There’s no way I could describe how I feel about you.” His chest hurt thinking about how much he wanted her.

She closed her eyes. “Silas, do you…love me?” When he didn’t answer, she opened her eyes. 

He’d never thought about what he felt for Katie, what he’d always felt for her. He’d never pinned it down to that one word. 

She cleared her throat. “Because I felt something from you too, when we were…making love. Just now.”

He took her hand and focused on her fingers, which was easier than looking into her eyes. “I’ve cared about people…not many, but I have cared for a few people in my life. And then there’s you. I don’t just care about you, Katie. It’s really all tangled up inside me, what I feel for you.” He could feel her frustration at his non-answer. He pulled her hand to his mouth and kissed the back of her fingers. Thunder rumbled in the distance. “I love you, Katie. I’ve probably loved you since that first moment I held you. When I came back to town after you’d turned eighteen, I probably wanted to see what could become of it. Not that I would have admitted that at the time, even to myself. But you were about to marry Ben. I could feel that you cared about him, even if you weren’t in love with him. And he definitely loved you. I realized then that it wasn’t going to be that kind of love between us.”

He felt pain spike through her. “Why didn’t you talk to me then? When I was eighteen.”

The feeling of loss flowed through him, reminding him how he’d felt then. But he wasn’t sure if it was coming from him or her. “You needed Ben. He was your rock, your savior. You didn’t need two saviors.”

“Is that all I am to you? Someone to save?”

He finally met her troubled gaze. “That’s all I’ve ever known with you until now.”

“And now?”

“Katie, we can’t let this get complicated, not now. That’s why I didn’t want this to happen. That and the fact that you’re married—emotionally married, anyway. I never wanted to cause you any guilt or confusion.”

“Well, too late, fella. Because I love you, too.”

He pulled her to her feet. “No, you don’t.”

She raised her eyebrows at his statement. “Oh, I see. You’re allowed to love me, but I can’t love you. Is that it?”

“That’s it.”

“That’s pretty selfish, don’t you think?”

He handed her clothes to her. “I’m not the one you should be loving.”

“Do you think that if I love you, you have to love me back? Is that it?”

“Love isn’t about expecting something in return.” He ran his hand through his hair. “I’ve loved you all these years and never expected anything in return.”

She surprised him by reaching out for his hand and pressing it to her soft mouth. He tried to resist the urge to pull away, but couldn’t.

She let out a sigh. “But you’ve got something in return, and you won’t accept it. That’s it, isn’t it? You can’t accept love, just like you can’t accept gifts. I just did the same thing you’ve done to me more than once, kissing your hand, and you couldn’t handle it. Does it make you feel weird that I love you?”

He grabbed up his own clothes and started getting dressed. “Yes, it does. Maybe I’m just weird. Spooky Silas, that’s what they called me. I am spooky. Maybe I’ve got so many other people’s feelings running around inside me, I don’t know what my own feelings are. Maybe I don’t even have any.”

She opened her mouth to say something, but three short blasts of a horn in the distance stopped her.

“Tow truck’s here,” he said. “Let’s go.”

They rode through the dark night in silence once they were back on the road. Katie kept pushing away her feelings about what had happened in the woods because she didn’t want Silas to pick them up. 

“It’s not fair that you can feel me and I can’t feel you,” she said at last.

“Life’s not fair.” He didn’t look at her, though his fingers tightened on the wheel.

“Wow, that’s profound. Thanks for sharing that with me.”

That got his attention.

“I used to think I was unlovable,” she continued. “Okay, sometimes I still do. I mean, even my mom couldn’t bear to stay alive for me. I wasn’t reason enough to hang in there, to fight her demons for.” She leaned against the door so she could face Silas. “Do you feel that way too?”

“There’s nothing unlovable about you.”

“But there is something unlovable about you, is that what you’re saying?”

His fingers tightened again. “Yes.”

“Because you’re in touch with this killer?”

“It’s why I’m in touch with him. Because there’s something inside me that was open to him. It’s the same thing that drew me to crime writing. It’s like the instinct to look at an accident as you drive by, even though you know you might see something horrible.
Because
you might see something horrible. But you can’t look away. That’s what writing crime is like for me.”

“What if…there was someone looking with you? Someone to pull you away if you stared too long?”

“Remember that quote I told you? How when you stare into the abyss, it also looks inside you? I wouldn’t drag anyone into that darkness with me. And what if…what if I’ve already looked too long?”

She couldn’t feel what he was feeling, but she could clearly see that something haunted him. “Silas, you know everything about me. Tell me what’s going on inside you.”

He shook his head before she’d even finished the sentence. “Not until I know for sure.” He pulled onto an old dirt road that wound back into the woods. The Boss poked his head between the seats checking out the reason they’d stopped. Silas scratched his head, and The Boss settled back on the seat with a sigh. Silas looked at her, weighing something. “I’ve struggled over whether I should tell you something—something that would change the way you feel about your mother’s death. It was part of the reason I came back when you were eighteen, to see if you were ready to hear it.”

She leaned toward him, wondering if he could feel the pressure weighing down her chest. “What? Tell me.”

He searched her face as thunder rumbled behind them. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a flash of lightning. 

Finally he said, “She didn’t kill herself.”

She nearly lost her balance, as though his words had physically hit her. “What are you saying? The Blue Devil drain opener was right there, she swallowed it…oh, God. Somebody made her swallow it.”

He was still holding onto the steering wheel as though to keep himself from touching her. “I didn’t know that I could pick up someone’s feelings after they’d died, but I felt a strong need to go to your trailer afterward. I was staying at the sheriff’s house at the time, waiting until they finished the paperwork to send me off. I sneaked out early one morning and walked to your trailer. 

“They had the crime scene tape across the door, but I broke in and went inside. I didn’t know what I was expecting to find. I walked through the trailer, and I could feel a lingering trace of your terror, what you’d probably felt when you found her. Then I felt a different kind of terror. A struggle. More than being afraid of whoever was in here with her, she was afraid for you, for what would happen to you. What I knew for sure was she had no intention of dying that night.”

Katie couldn’t talk for a few moments. She envisioned her mother’s struggle and the pain of the lye going down her throat. He reached over and took hold of her arm. 

She pushed away the images, not ready to deal with them yet. “The sheriff said they found you at the trailer. Did you tell them?”

“I knew what they’d think if I told them everything, but I asked them to look further. I said I didn’t think it was a suicide. All I got them to do was question me. Where was I that night? Did I know Ellie well? They tried to pin it on me. They took fingerprints and searched the trailer to find something to link me to the scene. But they found nothing.”

“Were you afraid I’d think you’d done it too?”

“I didn’t know. You were too young to understand any of it then.”

She sat back heavily as her bones seemed to drain right out of her. “She was murdered. Who would have wanted to kill her? She wasn’t raped. Didn’t have anything to steal. She never bothered anyone. She was the most afraid person I knew; she didn’t trust anyone.”

“Someone had hurt her once. I could feel it whenever she was around a man.”

“This changes everything. I’ve got to find out who did it. Was it the same person who’d hurt her before? Was it a boyfriend? My…father?”

“Do you know who your father is?”

“She never told me.”

Her mind was still sorting through the facts and implications. Someone had killed her mother and gotten away with it. Maybe someone she knew, someone she’d said hello to once.

Silas put the vehicle in gear and headed toward Flatlands again. The rain started, a heavy downpour that isolated them inside the car. She curled up on the seat and tried not to imagine what her mother’s last moments were like. She understood his difficulty in deciding whether to tell her or not. Living with the fact that her mother had committed suicide was different than living with the fact that she’d been murdered. Especially if no one believed it.  

What it did was remove the shame layer by layer. Everything she’d felt since she was nine peeled away to reveal different feelings. Still loss, still anger. Not directed at her mother, but at a faceless stranger.

It didn’t lessen the pain, though, that their last conversation was laced with anger. That Katie had left her mother alone that last night, and that possibly the killer wouldn’t have come into their trailer if she’d been there.

“It’s not your fault,” he said.

She pressed her hands on either side of her face. “Stop getting into my head and my heart! Leave me alone!”

He didn’t reply, only continued driving in silence, but he was there inside her. She could feel him, just as she’d felt him during other traumatic times. He said he couldn’t help it, and she believed him, but it didn’t make it easier to live with.

He slowed down as they turned onto the road their houses were on. “What are you going to do about Ben? About what we learned?”

She pushed through the haze of her dark thoughts. “I’ll have a day to think about it before he returns.”

“You know I’ll be here if you need me.”

“Silas, I don’t want you there. I need some time to sort out my feelings.”

He only nodded; but of course, he could probably feel her confusion.

When they pulled down her driveway, she was even more uncomfortable to see lights blazing through the trees. She hadn’t left the lights on. 

Silas cut his lights and stopped. “Stay here.” He got out and walked around the bend. When he returned, he said, “Ben’s there and so is Gary. What do you want to do?”

She bit her lip and contemplated her options. Showing up with Silas wasn’t going to be a good thing. “Ben knows I sometimes take walks through the woods at night. He hates it, but I still do it once in a while. Pull back out onto the highway and drop me off there. I’ll walk back.”

But he parked the car and walked with her. They stood at the edge of the woods looking at the house. Both men were obviously inside.

“Are you sure you can handle this?” he whispered in her ear.

She fought the urge to shiver as his warm breath tickled her. “I have to. I’m not going to be afraid like my mama was. Look where it got her.”

He gave her hand a squeeze and stepped back. “If you need me…” He let the words drift off. “Forget I said that.”

“I know.” She knew he’d be there, knew she only had to call him. She walked forward into the wash of light and up the steps. Her heart was tight when she opened the front door. And her knees nearly buckled when she took in the living room.

CHAPTER  18

Everything had been trashed. The couches were slashed and upturned, the bookshelves cleared of their contents. The coffee table was lying on the carpet, its legs broken from the tabletop. The porcelain replicas were scattered on the carpet in a thousand pieces. The flocked wallpaper had been torn in places.

Before she could take in any more of the house, Ben broke out of his daze and took her in his arms. “Katie, I’ve been worried sick. I had an uneasy feeling all day, like something wasn’t right. I kept calling and you weren’t here, so I came home…to this. You can imagine what I thought.”

She tried to sort through everything, first that something
had
been wrong, because she’d been making love with another man. Then that their house was in shambles, that someone had done this. After that, the truth she now knew about Ben.

“I’m sorry I worried you.”

He pulled her tight against him and stroked her hair. “I don’t want you to leave the house anymore. I can’t handle this.” His hands tightened. “You’ve been doing way too much wandering lately.”