Beau lowered his gaze back to his guitar, then ran his calloused fingers along the spine. “What’d you think?”
“Think?”
“The music.”
Harley paused. Beau Arson always seemed to surprise her. She never knew what to expect of him, what he would say, what he would do, how he would react. She could not read him, could not predict him like she could so many others, and it left her unsettled. “It was beautiful,” she said in truth, though she would have been afraid to say anything otherwise. “Did you write it?”
He slid the guitar from his lap and placed it on a stand beside his chair. “I did. Just now.”
Harley raised her brows. She assumed the piece had taken him months to compose, as it had sounded so technically challenging and seamlessly performed. And it probably would take most people that long, she thought, if they could even create something of that caliber.
But, of course, this was not the case with Beau Arson. It came naturally to him, almost by rote, just as the average person brushed their teeth, combed their hair, or tied their shoes each day. Beau Arson picked up a guitar and he created, every day of his life. She wondered if the pain and sadness he carried inside him, had carried inside him since he was a child, fueled his creativity, acting as a muse, lifting his art to heights not otherwise reached.
He rose from his chair, and as he rose, his body extending to its full height, she seemed to lessen in his presence, cowering, if not physically, then at least internally. He stood over her, guiding his arms through the sleeves of his shirt, and though she was not as susceptible to temptations of the flesh as others were, she could see, at least theoretically, the attraction women felt for Beau Arson, the spell as Jed put it, he cast upon them. It wasn’t just that his body was physically beautiful and powerful, but there was something of the animal about him, a virility that spoke to primitive, forbidden desires.
“You bake?” he said, buttoning his shirt to the chest.
“Huh?”
He gestured to the apron Tina had loaned her that morning.
“Oh.” She felt her cheeks color. “Yes. That. Well, um, Matilda—my pig—she kind of ate a hole in my dress at the festival this morning, and you could see my granny panties—I mean my underwear through the hole—so I borrowed this apron from a friend of mine who’s a baker.”
He released a gravelly chuckle. “Harley Henrickson, you never cease to surprise me. So,” he said, clearly amused, “you get any takers?”
“Pardon?” Then she realized he was referring to the apron’s logo: Bakers Knead Hot Buns. “Oh,” she said, in serious consideration, “well, there was a drunk guy on Main Street this morning. He said I could knead his hot buns anytime.”
He smiled. “There you go.”
“I don’t know,” Harley said. “It didn’t look like he had many teeth. He probably can’t eat much but buns.”
A roar of laughter rolled from Beau Arson, one that surprised Harley, not only because it came from him, but because she hadn’t been trying to be funny. Realizing the ridiculousness of it all, she began laughing, too.
When the amusement had settled, and the two had returned to a comfortable silence, Harley approached the purpose of her visit. “Beau, there really is something I need to speak with you about.”
Registering the seriousness of her request, he drew a chair from a nearby table and gestured toward it. “Please,” he said with kindness, “have a seat. And would you like something to drink? I can make a pretty decent cocktail, but probably nothing compared to yours.”
“I’ll just have a scotch. Neat.” She didn’t usually drink during the day, but she needed something to help her through the impending conversation.
Beau filled two glasses with shots of scotch and returned, handing one to Harley. “So what is it you’d like to talk to me about?” He returned to his seat.
Harley took a sip of scotch and savored the smokiness as it burned down her throat. She drew in a breath and in a soft voice, said, “Beau, I know about Patrick. I know what he did to you—to your mother.”
Beau swirled his scotch, watching it collect on the sides of the glass. “You do?”
“Yes. I know that he killed your mother.”
Sadness fell over his face, and his expression regained that haunted look. “How’d you find out?”
“Let’s just say I pieced it together.”
“All those years,” he said, shaking his head. “All those years, I’d always wondered why he’d taken an interest in me, why he was always helping me out. Nobody else sure as heck ever did. It was so strange. He just seemed to appear out of nowhere one day when I was kid, started showing up at the Boys and Girls Club after school, volunteering in the afternoons, tutoring me, mentoring me.
“I had no idea at the time that he’d already set up a trust fund for me, that if anything were to ever happen to him, I’d be taken care of, financially anyway. I asked him one time why he did all of it, why he helped me out. He said he’d lost a son once, and he wanted to help out another boy who would’ve been about his son’s age. He even said he wanted to adopt me, at one point, but being a single guy who never planned to remarry, it wasn’t appropriate. So he became like a benefactor to me instead.”
“And you never knew the truth until he was diagnosed with cancer?”
“No. He said he was dying and that he wanted to confess the truth to me before he died. That he hoped I could forgive him, that maybe his kindness to me over the years would somehow make amends for what he’d done.” His voice trailed off, and he added, “It didn’t.” He took a sip of scotch, and after rolling it around his mouth in thought, and swallowing, he said, “I’m not even mad anymore, I’m just …”
“Sad?”
“Yeah.”
At that moment, the back door swung open and Marcus appeared, a bandage taped across the bridge of his nose. He looked as if he were about to ask Beau a question, then stopped when he spotted Harley.
“Oh, it’s you.” He glared at Harley. “What’re you doing here?”
“Leave us, Marcus,” Beau said quietly.
Marcus turned to Beau and began apologizing. “I’m sorry, Beau. I mean, I don’t know how she got in here. We thought the doors were all locked, I swear. She must’ve broken in somewhere.” He returned his attention to Harley and made a face. “And gosh, Deliverance, you look even more hideous than usual.”
Like a grizzly bear, Beau rose from his seat, his anger hurling like a fist across the room at Marcus. “I said leave us!”
Marcus stood stunned, his eyes moving from Beau to Harley, then back to Beau again. His look of surprise cowered to hurt, and he retreated through the open door, closing it quietly behind him.
“I apologize.” Beau returned to his seat and worked to calm his anger. “I care for Marcus. I do. We have a long history, but he tries my patience sometimes.” He turned to Harley, and with an expression of compassion in his eyes, he said, “And he can be cruel—cruel to those who deserve it the least.”
He returned to his glass of scotch. “Now, where was I?” He gathered his thoughts and continued. “Yeah, so when I was growing up, Patrick was the only person except …” He stopped himself mid-sentence and decided to take another course. “He was the only guy who ever gave a crap about me. And the fact that he lied to me about something so important, so crucial to my very existence, is just unforgivable.”
He rested the glass on the table beside him and ran his fingers through the dark waves that fell across his forehead. “I knew nothing about my mother until he told me about her the other day. He said that when it happened, he’d just moved to Notchey Creek after losing his wife and baby, that he was deeply depressed, and that he’d been drinking at one of the bars in town that night.
“As he was driving home, he rounded a curve on Maple Bluff. He cut the curve too close, he said, and before he had time to throw on the brakes, he hit a car that was parked on the edge of the cliff. His head must’ve hit the steering wheel with the impact, he said, and he blacked out for a bit. When he came to, the car he hit was on fire, and the front end was dangling off the edge of the bluff. He ran over and saw that there was a woman inside, a woman he said was my mother. She was already dead from the crash, but I was in the back, crying in my car seat. The doors were locked, so he broke the rear window with a rock and pulled me from the car before it careened down the bluff and exploded.
“Then, he took me to a Catholic monastery that was close by, Our Lady of the Mountains, and left me on the doorstep. The nuns there were French Carmelites. They named me Beau because they said I was the most beautiful baby they’d ever seen.” He gave half a laugh. “Hard to believe now, isn’t it?” He shook his head and resumed his story. “And then they gave me the last name Arson because of the soot I had all over my body. They said it was a miracle that a baby so covered in ash and soot didn’t have any burns anywhere on him. They said I had ‘risen from the ashes unscathed.’”
He unfolded his leather jacket from the back of his chair and drew his arms through the sleeves, buttoning it at the chest.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about my mother the last few days. Wondering if she’d lived, what my life would’ve been like. If it would’ve all been different. Having a family. And now I’ll never know, will I? All because of Patrick Middleton.”
“And he thought he found your father too, hadn’t he?” Harley said. “As another form of atonement for what he’d done?”
“Yeah.” He removed his guitar from its stand and placed it inside a black carrying case, which he then buckled to a close. “After Patrick told me the truth about my mother, he said he’d been looking for my father and had found him recently. He said my father was a career military man who’d fallen on some hard times since he’d returned from overseas. That he had PTSD from the Gulf War and it had led to some substance abuse problems and bouts of homelessness here and there. His name was Martin Evans and Patrick had arranged for the two of us to meet.”
“Did you consider it?”
“No.” He lifted the guitar case by its handle, and held it down by his side. “To tell you the truth, I’d rather just put all of this behind me. Sometimes I think I was better off just not knowing anything about my past. And this Martin Evans person could be anybody, really. Who knows if he’s even my real father? Maybe Patrick got it all wrong. Maybe this man would be somebody who’d just try to cash in on my fame?”
Harley did not mention she had found Martin Evans, or at least the man she presumed to be Martin Evans, in the ditch in Briarwood Park, and no one had seen him since. Even though Beau seemed resigned to move on with his life, she thought this might only add to his hurt and confusion.
“The police know you were acquainted with Patrick,” she said.
“Yeah, your sheriff made that perfectly clear when he came by to see me earlier. He’s convinced I drugged Patrick, that I killed him. And I did give him that bottle of whiskey they found at his house, that’s true, but it was sealed when I gave it to him, unopened, just your label …”
He looked over at Harley with a playful grin on his face. “Wait, maybe you …”
Harley returned his smile. Despite her suspicions of Beau Arson, she found herself liking him.
He shook his head and took a sip of scotch. “I don’t know, but it seems like your sheriff is out to get me.”
Harley recalled her meeting with Jed at the shop that morning, about his suspicions about Beau, and his jealousy surrounding Cheri. “Well, I think part of the problem is his girlfriend, Cheri. Jed thinks she’s attracted to you, that maybe something might’ve happened between the two of you.”
Beau considered this, but Cheri’s name seemed to hold no meaning for him. “I don’t know her.”
“She’s a model. Tall. Icy blond hair. Very thin. Wears black stiletto boots.”
“That sounds like half of L.A.”
“Well, you might not remember her, but she certainly remembers you, and she’s not helping you make friends with Jed. Cheri’s Jed’s weakness, you see, and she keeps him hanging by a string most of the time.”
“I’m sorry for him,” he said, “but women like that are a dime a dozen. She might’ve come onto me, yes—a lot of them do—but I don’t remember her, and there was nothing on my part. I’m not saying that I’m an angel or that I’m an innocent. There’s plenty of things I’ve done that I’m not proud of, especially in my past, but I don’t indulge in women who are in relationships of any kind. It’s too messy and not worth my time. I like things easy. Unattached.”
He looked squarely at Harley, the seriousness returning to his face. “And I didn’t kill Patrick Middleton. I know that’s really what you want to know. I was angry with him, yes, and it’s true that I never wanted to see him again, but I didn’t hate him, even then, even after everything he’d done to me. I loved him. And I still love him, as much as I don’t want to. What he did to me … it didn’t make me want to kill him. It broke my heart.”
He zipped up his leather jacket and picked up his guitar case again. “Mind giving me a lift, kiddo?”
“Where are we going?”
“The festival. I promised them I’d play. And I’m not one to break promises.