“I hate him.” The passion in her voice bubbled up from underneath and spilled out.
Ryder saw how animation revived her and was glad.
“That he could come here and tell me that story about Mellie! I could kill him, I could.” Sheets, pillows, pillow-cases flew around her. “I hate him. I’ll never forgive him.” Her voice was a monotone, flat. Her fury showed not in the voice but in her jerky movements, her doubled-up fists wound tightly in the sheets as she stripped them from the bed. “If I ever see him anywhere near my house again, I’ll swear out a warrant.”
Leaning against the doorjamb, Ryder shifted.
Looking up, she glared at him. “Don’t you say one word to me. And don’t you dare defend him. I know he’s pathetic. I know I shouldn’t hold a grudge against him, but I do! I do! And I can’t help hating him because he was the last one to see Mellie and if he’d waited two minutes—one, even—she’d be here with me!” Josie tied the linens up with one knot and threw them toward the doorway. They landed at his feet.
Pacing in front of the closed window, Josie threw him quick glances while she stormed back and forth. “If I could forgive him, I would. But I can’t. He’s a weasel and a worm, and if there’s a heaven, they’ll slam the door in his face, and I—”
“He’s a jerk,” Ryder said mildly. “And he’s not telling the truth.”
She whirled on him. Her skirt whipped around her legs, and her hair belled out, settled in the airless room. “How do you know?”
“What was Mellie wearing that day?” He knew she would remember.
“Red tights. A navy skirt and shirt. A red-and-navy jacket,” she recited by rote. “Why?”
“Because he saw her go into the woods. He saw the color of her jacket or her tights in the woods. That’s why. It was cold. A lot of the shrubbery was killed in those December and January frosts. There would have been bare spaces. He saw her go into the woods. And I think he saw something else, too. But he’s afraid to tell because he doesn’t want to lose his job.”
“Why would he lose his job?” She sank onto the edge of the bed. Her hands gripped the edge of the bare, narrow mattress.
“He drinks. Or used to. Either way, he’s scared. And he’s afraid that people are blaming him for what’s happened to the children.”
“They searched the woods,” Josie said, numbed, and his heart ached for her. “For a week. They combed through the woods all the way down to the river. Stoner told me so. He organized volunteers and they divided into sectors. It was as if she’d never been.”
“Do you think Milton would have harmed Mellie? Or Eric?” Ryder added, watching her closely.
“A lot of us have a darkness inside we’re not aware of. Who knows what anyone would do?” She bent over her knees, toward the floor. Her hair swung away from her face, brushed the old boards.
“Where were you that day, Josie?” Ryder watched the sunlight on her face turn her skin to velvet peach, glisten in the tiny beads of perspiration along her lip. “You weren’t here, were you?” He didn’t accuse her. Wouldn’t. Not Josie. He knew her too well. Only an act of fate could have prevented her from being home for her daughter. Something had kept Josie away that day.
The sun splashed across the bare boards of the floor, turned the varnished old wood mellow with light.
Stirred up by her vigorous action, dust motes caught the blaze of sun and turned to diamond dust.
“I was five minutes behind the bus. I’d even left work early, but a sailboat went through to the gulf. The bridge tender raised the drawbridge. I was the first car in line. I was stuck in traffic.” She pulled her legs up onto the bed and wrapped her arms around them. “Five minutes.” Her laugh skewed up, up toward a level of despair beyond imagining. “For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse.” She stared at him over the green of her skirt. “You know the rest, Ryder.”
“For want of a horse, the war was lost. Five minutes, Josie. And if Henry Milton had waited as he was supposed to—”
“But he didn’t. And I wasn’t here. When I’d always been here before. So of course I hate Henry Milton and can’t stand to see him.” Acid burned in her words. “And the rest, as they say, is history. One of the reasons why I’m not crazy about history, Ryder. We can’t change it. You and I have that in common, don’t we? Guilt and recrimi-nation.”
“Psychic twins, Josie?” he suggested lightly.
“Guilt’s a powerful bond. Beats the heck out of super-glue, I bet.”
There was nothing he could answer. She was right. They were bonded by guilt and by a carnality that threatened to burn them both to a cinder. “Hey, green eyes, if there is such a thing as a psychic bond, I’ll bet a year’s income you and I are welded by now.”
“These last three days beat the heck out of those group encounters that charge you a fortune to get in touch with your inner self, I guess.” Her laugh was shaky, but she’d managed it. “Demon snakes. Rampaging elephants. Phantom phone calls.” She pulled a strand of hair over her shoulder and ran her fingers through it, untangling the silky stuff that slipped through her fingers like cool, dark water.
“Are you afraid of Milton?” he asked, thinking about the phone calls and the snake that had been coiled up on her step. Henry Milton was a country man. He wouldn’t be afraid of snakes, even rattlers.
“No,” she replied slowly, her brow furrowing in thought. “I don’t like him. I’m uncomfortable around him. But I don’t like many people lately, so that doesn’t say anything about Henry, believe me.” She stood up, went to her dresser and moved the copper pennies into a star before she turned back to him. “Should I be afraid of him?”
“You’ve had those phone calls. They might not be wrong numbers. Or interference.”
“It doesn’t matter. I won’t change my phone number.” Josie stacked the coins up, toppled them over with a touch.
“All right.” Ryder didn’t like Milton, but whether or not that made the man a killer was another matter. “Seemed a bit too coincidental for me that he showed up today after all these months.”
“You don’t believe him?”
“Yes. No. I definitely don’t believe in coincidences. We’ve had too many of them for my taste, Josie.”
“And you want to go to the circus,” she said as she walked toward him, bringing with her the faint, fragile scent of dying roses.
“That I do. Will you come with me?” he asked again.
“I’m not going to stay here,” she said and looked around the steam box of a room. “And I don’t have the nerve today to be outside by myself. Without someone around, anyway. Right now, I can’t bear to stay in this house.” She nodded vehemently. “Oh, yes, Ryder, I’m going to go to the circus. Give me ten minutes and I’m out of here.” She grabbed a pair of shorts hanging on the back of the door near him and pulled out a white T-shirt and a blouse that made him think of strawberry soda pop, fizzy and pink.
He waited in the kitchen while she took a shower. He heard the water go on. Off. On. And she was out, her face scrubbed and shiny, her fizzy pink blouse knotted at her stomach over the shirt. Her legs made the shorts seem nonexistent, but Ryder decided he liked the effect, that long, long length of tanned skin. But it wasn’t only the length, he thought, studying them as she raced back to the bedroom.
Her legs had a strength to them that made them beautiful. Like Josie herself. The tapered loveliness of muscle and skin was a wonder of nature, and she reminded him of a delicate, perfect hummingbird. Small and strong and exquisitely beautiful. Ryder didn’t think anyone had ever shown her just how beautiful she was.
Watching her flash and dart around the sweltering house, he wished he could be the one to show her.
“We might as well leave your car here and take mine,” he said as she stood on the doorstep looking at the two cars uncertainly.
“I have to change. And if it’s late by the time we’re finished, Josie, you know I won’t let you come back here by yourself. Not while there’s so much unfinished business.” He opened the passenger-side door for her.
“I should insist on taking my car. For form’s sake, you understand. To prove I’m a not a woman who uses a man. And because I don’t want you thinking I’m a wussie.” She wrinkled her nose at him. “That most of all.”
“All right,” he said solemnly, “I won’t think you’re a wuss.” He waited while she slid into his car, her legs lovely against the cream leather. “I’ll still respect you tomorrow.”
She’d covered the purple smudges under her eyes with one of those lotions and creams women worked wonders with, and anyone who didn’t know what she’d been through in the past three days sure wouldn’t see it broadcast on her face. You had to look for the tiny traces of strain, the evidence of tears shed.
And Ryder suspected those tears were the most bitter of all, the wormwood and gall to her soul. Those were the tears that called forth tenderness from him, those the tears that made him want to shelter her, comfort her in the old ways men and women had comforted each other throughout time.
When he stopped to shower and change at his house, he insisted she stay outside. In the car with the engine running. With the windows up, open a crack for air. “Lay on the horn if anything at all happens, hear me, Josie? Don’t even think twice about it. Just blast that horn and take off down the road.”
“What about you? What about your car?”
“Hell, I don’t care about the damned car, Josie. I was going to leave it at the parking lot all night, anyway, so that I could ride with you yesterday.”
Later when he returned after one of the fastest showers he’d ever taken in his life, she tipped her chin toward the roof of his car and then asked, “Do you believe in evil, Ryder?” She leaned her head against the window while she waited for him to answer. She’d pulled her hair up into some kind of twisted knot on top of her head and secured it with two bright hair combs the color of ripe tangerines. “Real evil?”
The tires swished against the concrete pavement. “Evil? Yeah, Josie, I reckon I do.”
“I never used to.” She was silent. The leather seat whispered against her skin as she shifted closer to the door. “But I believe in it now. I can feel it, Ryder.”
“Me, too, Josie.”
“But it doesn’t frighten you? The unknown? The unknowable?”
“When I thought I was going crazy, I was frightened. The idea that my self was turning against me scared the living daylights out of me.” He waited a moment before adding, “And now I’m worried about you. About what could happen to you if I can’t protect you. If I’m responsible for introducing evil into your life. That terrifies me, yes.”
“You felt responsible for Sandi, too.”
“This is different, Josie.”
“How?” She pursed her mouth pensively. The indentation in her bottom lip cried out to be touched, to be kissed. “You’ve tortured yourself for months over your sense of responsibility for Sandi, Ryder. I don’t want you worrying about me. I’m not your responsibility, understand?” Her small, round face was endearingly earnest. “I don’t intend to be the cause of another session on the rack for you if something happens to me. Do you hear me? Nobody’s responsible for what happens to me except myself. We’re both consenting adults, so to speak. And since I’m choosing to take part in this witch-hunt, why should you worry about me, Ryder?”
Because I’m beginning to care too much, Josie Birdsong, that’s why. Because I look at you and see all the things I’ve missed in life and never knew I’d want someday. And now it’s too late.
“I reckon,” he drawled, “it’s because I’ve been dying to play Caveman Charlie all my life, sweetheart. A kind of vestigial remains of the male instinct to serve and protect.”
“Oh,” she said sweetly, and the kissable indentation vanished, reappeared. “Like an appendix?”
“Yeah,” he muttered. “Something like that, I expect.”
Josie slipped her shoe off and tucked one leg under the other. “Good night, sweet prince,” she said with a wrinkle of her nose. “You do your male stuff and get us there. But if you get lost—”
“I know. Wake you up, right?”
“Gosh, no, Ryder. I’d get lost in a paper bag. I was going to suggest stopping at a gas station and asking for directions.” Her expression was sweet innocence.
“Of course.” He slapped his forehead. “Damn. I should have figured that out for myself. One of those missing genes us guys lose out on, huh?”
“You betcha.”
She used her hand as a pillow against the window and door. “Us wimmenfolks got all the really good genes. Try to remember that when you start feeling like thumping your chest and strutting around, okay?”
“I’ll try my feeble best, Josie. But, you know, being a guy, I can’t vouch for how successful I’ll be, but—”
“Shut up, Ryder,” she said, her voice silky with amusement. “You can’t quite manage the humble-male role. You’ll need to practice the meek shtick some more. You don’t have quite the right servile look in those eyes.”
“Whatever you say, Josie.”
“Arrgh. Let me go to sleep. Please. I’m about this far—” she held a thumb and index finger a quarter of an inch apart “—from committing terrible violence on your person if you don’t let me go to sleep. For five minutes. That’s all. Please?” She closed her eyes.
The brilliant sunlight wasn’t merciful. Deprived of her essential self, her animation, her face looked worn and drawn, even with the makeup masking the shadows.
With her eyes shut and her sassy tongue silent, she looked so small and helpless that Ryder felt as if he were invading her privacy by looking at her.
She was so tired that he wanted to tell her she didn’t have to work so hard at being cheerful, he didn’t care, but if that was how she wanted to play the game, he’d match her, shot for shot.
They didn’t speak for the rest of the trip to the circus grounds. Josie fell asleep with her cheek pressed against the car window. Her left hand slipped out from under her cheek and fell palm up next to him. Carefully, quickly, like a thief, he brushed the back of one knuckle against a line of scratches and calluses.
She worked so hard on that damned garden.
Turning off the Trail, he watched for the signs indicating the way to the circus grounds.
Maybe she was right to keep the atmosphere light. Maybe it helped diffuse that sense of hovering evil and darkness for her. Maybe it would help him ignore the craving to touch her, a craving he suspected was tied in with everything else.
Keeping the mood between them light wasn’t working for him. He couldn’t close his mind or his senses to her anymore.
He’d lost the ability to distance himself from her pain and sweetness.
Whether or not he could find that ability again was going to be interesting.
Whether or not he wanted to, ah, that was the real question, he decided as he pulled into the field that had been turned into a temporary parking lot.
“Wake up, sleepyhead.”
Hearing the voice, Josie stirred. She didn’t want to wake up. Much more pleasant to stay where she was with the low voice murmuring near her like the soothing sound of a river. For the first time in a long while, she felt safe. Protected.
A cold finger poked her bare arm. Ryder.
“Come on, Josie. Time’s a-wasting, and we got off to a late start.” The finger ran down her arm, brushed her palm.
She sat up. “We’re here?”
“Yes. And I didn’t get lost.”
“Oh, goody. Would you like a medal?”
“Of course. The larger the better. You know how us guys are about the issue of size.” He shot her a bland look. “Vanity or something, I reckon.”
Josie delighted in the way Ryder kept his face impassive in the face of her needling, but his mouth would give a small twitch. She’d learned to watch for it, and half the pleasure of razzing him came from seeing whether she could provoke that twitch.
The noises and smells of the circus grounds assaulted her, overwhelming her senses, confusing her. Too much noise after the long months of solitude. First the parade and now all these sensations. She moved closer to Ryder as he shut the car door after her. She couldn’t get a deep breath in all the color and noise. “This wasn’t a good idea, Ryder.”
He frowned. “We don’t have to stay.”
“Give me a minute, please?” Looking around, she tried to accustom herself to the wall of sound. Shrieks, drums, rumbling engines. Flags hanging limply from the main tent.
And everywhere, people. Rushing, screaming. Excitement turning their expressions grotesque.
People with children.
She hadn’t seen this many children all at once since the first day of school a year ago come September. Not even at the parade. The small whimper that escaped embarrassed her and she clamped her hand over her mouth.
“Sheesh, Josie, I should have thought.” Ryder bent over her, his lean body curving into her, and she sensed that he wanted to take her in his arms, shield her from the onslaught.
Truth was, at that moment she would have gone willingly, devil take the consequences.
“It’s the kids, isn’t it? Aw, sweetheart, come on. We’re leaving.” He touched the bend of her elbow, turned her back toward the car door he’d opened.
“No. I’m all right. I’d forgotten how quiet my place is. Was. This is good. I haven’t forced myself to do anything except go to work and go home. That’s the problem. It’s all a little overwhelming. But it’s good for me,” she added. “If I don’t quit being a hermit, I’ll start hating the whole human race. I mean, look at how I took off after poor Henry Milton. He’s harmless.”
And her reaction to Ned Dugan. But she didn’t tell Ryder about the creepy feeling Ned caused. It seemed too personal in a way she couldn’t identify.
“I want to stay, Ryder,” she insisted as she saw that she hadn’t convinced him. “Where do we go to find the trainer? How do you know he’ll even talk to you?” Generated by Ryder’s continuing silence in the face of her nervousness, Josie’s words poured out of her.
“Josie,” Ryder said gently, “you keep amazing me. I thought you were this reticent earth woman who’d dance naked down the street before she’d say more than three consecutive sentences. And I’m usually such a good judge of character.” He shook his head regretfully, but his sideways glance teased her. “I thought maybe the other night was an exception, but you really are a talker, after all, aren’t you?”
Startled, Josie glanced at him and recognized the truth of what he was telling her, a truth that went deeper than she was prepared to deal with. “Must be your fault, then, Ryder,” she said, scuffing the ground. “I’ve never been much of a chatterbox with anyone else. Except Mellie, of course. But she talked constantly. I picked it up from her. If you want me to hush up, I can. Easy as pie. Say the word.”
“The word.” His mouth twitched, once, at the left corner, and sounds faded from her consciousness in the tenderness of the look in his eyes. “But that’s all right, Josie. I like listening to you.” He lifted a hand toward her hair, as if he was going to brush a strand back, and the tenderness and kindness in his eyes blinded her, dazzled her with its affection.
If Bart had ever once looked at her that way, she would never have let him walk away. She would have fought tooth and nail to save her marriage for a look like the one Ryder gave her now. Affection. Compassion. Emotions more powerful in their way than the wickedly seductive physical hunger that had swamped them last night. These emotions had nothing to do with conquering and surrendering. This tenderness made her want to go to him and offer him herself, her heart, her soul, in return.
She blinked.
Seeing something in her expression, Ryder bent closer, his eyes darkening. And then he stepped back, and she felt as if an enormous magnet pulled her with him, all the little electrical impulses in her cells pointing toward him.
“On second thought, let’s stay, Josie.” His voice was gruff. “We’re better off here.”
Better to share that moment in public than back at her house.
Or his.
They both left the words unspoken.
Going in front of her to make a path through the milling people, he led them toward the big top and the wagons around to the back. Twice, shoved from behind by the energy of the crowd, Josie bumped into him. His light gray linen jacket was smooth and cool against her face, his back strong and wide enough for a woman to lean against, and she wished they were back at her house, even his, and could forget all the reasons that kept them apart.
With the cool, crisp fabric of his jacket rubbing against her cheek, Josie longed to know if she could make his lean body burn with that incredible heat again. Wistfully she wondered if she had the power to make him lose control, to need her so badly that only her word would stop him.
The strength of his male response to her made something deeply feminine in her nature hum, as though he’d turned on a switch in her that no one had known was there. Except Ryder. She was beginning to wonder if, indeed, all that heat came from outside them as Ryder suggested.
She wasn’t so sure.
The question lingered, invited her to find the answer. To see if there was a shore beyond the sea of grief.
Such a risk to take in the face of everything that threatened. She stared at the straw-packed, dusty ground where thousands had walked before her.
And kept a careful distance from Ryder.
Outside the enclave of train cars where the trainers apparently stayed, an empty field had been turned over to a model-airplane exhibit.
Throngs of adults and children ringed an open area where airplanes with nine-foot wingspans swooped and soared. Tugging the hem of his jacket, Josie stopped Ryder. “You go ahead. I’ll wait here. I’d rather stay outside, anyway, even in the heat. I’ll stay right here by this stand.” She indicated the cold-drinks-and-cotton-candy stand. As he hesitated, she said, “It’s broad daylight, Ryder. There aren’t any elephants, or dogs, or snakes anywhere in sight. I’ll be fine. Really.”
“You’re sure?”
Josie nodded. The field of planes was visible from the train car. “I’ll scream like a banshee if anything happens. But I want to be outside. Really.”
An eyebrow lifted in question, he shrugged. The gray jacket moved with him as if it, too, had been custom-made to fit the wedge of his shoulders, the lean muscles. “All right. But I won’t be long. I’m going over to that car.” He pointed to one with large bales of hay and straw near it. “Jacob Bloom is the man I’m looking for. I called from my house while I was getting dressed. Nothing like portable phones. Technology, Josie. Miracles.”
His tucked-in half smile made her heart turn over.
Ryder was a man who would wear well over the years, a man for the long haul. Ryder was a man who would keep a woman on her toes. He would tease and razz and nag, but he wouldn’t let her forget for an instant that she was a woman and he a man.
A man who could make a woman smile and forget, for long, wonderful moments at a time, the clouds and darkness.
His gray back, somber in the riot of color, moved away from her.
Josie wanted to call him back, cling to him.
A woman was truly lost if she clung. She’d learned the hard lesson that a woman needed to know that she could stand alone. Because, whether she willed it or not, the time would come. She would need her own strength.
But the promise of a strength shared, even briefly, oh, that promise cast a spell a woman would find difficult to resist.
And for that reason, if no other, Josie turned away, turned to the field of brightly whirring, dipping, soaring planes.
One brilliant yellow plane circled, rose, shrieked to the sky, and in an instant came dive-bombing toward a steel blue, stubby plane sedately circling around the field. Like a hornet, the yellow plane buzzed in, swung away, coming closer and closer to the blue target as the onlookers squawked and yelled in excitement.
Drawn by the drama in the chalk-dust white sky, Josie meandered closer, making sure that she stayed in view of the train car Ryder had indicated.
Ten men wearing orange-striped vests were in charge of the field. A sign indicated that the model-plane society of Angel Bay was contributing all proceeds to the pediatric wing of the hospital. Onlookers had a choice of flying the planes in a pattern and landing, taking off and guiding the planes around until the end of a five-minute time limit. On the side closest to Josie, two men were in charge of the aerial combat, selling chances to guide the blue or yellow plane as each dodged and attacked.
Begging their parents for permission, children swarmed around the adults lined up for a chance at the controls of the yellow plane. The man in charge of the blue plane had his line of customers, too, but it was the yellow plane’s vividness and sharklike design that drew the bigger crowds.
Josie herself felt an itch in her hand to try the controls. But she wanted the blue plane. Its squatty solidness appealed to her for the same reasons her ugly phone and Ryder’s homely bird pot did. Their ordinariness called to her.
Glancing back, she saw that if she got in line, Ryder would be able to see her. The train car was clearly visible to her, so she took her place in line and dug out three dollars for her chance.
Although she didn’t know the man in charge of the blue plane, she recognized Chuck Woolverton in front of the other line of yelling, screaming kids and adults. Pocketing the money from the eager participants lined up to try their hand with his plane, Chuck nodded to her, his gaze shifting to the thirteen-year-old who waved a ten-dollar bill at him. “Sure, kid, you’re next. But hold your horses. You have to wait until the planes land. You can pay for one turn a time, and then you have to get back in line. One turn, one chance. Five minutes a shot.”
“But I don’t want to go to the back of the line. Let me have an extra chance, Woolly. Besides, I helped paint it. Nobody’ll care.”
“No way, son.” Woolverton caught Josie’s eye and looked away, obviously harassed by the boy’s insistent demand.
“Fair’s fair, Woolly,” the boy whined. “Give me an extra minute on the Mustang, then, ’cause I can take the blue dude. That B-25’s a dinosaur. Don’t be such a hard nose, Woolly.”
“Not today, Doug. Can’t do. Rules is rules. You know that.” Usually a low-key patient man, Woolverton looked as if he were ready to bolt and run as his frazzled glance met Josie’s and fell again to the boy. Turning, Woolverton looked over his shoulder at the woman operating the yellow plane.
As he turned, Josie realized that Woolverton was the short, thin man Stoner had been talking to at the parade. A local mechanic who specialized in rebuilding car engines, Woolverton had fixed the valves in her car in February, not charging for the repair, and Josie knew she should feel grateful to him, but she couldn’t.
His kindness had seemed patronizing, a kind of pity, and she’d stayed away from him ever since, made uncomfortable by his gushing attempts to express sympathy. She’d sent him a check.
He hadn’t returned it.
But he hadn’t cashed it, either, and her checkbook still carried that amount, an unwelcome reminder every time she paid a bill or cashed a check. Hostility toward the man stirred in her again, even now, and she shifted, facing away from him.
Being with Ryder had made her aware of how isolated she’d become, how rusty her ability to interact in a normal way with normal people. Josie told herself she should go over to the man and apologize for the way she’d treated him after his generosity, but she couldn’t make herself take the first step in his direction.
Even watching his casual touch of the boy’s shoulder make her flinch.
When her turn came, she listened to the instructions.
“If you crash, you pay cash. Got it?” The man handed her the controller. “Don’t get cute and whip it around until it gets smashed or augers into the ground, lady. That’s my advice. You’re not going to have much chance against the P-51, anyhow. Just circle the cow pasture and have a good time.”
Waiting until her teenage opponent was ready, Josie had the eeriest sensation that she was being watched. She’d had the same feeling at the parade. Both times, the sensation of being singled out in a crowd had been eerily uncomfortable.
The hairs on the back of her neck rose, and she turned, but the whistle shrilled the beginning of the time limit, and people were screaming and clapping as the yellow shark plane came streaking low and fast at her plane still on the ground.