Best Kept Secrets (25 page)

Very softly, Alex said, "Stacey told me something else.

It was an offhanded comment, not a revelation. She said it as though it was common knowledge--something I should already know."

"What?"

"That you wanted to marry my mother." She refocused on him and asked huskily, "Did you?"

He averted his head for a second, then said, "Yes."

"Before or after she got married and had me?"

"Both." When he saw her apparent confusion, he said,

"I don't think a man could look at Celina and not want her for his own. She was beautiful and funny and had this way of making you think you were special to her. She had ..."

He groped for the adequate word. "Something," he said, closing his fist around the elusive noun, "something that made you want to possess her."

"Did you ever possess her?"

"Physically?"

"Did you ever sleep with my mother?"

His expression was baldly honest and terribly sad. "No, Alex. Never."

"Did you ever try? Would she have?"

"I don't think so. I never tried. At least, not very hard."

"Why not, if you wanted her so much?"

"Because Reede would have killed us."

Stunned, she gazed at him. "Do you really think so?"

He shrugged as his disarming smile moved into place.

"Figure of speech."

Alex wasn't so sure. It had sounded literal when he said it.

He scooted along the seat of his Jaguar until they were sitting very close. He slid his fingers up through her hair, laid his thumb along her neck and stroked it lightly.

"That's sure a dreary subject. Let's change it," he whispered, brushing an airy kiss across her mouth. "How about leaving the past for a while and thinking about the present?"

His eyes wandered over her face while his fingertips touched each feature. "I want to sleep with you, Alex."

For a moment, she was too stunned to speak. "You're not serious?"

"Wanna bet?"

He kissed her in earnest then. At least, he tried to. Tilting his head, he rested his lips upon hers, pressed, tested, pressed harder. When she didn't respond, he pulled back and gave her a puzzled look.

"No?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"You know without my telling you. It would be crazy.

Wrong."

"I've done crazier things." He lowered his hand to the front of her sweater and fingered a patch of soft suede.

"Wronger things, too."

"Well, I haven't."

"We'd be good together, Alex."

"We'll never know."

He ran his thumb along her lower lip, tracking its slow progress with his eyes. "Never say never." He bent his head and kissed her again--affectionately, not passionately--then returned to the driver's side of the car and got out. ", At the door, he gave her a chaste good-night kiss, but his

expression was indulgent and amused. Alex knew he thought she was just being coy and that wearing her down was only

." a matter of time.

She was so befuddled by his come-on that it was several minutes before she noticed that the red message light on her telephone was blinking. She called the motel's front desk, retrieved her message, and called the specified number. Even before the doctor got on the line, she knew what he would say. Nevertheless, his words shocked her.

"Miss Gaither, I'm terribly sorry. Mrs. Graham passed away earlier this evening without ever regaining consciousness."

Twenty-one

Alex knocked and waited until Reede called out, "Come in,"

before entering his office. "Good morning. Thank you for seeing me on such short notice."

She sat down in the chair in front of his desk. Without asking, he poured her a cup of coffee to her liking and placed it in front of her. She thanked him with a nod.

"I'm sorry about your grandmother, Alex," he said as he resumed his seat in the creaky swivel chair.

"Thank you."

Alex had been away for a week, handling the details of her grandmother's funeral. Only Alex, a handful of former coworkers, and a few of the nursing home patients had at tended the chapel service. After the burial, Alex had begun the unwelcome chore of clearing out her grandmother's room at the nursing home. The staff had been kind, but there was a waiting list, so they had needed the room emptied immediately.

It had been an emotionally stressful week. As she had sat staring at the modest casket, while organ music played softly in the background, she had felt an overwhelming sense of defeat. She had failed to fulfill the promise she had made to herself and to her grandmother: She hadn't produced Celina's murderer in time.

More defeating than that, she had failed to win her grandmother's absolution and love. That had been her last chance; she wouldn't have another.

She had given serious consideration to throwing in the towel, telling Greg that he'd been right, and that she should have taken his advice from the beginning. He would enjoy seeing her humility, and he would immediately assign her another case.

That would have been the easier course. She would never have to enter the city limits of Purcell again, or cope with the hostility that flew at her like missiles from everyone she met, or look into the face of this man, who generated myriad ambiguous feelings inside her.

From a legal viewpoint, she still had a case too weak to stand up in court. But from a personal perspective, she couldn't quit. She had become intrigued by the men who had loved her mother. She had to know which one of them had killed her, and whether or not she was responsible for her mother's murder. She would either have to deny her guilt, or learn to live with it, but she couldn't let it go forever unresolved.

So, she had returned to Purcell. She was staring into the pair of green eyes that had haunted her thoughts for a week, and they were as compelling and disturbing as she remembered.

"I wasn't sure you'd be back," he told her bluntly.

1

"You should have been. I told you I wouldn't give up."

; "Yeah, I remember," he said grimly. "How was the dance the other night?"

His question came out of the blue and evoked a knee-jerk response. "How did you know I went?"

"Word gets around."

"Junior told you."

"No."

"I can hardly stand the suspense," Alex said. "How did you find out I went to the Horse and Gun Club?"

"One of my deputies clocked Junior doing eighty-one that night out on the highway. Around eleven o'clock, he said.

He saw you in the car with him." He was no longer looking at her, but studying the toes of his boots. "You sure were in a hell of a hurry to get back to your motel."

"I was ready to leave the club, that's all. I wasn't feeling well."

"The barbecue didn't sit well with you? Or was it the people? Some of them make me sick to my stomach, too."

"It wasn't the food or the people. It was, well, one person: Stacey Wallace . . . Minton." Alex closely watched for his reaction. His face remained impassive. "Why didn't anyone tell me that Stacey had been married to Junior?"

"You didn't ask."

Miraculously, she was able to hold her temper in check.

"Didn't it occur to anybody that their hasty marriage might be significant?"

"It wasn't."

' 'I reserve the right to decide the significance of it myself.''

"Be my guest. Do you think it's significant?"

"Yes, I do. The timing of Junior's first marriage always struck me as strange. It's even stranger that the bride turned out to be the judge's daughter."

"That's not strange at all."

"Coincidental, certainly."

"Not even that. Stacey Wallace had been in love, or lust, with Junior since the day she first laid eyes on him. Everybody knew it, including Junior. She certainly made no secret of her devotion. When Celina died, Stacey saw her chance and seized it."

"Stacey didn't strike me as an opportunist."

"Grow up, Alex. We're all opportunists when we want something bad enough. She loved the guy," he pointed out impatiently.' 'He was sick over Celina's death. I guess Stacey figured her love could make his hurt go away, that it would be enough."

"It wasn't."

"Obviously. She couldn't make Junior love her back. She sure as hell couldn't weld his zippers shut." Vexed, he gnawed on the corner of his lip. "Who spilled the beans about this? Junior?"

"Stacey herself. She confronted me in the powder room and accused me of upsetting her life by reopening this case.''

"Gutsy lady," he said, nodding approval. "I always liked her."

"Oh, really? Did you sleep with her, too? Or did the Gail sisters keep you satiated?"

"The Gail sisters, huh?" He barked a short laugh. "I know Stacey didn't talk to you about Purcell's notorious triplets."

"Junior filled in the gaps."

"Must have been quite an evening."

* 'Most revealing.''

"Oh, yeah?" he drawled. "What'd you reveal?"

She ignored this well-placed insinuation. "Reede, what was the rush? Junior wasn't in love with Stacey. For the sake of argument, let's say he talked himself into marrying her.

Why did they marry when they did?"

"Maybe she wanted to be a June bride."

"Don't make fun of me!" She shot out of her chair and moved to the window.

He whistled low and long. "Boy, are you ever in a rotten mood."

"I just buried my only living relative, remember?" she flared.

He cursed beneath his breath and raked his fingers through his hair. "For a minute there, I did forget. Look, Alex, I'm sorry. I remember how bad I felt when I buried my old man.''

She turned to face him, but he was staring at nothing.

"Angus and Junior were the only ones out of the whole goddamn town who came to the funeral. We didn't even hold it in a church or the funeral home, just at the grave site.

Angus went back to work. Junior returned to school so he wouldn't miss a biology test. I went home.

"Not long after lunch, Celina came to my house. She had skipped school just to come and be with me. She knew I'd feel low, even though I hated the son of a bitch while he was alive. We lay down together on my bed and stayed there until it got dark. She knew if she didn't go home, her mother I would get worried. She cried for me because I couldn't." ; When he stopped speaking, there was a ponderous silence in the room. Alex was still standing by the window, motionless and transfixed by his story. Her chest hurt with heartache for the lonely young man he'd been.

"Was that the first time you made love to Celina?"

He looked straight at her, got out of his chair, and approached her. "Since you broached the subject of love lives, I how's yours?"

The tension snapped, as did her temper. "Why don't you stop beating around the bush and come right out and ask?"

"Okay," he sneered. "Has Junior made it into your pants yet?"

"You bastard."

"Has he?"

"No!"

"I'll bet he's tried. He always tries." His laugh was deep and stirring. "Bingo." He raised his hand and stroked her cheek with the backs of his fingers. "You're blushing, Counselor."

She swatted his hand aside. "Go to hell."

She was furious with herself for blushing like a schoolgirl in front of him. It was none of his business who she slept with. What bothered her most, however, was that he didn't seem to care. If she had to describe that glint in his eyes she would call it amusement, possibly contempt, but certainly not jealousy.

To retaliate, she asked suddenly, "What did you and Celina quarrel about?"

"Celina and I? When?"

"The spring of your junior year. Why did she go to El Paso for the summer and start dating my father?"

"Maybe she needed a change of scenery," he said flippantly.

"Did you know how much your best friend loved her?"

His goading grin vanished. "Did Junior tell you that?"

"I knew before he told me. Did you know, at the time, that he loved her?"

He rolled his shoulders forward in a semblance of a shrug.

"Nearly every guy in school--"

"I'm not talking about infatuation with a popular girl, Reede." She grabbed his shirtsleeve to show just how important this was to her. ' 'Did you know how Junior felt about her?"

"What if I did?"

"He said you would have killed him if he'd tried anything with her. He said you would have killed them both if they had betrayed you."

"A figure of speech."

"That's what Junior said, too, but I don't think so," she said evenly. "There were a lot of passions stirring. Your relationships with each other were overlapping and complex."

"Whose relationships?"

"You and my mother loved each other, but you both loved Junior, too. Wasn't it a love triangle in the strictest sense of the word?"

"What the hell are you talking about? Do you think Junior and I are a couple of queers?"

Unexpectedly, he grabbed her hand and flattened it against Jus fly. "Feel that, baby? It's been hard more than it's been soft, but it's never been hard for a fag."

Stunned and shaken, she pried her hand away, subconsciously rubbing the palm of it against her thigh, as though it had been branded. "You have a redneck mentality, Sheriff Lambert," she said, supremely agitated. "I think you and Junior love each other the way Indian blood brothers do. But you're competitive, too."

"I don't compete with Junior."

"Maybe not consciously, but other people have pitted you against each other. And guess which one of you always came out on top? You. That bothered you. It still does."

"Is this more of your psychological bullshit?"

"It's not just my opinion. Stacey mentioned it the other night, and not at my prompting. She said people always compared the two of you, and that Junior always came in second."

"I can't help what people think."

"Your competitiveness came to a head over Celina, didn't it?"

"Why ask me? You've got all the answers."

"You had the edge there, too. Junior wanted to be Celina's lover, but you actually were."

A long silence followed. Reede regarded her with the concentration of a hunter who finally has his quarry in the cross hairs. The sunlight streaming through the blinds glinted in his eyes, on his hair, on his eyebrows, which were slanted dangerously.