Hale's Point (24 page)

Impatiently he untied the straps of her swimsuit and peeled
it down to her waist, cupping her breasts with his hands. She broke the kiss,
gasping.
This can’t happen, this can’t
happen.

Lowering his head, he took one taut nipple in his warm mouth.
She groaned as he kissed and suckled her, a groan of both despair and yearning.
She wanted to feel his lips on every inch of her body, she wanted him inside
her, she wanted to give herself to him.

How could this be? How could she still want him, knowing what
he was? He had the power to make her forget herself, that’s why. When he
touched her, she dissolved.

Summoning all her strength, she pushed him away. Released of
his mouth and hands, she quickly turned and sprang to her feet before he could
stop her. Standing with her back to him, she pulled up her suit and retied the
straps.

He sat up. “Harley? What’s going on?”

Without answering him, she walked around the pool to the
shallow end, feeling Tucker’s eyes on her the whole time. She lifted her robe
from the chaise where she had left it and put it on as he gained his feet and
walked toward her. “Come on, Harley, talk to me.”

She tried to walk away; but he stepped in front of her and
grabbed her arm. She tried to shake him off, but his grip tightened. “Don’t
freeze me out, Harley. Talk to me. What’s the matter?”

She looked away from his huge brown eyes. “I just… I don’t
want to…to be with you that way. I just don’t want to.”

“I can see that. You mind telling me why?”

“Look, I know we had a deal—”

“Forget the deal. This isn’t about any deal. This is about
you and me.”

She straightened her back. “There’s never been any ‘you and
me’.”

“Then what’s been going on here all summer? You mind telling
me that?”

She met his eyes. “I’ve been a gullible little idiot. That’s
what’s been going on.”

“What?”

She grabbed his hand by the wrist and flung it away.

“Harley, I don’t—”

“It’s over.” She circled him, opened the French doors, and
went into the house. Glancing back, she saw him reach into his back pocket,
pull out his wallet, grimace, and hurl it angrily across the patio.

She ran to her room, closed and locked the door, then curled
up on her bed, shaking from head to toe.

It took about half an hour for the tremors to cease. She got
up and went to the window. The patio was dark. She stood still and listened for
a minute; the house was quiet. Carefully opening the door, she walked down the
hall to the bathroom, dropped her robe and swimsuit onto the tiled floor, and
took a long, hot shower.

Wrapped in a towel, her wet hair combed straight back, she
returned to her room. Tucker was there. She froze in her tracks, staring from
the doorway.

He stood at her dresser, opening the top drawer, which was
about chest-high on him. He had traded his wet khaki shorts for olive-green
fatigue pants and a white T-shirt. When he saw Harley, he looked up, his eyes
lowering automatically to the towel and her bare legs, then returned his
attention to the drawer. He felt around inside, lifting a stack of scarves and
looking under it. Closing that drawer, he opened the one beneath it.

“What are you looking for?” Harley asked.

“My cigarettes.” He pushed aside a jumble of socks.

“You can’t be serious,” she said. “You haven’t smoked for six
weeks. You’re going to start again now?”

“My motivation for quitting is gone.”

“You don’t want to be healthy anymore?”

He slammed the drawer closed and yanked another open. “I didn’t
quit for my health. I quit for you.” He glanced at her and then back at the
contents of the drawer. It was her underwear drawer, and he blinked at the
display of patterns: zebra, leopard, tiger, Dalmatian, snakeskin.

“They’re not in there,” she volunteered.

He shut that drawer and opened another. T-shirts. He pawed
through them freely. “I wanted to get into decent enough shape to win you. I
knew I couldn’t just have you. I had to earn you. I thought, this woman is
special. She deserves the best.”

Finished with the T-shirt drawer, he squatted down and opened
the bottom one, hesitating at the neat piles of bras and stockings.

“They’re not in that one, either,” Harley said.

He closed it, stood, and looked around. Zeroing in on her
night table, he slid open its single drawer, finding it filled with odds and
ends: memorabilia, buttons, sewing things, pens and pencils, safety pins…

“I tried to be the best for you.” he said. “I made myself
over for you. I reinvented myself just for you. And meanwhile I waited for you.
For six weeks I kept my distance from you, and don’t think for a second it was
easy.” He pushed the drawer back in and looked at her. “I thought you
understood why I was going to all that trouble. I thought you wanted me as much
as I wanted you.”

He turned away again and went to her dressing table, which
also had only one drawer. Rummaging through her modest collection of makeup and
toiletries, he said, “I guess I was pretty naive. You’re in the market for some
doctor or lawyer, just like Phil said. Not some crippled high-school dropout
who makes his living hauling stuff from one place to another.”

“Oh, please. I
never
thought of you that way.”

“Didn’t you? I mean, I know I’m more than that, I know I
deserve you. Maybe I didn’t six weeks ago, but I do now. Only now you don’t
seem to know it.”

He looked around in frustration. No more drawers. Without
thinking about it, Harley glanced toward her bed, and Tucker noticed. His
eyebrows shot up. “You’re kidding,” he said. Lifting the mattress with one
hand, he snatched the two packs of Camels from beneath it with the other. “Is
this what they teach you in business school? To hide your valuables under the
mattress? I thought that was out of style.” He pocketed the cigarettes, except
for one, which he placed between his lips.

“Tucker, don’t.” Harley walked over to him and grabbed the
cigarette away from him.

His hand closed around her wrist. “The first time you did
that, it was kind of cute. It’s lost its charm.” He took the cigarette back and
released her wrist. Producing a pack of matches, he lit up, grimacing as he
inhaled. He sat on the edge of her bed and rubbed his neck, then looked up at
her, his eyes briefly drawn again to the towel in which she was wrapped. “So,
what now?” he asked, leaning forward, elbows on knees. “What do you want? Level
with me this time, Harley. Tell me what you really want. You want me to get
lost? Just tell me the truth this time.”

The truth. “I know you want to see your father. And this is
more your house than mine, so I’d feel funny asking you to leave. I don’t mind
if you stay. As long as…as long as you understand—”

“That I’m to keep the hell away from you,” he finished,
meeting her eyes. “That I’m not to call you honey, that I’m not to touch you or
tell you how much I want you. I’m not to think about you every waking hour,
imagining what it would be like to take your clothes off and make love to you.
I’m not to wake up in the middle of the night in a sweat because I’ve dreamed
about you again. Right?” Harley just stared at him, unable to speak. He closed
his eyes, lowered his head, and sat that way for a few moments, the ash growing
longer on his
unsmoked
cigarette. “The thing is—” he
looked at her, and she saw the honest confusion in his eyes “—you just didn’t
seem like the kind of woman who would let things get this far and then yank the
rug out from under me.”

Her response was immediate. “And you didn’t seem like a drug
dealer. I guess we’re both full of surprises.”

His gaze never left hers. The ash from his cigarette dropped
onto the rug, but he didn’t notice. Finally he said, “That’s what this is
about?”

She said, “I found two articles from the
Miami Herald
in your father’s desk this morning—”

He stood. “Show me.”

After a brief detour to the bathroom to substitute her robe
for the towel, Harley led him to the study. She opened the drawer and pulled
out the first newspaper. Sitting in the leather swivel chair, he crossed his
legs with graceful ease-something that would have been impossible for him six
weeks before—and read the article in its entirety with no change in expression.
When he was done, she handed him the second article, and he read that, as well.
Still holding the newspapers, he sat back and studied her for a minute.

When he spoke, his voice was a soft rasp, and his words
seemed to have been chosen with care. “I can understand how this must have made
you feel, finding all this out. Your childhood was ruined because of your
parents’ dependence on drugs, I know that. That’s a big part of the reason I
didn’t want to tell you about Miami. I didn’t want you to think I was connected
in any way with drugs, and I certainly didn’t want you to know I’d been in
prison. Something I found out after I got out was, people aren’t interested in
why you served time, whether there was any justice in it or not. The very fact
that you were in there at all, brands you as a criminal permanently. The stigma
is almost impossible to erase.”

She folded her arms. “You’re assuming I’ll agree with you
that there was no justice in your being sent to jail. That’s assuming a lot.”

He nodded slightly, as if he had expected her to say this. “I
was convicted on the basis of Chet’s testimony. He swore in court that I’d been
away from the house all night, that he’d heard me return half an hour before
the police got there. I swore that I’d been asleep since eleven o’clock. It was
a little more complicated than that, but that’s the gist of it. As soon as Chet’s
father found out what happened, he arranged for this high-powered, silk-suited
lawyer to coach him through his testimony. I was represented by this overworked
young public defender who didn’t seem to know a damn thing about me or the case
except that I had to be guilty as hell or they wouldn’t have arrested me in the
first place. Anyway, the jury believed Chet, and I was convicted on all counts
and sentenced to spend half of the rest of my life behind bars.”

“You’re saying you were innocent?”

He nodded.

She said, “I’d find that a little more plausible if there was
any reason for Chet to have invented that business about you being gone all
night. But why would he have lied? You and he were friends. You turned down a
record deal for him. If anything, he would have been grateful. He would have
felt like he owed you.”

He sighed wearily and looked at the floor. “You’d think so.
But some friendships are more… one-sided than others. People always tried to
warn me about Chet, but I was… I believed in loyalty. And I never thought he’d
actually do anything to hurt me.” He absently patted the pocket of his T-shirt,
seeming vaguely surprised to find the cigarettes there. He pulled out the open
pack, looked at it for a second, then tossed it in the trash. Then he did the
same with the full pack.

He said, “I’d served seven months of my sentence when they
called me down to the warden. Seems Chet was at the controls of a
Beechcraft
Sierra filled with cocaine and heroin that lost
power somewhere over Texas. He tried for an emergency landing, but ended up
hitting this grain silo dead-on. The engine went up in flames, and the cabin
with it. They got him out, but he was… He lived for six hours. He was
conscious most of that time, but he knew he was dying. He talked nonstop, they
said, and he was surprisingly coherent. He told them about the night he
borrowed my Piper Comanche without asking, for that drug run that got
intercepted, and about how he set me up for the conviction to protect himself.
The police tape-recorded his confession, the investigation was reopened, and I
was completely exonerated. They released me on Christmas Eve, sixteen years
ago.”

He took a deep breath and met her eyes. Unsure what to say,
or what to believe, Harley just stared back. He opened the drawer and replaced
the two newspapers, saying, “Apparently Chet’s father didn’t see fit to fill
R.H.
in on the final chapter. For all I know, he thinks I’m
still in prison. He’s probably glad people think I’m dead. He probably wishes I
were.”

Still, Harley couldn’t think of anything to say. Rising,
Tucker walked to the doorway. “What I just told you is the way it really went
down, Harley. You can believe it or not, it’s your choice.”

He turned and was gone.

***

If only the truth were a matter of choice, but it wasn’t. It
was a matter of facts.

The next morning, Harley drove to the library of the State
University of New York at Stony Brook, in search of the facts.

“Do you have back issues of the
Miami Herald
on microfiche?” she asked the clerk, an emaciated
young woman with black-dyed, buzz-cut hair and a pierced nose.

The clerk turned a page of her magazine. “Year?”

“Uh… sixteen years ago. December twenty-fourth.”

Seven minutes later the clerk handed over the microfilm,
saying, “You
gotta
return it to the desk when you’re
done.”