Mississippi Blues (30 page)

“Shhh.” His lips brushed at her tears. He moved a fraction and the pain sharpened.

She couldn't speak. It hurt to breathe. How could the pleasure he had been giving her just disappear? And why had no one ever told her it felt so bad to be united physically with a man? No wonder he said he didn't want to hurt her. He had meant it. God, how did women ever do this more than once? A great, bitter disappointment filled her. She wanted to curl up and cry.

Jace took her face in his hands and kissed her, gently, so tenderly she almost forgot he still had her pinned to the mattress. A slow awakening began in her. Although not comfortable, the ache wasn't as bad. He dipped his head and laved her breasts until her nipples hardened. As he took a pink tip in his damp, hot mouth, her back arched. His mouth loved her as if he had all the time in the world to please her. Tiny tingles began to build inside her. Involuntarily, her body lifted, pressing to his. He moved forward a millimeter and surprised her when it didn't hurt.

He tried again.

The tingles built to tremors.

He rocked his hips forward.

The tremors intensified.

He slid almost out, then back.

The tremors turned to waves.

He pressed deeper.

The waves boiled over, taking her to a crest … and left her hanging there.

Two more strokes and he shuddered and went still.

Slowly, her breathing returned to normal and she began to notice his weight.

“You okay?” he asked near her ear.

“Yeah.” Too embarrassed to look at him, and disappointed more than she wanted to admit, she turned her face away and closed her eyes.

“Hey,” he took her chin and turned her face toward him, “what's wrong?”

“Nothing.” She wanted to be alone to process what had just happened.

“Are you … sorry?” His voice, barely more than a whisper, sounded scared.

She opened her eyes. “No … no.”

“Disappointed?” His lips turned down.

She lied. “No. Are you?”

He bent and kissed her collarbone. “Baby, there's nothing you could do that would ever disappoint me.”

A small shudder of delight skipped up her spine. The feelings she'd been holding in for years bubbled to the surface, and without thinking she blurted out, “I love you.”

His face went stone still and his voice raked over her like a judge pronouncing sentence. “Don't confuse sex, even great sex, with love.”

He sounded so much like Jimmy Ray, she wanted to hit him. For a moment she froze. Then she shoved him. “Get off me. And for the record, it wasn't that great. I said it was okay.”

He rolled away and put his arm over his eyes as she sprang off the bed, hauling the blanket in her white-knuckled hands. If she let go, she knew she would strike him. “You are such an asshole.”

“We agree on that.” He sounded resigned. “I keep trying to tell you that, but you just won't listen.”

“Well, I'm listening now. I got it. Until we figure out who set you up, you're stuck with me. Then you can go on about your life with no sign of me in your review mirror.” She spun away, the blanket trailing behind her. SShe made it to the living room before the tears came, hot and fast.

Collapsing on the couch, she wrapped up in the blanket hoping it would cocoon her from Jace, from her humiliation. How could she have blurted out she loved him like that? She knew sex didn't mean everlasting love and marriage. She had been taken by the moment and blurted out the first thing that came to mind. Swiping at her nose with the edge of the blanket, she let her thoughts run rampant.

So stupid, stupid. A man like Jace wasn't going to fall in love just because he'd had sex. She'd reassured him she could handle it. Hah. She'd be lucky if he'd sit in the same room with her ever again, much less touch her. He probably thought she was planning the wedding right now. As if. The sooner they figured out who had set him up and he could go on about his business, and she hers, the better.

Wiping her tears, she sat up and wrapped her arms around her middle. She had turned her back on her family to be with him. There weren't a lot of options. She couldn't just walk in the front door of
LeFleur
and say, ‘Hi, I'm home.' There was only one thing to do.

Put on a who-gives-a-shit face and stick it out until the truth was found.

Throwing off the blanket like a snake shedding its skin, she got up and strode bare as the day she was born into the bathroom and climbed into the bathtub. She lathered her hair then laid back to soak her sore body. Her muscles trembled, her woman's parts ached, but it was the pain in her heart that felt like it would never heal. It would, it had too, she vowed.

No one could live feeling this rotten.

As Trey entered the driveway at
LeFleur,
he spotted an ambulance and two patrol cars in the driveway. A lump of dread filled his stomach. Jumping out, he sprinted for the door. Had they found Lindy? Or had his mother taken a turn for the worse? Heart pounding, he skidded through the front door.

A flurry of activity at the door of his mother's room drew his attention. Two EMTs, guiding a sheet-draped gurney between them came out of the room, followed by a white-faced Chief.

Trey's gaze shot between the chief and the figure under the sheet. “Mother? No … ” Trey took a step, and then faltered. “Chief?”

“Your mother, she … ” The strong policeman stumbled a little, looked confused. He seemed incapable of speaking and fell onto the sofa with his hands hanging between his knees. His face had no color and his eyes seemed to have sunk into his head. He appeared to have aged ten years in one afternoon.

“What happened?” Trey didn't wait for an answer and moved toward his mother. His throat closed. He couldn't swallow the lump lodged there.

The EMTs were busy maneuvering the gurney out the sliding glass doors.

“Wait.” Slowly, dreading what he would see, Trey approached the shrouded figure. As the EMTs stepped respectfully away, he reached to pull back the sheet. His finger closed around the cool material, his nerves seemed to be outside his skin. He couldn't think straight. When had his mother gotten so tiny?

“Don't.” The Chief's voice cracked through the room. “Do not look at her like that.”

Trey didn't lift the sheet, but he continued to stare at the shrouded figure, trying to remember his mother's face before she got sick. His heart clenched in a tight knot he didn't think would ever come undone. He had known her death was imminent, but he'd hoped to have more time with her. To be able to come to terms with all the things that would now forever be left unsaid.

He forced himself to nod at the attendants. He dropped the material. As he watched, they rolled the gurney out of the house and placed it in the waiting ambulance. After they closed the doors and drove away without lights, he turned toward the Chief. “Did you find her?”

The Chief's eyes were glazed over. Finally, he nodded.

“Where's Etta?” Trey walked to the bar and poured a bourbon — neat, the way the Chief liked it — and brought it to him.

Holding the drink with a shaking hand, but not raising it to his lips, the Chief said, “There's a note in the kitchen. She got called away. There was an emergency at her niece's house. Your mother was sleeping. Etta thought it would be okay to leave her alone for an hour or so.”

“Mother passed while Etta was gone?” Trey sat next to the Chief, wanting to put his arm around his shoulders to comfort both of them somehow. But he knew his father wouldn't welcome it. “She died alone?”

He raised bleary eyes. “Your mother was murdered. Hill came in this house and smothered your mother with her own pillow.”

“What?” Trey rocketed to his feet. This obsession was getting out of hand. Why wouldn't the Chief admit there might have been someone else who could have killed Soloman? And why would he think Jace would want to kill his wife? “You don't mean that. Who would want to murder Mother? She had a terminal illness. All this death has affected the way you're thinking. Leroy hung himself today. Jimmy Ray Hunt a day ago. That's it.”

“I have proof.” The Chief waved a trembling hand toward his wife's room. “See for yourself.”

With disbelief in his heart, Trey trudged into his mother's sickroom. Normally dim, with low lights and the shades pulled, it now blazed with every light. The unpleasant scent of a stuffy hospital room and the lingering stench of her cancer assaulted his nose and he tried to ignore it. Nothing looked out of place. Her silver brush, comb, and mirror on the dresser looked exactly the same. He didn't touch the rows of medicine on the tray next to her bed. The closet stood empty, save several silk robes. Mother's clothes would be in the closet upstairs in the bedroom she'd shared with the Chief for twenty-five years.

What proof did the Chief think was here? Trey glanced at her unmade hospital bed and the pillow lying there. He averted his eyes then moved toward it. Glancing toward the door he saw the officers busy in the bathroom. They hadn't dusted in here yet. With a flick of his wrist he turned over the pillow.

Leaning close, he saw it.

A strand of dark hair.

He took a pair of clear plastic gloves Etta used off the nightstand and slipped one on. Then he picked up the hair and stuck it inside and empty medicine bottle. Jerking off the glove, he stuffed it and the bottle in his pocket.

The hair wasn't his mother's.

It was auburn.

He stuck his head in the bathroom door and froze. Two officers stood with their backs to him. One of them aimed a camera at the mirror and the resulting flash ricocheted off the surface, straight into Trey's face. Blinded for a moment, he wasn't sure he saw what his eyes were telling him when he could see again.

Etched across the mirror in bright, blood red lipstick were the words:

Two down

Two to go

Trey looked and looked again, not sure his eyes were seeing things correctly. Two down and two to go? Lindy and now his mother. Were the next two he and the Chief? Who had left the evil message? Had the writer killed his mother in cold blood? Why? One thing was certain — when he found out who had done this Trey would kill him with his bare hands.

The dark-haired policewoman saw him and frowned. “You can't be in here, sir. This is a crime scene.”

Numbly, he nodded and backed out.

The Chief hadn't moved. He stared into the amber liquid within the glass held between his hands. Trey walked over and sat beside him, searching for healing words.

“Did you see the message?”

“Yes, sir, I did.” He wanted to deny it, to push the awful image out of his head. But he couldn't. Someone had been in his mother's bathroom and left a note of hate scribbled across her mirror. “Why would someone want to hurt Mother and Lindy?”

“I'll tell you who. Jace Hill, that's who. He snuck in here and smothered your mother in her bed.” Some of the bourbon in his glass splashed to the floor. “He took my daughter. She's probably laying dead in a swamp somewhere. He's out there laughing at us right now.”

“How do you know Jace did these things?” Trey tried to remain the voice of reason. His mother's death had made the Chief's blind obsession worse.

“Did you see what he said?” the Chief asked. “‘Two down'? That means your sister and your mother. He motioned between them. “‘Two to go.' That means you and me. Half of our family is gone. If we don't hunt down Hill and put him back in a cage where he belongs, you'll be next. He'll save me for last to punish me.”

“Sir, shouldn't we let the officers do their job? Maybe they'll come up with a whole different scenario.” Trey wanted to distract the Chief from his vendetta. “For all we know, there might be a serial killer on the loose. Three people have died this weekend.”

“It was Hill,” the Chief insisted. “If you weren't packing a hard-on for his sister, you'd see it too. Your poor mother isn't even cold an hour and you're jumping to every excuse you can come up with to cover for that girl. Face it; Hill smothered Emily in her own bed.”

Trey flinched at the image of his former best friend holding pillow over his frail, cancer-ridden mother's face as she fought for her life. If Jace had done this thing, Trey would pull the switch himself. Even Summer couldn't defend him. “Don't you find it odd that two other people have died this week, sir? Jimmy Ray Hunt and Leroy Eaton.”

The Chief shifted his weight. “What are you suggesting? That your mother had some connection with a lowlife like Jimmy Ray Hunt? Emily didn't even realize white trash like that existed. And Leroy? He hung himself for one reason. He was a manic-depressive. I've known it for years.”

“He seemed okay at the picnic yesterday, sir,” Trey said mildly. Leroy had been a little odd, but he hadn't seemed so depressed that he would go home and hang himself in his barn within an hour.

“Leroy was a master of deception.” The Chief sipped his drink and stared at the opposite wall. “Always pretending, always hiding from things that hurt him.”

“Like what, sir?” Focusing on something but his mother kept Trey's grief at bay. If he stopped for a moment and let it knock him down he didn't know if he could get back up.

“He's been in love with my wife forever. I knew it all along, but he never acted disrespectful, so I left it alone. They died on the same day. Leroy would like that, if he knew.”

Trey felt his mouth drop open. The quiet little barber had carried a torch for Emily? He'd hidden it well. “Leroy Eaton was in love with my mother?”

“Sure. We all were. Me, him, Tom down at the grocery store. Even old Buford Krebbs carried a torch for Miss Emily Devereaux.” He snorted. “Course if I'd married old dog-faced Viola I'd be eyein' other women, too. Buford looked past Viola's shortcomings toward her daddy's money. But I was the lucky one, the man Emily picked. I won the prize. A fine lady, indeed. I didn't care a lick about her daddy's fortune. Never did understand why a sweet woman like her would pick a poor old goat like me, but she did.”