Shameless (The Contemporary Collection) (31 page)

She need not have hurried. Reid did not come after her. When she looked out the window, there was no one there. He was gone.

It was a long time before she slept that night. Images came and went in her mind, changing like a kaleidoscope equipped with sound. Keith and Reid in the dark at the lake. Reid with the little girl at the family reunion. The shadowy figure of a man who was not Reid watching Evergreen. Wen in her boat crossing the lake. The Reverend Taggart speaking of marriage. Reid and Charles with their heads together in front of the computer. Gordon and his mother at Keith's funeral. Bud accusing her of stupidity. Aunt Beck talking of old scandal and new. Gordon stomping from his car. It seemed there was a pattern there somewhere, some answers that she needed, if she could only see them.

She wondered, as she replayed the words Reid had said to her, if her doubts of his innocence had the power to hurt him as his did her. It was a strange idea, perhaps, since it would only be possible if he was, in fact, innocent. But didn't it show that if he thought she might be guilty, then he could not be? He could not suspect her of a crime he had committed himself. That was elementary. But only if it was possible to trust him.

Shall I kill him for you?

She had been so certain of his meaning as she faced him there at the steps. Yet, in the dark hours of the night, her doubt returned. It was possible she had misunderstood, and the words had been an offer of service after all. Wasn't that the position he had taken with her from the beginning: unrelenting, altruistic, all too competent service?

There were dark circles under her eyes and the tightness of a tension headache behind her forehead when she got up early the next morning. The idea of staying at home with nothing to do except think, staying where people could find her to complain or accuse, was intolerable.

She decided it was time to reestablish some semblance of a routine to her days. She had been neglecting the antique store. It was unfair to leave Wen to carry on alone for so long. Pulling a full skirt of grass-green twill and a matching cotton sweater from her closet, she began to get dressed.

Cammie spent the morning at the shop, helping unpack the most recent acquisitions from an estate sale. There was a great deal of junk in it: rusting silverplate, furniture store prints in flaking gilt frames, boxes of old books from which silverfish ran at the slightest touch, a collection of salt and pepper shakers shaped like farm animals. But there were also several pieces of Rockingham and Majolica earthenware, a Limoges porcelain chocolate service, plus a rosewood parlor set from the 1860s that still had the original silk brocatelle upholstery.

The grimy work and change of interest, not to mention Wen's caustic and irreverent comments on the things people thought worthy of saving, gave a lift to Cammie's spirits. She was beginning to feel halfway normal by the time noon rolled around.

Wen had gone to the kitchen in the back to heat homemade vegetable soup for their lunch. Cammie stayed in the front with a customer. She was wrapping the Britanniaware candlestick that the woman had bought when the brass shop bell rang.

The lanky shape and fine blond hair of the woman who stepped inside were instantly recognizable. Keith's girlfriend, Evie Prentice, flashed a quick, tense smile, but made no move to approach, wandering instead toward a grouping of old teddy bears. She bent to pick one up, caressing it softly, then held it an instant against the swell of her body under the oversized T-shirt she wore. When she put it back down, there was a wet sheen of tears in her eyes.

Cammie finished what she was doing and rang up the sale. When the door bell had clanged with the customer's departure, she moved slowly toward Evie. Her gaze rested on the dark circles under the girl's eyes as she said quietly, “How have you been, Evie?”

“Fine, just fine.” Evie's smile was overly bright as she swung to face her.

“I looked for you at the funeral, but you weren't there.”

The smile faltered. “That kind of thing is for families. I know Ed down at the funeral home; he let me in after everybody else left. I got to say good-bye, and that was — the main thing.”

“And the baby? You're feeling all right?”

“Yes, but — I saw your car out front, and you were so nice before. I thought—”

Cammie touched the other girl's hand briefly. “There is something wrong, then; I thought so. I expect you would like to sit down. Come over here and tell me about it.”

There was a back corner where a motley group of old chairs were pulled up around a potbellied stove with ornate chrome trim. There was no fire in the stove today, but the corner was quiet and out of the way. Cammie gestured toward a rocking chair, while she took a side chair with swan-neck arms.

“I guess just about everything is wrong,” Evie said as she settled into the rocker. She looked at Cammie, then glanced away again with color rising under her pale skin. “I don't mean to say anything bad about Keith, really I don't. I loved him and I — I think I would have been good for him. But he left me in sort of a mess.”

“How is that?” Cammie made the words as encouraging as possible.

“Well, he was paying the note on my trailer and the utilities, buying the groceries. He made me quit my job, so the only thing coming in was what he gave me. I didn't like it — with the other men I let come around, I kept working so as to be independent, see? Not that there was that many, only one or two. But there was the divorce coming up, and it seemed important to Keith to be supporting me. At least, until lately. Anyway, he got behind on the trailer note, and I always had to remind him when there was nothing left to eat. I had a little saved, but it — didn't last long. With him gone now, I've got no money. And nobody will hire me, not with the shape I'm in, not in this town.”

“I can imagine.” From the bitterness of the last words, Cammie thought the other girl had not had an easy time of it with her job-hunting.

“I purely hate the idea of going on welfare, though I guess I've got as much right as anybody. I've already seen about having the baby over at the medical center in Shreveport, where it won't cost anything, so that's all right. But what I'd really like is to get away from Greenley and everything that's happened. Only there's not much chance of that, what with everything being the way it is.”

Beyond where they sat, the door from the back opened and Wen stuck her head out. As she saw who Cammie was talking to, her face went blank with surprise. Cammie gave a slight shake of her head. Wen rolled her eyes but withdrew, though she left the door open a crack.

Evie Prentice, oblivious to the byplay as she stared down at her hands resting on her swollen abdomen, went on. “I hate to come bothering you again, but I don't know where else to turn. My last hope was Reverend Taggart. I thought maybe there was some church fund—” She stopped, as if to regain control, then went on again in broken tones. “You'd think a preacher would know all there was about forgiveness for sin and Christian charity, wouldn't you? But he had nothing for me except a sermon. Told me I had made my bed, and I could lie in it with whoever paid the price. Only thing I despise more than welfare is a hypocrite.”

There was pain and desperation in the girl's voice. In an effort to help her regain her composure and save her the necessity of asking, Cammie said, “Tell me how much you need.”

Evie looked at her with doubt and hope shining through the tears in her light blue eyes. “I couldn't take your money. Honestly, I couldn't. But Keith said — he promised he would take care of me and the baby, no matter what. I know it's weird to ask you, but I thought maybe you knew of a bank account or something he might have set up for us.”

There was nothing, Cammie knew that with absolute certainty. The only thing Keith had left at the bank was an overdraft. “I'm not sure what he may have done,” she said, “but I can look into it for you.”

“Would you? Really?” The tears in Evie's eyes overflowed, running in wet tracks down her face. “I was so embarrassed, so ashamed to face you with my problems and how it was with me and Keith. I just—”

“Never mind,” Cammie said soothingly. “I'll look into the money situation and call you in a day or two. All right?”

“I can't thank you enough. I — I loved Keith, and I was furious when he told me he was going back to you. But I never blamed him for wanting to, not really. I see what he was after.”

“I don't think you do,” Cammie said. “If it's any comfort, I think his sudden change of heart had more to do with money.”

Evie Prentice scanned Cammie's face, her drowned gaze considering. Slowly, it turned desolate. “No—” she said with a catch in her voice. “I don't think it is — any comfort, I mean.”

Cammie walked to the door with Keith's girlfriend. As Evie drove away, Wen came from the back to stand beside her.

“So you're going to find the money to help Keith's main squeeze.”

“She was more than that,” Cammie answered absently.

“Yeah, she was the other woman, the one he was shacked up with, the one he was going to use to make you a laughingstock just as soon as he had what he wanted.”

“Maybe.”

“So is it because you're sorry for her, or because you want her out of your hair?”

“Maybe I'm grateful to her for freeing me of Keith.”

“Oh, sure.”

“It's possible,” Cammie protested.

“Yes, and maybe you're a softhearted idiot.”

“Softheaded, you mean.”

“That, too.” Wen muttered an expletive. “Cammie, honey, you can't fix the world.”

“Yes, I can,” she answered with a determined lift of her chin. “Or at least my part of it.”

I DID NEED YOU.

Those words were driving Reid insane.

Nearly as disturbing was the answer he had made to them.

The two phrases had rung in his mind all night and half the morning, along with the confrontation he had witnessed between Cammie and Gordon Hutton. He hadn't slept; the thought of eating made him feel sick to his stomach. Long ago he'd learned the difficult lesson that sleep and food were needs you didn't ignore if you wanted to stay alive. Nothing, not even the explosion at Golan, as he referred to it in his mind, had gotten past his defenses enough to disturb these basic habits. Until now.

He was losing his carefully built numbness. It was being stripped away bit by bit, leaving nerves and feelings as exposed as worms discovered under thick mulch. Try as he might, he could find no protection for them, no surcease from the raw pain.

It had begun at Golan, of course; he wouldn't deny that. But it was being close to Cammie that had made him so exquisitely vulnerable.

The Fort seemed like a prison, and Lizbeth's eyes, as they followed him, were all too knowing. She had always understood him better than most. She had a husband and family of her own and a farm north of town, but in his memories of growing up, she was always in the house.

He could remember one hot summer when he was maybe four or five years old, standing beside her in the kitchen where they were now, watching while she drank a glass of water. The inside of her mouth, he noticed, was as pink as his own. After that, he'd always known she was the same, under her soft brown skin, as he.

She turned her head now, sparing him a glance from the green onions she was chopping for a casserole. “What's the matter, Mr. Reid, the mulligrubs got you?”

“You might say that,” he answered, propping his elbow on the table and resting his head on one fist. Keeping his gaze on the coffee cup he was turning in slow circles, he said, “Tell me something, Lizbeth, just what does it take to please a woman?”

She tilted her head forward to give him a look under her brows. “Now, you know that as well as I do.”

“I'm serious,” he protested, “and I don't mean sex or money or muscles or things like that.”

“Are we, by any off chance, talking about a certain woman in town, or just women in general?”

He gave her a straight look without answering.

“I thought so,” she said with a judicious nod. “In that case, I'd say there's not much you can do except to love her. She'll either come around or she won't.”

“I had a feeling you were going to say that.”

“Then why did you go and ask me? Seems like what you need is to get your mind off things for a while, maybe go fishing.”

“And get out from under your feet?”

She shook her head before she turned her broad back on him. “You know better than that.”

“Maybe,” he answered with dry humor. He paused a moment, considering her suggestion. Finally, he asked, “Ty still home on leave?”

“Got another week before he belongs to the Air Force again,” she said, scooping up green onions and dumping them into a sauce pan where butter sizzled. Glancing over her shoulder, she added, “Want me to call him?”

“Tell him to meet me out at the lake,” he answered, and let his smile convey his gratitude for her understanding.

He and Ty had a lot in common. They were the same age, and had played together from time to time when Lizbeth brought him to work with her during the summer. Together, they had roamed the game reserve, two boys pretending to be mighty hunters, cavemen, or soldiers. They had gone to the same school during the first flush of local integration, and both had tried out for one of Greenley's first integrated football teams. Ty had played halfback, making it his special project to protect Reid as the quarterback in tight play situations. Reid not only appreciated the coverage, but gave his halfback full credit for most of the important plays.

Ty had joined the Air Force out of school, becoming a helicopter pilot. He had worked his way up to a colonel's rank and was still climbing. Over the years, he and Reid had met in various out of the way places around the world to share a drink and catch up on the home news. The last time had been in California nearly two years ago. Reid had been intending to get together with Ty while they were both in town, but his time had been taken up with other things.

The day was perfect for fishing, the temperature hovering around seventy, wind calm, sun coming and going behind ragged and dingy white sheets of clouds. Reid and Ty launched the fiberglass bass boat, then took off down the lake channel. After a few minutes they eased into a long, tree-crowded arm of the lake well out of the traffic.

Using top-water bait, they cast with the easy competence of long habit, reeling in without wasted motion, but also without hurry. Neither of them really cared if they caught anything. It was enough to drift lazily over the tree-sap brown water with its surface tinted blue with sky reflection, using the trolling motor now and then to reach where rod and line could not take them.

They found the bass, great Florida-type monsters weighing from four to eight pounds, caught their limit and put them on ice. They were careful how they hooked what they caught afterward, since they needed to release them back into the lake.

Reid felt the tension leaving him by slow degrees. It had been with him so long that its departure left behind tingling discomfort.

He and Ty popped a beer or two as the day grew hotter. While they drank, they talked in a desultory way, damning politics and politicians, taking the past seasons of the Saints and the Cowboys apart, raking over the latest dust-up at the Pentagon. It was the kind of wide-ranging and impersonal talk resorted to by most men when they got together. When the two of them had nothing to say, they were silent.

Out of a long period of floating with the sun on his face and watching a blue and green dragonfly perched on his rod tip, Reid asked, “You ever think of getting married, Ty?”

The other man flashed a grin as he tipped his dark head. “Now and then. Right time, wrong woman. Right woman, wrong time. You thinking about it again?”

“Crossed my mind,” he allowed.

“Hear you seeing a lot of Cammie Greenley.” It was a statement that could be answered or left alone.

“Hutton,” Reid said without expression. “Cammie Hutton.”

“Right. You always did have a thing for her, didn't you? I remember after a football game, bunch of guys started asking some joker who dated her about how he scored. One idiot got down and dirty with his questions, and you took him apart.”

Reid shrugged without looking at Ty. “Seemed the thing to do at the time.”

“Ahuh. And as I recall, we used to circle back through the game reserve past the Greenley place so often we wore a trail like a super highway.”

Reid gave him a quick look. “You remember too much.”

“Like that time the field mouse got in the building, had all the girls screaming and jumping on the desks. You caught the thing, all macho with your bare hands, and it bit the hell out of you? But when Cammie Greenley said don't kill it, you took it out and let it loose behind the baseball field. Then you walked around for days with the stupidest look on your face, all because she said you were kind. Yeah, man, I remember that, too.”

Ty was kidding him, but Reid didn't care. He let the memory the other man had raised, bright-burnished and sweet, seep into his mind. And suddenly he felt an icy chill begin around his heart.

Cammie could not possibly have killed anyone. In spite of her courage, regardless of her bravado, she didn't have the hard inner core that would permit it.

Her threat against Keith's brother last night had been empty, if it had been a threat at all. He, of all people, should understand Cammie's ability to drive away those who could hurt her with a salvo of knife-edged words.

The only possible way she could have caused the death of a human being was if she'd been allowed no other choice.

He had known that simple truth before. How had he forgotten?

The answer was, he hadn't forgotten at all. What he'd done was ignore it.

He had ignored it because he'd been an idiot. He'd heard and seen her rout Gordon Hutton, and had been miffed because it seemed she didn't require his protection any longer.

He wanted her to need him because that was all he could use to hold her. And he'd wanted that hold on her desperately.

I
did need you.

The words she'd spoken had remained with him because hidden in them was a tiny hint that she might require something more than a strong arm and a warm body. He'd almost missed it in his concentration on his own needs.

Almost.

What if he was wrong? What if there was nothing in what she'd said except what he was reading into it, nothing except his own hope?

He loved her; he had for years. It seemed there had never been a time when he did not love her.

There had also never been a time to tell her so.

Maybe that time was now.

He'd tried once, and failed. And failing made it impossible for him to see her for years.

What if he made it impossible to go back to the physical relationship they had established? There was such near-intolerable pleasure in being able to touch her bare skin, to watch her face as she took the release he offered. There was such mind-stunning glory in finding his own surcease in the depths of her body. Could he endure being denied it?

What if he made it impossible to ever see her again?

It was a chance he would have to take. He had risked more before, and won.

He had also lost. At least one of those times, it was love he'd lost, though of a different, more gentle kind. And it was not he who had paid the price. Could he chance that? Could he bear it, and live?

What else was there? After all this time?

It was late afternoon by the time Reid took his leave of Ty, cleaned his share of the fish, cleaned himself up, then gathered together everything he would need. Hoping Lizbeth wouldn't fuss too much about the way he'd torn up her kitchen with his rummaging, he left for Evergreen.

Cammie wasn't at home, but that was no great problem. He let himself into the house with his handy lock-picking kit and headed straight for the kitchen.

He couldn't wait to see her face when she found him there, he thought as he set the deep fat fryer he had brought on the cabinet. He plugged it in, then reached for the gallon of peanut oil to fill it. If it came to that, he couldn't wait to hear what she might have to say. It was entirely possible she would do her best to annihilate him. It wouldn't make any difference; he could take anything she dished out.

That hadn't been true at one time. He hadn't known her as well then, or himself.

It would be a relief to finally come out of hiding, to — what was that phrase used by writers of spy novels? Come in out of the cold? He'd never heard anybody use it himself, not in all his years in the Company. It was descriptive, though. Being alone in your own mind was a cold and lonely thing.

There had always been warmth in thinking of Cammie, even when he'd known she was married to someone else. He had to admit that.

Holding her in the quiet aftermath of sex, or just for the sake of feeling her against him — with passion of a mental kind, yes, but without lust — had warmed someplace hidden inside that had been iced over for years. He loved being quiet with her, too, reading, watching television.

He loved watching her enjoy things, the way she had in New York. Maybe they could travel other places together. It would be a great way to spend a winter evening, choosing and planning trips, arguing over which sights they should see for the pleasure of coming to terms. He knew exactly how much it would take — or how little — to make him agree to go anywhere she wanted.

The peanut oil was heating just fine. He unwrapped the bass fillets, rinsing them under cold, running water before he laid them out on paper towels to drain. Dumping several cups of white cornmeal into a bowl, he began to rummage through the cabinet shelves for salt and pepper. He hoped his taste in seasoning suited Cammie, because he only knew one way to do it.

He saw that Persephone had been there during the day. She'd left supper for Cammie, pork chops and fresh mustard greens. Maybe he could heat the greens to go with the fish; that would be good. There was also a coconut pie for later. Persephone was one of a dying breed, like Lizbeth. They would both be retiring soon, and it would be impossible to replace them.

He and Cammie could take care of things together when that time came, he thought. He didn't mind cleaning, and he liked cooking. Well, he liked cooking some things; he was no expert.

Where would the two of them live? He didn't care. Either house would make a great museum, if the town wanted the donation. Or they could save the spare place for their kids.

A grin tugged a corner of his mouth. He might be getting just a little ahead of himself, but it was fun, anyway.

The oil was hot as blue blazes, just right. There might have been a bit too much water left in the fish under their coating of meal. The oil crackled and spat with the sound of a miniature artillery barrage as he dropped the fillets into the fryer.