The Heat of the Moon: A Rachel Goddard Mystery (Rachel Goddard Mysteries) (6 page)

I looked at him, suddenly wary. His face was serious. I swallowed the meat without chewing.

“Exactly what happened the other day,” he said, “after the basset was brought in? I can’t get it out of my mind, that expression on your face. Like you’d seen a ghost.”

I stared at the remains of my lunch, chicken slices and sugar snap peas and carrot slivers nestled in lettuce. I’d thought he’d forgotten, but all along he’d been puzzling over my crazy behavior.

“What was it that rattled you like that?” he said. “I’m not asking as your employer. I’m asking as your friend.” 

I made myself meet his gaze. Warm eyes, full of honest concern. My heart lurched. What would this supremely sane man think of the turmoil inside my head? With a shrug I told him, “It reminded me of something, that’s all. An old dream.”

He sat forward, interested. “A nightmare? About what?” He waited, patient and receptive.

I shook my head. “It wouldn’t make any sense to you.”

“Try me.”

I was silent, scraping my fork back and forth across my plate until the
screek screek
of silver on china got through to me and I stopped. I didn’t want to offend him with a rebuff, but I had no intention of spilling out a story of dreams and strange faces and the father I couldn’t remember.

When I didn’t answer, Luke sat back and said, “Do you ever ask your mother to analyze your dreams?”

My head snapped up. “My mother?”

“Don’t psychologists analyze dreams?”

“I don’t want to have my dreams analyzed. To tell you the truth, the very thought of therapy of any kind gives me the creeps.”

“Oh, that’s a great endorsement for your mother’s business.”

That struck us both as funny, and we laughed together.

“I apologize for what happened at the clinic,” I said. “You know I don’t usually go around scaring little children. Let’s not talk about it anymore, do you mind?”

I rose and carried my plate to the sink, silently pleading for an end to the subject. He followed with his own plate and I scraped our leftovers down the garbage disposal. The machine’s growl stopped talk and allowed me to regain my balance.

When I switched off the disposal I changed gears. “I had a dream last night that I’d defy anybody to analyze. You’ll be interested in this, it’s the kind of thing only a vet could appreciate.”

“Tell me.” Hands in his pockets, he leaned against the counter next to the sink.

I paused to recall details of the dream that awakened me with giggles during the night. It had been such a blessed change from the dark questions crowding my head before I fell asleep.

“I dreamed that a horde of basset hounds showed up at the clinic. They walked in by themselves, they didn’t have people with them. They filled up the reception area and overflowed into the cat waiting area, with some pretty lively consequences.”

Luke smiled. “And?”

“They were all suffering from terrible halitosis, which I diagnosed as bassetosis.”

I loved the sound of his laughter, so I kept going, embroidering the silly dream.

“Pretty soon the place was carpeted with dozens of bassets standing around on their stubby little club chair legs, all looking mournful and very embarrassed by the whole situation. The smell they gave off was so overpowering, and the atmosphere got so dense with it, the staff was running around opening all the doors and windows and fogging the place with air freshener.”

“You’re making this up.” 

“Absolutely not. You know how crazy things are in dreams. I remember that my biggest problem was classifying the disorder. I had to examine every dog carefully to determine whether it had smallmouth bassetosis or largemouth bassetosis—”

Luke burst out laughing, and I laughed with him, and somehow by the time we subsided to crinkle-eyed amusement he had an arm around my waist and I was leaning into his shoulder.

He sighed, brushed a finger across my cheek, and murmured, “God, Rachel, you’re so beautiful.”

His hand slid under my hair to caress the back of my neck, sending a shiver through me. I hadn’t planned on this. Had I? He was assuming too much. I’d allowed him to.

I let him pull me closer, but I kept my arms up between us, hands splayed on his chest. His heart thudded under my palm.

“You know something I’ve wanted to do since the first time I saw you?” he asked, his voice husky against my ear. His cheek, slightly rough, brushed mine.

My fingers curled, clutching the fabric of his shirt.

“The first time I came to see the clinic, you were standing by the desk with your back to me, I guess you were leaving, you didn’t have your lab coat on. I saw this beautiful long sexy back, and I wanted to go up and do this—”

Slowly, with a gentle pressure, both his hands traveled down my back and up again, while he kissed my neck, my cheek, my forehead, my temples. Heat rose in my skin where his lips touched.

Why not? One kiss. What was the harm in a kiss? I raised my arms, circled his neck, and met his mouth with mine. He drew me closer, locked me tight against him from shoulders to knees. His fingers were in my hair, cradling the back of my head.

Suddenly I felt once again the sharp sense of Mother’s presence hovering and watching. I broke the kiss, breathless. At first I thought he wouldn’t let me go, then he reluctantly withdrew his arms so I could take a step back.

A flush of color rode his cheekbones. “Zero to sixty in thirty seconds or less,” he said, then scrubbed a hand across his mouth and gave a short laugh. “I didn’t mean to come on so strong. It’s just that—” With his thumb he traced my moist lower lip. “In my imagination, we’ve already…”

A shock of pleasure surged through me and heat flooded my face. I almost moved back into his arms.

Instead, I managed a smile, smoothed down my hair with shaky hands, and said, “Maybe it’d be a good idea if we took this conversation out to the patio.”

For a moment he stood with one hand braced on the counter, staring down at the floor. He looked up with a slow rueful grin, all his thoughts and desires playing across his face.

“Okay,” he said. “Out to the patio.”

***

We stayed on the patio into the afternoon, sitting in the sun and talking with the safety zone of the patio table between us. His visit stretched on so long that I began to worry about Mother and Michelle returning and finding him still there.

When he said he had to check on a post-surgical patient, and rose to leave, the pang of disappointment I felt was mixed with relief. 

At the front door, his jacket slung over his arm, he said, “Have dinner with me tonight. I’ll come back in a while and pick you up.”

“Oh, I can’t, I’m sorry,” I said automatically.

“Tomorrow? We can spend the day together.”

“I promised Mother I’d go somewhere with her.”

He sighed. “Okay. Soon, though?” He stroked his thumb across my lips. “Real soon. Maybe next time you can come visit me.”

He slipped an arm around my waist and gave me a lingering goodbye kiss, but I held myself back, kept a slice of space between our bodies.

I watched him drive away, then closed the front door and sagged against it, releasing a long breath. If we hadn’t been in Mother’s house, we might have ended up in bed. If I’d had dinner with him, we would have gone to his apartment afterward and ended up in bed. I imagined us in a tangle of sheets, bodies naked and moist.

It would be wonderful. But he wanted far more than sex. He deserved more. I was tempted to take a chance, surrender to his openness and warmth and see where it led, but the stronger part of me was already in full retreat. Not only because he was my boss. He didn’t know me. We could talk forever about books and music and work, and he still wouldn’t know me. I was beginning to doubt that I knew myself.

Silence hung over the house, as it often did even when Mother, Michelle and I were all at home. A house of secrets, of unspoken things.

In Luke’s eyes my life here probably seemed a comfortable convenience that nevertheless robbed me of independence and privacy. But it had been unimaginable for me to live anywhere else after I came back to McLean. Mother would have been wounded and bewildered if I’d chosen to be alone in some tiny apartment, and I wouldn’t have been able to bear her stoic show of pretended understanding.

I walked down the hall, intending to tidy what little mess was left from lunch. Erase any evidence of Luke’s visit.

I stopped outside Mother’s study, across from the kitchen. Normally the door stood open, but she’d closed it the night before and left it closed. This was her way, I assumed, of letting me know she was still displeased by my invasion of her personal space. The thought made me feel like a punished child, ashamed and resentful.

I doubted the room contained anything I would want to see, among the old case histories Mother consulted when writing papers.

But while I had the chance I might as well take a quick look just to be sure. I’d already committed the worst offense, searching Mother’s closet and dresser drawers. This would be minor by comparison.

I grasped the knob, tried to turn it. The door was locked.

I jerked my hand back. She’d never locked her study before. Did she distrust me so much that she thought I’d rifle through confidential patient records?

Or was she hiding something that she didn’t want me to find?

I stared at the closed door. The clock on the living room mantel chimed five times. The psychology conference was ending about now.

I was at the kitchen sink scrubbing tiny red potatoes for dinner when my mother and sister walked through the back door.

***

Michelle, deep into research and composition, spent evenings at her computer with a do-not-disturb expression hung on her face. Mother was always just across the hall or downstairs. How could I get my sister alone and in a mood to talk?

In a fit of impatience, after waiting a couple of days for an opening, I walked into Michelle’s room one night and closed the door. She sat at her desk in a corner, inclined toward the computer monitor, long fingers busy on the keyboard. The screen was filled with words.

“I need to talk to you,” I said.

Tap tap tap. “In a minute,” she murmured.

I sat on the bed, watching her. She’d tucked her hair behind her ears, but a stray strand fell across her right cheekbone. Chewing her lower lip, an old habit of concentration, she looked so young that it was hard to believe we were both adults and everything had changed between us.

I walked to the window. Beyond it lay the side yard, but I saw only my ghostly reflection in the glass. Michelle typed, engrossed in her task.

“Mish,” I said, turning, “could I interrupt you for just a few minutes?”

Her hands lifted and clamped into fists above the keys. When she swiveled in her chair, her long blue cotton skirt twisted around her legs. “All right, what’s so important, Rachel?”

The second the harsh words were out of her mouth, her expression softened. Sighing, she said, “I’m so wound up, all this work to finish.” She pushed the tendril of hair off her face. “God, graduate school’s a grind. I should’ve stayed home Sunday and worked on this paper, instead of going off to the gallery to look at those ugly paintings.”

I sat on the bed again. “Or maybe you should have gone sailing with Kevin and relaxed a little.”

I hoped this would prompt her to tell me she’d seen Kevin only a few hours earlier. An accidental meeting, she was meant to think. Since she broke their boating date Kevin had called me a couple of times, wanting advice on how to win her over. I’d given him her seminar schedule and suggested he bump into her on the street and invite her to lunch. Today was the day he’d planned to do it. During the afternoon he’d called the clinic and left a message, conveyed to me by Alison: “It worked.”

But Michelle wasn’t going to confide in me. At the mention of Kevin’s name a furtive look came into her eyes, like a curtain closing, before her gaze flicked downward. Like me, she wanted to protect her secrets.

She tugged her skirt, straightening it. “What did you want to talk about?”

I leaned forward, elbows on my knees and hands together prayer-like. How could I get into this? Questions, a dozen of them, swirled in my head. “You’re studying childhood memory, aren’t you? What people remember from different ages and so on?”

Looking faintly incredulous, she glanced at the computer screen. I’d interrupted her work for this? Then she folded her hands in her lap and assumed a patient, knowing expression that she might have copied from Mother and practiced in a mirror. I was on my guard before she spoke.

“I don’t remember you burning the pictures,” she said. “If that’s what you’re about to ask me.”

My mouth fell open. My suspicion was right: Mother and Michelle had been discussing me. Since Friday night I’d been keenly aware of Mother’s watchful gaze, keeping tabs on my psychic balance, but when it seemed that Michelle also looked at me that way, I told myself I was imagining things, going paranoid. I couldn’t stand the thought of them murmuring together over my emotional wounds.

“When did she tell you about it?” I asked. “Saturday?”