Triple Exposure (14 page)

The rest of his words were lost in the rattling of the paper bag and her exclamation of delight. “Zeke. This is—This is incredible. No one’s ever…I can’t believe you made this for me.”

It was a wooden box. Simple, elegant, its planes a rich, red-gold that seemed to glow with the late sun’s rays. In the center of its top, he’d embedded an oval silver concha set with a single, large turquoise. To her untrained eye, the stone was stunning, its brilliant blue-green overlaid with
delicate black webbing. Rather than shining brightly, the embossed metal looked worn, like an old nickel.

“This part looks like an antique,” she said, fingering the concha.

“Old Pawn,” he said, “from a Navajo trader in New Mexico. It used to be a part of someone’s belt, years back, on the reservation.”

“So you drive there to do business?”

“Now and again, when the mood strikes. I like taking something old and broken, making it new and useful again. Pleasing.”

“The way you do with your horses,” she said.

He shrugged. “It’s not for everyone. If you’d rather have something all new, I could—”

When he reached for it, she held fast. “I love it, Zeke, and I love that you went through all the trouble to make it for me.”

“It wasn’t any trouble. Like I said, I just had a few odds and ends around, so I thought I might as well—”

She touched his hand and waited for him to look her in the eye. “It’s okay, Zeke. I like you, too. One heck of a lot better than the people I knew back in Philadelphia. Bunch of suck-ups pretending they were concerned while, behind my back, it was a completely different story.”

She had supposed that she’d had good friends. Fun people, artsy types, who shared laughter along with the struggles to establish themselves in a world that all too often turned its back on talent. But when the going got tough, every one of them had disappeared from her life, vanished like so many puffs of smoke fanned by a breeze. A boyfriend, a sweet-natured math teacher she’d started dating a few short weeks before the shooting, had bailed on her, too, scared off by the negative publicity—and his own doubts once he had seen the photos.

“People’ll hurt you,” Zeke said, “disappoint you every time.”

“Not all of them.” Rachel knew instinctively that Zeke
was formed of something tougher. Something as solid and enduring as the furniture he crafted.

He looked at her so intently, a thrill slipped down her spine. Fear her words would scare him off; fear they’d bring him closer. The memory of the image she had photographed was overlaid with an image of his fury when he had learned the picture had been published.

“
Do you have any damned idea what you’ve done?
”

She’d wondered about that, wondered, could the man be hiding, living as he did in Marfa with no phone or computer, no credit cards, and very little human contact? According to Patsy, no one knew his hometown or what he’d done before buying the site of the old candelilla factory. No one knew anything about his former life.

But in small-town Texas, that hadn’t kept people from imagining—and discussing in detail—his history. Some figured he’d ducked out on paying child support or was one of those mad-bomber-type weirdoes with an axe to grind against the government. Others, mainly women intent on becoming the antidote to heartbreak, guessed he’d washed up on shore here following the wreckage of a love affair.

None of these possibilities appealed to Rachel, but whatever his problems, she had far too many of her own to get involved. Yet she couldn’t look away from his face, couldn’t do anything but sigh in gratitude when he finally,
finally
bent to kiss her.

He moved slowly this time, so much more cautiously than the cataclysmic kiss before her crash. Not wanting to scare her as he feared he had before, he lingered in the soft pliancy of her lips, the sweet earnestness of her response. With callused fingers, he feathered touches from her temple to her jaw, then allowed his hand to drift downward along her slender neck.

As his fingertips traced the gentle inclination of her collarbone, he felt the stony fist inside him loosen, offering him a fleeting look at the man he’d hoped to be, the same
man he sometimes caught in sidelong glimpses as he rode into the desert or shaped weather-hardened mesquite into something lasting. Usually, he turned away, devastated by the lost potential, but when he saw it in her warm, brown eyes and heard it in her sweet voice, gratitude welled up inside him.

And maybe something more. Something he had given up the right to when he had stepped away from his past so many years before. He thought he had made his peace with it, thought he knew better than to hope for the possibilities that he’d abandoned, but touching Rachel, kissing Rachel, tore through all the layers of scar tissue and made the old wound drip bright blood….

Blood that took him back to
that
night, to the boy sprawled
bleeding, dying in the old goat pasture where they’d gathered. He
could hear the labored breathing, hear those he’d thought of as
friends saying, “Langley did it. Was Langley hit him so hard, it
laid him out like that.”

Shivering and sweating, Zeke jerked back abruptly, his elbow catching the vase beside the bed. Green ceramic shattered, amid a watery puddle and a blizzard of white petals.

“Damned clumsy,” he said. “I’m sorry for it—”

He was skewered on her sharp gaze.

“What’s wrong?” she asked. “It was so nice, and then—”

“I’ve got no business fooling with you.” He squatted, picking up the larger shards of broken vase. “No right.”

“You’ll cut your hand. Please leave it. Just tell me what you’re thinking. Why you pulled back from me.”

Not knowing how to answer, he went on picking up the pieces—and wishing he could pick up what had been shattered long before.

The door whooshed open, and a blonde woman with a pin reading
Volunteers Care!
swept inside. “I just got off the phone with—Oh, dear.” She glanced down at Zeke. “Sorry, I didn’t see you come in. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“Had a little accident,” Zeke said.

“I’ll have someone come to clean it. You wouldn’t—”

The volunteer flicked a look at Rachel before returning it to him. “—You wouldn’t happen to be a
Kyle
, would you?”

“
Kyle
?” Zeke glared, suspecting her of deliberate cruelty.

“Oh.” The woman flushed bright pink. Then, to Rachel, she stage-whispered, “I’ll be back to tell you later.”

“Please stay, Mrs. Dixon,” Rachel pleaded. Turning to Zeke, she explained, “Those flowers have a card in them. It says that they’re from Kyle.”

So this was someone else’s malice. “Another threat?” he asked.

Rachel frowned. “If you can find it in that mess, you’re welcome to read the message for yourself.”

Returning her attention to the volunteer, she added, “Please tell me, what did the florist say?”

As he picked among the broken foliage, Mrs. Dixon shook her head. “A
threat
? My friend, Glory, would never pass along that sort of message.”

“It wasn’t a threat, exactly,” Rachel clarified. “So are you saying she took the message? Was it a telephone order?”

“She said it came through a national service. It’s a toll-free number that collects the orders and then uses local florists to fulfill them.”

Zeke found the card and stood to read it. Though spotted with water from the vase, the words were clearly legible. And a less than subtle threat, but one that wouldn’t alarm anyone unfamiliar with Rachel Copeland’s history.

“Then the customer must have used a credit card,” said Rachel.

The blonde woman nodded. “Yes, but Glory doesn’t have access to that part, since the person paying opted to remain anonymous.”

“If the order came through the computer, then why’s the card handwritten?” Rachel pressed.

“I asked her that, too. She said her printer’s so low on toner, the note wasn’t legible, so she recopied the message onto the card for you. I also asked her if there was any way
she could call the 800 number people and find out for you which Kyle really sent the flowers.”

“Thank you,” Rachel said with far more patience than Zeke was feeling. “What did she say?”

The volunteer smiled apologetically and blushed. “That you should keep your boyfriends straight. She said she wasn’t bothering them about such a trivial—”

His tolerance at its end, Zeke burst out, “This isn’t about any boyfriend. Someone’s playing games with Ms. Copeland, trying to scare her with a message from a—”

“That’s enough, Zeke,” Rachel interrupted before looking at the clearly startled volunteer. “You’ve given me a place to start, and I appreciate that.”

Worry lines creased the woman’s forehead. “You’ll be calling the law then, won’t you, dear?”

“I’m living in Marfa, so I’ll contact the sheriff there once I’m home. Speaking of which, is Dr. Franconi ever going to get here so I can leave? My dad’s been waiting all afternoon for the call to pick me up.”

“I’ll take you if you’re ready,” Zeke offered. “If the doctor doesn’t show, we’ll just leave. This isn’t a prison, is it?”

The volunteer looked nervous about this suggested breach of protocol. “I just saw Dr. Franconi at the nurses’ station checking charts on my way in. So I expect he’ll be here any minute. I’ll go and find out for you.”

Mrs. Dixon swept out, her blue skirt swirling behind her.

Zeke lifted the card. “Why didn’t you tell me about this as soon as I came in?”

Rachel sighed. “I’ve been living with worse threats than flowers for a long time. The police in Philadelphia didn’t take me seriously when I reported them, and I can’t imagine Sheriff Castillo getting too excited either. For one thing, the crime—if there’s even really been a crime—probably took place outside his jurisdiction.”

“That call you got in the café. You thought it came from Marfa.”

“True.”

“And your glider crashed inside the county, too.”

“That was an accident, a faulty latch—or at least that’s what everyone thinks. The official word hasn’t come down yet.”

“The least Castillo could do is make a few calls, try to track down the name of the customer who sent the flowers,” Zeke suggested.

Rachel shrugged her shoulders. “So far, I haven’t seen much evidence of the law working in my favor. Back in Philadelphia, the only thing anyone cared about was those awful—those photographs of me with Kyle. The detectives investigating, and then the assistant prosecutor were all convinced I’d—”

“I heard some talk about those pictures,” Zeke admitted. Now that he knew her, it made him sick to think back to what those men in the barbershop had said about them. About what Rachel had been doing with Kyle Underwood.

She flushed deeply. “Those were faked. You know that, don’t you? My experts proved it. And they’ll prove it with these new ones.”

“I know they’re fakes,” he assured her. Yet still, the thought of such trash drifting around the Internet, where anyone could see it, made him want to smash all the computers in the world on her behalf. “And I know, too, that Marfa isn’t Philadelphia. You have family looking after you, and a lot more folks who’ve got no argument with a woman protecting herself with firepower. And you’ve got at least one friend, right here.”

She laid a hand on the gift he’d brought her before flashing a smile that sliced straight through his self-delusion. “So we’re friends, is that it?”

He nodded, sensing she was asking,
Is that
all?

“Best I can do,” he said.
No matter how much I wish things
could be different
.

She reached for his hand and lifted it to her mouth, where she kissed it reverently. Looking up through lowered lashes, she whispered words that vibrated in the narrow space
between them. “That’s another gift, Zeke, one I’ll tuck inside this trea sure box and guard like the crown jewels.”

By the time Zeke dropped Rachel at her grandmother’s house, the new moon visible at twilight had dissolved into the black of a night sky lit with a myriad of stars.

Walter Copeland opened the front door and hugged his daughter before stepping back to shake Zeke’s hand. “Come on in, Mr. Pike—”

“It’s Zeke,” he said.

“
Just
Zeke.” Rachel flashed a grin before blocking the charge of a barking, black-and-white dog. “Oh, no you don’t, J.D. You’re staying in to night. And hush.”

“Don’t you worry about his noise.” A gray-haired older woman, comfortably plump and wearing thick, square glasses, came to the entryway to kiss Rachel on the cheek. “James Dean’s always been partial to men.”

“And here I thought that was an ugly rumor,” Rachel quipped.

“Now you hush, too, child,” her grandmother scolded, affection brightening her eyes. “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your handsome friend?”

“Oops, sorry,” Rachel said. “Grandma, this is Zeke Pike. Zeke, say hello to my grandmother.”

“Good evening, Mrs. Copeland.” Zeke had seen her a couple of times at The Roost, had nodded hello at the post office, but he wasn’t surprised at the lack of recognition in her eyes.

“Benita’s fine, and pleased to meet you,” she said. “Please come in, Zeke. Before my angel decides to make a break for the neighbors’ trash cans after all.”

“Thanks, ma’am, but I’d better go.”

Patsy propped open a door and stuck her head out of the kitchen. “Come on in and join us. I made some bison chili and jalapeño corn bread, and there’s plenty.”

“Seems like the least we can do is feed you for saving us a drive.” Rachel’s father’s smile was relaxed and friendly.

The elder Mrs. Copeland lit up, “And you can play a round of Scrabble with us later. We can do teams. It’ll be fun.”

Rachel touched his elbow and whispered, “Don’t worry. It’s not quite as horrifying as it seems.”

To Zeke, it sounded like a taste of heaven, a rich stew of family bonds and laughter spiced with subtle conflicts that had evolved over the years. It would be easy, far too easy, to let his guard down in such a situation. Ignoring the ache in his chest—and his stomach’s growl of hunger at the aromas drifting from the kitchen, he set Rachel’s overnight bag inside the door. “Thanks for the invitation, but I can’t stay. I’ve got animals that need their dinner, and if I don’t get to it, one of ’em will take a notion to kick down the feed shed door.”