Triple Exposure (23 page)

In the darkness near the telescope, the observer crouched with nostrils flared to capture the acrid reek of ash and smoke, the pungency of gas fumes. Eyes closed and concentration focused on the burning imprinted behind the lids: the guttering flare of lights more mundane, more physical than those that spoke their secret tongue in coldly quiet pulses. Silhouetted in remembered flame, the dark shape of a great owl flapped silent wings. Tucking them in suddenly, it streaked down toward some unfortunate, small creature driven from its hideyhole by heat.

Some contemptible, weak creature that was carried limp and bleeding to a nest of sticks atop The Roost. A creature that was torn to gory ribbons and fed to a new-hatched pair of owlets quite tenderly, with a mother’s love.

Patsy showed up by herself. As she stared at the smoking hulk so close to her café, she looked so pale, so ill, that Zeke walked over from where he’d been waiting for Rachel in the shadow of a hangar. He passed the three firefighters, who stood by the side of their truck talking. None so much as glanced in his direction, and Castillo’s deputy had left to handle a call on the other side of Marfa.

“Rachel’s not hurt, only upset. Mostly pissed, but she’ll
be all right,” Zeke reassured Patsy. “Sheriff Castillo’s talking to her in Walter’s office.”

He said this by way of warning, to give Patsy time to brace herself before facing her former husband. All these years, and she still had trouble with it, Zeke knew. Some serious bad blood there. Miss Teen West Texas bad blood, he surmised, and because he valued Patsy’s undemanding friendship, he knew a moment’s satisfaction that the beauty queen in question had blown up to the size of a parade float in the years since Harlan Castillo had made an honest woman of her. Had a nasty disposition, too, according to the old man who occasionally cut Zeke’s hair.

Without taking her eyes off the destruction, Patsy blew out a deep breath and ran the end of her thin and graying ponytail between her fingers. It looked especially forlorn to night, and her jeans and loose sweatshirt appeared to have been slept in. “I appreciate the heads-up. You all right?”

“Better off than that van.” He glowered at what was left of it before asking, “So where’s Walter? Rachel told me you’d be coming with him.”

“He’ll be along. Had to stop for gas in Alpine, but he thought one of us should get out here pretty quick. Would’ve made it sooner, except I wasn’t dressed.”

“I heard you had a migraine.” In sympathy, he touched a spot beneath his own forelock. “Any better?”

The flashing of the remaining fire truck’s light lit the deepening folds of her frown. “It’s some new headache every day with that girl. Least now, she can buy herself another ride.”

“So she has insurance?” he asked.

Patsy’s laugh was mirthless. “Against fire, on that heap? I can’t imagine. But she’ll have some money from her grandmother. More’n any of us guessed.”

Though he’d spent a lot of time around the Copelands lately, Zeke was surprised to hear of it. “I imagine,” he said carefully, “that would be a help. With all the lawyer bills, too.”

Patsy nodded. “Rachel told us right off, she’s paying back everything we spent. Insisted on it, though it won’t leave much for her. Walter argued, of course without consulting me, but Rachel’s not taking no for an answer.”

Zeke heard a measure of approval in Patsy’s voice. Relief, too, that the business she had spent her adult life building would escape the expanding mushroom cloud of legal fees.

“Doesn’t surprise me,” he said. “It’s been eating at Rachel, owing both of you, not having any way to fix things. And she told me to night that lawsuit against her could end up getting dropped.”

Patsy turned her face from him, but not before he glimpsed her troubled expression. “She told you all about that, did she?”

No
, Zeke thought, Rachel hadn’t. He was certain she’d been holding something back, something that had upset her more than either her debt or the threat of a ten-million-dollar civil suit.
Let her have her secrets
, he told himself.
It’s not
as if you’re going to be around to help her deal with any of them
. Because he had to find a way out of the county before the sheriff’s facts caught up with his suspicions and he learned that Rachel Copeland wasn’t the only person in this county who had once been charged with murder.

But instead of admitting Rachel hadn’t trusted him with whatever was upsetting her, Zeke answered Patsy’s question with a noncommittal sound. Because he couldn’t help wishing she would misinterpret his response and fill him in on a matter he no longer had any business knowing.

As he’d hoped, Patsy went on talking, growling, “Perverted little bastard ought to be dug up from his grave and shot and killed all over.” Heat scorched the edges of her words. “Walter would for damned sure like to do it. And so would I, for all the grief and money this has cost us.”

“I don’t under—” he began.

“Even if that woman drops the lawsuits, this is a hell of a long way from over. Walt’s so furious, he wants to go after that kid’s piddly little estate for what he calls ‘justice.’ Rachel’ll
need more counseling, if she’ll have it. And she’ll stay just where she likes—at the center of her father’s universe.”

“I don’t think Rachel wants—”

Patsy threw up her hands. “Of course she wants Walter’s attention. He’s the only real parent she has left.”

Zeke heard the longing, the frustration in her voice, and it reminded him that even in a family, people could feel isolated. Even in a crowd, they could stand apart. Maybe that was what had started her talking to him at the café, one lone soul to another.

“It was hard enough when Rachel was back in Philadelphia,” Patsy told him. “Now she’s right here, with all her troubles, and I might as well have turned invisible. Because how do I compete with a girl who trails disasters in her damned wake? And now it turns out she was raped—”

“
Raped?
” Zeke echoed. “Rachel was—that son of a bitch
raped
Rachel?”

Patsy glared at him, said flatly. “She didn’t tell you.”

“Hell, no. And you’re talking like she’s done all of this on purpose just to mess up your life. That’s a hell of an attitude to take about your own—”

“That’s just it. Rachel
isn’t
my own,” Patsy shot back. “From the first day I came home with Walter, that girl’s let me know in a hundred ways that she never will be. If she were mine—if I hadn’t had my chance to have my own child stolen…”

Eyes welling, overflowing, Patsy couldn’t go on. She fought her tears, and he saw rage submerged within the pain of it, a stinging scorpion forever trapped in amber.

It filled Zeke with a sickening suspicion. A suspicion about a woman who had served as his fragile lifeline for fourteen years. Could Patsy want Rachel gone from here so badly she would—

No. Hell, no. He couldn’t hold the thought in his brain. Couldn’t imagine that this woman—a woman who’d shown clear concern for Rachel’s safety—would allow jealousy and resentment to drive her to violence.

But as much as he loathed asking her about it, as many questions as he had cascading through his brain about Rachel’s rape—
Had she been ashamed to tell him? Had she
kept it secret from her family, too?
—he had to push Patsy for more details, for Rachel’s sake, at least. Because he couldn’t leave her with a stalker on her tail, couldn’t leave Marfa without knowing for certain if her own stepmother could possibly…“What did you mean, about your chance to have your own kid being
stolen
?”

Did she blame Rachel, somehow? Had Walter refused Patsy’s request to have a baby, for his daughter’s sake? Zeke wasn’t good at judging women’s ages, but it seemed likely that Patsy had been young enough to become pregnant when they’d first married.

“That bastard, Harlan…” Patsy started.

“
Harlan?
What did he do?”

“Anything that moved,” she answered flatly. “Got me sick with his whoring—literally, I mean. Prostitutes. Gave me some filthy infection that scarred me up so bad inside, he stole my chance from me. But not his own—God’s joke on me, that. After ruining me, the son of a bitch marries some younger woman and parades around those sons of theirs like trophies.”

“Oh, Patsy. I’m sorry.” He shook his head at the unfairness of it. No wonder she hated Harlan. But what about Rachel? Did Patsy despise her, too, for serving as a reminder of the one thing she wanted but could never have?

Patsy shook her head. “Harlan’s sorry, too, damned guilty, for all the good that does me. Bastard.”

Before Zeke’s eyes, she reassembled her protective armor, rebuilt from scratch the broad, implacable face he’d known for so long.

“It’s a long time back. More than twenty years ago. And there’s no help for it. Now or then. Stupid of me to keep thinking on it, all these years later. You must think I’m some kind of monster, fussing about Rachel when she’s the closest thing to a daughter I’m ever going to
have. I do—I love the girl, in my way, the best that I know how.”

Zeke weighed her words, then nodded slowly. “I believe it.”

Patsy looked at the ground. “Sometimes I think maybe God knew what he was doing, turning a woman like me barren. Maybe I got no better than I had coming—”

He winced at the self-loathing he heard in her voice. “I don’t believe it works that way. And I don’t think you’re any monster. It’s just that sometimes, the present bumps up against the past. Knocks a few dirt layers off a grief we thought was dead and buried. It’s happened to me more than once, just since Rachel’s shown up. Before she came—I thought I was through remembering. Would’ve liked it better, maybe, if I had been.”

“So you wish she’d never come home…Wish you’d listened when I warned you.”

He shook his head. “I would never wish that. Because I was wrong to think I could just walk away from my past, wrong to think it wouldn’t make a difference.”

It had ruined everything, had left him with a blighted, withered remnant of a life. He glimpsed what he’d lost each time he was with Rachel. That possibility, that glimmer, had smashed open a locked corner of himself when they’d made love. But since he couldn’t find the words to explain such a thing to Patsy, he said, “And because I love her. I love Rachel just like you do, the best that I know how.” He felt beaten down by the knowledge that he couldn’t stick around to help her through whatever memories she’d hidden, that he couldn’t even stay to keep her safe.

As worried as he still was about the stalker, he’d at least dismissed the idea that Patsy, of all people, could have any involvement in Rachel’s recent problems. Her stepdaughter’s arrival might have stirred up feelings that reminded Patsy of old heartbreak, but the woman he’d known all these years would do her duty toward a family member. Maybe not cheerfully, but she would manage, for Walter’s sake if not her own.

“You love her?” Patsy whispered. “I’ve see a lot of women throw themselves in your direction. Heck, I’ve nearly had to hose down Lili to keep her off you in the café.”

He snorted, shaking his head at the thought of Lili, with her transparent words and gestures. If she had been a filly, she’d have lifted her tail beneath his nose. “I don’t encourage little girls.”

“Or anyone else I’ve ever seen. Until Walter’s daughter walked in The Roost that first day.”

He shrugged. “Nothing’ll come of it. Rachel knows that.”

“Does she? I’ve told her as much, but—”

“She said you’d warned her off me.”

Patsy shrugged. “I like you well enough, but you’re a man with ‘life-long bachelor’ stamped all over you.”

Accepting the explanation—since he would have sworn to it himself even a few days earlier—Zeke nodded and asked her point-blank, “When did Rachel tell you she’d been assaulted?”

“Day after the funeral. That was the day she found out.”

“Found out? I don’t get it. How could she not know?”

Patsy scowled. “There’s some kind of knock-out drops or pills—date-rape drugs, they call ’em. These perverts dissolve ’em into women’s drinks. The thinking is that Kyle slipped her something and then took advantage later, after the rest of her students headed home. Some private investigators found pictures, different pictures that were really all her. Rachel looked unconscious in ’em—got some high-dollar experts lined up who’ll swear to it in court. And it explains a lot of things that—I hate to admit this—made me wonder, why witnesses said she was acting wild that one night in public, why she says she can’t remember.”

“Son of a bitch.” Fury burned in him like a live coal, igniting primitive instincts he’d swear he didn’t possess. Archaic impulses to ride forth and wreak havoc, to avenge the woman his heart had no more sense than to claim. With the culprit dead, Zeke didn’t know where to direct his anger.
So it was no surprise that some of it slopped over onto Patsy. “What do you mean she
says
she can’t remember? If she’d known before, wouldn’t she have told somebody? God, Patsy, they took her to that jail in Philadelphia and booked her, didn’t they? Took her prints, strip-searched her—you think she would’ve put up with that ugliness if she’d had any idea of what went on?”

“No need to chew my liver out,” Patsy snapped. “I didn’t mean it that way. I know she’s been getting messages from the psychologist for weeks, but she didn’t ever call back that I know of. And I can’t say I blame her. Who’d want to face such a thing? Easier to keep what’s past out of sight if you can.”

Zeke started, suddenly wondering if she had guessed something about him, if she’d known all along. Before he could think of a response, a truck’s door closed behind him.

Patsy’s gaze darted to look toward the arrival. Lowering her voice, she said, “That’s Walter, and about time. I’d better go see to him. Then we’ll talk to Rachel. Harlan, too, I guess.”

Zeke was surprised when she handed him her keys.