Honey Moon (42 page)

"I needed the money. And I sold the ranch, too, so it wasn't like I was singling you out for persecution." Selling the ranch was the most difficult decision she'd ever had to make, but she'd ended up liquidating almost everything to finance the restoration of the coaster. All she had left was her car, some clothes, and this park. Even so, she still didn't have enough money, and she would be lucky to make it to January before what she had left ran out.

She refused to think about it. She wouldn't let anything sway her from the determination that had been born in her the day she had returned to the park and had seen Black Thunder again. Sometimes she thought her decision to rebuild the coaster was all that was keeping her alive, and she couldn't let sentiment weaken her.

"This whole thing's crazy," Chantal cried. "Sooner or later, you're going to run out of money. And then what'll you have? A half-finished roller coaster that no one will be able to ride sitting in the middle of a place where nobody ever comes."

"I'm going to find a way to raise more money. There are some historical groups interested in restoring wooden coasters." Honey avoided meeting Chantal's eyes. None of those groups had the resources to come up with the large amount of money she needed, but she wasn't going to admit as much to Chantal. Her cousin already thought she was crazy. And maybe she was.

"Just suppose a miracle happens and you finish Black Thunder," Chantal said.

"What good will it do

you? Nobody's going to come to ride it because there isn't a park here anymore." Her eyes grew dark with urgency. "Let's go back to California. All you'd have to do is pick up the phone and somebody'd hire you to be in a TV show. You could make lots of money."

Honey wanted to put her hands over her ears. Chantal was right, but she couldn't do it. As soon as audiences saw her trying to play a part other than Janie Jones, they'd realize what a fraud she had been as an actress. The record of those performances was the only thing that she had left in which she could take pride, the only thing she couldn't sacrifice.

"This is crazy, Honey!" Chantal exclaimed. "You're throwing away everything.

Are you trying to put all three of us in a grave right along with Dash Coogan?"

Honey slammed down her spoon, splashing soup everywhere, and jumped up from the table. "Don't

you talk about him! I don't even want to hear you mention his name. I don't care about houses or California or anybody coming to the park. I don't care about you and Gordon. I'm restoring this coaster for me and not for anybody else."

The back door had opened, but she didn't notice until Gordon spoke. "You shouldn't yell at Chantal like that," he said quietly.

She spun around, her teeth barred. "I'll yell at her any way I want. You're both worthless. The two most worthless people I've ever met in my life."

Gordon studied a point just above her right eyebrow. "I've been working right by your side, Honey, ever since we came out here. Ten, twelve hours a day.

Just like you."

It was the truth. Today's absence was rare. Gordon worked with her on Sundays and in the evenings after the men had left. She had been surprised to see that hard work even seemed to agree with him. Now as she noticed how pale he was, she realized he had probably been telling the truth when he had said he wasn't feeling well, but she didn't have any sympathy left to waste on anyone, not even herself.

"The two of you had better not push me. I'm in charge, and you need to decide right now how it's going to be." Her mouth twisted bitterly. "The old days are gone when you could get anything out of me you wanted just by threatening to leave. I don't care anymore if you go. If you don't think you can live with my decisions, then pack your bags and be out of here by tomorrow."

Brushing past him, she stalked out the back door and down the crumbling concrete steps. Why did she

let them stay? They cared about her money, but not about her. And she didn't care about them anymore. She didn't care about anyone.

A chilly, wet blast of wind hit her, and she remembered that she'd left her sweatshirt behind. Off to her left she could see Silver Lake, its rain-cratered surface slate gray and fetid under the December sky. A vulture swooped over the ruins of the Dodgem Hall. The land of the dead. The park was a perfect place for her.

She slowed her steps as she entered the trees and the emptiness enveloped her.

Wet brown needles stuck to her work boots and the bottoms of her jeans. She wished she could rebuild the coaster by herself so she could get rid of everyone else. Maybe in the solitude Dash would talk to her. She sagged against the scaly bark of a longleaf pine, her breath forming a frosty cloud in the air, grief and loneliness overwhelming her.
Why didn't you take me with you? Why did you
die without me?

Only gradually did she grow aware of the fact that a man was standing in the far end of the clearing near her trailer. Chantal had said it wasn't safe for her to live so far away from them, but she had paid no attention. Now the hair at the back of her neck prickled.

He lifted his head and spotted her. There was something ominous about the still way he held himself. She'd encountered several vagrants since she'd returned to the park, but they'd run away when they

saw her. This man didn't look as if he intended to run anywhere.

Until that moment she hadn't thought she cared enough about her personal safety to experience fear

again, but even from sixty feet away, she could feel the man's menace. He was much larger than she, broad-shouldered and strong, with long, wild hair and a frightening black eye patch. Rain glistened on

his leather jacket, and his jeans were muddy and soiled.

When he didn't come any nearer, she experienced a flicker of hope that he would turn away. But he began to move toward her instead, taking slow, threatening steps.

"You're trespassing." She barked out the words, hoping to intimidate him in the same way she'd intimidated so many others.

He said nothing as he came closer, then stopped in the shadows less than twelve feet away.

"What do you want?" she demanded.

"I'm not certain." His words were colored by a faint foreign accent she couldn't quite identify.

An icy finger of dread trickled down her spine. She was alarmingly aware of the emptiness of the

clearing, the fact that even if she screamed, Gordon and Chantal wouldn't hear her.

"This is private property."

"I am not hurting anything." There was no intonation to his speech, just that soft, alien accent.

"You go on and get out of here," she ordered. "Don't make me call my watchman."

She wondered if he suspected there wasn't a watchman, because her empty threat didn't intimidate him.

"Why would you do that?" he asked.

She wanted to run, but she knew he would overtake her long before she could reach Chantal's trailer. As he stood staring at her, she had the frightening sense that he was trying to make up his mind about something. Her own brain quickly supplied a possibility. He was trying to decide whether he should kill her or just rape her. For a moment something about him seemed familiar. She thought of all those true-crime television shows Gordon and Chantal watched and wondered if she could have seen him on one of them. What if he was a fugitive?

"You don't know me, do you?" he finally said.

"Should I?" Her nerves were stretched so tautly she wanted to scream. One wrong word and he would

be on her. She stood frozen until he took another step forward.

She instinctively moved back, holding out her arm as if that frail barrier could keep him away. "Don't come any closer!"

"Honey, it's me. Eric."

Only gradually did his words penetrate her fear, but even then it took a few moments before she realized who it was.

"I didn't mean to scare you," he said, in a flat, dead voice that no longer held any trace of accent.

"Eric?"

It had been years since she had seen him in person, and the many newspaper and magazine photographs of him bore no resemblance to this menacing-looking one-eyed stranger. Where was the sulky young heartthrob she had known so long ago?

"What are you doing here?" Her voice was harsh. He had no right to frighten her like that. And he had

no right to intrude on her privacy. She didn't care if he was Mr. Big Shot in Hollywood. She was long past the point when she was impressed by movie stars.

"I noticed a sign about twenty miles from here and remembered how you used to talk about this place.

I was just curious."

She took in the eye patch and his unkempt appearance. His clothes were muddy and wrinkled, his hands dirty, his jaw dark with stubble. It was no wonder she hadn't recognized him. She remembered his automobile accident, but she no longer felt pity for people who were lucky enough to emerge from accidents with their lives intact.

She didn't like the fact that she had to tilt her head to look him in the eye. "Why didn't you tell me who you were right away?"

He shrugged, his face blank of any expression. "Habit."

Uneasiness crept through her. He stood silently, making no attempt to explain either his presence in the park or his menacing appearance. He simply returned her gaze with one clear blue, unflinching eye. And the longer he looked at her, the more she had the disturbing sense that she was staring into a mirror image of her own face. Not that she saw a physical resemblance there. It was something more fundamental. She saw a bleakness of the soul she knew all too well.

"You're hiding out, aren't you?" she said. "The long hair. The phony accent.

The eye patch." She shivered against the cold.

"The eye patch is for real. They wrote it into the script for my last film. As for the rest, I wasn't trying to scare you. The accent's automatic. I use it to keep the fans away. I don't even think about it anymore."

But he seemed to be trapped in something more fundamental than a ruse to avoid being recognized by his fans. As a runaway herself, it wasn't difficult to recognize another, although what he had to run from she couldn't imagine.

He stared off into the distance. "No neighbors. No satellite dish. You're lucky to have this place."

He hunched his shoulders against the damp wind, still not bothering to look at her. "I'm sorry about Dash. He never liked me much, but I genuinely admired him."

His condolences sounded begrudging, and she bristled. "Not as an actor, I bet."

"No. Not as an actor. He was more a personality than anything else."

"He always said he played Dash Coogan better than anybody." She clamped her teeth together so they wouldn't chatter. She didn't show her weaknesses to anybody.

"He was his own man. Not many people can say that." Turning his head, he looked past her toward the sliver of lake visible through the trees.

She remembered a newspaper photograph she'd seen of him the day before the Academy Awards: mousse-slicked hair, RayBan sunglasses, unstructured Armani suit. The photograph hadn't shown his feet, but they had probably been sockless and stuffed into a pair of Gucci loafers. It struck her that he was a man of a thousand faces, and his vagabond's guise was merely one of them.

"You've got a lot of space here," he said.

"And not very many people," she replied. "Which is the way I want to keep it."

He didn't take the hint. Instead, he glanced toward the trailer. "You wouldn't happen to have a shower rigged up in there with some hot water?"

"I'm afraid I'm not in the mood for company."

"Neither am I. I'll be back as soon as I get some clean clothes from my van."

By the time she opened her mouth to tell him to go to hell, he had disappeared into the trees. She stalked into the trailer and momentarily considered locking the door. But an enormous weariness had settled over her, and she realized she simply didn't care. Let him take his shower. Then he would go away and she could be alone again.

She was shivering, and she wasn't about to wait around in wet clothes while Mr. Movie Star used up all her hot water. Let him take the leftovers. As she peeled out of her work clothes and stepped into the shower, she wondered what had happened to him. Other than his divorce and the automobile accident he had obviously survived, she had never heard of a single traumatic event in his life. He was one of God's chosen, given fame and fortune as if he'd been sprinkled with fairy dust at birth. What right did he have to act as if he were living out a Greek tragedy?

After she had dried off, she slipped into a pair of worn gray sweats she kept on the back of the door,

then left the bathroom for the tiny, utilitarian bedroom that occupied the back.

She didn't bother to look toward the trailer's living area to see if he had returned, but a few moments later she heard the bathroom door click shut and then the sound of the shower running.

When she had finished combing the snags out of her wet hair, she went to the small kitchen that ran along one side of the living area. She thought about making a pot of coffee, but she didn't want Eric to stay that long, so she filled the sink with water and began washing the dirty cups and glasses that had accumulated over the last few days.

When he emerged from the bathroom, he was wearing clean jeans and a flannel shirt. His long hair was slicked back from his face, and he had shaved. She hadn't intended to ask any questions that would prolong his visit, but once again the eye patch caught her attention.

"Is your eye injury permanent or temporary?"

"Permanent. At least until I have surgery. Even then, who knows? It's not a sight for weak stomachs."

This time a stirring of pity disturbed the shell she had erected around herseif.

The loss of an eye would be difficult for anyone, but it must be especially devastating for an actor who was being deprived of one of the most fundamental tools of his trade.

"I'm sorry," she said. The apology sounded resentful, and she thought how much she disliked this tough, hard person she had become.

He shrugged. "Shit happens."