The Salt Maiden (16 page)

“I
will
get this person, Dana. I swear it to you.”

In his eyes she saw him beg her to forget that he had also promised he’d find Angie. His fingers glided through her hair and caressed the side of her neck. She wanted to believe him. God only knew she needed to believe in
something
.

“Can you tell me,” she asked, “where my sister’s…where’s her body?”

“El Paso ME’s office. The FBI’s put a rush on the postmortem.”

Dana tried not to think about the Y incision. Closed her eyes but couldn’t keep back the image of gloved hands lifting out the mass of dripping entrails. She wanted to ask if he could stop it, to beg them not to put Angie through that final assault. But to do that she’d have to hold the horror in her head long enough to form a cogent argument, and she couldn’t bear it. Probably
shouldn’t
, since Angie’s body might offer up the evidence she could no longer share in words.

“That’s enough for now,” Jay said as he pulled away. “Why don’t you rest a few more minutes, and I’ll bring you some food and…Do you drink milk?”

When she didn’t answer he offered a brief smile. “What if I told you it came from free-range dairy cows with all-organic diets, weekly massages, and plush retirement packages?”

Against her will, she smiled back, and almost imperceptibly the anguish knotted hard inside her eased. “I’d call you a liar,” she managed, “but I’d drink it.”

“Okay.” He kissed her forehead, teasing the knot a little looser.

When he pulled away she tumbled headlong into his gaze.

“I’ll be right back,” he told her.

As the door closed she stared after him, her teeth pinching her lower lip until it hurt. What she felt for him was gratitude, a knee-jerk response to the kindness any decent person might feel obliged to offer.

It can’t possibly be love.

She was smart enough to understand that she was caught up in a perfect storm of conditions guaranteed to obliterate good judgment. Grieving for her sister, on the rebound from a breakup, and recovering from the loss of her fertility, she
had no business even thinking of Jay Eversole as anything but a momentary oasis in this hell.

And no business whatsoever imagining that a man still raw from his own traumas would have any better sense than she did. If she’d glimpsed love in his gaze, it was simply an illusion, a mirage so cunning he couldn’t tell it from reality.

It was up to her, then, to remember the distinction. And up to her to ramrod some sort of justice for her sister, if she could only find the strength.

When the knock at her back door came, Mrs. Lockett was ladling vegetable soup into a bowl while Jay threw together a cheese sandwich made with two thick slabs of the homemade jalapeño beer bread famous throughout the county. Without waiting for an answer Estelle Hooks came in, her heels making their familiar
click-drag
on the tile.

“Turn on the TV,” she blurted. “Hurry.”

“If your son’s giving interviews again…” Jay growled, wondering how Wallace could have already forgotten the first-rate ass-chewing he’d gotten the last time. Certainly he’d acted resentful enough to let Jay know his words had made an impact.

“It’s not Wallace. It’s you,” Estelle said.

Mamie Lockett scuttled out of the kitchen to turn on the set in her parlor, her movements so swift and unexpected that her orange tabby tomcat jumped off the couch and ran behind it, yowling. With a fleet of knickknacks weighing down the doilies, the room looked like something from the forties, but the television’s reception was a credit to the satellite dish on her roof.

“What channel?” she asked as she squinted down at the remote. Her reading glasses, as usual, were perched atop her head.

Estelle snatched away the clicker while Jay protested, “But I didn’t talk to anybody.”

The station Estelle punched in was running a terrifically annoying commercial for some headache medication.

Jay wished he had some, then frowned and said, “We must have missed the story. What was it—”

She shook her head and shushed them. “It’s about to come on, they said. Right before they went to the commercials that pretty little reporter lady promised some exciting new information on the sheriff connected with the Rimrock County Salt Maiden case. Or do you think she could’ve meant my Wallace? After all, it’s not the first time he’s been mistaken for a sheriff. And even Suzanne Riggins had to admit he looked authoritative.”

Unfazed by her pride, Jay stared at the television. Fear smoldered in his belly while his hands went icy cold.

Mamie patted his arm. “I’ll bet they’re going to point out that you’re a real American hero, that’s what you are.”

He nearly choked on disbelief. “A
hero
?”

“
All
our boys in uniform are heroes.” Her gaze drifted to the faded photo on her sideboard of a boyish-looking man wearing sailor’s whites and a cocky grin beneath his tilted hat. Her late husband, Jay remembered, had been a navy squid in World War II. Lost a leg on some Pacific island hellhole after his Japanese captors let it go gangrenous. People had spoken reverently of him for decades, how his actions had saved dozens, how after coming home with every reason in the world to feel angry and defeated, he had never been known to step out his front door without a smile.

In spite of the medals he had been awarded, it made Jay sick that Mamie Lockett would compare him to a real hero like her husband. That the circumstances of his discharge would bring him anything like honor.

Yet unearned praise turned out to be the last thing he needed to sweat over. Instead he watched his worst fear play out in slow motion. Noted the sparkle in the anchor’s eye as she heightened the suspense by cobbling a recap out of
sound bites. Brave little girl struggling for her life in Houston. Heroic search for the missing birth mother. Mummified body in the salt tomb with its links to a well-organized scheme to bilk retirees across the country out of millions. And finally the tragic murder of Angie Vanover herself, under the watch of a sheriff whose “fitness to hold office has been called into question.”

And then she came right out and told them—told the whole world what had happened in that theater. How a respected professor bringing snacks to his boy had been set upon in an unprovoked attack that smacked of ethnic hatred. How the man sustained a cut requiring seven stitches to the side of his head, from where he’d fallen hard against the armrest of a stadium-style seat.

The shot switched to a large and frizzy-haired young woman sausage-stuffed into a hot-pink tube top.
Izzy Jablonski, Terrified Movie Patron,
read the graphic beneath her Lycra-flattened breasts. Her head dipped toward the proffered microphone, her wide mouth opening as if she meant to eat it.

“The man was a
maniac
,” she raved, waving her hands and bugging out her bulgy blue eyes for effect. “Totally deranged. I had to go to
counseling
for the trauma, like they tell you to on
Dr. Phil
. And I was shaking so hard there was no way I could work over at Hair by Harriet’s on Valley View Lane, where ho-hum hair’s made history. That’s three whole days of pay lost, plus tip money, but after what I saw…”

She shook her head, her eyes now all but bursting from their orbits.

You’d last about three seconds on the ground in Baghdad
, Jay wanted to tell her as a dark tangle of broken corpses overlaid her pale face, and soul-rending ululations drowned out the whipped-up histrionics. With an effort he tore away the past that filmed over the present.

“It’s just
terrifying
.” Good old Izzy was on a roll now, tearing visibly. “Imagine anyone giving a man like that a badge
and, worse yet, allowing him to carry around a loaded
weapon.
What on earth were those people out there
thinking
?Iwon’t sleep nights worrying about this. I might have to go on
disability
for my stress! And who’s going to pay for
that
?”

“I’m not listening to one more second of this bullshit.” Turning from the screen, Jay felt the women’s stares as he stalked back toward the kitchen. “I’m taking Dana her dinner, but I’ll do my best not to be a damned maniac about it.”

He didn’t wait for a reply before snatching the tray off the counter. But that didn’t save him from hearing them whispering in the parlor, Estelle confiding how she’d seen him drop into a crouch behind her desk.

He nearly bumped into Dana in the hallway, which was lit only by a tiny night-light at knee level. She was emerging from the bathroom, and she smelled of Ivory soap and spearmint. He hesitated, worried that she might have overheard the TV. That she’d believe she had made love to some kind of psycho.

“It was…it was so kind of Mrs. Lockett to leave me the toothbrush and the comb and everything. I need to thank her for it, to thank her for everything she’s done.”

Relief rippled through his tensed limbs. She didn’t know, not yet.

Her gaze dropped to the tray in his hands. “And this is nice, too, but I still don’t think I can—”

“That’s the trick,” he said. “Don’t think. Do you want to eat it in the bedroom?”

“I’m not…I’m not ready to face anyone. Anyone else, I mean.” Without meeting his gaze she slipped back into the room.

He followed her and closed the door behind them, giving in to the absurd fear that Estelle’s story would scuttle in on spider’s legs to whisper the ugly truth in Dana’s ear.
Tell her first
, his conscience urged him.
Before she hears the Izzy Jablonski version from someone else.

She propped the pillows against the headboard, then sat
down and pulled the sheet over her thighs. In the lamplight she looked a little better for her cleanup, but her face was pale, and she had a raw-looking scrape beneath her right eye.

With a sigh she told him, “I could sleep forever. And you look tired, too.”

He pulled a delicate cane-bottomed chair next to the bed, and then thought better of putting his weight on it. As he set the tray down on the nightstand, he said, “I caught a few Zs this afternoon, but there’s been lots to do.”

Say it.
But the warmth in her expression made it harder. It could be a long, dry stretch before anybody looked at him that way again. The kind of women he craved tended to be skittish around nationally known nut jobs. Especially those given to unprovoked attacks.

“Soup or sandwich first?” he asked.

She reached for the milk instead and took a polite sip, apparently thinking to appease him. She moved to put it down again, but seemed to change her mind before draining three-quarters of the glass.

“I didn’t realize I was so thirsty.” At her stomach’s growl she glanced down. “Hungry, too, apparently.”

“Your body has its own agenda, no matter what’s going on in your head.” His pulse quickened and his muscles tensed.
It won’t get any easier, so just go ahead and do it.
“It was like that for me in the hospital.”

She touched the side of the soup bowl, then took the sandwich plate instead. “You were in the hospital? Were you hurt when your men…Were you injured in the Middle East?”

“Not physically.” It was all he could do to meet her gaze directly.

“Post-traumatic stress?”

He swallowed painfully, hating this, hating himself. And then he forced himself to nod.

“That’s perfectly understandable,” she said. “Anyone who saw what you did, who saw people killed, would natu
rally be shaken. Even animals, after something scares them badly—”

“There was…there was an incident when I came home. A mistake I made. In a crowded theater. First movie I saw stateside—or tried to see.” It had damned sure been the last one, too.

She picked a few green chunks of jalapeño from the beer bread and laid them on the plate’s rim like a garnish. “Tell me,” she invited, no judgment in her voice.

He grimaced. “With everything you’ve been through, maybe now’s not the time. You’ve got plenty on your mind without me—”

“Could be I’ll feel better hearing about somebody else’s trouble for a change.” She nibbled a corner of the sandwich half and chewed it woodenly. Moisture seeped from one eye, and she reached up to wipe it.

“Don’t do that.” He shook out her white cloth napkin. “You get jalapeño oil in that eye, you’ll really have something to cry over.”

She went very still while he carefully blotted the leaking tear. Once he had finished she scooted over. “Sit down, will you, please? My neck’s stiff, and it hurts to look up.”

He sat on the edge of the bed. If Estelle and Mamie saw, there’d be talk around town. But considering the newscast, that toothless bit of gossip would have to take a number.

“I wouldn’t have brought it up now,” he said. “Except…this thing that happened…they’ve put it on the news. Made it sound like I’m some kind of menace—and maybe that’s what I am.”

“Then tell me what really happened,” she said. “Because I’ve already seen how twisted up these stories get once they pass through the vulture’s bowels. Believe me, a certain reporter who’s been spreading vile dirt about my family is about to have a day of reckoning. She’s my mother’s friend, or so we all thought. She wasn’t the same witch trashing you? Regina Lawler?”

Jay shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

Then he told her the true story. How carefully he’d chosen the movie in the first place: a mindless comedy a cop buddy had suggested might help him remember how to laugh. How a preview trailer for another flick had put him all wrong with its billowing explosions that conjured up the smoke and smells and screams of that night at the checkpoint. How when he’d seen a tall man in a turban, silhouetted over pyrotechnics, he had leaped on instinct, his shoulder slamming the man’s sternum and bringing him down hard.

How his “terrorist” had shamed Jay with his understanding, despite the blood and stitches and his own son’s horror. Or maybe the professor had been scared to raise a fuss, fearful of calling any more attention to his heritage in a post-9/11 world.

“But the worst part was the screaming—and how everybody looked at me when my friend said I was just back from the Middle East. They’d started out scared, confused about what happened. Then I saw it turn to pity, heard some people start to argue that we shouldn’t even be there. That I was no better than any of the psycho baby-killers back from Vietnam.”