Chesapeake Tide (19 page)

“Don't be silly.”

“If you don't want him, why can't I have him?” Shelby asked reasonably.

“Because you're married and because he doesn't want you. He didn't years ago and he doesn't now.”

Shelby smiled. “You don't know everything, Libba Jane. I can be mighty persuasive when I try. That is, if you don't mind. After all, I don't want to horn in on what's yours.”

“That's very considerate of you,” Libby replied acidly. She took another look at her friend's face and gave up attempting to reason with her. “Do what you want, Shelby. You always do, anyway. Russ isn't mine anymore. You're not hurting me, but you are jeopardizing your marriage. Fletcher's a fine man. I just hope you come to your senses before any permanent damage is done.”

Shelby placed a conciliatory hand on Libby's shoulder. “Don't be mad, Libba Jane. I'm just gonna have a little fun. You know I'm harmless.”

Libby had lost her appetite and she certainly didn't need this. She downed her tea and stood. “So far, you've been harmless. I wish you'd listen to me. Don't do anything you'll regret. This is a small town and you of all people know what that means. Fletcher has to live here and so does Russ. I've got to get back to the office.” She smiled woodenly at Beth Ann and Angie. “Nice to see you. Let's do this again when I have more time.”

“Don't leave, Libba,” Shelby begged. “I'm sorry. Lordy, you're touchy. I didn't mean to make you mad.”

“You didn't make me mad. I have things to do.” She gathered her belongings, met Verna Lee's amused glance from across the pool and walked away.

Libby turned on the ignition and twisted the air conditioning dial to full blast. With her mind on auto-pilot, she pulled out of the parking lot and instinctively headed west toward the Chesapeake.

She was thirty-seven years old. Seventeen years had passed, yet the idea of Shelby and Russ was still as painful as it had been when she'd run into Mitch at the dry goods store and he'd casually revealed what she'd been the last to know. Shelby and Russ. Russ and Shelby.

That was the summer Eric Richards had shown up in Marshyhope Creek. Eric with his blond good looks and his Hollywood smile. The rest was history. If only she could turn back time. She would handle it all so differently, or would she?

Sighing, she checked her rearview mirror, reduced her speed and turned the car in the direction of Marshyhope Creek. Regrets were pointless. She had work to do.

L
ibby sat outside on the porch swing slapping at the blackflies that bit her ankles. It was early evening. By midday the mercury had risen to a stifling ninety degrees and heat still hung oppressively over the Maryland side of the Chesapeake. Dinner had been difficult. Nola Ruth had been uncharacteristically silent and Chloe predictably sullen. Her father carried the conversation, teasing Chloe out of her mood and forcing answers from his preoccupied wife. Libby tried to match his mood, but she couldn't manage eye contact with her mother and in the end the effort had been too much and she'd retreated to the porch. Her leave from Ventura County would be over soon and Chloe would start school next week.

Her afternoon at the club, brief as it was, had unsettled her. No one had been unpleasant or unwelcoming, but if she never saw Beth Ann or Angie again, it would be too soon. The fact was she had nothing in common with any of them, Shelby included. Libby tucked a leg beneath her and pressed her bottom lip with her finger. How had her mother managed? She was an intelligent woman, educated, well read, with strong political opinions. Was she ever bored with the empty conversations around her or had her husband been enough?

She heard Chloe in the upstairs bedroom and time rolled back. It was odd hearing noises from the room that had been hers as a child. On her fifteenth birthday, Libby had graduated from the yellow room with the white canopy to the back of the house and the room with the mahogany four-poster. She hadn't regretted the move, but the yellow room had always been her favorite. It was perfect for a girl Chloe's age, young and bright, hopeful and feminine, a room designed as a refuge, a private retreat, a place for sleeping late on lazy mornings.

Libby smiled, remembering how hard it had been for Russ, an early riser, to wait until after nine to see her on a weekend morning. He'd been up before sunrise working his daddy's trawlers and was anxious to begin the pleasure part of his day. Phone calls were useless because her mother refused to wake her. Russ would drive to the end of the Delacourte's long, dirt-packed driveway, sneak behind the house and position himself below her room in the center of a lush flower bed. There, he bellowed as loudly as he could. “Wake up, Libba Jane, or I'm leaving without you. The day's half gone.”

Libby would crack open the French doors and poke her dark, sleep-tousled head over the balcony. “It's the crack of dawn, Russ Hennessey. Go away and come back at a decent hour.”

“Ten minutes,” he had replied. “Ten minutes is all the time you've got.” Inevitably, she would be down the stairs, sunny-faced and scrubbed, well within the allotted time. Libba had loved her sleep, but once, a long time ago, she had loved Russ more.

Cole Delacourte's voice interrupted her. “You're mighty quiet tonight, Libba Jane.”

“Everyone's quiet tonight.”

Cole pulled a cigar from his pocket, bit off the end and spit it into the shrubbery. “I'm not.”

Libby laughed and made room for him on the swing.

“No, Daddy. You always have something to say.”

He sat beside her. “I hope that's a compliment.”

“It is.”

“How's the job coming?”

“All right, I guess. I'm not sure where the contaminants are leaking into the water or even if they're still leaking into the water, but I'm working on it.”

“Does it have to be local? What about pesticides from the farms up north?”

Libby's forehead wrinkled. “Blue crab is a local shellfish. They don't migrate very far. My guess it's something here.” She hesitated.

“Go on.”

“Fish are one thing, it's people I'm worried about.”

“Why?”

“We have a large concentration of leukemia for such a small area. That would indicate that contaminants have been here for quite some time. I'm not getting the whole picture. I wish I had my own lab here.”

“Good Lord.”

“Exactly.”

“We don't drink much tap water,” Cole said thoughtfully.

“We brush our teeth with it. We water our plants and cook with it.”

“Should we buy a purifier?”'

“We could, but it would be like locking the barn after the horse has already escaped. We need to find the source.”

“Have you bitten off more than you can chew?”

Libby sighed. “That's an understatement. The truth is, I don't know where to begin.”

Cole patted his daughter's knee. “You'll manage, honey. If there's anyone who can do it, you can.”

“Cliff Jackson could do a much better job.”

“He's not here and you are. Don't sell yourself short.” Cole smiled. “You always were a tenacious little thing, butting straight into a challenge no matter how tough it was.”

“I've changed.”

“I don't think so.”

It was cozy talking with her father, a man she had always admired but who had always seemed too preoccupied to carry on a conversation with his teenaged daughter. “Are you thinking of retiring, Daddy?”

He whistled. “That's a difficult question to answer. I suppose you could say I'm semiretired. I only take on those cases that really make sense to me.”

Libby laughed. “You've always done that. It made Mama so mad. I can still remember the fights you had.”

“I never fight with my family. I restrict my fighting to the courtroom,” her father said mildly.

“Mama did enough for both of you.”

Her father looked at her curiously. “Is that what you remember, Libba? Your mama and me fighting with each other?”

She shrugged. “It doesn't matter.”

“I think it does. It might explain a lot of things.”

“I didn't have a terrible childhood, if that's what you're getting at.”

Cole Delacourte looked at his daughter's lovely profile, at her bare shoulders in the white halter top and the slim legs curled beneath her. With her hair pulled back into a ponytail she looked no older than she had seventeen years ago when she'd shocked the hell out of everyone and run away without so much as a by-your-leave. He'd always liked that phrase. A history buff, Coleson appreciated everything English, formal and old-fashioned. “What demons were you fighting, honey, and why did you come back?”

Libby's eyes were the warm brown of summer oak. She smiled. “I came back because you asked me. As for demons, I don't remember any in particular.” She looked out across the bay and slapped away another blackfly nibbling at her ankle. She thought back to that summer and her dissatisfaction with the way her life was turning out. “I was edgy that summer and terribly bored. I felt sensitive all over, my skin, my mind.” She shook it off. “I'm not explaining very well, but everything was intensified and I couldn't get anything right. It was as if my nerves were exposed. Nothing made sense to me.” She looked at her father. “Have you ever felt that way?”

He nodded. “The year I met your mama.”

Libby went completely still, willing him to continue, to finish the story her mother had begun.

Coleson Delacourte leaned his head back against the swing's cushion and closed his eyes. “I often wonder if I would have done things differently, but then I think of Nola Ruth and the way she was and I know I wouldn't.”

“You loved her very much.”

Cole nodded. “I still do.”

Libby hesitated.

Her father waited. The night was soft, the air thick with the smell of gardenia.

“Weren't you afraid of loving someone so much?”

“I considered myself lucky to be capable of such an emotion.”

“But didn't you wonder if she felt the same?”

“There's no wondering about it, Libba Jane. No one loves the same. Most relationships are sixty-forty. Ours is one of those. I'm the sixty, your mama's the forty. I knew that from the beginning.”

Libby shuddered. “Doesn't that make you feel terribly insecure to know that your wife isn't giving as much as you are?”

“Not at all. Nola Ruth gives more than I do because it isn't as easy for her.”

She looked at her father. It was easier now that his eyes were closed and his body relaxed to examine him fully. “Were you disappointed that I wasn't a boy?” she asked out of the blue.

He smiled. “Not for a single minute.”

“Mama told me a story,” she hurried on. “She said you knew. Do you?”

He didn't pretend to misunderstand her. “All that was a long time ago, Libba Jane, before your mother was even eighteen years old. Imagine having to live down something your entire life because of a blip in time that happened before you were even a woman.”

“It was a pretty big blip, Daddy.”

“I suppose for a woman of her class and race, it was. The truth is, it happened more often than most of us realize. It's still happening, only the world has changed a bit, thank God.”

“Don't say it didn't hurt you.”

“Actually, it didn't. I felt sorry for Nola Ruth, sorrier than you can imagine that she went through such pain, but it wasn't about me. Our lives together, and with you, happened later. She was a different person.”

Libby didn't dare ask which of the two people her mother had been was the one he preferred. She stared out into the inky sky with its thousands of stars and was comforted by the vast randomness of it all. Maybe the life and troubles of one small person didn't matter much in the scheme of things.

“Thanks, Daddy,” she whispered.

Cole didn't answer her. He was somewhere else, far away, when the word
future
meant something entirely different than it did to a man approaching old age, a man with a grown daughter, a teenage granddaughter and a wife at the end of her years.

Abruptly he stood. There was something he needed to know, something that wouldn't wait. Only Nola Ruth had the answer. “Good night, Libba Jane.” He bent down to kiss her cheek.

Libby looked up at him. Her eyes were liquid dark, almost black, as if the pupils had spilled their color into the irises. “I love you, Daddy,” she whispered.

“I love you, too,” he said automatically. It wasn't his daughter's love that he questioned.

He found his wife in the downstairs bedroom she now occupied. For the first time since her stroke, he hadn't bothered to knock. She was reading in bed. The unmarked side of her face was backlit by lamplight, as lovely to him as it had been when he first saw her.

She looked up and frowned. “Is something wrong?”

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not.”

Marking her place with her finger, she gave him her full attention. “What is it, Cole?”

Instead of his usual preferred spot, beside her on the bed, he took the chair near the window. “It occurs to me that I haven't asked you the obvious in a long time. I've just assumed it.”

She waited.

He drew a deep breath.

Her laugh was indulgent, amused. “We've been married a long time, Cole. Surely you can ask me a question.”

“Ah, but it's not the kind of question I usually ask.”

“You're making me nervous.”

“I wouldn't want to do that, Nola Ruth. Heaven forbid that I should make you uncomfortable in any way at all.”

She stared at him. Coleson Delacourte wasn't a drinking man, but then perhaps the circumstances had never been serious enough.

He leaned forward. “Do you still love me, Nola Ruth?”

Her eyes widened. “Are you serious?”

“Completely.”

“What an absurd question.”

“Answer it, anyway.”

Color rose in her cheeks and she fidgeted with the edge of the blanket. “This is ridiculous, Cole.”

“Is that your answer?”

“What do you want me to say? Demanding a declaration of love isn't exactly conducive to a meaningful sentiment.”

He stood and started for the door. “It appears I have my answer.”

Nola Ruth's jaw dropped. “Cole,” she cried out. “Come back and sit down.”

“I don't think so.”

“For pity's sake. Shall I beg? Is that what you want?”

He turned, his hand on the knob. “I want an answer, an honest, simple answer.”

Her lips were dry. She wet them. “All right, Cole. I'll tell you. I do love you. I'll love you forever for a number of reasons, but mostly because in the nearly four decades we've been married, even in the heat of our worst arguments, you've never so much as hinted that I'm anything other than what I appear to be.”

“That's enough, Nola Ruth,” he said under his breath. “We don't need to discuss this, not now, not ever.”

Coleson Delacourte was normally not an emotional man. His feelings were buried deeply beneath a veneer of cool reserve and hardheaded logic. In the courtroom he'd been compared to a barracuda, a lawyer with a killer instinct and a keen sense of his opponent's vulnerability. There had been other young lawyers in Washington beginning their careers at the same time, men fevered with excitement over the beginning of America's new era—men anxious to see their names in the history books and convinced that the South was the place and civil rights the issue of the future.

But Cole was different. Along with the fever and the instinct he brought with him to Washington an eye for detail, a nearly photographic memory and a courtroom presence that was helped by his cultured Southern accent, his lean six-foot frame and a pair of electric blue eyes that could wear down a witness's testimony on the stand without his ever raising his voice. The court became his arena, the media his friend. He never faltered, never disappointed, never wavered from furthering his ambition, until the day he drove home for a well-earned vacation. He had plans to sleep late, drink bourbon until he was dizzy, fish the fingers of the Chesapeake and roast his catch over coals on the white sand beaches of his boyhood, dressed in nothing more than a pair of tan swim trunks and a shirt without buttons.