“Shouldn’t you see a doctor? Do you want me to drive you to the emergency room?”
“Hell, no. And would you please keep your voice down? I don’t want Grandma and Grandpa to see this. I’d never hear the end of it.”
“What happened?”
“Well, it was like this.” She scraped the cream filling out of an Oreo with her lower front teeth. “I went to this shit-kicker’s dance hall. The place was
swinging. Friday night, you know payday. Everybody was in a party mood. There was this one guy with a really cute ass.” She ate the two disks of
chocolate cookie and dug into the ceramic jar for another.
“He took me to a motel. We drank some beer and smoked some grass. He got a little too sublime, I guess, because when we got down to business, he
couldn’t get it up. Naturally, he took it out on me.” As she summed up the tale, she dusted her hands of cookie crumbs and reached for the glass of milk.
“He hit you?”
Fancy gaped at her, then gave a semblance of a laugh. ” ‘He hit you?’ ” she mimicked. “What the hell do you think? Of course he hit me.”
“You could have been seriously hurt, Fancy.”
“I can’t believe this,” she said, rolling her eyes ceilingward in disbelief. “You always enjoyed hearing about my romantic interludes, said they gave you a
vicarious thrill, whatever the hell that means.”
“I’d hardly classify getting hit in the face romantic. Did he tie you up, too?”
Fancy followed her aunt’s gaze down to the red circles around each of her wrists. “Yeah,” she answered bitterly, “the bastard tied my hands together.”
Carole didn’t have to know that the “bastard” she referred to wasn’t the drunken, impotent cowboy.
“You’re crazy to go to a motel room with a stranger like that, Fancy.”
“I’m crazy? You’re the one stuffing ice cubes in a Baggie.”
“For your eye.”
Fancy slapped away the makeshift ice pack. “Don’t do me any favors, okay?”
“Your eye is turning black and blue. It’s about to swell shut. Do you want your parents to see it like that and have to tell them the story you just told me?”
Irritably, Fancy snatched up the ice pack and held it against her eye. She knew her aunt was right.
“Do you want some peroxide for your lip? An aspirin? Something for the pain?”
“I had enough beer and grass to dull the pain.”
Fancy was confused. Why was Carole being so nice to her? Since coming home from that luxury palace of a clinic, she had been freaking weird. She
didn’t yell at the kid anymore. She looked for things to do instead of sitting on her ass all day. She actually seemed to like Uncle Tate again.
Fancy had always considered Carole stupid for playing Russian roulette with her marriage. Uncle Tate was good-looking. All the girls she knew drooled
over him. If her instincts in this field were any good, and she believed them to be excellent, he’d be terrific in bed.
She wished she had somebody who loved her as much as Uncle Tate had loved Carole when they had first gotten married. He’d treated her like a queen.
She had been a fool to throw that away. Maybe she had reached that conclusion herself and was trying to win him back.
Fat chance. Fancy thought derisively. Once you crossed Uncle Tate, you were on his shit list for life.
“What are you doing up so late,” she asked, “sitting all by yourself in the dark?”
“I couldn’t sleep. I thought cocoa might help.” There was a half-empty cup of chocolate on the table.
“Cocoa? That’s a hoot.”
“A proper insomnia remedy for a senator’s wife,” she replied with a wistful smile.
Fancy, never one to beat around the bush, asked, “You’re mending your ways, aren’t you?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know damn well what I mean. You’re changing your image in the hopes that Uncle Tate will get elected and keep you on when he goes to
Washington.” She assumed a confidential, just-between-us-girls pose. “Tell me, did you give up humping all your boyfriends, or just Eddy?”
Her aunt’s head snapped up. Her face went pale. She pulled her lower lip between her teeth and wheezed, “What did you say?”
“Don’t play innocent. I suspected it all along,” Fancy said breezily. “I confronted Eddy with it.”
“And what did he say?”
“Nothing. Didn’t deny it. Didn’t admit it. He responded as a gentleman should.” Snorting rudely, she headed for the door that led to the other rooms of the
house. “Don’t worry. There’s enough shit flying around here already. I’m not going to tell Uncle Tate. Unless…”
She spun around, her attitude combative. “Unless you pick up your affair with Eddy again. It’s me he’s gonna be screwing from now on, not you. G’night.”
Feeling smug and satisfied for having made herself so unequivocally understood, Fancy sashayed from the kitchen. One look in the mirror over her
bedroom dresser confirmed that her face was a mess.
It didn’t occur to Fancy until days later that Carole was the only one in the family who had even noticed that she was sporting a black eye and a busted lip,
and that she hadn’t ratted on her.
TWENTY
Van Lovejoy’s apartment was House Beautiful’s worst nightmare. He slept on a narrow mattress supported by concrete building blocks. Other pieces of
furniture were just as ramshackle, salvaged from flea markets and junk stores.
There was a sad, dusty pinata, a sacrilegious effigy of Elvis Presley, dangling from the light fixture. It was a souvenir he’d brought back from a visit to
Nuevo Laredo. The goodies inside several kilos of marijuana were but a memory. Except for the pihata, the apartment was unadorned.
The otherwise empty rooms were filled with videotapes. That and the equipment he used to duplicate, edit, and play back his tapes were the only things of
any value in the apartment, and their worth was inestimable. Van was better equipped than many small video production companies.
Video catalogs were stacked everywhere. He subscribed to all of them and scoured them monthly in search of a video he didn’t already have or hadn’t
seen. Nearly all his income went to keeping his library stocked and updated.
His collection of movies rivaled any video rental store. He studied directing and cinematographic techniques. His taste was eclectic, ranging from Orson
Welles to Frank Capra, Sam Peckinpah to Steven Spielberg. Whether filmed in black and white or Technicolor, camera moves fascinated him.
Besides the movies, his collection included serials and documentaries, along with every inch of tape he had shot himself in the span of his career. It was
known throughout the state that if stock footage of an event was needed and it couldn’t be found elsewhere, Van Lovejoy of KTEX in San Antonio would
have it.
He spent all his free time watching tapes. Tonight, his fascination was centered on the raw footage he had shot at the Rocking R Ranch a few days
earlier. He’d delivered the tapes to MB Productions, but not before making copies of them for himself. He never knew when something he’d shot years
earlier might prove useful or valuable, so he kept copies of everything.
In post-production, MBP would write scripts, edit, record voice-overs, mix music, and end up with slick, fully produced commercials of varying lengths.
Van’s camera work would look sterilized and staged by the time the commercials went out over the air. He didn’t care. He’d been paid. What interested
him were the candid shots.
Tate Rutledge was charismatic on or off camera. Handsome and affluent, he was a walking success story the kind of man Van usually despised on
principle. But if Van had been a voter, the guy would get his vote just because he seemed to shoot straight from the hip. He didn’t bullshit, even when what
he was saying wasn’t particularly what people wanted to hear. He might lose the election, but it wouldn’t be because he lacked integrity.
He kept thinking that there was something wrong with the kid. She was cute enough, although, in Van’s opinion, one kid looked like another. He usually
wasn’t called upon to videotape children, but when he was, his experience had been that they had to be threatened or cajoled into settling down,
behaving, and cooperating, especially when shooting retakes or reverse questions.
That hadn’t been the case with the Rutledge kid. She was quiet and didn’t do anything ornery. She didn’t do anything, period, unless she was told to, and
then she moved like a little wind-up doll. The one who got the most response out of her was Carole Rutledge.
It was she who really held Van enthralled.
Time and again he had played the tapes those he’d shot of her at the ranch, and those he’d shot on the day she left the clinic. The lady knew what to do in
front of a camera.
He’d had to direct Rutledge and the kid, but not her. She was a natural, always turning toward the light, knowing instinctively where to look. She seemed to
know what he was about to do before he did it. Her face begged for close-ups. Her body language wasn’t stilted or robotized, like most amateurs.
She was a pro.
Her resemblance to another pro he had known and worked with was damned spooky.
For hours he had sat in front of his console, replaying the tapes and studying Carole Rutledge. When she did make an awkward move, he believed it was
deliberate, as if she realized just how good she was and wanted to cover it up.
He ejected one tape and inserted another, one he had shot so it could be played back in slow motion. He was familiar with the scene. It showed the
threesome walking through a pasture of verdant grass, Rutledge carrying his daughter, his wife at his side. Van had planned his shot so that the sun was
sinking behind the nearest hill, casting them in silhouette. It was a great effect, he thought now as he watched it for the umpteenth time.
And then he saw it! Mrs. Rutledge turned her head and smiled up at her husband. She touched his arm. His smile turned stiff. He moved his arm slightly,
but enough to shrug off her wifely caress. If the tape hadn’t been in slow motion, Van might not have even noticed the candidate’s subtle rejection of his
wife’s touch.
He didn’t doubt when the post-production was done, the shot would be edited out. The Rutledges would come out looking like Ozzie and Harriet. But there
was something wrong with the marriage, just like there was something wrong with the kid. Something stunk in Camelot.
Van was a cynic by nature. It came as no surprise to him that the marriage was shaky. He figured they all were, and he didn’t give a flying fig.
Yet the woman still fascinated him. He could swear that she had recognized him the other day before he had introduced himself. He was constantly aware
of expressions and reactions, and he couldn’t have mistaken that momentary widening of her eyes or the quick rush of her breath. Even though the
features weren’t identical, and the hairstyle was wrong, the resemblance between Carole Rutledge and Avery Daniels was uncanny. Carole’s moves were
right on target and the subconscious mannerisms eerily reminiscent.
He let the tape play out. Closing his eyes, Van pinched the bridge of his nose between two of his fingers until it hurt, as if wanting to force the notion out of
his head, because what he was thinking was just too weird ”Twilight Zone” time. But the idea was fucking with his mind something fierce and he couldn’t
get rid of it, crazy as it was.
Several days ago he’d walked into Irish’s office. Dropping into one of the armchairs, he’d asked, “Get a chance to watch that tape I gave you?”
Irish, as usual, was doing six different things at once. He ran his hand over his burred gray hair. “Tape? Oh, the one of Rutledge? Who’ve we got on that
human bone pile they found in Comal County?” he had shouted through his office door to a passing reporter.
“What’d you think about it?” Van asked, once Irish’s attention swung back to him.
Irish had taken up smoking again since Avery wasn’t there to hound him about it. He seemed to want to make up for lost time. He lit a new cigarette from
the smoldering butt of another and spoke through the plume of unfiltered smoke. “About what?”
“The tape,” Van said testily.
“Why? You moonlighting as a pollster?”
“Jesus,” Van had muttered and made to rise. Irish cantankerously signaled him to sit back down. “What’d you want me to look at? Specifically, I mean.”
“The broad.”
Irish coughed. “You got the hots for her?”
Van remembered being annoyed that Irish hadn’t noticed the similarities between Carole Rutledge and Avery Daniels. That should have been an
indication of just how ridiculous his thinking was, because nobody knew Avery better than Irish. He had known her for two decades before Van had ever
laid eyes on her. Mulishly, however, Irish’s flippancy compelled him to prove himself right.
“I think she looks a lot like Avery.”
Irish had been pouring himself a cup of viscous coffee from the hot plate on his littered credenza. He gave Van a sharp glance. “So, what else is new?
Somebody remarked on that as soon as Rutledge got into politics and we started seeing him and his wife in the news.”
“Guess I wasn’t around that day.”
“Or you were too stoned to remember.”
“Could be.”
Irish returned to his desk and sat down heavily. He worked harder than ever, putting in unnecessarily long hours. Everybody in the newsroom talked about
it. Work was a panacea for his bereavement. A Catholic, he wouldn’t commit suicide outright, but he would eventually kill himself through too much work,
too much booze, too much smoking, too much stress all the things about which Avery had affectionately berated him.
“You ever figure out who sent you her jewelry?” Van asked. Irish had confided that bizarre incident to him, and he had thought it strange at the time, but
had forgotten about it until he had stood eyeball to eyeball with Carole Rutledge.
Irish thoughtfully shook his head. “No.”
“Ever try?”
“I made a few calls.”
Obviously, he didn’t want to talk about it. Van was persistent. “And?”
“I got some asshole on the phone who didn’t want to be bothered. He said that following the crash, things were so chaotic just about anything was
possible.”
Like mixing up bodies? Van wondered.
He wanted to ask that question, but didn’t. Irish was coping as best he could with Avery’s death, and he still wasn’t doing very well. He didn’t need to hear
Van’s harebrained hypothesis. Besides, even if it were possible, it made no sense. If Avery were alive, she’d be living her life, not somebody else’s.
So he hadn’t broached the possibility with Irish. His imagination had run amok, that’s all. He’d compiled a bunch of creepy coincidences and shaped them
into an outlandish, illogical theory.
Irish would probably have said that his brains were fried from doing too much dope, which was probably the truth. He was nothing but a bum a washout. A
reprobate. What the fuck did he know?
But he loaded another of the Rutledge tapes into the VCR anyway.
The first scream woke her. The second registered. The third prompted her to throw off the covers and scramble out of bed.
Avery grabbed a robe, flung open the door to her bedroom, and charged down the hall toward Mandy’s room. Within seconds of leaving her bed, she was
bending over the child’s. Mandy was thrashing her limbs and screaming.
“Mandy, darling, wake up.” Avery dodged a flailing fist.
“Mandy?”
Tate materialized on the other side of the bed. He dropped to his knees on the rug and tried to restrain his daughter. Once he had captured her small
hands, her body bucked and twisted while her head thrashed on the pillow and her heels pummeled the mattress. She continued to scream.
Avery placed her hands on Mandy’s cheeks and pressed hard. “Mandy, wake up. Wake up, darling. Tate, what should we do?”
“Keep trying to wake her up.”
“Is she having another nightmare?” Zee asked as she and Nelson rushed in. Zee moved behind Tate. Nelson stood at the foot of his granddaughter’s bed.
“We could hear her screams all the way in our wing,” he said. “Poor little thing.”
Avery slapped Mandy’s cheeks lightly. “It’s Mommy. Mommy and Daddy are here. You’re safe, darling. You’re safe.”
Eventually, the screams subsided. As soon as she opened her eyes, she launched herself into Avery’s waiting arms. Avery gathered her close and
cupped the back of her head, pressing the tear-drenched face into her neck. Mandy’s shoulders shook; her whole body heaved with sobs.
“My God, I had no idea it was this bad.”
“She had them nearly every night while you were still in the hospital,” Tate told her. “Then they started tapering off. She hasn’t had one for several weeks. I
was hoping that once you got home they would stop altogether.” His face was drawn with concern.
“Is there anything you want us to do?”
Tate glanced at Nelson. “No. I think she’ll calm down now and go back to sleep, Dad, but thanks.”
“You two need to put a stop to this. Immediately.” He took Zee’s arm and propelled her toward the door. She seemed reluctant to leave and looked at
Avery anxiously.
“She’ll be all right,” Avery said, rubbing Mandy’s back She was still hiccuping sobs, but the worst was over.
“Sometimes they come back,” Zee said uneasily.
“I’ll stay with her for the rest of the night.” When she and Tate were left alone with the child, Avery said, “Why didn’t you tell me her nightmares were this
severe?”
He sat down in the rocking chair near the bed. “You had your own problems to deal with. The dreams stopped happening with such regularity, just like the
psychologist predicted they would. I thought she was getting over them.”
“I still should have known.”
Avery continued to hold Mandy tight against her, rocking back and forth and murmuring reassurances. She wouldn’t let go until Mandy indicated that she
was ready. Eventually, she raised her head.
“Better now?” Tate asked her. Mandy nodded.
“I’m sorry you had such a bad dream,” Avery whispered, wiping Mandy’s damp cheeks with the pads of her thumbs. “Do you want to tell Mommy about it?”
“It’s going to get me,” she stammered on choppy little breaths.
“What is, darling?”
“The fire.”
Avery shuddered with her own terrifying recollections. They seized her sometimes unexpectedly and it often took several minutes to recover from them. As
an adult, she found it hard to deal with her memories of the crash. What must it be like for a child?
“I got you out of the fire, remember?” Avery asked softly. “It’s not there anymore. But it’s still scary to think about, isn’t it?” Mandy nodded.
Avery had once done a news story with a renowned child psychologist. During the interview she recalled him saying that denying the authenticity of a
child’s fears was the worst thing a parent could do. Fears had to be acknowledged before they could be dealt with and, hopefully, overcome.
“Maybe a cool, damp cloth would feel good on her face,” Avery suggested to Tate. He left the rocker, and returned shortly with a washcloth. “Thank you.”
He sat down beside her as she bathed Mandy’s face. In a move that endeared him to Avery, he picked up the Pooh Bear and pressed it into Mandy’s
arms. She clutched it to her chest.
“Ready to lie back down?” Avery asked her gently.
“No.” Apprehensively, her eyes darted around the room. “Mommy’s not going to leave you. I’ll lie down with you.”
She eased Mandy back, then lay down beside her, facing her as their heads shared the pillow. Tate pulled the covers over both of them, then bridged then
pillow with his arms and leaned down to kiss Mandy.
He was wearing nothing but a pair of briefs. His body looked exceptionally strong and beautiful in the soft glow of the night-light. As he started to stand up,
his eyes locked with Avery’s. Acting on impulse, she laid her hand on his furry chest and raised her head to lightly kiss his lips, “Good night, Tate.”
He straightened up slowly. As he did, her hand slid down his chest; over the hard, curved muscles; across the nipple; through the dense, crisp hair; to the
smoother plane of his belly; until her fingertips brushed against the elastic waistband of his briefs before falling away.
“I’ll be right back,” he mumbled.
He was gone only a few minutes, but by the time he returned, Mandy was sleeping peacefully. He had pulled on a lightweight robe, but had left it unbelted.
As he lowered himself into the rocking chair, he noticed that Avery’s eyes were still open. “That bed’s not meant for two. Are you comfortable?”
“I’m fine.”
“I don’t think Mandy would know if you got up now and went to your own room.”
“I would know. And I told her I’d stay with her the rest of the night.” She stroked Mandy’s flushed cheek with the back of her finger. “What are we going to
do, Tate?”
Resting his elbows on his knees, he sat forward and dug his thumbs into his eye sockets. A tousled lock of hair fell over his forehead. With stubble
surrounding it, the vertical cleft at the edge of his chin seemed more pronounced. He sighed, expanding his bare chest beneath the open robe. “I don’t
know.”
“Do you think the psychologist is doing her any good?”
He raised his head. “Don’t you?”
“I shouldn’t second-guess the choice you and your parents made while I was indisposed.”
She knew she shouldn’t get involved at all. This was a personal problem and Avery Daniels had no right to poke her nose into it. But she couldn’t just
stand by and let a child’s emotional stability deteriorate.
“If you have an opinion, be my guest and say so,” Tate urged. “This is our child we’re talking about. I’m not going to get petty about who had the best idea.”
“I know of a doctor in Houston,” she began. One of his eyebrows arched inquisitively. “He… I saw him on a talk show once and was very impressed with
what he had to say and how he conducted himself. He wasn’t pompous. He was very straightforward and practical. Since the current doctor isn’t making
much progress, maybe we should take Mandy to see him.”
“We haven’t got anything to lose. Make an appointment.”
“I’ll call tomorrow.” Her head sank deeper into the pillow, but she kept her eyes on him. He sat back in the rocking chair and rested his head against the
stuffed pink cushion. “You don’t have to sit there all night, Tate,” she said softly.
Their eyes met and held. “Yes, I do.”
She fell asleep watching him watch her.
TWENTY-ONE
Avery woke up first. It was very early, and the room was dim, although the night-light still burned. She smiled wistfully when she realized that Mandy’s small
hand was resting on her cheek. Her muscles were cramped from lying so long in one position; otherwise, she probably would have gone back to sleep.
Needing to stretch, she eased Mandy’s hand off her face and laid it on the pillow. Taking agonizing care not to awaken the child, she got up.
Tate was asleep in the rocker. His head was lying at such an angle to one side that it was almost resting on his shoulder. It looked like a very
uncomfortable position, but his abdomen was rising and falling rhythmically, and she could hear his even breathing in the quiet room.
His robe lay parted, revealing his torso and thighs. His right leg was bent at the knee; the left was stretched out in front of him. His calves and feet were
well-shaped. His hands were heavily veined and sprinkled with hair. One was dangling from the arm of the chair, the other lay against his stomach.
Sleep had erased the furrow of concern from between his brows. His lashes formed sooty crescents against his cheeks. Relaxed, his mouth looked
sensual, capable of giving a woman enormous pleasure. Avery imagined that he would make love intently, passionately, and well, just as he did
everything. Emotion brimmed inside Avery’s chest until it ached. She wanted badly to cry.
She loved him.
As much as she wanted to make recompense for her professional failures, she realized now that she had also assumed the role of his wife because she
had fallen in love with him before she could even speak his name. She had loved him when she had had to look at him through a veil of bandages and rely
only on the sound of his voice to inspire her to fight for her life.
She was playing his wife because she wanted to be his wife. She wanted to protect him. She wanted to heal the hurts inflicted on him by a selfish, spiteful
woman. She wanted to sleep with him.
If he claimed his conjugal rights, she would gladly oblige him. That would be her greatest lie yet one he wouldn’t be able to forgive when her true identity
was revealed. He would despise her more than he had Carole because he would think she had tricked him. He would never believe her love was genuine.
But it was.
He stirred. When he brought his head upright, he winced. His eyelids fluttered, came open with a start, then focused on her. She was standing within
touching distance.
“What time is it?” he asked with sleepy huskiness.
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