A Dark Lure (20 page)

He gave a snort. “Ah, I see, so
that’s
where it came from—that ‘wallowing in your own self-pity, all you know is your own narcissistic pursuit’ comment over the phone.”

Heat burned into her face.

“My stepson—that’s how I think of him—his name is Ty.” He paused, then gave a wry smile. “He’s Holly’s son from her previous marriage. He’s around the same age as Jimmie was when he died. Sometimes life really makes no sense.”

“I know.”

His gaze collided with hers. Then very slowly, still holding her eyes, he reached over and took her hand in his. Softly, he traced his thumb across the scar on her wrist. Olivia started to shiver inside. Her eyes began to burn. But she fought the urge to pull away, fought the shame.

They sat like that, touching, in tremulous silence. Unspoken words heavy and pregnant between them. A kestrel wheeled, cried up high.

“Jimmie,” he finally said, “used to come into the barn and sit on one of the hay bales, or on the tack box. He’d watch me working on the truck for hours, drove me nuts with his questions.” A sad smile curved his lips. “I think I secretly loved the adulation—the fact little Jimmo actually wanted to learn things from me. I would come straight here after school, and I’d spend most of my time here during vacations, after I’d done my ranch chores.” He paused, looking into the barn, watching the shadows, the interplay of sunlight and darkness. The flock of swallows
swooshed
back in under the eaves, and she realized an orange cat was sitting next to a bale, watching them.

He was right. She could feel it. Ghosts. As if this place were suspended in time. As though his words, his memories, were unspooling the years so that she could almost see a young Cole here, shirt off, working on the vintage truck, the clunk of metal tools. Little Jimmie swinging his legs, chattering away.

Cole traced his thumb absently across her wrist again, and Olivia’s heart quickened. The instinct to escape began to pound louder through her blood.

“I used to like to take things apart just to see if I could put them back together,” he said.

“You still do, but with people. In your books. You deconstruct motive, figure out what drives people to do things like climb mountains. To risk life. To live on the edge of existence. You take them apart to examine why they do the extreme.”

He shot a look at her. “You really have read my books?”

This time she smiled. “Truth? I’ve skimmed, mostly. And I’ve read the jacket copy. But I’m reading your latest right now. The one on survivors. I sort of borrowed it from your dad’s desk.”

“It was on his desk?”

“In his drawer when I went looking for your number. It was bookmarked.”

“He’d been reading it?”

“Appears so.”

His gaze burned into hers, as if he were trying to see right inside her. Deconstruct her. See what fired her. His mouth was so close, his lips chiseled to perfection. Wide mouth. Strong mouth. She imagined it against hers. Heat seemed to swell and shimmer between them. Tangible. She swallowed at the intensity but seemed utterly incapable of looking away. So she filled the space with words instead.

“Sven Wroggemann—he was a guy you mentioned in the chapter about bush pilots. You said he was driven by survivor’s guilt. That he believed he should have died in his wife’s place, and that’s what kept him chasing death, tempting and daring it to take him at each turn. You wrote that you thought part of him actually wanted to die, to be punished for having survived.”

She turned her body to fully face his. “Is that how it is with you?” She tilted her head toward the barn. “You feel it should have been you who died, not Jimmie or your mom? Is that why you tempt your own fate, and chase others who do, too?”

He stared at her for a long while. Leaves clattered in the wind and branches scraped against the siding of the barn. He then scrubbed the dark stubble on his jaw.

“I suppose it’s absurd, but I never thought about it that way,” he said.

“Sometimes it’s easier to deconstruct others.” She paused, then said, “When I started reading of your pursuits, I envied your freedom to live life at such full throttle, but I see now it might not have been freedom at all, but a kind of prison.”

Ace came snuffling at their feet. Cole reached down, scratched behind the dog’s ear. Ace repaid him by sitting on his boot and leaning into his leg for a deeper scratch.

Olivia was suddenly conscious of the time and needing to complete her chores before the guided fishing session with Burton and his daughter. But she was also deeply curious now. “What
did
happen in the Sudan?”

His features tightened, and his eyes darkened.

Inhaling deeply, he said, “It was also my fault. I should have had a better read on how volatile things had become.” He paused. “Truth was, I did have a read. Yet I was in this rush, amped with adrenaline.” He met her gaze. “And yeah, maybe that was the drug I was chasing, the drug that numbed the memories. It gave me a kind of tunnel vision. I’d scored a one-on-one interview with one of the rebel leaders. Holly and Ty were with me. She was doing a shoot for
National Geographic
and was going to capture the whole thing on film. But we let slide one fundamental thing—that we were parents. And that we should have been parents before reporters. That our son was more important than showing the world the atrocities in a foreign land.”

“That’s a tough call.”

“It’s not. Not when you dig deep and ask yourself what it is, really, that drives you to bring these stor
ies and images to the world. Is it outrage? Is it exposing the atrocities, shining the light on egregious injustice, a tool to fight it? Or how much is about your own thrill, the excitement that you could be nailing a blockbuster story, something that’s going to make you famous, a journalistic hero, land you another movie deal. Blot out the past.” He met her eyes. “How much really
is
narcissistic self pursuit?”

Olivia met his eyes, realizing in that moment how her comment must have sliced him.

“I wrapped up the interview. That afternoon we were in a small rented room in Wadi Halfa. We had Ty with us. We were liberal. Bold. Acclaimed in our circles. We were homeschooling and giving our son a radical world education. We were self-righteous and smothered with hubris, which made us feel
. . .
invincible. And that’s how it happened. The attack came in the streets of Wadi Halfa. Short end of it all, we were trying to flee when Ty fell and got caught up in the melee. Holly and I were swept one way in the crowd, and Ty the other. He tried to run across the street to us.”

He stopped talking. His features changed, and his eyes went distant.

“Ty was almost taken down by a machete, got cut across the upper arm. I managed to run into the melee and grab him away. I carried him back to Holly, to the doorway where she was hiding. Ty’s blood was hot on my hands, my face, my arms.” His voice caught. He took a moment to marshal himself. “We got him to safety. We’re both first aid trained and managed to bandage him up. We made it to a doctor. We were all more shook up than anything. It was a close call. The warning knell. The end of our relationship.”

“Why?”

“Holly and I fought. We blamed each other. We tried to go on. But Ty’s scrape with death became an irreparable rift, a symbol of everything we were doing wrong as a family. Every time Holly and I looked at each other, touched each other, we saw blame in each other’s eyes. With it came the associated self-recrimination, the bitter words, the questioning about where we were going and who we really were as a couple, a family. She left. A break, she said, to think. It became permanent.”

“Maybe you both just need some more time,” Olivia said.

He gave a soft, derisive snort. “Holly’s moved in with her ex. She took Ty back to his real father. A stable environment, she said. She’s moved on. I’m the bad memory. I am the face of her own guilt. I’m the ‘affair’ she regrets having. She couldn’t look into my eyes without seeing it. Nor can I look into hers. We can’t go back, Liv. She’s pregnant again.” He seemed to struggle for a moment. “Oh, fuck, who am I kidding? I hate her for that. It’s as if having another baby, a new kid, is in defiance of our memories. Of me. As if she can blot it all out.”

“Or it’s her way of coping, just moving forward.”

He flattened his mouth.

She looked away, thinking about motherhood. Children, babies. Loss. The pain could be big and breath-stealing. It had been utterly crippling for her. It still was.

She ached with every molecule of her being to know what had happened to her baby. But she also knew she’d done the right thing in sacrificing her child to adoption. She would not have been a fit mother. Only once she’d reached Broken Bar and begun to find a measure of peace had she begun to believe she could be sound enough to raise a child. Until now. Until the flashbacks returned. And she knew it wasn’t possible—she’d forever be haunted by
him.
Dead or not, he lived inside her. At least she’d freed her baby.

She wanted to tell Cole that she understood. That she’d lost family, too. That her daughter—wherever she was—would be just a little older than Ty and Jimmie.

“Be careful, Cole,” she said quietly. “You don’t want to hold on to it too hard.” She paused. “You don’t want to be your father.”

His mouth opened. He stared at her. Then he snorted. “Funny, how sometimes you can see so much about others, but not yourself.” He paused. “What about you, Liv?”

Liv.

It was the second time he’d called her that.

“You try to outrun it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Your past. You almost killed me back there, yet you won’t talk about it.”

She got up suddenly, dusted off her jeans. “I really should go. I have errands to run, a fence to fix before a guided fishing trip later this afternoon. And there are several guests booked for dinner at the lodge. I should give Jason a hand.”

She tried to walk smartly down the rutted track, but her legs felt like water, as if they didn’t belong to her. He was unraveling her like he unraveled the people in his books, peeling the layers away, exposing things she’d managed to keep hidden for years.

She stopped suddenly and swung around.

“I found out who left the newspaper and lure,” she called out, trying to reassert her ground, show she was sane. “It was the new guest I signed in. They belonged to him.”

He got up. “Let me help you with that fence.”

“No.”

“I don’t like it. A woman alone with armed squatters or poachers.”

“Says he who profiles people who live on the edge.”

He opened his mouth, but Olivia turned, breathing in deep and focusing on long, steady strides as she made her way back toward her horse. Ace came running to her heels. She could feel Cole’s eyes burning into her back—feel his need. She felt she owed him more comfort, after he’d shared like that. But she couldn’t offer more. It brought him too close to the fragile part of herself—the very human part that ached to share, to touch and be touched, to be held.

So she refused to look over her shoulder. She wasn’t sure what had just happened back there, but the paradigm of her world had tilted dangerously.

She mounted Spirit, and as they cantered up over the ridge, she saw a plume of dust rising down the valley. A gleaming black SUV was barreling down the dirt road toward the lodge. Norton Pickett. Myron’s lawyer. He had to be delivering the new will. Tension twisted, and she kicked Spirit into a gallop.

After the sergeant left her office, Dr. Bellman leaned over, pressed the buzzer, asked for her assistant to bring in Gage Burton’s medical records.

She paged quickly through her files, studying again the location of his tumor, the growth progression. She noted, too, that Burton had blown off his last appointment.

She rolled her pen between thumb and middle finger, debating what the cop had just told her.

I have reason to believe Gage Burton might be endangering his daughter . . . time could be of the essence . . .

She reached for her phone, dialed Burton’s home number.

It rang three times before going to voice mail. Probably because he was out of town, as the cop had said. Bellman then tried Burton’s cell. It clicked directly to voice mail, saying he was out of the service area. She sat for a while, rolling her pen between her thumb and middle finger.

Once before, early in her career, there had been a time when, if she had intervened, she could have saved a child. Instead she’d adhered rigi
dly to her code of ethics. The child had died. At the time she’d promised herself
if it came to a child’s life again, she would risk it—she would warn someone. She’d circumvent the bureaucracy. She could not live with letting it happen again. And Burton had been showing signs that worried her.

She dialed Burton’s cell again, and this time she left him a message, telling him he needed to come in.

Then she reached for the card the cop had given her. She dialed Mac Yakima’s number.