After Midnight (10 page)

Wound tighter than a new reel and all too aware that it showed, Steve snagged the bag of groceries, shoved the hatch back and went below deck.

Suffocating waves of heat erupted from the interior, heavy with the scent of varnish and the ever-present mildew that was every sailor’s bane. Depositing the groceries in the galley, he flicked the switch to the small air conditioning unit built into the rear bulkhead. He’d had to call in a few favors to get the county to string a power line down to the dock. The same with the phone company. Electrical and telephone lines were necessities in his line of work, as was the sleek little computer sitting atop the drop-down mahogany shelf that did double duty as desk and dining table.

His old, cast iron frying pan gave an angry rattle when he drew it from the cupboard above the stove. Forcing his hands to slow, he assembled the ingredients for cornbread batter and hushpuppies and tried to decide which he wanted more at the moment – to have Jess flat on her back in his bunk or off the boat before he made a fool of himself trying to get her there.

He hadn’t yet made up his mind when her foot appeared on the top step. Stooping, she descended halfway down the steps and peered into the cabin.

“Close the hatch,” he instructed curtly. “You’re letting in the mosquitoes.”

The prospect of sharing a meal with Steve scraped at Jess’s nerves, already strung tight after the steamy interlude on the deck. Ultra-sensitive to every move he made in the cabin’s minuscule galley, she watched him put together a simple feast of store-bought coleslaw, fried catfish, and hush puppies.

Steve’s evidently hadn’t defused, either. He didn’t need her help, he informed her curtly when she volunteered her services. Her main task -- her only task at the moment – consisted of keeping out of the way.

That proved a challenge in a living and work area not much larger than her condo’s walk-in closet. Jess took one of the captain’s chairs bolted to one side of the eating area, but had to duck each time Steve reached for something in the cabinet above her. After the third or fourth duck, she abandoned the chair and squeezed onto the cushioned bench behind the drop-down table.

She couldn’t help but contrast the sleek little high-tech computer on the table with the scarred, if lovingly polished slab of mahogany it rested on. The wood showed its age in every nick and scratch. Like the rest of the creaking, rocking boat, it had weathered a few storms, Jess guessed.

As had the boat’s owner. Her glance went to the man handling both spatula and cast iron frying pan with consummate skill. He stood with his legs spread against the gentle roll of the boat, his jeans snug against his thighs.

Smothering an oath at the sudden spear of heat in her belly, she wrenched her gaze back to his face, only to discover he’d been looking her over while she did the same to him.

“Don’t you get claustrophobic living on a boat?” she asked, more to divert the sardonic comment she saw forming on his face than to make conversation.

“No.”

Her fingers drummed on the closed computer. Evidently he wasn’t ready for polite chitchat yet. Well, she supposed she couldn’t really blame him. She was still strung wire tight herself. Blowing out a breath, she refrained from further comment while he transferred the catfish to a plate, heaping the browned fillets alongside hushpuppies glistening with a sheen of grease.

“Move the computer, would you?”

She edged the notebook to the seat beside her. Jess had never considered herself a real catfish aficionado, but the aroma that steamed from the cracked blue platter Steve put in front of her had her mouth watering. Wedged in place behind the table, she could only sit and wait with mounting impatience while he retrieved a plastic container of coleslaw from the fridge, along with a sweating glass jug of iced tea. Finally, he set out plates, glasses, and utensils and seated himself in the captain’s chair on the other side of the table.

“Help yourself.”

Taking him at his word, Jess forked several hushpuppies and a large fillet onto her plate. The catfish flaked white and succulent under its crisp coating. The hushpuppies, she discovered when she bit into one, bit back. Her eyes watering, she grabbed her glass of tea and downed half of it in several large gulps.

“Sorry,” Steve offered, the harsh planes of his face softening for the first time since they’d come below deck. “I should have warned you that I include a touch of Tabasco when I mix up the batter.”

“A touch?” Jess gasped, her tongue still on fire. It took another few swallows to douse the flames. Cautiously, she poked at the fish. “Did you use the same batter on this?”

“That’s just plain cornmeal, egg, and milk. Tobasco would overwhelm the delicate flavor.”

“No kidding.”

She nibbled cautiously on a small piece. It tasted every bit as moist and delicious as it looked. Relieved, she followed Steve’s lead and settled in to satisfy the hunger now emitting low, warning growls from the vicinity of her stomach.

With the boat rocking under them and the air conditioner humming busily just above their heads, they emptied the platter of all the catfish and most of the hushpuppies. Jess reached her limit before Steve, who polished off the last of the coleslaw.

Digging a package of gum out of his shirt pocket, he offered her a piece. Jess declined, but now knew the source of the cinnamon that had flavored his kiss. The memory of how her tongue had danced with his had her shifting on the bench, edgy and annoyed, until he hooked his hands over his stomach and stretched his legs under the table.

“All right. You wanted to talk. Let’s talk.”

Jess blew out a short breath. Evidently filling his belly hadn’t mellowed his mood. Okay, so maybe she owed him more than the grudging apology she’d offered earlier. Might as well get that out of the way first.

“Look, let’s try to get past what happened up on deck. It… It surprised me as much as it did you.”

He looked as thought he had a few words to say on the matter, but clamped his mouth shut and gathered the dirty dishes instead.

Jess slumped back against the cushion, drumming her fingers drummed the laptop’s lid. It was an Apple G-4, she saw, billed as the fastest computer on the planet. Wondering if its fifteen-inch screen lived up to the hype, she raised the lid. At her touch, the darkened screen blinked to life. She was reaching for the lid, intending to close it and put the computer to sleep again, when the name at the top of the screen leaped out at her.

Helen Yount Blackwell

Frowning, she skimmed the lines of print below her mother’s name. With each word, Jess’s throat closed a little more, until she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t drag so much as a gasp into her lungs.

“Jess?”

She lifted her stunned gaze to find Steve with the rest of the dishes in his hand and his narrowed gaze locked on her face. She swallowed, trying desperately to work the paralyzed muscles, and lifted the laptop onto the table.

“What is this?”

He flicked a glance at the screen. His jaw went tight. “Those are my notes.”

“About my mother?”

“About an incident that reportedly occurred at the Blue Crab twenty-five years ago.”

She flattened her palms on the table, whether to steady them or absorb strength from the smooth, thick wood, she didn’t know. Carefully, so very carefully, she measured her words.

“Is this part of a police report?”

“No.” His eyes held hers. “There was no official report. I got the information from Sheriff Boudreaux.”

“Sheriff Boudreaux.” The little air she’d managed to pull into her lungs hissed out. “I remember him.”

“He remembers you, too.”

“And he said…?” She cleared her throat again. “He said my mother was raped?”

Was it an act? Was she feigning that bruised look around the eyes? For all his years of interrogating suspects, Steve was damned if he could tell.

The cop in him took over. Shoving the remaining dishes into the sink, he hooked his chair around and sank down to her level. He wanted to gauge every flicker of facial muscle, needed to read every emotion.

“According to Boudreaux, five men assaulted your mother. It happened the same night you and she left town.”

“The same night Boudreaux ran us out of town,” she countered swiftly, bitterly. “Did the sheriff name the five men? Are they here, in your computer?”

She hit the page-up key an instant before he reached over and snapped down the laptop’s lid. She glimpsed the list, or enough of it to whisper the first name.

“Delbert McConnell.”

“He was a local minister,” Steve said into the silence that followed. “He drowned some weeks back. You might have read the story in the newspaper.”

Something flickered in her eyes. Shock? Surprise? Guilt? It was gone before he could put a label to it.

“Ron Clark was there, too.”

She didn’t make a sound. Not a damned sound. But she clamped her mouth shut as tight as a safe to keep something back. In anyone else, the white lines cutting into her cheeks might have given Steve a primal satisfaction. Now he experienced only the twisted hope that she’d keep her lips sealed. At least until he figured out just what the hell she might say.

“Boudreaux said Wayne Whittier was also one of the five. Along with Congressman Calhoun and…”

Her dry, harsh laughed stopped him in mid-sentence. “He didn’t even recognize me.”

“Congressman Calhoun?” The skin on the back of Steve’s neck tightened. “You went to see him at Silver Acres?”

“I saw his son. At the reception up in DeFuniak Springs.” Her mouth twisted. “Until Dub’s wife whispered in his ear, he didn’t even recognize the girl who once rubbed his nose in the dirt.”

Like a boat plowing through angry waves into the calm eye of a hurricane, she seemed to steady. Only her hands moved, slipping into her lap, white at the knuckles, one thumb kneading a pocket of puckered flesh.

“Who was the fifth?”

“Billy Jack Petrie.”

Her mouth opened. Snapped shut. Opened again.

“Is that…?” With a quick shake of her head, she started over. “Is that why you went to see Petrie today?”

“Yes.”

The tiny pop of Steve’s gum was the only sound in the cabin for long, heavy moments.

“Bill Petrie thinks I got on his case about how he handled one of his men,” she said at last. “Now…”

“Now?”

Her mouth curved in a slow, feral smile. “He’s going to sweat blood by the time I finish with him.”

Before he could stop himself, before he could decide whether he even wanted to stop, the cop in Steve moved in for the kill.

“Is that all he’s going to do, Jess? Sweat? Or will he turn up dead, like Delbert McConnell and Ron Clark?”

The smile froze on her face. The thumb kneading her scarred flesh ceased its slow circles.

“Is that what you think, Paxton? That I arranged Clark’s suicide and McConnell’s drowning?”

He considered every possible reply before giving the only one he could. “I’m beginning to wonder if someone did.”

“Someone who couldn’t trust the local law enforcement officials to bring her mother’s rapists to justice, you mean?”

For the first time, she allowed emotion to whip into her face and voice.

“Someone who already had a taste of Walton County justice when Sheriff Boudreaux hustled her out of town in the middle of the night?”

“Cliff Boudreaux had his reasons for suggesting you and your mother leave town. They run a little different from the ones you remember.”

“Oh, yeah? Why don’t you try a couple on me to see how they fit?”

“Your mother refused to bring charges against the men. She wouldn’t go to the hospital to have a rape kit done, so there was no evidence to support charges in any case. According to Boudreaux, she didn’t want the public ordeal of a trial.”

“According to Boudreaux,” Jess echoed with a twist of her lips.

“Could be he sympathized with her and with a knob-kneed kid who’d already started down the road to trouble,” Steve said evenly. “Could be he figured it would be better for both of you to get out of town, given the circumstances.”

Jess weighed the arguments and came up short on one side of the scale. “And it could be your predecessor just didn’t want a cocktail waitress making trouble for some of his buddies. Did that occur to you?”

“Of course it did. It also occurred to me that those same buddies could get real nervous if the waitress’s daughter showed up after all these years and decided to make a little trouble herself. So nervous one of them might just force her Mustang off a bridge.”

“What!”

The shock looked real. Too real to be feigned. Yet Steve had heard too many suspects proclaim their innocence in the same, stunned tones to trust anything but his own instincts. The problem was, he wasn’t completely sure he could rely on those instincts where this woman was concerned.

“Why don’t we just cut through the bullshit here, Jess? Tell me exactly how much you knew about what happened at the Blue Crab.”

As shaken as she appeared at that moment, she knew better than to fire off an answer to that one. Steve felt a stab of satisfaction, though, when her thumb went to work on that right hand again. He’d gotten through to her. Thank God, he’d gotten through to her.

“What if I tell you I didn’t know anything about it?”

“I’ll believe you.”

“Why?”

“Mostly because I want to,” he replied with brutal honesty. “And I don’t have any evidence to prove otherwise.”

Yet.

The unspoken caveat hung between them, as thick and heavy as odor of congealing grease.

“All right,” Jess said slowly. “I didn’t know anything about it. My mother never told me she’d been raped at the Blue Crab. She never explained why Sheriff Boudreaux showed up at our door that night, or why we left Choctaw Beach so suddenly. If she had…”

“If she had?”

Her clear green eyes didn’t waver.

“I probably would have sneaked out, snitched the rusted old double-barrel shotgun mom kept in the car trunk, and tried to blow off those bastards’ balls.”