B00NRQWAJI (22 page)

“You know,” Calvin said, “Adam’s not going to come over here while I’m in his seat.”

I shrugged with a carelessness I didn’t feel. “I don’t see his name on this log. Besides, he wouldn’t be avoiding you. He’d be avoiding me.”

Despite my determined cynicism, however, my eyes roved the crowd until I found him. Barrett was at Charlotte’s table, sliding puffy marshmallows onto sharpened sticks under her direction. They chatted. I didn’t know what he said to her, but she laughed and touched his arm. And even at a distance in the dusk, I could see the flirty flash in her eyes.

Jealousy threatened to burn me up. And I wasn’t the only one. Luke Rittenhaus, glaring at Barrett, dropped onto the log on Cal’s far side.

To me, he said, “I thought I told you to go back to Washington.”

“You made a suggestion,” I reminded him. “I didn’t listen to it.”

Rittenhaus said nothing, only gulped beer from the can in his hand.

I said, “Somebody told me the nightgown Pamela wore the night she was attacked didn’t belong to her. It belonged to Charlotte.”

I had the sheriff’s full attention now—and Cal’s as well.

“What if,” I said, “the assailant didn’t intend to target Pamela? What if he meant to target Charlotte?”

“ ‘Target’?” Calvin said. “You make it sound like the attack was premeditated rather than a chance encounter in that field.”

“Maybe it was chance. But maybe it was planned. Rape is an act of violence. It’s about domination, subjugation, power, and control. Pamela could’ve inadvertently ticked off a guy with self-entitlement issues. Or maybe Charlotte did.”

“Not plausible,” her brother said.

“Why not?”

“No one went after Char once Pamela was dead. She’s lived in this town all her life and no one’s bothered her in the last twenty years.”

“Are you sure of that? You only recently moved back to Fallowfield.”

I’d made him uncomfortable. I could see it in the way he fidgeted. I hadn’t made Rittenhaus feel much better, either.

The sheriff said, “In your coat and with her ponytail, poor Kayley Miller would look a lot like you in the dusk. You may be right about Pamela Wentz’s assault being a case of mistaken identity, and you may be wrong, and I’ll do my best when it comes to arresting Kayley’s assailant. But if you stay in Fallowfield, Miss Sinclair, you keep an eye over your shoulder. I’ve got no leads. No fluids, hair, or fibers. I just know I wouldn’t want to see you end up like Kayley.”

And with that, the sheriff crossed the clearing to slip an arm around his girlfriend. Cal, too, excused himself and disappeared into the darkness that pressed close. I turned up the collar of my blazer to ward off the night’s chill. But I knew I was kidding myself. The shiver suddenly racking my bones had nothing to do with the weather.

Barrett materialized from the gloom. Wordlessly, he sat beside me on the log. He had a longneck bottle in one hand. And something else in the other. He offered that something else to me.

It was a graham cracker s’more.

“Don’t you want it?” I asked.

Barrett wouldn’t meet my eye. “I, uh, made it for you.”

“Thanks.”

I took it and bit into it. Between the honeyed crackers, a delectable square of milk chocolate had melted under the heat of the fire-roasted marshmallow. The whole thing was warm and gooey and sweet and comforting.

Not long after Barrett and I had first met, we’d shared late-night Pop-Tarts in his office. He’d made mine s’more that time, too. That was scarcely seven months ago, but out here, in a remote field on the edge of Barrett’s hometown, it felt like that brief moment of connection between us had happened a lifetime ago.

“Would you like a taste?” I asked, offering the treat to him.

Barrett hesitated, then leaned close to me. He smelled of hardwood smoke and the fresh night air. Of lemon soap and bitter hops. His lashes were golden in the firelight. They fanned his cheeks as he took a bite.

“Not bad,” he mumbled, washing it down with a swig from his bottle.

I gestured toward his beer. “How many of those have you had?”

“Not nearly enough.”

He rested his elbows on his knees and gazed into the bonfire. He’d shaved at some point during the afternoon, and licks of orange and red danced across his handsome face, highlighting every sorrow he’d spent so much effort trying to hide. On impulse, I reached for him—and stroked the back of a fingertip along the arching bow of his mouth.

Barrett jerked, looked at me like I’d slapped him.

“Marshmallow,” I said, and prayed he believed me.

He said, “I didn’t see your Jag by the road.”

“I got here late. Besides…” I pulled the keys to the old Chevy from my pocket, jingled them until they rang like wind chimes. “I didn’t want to run into Eric’s Mercury again. That Jag sticks out like a sore thumb here in Fallowfield.”

“Your Jag’s not the only thing that pegs you as an out-of-towner.” Barrett plucked the keys from my hand. “Any objections to getting out of here?”

“None. But are you sure you want to go? I don’t mind staying.”

“I’m sure,” he said, and pushed to his feet.

Chapter 23

Barrett drove.

And I suspected the roads he took weren’t on any map.

For over twenty minutes, we plowed through the darkness. The Chevy’s high beams spooked the occasional stray rabbit. A red fox paused in the middle of the road to watch our approach before streaking away into the black. We didn’t see any human beings, however. And we didn’t encounter other cars.

Eventually, a split-rail fence popped up on my side of the truck. On Barrett’s side, the terrain fell away at a gentle slant. At a certain spot, he stopped the pickup, cut the engine and the lights.

The night closed in on us—and brought with it the giddy thrill of being alone with someone special in the dark. Beyond the windshield, an inky sky beckoned. Like a rich spill of the sweetest sugar, stars lay scattered across it.

“It’s beautiful out here,” I whispered.

And it was. I’d nearly forgotten how beautiful night in the countryside could be. And I knew that meant I’d lived too long under the light pollution of the East Coast megalopolis.

“Wait until your eyes adjust to the dark,” Barrett said. “Come on. We’ll get a better look.”

He reached behind the seat of the pickup, came up with a rolled sleeping bag. He hopped out of the truck, offered a hand to me. Heart hammering, I laid my palm in his.

“You just happen to drive around with a sleeping bag in your truck? When you were in high school, I bet all the fathers in Fallowfield locked up their daughters when you boys rolled through town.”

If I could’ve bitten back the words, I would’ve done so. The last thing I wanted to do was spoil this moment by reminding Barrett of his encounter with Pamela. And everything that had happened to her after he’d turned down her amorous advances.

But she seemed far from his mind when he said, “What? Are you saying I was some kind of senior-class make-out king?”

“Can you offer evidence to the contrary?”

“This sleeping bag is serious business, Jamie.”

“I bet it is.”

“Winter’s coming,” Barrett said, sounding prickly. “You get stuck in a ditch up here, you can freeze to death before help finds you.”

I refrained from commenting, smiled to myself, and followed Barrett blindly into the slanting field.

I heard rather than saw him unfurl the sleeping bag, unzip it, and spread it on the ground.

“Have a seat,” he said. “Unless you’re afraid to be alone. With me. In the dark.”

I couldn’t see the details of his face, hidden as they were deep in the night’s shade.

But nothing could hide the wound in his voice.

“Why would I be afraid of you, Barrett?”

I sank onto the bag’s quilted lining just to prove my point.

He did the same, but stuck to the far edge of his half of the bag.

He said, “I saw how my old friends looked at me tonight. It’s the same way everyone’s looked at me all day. And it’s the way they looked at me over twenty years ago. I know what they’re thinking, Jamie. They think I raped and killed Kayley, just like they think I raped Pamela.”

“But you didn’t,” I said. “In either case.”

“No,” he murmured. “I didn’t.”

He stretched out on his half of the sleeping bag, tucked an arm beneath his head, and gazed up at the sky.

After a while, he said, “She said she loved me.”

And I knew he meant Pamela.

“She was so young, Jamie. How could she know?”

“You got married once. Presumably, you loved your wife. You must’ve known you did.”

“Yeah, but I wasn’t a fourteen-year-old girl at the time.” He huffed out a sigh. “How do you know when you’re in love?”

Barrett’s question made something shift uncomfortably behind my breastbone. I scooted closer to him and lay back on the soft sleeping bag. Overhead, the stars glittered like a crocodile’s tears.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Falling in love hasn’t happened to me often, though. I can tell you that.”

“It happened once, didn’t it? You were married, too.”

I could’ve lived without Barrett bringing that up. He’d briefly served under my ex-husband. Barrett knew what a heel the guy was.

But I forgot all that when Barrett rolled onto his side to face me. He propped his head in his palm, gazed down at me in the starlight. With a gentle hand, he tugged the points of my blazer’s lapels closer to my throat. The ground was chilly and I shivered. But that wasn’t the only reason. My pulse had picked up its pace. Like something special was about to happen.

But Barrett was waiting for my answer, so I gave him one.

I said, “I suppose I’ll know I’m in love when I can’t wait to see the guy. If I can trust him with everything I am, not just everything I have. If his smile lights me up like fireworks on the Fourth of July. If I’d travel a million miles just to stand by his side, I—”

And in that instant, I couldn’t say another word. Because the truth came crashing in on me. I wasn’t just describing theoretical feelings for some random man who would walk across my path some day.

I was describing exactly how I felt about Barrett. Here. Now.

The realization made me clam up. It made me sit up. It made me sick to my stomach. Because it cast a whole new light on why I’d felt bereft when Barrett had left my guest bedroom last Tuesday. I’d told myself my feelings had been about sexual frustration and the embarrassment of rejection. That I’d been ready to be close to him, that he’d been all for sex but wanted to keep me emotionally at arm’s length. However, in this fit of honesty under the stars, I could see the bigger picture. For some time, I’d been
in love
with Lieutenant Colonel Adam Barrett. And he’d made it painfully clear he didn’t feel that way about me.

“Vance,” I blurted, desperate to change the subject before Barrett could see too far into my heart.

“What about him?”

“I saw you today. In your grandmother’s driveway. Before you two left for Eric’s memorial. Did he tell you who he was meeting at the Cherry Bomb last night? Did he tell you why?”

Barrett shifted on the sleeping bag, crossed one ankle over the other. “He claims the guy was an old buddy from the National Guard. His name’s Llewellyn. Supposedly, he was just passing through.”

“I’m not sure I believe that,” I admitted. “Do you?”

“No.”

I wrapped my arms around my knees in an effort to keep myself together, to keep my mind on Vance, and looked up at the dome of the sky. In bright detail against the black of the night, the constellation Perseus had just set foot above the treetops at the horizon. A stranger in a strange land, he’d taken on one bizarre injustice after another according to the Greeks—and he’d triumphed. Now, preserved among the stars, he’d tumble forever across the night for the sake of his love, the cold and remote Andromeda. And the thought of an outsider, a warrior, like Perseus, still alone after all his trials, made me want to weep.

But then Barrett said, “Vance is keeping something from me. I just don’t know what.”

“Did he have a thing for Pamela in high school? Or maybe Charlotte?”

“Why Charlotte?”

I told him about the nightie.

And how his grandmother had seen Charlotte shoplift it.

“You don’t know Vance like I do. I can’t see him ambushing and attacking anyone, let alone a woman. He’s never been very proactive,” Barrett insisted.

“But he drove down to D.C. to get to you. He held Mrs. Montgomery at gunpoint to convince you to come with him. And right before Kayley disappeared, you said you hadn’t seen him in a day or more, so you don’t know he didn’t grab her.”

“None of that means Vance had anything to do with what happened to her.”

This was true.

But I wasn’t willing to bet my bottom dollar on it.

“Whatever Vance is hiding, it’s got to be about Eric,” Barrett said. “And I can’t go back to New Jersey until I know what it is.”

“If you don’t go, Barrett, Shelby will have to arrest you.”

“She’ll have to find me first.”

“She can, she will, and it’ll ruin your career,” I snapped, unable to mask my irritation any longer. “Are you willing to throw away everything you’ve earned for the secrets men like Vance McCabe keep around here?”

Barrett chuckled and I didn’t like it.

“Go ahead,” he teased. “Tell me how you really feel.”

But that was exactly what I’d done every moment since we’d stepped out under the stars.

“We should get back to the orchard,” I said, springing to my feet—and blinking back tears. Besides, I hadn’t forgotten Dawkins wanted to chat. And I was all for listening to what he had to say.

“All right.” Barrett rose slowly.

He balled up the sleeping bag, stuffed it under his arm, and we began the short march to the truck.

“Jamie, since we’re talking about this, Luke wants you gone. He’s worried Kayley’s attacker might’ve been after you.”

Like I didn’t have a care in the world, I shoved my hands deep into the pockets of my blazer, squared my shoulders, and willed my spine as straight as a ramrod.

“Why would anyone want to do that to me?”