By Starlight (20 page)

Jack frowned. That way was back toward Jeffers and Sumner, back toward bullets being fired at them, back toward danger. Still, the thought of spending the night hacking through the underbrush wasn’t appealing, either. Besides, it would take too much time. They had to make it back to the truck so that he could get back to Colton, decide what to do with his discovery, and make sure that Maddy was protected from the two criminals who’d somehow ensnared her in their plans.

There was no other way.

But just as Jack made his decision, something occurred to him.

“You could’ve gone on without me, you know,” he said to Clayton. “If you’d kept running the right way, you’d have made it back to the truck and be safely headed back toward Colton by now. Coming back for me only put you at risk.”

“Can I ask you somethin’?” Clayton answered.

Jack nodded.

“If this was your neck of the woods, if you was the one knew your way round, if I’d been the one run outta there without a clue where I was goin’, would you a come after me or would you a saved your own hide?”

“I would’ve run after you,” he answered truthfully.

A huge grin spread across Clayton’s face. “That’s ’cause a real friend don’t leave the other in a tight spot no matter how stupid a thing he mighta done.” He chuckled. “Now let’s get the hell outta here!”

“I know he was up here! I seen him!”

Jeffers watched with growing annoyance as Sumner thrashed around beneath an evergreen tree. This was the spot where he swore he’d seen Jack Rucker watch them load smuggled booze into their truck. They’d hurried up the narrow road and then plunged into the woods, but so far they’d found nothing and no one. Jeffers was beginning to feel foolish for having bought into the boy’s claim.

“Look at this!” Sumner suddenly shouted, pointed excitedly around the base of the tree. “Somethin’s been rootin’ round in here!”

“It coulda been a rabbit or squirrel, maybe a fox.” Jeffers shrugged.

“Naw, it’s too much for that,” Sumner insisted.

Jeffers walked over and looked down at the ground; it
did
look like more than an animal could make, but for all he knew, Sumner had stirred it up and was trying to convince himself it was something more.

Jeffers sighed. Looking around, he saw only the forest staring back, nothing but trees and rocks and bushes as far as he could see, which wasn’t very far. Undoubtedly, it stretched on for miles without end.

“He ran on this way,” Sumner exulted, walking with his head down, following something as it led away to the west.

“You a tracker now?”

“Just come on,” he insisted, scurrying off.

Jeffers walked along behind halfheartedly for a couple of minutes as Sumner led them down a gentle depression and through a tight grove of trees; as he hurried along, the boy seemed to be mumbling to himself. Suddenly Jeffers was struck by the absurdity of what they were doing and stopped walking.

“We ain’t goin’ no farther,” he declared.

“Come on, Jeffers,” Sumner pleaded, looking back at him. “We just gotta find him! We gotta! He was watchin’ us!”

“Right now, I don’t give a damn if Rucker was up here or not,” Jeffers snapped. “The only thing that matters is gettin’ that truck back to town. We’re fools for wanderin’ off into the woods and leavin’ it unguarded. We gotta get back to town.”

“Then I’ll go on by myself,” Sumner argued.

“I said
we
gotta get back,” Jeffers growled, wondering how far the boy was willing to push the matter. “I ain’t unloadin’ it by myself.”

Sumner looked desperate. “But he could be just up ahead,” he argued. Pointing at a couple of large rock outcroppings twenty feet away, he said, “He could be hidin’ right behind them for all we know!”

“Now why in the hell would he stay round here with the way you was shootin’ at him?” Jeffers asked. “If I was him, I’d be long gone from here by now.”

“But the tracks—”

“Come on,” Jeffers snarled. “We’re leavin’.”

This time, Sumner did as he was told, though he looked as enthused as he’d been about every other thing Jeffers had ordered him to do all day. As he trudged past, his feet dragging in protest, Jeffers knew that the time was coming fast when he’d have to figure out what to do with the boy once and for all.

Jack and Clayton waited quietly behind the rock outcropping they’d hurried to at the first sounds of Jeffers and Sumner approaching. For several long and anxious moments, they’d stayed frozen in place, listening to the two criminals argue about whether they should go farther; Jack found himself rooting for Jeffers to win out. As the argument dragged on, Jack had been too frightened to breathe for fear he’d give him and Clayton away. Sumner had no idea how right he’d been; they
were
behind the rocks, just as he’d suggested. Fortunately, he and Jeffers hadn’t come any closer. Still, it wasn’t until well after the two men had walked away and the sounds of the heavily liquor-laden truck had long since quieted that Jack and Clayton dared to venture into the open.

“That was closer than I woulda liked,” Clayton sighed with relief, “but long as they didn’t see us, everythin’ worked out.”

“Except for the fact that Sumner’s still convinced he saw me.”

“I wouldn’t worry ’bout that none. After all, he hated you plenty ’fore he suspected you of followin’ him into the woods.”

Jack knew that Clayton was right. Still, he knew that the next time he set foot in the speakeasy he and Sumner were going to have fighting words; if the man started firing bullets into the woods at the sight of his face, what would happen when Jack was standing right in front of him?

“We best be gettin’ back to Roger ’fore there ain’t no light left to the day,” Clayton said.

In some ways, Jack was thankful he’d have the whole ride back to Colton to figure out what he was going to do next.

SO WHAT WAS IT LIKE
kissing Jack again after so many years?”

Maddy spun around from the kitchen counter where she’d been cutting carrots and looked at Helen. She sat at the small table nearest the window, absently thumbing through her favorite Hollywood gossip magazine. Though she was looking down, acting as if her question was nothing out of the ordinary, Maddy could still see the faintest wisp of a smile.

“How…how did you…?” she stumbled, so taken aback that she was nearly speechless.

“Because I was watching you through the window in the back corner of the storeroom,” Helen replied as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “You really didn’t expect me to stay at the front counter, did you?”

“You shouldn’t be spying on people,” Maddy said, annoyed.

“Oh, come on, now.” Her sister laughed, closing her magazine and finally looking up, her eyes full of mischievousness. “The two of you are the most exciting thing to happen in this town in I don’t know how long! Everyone is talking about you, so when I have the chance to watch something happen firsthand, I
have
to take it! I almost broke my neck climbing up on a stack of crates to get a better view, although it was worth it. What I saw was sure better than what’s written in here,” she explained, rifling the pages of her gossip magazine. “Besides,” she added with a frown, “I figured you would’ve told me all about it by now. I didn’t expect you’d keep it to yourself…”

The truth was, Maddy had had a hard enough time understanding what had happened between her and Jack that it would have been impossible to tell someone else. She just couldn’t believe that Jack was a
gangster
! Over and over, she tried to come up with another explanation for what he did for a living, something that would explain the things he’d said, the way he described the man he worked for, or his reluctance to give her many details about the life he’d led for the last seven years. But she hadn’t been able to come up with anything. Instead, she’d kept their conversation, and their kiss, to herself. The problem was that she hadn’t counted on someone spying on them. Still, she understood why Helen was disappointed.

“I would’ve told you eventually,” Maddy offered.

“When?” her sister asked. “After he’d asked you to marry him?”

“Helen!”

“I’m kidding.” The girl laughed, raising her hands as if she were surrendering. “You’re not really mad at me for watching, are you?”

“No,” Maddy admitted.

“Good! Then you won’t mind telling me what it was like,” Helen prodded again, her voice practically dripping with excitement. “Tell me everything!”

“I don’t know…”

“Please!” Helen pleaded.

Maddy sighed; her sister wouldn’t let up unless she told her
something
. “Well…it
was
nice…,” she began, remembering how it felt to be in Jack’s arms and to have her lips against his. “Whenever I’m with him now, sometimes it feels like nothing’s changed between us, but at others, it’s completely different. I still get upset about how he left, but there’s no use denying how I feel about him.”

“How
do
you feel?”

“I love him,” she answered, a flutter racing across her heart.

“Did you tell him?” her sister asked.

Maddy nodded.

“Well, what did he say? Did he tell you he felt the same?” Helen pestered her. “I swear it’s like pulling teeth to get anything out of you!”

“It’s not that bad,” Maddy said, laughing. “I just don’t believe in spreading my business around like the women you read about in your magazine.”

“Aw, you’re no fun! Give me something!”

“I told you,” she said. “It was nice.”

“I suppose I can understand why you can’t come up with anything more to say. Jack’s more handsome than ever!” Helen observed. “I think his good looks have you tongue-tied.”

“Really? Do you think so?”

“Absolutely! With his dark hair,
those eyes
that go on forever, and his broad shoulders, he looks like he could be an actor up on a movie screen. I could see Jack playing a soldier or a cowboy or a policeman—”

“Or a gangster,” Maddy blurted out before she could stop herself; immediately she flushed bright red with embarrassment, looking at her sister to see if she’d given her fears away, but Helen didn’t seem to have noticed.

“No,” she answered, crinkling up her nose as she gave the idea thought, “he’s not rough enough to play a part like that. It just wouldn’t be believable.” Suddenly Helen’s eyes brightened. “But I could sure see him in a romantic feature after watching the two of you kiss! Wouldn’t he look great up on the screen beside Jean Harlow?”

“I’d rather he was next to me.” Maddy frowned.

“You know what I mean!”

As the two of them laughed, Maddy thought about how it felt to be loved by Jack Rucker after all the years they’d spent apart. Helen was right; he was still incredibly handsome, as well as smart, funny, and everything else Maddy had ever wanted in a man. No one else compared. She thought about the vow she’d made to herself as they’d kissed behind the mercantile; no matter what, she’d help him break free from the mobster life he’d somehow gotten himself involved with. Their love would prevail. They’d make up for the years they’d spent apart and start anew together.

“So what are you going to do when Jack leaves you again?” Helen asked, her voice soft and cautious, breaking into Maddy’s pleasant thoughts.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I hope you don’t think that he’s going to stay here forever,” her sister explained. “Virginia Benoit told Eunice Manfreddson that Jack came back to Colton for business. That means he’s going to eventually go away.”

“Not necessarily,” Maddy argued.

“Maddy, he told me that he’s been to places like Chicago and San Francisco, even Los Angeles. If he’s been to cities as big as those, as exciting as those, what possible reason would he have for wanting to stay here?”

Though it pained Maddy to hear Helen making some of the same arguments that Jeffers had buffeted her with in the speakeasy, she wasn’t particularly surprised. Everyone in town was enjoying gossiping about her and Jack’s unexpected reunion, but no one expected their love to last. But then, no one had seen them on their bridge or on the back steps of the mercantile; what everyone remembered was when she slapped Jack in the mercantile. What Maddy wanted was to prove everyone wrong, to love and be loved in return.

In the end, Maddy had to believe that she knew the answer to Helen’s question. She hoped that there
was
a reason Jack would want to stay.

Me…

“…estimate that the amount of money being lost to organized-crime operations totals well into the millions of dollars nationwide. This scourge is rampant! Whether it’s prostitution, the shakedown of honest businesses for protection kickbacks, drugs, murder, or especially the proliferation of alcohol, an act that the government has deemed illegal through the enactment of Prohibition, it is the undeniable duty of every honest American to stand up against this foe and fight for the sake of self and country! Only then can we be safe! Only then—”

Silas leaned over with a groan and shut off the radio, breaking the hold that the on-air preacher’s sermon had held on Maddy. She’d stood at the end of her father’s bed with his dinner tray in her hand for a long minute, mesmerized, hanging on the firebrand’s every word, but in the silence that followed she shook herself free of his grasp and offered her father a weak smile.

“He seems passionate,” she offered.

“Pastor Mead’s a bit of a blowhard if you ask me,” Silas shrugged, “but that doesn’t mean I disagree with the message. If you want to hear the rest, I could always turn it back on.”

“No, I’m fine,” Maddy answered a bit too quickly. “I just got caught up in it for a minute, that’s all.”

Even as she placed her father’s meal on the bed beside him, Maddy thought about what she’d heard on the radio. Living in Montana, far removed from the hustle and bustle of city life, it was hard for her to imagine the impact organized crime could have. All she knew was what she’d read in the newspaper and heard on the radio. With all the problems at the mercantile and her family’s struggles dealing with Silas’s deteriorating health, she already had plenty to worry about. Still, what she knew seemed frightening and dangerous.

And somehow, Jack has gotten himself tangled up in it.

Maddy had taken some solace in Helen’s declaration that Jack didn’t look the part of a gangster, but now, minutes later, she was already wavering. It was true that Jack didn’t resemble the men Hollywood cast as thugs, mobsters, and cutthroats, driving dark cars and firing machine guns, but that was the movies. What sort of people were they in real life? Was it really possible that Jack Rucker, the man she’d loved so passionately, had believed would be her husband, had wanted to spend the rest of her life with, had become involved in something so corrupt? Thinking about how he’d held and kissed her, Maddy couldn’t bring herself to believe it.

Maddy began tidying up her father’s bedside table, but just as she was about to leave and start getting ready to go to the speakeasy she noticed that he was staring at her, his hand absently turning his spoon in his stew.

“Is there something wrong with your meal?” she asked.

“I’m sure it’s fine,” he replied, still watching her.

Maddy hesitated. It was as clear as the moon rising outside her father’s window that there was something he wanted to talk to her about; from the grim look creasing his face, she doubted that it was anything she wanted to hear.

“Are you going to choir practice tonight?” he asked.

“As soon as I finish cleaning up in the kitchen.”

“How’s it going?”

“Pretty well,” Maddy answered, a sliver of unease flaring in her stomach. “I don’t think my singing is ever going to turn heads, but I’m getting better.”

Her father nodded, his jaw clenched so tightly that it looked to her as if he was gnashing his teeth. For a long while, he didn’t say a word in answer, letting the silence between them drag on so long that Maddy’s discomfort steadily grew.

“Did I tell you I had a visitor earlier this afternoon?” he finally asked. “Someone who came by while you were at the store?”

“No, you didn’t,” Maddy replied.

“Reverend Fitzpatrick was nice enough to stop by,” Silas explained. “He stayed for about an hour. We talked about all sorts of things.”

Maddy could only stare as her knees grew weak; she felt as if the floor beneath her were dropping away. Her heart pounded and her mind raced. This was the moment she’d worried about ever since she’d agreed to Jeffers’s scheme. This was when all of the many lies she’d spoken would come home to roost.

“Dad, I—”

“The reverend came to see me because he said the Good Lord had given him some perspective on how I’ve been feeling,” Silas said, talking right over her. “Apparently, he’s been so sick for the last week that he’s been unable to get out of bed and had to cancel church on Sunday.”

“Let me explain—”

“When I asked him if that included the choir practices, he said it had,” her father continued with a hint of a smile, as if there was something funny in his daughter having consistently lied to him. “He said he was so sick that if he’d tried to stand there and conduct, he was liable to either pass out or throw up, and neither one was very appealing to him.”

“Just listen for a—”

“And then I started thinking about all of the times last week you brought me my dinner, just like tonight,” he said, the anger in his voice growing more pronounced with every word. “I remembered you saying that you were going to practice a couple of times, but after what Reverend Fitzpatrick told me, I imagine it must’ve been pretty hard to practice if you were the only one there.”

With that, Maddy’s father fell silent, but now, without him interrupting her every attempt to explain herself, she suddenly found herself unable to muster any words in her own defense. Instead, she stared and worried. The reverend hadn’t known what guarded secrets he’d been revealing, but Maddy couldn’t help but wonder what else he’d let out of the bag. Had he told her father about the speakeasy? After all, the reverend had been a regular customer and may have assumed that Silas knew what was happening. If her father had learned the truth, she could only imagine how disappointed he must be.

“Don’t you have something to say for yourself?” he demanded.

“I think you already know,” she answered.

“That you lied to me again!”

“I didn’t mean to hurt you—”

“And yet you did precisely that by not telling me the truth!” Silas thundered. “Why is it that I keep getting visitors who tell me all of the things my daughter is doing? The secrets she’s keeping! What else aren’t you telling me?”

“Nothing…”

“That’s what I thought the last time. And that’s why I want to hear you say it! I want the truth! I want you to admit what you’ve done!”

At this point, Maddy wondered what the harm could be in doing what her father wanted; it was obvious that in talking to the reverend he’d learned something about the speakeasy. But just as she was about to steel herself and attempt to offer an explanation he talked over her yet again.

“I want you to admit that you weren’t going to your choir practice because you were spending time with that no-good Jack Rucker!”

For the second time in a matter of days, Maddy was both relieved and surprised that her father hadn’t learned the truth about the speakeasy. Both times, her relief had come at Jack’s expense. But this time instead of listening demurely as Silas ranted and raved about the man to whom she’d given her heart, Maddy began to grow angry.

“The last time we talked about Jack,” she explained, “you only told me to be careful. You didn’t say that I shouldn’t see him again.”

“I don’t want you to get hurt!”

“Then you have to start trusting me a bit,” Maddy said. “I’m not the girl I was seven years ago.”

“But if he were to leave—”

“Then I’ll deal with it.” In her heart, Maddy knew it was true. Maybe Helen, her father, and even Jeffers were right: As soon as Jack got the chance, he was going to bolt back to wherever he’d come from. He’d come back to Colton for business and all she was to him was a distraction from his past. He’d have his fun and then go. If that happened, she’d look like a fool around town. Everywhere she went, people would lower their voices, whispering about poor Maddy, about what a pathetic laughingstock she was, gullible enough to believe in love twice.