Clay (10 page)

“What would it take to get you to show me where it grows?” Janna wanted that color and the dye plant that made it. She could feel her creative energy rising
at the mere thought but there was more to it than that. An idea had come to her as she made lunch, her subconscious generating visions of designs even as she arranged chicken and lettuce. It seemed that this special shade of blue, and the fabric series that she could develop for it, would be enough to gain a new contract from the company with which she worked. The promise of it might be enough to persuade her banker to increase her outstanding loan to cover Dr. Gower’s new demand. That would at least return to her the choice between the two unpalatable options facing her for Lainey’s surgery: using Dr. Gower’s cadaver kidney or coercing Clay.

Then there was Lainey herself. She loved blue in all its shades and hues, and it seemed that helping with the dye might serve to wean her away from her growing dependence on Clay’s company. That would ease the niggling worry Janna was beginning to feel about how Lainey was going to react when he vanished from her life. In short, it seemed that if she could just find the Aphrodite’s Cup, everything might be all right.

Clay watched her, his gaze unreadable. Finally he countered, “How much do you need? That is, how many plants, approximately? It takes whole fields of indigo, I think, to produce a pound of dye. I’m assuming it would be the same with Aphrodite’s Cup.”

“I’m not sure, since I don’t know how the dye is extracted. Making indigo is a long drawn-out process that includes fermentation in outdoor vats, but it
might be possible to boil the stems or roots of Aphrodite’s Cup. I’d need only a few plants at first, for a test.”

“But maybe a lot more afterward,” he said.

“I wouldn’t want to harvest it to extinction, if that’s what you’re thinking. Should the plants turn out to have commercial application, then cultivation would have to be arranged.”

He searched her face, his gaze straight. At last he said, “I’ll think about it.”

“But you said you could get it!”

“I never said I would,” he replied, unrepentant.

In other words, he meant to keep his swamp secrets to himself, or else use them as some kind of bargaining chip, Janna thought. She should have known. “Fine,” she said, her voice hard. “I’ll find the damn plant myself if I have to search the swamp inch by inch.”

What he might have answered, she didn’t know. They were interrupted by the sound of a boat, a sizable craft from the roar of its motor. It was traveling at a steady pace, but with the caution of a driver who knew the lake and had sense enough to be wary of underwater obstacles. It seemed to be heading straight for the camp.

Janna left the bedroom, closing the door behind her. In the kitchen, she moved to the front windows and lifted a slat of the blinds that covered them. The boat was almost at the dock. It was white and shining, a fast cruiser with a spotlight and antennas decorating
the front, and a man in uniform and wearing dark shades behind the console. On its side was an insignia. She couldn’t make it out at first; then the boat turned broadside to her as it eased to a stop.

Janna’s breath caught in her throat as the letters jumped into focus: Tunica Parish Sheriff’s Department.

C
lay had a passion for boats, had lived with them all his life, since his family home, Grand Point, was on the lake. They were to him what hot rods were to some men, and he had owned more than a few. He’d also helped work on the bass rigs, pontoon boats, houseboats and other assorted craft belonging to his cousins, Kane, Luke and Roan. It was no task at all, then, for him to recognize the sound of the cruiser maintained by the Parish Sheriff’s Office because the lake and its swamp or the river bordered so much of its jurisdiction. Roan’s controlled style of piloting was easy to distinguish as well. It appeared that his cousin was paying an official visit.

As the motor rumbled into silence, and then Janna’s footsteps left the porch on her way down to the dock, he said to Lainey, “Look’s like your mom’s got company. Wonder who it can be?”

The girl wrinkled her nose in a grimace. “Probably that red-haired nurse. I hope she doesn’t stay long.”

“Nurse?”

“She comes to take my blood, but she was here not long ago.”

“Not time for more sticks, then?” he asked with as much sympathy as curiosity.

The girl shook her head so quickly that her hair fell into her face. “Not yet.”

“That why you don’t like her, because she always sticks you?”

“Sort of,” Lainey agreed, though she kept her gaze on Ringo. “But mostly, she’s not very nice. She doesn’t smile in her eyes. And she gives me orders like she’s my boss, and doesn’t always tell me before there’s going to be a stick. I don’t like the way she talks to Mama, either.”

Clay reached to push the shiny blond hair, so like her mother’s, behind the girl’s ear and away from her face. “She talks mean to your mom?”

Lainey hunched a shoulder. “She just sounds like she’s mad all the time, like maybe she doesn’t like coming here.”

“You’re a bright girl,” Clay said, his voice dry.

Lainey flashed a smile then that told him she had the potential to become an accomplished flirt in a few years.

“But it might not be the nurse coming to see you,” he said. “Don’t you want to find out for sure?”

Her face turned serious as she glanced at the cable that held him then returned her gaze to his face. “You want to know, huh?”

“Could be,” he answered carefully.

“Okay.” Gathering up Ringo, her rag doll and the handful of film canisters that had become her favorite toys, she headed out the door. “Be right back.”

As soon as the screen door slammed shut, Clay, giving thanks for the free use of his hands, performed a little magic on the padlock that fastened his waist ropes with the folding tool from his pocket. Sliding off the bed, then, he padded barefoot from the room and down the hall. In the kitchen, he stepped behind the table to the window that looked out onto the screened porch and the lake beyond. With care, he lifted a louver of its blind just enough to see out.

The visitor was Roan, all right, standing at ease with his Stetson under one arm and both the star of his badge and his sandy hair glinting in the hot sunlight. A scowl drew his brows together so his forehead pleated into grooves.

Janna’s back was to Clay, but he saw her make the age-old gesture with arms open and palms upturned that signified lack of knowledge for whatever query Roan had put to her. A tight grin curled one corner of Clay’s mouth as he noted his cousin’s ambivalence, as if the sheriff didn’t know whether to believe her or call her a liar to her face. At least he was undecided enough that he made no move toward barging into the camp, which had been Clay’s first concern.

Lainey, he saw, had taken up a position on the concrete steps that led up to the porch. She was setting out a tea party in front of her doll and her raccoon, using the film canisters. Ringo, bored with the proceedings, batted a canister around until it tumbled down the steps and rolled along the dirt walkway to stop just inches from the toe of Roan’s boot.

The sheriff bent and picked up the plastic cylinder. He stared at it for a second, then glanced toward Lainey’s sizable collection. Putting a finger inside the film container, he stood twirling it around in idle preoccupation, dividing his gaze between the facade of the camp and Janna as he talked to her. She shook her head again, a movement that somehow managed to convey regret. Roan slipped the cylinder off his finger in a show of one-handed dexterity, then tossed it back onto the porch step beside Lainey. Seconds later, he replaced his hat, tugged it down over his eyes in a polite gesture of farewell, then turned away.

Clay didn’t know whether to laugh or curse. He wasn’t ready to give up the cozy nest he’d made for himself, but it was just a little sobering to see how easily an attractive female could hoodwink the law.

The sheriff backed his boat away from the dock at idling speed, then pushed the cruiser into a takeoff that churned up a wide wave as he swooped into the turn. Seconds later, he straightened on a course that would take him back to Turn-Coupe. When Clay saw Janna turn toward the house, he made tracks back to his room. By the time she returned with Lainey, he was reclining like a sultan on his couch while properly restrained once more.

“So,” he said, pretending to stifle a yawn. “What was the excitement all about?”

“Someone looking for you.”

Strain sounded in her voice. The visit from the law worried her, Clay thought. “Anyone I know?”

“All right, it was your cousin, the sheriff.” She
didn’t look at him as she spoke, but began to pick up the plates and glasses they’d been using, stacking them together.

“Nice of him to be concerned,” Clay commented in dry tones.

“It wasn’t just that. It seems you had an appointment to be fitted for a tux as a groomsman in his wedding, one you missed. He doesn’t consider your nonappearance to be like you. So when does this wedding take place?”

“A month and three days from now.” He waited to see how that time limit affected her. Her lips tightened but nothing more, which led him to think that she could have a shorter time frame of her own. That bothered him. It bothered him a lot.

“A big event, is it?” she asked finally.

“Wedding of the year for Tunica Parish. That’s saying something, since my cousin Luke caused a fair splash earlier in the summer. He married romance author April Halstead, you know.”

“What’s so important about it?”

“It involves the sheriff, for one thing, but the woman he’s marrying is East Coast high society.”

“Funny you didn’t mention this little arrangement before.”

“You didn’t ask. I thought my agenda made no difference to you. Or is it just that it never occurred to you that I might have a life?”

The look on her face told him that she’d thought that exactly, or else that she’d considered photography his life in the way that work often consumed
men. If the latter, then she wouldn’t have been that far from the truth.

“Arty mentioned the wedding,” she said, “but didn’t know about this fitting, I suppose. The sheriff said he intends to make sure you show up for the ceremony, and that I should remind you if I see you.”

Good old Roan, Clay thought. He suspected something was going on or he’d never have given her a message. “I haven’t forgotten.”

She glanced around the room, apparently searching for some missing dish since she leaned over a moment later to retrieve the glass that he’d set on the floor beside the bed. When she straightened again, she said, “I’m sorry that I made you miss your appointment.”

“No problem. I expect Roan ordered the tux in his size since we’re a close match.”

“Well, that’s all right then.” She put the glass she held on top of the other dishes then turned away.

At the tart sound of her voice, it struck him that he’d brushed off her apology as though it didn’t matter, as if he considered it mere form, which he had. It seemed she’d meant it, after all. Something was riding her, he thought. Her face looked drawn, and the dark shadows of sleeplessness lay under her eyes.

“If you’re
really
sorry,” he said to her retreating back, “you could always let me go.”

She turned at the door to give him a dirty look. “I’m not that sorry.”

“I thought not,” he told her, but she seemed not to hear. His smile was crooked as he watched the
enticing curves of her backside whisk out of the room.

They passed the remainder of the day in a fair degree of peace. Lainey acted like a buffer and convenient means of communication between them, since they spent more time talking to, and through, her than they did to each other. She was an intelligent child, Clay thought. She knew something was going on between him and her mama. Sometimes she looked at them with the same exasperation that she turned on Ringo when the dumb critter tried to eat her crayons, as if he should know better than to do things that weren’t good for him.

In the middle of the afternoon, after Lainey had rested, Janna put the girl in the ancient aluminum boat that had been tied up to the dock for as long as Clay could remember. She paddled off in the general direction of Arty’s place. She didn’t tell him where she was going or when she’d be back, but Clay suspected that she was going to look for dye plants, particularly, the Aphrodite’s Cup.

He had to admire her initiative, even if he was a victim of it. He also didn’t mind watching the way she wielded a boat paddle, the grace and strength in the lines of her body as she dipped and swayed with the motion. She was quite a woman, taking care of her daughter on her own, creating her fabrics out of no more than color and imagination, willing to brave snakes and alligators to get what she wanted. Willing to go to any lengths to protect and preserve the things she loved.

Regardless, it bothered him that she was going out virtually alone this afternoon. The lake and its swamplands were vast and deep, a labyrinthine network of multibranching channels shaded by tall cypress trees, of interconnected sloughs and small creeks and stretches of marshlands where saw grass grew in water only inches deep. It was easy to get lost if you didn’t know it, and sometimes hard to be found again.

Added to that was the dumping of the dead boy. It might be a fluke, or it might not. Until they found out one way or the other, poking around the back reaches of the lake wasn’t the smartest thing to do.

He should have warned her or at least tried to prevent her from going, Clay thought. Not that he’d known what she meant to do up until it was too late. Anyway, he had no right to tell her anything, couldn’t without revealing what he knew. He comforted himself with the knowledge that there would be other fishermen and boaters on the lake. And of course, if she was mixed up in whatever was going on with the snatched organs, then she was in no danger anyway.

The urge to go after her, no matter what, was so strong that Clay could taste it. Whether he wanted to stop her or to help her find what she needed, he really couldn’t say. Either one was too stupid too contemplate. She wouldn’t appreciate his interference. To her he was the enemy, someone who already stood in her way.

The hours stretched. The camp seemed so empty with only Ringo for company. A dozen times, Clay
thought of just leaving, letting Janna come back to find the place deserted. What kept him from it, he wasn’t sure. Dark suspicion, maybe, curiosity without a doubt; concern for Lainey, certainly. Added to these was the need to see this thing through to the end. And on top of everything else, like cherry on a sundae, was the prospect of just retribution. Whatever the reason, it constrained him much more than rope and padlock.

It was funny, but he missed television in spite of the fact that he seldom watched anything except nature shows. He needed mindless entertainment of some kind, both to pass the time and also to provide a distraction. He had far too much time to think now that he was unable to watch Janna work or play with Lainey and Ringo. Some of his thoughts weren’t that comfortable.

He kept coming back to the fact that Lainey was Matt’s daughter and wondering how much his and Matt’s family history had to do with the fact that Janna was a single mother. Their father had been a throwback in many ways, with the typical Benedict faults of stiff-necked pride and insularity carried to the extreme. A conservative to the bone, he thought in absolutes, was fast to take offense and slow to forget. Any man who wasn’t with him was against him, and those who held opposing political and religious views were not only dead wrong but also terminally stupid. How he’d ever gotten involved with their mother, an unrepentant hippie with liberal views and a fascination with every offbeat idea or belief
system that came along, was a mystery. Maybe it was the attraction of opposites, but it had been inevitable that the relationship would go bad. That it had started off on the wrong foot with marriage vows exchanged in haste because of pregnancy had only put the seal of doom on it. All Clay could think was that there had been a strong sexual component in there somewhere, one that had served to produce four boys, Adam and Wade, Matt and himself, before it faded.

Clay loved his mother dearly, but even he had to admit that she wasn’t the easiest of women. Her idea of the truth was colored by her needs of the moment. Her attention span was about two milliseconds long, and her sense of responsibility had never been particularly active, especially when it came to her sons. She’d allowed her ex-husband to claim custody while she went off to Greece or Tibet. Not that they had minded, since they’d much preferred running wild in the swamp with their cousins. In spite of her faults, however, their mother was sweet-natured, generous beyond accounting and spectacularly talented. In short, she was an artist. They’d all loved her without reserve and protected her against every criticism, and still did.

It was interesting that Janna also had an artistic background. How much had that shaped Matt’s attraction to her? he wondered. And what influence had it exerted on the fact that Lainey had never been legally recognized as a Benedict? Had Matt been nervous about bringing another creative female home to
Grand Point? Had he been afraid of what their father would say or how he would treat her?

Ironically the problem would not have lasted. Their old man had died of prostate cancer almost four years ago. It was, not incidentally, about the same time that Clay had left veterinary medicine and taken up nature photography full-time rather then treating it as a hobby. It was also when he’d really become reacquainted with his mother.