Jilted (22 page)

When Hector finally left, I stood in the middle of my living room. Alone and empty. But the solitude no longer refreshed me, and my emotions slunk through my heart like the wispy clouds of an early morning fog. Gray and silent, they obscured all that was real in my world, and the details of my life blended together into a haze of uncertainty.

I blinked, chiding myself for being melodramatic, and then I padded into the kitchen and opened a bag of pretzels. My shift at the diner started in an hour, and Dixie was running out of options. So what if I was suspected of killing my husband? More than likely he was murdered by my ex-boyfriend. But either way, I still had to go to work. I snickered at the absurdity of it and shoved a pretzel in my mouth. I chewed, but the salt had little or no taste, and the gummy texture on my tongue repulsed me. Spitting the pretzel in the sink, I cupped my hand and drank a swallow of water to wash it away.

I stomped to my bedroom, sick and tired of feeling sorry for myself, fed up with wallowing in pity, and past ready to get on with life. I jerked the remaining letters from the drawer of the nightstand, then fell to my knees and reached far under the bed for the metal firebox, whose contents I dumped on the rug. I shuffled through papers and trinkets. A tiny card that had come on a delivery of flowers from Neil when we were dating in high school. A newspaper blurb from the
Lubbock Avalanche-Journal
about a little-known citizen of Trapp who had been convicted of rape and sent away to prison. A paper lunch sack on which Hoby had scrawled a love note one morning before he left for work. The bulletin from that Sunday morning, the week the church asked me to worship someplace else. And one more item that I fingered carefully. The program from my parents' funeral.

When I had it all piled in front of me, I realized I was breathing hard. I settled back against the side of the bed and stuck out my tongue at the pile. Clyde was right. I had been holding on to this junk too long—
psychological tokens
, as he called them—to keep myself locked away from the world. I nudged the papers with my tennis shoe. Maybe I didn't deserve better … but maybe I did.

Pushing the box back under the bed, I lifted each of the papers, one at a time, and laid them across my palm. Then I stood, walked to the kitchen, and dug through a drawer for a lighter. Such an obvious thing to do, and I wondered why it had taken me so long to think of it. It wasn't as if destroying these tokens would erase my past, but in a crazy way, it might release my future. Or at least open my mind and my heart.

I stepped onto the back porch, closed the door behind me, and eased down to lean against it with my bottom on the cement. Stretching my legs out in front of me and crossing my ankles, I peered at the sky. Cotton-ball clouds dotted a blue background, but I knew it wouldn't last long. Clyde had said another storm would be blowing in tomorrow, but that was Texas weather for you. Calm one day, wild the next.

Sort of like my life.

I reached for the paper sack and held it by its bottom edge, and then I cranked the lighter until a flame leaped forward and nicked at the bag. Soon the rich gold ate away at Hoby's words, leaving a line of black ash that gradually gobbled the memory and dropped it in pieces to the ground. I released the last corner to the porch before the heat touched my fingertips. And Hoby's love note was gone.

Seven years of my life—rocky, beautiful, married years—were now placed in a closet in my heart. A closet I could visit occasionally, but not one I would ever want to hang out in. It wasn't warm or welcoming, not a home, merely a functional storage space for items I no longer needed. I reached for the funeral program.

That one was harder. A part of me felt as if I was denying my feelings for my parents, rejecting them. But a bigger part of me—a healthier part—knew I would never forget them, never completely let them go, and my mind would be cleansed by this simple action. That's all it was. An action. An exercise. A way to grieve and heal and move on. More ashes fluttered away on the breeze.

Already I felt release, but the feelings of liberty were so foreign, they frightened me. I pulled my knees up to my chest and wrapped my arms around my shins. That felt better. Safer. And I knew if I rolled tightly into a ball, it wouldn't seem as though I were about to crack. But I had more work to do.

As I watched Neil's letter disappear, I heard a muffled knock in the house, and then the doorbell. It would be Clyde wanting to know what had happened with Hector, wondering why I had never made it to the sheriff's office. I started to boost myself up but changed my mind. I didn't need him right then. I needed to finish this once and for all, a personal funeral for all my regrets.

As the front door opened, the back door rattled from the suction, and I heard Clyde's heavy footsteps creaking through my house as I held his burning newspaper article in my hand. It sounded as though he opened and closed a few doors during the time I calmly destroyed a short note Neil had written, and by the time I held the last corner of the florist's card, the door rattled again, and Clyde had gone.

My gaze returned to the sky, where the cotton balls had shifted to the right, constantly moving, floating, changing, and I wondered if I would ever feel normal again. Whole.

Without looking, I reached for the last item in my stash. The bulletin from the church. My fingers automatically worked to open the fold, as they had done so often in the past, but I stopped myself before my eyes scanned the words. I had read that blurb too many times already. Good grief, the wording and the font would be etched in my brain until the end of time. The folks at church had turned their backs on me when I needed them most. They had hurt me almost beyond comprehension, but maybe … just maybe … I could forget.

Ruthie forgave them, and she had read that stinking bulletin more than I had. She used to keep it in her room, but she threw it away after she married Dodd. When I found it there, what once had been her token then became mine.

I cranked the lighter again. For all I knew, this was the last remaining copy. The last physical proof that those people had done such a hurtful thing. The last evidence justifying my bitterness toward them. But wasn't that what all these papers had been?

I waved the bulletin slightly, and the flames flared up, engulfing the folds of paper, then dwindled down into nothingness. Along with the words. They were nothing now.

My head thunked against the door behind me, and I tapped it twice, a gentle reminder of the sturdy things in my life. Like Clyde. Clyde Felton was solid.

I considered the men I had loved in my lifetime. All three called themselves Christians, yet each was so very different from the others. And each had treated me differently, too. Neil and Hoby had hurt me. Would Clyde eventually do the same?

I didn't want to think so, and I shoved the thought high above my head toward the cotton-ball clouds. Clyde was a good man, and he loved me. He wanted to make something better of himself, and he said he wanted me to tag along while he did it. But even if he never changed a thing, even if he worked at the Dairy Queen for the rest of his life, even if someday he hurt me … even then … I would want to be with him.

I shook my head and smiled. He was such a fool about that old shack of his. The thing was worthless, but he hung on to it because it reminded him of Fawn and his grandpappy. But mostly Fawn. It was silly, because the girl had lived there less than a year and never fully moved back up there after Nathan was born, but Land sakes, the place must have been nice in its day. Even though the house was small, the views from the front windows would have kept anyone from caring about the cramped living quarters.

I found it ironic that Neil, one of the wealthiest men in Garza County, had clearly been envious of my boyfriend's real estate. Then again, Neil Blaylock had always scorned anything he couldn't get his hands on. In fact, Clyde had said he was surprised Neil hadn't torn the place down already. I squinted, remembering Neil leaning against the porch railing on the other side of the screen door, and then my mood faltered.

Neil had called Clyde's old shack a
love nest
. He had said Clyde and I should be hiding out there. That seemed strange. The house had been abandoned for a year, and Clyde and I had only been up there one time in the past two weeks.

Two weeks.
Had everything between Clyde and me happened in only two weeks? A charred paper fragment tumbled across the porch, the words still visible in the black ash, and I smashed it with my thumb, marveling at the way my opinion of Clyde had changed in such a short time. When he came back from prison, he was little more than a pitiful drunk, and at that time, I wasn't even sure I wanted to be his friend. But he had proved himself to the people down at the church, to me and his other friends, and most important, to his daughter. Now Fawn needed him more than he knew.

He was hanging on to the shack because of her, so I could hardly ask him to tear it down, even for something as life changing as opening a restaurant. Pushing myself to my feet, I brushed my hand across my bottom, hoping I hadn't dirtied my work uniform. I reached for the door handle, but then I froze, piecing together tidbits of memories not unlike how Hector was piecing together evidence from my past. Both of us were working our own jigsaw puzzles.

The sun must have gone behind one of the cotton balls, because a shadow swept across the porch, darkening the steps where ashes had made their way to the ground. My body went cold as all the pieces came together to form a complete picture, a vision from the past. I realized I wasn't the only one who had been hanging on to a psychological token.

I lowered myself slowly to my hands and knees, and then lay down on my side and curled into a ball.

But only for a minute.

When Clyde got off work that night, he drove straight to the diner, anxious to talk to Lynda about her discussion with Hector. That morning when the sheriff had placed her in his car, she looked so lost, terrified of getting arrested and being convicted of a crime she didn't commit. He could imagine her sing-song voice. “This is Trapp, Clyde. No matter what you do, the town will gossip a different version of it.” And she had been right again.

He saw her through the windows of Dixie's Diner, sweeping the dining room, and he realized how worried he had been. He wasn't at all sure he wanted her going around town alone. The sheriff had stopped by the Dairy Queen earlier and said enough to let Clyde know that they were searching for Neil and that they considered him armed and dangerous. Clyde never figured Neil to be brave enough to kill another human being, and Clyde had met a few murderers in his lifetime.

But he had no intention of taking chances. Clyde tapped on the locked door.

Lynda startled as though she'd heard a gunshot, but when she saw that it was him, her shoulders relaxed and she flipped the lock. “What do you want?”

It was a strange greeting, but he let it go. “Thought I'd follow you home. They still haven't found Neil.”

“Blue and Gray figure him to be well past the border of Mexico by now.” She laughed, but it didn't sound real. “Crazy, huh?”

She propped the broom against the counter and turned a chair upside down on a table. Clyde hurried to help.

“I talked to the sheriff,” he said. “Susan confessed that Neil has been liquidating assets.” He paused with a chair lifted waist high. “I have to agree with the Parker sisters, Lyn. I bet he's long gone.”

“I don't think so. Susan's still here. And Fawn and Nathan.”

A pickup crawled past the front windows, and Clyde studied it before continuing to flip chairs.

Lynda dragged the broom slowly beneath a table, forming a small pile of dust and bits of food, but then she paused. “When Neil suggested we leave town together, do you think he was trying to make us look guilty?”

“I reckon so.”

“It doesn't make sense,” she said. “It's like he staged the whole thing to exploit your temper and make you look guilty, but you have the most solid alibi a person can have. The Texas prison system.”

“He's desperate, Lyn, and thinking crazy. Like threatening to have me arrested because of Nathan. There was never anything to that. Just trying to make me look bad.”

She continued sweeping. “And if we ran off together, I would look more suspicious.”

“Yep.”

“Is it all right if I hate him now?”

He flipped the last chair over and leaned against the counter. “Hate's too strong.”

“Yeah, I suppose.” She sighed, seeming lost in thought. Clyde couldn't get a feel for her mood. She'd had such a strange few days, her emotions were surely in a jumble, but she seemed detached, emotionless, numb. Maybe that was self-preservation. She gave a short grunt of a laugh and glanced at him. “Those stinking letters of mine came in handy after all.”

“How so?” Clyde rubbed a palm over his mouth, not sure he should admit he had seen her burning them out on her back porch. Without a doubt, she had heard him calling her name, and she hadn't wanted to be disturbed. This time he had let her be.

“Turns out an old letter of Hoby's put Neil and him together around the time of the”—she cringed—“accident.”

“How do they know when it happened?”

“Hoby got a speeding ticket on I-20 toward the end of December, but he never paid it. Hector says that could have been about the time it happened.”

“But if you're the one that got the letter from him, why are they looking at Neil instead of you?”

She shrugged and swept under another table before she answered him. “I was in the hospital in December.”

He leaned forward. “I never knew that.”

“I was treated for psychological problems. You know, depression and all.”

He studied her for a while, wanting to hold her but sensing she wouldn't accept it at the moment. “You were suicidal.”

“Yes.” She said it loudly. “Anyway, I have almost as solid an alibi as you.”

The sound of her laughter, uncontrolled and sinister, forced him to move toward her, approaching as if she were a cottontail rabbit hiding in the brush. He took the broom in one hand and pulled her into his arms with the other. “I wish I had been there, Lyn, and I wish I could erase all the pain from your past.”

“I do, too.” She pulled away from him, and her eyes looked lost and abandoned. She took the broom from him and swept the debris into a dustpan.

Something didn't feel right. She was closing herself off again, and Clyde scrambled for a way to bring her back. They'd had such a good time before everything fell apart. Cooking together, exploring the turbine, making plans at his property on the Cap. He stepped toward her. “I don't have to work till late tomorrow. I was thinking maybe you'd come over and let me cook for you. I could make you a little batch of homemade ice cream.”

She dumped the dirt in the trash and stored the dustpan with the broom on a hook in the corner. She didn't answer.

“Or we could just head out to the turbines again …” His spirits fell as she stopped, exhaled, didn't look at him. “Or just whatever,” he finished softly.

She stared at the side of the cash register for so long, he began to think she hadn't heard him. But no, of course she had. He shoved his hands in his pockets to wait her out.

“I guess I better not,” she finally said.

Better not what?
Talk to him? Sit with him? Love him?

She shook her head. “I can't do this.”

His stomach sank to the floor beneath him.
She didn't want him anymore.

“It's not that I don't care about you. Of course I do, but I'm not up to any more drama right now. What with Hoby and all. And Ansel dying. And I haven't even had time to think about Ruthie and what she must be feeling through all this.”

She was telling him she was too busy? She still hadn't looked at him, but Clyde kept staring at her, not believing. “You must be tired after all you've been through today,” he said. “Why don't we talk about it tomorrow? I'll pick you up, and we can take some muffins to the Cap again. Get away from everything down here in town.”

“No.” Her eyes met his then, and her chin quivered. “I'm not going up there with you.”

The hatred in her eyes matched any glare she had ever leveled at Neil Blaylock, and it shook Clyde's confidence to have the same look directed straight at him. But it irked him, too. “What's up, Lyn? Talk to me.”

Her hands locked together loosely on the counter, giving the impression she didn't care much about the outcome of the conversation, but Clyde doubted that was the case.

“I know about your house on the Caprock.” Her eyebrows lifted slightly. “I figured it out.”

Women had always been confusing to Clyde, but right now he thought Lynda was a complete mystery, and he had no earthly idea what she was talking about. “Do you mean my plans to move up there?” He rubbed the side of his jaw with his thumb. “I don't mind reconsidering that notion. That's something we can figure out together. But there's no rush,” he added quickly.

“You don't even understand it, do you?” She looked at him then, with exhausted eyes. “You told me you wanted to keep the house because you had memories of Fawn there. I assumed when she lived there last year, but that's not what you meant.” Her eyes narrowed. “Is it?”

Clyde felt as if he were falling down a dark tunnel, three hundred feet above the ground, with nothing to cling to and no hope of release.

Lynda's lips curved upward ever so slightly, but her eyes remained empty. “You don't have memories of Fawn living in your grand­pappy's house. You have memories of her being conceived there.”