Secrets Of Bella Terra (25 page)

Maybe Brooke’s mother had a point. Maybe Brooke should forget Rafe, give Gagnon a whirl, go to Scandinavia, be a wild woman.

But the fact of the matter was . . . Rafe was dangerous. She knew that. She’d never doubted that. But she also knew he would never do anything criminal. She didn’t know that about Gagnon. In fact, she thought . . . well, she thought any woman who trusted Gagnon could land in prison or worse.

Which did not eliminate Sweden. She could still go there.

Gagnon got down to business. “What can I do for you?”

“We’ve got a situation in Bella Valley that I think might be bigger than I’d imagined.”

“Tell me all about it,” he invited.

She did, and when she had finished, he said, “This is truly fascinating. Let me check on it and I’ll get back to you before your evening is over.”

“Thank you, Gagnon. When you visit the resort again, I promise you a very special bottle of wine to express my gratitude.” Hopefully that wouldn’t get her into too much trouble.

“Only if you’ll share it with me.”

“I will, indeed.” Sharing a bottle of wine with Gagnon would fulfill every woman’s fantasy. The trouble with Gagnon, as far as Brooke was concerned, was simply that he was too handsome, too clever, too lacking in integrity, and, when it came to women, too inconsistent.

“I look forward to it,
chérie
. And,
chérie
—I want to enjoy that wine with you, so until this murderer is caught, you be very, very careful.”

“I will.”

He hung up without another word.

Now Brooke walked to the dining room. Once there, she again went to the table and arranged the wine bottles before her. One by one, she lifted the candles out, turned the bottles over, and shook them. They were empty.

All the while Brooke thought about her mother and how she wanted Brooke to leave Bella Terra and the memories of Rafe, and how Sarah wanted Brooke to give Rafe another chance.

What about Rafe—what did he want?

For that matter, what did Brooke want?

Looking across, she saw a memory leaning against the wall.

Rafe. Not Rafe as he was now, but the blurry outline of Rafe as he had been at Christmas her senior year of college.

Brooke had come home to cold weather and rumors that Rafe had been a prisoner of war, and when she asked her mother about it, Kathy looked her in the eyes and said, “I didn’t think the story was important enough to disturb your studies. Besides, you’re engaged to another man.” Her mother’s voice warmed. “I can’t wait to meet Dylan.”

“You’ll like him.” By that, Brooke meant he was the polar opposite of her father: scholarly, unadventurous, as faithful as an old dog.

Brooke refrained from asking anything else about Rafe. After all, he didn’t matter to her anymore.

As always, Brooke and her mom headed up to Nonna’s on Christmas Eve. Every previous year, she’d come home, celebrated with her mom, visited her friends, and whenever she saw Rafe, she had pretended that he didn’t matter to her.

Every year, it became more and more true.

He helped, of course. His military haircut, his ramrod posture, reminded her of her father, and that was enough to put a distance between them. Then she took care never to be alone with him, and in that, her mother helped. Whenever Kathy saw Rafe Di Luca, she managed to get between him and Brooke.

Every year on Christmas night, Brooke and her mom always went up to Nonna’s to pay their respects—as Kathy said, Sarah had been unfailingly kind to them.

The home ranch was always full of visitors and family; Brooke and her mom always ate too much of Nonna’s cooking, drank a mug of mulled wine, exclaimed about the decorations on the tree, and talked to Eli and Noah. Brooke carefully kept her conversations with Rafe to a casual, “Hi, how are you?”

That year, as usual, the warmth of the house enfolded them. Someone thrust food and drink into their hands. They made their way into the gaily decorated dining room to greet Sarah. Brooke remembered thinking that Sarah was showing her age and maybe the strain of raising her grandsons.

Then Brooke came face-to-face with Rafe . . . and everything else faded away.

He stood unmoving, his back to the wall. He wore jeans and a short-sleeved blue T-shirt that hung on his spare frame. He was so still, only his eyes moving, flickering as he observed everyone in the room. Scrutinized them as if trying to decide which of them would be the first to try to kill him. The room was full, but around him a small space had formed, as if he gave off a force field to hold them away . . . or as if whatever had happened to him was contagious and everyone was afraid to get close for fear they’d catch it.

Brooke looked from him to Nonna.

Nonna met her gaze and her eyes filled with tears.

Brooke looked back at Rafe, only to discover he was staring at her with such a world of pain and longing….

Brooke’s mother stepped between them. “Honey, try this. It’s Sarah’s fruitcake and you know how much you love it.”

Brooke stared at her, uncomprehending. Then her brain snapped back to normal; she smiled into her mother’s worried face and said, “Thank you, Mom. It smells great!” Taking the cake, she ate a few bites, and tried the cookies and the prosciutto and the marinated artichokes. She drank wine and sang Christmas carols by the piano. She showed off her engagement ring to her cadre of envious school friends, and only once looked toward Rafe, when she saw Eli approach his brother and speak to him, and the two left the room together. Nothing about Brooke’s behavior indicated she had a thought other than enjoying her last Christmas in Bella Valley without the man she would marry in the spring.

But when she got home, she lay on the bed, feeling alone as she had never been in her whole life.

She hurt. She waited.

And she listened.

Two hours later, when the spray of gravel hit her window, she was up and leaning out, offering her hand to Rafe. “Come in,” she said.

“I can’t.”

She didn’t know why he couldn’t, but his voice was so flat and dead, she believed him. So she wiggled through the window in her flannel Christmas pajamas and fell into his waiting arms.

R
afe held Brooke tightly as he carried her to the alley and into the shadows where he’d parked Nonna’s Mustang. She stretched down, opened the passenger door, and he put her in. She watched him walk around to the driver’s side, a shadow stealing through the dark night. The car door opened softly, the lock almost muted by his care. He slid in and started the engine. And he drove. He drove for an hour, up into the foothills, then higher into the mountains, foot on the accelerator as if he were trying to escape something. To escape himself.

Finally, at three o’clock in the morning, she put her hand on his arm. “Stop and tell me about it.”

He pulled off the paved highway onto a small, rutted dirt road that went nowhere. When they broke out of the trees and into a mountain meadow, and the Mustang’s front wheels sank into the mud, he stopped the car.

They sat looking at the stars—so many stars, a hundred million stars in a clear black sky—and he began to talk.

“Eight of us. We were supposed to blow up the rebels’ munitions storage, the biggest in the Afghan mountains. It took us weeks to get into position. We went in at precisely the right time. Everything went perfectly. . . . There’s a saying in the military: If your attack is going too well, you’re walking into an ambush. We were. They caught us. Put us in cages where we could
see
the ammunition we were supposed to destroy. Held us for ransom. I knew that wouldn’t work—the U.S. military doesn’t ransom their people.” His voice was flat and hard and very quiet, as if even in this isolated spot, he feared being overheard. “They knew it wouldn’t work, either, but they also knew they could make us give video confessions, and those confessions would play on the Internet and the media would give them attention.”

“I didn’t see any videos online.” During the fall semester, she had been studying hard, but she had glanced at the headlines occasionally. She would have noticed Rafe’s face.

“Because we beat one another up.”

“What?” She had meant to keep her voice gentle and without inflection, but that surprised her.

“They wanted to show us freely confessing we were spies, so we punched one another enough to cause some ugly bruises. Pissed them off, so they stopped feeding us or giving us water, which pretty much worked to make us willing to do anything they wanted.” Rafe seemed to think that would surprise her, so he added, “Yeah, really. Without water, I’d do almost anything. But bodies don’t heal without hydration, so it was a stupid move on their parts. We lost one guy then and there, Walter Davis from North Bend, Indiana. He got an infection and died. I think he died because he hated being underground all the time.”

“They kept you underground?”

“In the caves, yeah. We lost Harou Yoshida from Honolulu, Hawaii, and Madison Dominguez from San Diego, California, because those two motherfuckers, you know, wouldn’t shut up.” Rafe’s voice almost smiled. “They were always ragging on the guards about their hygiene and whether they . . . Well, those two guys were gross. Funny gross. Fuck, man. Those guys. There was nothing they wouldn’t say.”

Rafe had never sworn like that. Not in front of Brooke. But she didn’t think he’d even noticed. “How did you lose them?”

Abruptly grim, Rafe said, “The guards got mad and shot them. Left them there. That’s when the rest of us got sick. You know, you can’t leave two bodies rotting in the cages with living human beings without some horrible disease popping up. When the guards finally came to haul the bodies away, we were all so sick, dysentery, I think. We were dead men. None of us were going to last another hour. So they walked in, put down their rifles, threw a tarp over the bodies, and started to drag them away. If I’d, um . . .” He stopped and rolled down the window, thrust his head and shoulders out, and breathed deeply, trembling.

It was a cold night. The heat generated by the car was gone. Steam had crept up the windows, enclosing them in the small interior of the Mustang.

And he was hanging out, gasping for breath.

Now she understood why he couldn’t come inside her bedroom. He didn’t want to be inside anywhere.

She didn’t blame him.

She pulled her legs up on the seat, tucked the hems of her pajama pants over her bare toes, hugged herself to create warmth, and watched him until he shook like a dog and pulled his head in.

“Sorry.” He sounded more like Rafe than he had all night. “Just had a moment. I shouldn’t be filling you in on all the details, anyway. They’re disgusting and uncivilized. Nobody wants to know. They just want me to get better.”

So many things she could say. So many approaches she could take.

She settled on breaking the tension. “Let’s have some respect. I’m not that civilized.”

“Really? You’re not?” He sounded wryly polite.

“When there’s a thunderstorm, I go out and walk in the rain without an umbrella. I could be dead in an instant, but I defy the lightning!”

“Whoa.”

“Exactly. Politically correct I am not. One time when I was eight, I threw the cat into the sprinkler.”

“You’re out of control.” He gave her a proper amount of awe.

“Yes, I am. Best of all, in my freshman year at college, we had a hard freeze and my whole dormitory went out and jumped in the fountain.”

“Did you have your clothes on?” He sounded stiff and perturbed.

“My sweat suit!”

He cackled. There was no other word for it. He definitely cackled. “I am now fully respectful of your feral side.”

“That’s right, ba-bee.” She was cold enough to shiver in little shudders.

He noticed at last, and rolled up the window. “Wait a minute.” He got out, went around and opened the trunk, and came back with the ragged quilt Nonna kept in the back. For picnics, she always said, but long ago, in high school, Brooke and Rafe had more than once made love under its protection.

He got back in and held it close to his chest. “Give me a minute; I’ll warm it for you.”

Brooke knew she would give him as many minutes as he needed. She’d stay here all night if he wanted her to, and with the front wheels stuck in the mud, they might be here part of the day, too.

She spared a thought for her mother’s frustration; then he wrapped her in the blanket and she forgot her mother. Offering him a corner, she asked, “Don’t you want to share?”

“I don’t feel the cold,” he said. “In the caves . . . it was hot down there.”

“All right.” Her shivering was easing. “So anyway, tell me the rest of the story. The guards were dragging out the bodies and you—”

“If I’d been somewhere where I wasn’t lying on the ground in my own feces, I don’t think I would have been able to get up. All I can recall is this upswell of vomit and anger. I leaped up and grabbed the rifle. I remember the looks on their faces when they heard the round go into the chamber and turned and saw me on my feet—it was pure I’m-going-to-hell terror. Don’t kid yourself, Brooke. I’m not a good person. I was glad they were shitting themselves.”

“Did you shoot them?”

“I shot them both.”

She looked down into the dim reaches of the car, thinking that someone like her—a female college student with no experience with violence—shouldn’t be so ferociously joyful about his brutality.

But she couldn’t lie. “I’m glad, too. What did you do next?”

“First, I grabbed their canteens and drank their water. Wrong! Because the shot echoed all over that cave and every damned insurgent heard it. But I was crazed. The second thing I did was what we’d been sent to do. I set a charge under the munitions.”