Walking After Midnight (35 page)

„Oh, yeah?“

„Yeah.“

„You planning to see him again?“

„You mean if we survive this?“

„That’s what I mean.“

Summer eyed him. „Maybe.“

„Maybe?“ His black eyes narrowed.

„Depends on if I have a reason
not
to see him again.“

„Like what kind of reason?“

„I don’t know – like maybe if there was somebody new in my life.“

„Is there?“

„Mmm.“

„That’s no answer.“

„It’s the best you’re going to get.“

„Oh, yeah?“ He kissed her mouth, his lips warm and leisurely and entirely proprietary. „Know what? I think there’s somebody new in your life.“

„I thought you didn’t want to get involved.“

He smiled lazily at her. The effect of that smile at such close quarters was devastating. „I don’t. But like you said, I think it’s already too late.“

„Really?“

„Uh-huh.“

„You’re involved?“

„Looks like it, doesn’t it?“

„So what about Deedee?“

Steve sighed, and rolled onto his back, bringing with him Summer, the quilt, and Muffy, who was tangled up in it. Muffy, indignant at being treated with so little consideration, wriggled out the end of the cocoon to hunch indignantly just inside the shelter. Neither human paid the least attention to her.

„Baby, I think you’ve got hold of the wrong end of the stick where Deedee’s concerned. We never had the kind of love affair that you seem to think we did. What was between us was never meant to be a forever kind of thing. She and I both knew that all along. All right, so I keep thinking that I see her. I can’t help it. Damn it, I know she’s dead, and I don’t believe in ghosts. So you want to hear the only explanation I can come up with?“

„What’s that?“ Summer, lying sprawled atop him securely swathed in quilt, lifted her head, folding her hands on his chest and propping her chin on them as she looked down into his face.

„I never saw her before I met you. Not once, in the three years since she died. I think I’m seeing her now because of guilt over the way I feel when I’m with you.“

„Really?“ Summer looked down at him hopefully.

„Really.“

„So how do you feel when you’re with me?“

Steve grinned. „Horny.“

Summer pinched his chest. He yelped, rubbing the injured spot.

„Is that all?“ She glared at him.

„Hey, it works for me.“

Summer pursed her lips and rolled off him, crossing her arms over her chest and presenting her back to him with a flounce.

„What more do you want?“ he protested, leaning up on one elbow to peer down into her averted face.

„From you?“ Summer laughed. „Not a thing.“

„Now you’re mad at me.“ He dropped a kiss on her ear. She elbowed him sharply in the chest. He grunted, cringing, and then leaned over her again.

„I suppose you want me to tell you that I think we’ve got something special going here. That with you and me, maybe it is a forever kind of thing. Is that it?“

„I don’t want you to tell me anything. I don’t even want you to speak to me. I – “

„Well,“ he interrupted, his breath warm as he spoke into her ear. „That’s just what I think.“

It took a moment for that to sink in.

„What?“ She turned over so that she could see his face. He smiled at her, rather ruefully, she thought.

„You heard me,“ he said.

„Repeat that.“

„Not on your life.“

„Steve Calhoun, are you trying to say that you’ve fallen in love with me?“

„I guess.“

„You
guess?“

At the indignation clear in her face and voice, he backtracked hastily. „All right, I know. I think.“

„You
think?“
This time it wasn’t indignation she felt. It was outrage, pure and simple.

„Jesus, Summer, what do you want?“

„I want you to tell me, straight out, that you’ve fallen in love with me, if that’s what you’re trying to say.“

He stared at her without speaking for a moment. They were facing each other, lying on their sides swathed in the quilt, their heads inches apart on the blue nylon gym bag. Summer, rigid with temper, had both arms crossed firmly over her chest. Steve reached down, grasped both her hands with his, and pulled them, not without some token resistance on her part, free. Then he carried them to his mouth, and pressed a kiss against the knuckles of both hands.

„I think that maybe, just maybe, you were sent to rescue me from outer darkness,“ he said quietly. „When I first encountered you, in that funeral home, I didn’t really care if I lived or died. Now I do.“

„Steve,“ she whispered, touched to the heart by his words, and the infinite tenderness in his black eyes.

„Hush,“ he said. „Let me finish, now that you’ve got me started. For years, I haven’t been able to look into the future with any kind of hope or joy. Now, when I think of a future – of being with you in my future – I feel both. Does that mean I’ve fallen in love with you? Who knows? But I’m willing to give it a shot – if you are.“

„Oh, Steve.“ Looking searchingly into his eyes, Summer realized how sincerely he meant what he said. Her heart swelled. They were two people, damaged by life, who had somehow found in each other what they needed to heal their wounds. And that was a miracle. There was no other word for it. Summer snuggled closer, freeing her hands to stroke his bristly cheeks, trace the hard line of his mouth, tenderly touch the healing bruises. „If you can’t come right out and say it, I can: I’m in love with you.“

„Yeah?“ He gave her a curious, lopsided little smile.

„Yeah,“ she answered softly, and kissed his mouth.

Peering in through the makeshift shelter’s entrance, a not-quite-ready-for-prime-time angel gave a rousing cheer.

Which neither of the two principals to the conversation heard. Though Muffy did, and cocked her head in wonderment.

34

That night, the heavens celebrated. Thunder roared approval. Lightning cracked in laudatory bursts across the sky. Rain pelted down in never-ending applause. Summer and Steve, wrapped up in the quilt and each other, heard none of it.

She told him the truth of what it had been like to be married to Lem, about the bulimia she had developed as a result, about how hard it had been to heal herself and become whole again.

He told her about how he’d been drinking too much for years, about how, when his life had exploded in his face, he’d gone off the deep end and lit out on the bender to end all benders: a lost weekend that had lasted for nearly three years.

She told him that Lem had left her to marry his twenty-two-year-old nurse.

He told her that grief over the mess he’d gotten himself into had caused his father’s death.

And they held each other, and cried, and laughed, and made love – and healed.

„So what made you decide to come back?“ Summer asked sleepily several hours later, as the tale of Steve’s wanderings over the last three years came to a close.

He was lying on his back and her head was cradled on his shoulder. The ground was hard. The air was cold. Pine needles prickled through the quilt in places to jab her most sensitive parts. Summer didn’t care. Naked, swathed in the quilt and warmed by the blast-furnace heat of Steve’s body, she felt blissfully, foolishly happy. Beneath the palm she had pressed to Steve’s hair-roughened chest, she could feel the steady beat of his heart.

„To Tennessee, you mean?“ One hard-muscled arm was tucked beneath his head and the other was wrapped around Summer’s shoulders. As he spoke, his gaze was fixed on the raw planks of their makeshift ceiling. Summer immediately thought of him imagining Deedee lurking around up there somewhere, but dismissed the suspicion as unworthy. She had a gut feeling that Steve wouldn’t be seeing Deedee anymore. At least, she added to herself fiercely, not if he knew what was good for him!

„Well, as I told you, I was out in Nevada. My credit cards and my savings had taken me a long way, but by this time I was about broke. I woke up one afternoon in a whorehouse – Mabel’s, where the motto is The customer always comes first. There was a girl beside me, and we were both naked – ow, don’t punch me! – but I couldn’t remember how I got there, or a single thing we’d done. She was a hell of a good-looking girl, too.“

Steve smiled reminiscently, then yelped as Summer gave a punishing yank to a captured twirl of his chest hair.

„Jesus, you’re vicious.“ He slanted a glance down at her, grinned, and continued. „I couldn’t even remember what day it was. So I asked her, and she said Christmas Eve. That made me feel kind of sick. So I got up, got dressed, and went back to the hotel I’d been staying in. It was a cheap hotel, twenty-five bucks a night. They changed the sheets maybe once a week.“ He took a deep breath. „So I started thinking about Christmas, and I picked up the phone and called my daughter. I hadn’t talked to her for a while, because every time I called Elaine said she didn’t want to talk to me. But this time my daughter answered. I said 1 loved her, Merry Christmas. She said, ‘I hate you, Daddy,’ and hung up the phone.“

The pain in Steve’s voice was as tangible as his heartbeat beneath Summer’s palm. She ached for him, snuggling closer, kissing the side of his neck in silent sympathy.

„Children always say that to their parents. I know my nephews and nieces do.“ It was poor comfort, Summer knew, but the best she could offer.

„I know.“ He sounded tired. „But it was like she’d slapped my face. It shocked me into taking stock of myself. I saw the sorry thing I’d become – a dirty drunk sleeping with whores – and knew I had to make some changes. I took a shower, cleaned up, shaved. Then I went to church – it was a little Methodist church, sitting up on a hill in the middle of that podunk town – and I – well, hell, I prayed. Then the whole congregation started coming in. It was Christmas Eve, remember. There was a candlelight service. I stayed for that, too. When it was over, I knew I had to do my best to put things right in my life.“

Summer listened, spellbound, to the deep rumble of his voice. His heartbeat was slow and steady beneath her hand.

He went on: „I quit drinking, there and then, cold turkey. With God’s help, I haven’t had a drink from that day to this. I got tested for AIDS. I was clean, you don’t have to worry. Then I headed home, meaning to do my best to earn my daughter’s forgiveness. On the way back, I started to think things through. Right after Deedee died, I was too shocked to see real clearly, but since I had quit drinking the fog was beginning to lift. I had a hard time believing that Deedee had committed suicide – you would have had to know Deedee to understand – but I hadn’t questioned it, before. Now I started to. She’d left behind that videotape, remember. Besides the, uh, sex, it also had her saying that she was going to kill herself because I was breaking off with her to go back to my wife. Hell, I never said that. I never
left
my wife, and I broke off with Deedee mainly because of Mitch. She knew that, had a screaming fit about it in fact. So what she said on the tape just didn’t fit.“ He hesitated for a minute, frowning up at the ceiling. „And then there was the key.“

„What key?“

„The key to my office. It was a temporary office in Nashville, one I was using just while I worked on the investigation I was telling you about. I’d only been in it about a month. Because of the sensitive nature of the case, I had the locks changed on that office when I moved into it, and I locked it every single night, no exceptions. I locked it the night Deedee died in there. So how did she get in? She didn’t have a key. There was only one, and it was either in my pocket or locked in my desk drawer at home every single minute of every single day. She and Elaine had never much liked each other – maybe Elaine sensed that I’d always had a soft spot for Deedee, I don’t know – so Deedee was hardly ever at my house. She couldn’t possibly have sneaked the key out of my desk drawer while I was asleep or anything like that. She hadn’t been inside my house at all since we started sleeping together, I know. My office was locked, and she didn’t have a key. So what did she do? Break in? Deedee weighed about ninety pounds, and she was anything but mechanical, and anyway there were no signs of a break-in. So how did she get into my office to hang herself? And why would she do it there, and leave behind that videotape, anyway? She was gonna be dead by the time it was found, so the only one it would hurt was me. Deedee was mad, but I don’t think for a minute that the last act of her life would have been to deliberately cause trouble for me.“

„So what are you saying? That you don’t think she killed herself?“

„I don’t see how she could have. But if she didn’t, who killed her, and why? The only possible reason to take her out the way they did was to do harm to me, but why, if somebody’s aim was to harm
me,
didn’t they just kill me and have done with it? Shooting me would have been a hell of a lot easier than going through the whole elaborate setup somebody had to go through if Deedee was murdered. I can’t make sense out of it. I couldn’t when I first started trying to work it out, and I can’t now. There’s a piece of the puzzle missing, and I can’t find it. So I decided the only thing to do was go back over the investigation I was working on when she died. Inch by inch, lead by lead, fact by fact, looking for something, anything, that I might have missed the first time around. That’s what I was doing outside that funeral home that night, and that’s how we ended up here.“