In one corner of the room, a handsome and smiling Judge Kevin McAllister was holding court over a bevy of young matrons who giggled and poked at each other in delighted embarrassment each time he opened his mouth. Behind the serving table, his wife was talking to Shep Henley, going a mile a minute, her composure severely damaged. Henley turned around, his gaze scanning the room, stopping when it reached their table. The fury in his eyes was a living, breathing thing. Nick raised his glass in greeting, and Henley turned back to Neely McAllister. He took her hand in his and patted it soothingly, while she continued to talk rapidly and with obvious distress.
Nick narrowed his eyes. “Hey, Kat?”
She looked up from her meatloaf. “What?”
“Take a quick gander at the serving table. Henley and McAllister. Tell me what you see.”
She and Janine both discreetly glanced toward the buffet table. “He’s holding her hand,” Kathryn said dryly. “Comforting her. Telling her that she’s right, that Nick DiSalvo really is the spawn of Satan.”
“Is that all you see?” he said, disappointed. “There’s something else, but I can’t put my finger on it.”
“It’s the way he’s looking at her,” Janine said.
Kathryn swiveled her head around and looked at his daughter. “What?” she said.
“The way he’s looking at her,” Janine repeated. “And the way she’s looking back at him. It’s the same way you and Daddy look at each other.”
Kathryn and Nick stared at each other, stunned, and then they both looked back at the couple who stood at the serving table. Henley was still holding Neely’s hand, still hanging on her every word, still gazing at her with obvious adoration.
“I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Nick said.
“Ubiquitous,” Janine said gleefully as she arranged the letters on the Scrabble board. “That gives me—what? Twenty-seven points.”
“And the championship,” Kathryn said. “This kid is good, DiSalvo. You should have warned me.”
“Just one of her many talents,” he said. “Right, squirt?” Balancing his coffee on his knee with one hand, he ruffled his daughter’s hair with the other.
“I used to play with Mom all the time,” Janine said as she gathered up pieces and dumped them back into the box, “when you were working late.”
His gaze met Kathryn’s, and the stricken look in his eyes made her heart contract. “Is your mom a good player?” she asked, picking up a stray letter and tossing it into the box.
“She’s okay. Not as good as me.” Janine covered the box and rested her elbows on her splayed knees, long dark hair falling all around her. “But Walter—” She said the name with exaggerated disdain and a roll of the eyes. “He’s really good. He’s a wimp, but he’s really good at Scrabble.”
“Janine,” Nick said in mild reprimand. “That’s not a very nice thing to say.”
“Well, it’s true, Daddy. Walter is a dork.”
“Your mom seems to like him,” he said flatly.
“She liked you better,” Janine said.
With his left hand, Nick rubbed at the knuckles that were clenched tight around the handle of his coffee cup. “Yeah, well, that was a long time ago.”
“Not that long ago,” Janine said.
Kathryn looked from father to daughter and back. “I think,” she said briskly, “it’s time for me to be getting home. It’s late, and I need to let the dog out.”
Janine looked at her with renewed interest. “What kind of dog do you have?” she said.
“A Rottweiler. Your dad gave him to me.”
“Really, Daddy? You gave her a dog? How come we don’t have a dog?”
“We don’t need a dog,” he said curtly. “I’ll drive you home.”
“That’s not necessary,” Kathryn said. “It’s a beautiful night, I can walk. I am capable of walking, you know.”
He gave her a look fraught with meaning. “Then I’ll
walk
you home.”
“Fine,” she said. “I’ll get my purse.”
“I’ll be home in an hour or so,” he told Janine. “Don’t open the door to anybody you don’t know. Basically that means nobody but me or Caroline.”
Janine sighed. “I’m thirteen years old, Daddy. I grew up in the city. I’m not stupid.”
“I want you to remember,” he said, “that just because you’re in a small town, that doesn’t mean there’s no danger. There are bad people in small towns, too.”
“Like Kathryn’s mother-in-law?”
He met Kathryn’s eyes. “She’s the queen of mean,” he told his daughter. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean she’s bad. Not in the sense I’m talking, anyway. But there are dangerous people around. We had a murder just the other day, and we still don’t know for sure who did it. And that scares the hell out of me.”
“I don’t understand,” Janine said. “I thought you arrested somebody. Dewey something-or-other.”
Again, his eyes met Kathryn’s, helpless and beseeching.
“Shall I tell her?” she said.
“Go ahead. It’s really your story to tell.”
“Come on, sweetheart,” she said to Janine. “Let’s sit on the couch while I tell you all about it.”
Janine looked from Kathryn to her father. “Okay,” she said.
“Four years ago,” Kathryn said, settling onto the cushion beside her, “I came home one day and found my husband dead. He’d been murdered, stabbed to death with my wallpapering shears. I was young, and I was ignorant, and I was scared. I made the mistake of pulling the shears out of his body. By the time the police got there, I had his blood all over me and my prints on the murder weapon. They said I killed him, but I didn’t.” She leaned forward and took Janine’s hands in hers. “It’s important to me that you believe that. I was so scared. I loved Michael so much, and I couldn’t understand why they thought I would have killed him. It took me a while to figure out that I’d been set up. I took the fall for somebody else, somebody who made sure I was put away someplace where I couldn’t ask too many questions about what happened to Michael. I spent four years in prison, Janine. If you’ve never been there, you can’t imagine what that’s like. The kind of things that go on. The kind of people you’re forced to be with, day after day after day.”
“It must have been scary,” Janine said.
“It was very scary. But finally, my lawyer found new evidence and brought it to trial, and a judge released me. He overturned my conviction. And I came back to Elba to find out who really killed Michael.”
“Why would anybody want to kill him?” she said. Her eyes narrowed in concentration, making her look so much like her father that it was startling. “Was he like that awful woman? His mother?”
Kathryn closed her eyes at the poignancy of her memories. “No, honey,” she said, opening them again. “Michael was the kindest, sweetest man I’d ever known. He was nothing like his mother. I can’t imagine why anybody would have wanted to kill him. But I intend to find out. Now, Wanita Crumley is dead, and I think the two murders are related. I think that whoever killed Michael is the same person who killed Wanita. So does your dad. We don’t believe that Dewey killed her. But people around here have long memories, and they don’t believe I’m innocent. So I’m not exactly winning any popularity contests these days. Things have happened.”
“Like the spray paint on Daddy’s Blazer?” Janine said.
She decided it would be a good idea to skip over the snake incident. And the driver who’d nearly run her down. “Yes,” she said. “Like that. Which is why your dad wants you to be very careful. People know we’re
—
” She looked up at Nick, at a loss for words, uncertain of what their relationship really was. “Seeing each other,” she finished. “In their eyes, that makes him guilty by association. Neither one of us,” she said pointedly, “wants anything to happen to you as a result of this mess.”
Janine spent a long time considering her words. Then she patted Kathryn’s hand. “It’s okay,” she said. “I believe you.” She turned to her father. “Daddy,” she said gravely, “I think it would be safer for you to drive Kathryn home.”
When they were alone in the Blazer, she said, “That’s quite a kid you have there, DiSalvo.”
“You’re telling me.” He shifted gears, threw an arm over the back of the seat and backed out of the driveway. Shifted again, and the truck lurched forward. “Okay,” he said, “now that we’re alone, you can tell me what’s got you so wired up.”
So she told him, told him about Ruby Jackson, about the Businessmen’s Benevolent Association, about Ruby’s rich and handsome white lover. “I’m on to something,” she said. “I know it. There’s some connection here. Four people, four different lives. Ruby, Kevin, Michael, and Wanita. But I’ll be damned if I can figure out what connects the four of them.”
He rubbed absently at his chin while he deliberated. “If there’s a connection,” he said at last, “we’ll find it. We’re too deep into this now to back off.”
“Is that the reason behind tonight’s little performance?”
He pulled up to the curb in front of her house and shut off the engine. “Tonight,” he said, stretching out his long legs, “I wanted to deliberately provoke somebody. I just wish to Christ I knew who it was.”
“All signs,” she said, “point to my erstwhile father-in-law. The scumbag.”
Still rubbing his chin, he said, “Mmph.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know exactly.”
She turned, folded a leg beneath her, and studied him. “You don’t think Kevin’s the one?”
“I honestly don’t know. A father killing his only son. A crime of passion, committed in a moment of rage? What possible motive could he have?”
She thought about it. Except for the blood that ran in their veins, what did Michael and Kevin McAllister really have in common? Michael knew exactly what his father was, and had been determined not to turn out like him. Or like Neely, for that matter. He might have inherited his father’s looks, but the resemblance had ended there. Michael McAllister had been his own man, determined to make his way in this world not because of the McAllister name, but in spite of it.
“What do you make of Neely and Shep?” he said.
“It gives me the creepy-crawlies just to think about it. Do you suppose they’re doing it? Or just yearning after each other, committing the sin of lust in their hearts, like Jimmy Carter?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t imagine Neely messing up that perfect hair.”
“Or taking off the pearls. I bet she wears them in the shower.”
Dryly, he said, “Now there’s a picture worth a thousand words.”
“You know,” she said, “Clara says she tried several times to tell Shep Henley that I was innocent, but he refused to listen. Couldn’t that be construed as obstruction of justice?”
“He’s a cop. As far as he was concerned, he already had his killer, tried and convicted and sent up the river. Who’s going to listen to a batty old broad like Clara? Besides, can you imagine the headache he’d have gotten if he’d believed her, and started snooping around in a case that was already settled? It was a hell of a lot easier to just leave it alone.”
She pursed her lips. “And leave me in prison,” she said.
“Welcome to the American justice system.”
“How can you sleep at night, DiSalvo, knowing you’re a part of something so corrupt?”
“I’m one of the good guys,” he said. “I put the bad guys in jail. Simple, first-grade logic.” He moved across the bench seat toward her, resting his arm on the back of the seat, near her shoulder. “By the way,” he said, his voice low and intimate and silken, “I meant to tell you earlier.” He toyed with the locket at her throat. “You’re looking pretty damn spectacular tonight, McAllister.”
It was astonishing, the way just a few words from him, spoken in that particular tone of voice, could send goosebumps racing up her arms and down her belly. In a husky voice, she said, “You think so?”
He reached out a hand to cup her cheek. His thumb, whisper-soft against her skin, moved sensually against her bottom lip, and she went limp in all those dark, fluid woman-places that only he could touch. “Nick,” she whispered.
His mouth was soft on hers, and she kissed him with fierce eagerness, hands tangled in his dark hair as his tongue slithered against hers with exquisite delight, sparking a fire that burned, dark and throbbing, inside her. His hand slid beneath her skirt and his knuckles brushed the tender flesh at the inside of her thigh. She moaned softly and bit at her bottom lip. “Stop,” she gasped. “We’re right on the street where people can see us.”
“They can’t see a thing,” he said. “Besides, the whole town knows we’re sleeping together. We might as well give ‘em something to talk about.”
“Minnie Rawlings,” she said, “probably has her infrared binoculars
…
trained on us
…
even as we speak.”
He skimmed fingertips up and down her inner thigh, causing her stomach to convulse in excitement. “You have the most spectacular legs,” he whispered against her throat, “that I’ve ever seen.”
“Oh, Christ, Nick,” she breathed, “don’t.”
Beneath the flowered skirt, his hand reached the warm spot between her thighs. Knuckles brushing against the crotch of her panties, he said, “You don’t like it?”
“You know I like it.”
“Yeah. Me, too.”
He slipped a finger inside the panties, inside the place where she was already hot and wet and ready for him, and she moaned in ecstasy. “How much time do we have,” she said hoarsely, “before Janine sends out the bloodhounds?”