“I’m afraid he’s busy right now.”
“Fine. I’ll wait.”
Without waiting for an invitation, she made herself comfortable in one of the padded oak captain’s chairs the bank supplied for its customers. Everything about the place, from the plush mauve carpeting to the rich mahogany wainscoting, shouted out that Serious Business took place here, beneath the watchful eyes of a gallery of former bank presidents going back more than a century. The South, Kathryn had quickly learned, took its history very seriously.
She waited thirty-seven minutes for her audience with the bank president, countering the curious and angry stares of passing customers with a bland and impersonal smile. John Chamberlain finally emerged from his office, glanced quickly right and left, and ushered her inside. He sat in a plush leather chair behind a massive desk of polished walnut and folded his hands over his ample girth. With false joviality, he said, “And what may I do for you on this fine day, Miz McAllister?”
“I just learned something that I find curious, Mr. Chamberlain. And I thought perhaps you could enlighten me.”
“And what might that be?”
“After Michael’s death,” she said, “while I was in prison, you foreclosed on our mortgage.”
He straightened in his chair. “That’s correct. Since you were unable to make the payments, Miz McAllister, we were forced to take back the house and sell it.”
“To my father-in-law.”
The joviality disappeared. “I’m afraid,” he said, “that I’m not followin’ you.”
“Don’t you find it odd, Mr. Chamberlain, that a couple like the McAllisters would buy the house where their only son had been brutally murdered just a few months earlier?”
“I don’t find it anything, Miz McAllister, except none of my business.” He smiled thinly. “Or yours.”
“It just seems a rather gruesome reminder of their loss. I can’t imagine why they’d do such a thing. Can you?”
“I really cannot continue this discussion any further. These are questions that should be directed to your former in-laws. Now, is there anything else I can do for you today, Miz McAllister?”
“Not a thing.”
“Good. Then I suggest you leave, quietly and promptly.”
Her hand was on the doorknob when he spoke again. “Oh, by the way
—
”
“Yes?” She turned to look at him, sitting there behind his huge desk, looking for all the world like a walrus.
“If you’re thinking of opening a bank account,” he said, “First Federal Savings is right down the street.”
On the sidewalk, in front of the bank, she came face-to-face with her mother-in-law.
Even on the hottest summer day, Neely McAllister wore silk and pearls. Today her dress was a soft coral shirtwaist, with tiny pearl buttons down the front. Thanks to the miracle of Lady Clairol, her hair was still a soft ash blonde, and it was drawn up in an elegant chignon that was the envy of all the younger members of the Ladies Aid Society.
Her eyes were a glacial blue that somehow managed to cool by several degrees the instant she saw Kathryn. Her mouth narrowed and her face drew into a hard mask that emphasized every wrinkle accumulated in her fifty-seven years.
“Good morning, Neely,” Kathryn said evenly.
“How dare you come back here,” her mother-in-law said in a voice that managed to be harsh without losing the even modulation all finely-bred young Southern ladies learned in finishing school. “After all you put us through, how dare you show your face in this town?”
“After all
I
put
you
though? You may have lost a son, but I lost a husband. I loved him, and you didn’t even stand by me. You threw me to the wolves and watched while they licked my bones clean. And you have the nerve to criticize me?”
A muscle twitching in Neely’s cheek was the only indication of her emotional state. “You’re nothing but a tramp,” she said. “I told Michael that the day he brought you home. I begged him to reconsider the marriage. I offered to pay any price you asked to have it annulled. But he laughed at me. His own mother.” She stiffened her spine and raised her head. At that angle, in the bright light of midday, the wattles beneath her chin were plainly visible. “You had him bewitched. You, a nothing little tramp who got him to do your bidding by spreadin’ your legs whenever he asked.”
Of their own accord, her fists clenched. “That’s enough,” she said.
“He never loved you,” Neely went on, as though she hadn’t spoken. “He was just highly sexed, like his father. And he had a weakness for long-legged, trashy women.” She pursed her mouth in distaste. “Also like his father.”
“What do you know about love? You’ve never loved anybody but yourself.”
“I love this town. And I know that it breaks my heart to see white trash like you dirtying up our fair streets.” Her face hardened, and so did her voice. “I want you out of my town.”
“The last time I looked,” Kathryn said dryly, “I didn’t see your name written down the center of Main Street.”
“Well, then, Kathryn, perhaps you should consider lookin’ a little more closely.” And with her shoulders back and her head raised, Neely walked away without looking back.
For a single instant, Kathryn seriously considered picking up a large rock and bashing in the back of that perfectly coifed head. Rage could drive people to do things that were light years beyond their normal ethical boundaries. She’d seen it more than once during those four years she spent in prison. But this was the first time she’d experienced it firsthand.
Her hands were shaking when she climbed into her car and slammed the door. She tore out of the parking space, shifted gears with a vengeance, and the little car shot forward, past the old men who were smoking and chawing outside Carlyle’s Barber Shop. Like trained dogs, they all looked up as she passed, watching her with keen interest, probably already laying odds on the outcome of the contest between the two McAllister women.
She was still steaming an hour later when the telephone rang. She picked it up, balanced it against her shoulder. “Hello?” she said.
Silence. Dead silence.
“Hello?” she said, louder this time.
“If you know what’s good for you,” the voice whispered, “you’ll get out of town now.”
“What? Oh, for Christ’s sake. Who is this?”
At the other end, the phone was quietly hung up. Kathryn looked at the receiver in disbelief, then slammed it back into place on the kitchen wall.
A moment later, it rang again. She gritted her teeth and picked it up. “Hello?” she said.
Again, silence.
“Look,” she said, “don’t you think you’re being a tad melodramatic?”
“Bitch,” the caller said, and hung up the phone.
When it rang a third time, she snatched it up. “What the hell do you want?” she shouted.
“Mother of mercy, McAllister,” Nick DiSalvo drawled, “remind me not to get you riled up any time soon.”
She went limp. She hadn’t realized how hard she’d been trembling. “DiSalvo,” she said weakly. “I wasn’t expecting you.”
“That’s a relief. I’m glad to hear that greeting wasn’t meant for me.”
She ran a hand through her hair. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve been getting some interesting calls.”
“Congratulations. I hear you managed to piss off quite a few people today. I’m sorry I missed your little
tète-a-tète
with your mother-in-law. I would have paid money to see it.”
“My,” she said dryly, “word does travel quickly around here.”
“Welcome to Elba.”
“Is there a reason you called, DiSalvo, other than to mock my public humiliation?”
At his end, there was a brief silence. “I called to apologize for last night,” he said. “I had too much to drink and I was acting stupid.”
It was the last thing she’d expected, and something softened inside her. “Apology accepted,” she said. “And I didn’t witness any stupid behavior. Of course, I can’t vouch for what you did before or after you came to my house.”
“Listen
…
” He paused, and her fingers tightened on the telephone receiver. “Do you have plans for dinner?”
Her stomach took a hard kick. She cleared her throat. “DiSalvo?” she said. “Are you asking me for a date?”
“I’m asking you to have dinner with me, McAllister. I have to eat dinner, you have to eat dinner. I just thought we might consider eating dinner together.”
It was stupid. He was a cop, and she was a convicted felon. To hell with the fact that the conviction had been overturned. It was still the most monumentally stupid thing she’d ever done. “Yes,” she said. “I’ll have dinner with you.”
“You like barbecue?”
“Everybody likes barbecue, DiSalvo. It’s a prerequisite for living in this place. That, and knowing all the verses to ‘Dixie’.”
“Is that a note of cynicism I hear in your voice, McAllister?”
“Why, Mr. DiSalvo,” she said in an exaggerated Southern belle voice, “whatever possible reason could I have for being cynical?”
“I’ll pick you up at six. That’ll give me time to shower and change first.”
The picture his words painted in her mind was best left untouched. Gruffly, she said, “Don’t keep me waiting, DiSalvo. It’s been a busy day, and I’ve worked up a powerful appetite.”
Chapter Four
Buzzy’s Bar-B-Q was located twenty miles east of Elba, just over the Stetson County line. Political correctness had not yet reached this section of the Bible belt, where tobacco was king, so a haze of blue smoke hung thick as kudzu over their heads, and well-oiled laughter lubricated the room. They were served humongous portions of barbecued ribs, swimming in Buzzy’s own secret sauce, with a generous helping of potato salad on the side. They washed it down with long-necked bottles of Bud. “Do you have any idea,” Kathryn said, licking a drop of barbecue sauce off her thumb, “how long it’s been since I’ve eaten in a restaurant?”
DiSalvo raised his head and looked around the noisy, crowded room. “This is a restaurant? I thought we’d just been dropped into the middle of Dante’s Inferno.”
“I just got out of prison, DiSalvo. This place is heaven.”
He smiled just a little. “You have barbecue sauce on your chin.”
She rubbed briskly with her fingertips. “Better?”
He picked up a paper napkin and dipped it into his water glass, then leaned over the table and scrubbed at her face. “Better.”
She rested her chin on her palm and studied him. “So tell me, DiSalvo. Why’d you become a cop?”
He leaned back in his seat and stretched out his long legs. “My dad was a cop. And both of my uncles. I guess it’s in the blood.”
She toyed with her beer bottle. “No burning desire to save the world?”
“More a burning desire to put food on the table. I got married when I was nineteen. That pretty much put an end to any save-the-world fantasies I might have had. I was too busy paying for the pediatrician and the new washer and dryer.”
“You have kids,” she said in surprise. Somehow, she hadn’t pictured him as a father.
“A daughter. She’s thirteen. They grow so fast, you know? One day they’re wearing Pampers, the next day they’re going out on dates.” He looked at her in bewilderment. “Where the hell does the time go?”
“Is she in New York?”
“Yeah. With her mother. Want to see a picture?”
He reached for his wallet, opened it, pulled out a photo of a slender, dark-haired girl with his melted-chocolate eyes. “She’s pretty,” Kathryn said.
Nick took the photo back and studied it. “Yeah,” he said, “she is. She looks just like her mother.”
“So what happened? How did Mrs. DiSalvo become the ex-Mrs. DiSalvo?”
He slipped the picture back into his wallet and returned it to his pocket. “She wanted a husband who was home every night for supper. I was married to my job. After a while, she found somebody who wasn’t.”
“Ouch.”
He raised his beer bottle. “Ouch,” he said.
“How in the world did you get from New York City to Elba, North Carolina?”
“You want the truth, or the gussied-up version?”
She took a sip of beer. “I’ve always been partial to truth.”
With his thumbnail, he tore at the label on his beer bottle. “I worked Vice out of Midtown Manhattan,” he said. “Lenore and I had just split up, and I was a mess. Drinking too much. Distracted. Careless. One night, my partner and I went out on a routine call. Something went wrong, and Jimmy ended up dead. The next day, I turned in my badge.”
“And?” she said softly.
“And
—
” He raised his beer bottle and looked at her through its amber light. “After six months or so, when I finally got tired of feeling sorry for myself, I answered a classified ad, and I ended up here.”
“The grapevine says you’re a good cop, Nick.”
“Yeah? Tell that to Jimmy. Tell that to his pregnant wife and his three-year-old kid. I screwed up, and my best friend ended up dead.”
“We’re all human. We all make mistakes.”
“I don’t want to talk about it anymore. It’s your turn to bare your soul. Tell me about Kathryn.”
“There’s not much to tell, really. I grew up in a Boston suburb. Blue-collar. Probably a lot like the neighborhood where you grew up. My mom died when I was eleven, so it was just Pop and me after that. He never made it past the eighth grade, but he always told me I could be anything I wanted to be.” She smiled wistfully at the memory. “He was the most incredible human being I’ve ever known.”
Quietly, DiSalvo said, “He’s gone now?”
“He died while I was in prison. They wouldn’t even let me go to his funeral.”
His face hardened. “Bastards,” he said.
She raised her shoulders. “Anyway,” she said, “I met Michael my junior year of college. I needed an art elective for my teaching degree, so I signed up for life drawing, thinking it would be easy. I couldn’t draw worth beans, but there was this guy in my class who was just so intense, and
—
God, so talented! We got to talking after class, and he invited me for coffee. He was planning to be an architect, and he was the most charming, most genuine guy I’d ever met. I brought him home to meet Pop, and they hit it off like old chums. After he left that night, I told Pop I was going to marry him. And I did, two years later, the night before graduation.”
“And he brought you home to Elba.”
“And he brought me home to Elba. Michael loved this town, and everybody in it. And they all loved him. Or so I thought.” She busied herself folding her napkin. “Obviously, I was wrong. Somebody hated him enough to want him dead.”
“And now,” he said dryly, “you’re on a one-woman suicide mission.”
“I was so much in love with him,” she said. “In love with that kind of wide-eyed intensity you feel at twenty, when you have the whole of life ahead of you, and forever’s real, and nothing can get in your way. We had it all planned out. The careers, the house, the kids. Two, maybe three. We both grew up without siblings, and we both swore we wouldn’t do that to our own kids. He’d be the major breadwinner, once his architecture practice got off the ground. I’d teach school, which meant I’d be home when the kids needed me. We were young and idealistic, and we knew we had plenty of time to make it all happen. But you see, we ran out of time. Somebody did get in the way, and I can’t just let it go. Michael was a good man. He didn’t deserve to die that way. He won’t be at peace until the person responsible for his death is punished. And I won’t be at peace until I clear my name.”
“Whoever killed him isn’t going to stop at one, Kathryn. If you keep nosing around in the wrong places, you’re going to wind up in a ditch somewhere with your throat slit. It’s not worth it.”
“And that, Chief DiSalvo, is where we disagree.”
The camaraderie between them had abruptly fizzled out. They drove the twenty miles back to Elba in a strained silence. Nick pulled the Blazer into her driveway and left the engine running. “I’ll come in with you,” he said, “to make sure the house is empty.”
“I can take care of myself. Thank you for dinner.”
“I’m not leaving,” he said gruffly, “until you’re in the house.”
She wasn’t sure why she was so angry. She slammed the door of the Blazer and stalked indignantly toward the house and up onto the porch. She reached into her purse to pull out the key, and that was when she saw the box. Roughly three feet square, it was an ordinary cardboard box, the kind anybody could pick up from the pile out back of the Dixie Market, and it had been intentionally left where she would have to move it to open the front door. With a sigh of resignation, Kathryn walked over to it and peered inside.
The snake was coiled like a garden hose, sleek and shiny, the diamondback pattern clearly visible in the moonlight. He was probably five feet long, and as thick as a man’s arm.
Her breath left her in a single, mighty rush. Adrenaline shot through her veins as she stood frozen, rooted to the spot, unable to move, unable to take her eyes off the hideous creature that watched her from less than a yard away.
Her mouth moved, but no sound came out. Her chest ached as she struggled for breath, and then oxygen filled her lungs and she began screaming, screaming hysterically, screaming DiSalvo’s name over and over again.
She heard his truck door open, heard his footsteps running toward her, and still she continued to scream. In the box, the snake raised its head, its tail, and began that distinctive rattling sound.
DiSalvo came to an abrupt halt behind her. “Holy mother of Moses,” he said. “For Christ’s sake, don’t move.”
“Nick. Oh, God, Nick, please do something.”
“I’m thinking. Christ, I left my weapon at home. Let me think. Shit. Whatever you do, don’t move
—
”
“Don’t leave me!”
“I’m not going anywhere. Look, I’m going to get a good grip on the back of your pants. You with me so far?”
She wet her lips. “Yes.”
His warm hand burrowed down inside the waistband of her jeans. In spite of the hot, steamy night, her body, her blood, had turned to ice, and the contact with his warm flesh was reassuring. “Okay,” he said quietly. “I’m going to count to three. When we get to three, I’m going to yank as hard as I can, as quick as I can. And we’re both going to run like hell. Got that?”
The snake continued to watch her. “Yes,” she said.
“One more thing.”
“Yes?”
“I don’t know if you’re a particularly religious person, but if you were ever going to be, now’s as good a time as any to start. Count with me. One. Two. Three
—
” He yanked so hard she lost her footing. The snake reared, and Nick caught her around the waist by one arm and vaulted over the porch railing.
They landed in the flower bed, a tangled, writhing mass of arms and legs and bodies. “Up!” he said, struggling to free himself from the brambles of the wild rose bush that climbed the trellis to the roof. She peeled a thorny branch away from his shirt, and then they were both on their feet and running toward the Blazer.
They climbed in and slammed the doors and sat there panting, cold with sweat and fear. His shirt was ripped from the brambles, and her hand was bleeding. While her heart thundered in her chest, he reached into the glove compartment, pulled out a clean tissue, and tucked it into the palm of her hand. “You okay?” he said, dabbing at the blood.
“I don’t think
…
I’ll know
…
for a while.”
“You’re okay. You haven’t lost your sense of humor.” He reached for the radio mic. “This is DiSalvo,” he said into it. “Radio Bucky Stimpson and tell him to drop whatever he’s doing and come over to Kathryn McAllister’s place as fast as he can get here. I don’t have my weapon with me, and somebody left a gift on Ms. McAllister’s front porch tonight.”
The scratchy voice at the other end said dubiously, “A gift?”
“That’s what I said. Tell Bucky we have ourselves a full-sized rattler here, and Kathryn and I are not leaving this vehicle again until somebody comes over and blows his damn ugly head off.”
The atmosphere was almost carnival-like. It was the biggest event Elba had seen since Alvin Deverell had gotten liquored up at Dewey’s last May and shot out all the lights on Main Street. While Kathryn hovered inside Nick’s Blazer, half the male population of the town stood on her front lawn, admiring the dead snake and testifying as to how he was the biggest rattler they’d seen since the one that bit the Crosley kid back in ‘83. Kid damn near died. Would have, too, what with the hospital being forty-five minutes away, if his Pa hadn’t remembered that Dewey Webb kept a snakebite kit on the shelf in his supply room.
Kathryn closed her eyes and tuned out their voices. When the Blazer’s door squawked open, she jumped. DiSalvo stood there in the dim glow of the dome light. “You okay?” he said gruffly.
“I’ve lost ten years off my life, but I’m okay.”
“Yeah. You and me both. Listen, maybe you shouldn’t stay alone here tonight.”
“This is my home. I won’t let them drive me from it.”
“Whoever put that snake here wasn’t fooling around, Kathryn. This isn’t like emptying out your cupboards and tipping over your plants. If that damn thing had bitten you
—
”
“It didn’t. And I’m not going anywhere.”
“Then at least call Raelynn or somebody to stay with you.”
Ignoring him, she said, “How much longer are they going to be here?”
“I’ll chase ‘em away. Why don’t you go on in the house? You look beat.”
Because she didn’t know what else to do, she went inside and put on the teakettle. She stood in the kitchen, gripping the edge of the countertop and trying to shake off the panic that still hovered just beneath the surface. It wasn’t a stranger who’d left that creature on her porch tonight. Whoever put it there had known about her irrational fear of snakes.
She squeezed her eyes shut and stood there trembling. Behind her, DiSalvo said softly, “Kathryn?”
She hadn’t even heard him come in. She bit her lip. “Are they gone?”
“They’re gone.”
“And the snake?”
“Bucky carted it off, all excited, like it was the greatest archeological find since T. Rex.” He came up behind her, rested both hands on hers and hooked his thumbs around her wrists. “You’re cold,” he said.
“Nick
…
”
Still holding her wrists, he folded his arms around her from behind and pulled her into him. He was warm, so warm, and for a moment, she allowed herself to relax against him, allowed herself to savor the wild mix of emotions that swirled up inside her. “Nick,” she said again.