Born Innocent (5 page)

She started down a ridge to her right. The way was steep and rocky and she had to climb backward, carefully feeling with her toes for stable boulders, until she made it to the river’s edge.

She paused, then, on the rocky promontory that she’d been seeking. She turned off her flashlight, and waited until her eyes adjusted to the night. As. she waited, she listened.

Now and then she could hear a car whoosh past on the highway that curled around the mountain high above the opposite bank. And there were night birds calling, and frogs croaking—animal sounds. And the river, which ran deep here, lapped very gently at the rock where she stood. But that was all. No people, no bright lights, no firecrackers. She was alone under the stars.

She quickly stripped off every stitch she was wearing, and dived cleanly from the rock, tuning out completely her mother’s chiding voice as it played in her head.

Swimming alone? Foolish, foolish girl. And naked, well, I never...

The water was cold and slick, liquid silk on her bare skin. She swam around the pool in circles, cleansing herself, clearing herself. Finally she pulled herself, shivering, back onto the rock. She dried herself with her sweatshirt.

Putting on her clothes once more, she sat on the rock and gathered her knees against her chest. Then, because it consoled as much as it grieved her, she let the memory of her one night with Joe Tally come into her mind....

The moon had been on the wane that night. It provided little more than a sliver of light. The stars had seemed so far away, scattered across the heavens above the tall, dark trees.

Claire had wanted to hurry, but she’d forced herself to drive slowly on the twisting dirt roads, to watch carefully for each of the turns that would take her to the Tally Ranch. If she missed one, she knew, it could take hours to get back on the track.

Going slowly paid off. She found the entrance to the ranch with ease, though it was nothing more than a break in a barbed-wire fence with a rutted dirt driveway running through it.

Claire turned into the driveway, which made a loop in front of the weathered house. She drove into a yard of dust and weeds. Parked among the weeds were a tractor that had seen better days and two beat-up pickup trucks.

Behind the house, where the pasture land flowed away to timbered hills, the wild grass was still green that early in the year. It appeared silver, though, by moonlight. One lone horse grazed there, a swaybacked fellow, even to Claire’s untrained eye.

It all looked so lonely. Claire knew a creeping apprehension. Under the mantle of darkness, the ranch seemed abandoned, a place where only ghosts might walk. She almost wished she hadn’t come. Still, she didn’t drive away.

She was worried about Joe. The word around town was that he was hiding out drunk here, only emerging long enough to buy more booze. She had tried to call him, but he wasn’t answering his phone. Finally, she’d admitted to herself that she wouldn’t rest until she found out for sure if he was all right.

So she’d called Verna and asked her to watch the desk. Verna had come right over, and Claire had set out to see if Joe was all right.

Claire pulled the van up in front of the house and turned the engine off. Then she opened her door, got down and peered into the shadows of the big front porch.

It was after she’d already closed the door of the van behind her that she heard the growling. She squinted harder at the shadows on the porch, trying to see who—or what—was snarling at her. Right then, as if in answer to a question she hadn’t asked aloud, two big German shepherds materialized from the shadows by the front door.

Claire stood absolutely still. Her father, who’d loved big dogs, had once told her that sometimes stillness and lack of perceptible fear could give a person an edge with even the most attack-prone of animals.

The dogs approached her, sniffing, growling a little, but looking more wary than ready to attack. She let them smell her.

Then she said, firmly, “Sit.” They both looked at her, measuring her. She snapped her fingers once, sharply, and pointed at the ground. “Sit. Now.”

Both dogs dropped their hind ends to the ground and looked up at her with expectant, trusting interest.

She tried not to let them see her long sigh of relief. “Stay,” she instructed with great gravity.

She calmly walked past them, and though she heard one of them whine hopefully, they stayed where they were. She went up to the porch, and when she got there she strode right up to the door and pounded on it decisively.

No one answered.

“
Joe?” she called, her voice sounding eerie and strained in the silence. “Joe!”

Except for more whining from one of the dogs, no answer came. She tried the doorknob. It wouldn’t turn.

About five feet to either side of the door were long double-hung windows, similar to the ones in her cottage at the motel. Claire inspected the one on the right, and saw that it was firmly latched from the inside. Curtains of some dark material were drawn across it, so she couldn’t see in.

She approached the other window, her sneakers making the old porch boards squeak. It was screened, curtained and latched, like the first. She jiggled the frame of the screen, anyway, and saw that to remove it from the outside she would have to bend the frame.

Sighing, she turned toward the yard again, where the pair of dogs waited and her shiny, new van looked out of place among the derelict equipment Joe kept there.

Everything was locked up. No one answered her calls. She supposed there wasn’t much else to do here.

But then she thought about the back entrance; maybe it would be unlocked. So she followed the porch around, jarring screens and checking for latches as she went, and
finally trying the back door to find it securely bolted against her, too.

She was stymied. Short of breaking in, what more could she do? She descended the steps at the back of the house and walked around through the weeds to her van.

The dogs whined. She said, “Okay. Come.” They wiggled over, like a pair of huge puppies, and gratefully received a few pats and strokes and gentle words.

From where she stood, she could see nothing of what went on behind the windows on either side of the front door. The shadows of the porch completely obscured them from her view. Still, she felt that Joe was watching her, that he was in there, though he wouldn’t come to the door—just as he hadn’t answered any of the number of messages she’d left on his answering machine in the past few days.

The dogs looked sleek and well fed. Someone was taking care of them. Who else could it be but Joe?

“
Sit,” she told the dogs again. They didn’t even hesitate this time, but dropped to their haunches in the dirt at her feet.

She turned and opened the driver’s door of her van, then felt under the seat for the heavy-duty flashlight. When she had it in her hand, she went to the back of the van, where she kept a little toolbox and a pair of work gloves. She pulled on the gloves, told the dogs once more to stay, and approached the steps to the porch again.

She melted into the shadows by the door, walked right up to the window on the left, and pried the screen out enough to bend it and then wrench it free of the sash. She lifted the flashlight—and shattered the glass of the bottom pane, grimacing a little at the way the splintering glass cut through the ghostly silence, which seemed to lie like a stifling blanket over the neglected house.

She took a few moments to carefully break off the shards that remained in the frame, so she wouldn’t injure herself climbing in. Then, when no sharp fragments were left to cut her, she laid her gloves on the porch, lifted her leg over the sill and went in, shoving the dusty, dark curtain out of her way.

“
Come on in, Claire. Don’t let my dogs—or a locked door—stop you.”

At the sound of Joe’s taunting voice, Claire froze, straddling the window. She peered through the darkness at the room she’d half entered. But she couldn’t see a thing. It was pitch black, except for what looked like the red glow of a lighted cigarette several feet away.

Joe helped her then, by flicking on a floor lamp. She blinked at the sudden brightness. But her eyes quickly adjusted, and she found herself staring at him.

He was stretched out on a frayed couch not ten feet away from her, wearing a faded flannel shirt and a pair of old black jeans with busted-out knees. The shirt was unbuttoned, and the lamplight gleamed on the washboard-hardness of his bare belly. She couldn’t see his eyes; he’d shielded them from the glare of the lamp with the back of the hand that held the cigarette. But she didn’t need to see them. She knew he was studying her as she hovered, half in, half out, of his living room. She watched, not sure what to do next, as the smoke from his cigarette trailed lazily up toward the watermarked ceiling.

Feeling ridiculous, but too far down this particular road to turn back, she swung her other leg over the sill and faced him. “What’s going on?” She dared to take a step toward him. “I called and called. Why didn’t you answer the phone, or the door?”

He didn’t bother to sit up, though he did grant her a slight shrug. “Well, gee, Claire. I guess you could say I just wasn’t in the mood for company.”

She ignored his sarcasm. “Why not?”

“
None of your business.” He gestured with a quick flick of his head toward the broken window behind her. “Now get lost. You can just... slip out the way you came.”

She stood firm. “You’ve been alone long enough.”

He chuckled, then, a sound so cold she shivered in response to it. “What are you up to, Claire? I hope you aren’t here to tell me again how you can’t live without me. I thought we’d settled all that the last time you begged me to take advantage of you.”

She shook her head and kept her face calm. But down inside her she knew hurt. It was cruel of him to bring up her old foolishness after all this time. Six years ago, after the second time she’d humiliated herself and begged him to love her, she’d decided enough was enough. She’d come to grips with the fact that Joe Tally was never going to give her love
a chance.

She’d stayed away from him for a couple of years. Then, slowly, they’d started coming into contact with each other again, sharing an occasional game of pool over at O’Donovan’s, stopping to exchange greetings and personal news when they passed on the street. They’d developed a new kind of relationship; she thought they had become friends. And that was why she was here: to help a friend.

She decided it was necessary to make her true motive clear. “No, Joe. You don’t have to worry.” She forced a rueful chuckle of her own. “I’m over you. You’re safe from me, I promise you.”

He gave her a half grin, and she dared to hope he was relaxing his guard a little. “Glad to hear it,” he muttered, and dragged on the cigarette.

“
But I thought,” she hurried on, “that over the last few years, we had become friends.”

He exhaled, and flicked his ash on the scuffed hardwood floor. “You did, huh?”

“
Yes. I did. I still do.” She spoke more strongly, “I
am
your friend, and I’ll always be your friend—no matter how hard you push me away.”

He was quiet for a moment, watching her. And then he lazily sat up and stubbed out the cigarette in an ashtray on the coffee table in front of him. She stared at him, thinking that he looked grim, tired and rumpled, but in spite of the open beer can beside the ashtray, not drunk.

He swung his long legs to the floor and looked down at his bare feet for a moment. Then he looked at her again. He sighed. “I’m fine, okay? You’ve seen for yourself. Now you can go.”

She bit her lip, reluctant after going so far with this, to leave without some understanding of why he’d chosen to withdraw from the world for a week. She asked, hesitantly, “Is it... about Mexico?”

He looked away. “Get lost. Go now.”

She knew a little surge of triumph. At last she was getting somewhere. “It
is
Mexico, isn’t it?” The last time she’d talked to him, a couple of weeks before, he’d mentioned that he was heading down to Mexico the next day to track some kid, barely eighteen, who’d skipped bail. “Oh, Joe,” she coaxed. “What happened there? Is it... that boy you told me about?”

“
Get out. I’m warning you.”

“
Oh, Joe, please...”

He looked at her again. And his eyes had changed. Now they were the eyes of a wolf as it measures its prey. “What is it with you, Claire? What’s it always been with you?”

Claire stared at him, wondering what had gone wrong. She’d only wanted to help, but her questions about Mexico had triggered something ugly in Joe. Now the gloomy room seemed to vibrate with menace. She held her ground and insisted, “I’m your
friend.
I only want to help.”

He shook his head, a grin worthy of the wolf he resembled curling the corner of his mouth. “You just won’t get the message about me, will you?”

“
Joe, I...”

He stood up.

“
I...” Her throat closed up, and her mouth went dry as she watched him step around the coffee table and close the distance between them.