Cry Wolf (15 page)

“Savannah?” He mumbled her name to himself, straining his eyes against the darkness that cloaked her features. Of course it was. She would come to him now in contrition, as she always did after one of her little blowups. And he would take her back and comfort her. They had gone through this cycle before. Savannah was a creature of habit. He frowned at the thought that her habits included self-inflicted torment and degradation.

She fell into his arms the second he opened the doors, sobbing like a child. Cooper folded his arms around her and rocked her and murmured to her, his lips brushing softly against her wild mane.

“I'm sorry!” she cried, grabbing handfuls of his shirt in her fists. “I'm so, so sorry!”

“Hush,” he whispered, his voice low and smooth and soothing. “Don't cry so, darlin', you're breaking my heart.”

“You break my heart,” Savannah said, aching so, she felt completely raw inside. “All the time.”

“No,” he murmured. “I love you.”

“Love me.” She drew a shuddering breath and whispered the words again and again as scalding tears squeezed through the barrier of her tightly closed eyelids. “Love me. Love me.”

Wasn't that all she had ever wanted? To be loved. To be cherished. And yet she gave herself away time and again to men who would never love her. Confusion boiled and swelled inside her, and she cried it out against Cooper's solid chest, wrapping herself in his warmth, anchoring herself against his strength. She felt so lost. She wanted to be strong, but she wasn't. She wanted to be good, but she couldn't. The only thing she was good at was sex, and that wasn't enough to make Coop forsake his vows.

“Hush, hush,” he whispered, rocking her.

She smelled of sex and cheap cologne. She'd been with another man. He was neither surprised nor dismayed for his own sake. He didn't expect fidelity from Savannah. She was, by her own definition, a harlot. It saddened him, though, in a deeply fundamental way. Savannah was in many ways the embodiment of the South, he thought. Beautiful, wanton, stubborn, victimized . . .

“. . . Cooper?”

Savannah leaned back and looked up into his face, her fists still wound into the fabric of his shirt. He blinked at her, his thick blond lashes sweeping down behind his spectacles, clearing the glaze from his too-blue eyes.

“Damn you,” she snarled, pushing herself away. “You're not even listening to me! You're off with
her
in your mind, aren't you? Off with Lady Astor. Pure, chaste Lady Astor.”

“I wasn't,” he said calmly. He went to the desk, dismissing her, and went about the business of putting his notebook and pen away, tamping out the last of a good cigar that had gone to waste.

“You'd rather she were here,” Savannah said bitterly. “She wasn't off fucking Ronnie Peltier eight ways from Sunday tonight. No, she's sitting over at St. Joseph's, pretty as an orchid, dumb as a post—”

“Stop it!” Cooper's voice tore like thunder through the air. He wheeled and grabbed her by the arms and gave her a rough shake. He caught himself before he could shake her again and reined his temper in with an effort that made him tremble.

“Damn you, Savannah, why do you do this?” he demanded, his voice harsh, his fingers biting into the flesh of her arms. “You beg for my love, then you make me want to hate you. Why can't you just take what I can give you and be happy with that?”

“Happy?” she whispered bleakly, looking up at him, her heart in her eyes. “I don't know what that is.”

Cooper closed his eyes against a hot wave of emotion and pulled her against him, holding her tight.

“Don't hate me, Coop,” she said softly, sliding her arms around his waist. “I do enough of that for both of us.”

“Shhh . . . Hush . . .” He brushed her hair back from her cheek and pressed a kiss to her temple, then to her mouth. “I love you,” he said, the words barely more than a breath as his lips brushed against hers. “I love you.”

“Show me.”

The hall clock ticked away the seconds of the night. Savannah listened to it in the stillness as she lay curled against Cooper's side. He was asleep, breathing deeply, one arm still holding her close. He looked older sleeping. With his vitality turned off, his athletic energy refueling, there was nothing left but the face that had weathered fifty-eight years of life.

For just a moment she imagined he was her father lying there, alive, holding her next to him. Jeff Chandler would have been fifty-eight if he had lived. And for a moment she allowed herself to wonder what her life would have been like. How different she might have been. She might have been the famous one of the Chandler sisters. She might have been an actress or a fashion designer. And Laurel . . . Laurel might not have needed to fight so hard for justice.

Poor Baby. Guilt nipped her as she thought of the way she'd left Laurel at Frenchie's. She really should have been home now, seeing to it that Laurel was getting some rest. Seeing to her sister's recuperation was her job now. But she had needed this time with Coop. Time without fighting, without words, with nothing but love between them.

There was never anything less than gentleness in his lovemaking. He was always so careful with her. No hurry. No frantic grappling. No rough urgency. Tenderness. Reverence. As if every time was her first time.

No, she thought, her mouth twisting into a parody of a smile. Her first time had been nothing like that.

“You want me, Savannah. I've seen the way you look at me.”

“I don't know what you mean—”

“Liar. You're a little tease, that's what you are.”

“I'm not—”

“Well, I'm going to give you what you're asking for, little girl.”

“No! I don't want you to touch me. I don't like that.”

“Yes, you do. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to yourself. This is what you were made for, Savannah. . . .”

And she had closed her eyes against the first burning pain and damned Ross Leighton to eternal hell.

Lady-killer . . . Killer . . . “The only place I kill people is on paper.” . . . Liar . . . You're a liar, Jack. . . .

He paced the halls of L'Amour, oblivious of the wallpaper that was peeling off the walls, oblivious of the dust, the dank odor of mildew and neglect, oblivious of everything but his own inner torment. It snarled and snaked inside him like a caged beast, and there was nothing he could do about it but stalk the dark halls of the house. He couldn't set the beast loose because it terrified him to think what he might do—go mad, kill himself.

Kill himself. The idea had crossed his mind more than once. But he dismissed it. He didn't deserve the freedom death would offer. It was his punishment to live, knowing he was worthless, knowing he had killed the one person who had seen good in him.

Evie. Her face floated before his mind's eye, soft, pretty, her dark eyes wide and trusting. Trust—that cut at him like a razor. She had trusted him. She was as fragile as fine blown glass, and she had trusted him not to break her. In the end he had destroyed her, shattered her. Killed her.

A wild, indistinguishable cry tore up from the depths of him, and he turned and slammed his fist against the wall, the sounds of agony and impact echoing through the empty house. Empty, like his heart, like his soul, like the bottle of Wild Turkey dangling from the fingers of his left hand. The beast lunged at its barriers, and he whirled and flung the bottle and listened to it smash against a door down the hall.

“Worthless, useless, rotten . . .”

The image of Blackie Boudreaux rose up from one of the dark corners of his mind to taunt, and he stumbled from the hall, through a dark room, and out onto the upper gallery to escape it.

“Bon à rien, tu, bon à rien . . .”

The memory came after him like a demon, painfully sharp and so bright, he squeezed his eyes closed against it. He pressed his back against the brick wall, braced himself, held himself rigid until every muscle quivered with the effort, but nothing stopped the memory from coming.

His mother stood doubled over by the kitchen sink, blood running from her nose and lip. Tears swam in her eyes and streamed down her cheeks, but she didn't cry aloud. She knew better. Blackie didn't want to hear caterwauling; it made him meaner.
Le bon Dieu
knew he was mean enough in the best of times.

Jack clutched at her skirt, frightened, angry, ten years old. Too small to do anything. Worthless, useless, good for nothing. Good for hating. He figured he was an expert at that. He hated his father with every cell of his body, and that hate launched him away from his mother's trembling legs and into Blackie's path as he advanced, arm drawn back for another blow.

A high-pitched scream pierced the air as Marie came running in. Jack didn't glance at his little sister, but yelled for her to get out as he flung himself at their father. He wished he were bigger, stronger, big enough to hit Blackie as hard as Blackie hit Maman, but he wasn't. He was just a puny runt kid, just like Papa always told him.

That didn't mean he wouldn't try.

He balled his fists, meaning to pound his old man as best he could, but Blackie had other ideas. He swung the arm he had pulled back to strike his wife with, instead backhanding Jack across the face, knocking him aside like a doll.

Jack hit the floor, his head spinning and throbbing, tears clouding his vision, hate burning through him like acid.

Then suddenly he wasn't ten anymore. He was a teenager, and he got to his feet and grabbed the iron skillet off the stove and swung it with both hands as hard as he could. . . .

He jerked as his mind slammed the door on the memory.

“The only place I kill people is on paper, sugar. . . .”

From where he stood in the deep shadows of the gallery he could see Belle Rivière. He could see across the darkened courtyard to the back door, where the outside light was still burning. All the windows were dark. Sane people were in bed at this hour. Laurel was in bed.

“And I sit in the still of the night and howl at the moon,” he mumbled, sliding down to sit on the weathered floor of the gallery. Huey materialized from the shadows and sat down beside him, a grave look on his face, pendulous lips hanging down.

“You don' know enough to stay away from the like of me, do you, stupid hound?”

Laurel knew enough. She was wary of him.

“And well you should be,
mon ange
,” he murmured, staring across at the black windows of Belle Rivière.

She had let him kiss her, had let him get close, but in the end she had shied away. Just as well for her sake. He was a user and a cad.
Lady-killer . . . killer
.

The word simmered in his brain as he pushed himself to his feet and went inside to work.

Chapter
Eight

Savannah took the demise of her Corvette with remarkable good grace. It was news of who had been driving she took exception to.

“Jack?” She arched a brow, stiffening slowly but visibly, her back straightening. She sat on Laurel's bed, wearing her champagne silk robe open over a black lace teddy, looking like an ad for Victoria's Secret with her hair mussed and her lips kiss-swollen. “What the hell were you doing out on the bayou road with Jack Boudreaux?”

“A question I asked myself as we hurtled along like some kind of rocket test car on the salt flats,” Laurel grumbled as she studied herself with a critical eye in the cheval glass.

The skirt she wore was soft and flowing with a pattern of mauve cabbage roses and deep green leaves on an ivory background. The waist was riding at the top of her hips, and the hem hung nearly to her ankles. Weight loss was hell on the wardrobe. It would have to do. She hadn't brought many good outfits with her. At any rate, the petal pink cotton summer sweater was baggy enough to hide the sagging waist. She heaved a sigh of resignation and looked at her sister via the glass.

“I can't drive a stick. He offered—no, he
commandeered
,” she corrected, irritated all over again with his highhandedness. If he hadn't been so pushy, she never would have ended up kissing him, never would have ended up staring at the ceiling half the night.

Savannah frowned, hit unaware by a jolt of jealousy. Frenchie's was her territory, her little kingdom of men. Jack Boudreaux was a member of her court. She didn't like the idea of his sniffing around her baby sister, especially when he had yet to come sniffing around
her
. And she didn't like the idea of sharing Laurel, either. Laurel had come home to her big sister for love and comfort, not to Jack Boudreaux.

“He's trouble,” she said, rising to come and stand behind Laurel. “Stay away from him.”

Laurel shot a curious look over her shoulder as Savannah fussed with the lace collar of her sweater. “Yesterday you seemed charmed enough by him.”

“It's one thing for me to be charmed by him. I don't want him charming you, Baby. The man's a cad.”

Savannah the great protector. Always watching out for her while no one watched out for Savannah. A cad was good enough for Savannah, or a pool shark ten years her junior, or a married Pulitzer Prize–winner old enough to be her father. Laurel chewed back the urge to say something she knew she would regret. She loved her sister, wanted something better for her than the life Savannah had chosen for herself, but now was not the time to say so. She had enough on her mind thinking of the dinner she had no appetite for.

“You said he was a writer. What does he write?”

“Oooh,” Savannah cooed, a wicked smile curling the corners of her mouth and sparkling in her eyes. “Deliciously gruesome horror novels. The kind of stuff that makes you wonder how the man sleeps nights. Don't you ever go to the bookstores, Baby? Jack's practically always on the best-seller lists.”

Laurel couldn't remember the last time she'd read anything that wasn't written in legalese. The Case had consumed all her time, pushing all else out of her life—her hobbies, her friends, her husband, her perspective . . . at any rate, she wasn't given to reading the kinds of books that kept people up wide-eyed with fear of everything that went bump in the night. She didn't need to pay money to be horrified and get depressed. She dealt with enough real-life horrors. Depression was something she could get for free.

She tried to reconcile her image of Jack, the piano-playing, car-stealing, kiss-stealing rogue, with her mental image of what a horror novelist would be like, and couldn't. But there was another Jack, the man she had caught glimpses of at odd moments. A harder, darker man with an inner intensity that unnerved her. Just the memory of that man brought out a strange skittishness in her, and so she dismissed all thoughts of him and concentrated instead on the matter at hand.

She looked at herself in the mirror again, deciding she looked like a little girl playing dress-up in her mother's clothes. Not that Vivian had ever allowed them to do such a thing. Savannah rummaged through a drawer in the walnut commode and came back with two safety pins. She made a pair of pleats in the front waist of the skirt and secured them, hiding the pins with the hem of the sweater.

“Instant fit. Old fashion-model's trick,” she said absently, studying Laurel with sharp scrutiny.

“Why didn't you stick with it?” Laurel asked.

“You'll wear my new gold earrings,” she muttered, then snapped her head up. “What? Modeling?”

“You had a good thing going with that agency in New Orleans.”

Savannah sniffed, lifting one shoulder in a casual shrug while she picked up a makeup brush and a pat of blusher and expertly dusted soft mauve along Laurel's cheekbones. “Andre loved me for my blow jobs, not my portfolio. I wasn't good enough—at modeling, that is. I happen to give the world's greatest blow job.”

Laurel didn't comment, but Savannah caught the tightening of her jaw, the thinning of her mouth. Disapproval. It stung, and she resented it. “Do what you do best, Baby,” she said, a fine razor edge to her voice. “Your thing is justice. My talents lie elsewhere.

“Now, let's take a look at you,” she said briskly, setting the makeup aside. “I can't imagine why you're going to this. I would have told Vivian to go to hell.”

“You have,” Laurel said flatly. “On numerous occasions.”

“So it's your turn. She jerks you around like a dog on a leash—”

“Sister, please.” She closed her eyes briefly. Lord, if she wasn't up to this fight, what in hell would she do at Beauvoir? A tremor of nerves rattled through her. Dinner with Vivian and company was like dancing through a minefield. God, she thought derisively, how had she ever survived in the courtroom when she was such a coward?

“I could have said no,” she said wearily, “but I don't need the trouble. One meal, and I'm off the hook. I might as well get it over with.”

Savannah made a noncommittal sound. “Well, please borrow my new gold earrings, and for chrissakes, don't wear those awful Buddy Holly glasses. They make you look like that little chicken in the Foghorn Leghorn cartoons.”

Laurel arched a brow. “You don't want me to go, but you want me to look good?”

Her pale eyes turned hard and cold, and a bitter smile cut across her lush mouth. “I want Vivian to look at you and feel like the dried up old hag she is.”

Laurel frowned as Savannah went to fetch the earrings from her room. They had always been adversaries—Savannah and their mother. Vivian was too selfish, too self-absorbed to have a daughter as beautiful, as attractive to men as Savannah was. Their rivalry was yet another unhealthy facet in an unhealthy relationship. That rivalry was one reason Laurel had always down-played her own looks. Always the little diplomat, she hadn't wanted to rock an already listing boat by attracting attention to herself. Her other reason wasn't so noble, she admitted, scowling at herself in the mirror.

If I'm not as pretty as Savannah, then Ross will leave me alone. He picked Savannah, not me. Lucky me.

There wasn't a word for the kind of guilt those memories brought, Laurel thought as Savannah returned. Her robe had slipped off one shoulder as she fiddled with the earrings, revealing a hickey the size of a silver dollar marring her porcelain skin. Laurel's stomach knotted, and she wondered how she was ever going to choke down pot roast.

Sunday dinner at Beauvoir was a tradition as old as the South. The Chandlers had always attended Sunday services—as much out of a sense of duty and obligation to the community as out of reverence for the commandments—then a chosen few would be invited to dine at Beauvoir and pass the day away in genteel pursuits. There were no Chandlers left at Beauvoir, but the tradition endured, a part of Vivian's twisted sense of social responsibility.

If only she had possessed a fraction of that sense of responsibility for her own family, Laurel thought as she stood on the veranda and rang the bell. It had begun to rain again, and she listened to it as she waited, hoping in vain that the soft sound would soothe her ragged nerves. She thumbed a Maalox tablet free of the roll in her skirt pocket and popped it in her mouth.

The downtrodden Olive answered the door, as gray and gloomy as the afternoon, looking at Laurel with dull eyes, as though she had never seen her before. Laurel tried to give her a sympathetic smile as she stepped past the woman and headed toward the main parlor, visions of old zombie movies flickering in the back of her mind.

This would be the perfect setting for a horror movie or a horror novel. The old plantation on the edge of the swamp, a place of secrets, old hatreds, twisted minds. A place where tradition was warped into something grotesque, and family love curdled like spoiled cream. She tried to imagine Jack writing it, but could picture him only in a Hawaiian shirt with his baseball cap on backward and that cat-that-got-the-canary grin on his face. The image brought a ghost of a smile to her lips as she pictured him here, in the main parlor of Beauvoir, observing the assembled guests.

That he wouldn't exactly fit in was the understatement of the year. Ross stood near the sideboard looking freshly pressed and perfectly groomed in a silver-gray suit. He was the model of the well-bred, distinguished Southern gentleman, right down to his neatly manicured fingernails. The easy, patronizing smile. The aura of authority.

Laurel dragged her gaze away from him, sure the hate she felt for him was strong enough, magnetic enough to draw the attention of everyone in the room. She focused instead, briefly, on the other guests, quickly sizing them up in a way that was automatic to her. As a prosecuting attorney she'd had to draw swift and accurate impressions of victims, perpetrators, prospective witnesses, defense attorneys. She did so now for many of the same reasons—to give herself an edge, to formulate a strategy.

The man Ross was speaking with wore a clergyman's collar. He was small and thin and balding, and nodded so often in agreement with Ross's pontificating that he looked as if he had some kind of nervous condition. She labeled him as weak and obsequious and moved on.

A middle-aged couple stood behind the settee where Jack had corralled her the night before. A pair of plump, pleasant faces—the man's slightly sunburned, the woman's pale and perfectly made up. The woman wore a pale pink suit with a flared jacket that looked too crisp not to be brand-new, and her black hair had that wash-and-set roundness achieved by an hour of teasing and back-combing in a chair at Yvette's House of Style. Her gaze strayed continually, covetously to the obvious signs of wealth in the room. They would be neighbors, Laurel guessed. Planters, but not on a par with the massive Chandler-Leighton holdings. People who would be suitably humbled and impressed with an invitation to Beauvoir.

She moved on to Vivian, enthroned in her wing chair, looking cool and sophisticated in a royal blue linen dress. The other wing chair was occupied by a tall, dark-haired man who sat slightly turned, so that Laurel couldn't see his face. Before she could shift positions to get a quick look at him, Vivian caught sight of her and rose from her chair, the corners of her mouth curling upward in her version of a motherly smile.

“Laurel, darlin'.”

She came forward, hands extended. Dutifully, Laurel took hold of her mother's fingers and suffered through the ritual peck on the cheek as they became the focal point in the room.

“Mama.”

“We missed you at services this morning.”

“I'm sorry. I wasn't feeling up to it.”

“Yes, well . . .” Vivian kept the thin smile in place. Only Laurel caught the censure in her gaze. “We know you need your rest, dear. Come meet everyone. Ross, look, Laurel is here.”

Ross came forward, his smile like a banner across his face. “Laurel, darlin', aren't you looking pretty today!”

He put a hand on her shoulder, and she moved deftly away, not willing to suffer his touch for anyone's sake. “Ross,” she murmured, tipping her head to avoid making eye contact with him.

The clergyman was introduced as Reverend Stipple. His handshake was as soft as a grandmother's. The couple, Don and Glory Trahern, had recently taken over the plantation of Glory's uncle, Wilson Kincaid, whom Laurel remembered vaguely as a friend of her father's. Don Trahern seemed a nice mild-mannered sort. Glory was obviously courting Vivian's favor, smiling too hard and gushing too many pleasantries. Laurel murmured the requisite greeting, then found her gaze straying to the last of the group to be introduced.

The little circle of guests opened to make way for him, everyone looking up at him as if he were the crown prince of some foreign place come to grace poor little Bayou Breaux with his presence.

“. . . and our guest of honor today,” Vivian said. “Stephen Danjermond, our district attorney. Stephen, my daughter Laurel.”

A setup. Laurel felt as though she'd been blindsided. She had expected Vivian's usual assemblage of minor local royalty. She hadn't expected her mother to play this game. She and Danjermond were the only people in the room younger than forty-five. The only two people conspicuously unattached. She felt like a fool, and she felt like leaving. But she gritted her teeth and held her hand out, tilting what she hoped was a blandly pleasant look up at the district attorney.

“It's a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Danjermond.”

“The pleasure is mine,” he said smoothly.

His gaze caught hers like a tractor beam and held it, steady, unblinking, calm. Flat calm, like the sea on a windless day. His eyes were a clear, odd shade of green. The color of peridot, fringed by thick, short lashes and set deep beneath a strong, straight brow. He was strikingly handsome, his face a long rectangle with a strong jaw and a slim, straight nose. His mouth was wide and mobile, curving up on the ends in a sensual, almost feline way.

He would be a formidable opponent in the courtroom. Laurel knew it instinctively, could feel the power of his personality in his gaze even while she could read nothing of his thoughts. She started to draw her hand back, but he held on to her—lightly but firmly, closing both his long, elegant hands over her much smaller one.