Death Qualified (7 page)

    "I feel sick. Too much going on today. I have to do something. I'll call you, Jessie. Tomorrow. I'll call you."

    She knew she sounded insane, but nothing she could think of saying was right; she put down her glass and started to walk fast.

    "Nell, I'll drive you home," Clive said, at her side, his hand on her arm.

    "No!" She shrugged away from him.

    "No, I want to walk, something I have to think about. I'm okay, not really sick. Headache. That's all. I have a headache."

    "Let me," Doc said quietly, coming up to her.

    "I'll go part way with you, Nell."

    Silently she nodded, and they walked toward the woods together. Out of range of the others still on the deck, she said in a low voice, "Lucas must have sent those men. He tried that before. And his father said he's on his way here.

    I think he's already here, watching. Don't come tonight.

    Don't call. He's somewhere near."

    "For God's sake! Has he threatened you? Get an in junction, keep him away!"

    She shook her head.

    "It's all right, Doc. Just stay away until he's gone. Don't give him any ammunition." She tried to smile.

    "He'd know if he saw us together. He'd know. And it would be a weapon."

    Doc stopped walking, his hand braked her in mid-stride.

    "Are you going to let him in your bed again?"

    She touched his cheek gently.

    "No. Go on back. Just tell them I'm upset, too much happened today. Over wrought. Isn't that the word? Good Victorian genteel women got overwrought all the time, didn't they?"

    He started to reach for her; she backed away, shaking her head. After a moment, he turned and stalked back toward his house. She watched briefly, then resumed her walk home.

    Lucas, she thought again. Lucas. Until that second on the deck it had not seemed quite real, not true that he was on his way here after all those years, but now she felt certain that he was close, and she did not know yet how she would deal with him this time. She began to hurry. If she had believed it before, she never would have left Travis alone. Not even for a minute.

    SIX

    nell put the truck in the garage and locked the door.

    She locked the door to the shed where the tractor and mower were stored, and then went inside her house to hurry through the rooms to check windows, door locks, outside lights. Futile, she knew; the door locks were a joke. Besides, he wouldn't come here, expect to find her in the little house; they had lived together in the main house. She frowned. He might walk in on Tawna; she would have to warn her and James to keep their doors locked.

    That was how it had been last time. She had come downstairs from putting Travis to bed; Grampa had been dozing in front of the television. She had entered the kitchen to see Lucas outlined against the evening sky.

    She caught her breath at the sharpness of the memory, the sexual awakening the memory jolted into being. She shook her head. Never again. He had stayed three weeks, and on September tenth, he had gone. Carol had been born the following June, six years ago this month. She shook her head again, harder. She would kill him first, she thought grimly.

    The phone rang, startling her. For an instant she had that peculiar twinge in her stomach, the way she always did if the phone rang when the children were out some 5 where, always for just that one instant certain something terrible had happened to one of them. She picked up the receiver. It was John Kendricks, her father-in-law.

    "Is he there yet?" he asked with an uncharacteristic brusqueness.

    "No. I haven't heard a thing from him."

    "Nell, honey, me and Amy, we can't get it out of our heads that he's in bad trouble. And we're thinking it would be a good idea if the kids aren't there when he shows up.

    What if the police are after him, I mean?"

    "Police? Why would they be?"

    "That's just it, honey. We don't know. But there's bad trouble. We know that."

    She shook her head and had to moisten her lips in order to speak.

    "Maybe he isn't even coming here."

    "Oh, he will. He will. And, honey, me and Amy, we'd like to take the kids over to visit with Janet and Clan for a few days, a week."

    Janet was his daughter, Clan her husband. He was a rancher in the Blue Mountains area.

    "You're really worried, aren't you?" Nell asked in a low tone.

    There was a pause, then he said gruffly, "Guess we're all worried. Something's wrong. He's my son, but those kids are my grandkids. Whatever he's done, well, he's a grown man, but they haven't done anything to bring them trouble. Anyway, that's what me and Amy's been talking about all evening, all day. And I wanted to call."

    They talked a few more minutes, and she said she would call back later if it didn't get too late. Anytime, he said firmly. And he could pick them up by ten in the morning, if she could have things ready by then.

    What kind of trouble did he expect, she asked silently when she hung up. Police bursting in with drawn guns?

    Lucas raving, crazy, on drugs? Did they think she and Lucas would fight, frighten the children? She started to prowl the house again, seeing nothing. They knew that if he showed up again, she intended to throw him out. She had told them. About time, Amy, his mother, had said through tight lips. John, his father, had embraced her and kissed her cheek.

    When John called on Tuesday, she had gone numb;

    brain, body, everything about her had gone numb. By Tuesday night she had managed to pretend that Lucas would not show up here. There had been time enough if he had intended to come here. He could have made it before dinnertime. By Wednesday she had convinced herself that he had gone back to wherever he had been for the past six and a half years. But during the night Wednesday, she had realized that her body yearned for his body, that she wanted him to show up the way he had done before, just be there, as if he had never been gone. She had jumped out of bed, furious with the betrayal of her body, and she had come to realize that she was afraid of him. Not for any physical threat he posed; he didn't pose any, but because her body knew nothing of time and abandonment and dishonor. Her body wanted his body. And she hated him for that more than for leaving her alone all those years, more than for impregnating her and running, more than for his denial of fatherhood, of responsibility, of simple decency.

    She had needed him so many times, had cried in that need, but no more. Never again. The last time there had been no warning, no way to control that sexual surge. A cloud of pheromones, she thought; they had both been overwhelmed by pheromones, exactly the same way they had been when they met as students. Control was a word without meaning then, when they were so young. And again when he returned.

    But no longer. Never again. The passion was there, and also lust, but passion could be channeled into hatred and make that hatred flare more than love or lust could hope to equal.

    This time she had been warned. This time the passion he saw in her would scald him.

    By the time Travis arrived home with James, her decision had been made to let them go with their grandparents.

    John Kendricks was as lithe and loose-looking as Lucas, as Travis, with the same half grin, the same set of gestures that somehow looked as if they started and were deliberately stopped again before completion. A half shrug, an imcomplete movement with the hand. He was as brown as his toasted wheat, and deeply wrinkled with white lines like valleys in the brown ridges of his face. He was a wheat farmer, and Nell knew that he wouldn't really go away and leave everything for a week unless he was convinced that it was desperately urgent. He embraced her with self-conscious awkwardness, but he was almost childlike with the children.

    "How did he look?" Nell asked in a low voice as the children ran back and forth stashing their things in John's station wagon.

    "What did he say?"

    "Looked fine, healthy. Said damn little. He was pretty tired. Said if anyone came asking for him to say he hasn't been around in years. I said who would come, and he said anyone. You know how he can get."

    She nodded.

    "But-" "Car comes to turn around in the drive, you know how they do. And he was' up like a shot, ducking out of sight, watching from the side of the window drape. Like a man on the run, honey."

    "Mom, can I take the camera?" Travis yelled from the back of the station wagon.

    "Certainly not."

    John squeezed her arm slightly and said, "If there's room for me in that wagon, guess we'd best be on the way.

    Honey, take care of yourself."

    Carol ran back inside to look for her Cabbage Patch doll, and Travis began to look for some comic books for the trip, and finally John Kendricks got into the wagon and leaned on the horn. Both children dashed back out.

    Nell saw to it that their seat belts were secure; there were more kisses and promises to call, to write, to be good.. ..

    Then she stood in the driveway and watched the station wagon vanish around the first curve.

    When silence returned she walked to the main house to warn Tawna that Lucas might show up.

    The year Carol turned one, Nell's grandfather had died.

    Nell had tried to call Lucas; she sent a registered letter;

    she sent a telegram. There had been no response. John and Amy Kendricks had worried about her being alone in such an isolated place. She inherited the land, but there was little real money, spending money, and she was afraid to touch the capital of her inheritance. And she couldn't start selling the walnut trees, not yet. Finally she had decided to rent out one of the houses, and with the same decision, she realized that she wanted to live in the original house with her two children. Besides, the big house' could be rented for three times as much as the little one, and she needed the money.

    Tawna and James had applied, along with dozens of other people. They had been having trouble finding suit able housing, Tawna had said with a clipped Boston ac cent. She had been hired at the university, and James could practice his veterinary medicine just about anywhere, but they also had teenage children. Their daughter played the flute. And sometimes James brought his work home a sick animal that he nursed around the clock. She had been very proper, almost distant, as if relating someone else's problems, not her own.

    "He treats big animals," she had said, finishing.

    "Does he do elephants?" Nell asked.

    "No," Tawna had said gravely, and just as gravely added, "But he'd swap all the gold in all his molars for the chance." She smiled then, an expansive, illuminating smile that grew and grew, and her teeth certainly had no gold to swap. They both laughed, and Nell said the house was theirs.

    Now Nell knocked on the door, and Tawna called, "Come on in. Be right down."

    Nell entered the kitchen. The table was covered with ceramic jewelry in brilliant colors. Tawna taught French and did ceramics as a hobby. She might have been able to make a decent living making jewelry, but the odds were against her, she said. The jewelry on the table was dazzling.

    "Wow!" Nell said, moving closer, touching nothing.

    "Hey, all right, no? Think Celsy would like these?"

    Tawna entered the kitchen. She wore tan slacks and an oversized scarlet sweatshirt, and she had on a pair of green and gold fish earrings, three inches long, with scales that flashed when she moved. She was tall and strongly built with wide shoulders, big bones. She kept her hair drawn back in a severe chignon, accentuating her bony face even more. The earrings looked wonderful on her. They would look wonderful on her daughter, Celsy, who was due home on Sunday from her first year at Juilliard.

    Tawna took off the earrings, placed them on the table, and surveyed the assortment spread out before her. Speaking as if addressing the jewelry, she said, "But you didn't come to talk about earrings. You're bothered by something."

    Hesitantly Nell said, "I thought I'd better tell you. My husband might show up, and I don't think he knows I'm not living here. He could walk in, I guess."

    "Ah, the prodigal father. He walks in, James heaves him out. Or I do." She spread her hands palms up, as if to say, see how simple.

    "Well, it might be better if he didn't actually get in.

    Maybe you could lock your doors?"

    "Whatever you like. Now, you sit, and I'll pour coffee, and you can help me decide which pieces are best for Celsy. And, Nell, if you want him heaved out of your house, we'll be there."

    Nell turned down the coffee; they chatted for a few minutes, and she got up to leave. At the door Tawna said, "But, baby, you have any trouble with that man, you have two very good friends, very close. Remember that."

    Back home again, Nell began to sort through the stuff she had refused to let Travis take with him. His basketball.

    His cousins had a basketball, she had said firmly. Two frogs in a box. She took the box outside, removed the top, and left it under a rhododendron. She found Carol's newest Cabbage Patch doll under a sweater that had both elbows out. She had told Travis to forget it, even if it was his favorite. She held the doll, and suddenly clutched it hard against her breast and bowed her head, fighting tears.