Nighthawk & The Return of Luke McGuire (8 page)

Of course, it could be because he’d had to give up so much in the last few years. Even his war gaming had gone by the wayside, his carefully painted miniatures put away so that children couldn’t break them, his sand table dismantled so that Mary and Bill would have a bedroom. Nor could he even cast any new figures to occupy himself with painting and mounting them. The materials were expensive, and besides, he didn’t want molten lead around the children. Hell, he didn’t want lead around Mary and Billy period.

Not that he regretted it. He believed in taking care of kin and to hell with the cost. But he missed his hobby.

He missed being on the road. He missed his trucker friends who’d kept in touch for a while but, face it, he was off the beaten track and their loads were taking them elsewhere.

The house that had once seemed ample now seemed crowded and noisy, but that was okay, except when he was feeling melancholy and lonely and wanted something that he couldn’t quite name. All the life and liveliness inside only made him feel even lonelier.

But this feeling had been coming over him periodically ever since he could remember. What he ought to do was go back inside and watch that murder mystery with Paula and Enoch instead of standing out here looking up at the Big Dipper and feeling smaller than a flyspeck.

Instead he kept right on staring up into the infinite vastness of the night, feeling as if he might spin away into nothingness.

Back when he’d lived on the reservation, finding a woman he was allowed to date had been quite a challenge. Kinship had reached out among ranks of cousins to the extent that he could travel twenty-five or thirty miles, cast his eye on a waitress he’d never seen before in some diner, and be told she was related to him in some way that put her off-limits. It had been a relief when he got out into the larger world and discovered that he was free to ask just about anybody for a date. Until he learned he was often being used. It was his being Indian that attracted most non-Indian women, not his personality or character. He had begun to feel like a scalp on somebody’s coup belt. Several unpleasant experiences had made him extremely cautious, but not even caution could fully protect him. It certainly couldn’t protect him from the hurt he saw in a woman’s eyes when her family objected to him. Or when her friends walked away. Or when total strangers said something on the street.

That kind of treatment killed a relationship sooner or later. It had sure ended his. He had felt guilty all the damn time about the price a woman was paying to be with him, and guilt had made him resent her. In the end he was never sure if she left because he drove her off or because she got tired of being shunned by her family and friends.

Nor did it matter which it was. Either way it spelled disaster.

So what the hell was he doing getting the hots for a white woman? Because he
was
getting the hots for Esther Jackson. So far, each time he’d felt a flicker of it, he’d managed to smother it before he was forced to really notice it. Today something had shifted and now he was deeper in manure than the grass under the compost heap.

She had beautiful auburn hair, dark and rich with red. Her unusual hazel eyes, framed in thick, dark lashes, almost seemed to be lit from within. He didn’t know why, but a woman’s hair and eyes were the two features that most attracted him. In Esther’s case, she was so busy trying to hide that leg brace that she managed to conceal any other attractive attributes she might have—except that day he’d found her wearing jeans. There was no mistaking then the gentle curve of her hips and the slender length of her legs. But it was her hair and eyes that had begun to haunt his dreams.

Like lovesick Mop who’d spent most of the remainder of the day sending soulful looks in the general direction of Esther’s house, he found himself mooning about yards of silky hair trailing over his skin, about laughter flashing like sunlight in a pair of hazel eyes, about a laugh that was as refreshing and gentle as the bubbling of a lazy brook on a summer’s afternoon.

Damn, he had a case of it, worse than any since his early twenties. He could almost have laughed at himself, except that the yearning was so powerful.

It didn’t matter anyway. He’d never seen a woman who was looking any less for a relationship. She was plainly self-reliant, and not by word or gesture had she betrayed even the remotest interest in him as a man.

And even if she had, it would have been a recipe for heartache.

Hell, it was nothing to get all worked up about anyway. He just needed to get laid. All of this mooning was merely a function of protracted celibacy. There was nothing special about Esther Jackson except that she was an unattached female. Any unattached female would have the same effect on him.

Yeah. Right.

Laughing quietly at himself, he decided to drive into town and get some ice cream. The kids would be thrilled tomorrow and it would give him something to do besides mope.

The stairs mocked her. Esther stared at them with sudden loathing and considered sleeping on the couch in the study rather than climbing them. It wasn’t that they were difficult to climb or descend—although they were—but suddenly she was awash in memories of the role stairs had played in her life.

Stairs were everywhere, and she’d never developed a phobia about them. They hadn’t been responsible for her own injuries or her mother’s death, after all. Her father bore the entire, unmitigated blame for that. Other than a qualm about the difficulty she would have mounting them because of her leg, she hadn’t been put off by the stairs in her house.

Until tonight. Until she had to sit up with her insides roiling in fear over Richard Jackson’s return to her life.
Dad.
How could he dare sign himself that after all he’d done? There wasn’t a man on the planet less deserving of that title.

She had turned off all the lights again because the darkness seemed safer, the action a definite throwback to her childhood. When Richard had been on a drunken tear, she and her mother had tried desperately to stay out of the way and to avoid attracting his notice. One of the ways they had done that was to turn out all the lights and hide. Among her earliest memories was hiding in closets with her mother.

There was a sliver of moon tonight, and its light fell through the uncurtained window at the landing where the stairs switched back, and fell in a silver cascade toward Esther’s feet. It could have been beautiful, moonlight gleaming on polished wood. Instead it looked eerie, a stage set for a play that hadn’t yet happened, a stage awaiting the arrival of the actors.

She shuddered and forced herself to turn away. If she ever bought another house she was going to buy one without stairs. Ridiculous or not, she didn’t need unnecessary reminders of her past.

That was one of the reasons she didn’t even keep a photograph of her mother out where she could see it. Not that there were many pictures. Family photos had consisted of the occasional snapshot taken by a friend or neighbor.

And that was another thing. Her parents had had a lot of friends, especially in earlier years, while Esther was still small. Neither of them had been such heavy drinkers back then, and had gone through long periods where they didn’t drink much at all. There had been friends who came over in the evening to play cards and friends who had lived next door. There had been laughter and even some love.

She could remember it, if she tried very hard, although she usually tried to avoid it because it hurt so much. But there had been a time when her father hadn’t been so angry very often, a time when she had felt secure in his arms and love.

Then had come the drunken rage when he threw her down the stairs. After that…well, after that things had steadily deteriorated. His drinking had increased, and so had her mother’s. And sometimes Esther had felt that the very sight of her and her useless leg had repulsed them so much that they had hidden in booze.

Maybe. Her analyst had suggested that Richard Jackson had felt so guilty for hurting his daughter that he had sought forgetfulness in his drinking.

Esther wasn’t prepared to be that generous. After all, saying the man drank out of guilt almost sounded like a valid excuse. But there wasn’t any excuse. None at all. And in the end she had come to believe that her father hated her, that he had never really loved her at all.

Now he wanted to talk to her, and here she was in the middle of nowhere with a staircase that might prove to be the perfect weapon for him. After all, he’d managed to kill her mother by knocking her down the stairs. Out here with no witnesses, and with Esther’s bad leg, he could probably make it look like an accident.

God! Couldn’t she stop thinking about this? She was going to go nuts and all the man had done was write to her! He hadn’t even said anything about showing up; he’d just written a letter.

But she hadn’t written back to the address printed beneath his signature, nor was she going to. What then? If he got no answer would he call? Or would he just show up on her doorstep?

Feeling disgusted with the way her mind kept worrying the problem, like a rat on an exercise wheel, she ordered herself to go into the kitchen, turn on the lights and make a cup of tea.

She turned on the overhead light, but its brilliance was far from reassuring. The brightness inside made the darkness beyond the window opaque. No longer could she see the moonlit countryside and that made her even more uneasy.

She forced herself to ignore the feeling while she put the kettle on and tried to decide between her various teas. Green tea, she decided at last. It had been a long time since she’d made herself a cup.

And this had to stop, she told herself. Her father had consumed the entire first fifteen years of her life with fear, and she wasn’t about to let him consume any more.

But how could she stop this obsessive cycling of her thoughts? She was scared, the man posed a threat, and until something concrete happened to settle the issue, she could hardly just stop being afraid, right?

When the tea was ready and she poured herself a cup, she had to fight the urge to turn out the light once again, thus making herself safe in the dark. She believed that if she didn’t give in to the fear, perhaps she could conquer it.

But it wasn’t easy, especially when it occurred to her that someone could come right up to the window, look into the brightly lit room and see her clearly. But the café curtains were drawn, she assured herself. Somebody would need a ladder to see over them.

Was that a car engine? Her heart slammed into overdrive as she strained her ears to hear. The wind here never seemed to stop, and even now it was making little sounds, rattling the power and phone lines against the eaves, making the dryer vent clatter. Maybe…but no. At some level just below the audible, she detected it, a faint rumbling vibration.

Then it stopped and she heard the distinct
thunk
of a car door slamming. Panic ripped through her in a searing wave, then subsided as adrenaline took over. Moving swiftly, she grabbed a butcher knife from the block on the counter and headed for the front door.

No one, absolutely no one, was going to beat her up ever again.

She left the light on in the kitchen, not wanting to alert the person outside to the fact that she was aware of him. Golden light fell through the door into the foyer, illuminating it. She hesitated only a moment before stepping out there, taking care not to cast any shadows across the windows on either side of the front door.

Someone was outside. She could see the dark shadow on the porch through the sheer curtains on the window beside the door. Gripping the knife tighter, she took a deep breath and moved another step closer to the door.

Her heart was hammering so loudly that it was a moment before she realized that the person outside was knocking gently on the door.
Knocking?
She froze, confused. Her father wouldn’t knock, would he?

“Esther?”

She recognized the voice, and in an instant relief poured through her, leaving her feeling weak. Craig Nighthawk. What was he doing here after midnight?

She walked toward the door, and with each step the confusion of the previous moments when past and present had somehow mingled to create a nightmare slipped away, leaving her firmly centered in the now.

Opening the door, she found Craig Nighthawk standing on her porch holding a foil bag and two plastic spoons. He held them up. “Ice cream? I just bought some in town and thought you might like to share.”

Then his eyes fell to the butcher knife in her hand. “Did something happen?”

She looked down at the knife and felt horror creep through her. She’d been carrying a knife with the intention of inflicting serious injury, possibly even fatal harm. That wasn’t her, was it? She didn’t do things like that.

“Esther? Is something wrong?”

She looked up at Craig, wondering how someone she hardly knew could be so welcome. “I… No. No, nothing’s wrong. I just…” For some reason it seemed impossible to explain that she had been terrified of nothing at all except her own fears. “I…was nervous, worrying about my father, and when I heard your engine…”

He looked embarrassed. “I guess I take the jerk of the year award. I should have thought about how it would make you feel when you heard me drive up in the middle of the night. I was on the way back from town with the ice cream when I saw your light was on—”

“My light?” she interrupted. “But the highway is a mile from here.”

“There’s nothing else out there to get in the way. I could see your light easily from the highway.”

It had never occurred to her that her house lights would be visible that far away. Now how was she going to deal with that?

He shifted a little and lifted the bag. “I’m sorry I scared you. Would you like to share some ice cream with me or should I just go home before it melts?”

He asked the question gently, as if he realized he was not the foremost thing on her mind. She hesitated, not because she was uncertain, but because she seemed to be unable to drag herself out of the morass of her own confusion and concern.