One Summer (19 page)

At the end it was she who was crying out, and he who merely gritted his teeth in a fiercely silent release.

He collapsed on top of her, his weight pinning her down. Even as she wrapped her arms around his shoulders and threaded her fingers through his silky black hair, Rachel fell fathoms into a deep sleep.

18

R
achel felt like a slut. Two minutes of lying beneath Johnny and listening while he snored noisily in her ear, and she felt like a slut. She was naked except for her skirt, which was hopelessly twisted about her waist, and her sandals, which neither of them had ever even bothered to remove, drenched with his sweat, slick with his juices. The taste of whiskey was sour in her mouth. The air around her stank of whiskey and sex. How long she’d slept, whether fifteen minutes or several hours, she had no way of telling. All she knew was that she was bone tired, her muscles ached, and she felt unclean.

When she thought of what he’d done to her, what she’d let him do to her and gloried in the doing, she felt embarrassed. When she remembered with whom she had done such things, she wanted to die of shame.

Johnny Harris. Her former student. Years younger than she. Ex-con with an attitude. Lover of Glenda Watkins and the lord only knew how many other women as well.

He’d said himself he’d fantasized about making love to her from the time she was his English teacher in high school. She’d just helped him make an adolescent daydream come true in an interlude as steamy as it was unlikely to be repeated. Probably this one time was all he wanted of her. Certainly it was all she could expect. Anyway,
what did she want—a relationship? With Johnny Harris? The very idea was a joke, a not-so-funny joke.

He had cried in her arms. At the memory Rachel felt her heart turn over. As much as she hated to admit it, there was more to her feelings for him than compassion and lust. She cared about him. And while he might see her as a shoulder to cry on—a mother figure, perhaps—he did not care about her in the same way. She knew that.

He had had the “hots” for her, he’d said. That about summed up his interest in her, Rachel feared. Now that he’d gotten what he had wanted, well …

He would not respect her in the morning.

That hackneyed phrase, culled from her reading, sprang into her mind. She’d been raised to be a lady—another hackneyed phrase, an anachronism even, but she couldn’t help it, it was the truth. In small southern towns they still had ladies, as well as women who weren’t ladies—and such ladies knew that if a girl was easy, the man would take what he could get and then move on to the next conquest like a bee flitting from flower to flower.

Easy
was too mild a word to describe what she had been.
Wanton
didn’t even cover it. Lover of words that she was, not even she could think of one salacious enough to fit.

Rachel was almost afraid to touch him lest he awaken and she had to face him, right then, the way she was, the way they both were. She didn’t think she could bear it.

But he had to be shifted. His weight was growing increasingly unbearable, and her spine was starting to ache from being crushed into the hard floor beneath the carpet. Besides, she wanted to get away.

By dint of much wriggling and shoving at his left shoulder, Rachel was able to maneuver herself out from beneath him. He slept on, oblivious, as she got to her feet. Shaky-kneed, she stood looking down at him while she did her best to smooth out her crumpled skirt. His snoring had increased in volume, become stertorous in fact. Rachel
realized that his sleep did not stem from sexual satiation. He was in a stupor from too much whiskey.

For a moment she had to fight the urge to kick him as he slept.

His arms were stretched out over his head, his fingers curling loosely down into the carpet. His long legs were close together, probably because of the constriction of the jeans and Jockey shorts, which were pushed halfway down his thighs. His buns were bare, nice, tight, round buns that were, as she now knew from firsthand experience, as hard to the touch as they looked. They were smooth and hairless and several shades paler than the muscular tops of his thighs, which were further darkened by a sprinkling of black hair. The cleft in them drew her eyes. Rachel remembered sinking her fingers into that cleft, blushed, and pulled her eyes away.

The white T-shirt was only faintly twisted at his narrow waist. Rachel speculated that its snug fit kept it from being as hopelessly dislocated as her skirt had been. Peeking from beneath one broad shoulder she spied a telltale pink strap: her bra. Bending to retrieve it, Rachel practically had to lift his shoulder off the ground to get it free. If she hadn’t experienced it herself, she would never have believed that a man so lean and hard of muscle could weigh so darn much.

She discovered that her hands were unsteady as she tried twice to fasten the hooks on her bra. Finally she succeeded and, slipping the straps up over her shoulders, slid the garment into place. The thought that popped unbidden into her mind was that he had not seemed disappointed at the size of her breasts. On the contrary, he had caressed and kissed them with an enthusiasm that was, in retrospect, downright mortifying.

Rachel flinched at the memory, feeling hot color flood her neck and face. How would she ever be able to face him again, with the specter of this night between them?

The answer was, she wouldn’t. Not for a while, anyway.

While it was impractical to think she could avoid him forever, and she knew it, perhaps she could for a few weeks. School started on Thursday—was that only two days away? She would be busy, too busy to stop by the hardware store for some time after that. She had to hire a new manager, but maybe Olivia could handle the job for a few weeks. Or maybe Ben could be persuaded to stay on a little longer.

Devil take Johnny Harris! Ever since he had wormed his way back into it, he had consistently fouled up her life.

Time blunted even the most excruciating memories, as Rachel knew from experience. She only hoped that it would blunt this one before she had to meet those smoky blue eyes again.

Her raspberry T-shirt lay by a corner of the couch near his feet. Rachel skirted Johnny’s prone body, picked it up, and pulled it over her head. Tucking the T-shirt into her skirt as quickly as she could, she looked around for the one garment she had not yet recovered: her panties.

At the memory of how she had lost them, she wanted to hide.

They were nowhere to be found. After a careful search, Rachel decided that Johnny must be lying on them. There was simply no other place that they could be.

For a moment, she was tempted to abandon them. To all outward appearances she was decently dressed. She could just go home as she was, and no one would be the wiser.

Unless and until Johnny Harris decided to return her panties to her, which, knowing him, he was perfectly capable of doing in a very public way.

Rachel could not take that chance. The very idea made her face burn.

Kneeling beside him, she caught hold of one shoulder and heaved. Nothing much happened, except that he grunted, briefly interrupting his snoring. He was too heavy for her to shift, let alone flip over onto his back.

From somewhere behind her came a snuffle and a soft whine, The slavering beast was lurking in the bedroom with only a flimsy wooden door standing between them. Rachel was galvanized. Johnny was insensible and unlikely to be aroused even if she were to be chewed to pieces on top of him. If the dog were to get out, her fate would not be something she could consider with sanguinity.

She heaved at the shoulder again. It lifted perhaps an inch off the floor before thudding back down. Again he grunted, and the dog whined. At that Rachel gave it up for a lost cause. He was not going to be moved, not by her, not in his present state of drunken dead weight.

The snuffle came again, then a growl instead of the whine. Clearly the animal could smell her and was making his displeasure clear in no uncertain terms. Rachel decided to leave while she still could, panties or no.

Heading toward the door, she spied her panties in a ball under the lamp table. With a murmur of relief, she fished them out and pulled them on.

Then, without so much as a backward glance at Johnny, she let herself out the door.

Though the night was warm, Rachel shivered as she drove toward home. All in all, the last few hours had been some of the most physically and psychically draining of her life. First Johnny had assaulted her emotions, tearing at her heart until it bled, and then he had stormed her body. Her capitulation had been a mind-blowing surrender of body and soul. It was only natural that she should be not quite herself in its aftermath.

Tylerville at night was as dark as a graveyard. Not even the faint light from the crescent moon high overhead was enough to banish the eerie shadows that blanketed the narrow, curving road. Rachel drove toward home, past the empty fields and through the double lanes of towering pines along the route she had traveled several times a day for most of her life and tried not to let her imagination get
the best of her. There were so many spooky stories about various places around Tylerville that if one dwelled on them, one would never go anywhere alone at night. The problem was, some of the tales were true, she knew. She just didn’t know which ones.

Her great-aunt Virginia, for example, used to tell a story about the old Baptist church, long since abandoned, that Kay and the other members of the Preservation Society were so anxious to beautify. Its spire pointed skyward on a little hillock not far from Rachel’s home. Rachel drove past it every time she went into or returned from town, and rarely did she think of the ghost of the church organist who still supposedly played there. But tonight, as she approached the church, the story retold itself in her head of its own volition. It was probably because her nerves were already so on edge, Rachel thought dismally as she pressed harder on the accelerator. But the little frame building, its white paint periodically freshened by the Preservation Society, seemed almost to glow in the dark. In all events, she could not keep her eyes from seeking out and finding it as she barreled down the road.

The story was that the church organist, a young woman whose name was forgotten in the mists of time, had been having an affair with the minister. His wife, who had originally planted the cemetery gardens that Kay was so anxious to restore, had somehow found out and had lain in wait for the two of them. Most shocking of all, the two had conducted their misbehavior in the church itself. One night the minister had been called away by sickness amongst his flock, and the pretty organist had been in the church waiting for the lover who didn’t come. His wife came instead, murdered her rival by means unknown, and got rid of the body. The minister may have suspected, but no one else did.

The young woman’s disappearance was one of those mysteries that enlivened the town’s gossip circuit for many years to come. The minister’s wife went on to lead a long
and apparently blameless life with her erring spouse, and during her lifetime no one was ever the wiser about her crime. Her one error was that she had kept a diary in which she wrote faithfully every day. Recipes and church-related problems were bound up with the tale of the murder and its aftermath, so the story went. The diary, of course, later mysteriously disappeared.

The only corroborating evidence was the discovery, sometime in the nineteen thirties, of a young woman’s coffinless skeleton in a partially underground crypt back behind the church. By then, the minister and his wife were long dead, and the grisly artifact with its accompanying tale of adultery and murder was excitingly scandalous rather than horrifying. That such a skeleton had actually been found the town elders had sworn. Everything else, as Rachel was aware, was pure speculation.

But the scary part was that, on a rainy night such as the one on which the murder supposedly had taken place, local wags claimed that the doomed organist could still be heard playing her instrument as she waited for her partner in sin to join her.

Aunt Vir, who had never told a lie in her life as far as Rachel knew, claimed to have heard the ghostly music herself as a young girl. She and some friends had crept into the churchyard, scared and giggly, to see the ghost for themselves—and sure enough, as they had sneaked up to one of the windows, an organist’s rendition of “Amazing Grace” had swelled past their ears. The girls had run for their lives.

Years later, when Aunt Vir had retold the story for the umpteenth time for her wide-eyed nieces, it had still been frightening enough to make the back of Rachel’s neck prickle.

Moonlight now touched the spire of the church, making it seem to glow. In the shadows beside the building a ghostly figure appeared to move. Rachel looked, then looked again, convinced in that hideous moment that she
had actually seen something. But of course there was nothing there. She knew that as well as she knew her name. Still, she almost sideswiped a tree as she hurtled around a bend in the road.

Imagination, of course, she told herself firmly, even as the sweat dried on her palms. It was nothing but imagination.