One Summer (32 page)

“Yeah, me. Why not? I can cook.” He finished with his hair and wrapped the towel around his waist.

“
You
can cook?” Her disbelief was so transparent that he grinned.

“Rachel, sweetheart, I hate to tell you this, but your stereotypes are showing. Good God, what is it about me that makes people assume the worst? Of course I can cook. Growing up in a family like mine, if you can’t cook, you starve.”

“
You
can cook.” Still faintly disbelieving because she couldn’t help it, she ran her gaze down that long, strong, quintessentially masculine body. In her family, her mother had cooked, and the girls had learned from Elisabeth. If Stan had ever so much as stirred a pot of soup, Rachel had never seen it. But Johnny was right, of course. Just because he was so very, very male was no reason that he couldn’t prepare a meal. She was stereotyping him, just as everybody else did.

“Well?” His eyes met hers through the mirror.

“By all means, cook. I can’t wait.”

He grinned and left the bathroom. Rachel heard him rummaging around in the bedroom and assumed he was getting dressed. She went into the living room to fetch her purse, gingerly stepping over Wolf, who sprawled in the
hall watching Johnny in the bedroom with slavish devotion. The huge animal rolled an eye at her as she almost hopped over his prone form, but Wolf didn’t so much as offer up a growl.

Applying the few cosmetics she habitually carried in her purse—lipstick, powder, hand lotion for moisturizer—she fluffed out her already drying hair and headed for the bedroom to dress. In the kitchen, she could hear Johnny banging around with pots and pans. The idea of his cooking her a meal was so endearingly ridiculous that she smiled as she stepped into her clothes.

A short time later, wearing most of the outfit she had arrived in—the slim skirt of the pink suit, her short-sleeved white silk blouse, a single strand of pearls, and beige pumps—but leaving off the fitted jacket, she headed toward the kitchen to see if she could assist the chef.

Wolf, lying by the door that led down to the store, watched her with a brooding look that made Rachel a little nervous. She cast him a wary look, then stepped into the kitchen.

It was empty. Pots bubbled on the stove, and a delicious, garlicky smell emanated from the oven, but of Johnny there was no sign.

“Johnny?” she called, turning back to seek him. He must have gone into the bathroom without her noticing. There was noplace else in the small apartment where he could possibly be.

Wolf stood in the doorway, staring at her.

Rachel stared back, not knowing what else to do. The dog blocked the only exit.

“Johnny!” A hint of panic edged her voice. The animal was enormous, tall and stocky and obviously battle scarred. If he was any particular breed, Rachel couldn’t identify it. But then, she had had very little experience with dogs. Her aunt Lorraine had once had a toy poodle, and that was the extent of it. Her mother would never tolerate dogs in her immaculately kept house.

Johnny, wherever he was, did not answer. Wolf’s eyes appeared to sharpen, and the look he focused on Rachel seemed almost greedy. Dear God, did the creature mean to eat her? Would he actually attack?

Rachel stepped back a pace. Wolf, to her horror, advanced one.

“Johnny!” It was a full-throated yell. Wolf’s ears pricked up at the cry, and he took another step forward.

Rachel, cautiously retreating, found herself with her back against the counter. Moving as nonchalantly as she could, so as not to provoke the dog, she braced both arms against the countertop behind her and eased herself into a sitting position atop it. Wolf took another step forward. He was all the way inside the kitchen now, not more than a yard from her dangling feet.

“Johnny!” This time it was a despairing wail. Wolf’s head came up, his eyes gleamed, and Rachel hastily tucked her feet beneath her, then scrambled to her feet. Crouched on the counter, she grabbed a long-handled wooden spoon that rested near the sink and held it out before her as a very inadequate shield.

“What the—” At Johnny’s voice from the doorway, Rachel practically sagged with relief, so glad to see him that she didn’t even mind the amusement evident on his face.

“Help,” she said weakly.

Johnny grinned.

“Where were you?”

He walked into the kitchen, still grinning, brushed by Wolf, who flattened his ears and wagged his tail for his master, and opened the refrigerator door.

“Down in the store. I needed some salt for the spaghetti sauce, and I remembered that Zeigler keeps little packets from Burger King in his desk.”

Extracting something from the depths of the refrigerator, he tossed if to Wolf, who gulped it down eagerly and wagged his tail for more.

“Go lie down,” Johnny said, waving the animal away.
To Rachel’s relief and amazement, the animal turned and went.

“He wanted a hot dog.” Johnny came over to lift Rachel down from the counter and remove the spoon from her grasp.

“A hot dog? Are you sure?” Still shaken, Rachel leaned her forehead against Johnny’s chest.

“I’m sure. What did you think he wanted?”

“To eat me,” Rachel said with conviction.

Johnny burst out laughing. He laughed until Rachel, disgusted, brushed by him, meaning to return to the bedroom.

Wolf, sprawled on his stomach just outside the kitchen door, stopped her in her tracks. She eyed him with dislike. He looked back at her with what she was ready to swear was mockery.

“Here. Give him one.”

Johnny, coming up behind her—and wisely no longer laughing—tried to put a slimy-looking hot dog into her hand.

“No! I’d sooner try to feed a barracuda!” Rachel folded her arms over her chest so as not to be persuaded.

“I want you two to be friends. Come on. Please.”

Johnny in a coaxing mode was enough to weaken her knees—but not her fear. Rachel shook her head.

He sighed. “I’ll make a deal with you. You try to make friends with Wolf, and I’ll try to make friends with your mother.”

Rachel stared at him disbelievingly. “Are you actually comparing my mother to an ill-trained, ferocious, gargantuan monster of a dog?”

Johnny shrugged. “She scares the hell out of me.”

Rachel looked up at him for a moment, considering. “All right,” she said grudgingly, and held out her hand for the hot dog.

By the time Johnny’s spaghetti dinner was ready, Rachel felt that if she and Wolf were not exactly friends, they
had at least called an armed truce. The cost of peace had been one and a half packages of hot dogs.

For the rest of the day, they did very little. They ate, walked Wolf in the vacant lot across the street from the store, went for a drive to nowhere really, then returned to sprawl on the couch with Johnny’s head in Rachel’s lap, watching TV and talking about nothing. The topic of Glenda they both deliberately avoided. Fortunately, the joy of new love proved a potent anesthetic against their sorrow.

At six, Rachel reluctantly began thinking about going home. When she broached that notion to Johnny after a quick meal of bacon and eggs that she threw together before she left because she couldn’t bear the thought of him eating alone, his eyes clouded, but he nodded.

“Yeah, it’s getting late.”

“I’ll stay the night, if you don’t want to be alone.”

They were in the kitchen, unloading the dishwasher. The ease with which they performed simple domestic chores such as cooking and cleaning up together surprised Rachel. It was as if she had known him all her life—which, when she thought about it, she nearly had. The realization made Rachel smile a little.

“You don’t need to do that.”

She put away the skillet that she had been returning from dishwasher to cabinet and turned to face him. He was leaning against the counter, watching her. His face was perfectly expressionless, but she knew, without knowing how she knew, how much he hated the idea of her going.

“I know I don’t need to stay. The question is, do you want me to stay?” Her words were direct, cutting through the smokescreen of his self-sufficient maleness. She waited. He had been without anyone to lean on for so long that admitting to needing her, or indeed anyone, was hard for him.

He grimaced. “Your mother will probably come after me
with a shotgun if you stay. If anyone else finds out, you’ll be branded a scarlet woman by the whole town. The school board might invoke your—what was it?—moral turpitude clause, and you’ll get fired. Do I want to put you through that? No.”

“None of that matters, if you need me.”

“I want you to stay, but I don’t need you to, not enough to put you in that kind of position. No, you go home tonight, and sleep in your own bed, and come spend the evening with me tomorrow.”

“Will you cook?” Rachel asked, smiling.

“Spoiled you already, have I?” He grinned and held out his arms to her. Rachel walked into them, and they closed around her as if he never meant to let her go, for all his fine words.

By the time she left his apartment, it was nearly eight o’clock. He saw her into her car, then stood on the pavement, watching her drive away.

Leaving him alone with his ghosts was the hardest thing Rachel had ever done in her life.

34

T
he following few days were at the same time the best and worst that Rachel had ever experienced. On the plus side, she spent her evenings with Johnny, sneaking up the back way to his apartment after the store closed so that she wouldn’t be seen and staying until eleven or eleven thirty each night. They walked the dog, slow-danced around the living room to a collection of oldies that Johnny had put together as a teenager and had just lately retrieved from his father’s house, cleaned the apartment, cooked, made love. All the while they talked, about anything and everything, and Rachel rediscovered the sensitive, intelligent, knowledge-hungry mind that had once so attracted her. That that mind now resided in the body of a man, not a boy, a man with whom, moreover, she was deeply, passionately in love, seemed like a gift from the gods. To be able to discuss such widely divergent topics as life after death and the intricacies of spaghetti sauce with a man who both quoted Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and drove her out of her senses with lust was more than she had ever thought to ask from life.

On the debit side, Tylerville was agog with Glenda Watkins’s murder—and most of the townspeople were convinced that the killer was Johnny Harris. The town’s propensity for gossip had turned ugly, and rumors abounded. Tales ranged from a cult of devil worshippers (with Johnny
as the head demon) to Johnny as homicidal sex maniac. The more ridiculous tales would have been easy to laugh off, except that they concerned the man she loved.

Even her own mother, despite Rachel’s assurances that Johnny could not possibly have done it, outspokenly considered him a psychopath. As she told her daughter, she hoped he would not undergo a Dr. Jekyll–Mr. Hyde-style personality change while Rachel was with him.

Only Becky was in the slightest degree sympathetic to Rachel in love, and that was because she was experiencing her own tumult. Michael had gone back to Louisville without Becky’s signature on the papers that would permit him to sell the house, but he had threatened to return the coming weekend. Becky, sick at heart, put aside her grief to champion her sister to their mother. Rachel in turn listened to Becky’s outpourings whenever her sister felt the need to talk. Devoted to each other as children, only slightly estranged by the upheavals of adolescence and Becky’s subsequent marriage, the two now grew close again. Rachel discovered that having her sister as friend and ally was an enormous source of comfort, and Becky seemed to feel the same.

Glenda’s funeral was scheduled for Saturday morning, a week to the day after her death. The additional time was needed to allow authorities to run more tests on the body. On Thursday preliminary word had come back from the state crime lab that her killer and the murderer of Marybeth Edwards appeared to be one and the same. In the eyes of the law, Johnny was beginning to look like an innocent man. But gossip had branded him guilty, and the town sizzled with discontent because so obvious a suspect remained free.

Chief Wheatley had warned him not to come, and he had promised Rachel that he would heed that warning, but Johnny showed up at Glenda’s funeral. Rachel nearly fell out of her chair when she saw him walk in the door of the same small paneled room in Long’s funeral home where
the service for Willie Harris had been held. A good portion of the town had turned out for
this
one, although most were curiosity-seekers drawn by the sensational nature of Glenda’s demise rather than family or personal friends. Even a reporter for the
Tylerville Times
was present, along with a photographer. When the photographer began snapping pictures, Sam Munson hurried up and asked him to stop. A loud argument ensued, the upshot of which was that both reporter and photographer were summarily evicted from the proceedings.

Things quieted down for a few minutes after that. More flowers arrived. Taped funeral music blared forth unexpectedly over the loudspeaker, causing the nervous to jump before the volume was hastily adjusted to a suitable level. The eyes of many in the overflowing crowd focused on the closed coffin as someone wondered too loudly just how disfigured the corpse was. The room seethed with morbid speculation on the exact details of the murder. Everyone, it seemed, agreed on just one thing: the most likely suspect. The name Johnny Harris was bandied about freely, though it was never spoken above a whisper.