The Secret of Everything (19 page)

“Said the spider to the fly.”

He laughed, the sound as big as the rest of him, so vivid that several diners turned around to see where it came from. A spectacular brunette with three giant diamonds dripping delicately down her cleavage smiled, and Tessa realized she was an actress. A very famous actress. Who looked Vince over as if he were dessert.

He noticed, waggling his eyebrows at Tessa. “She can’t help herself.”

“I suppose not.”

“C’mon.” He stood and dropped some bills on the table. “Let’s blow this pop stand, sister.”

“You didn’t really say that.”

His grin—that sexy, sexy, small twinkle—caught her, midchest.
In the distance, lightning flashed. She saw it and thought,
Uh-oh
, but followed him out anyway.

As they wound through the narrow old lanes, gusts of wind skipped through, sending dry leaves clattering across the cobblestones. Tessa caught her hair and twisted it close to her neck. She heard a howl in the distance, like a banshee screaming. The hairs along her nape rose. “What the hell
is
that?”

“An owl, maybe.”

Tessa frowned. No owl she’d ever heard.

“You know what this is, don’t you?” Vince said, stopping to lift his face to the wind, like a dog scenting something. “Summer, blowing away. Tomorrow will be fall.”

Thunder ambled across the mountains, quietly. “Summer doesn’t end for almost three weeks.”

“You’ll see.”

And suddenly she did feel colder. She tucked her scarf around her shoulders. She was glad when he led her into a cantina—there was no other word for it—with a ragtag band playing bluegrass in the corner. A pool table took up the far end of the room, and most of the patrons sat around the bar. Vince and Tessa sat a table near the back. “Quiet here,” he said.

Everything seemed edged with luminosity: the plants hanging around an old-fashioned skylight, girded like a Victorian conservatory; the tiny purple lights looping around the bottles behind the bar; the musicians playing their eccentric instruments. “This is great.”

“It’s my favorite,” Vince said. “Hasn’t been corrupted yet.”

“Have things changed a lot here?”

Vince rested his arms on the table in front of him and pursed his lips, looking around the room as if to evaluate it. Nodded. “It’s not all bad, but yeah.”

A woman in her sixties, with dyed black hair and the pouches of too many late nights beneath her eyes, dropped a cardboard coaster in front of each one of them. Waited.

“You order for me,” Tessa said.

“You’re not a margarita kind of woman, I don’t think.”

She shook her head.

“Tomato beer for me,” he said, and narrowed his eyes. “And … let’s see … a Guinness for my friend here.”

Tessa sat up straight. “They have Guinness?”

“We got everything.”

“Guinness it is.” She grinned at Vince. “Well done.”

The dark eyes glittered, focused entirely on her face. It was both disconcerting and heady.

“So what makes all the change a good thing?”

A single lift of his shoulder. “Well, it was just a dying little mountain town before all the tourists started showing up. So that’s good. People need jobs.”

“But?”

“Taxes have skyrocketed, which means not everybody can keep their land. And I don’t want to see the land all turn to million-dollar retreats.”

“Right. Classic story.” The woman brought their drinks, and the Guinness was decent. Not too cold, deep and bitter and strong. “Do you live in town, then?”

“No, just outside. I bought some land for my girls when we came back here after my wife died. It’s a good house for them, the old kind of farmhouses they built in the twenties, all red-sandstone blocks. Really solid.”

It was easy to imagine him in a house like that, with those little girls—a life so unlike her own. She had thought that, perhaps, her life in Tasmania would be like that.

Which she hadn’t admitted to herself very often. She took a
swallow of stout, pursed her lips around the flavor, and heard that little voice say again in her head,
Here I am
.

“So what made your day weird?” Vince asked.

Tessa took in a long breath, blew it out, and made a decision. “I lived here when I was very small. At the commune.”

“Wow. Maybe that’s why you look familiar.”

She smiled. “Yeah, maybe we were sitting at the drugstore, side by side, long, long ago.”

“Could have happened,” he said in that rumbling voice. His mouth tipped up at the corners in that sexy, barely there grin.

“Yeah. Anyway. I went out to Green Gate Farms today, to check out the possibilities for the tour, and”—she paused, picking her way through truth and lies—”it was weirdly familiar. It kinda freaked me out.”

“You’re bound to remember something, right?”

Tessa nodded. “I don’t know why it bothered me. Kinda silly, I guess.” She rubbed the edge of one eyebrow, squinting as if to focus it all a little better. “It’s like what I think I remember is a movie, and something else is there.”

“There was a lot of drama there a long time ago. Do you know the story, how everybody came there?”

“Some of it.”

“It’s all hearsay, of course. I don’t actually remember any of it.” The band started to play Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s, “Teach Your Children.” Both Tessa and Vince glanced over. “Weird,” he said.

“It’s me. I’m having a Crosby, Stills and Nash day. Third time I’ve heard one of their songs today.”

“Déjà Vu,”
he said, naming the album.

Tessa laughed. Touched his hand. “Anyway. Tell me the story.”

“Fact number one: I was born at the commune.”

“No kidding? How long did you live there?”

“I didn’t. My mother used a midwife and the birth didn’t go well. As you might imagine,” he spread his hands, “I was a pretty big baby, almost ten pounds, and although my mother is six feet tall, it was too much. She ended up hemorrhaging, and they rushed her to Santa Fe and we both nearly died. That was that, for her, so she moved to town and bought the bookstore, and that’s where I grew up, over the store.”

Tessa feigned swooning. “That would have been my ultimate dream come true as a ten-year-old—access to all those books whenever I wanted.”

“It was great. It’s still great.” He raised his beer. “To reading.”

She toasted with her glass. “What do you like to read?” She asked, and drank deeply. It was actually very good for Guinness not in Ireland.

“Mostly fiction. Mysteries, science fiction, horror, big history sagas, you know, like kings and battles and things like that. How about you?”

“Literally everything.” She laughed, a little ruefully. “I always read everything when I was a kid—and I do mean everything, from Nancy Drew to Dickens to my dad’s John D. MacDonald—but then I went to regular school and the English teachers started telling me to read ‘real’ books, so I tried. And you know, I kinda went off reading for a while. I had already been reading literary novels and the classics mixed in with whatever else, but—” She waved a hand. “So I went back to reading whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted to—reading had been my greatest pleasure in all the world. I mean, I never really watched all that much television, because we were moving around, never really had solid digs until I was thirteen, so reading was everything.”

Vince leaned in, looking happy. “Me, too. Not the moving around, but the reading. I didn’t read nonfiction, and I didn’t
really like mysteries in those days, but I read everything else.
Everything.”

“Are you nearsighted?”

“Lasered.”

“Me, too!” She slapped the hand he raised. “What were some of your favorites?”

He leaned on the table, and the edge of his tattoos showed beneath the sleeves of his T-shirt, a pale earth color with
There’s no place like roam
on the front. “Big on Stephen King. Asimov, of course, and all those big, juicy sagas that they used to have in the seventies and eighties, you know, like
The Adventurers
and—”

“Oh, yes,” she cried. “And Sidney Sheldon.”

He made a face. “He was okay, but maybe too romancey for me, that guy.”

“Yeah, he’s probably more of a writer for women. Like Tolkien is more for guys.”

“You think so? I know women who like him.”

“Mostly tomboys, I bet.”

He grinned suddenly. “Probably.” He winked. “And they say reading is dying.”

“No way. So, tell me the drama about the commune.”

“Okay.” He put the bottle down precisely in the middle of the cardboard cocktail pad the server had put on the table. “So two brothers came out here from California. Wealthy kids, you know, looking for something. They had a vision for a commune and got it going, and from what I understand, it was pretty good for a few years. My mother lived there from the early days, ‘67, ‘68, with some of the original people, and it was pretty smooth.”

“Right, I heard some of this earlier.” She pulled out her notebook and flipped back a few pages. “Paula, who runs the farmers’
market stand, and Cherry, her daughter, and the two brothers who started it all, Jonathan and Robert Nathan.”

“Right. My mom and Paula are still good friends.”

Tessa nodded. “So what ended the idyll?”

“Drugs, basically. Lot of people who came out to the commune were just there to get laid, loaf around, smoke dope.”

“The usual.” Tessa found herself noticing the vein running along the side of the muscle in his forearm and disappearing again into his wrist. Sexy.

“One of the people who came was a guy named Xander,” Vince said, “from some big shipping family in the northeast. Really good-looking, very intelligent and charismatic, and he used it to his advantage, sort of set up a harem of women and children who were all living in a big old house out on the land.”

Something thudded through her belly. “The Victorian, right? I saw it.”

“Yeah. Later they made a school down there for all the commune kids, but at that time it was mostly Xander and his women, and a few other guys and their women.”

Tessa shook her head. “I don’t get the appeal of that life.”

“No. Me, either. But we have the advantage of being post-baby boomers, right? There was a whole lot of shaking going on. They shook it loose for us.”

Tessa had said much the same thing to her father, about the commune turning into the farm. “So what happened to Xander?”

“Somebody shot him right through the heart. They’ve never solved the crime or even tried that hard. Several women disappeared right after that, and a couple more moved to town, and the commune fell apart.”

Tessa inclined her head. “This is only part of the story that I heard this morning. Cherry also said somebody made off with kilos and kilos of marijuana.”

His eyebrows rose. “I’ve never heard that part.”

“That’s what she said. She also said there was a writer out there a few years ago, trying to piece it all together, and nobody talked.”

“Yeah, it’s all really mysterious. I guess the most we know is that something bad happened, and Xander died, and after that the commune lost most of the members.”

Including Sam, Tessa thought. Including herself.

Overhead, a pattering began on the skylight, loud enough to be heard over the music. “Uh-oh!” Tessa looked up. “I’d better get back to the hotel. It’s starting to rain.”

He measured her. “I was thinking maybe you’d like to come to my place for a little while.”

Tessa met his eyes. “Maybe for a little while.”

   L
ater, she remembered the night in exaggerated camera shots, as if in an art-house movie. They dashed through the rain to Vince’s truck. It was dark and, as they ran, water splashed over their ankles. When they got to the truck, she put a hand on his biceps and looked up at him.

“Vince,” she said, just his name, and it was enough. His other arm swept around, engulfed her, and that big head blocked the rain as he kissed her. And again. Rain ran in cold tiny rivulets down her face, dripped down her cheek to fall on his chest. She felt the wet on her forehead and the part of her hair and her shoulders. His mouth was a pool of heat, succulent lips, thick tongue, and his arm hauled her close, over his thigh, against his belly. In ancient greeting, they pressed groins together.

She started to shiver.

“Do you want to come to my house?” His voice was so deep it was nearly inaudible.

“Yes. I’ll follow you.”

He paused. “It’s just down the State Road, about three miles. I’ll meet you there.” He kissed her again. “Remember, I’ve got your dog.”

Tessa drove her car out of the hotel parking lot and followed Vince to his house. In the car, she turned the heat on, shivering in her wet clothes. When they reached a gate, he got out, opened it, and they drove through, then he had to get out and close it again.

The house was two stories, as square as a schoolhouse, with a porch on two sides and a wide meadow rolling away down to a stand of trees. She parked and rushed up to the porch. The rain was coming down in steady, drenching sheets. Her clothes and hair were stuck to her. Her sandals slid off her feet as she walked.

Vince got the dog out of the back and coaxed him into the house, then flipped on the foyer light. It was blazing and unpleasant, but it stayed on for only a second. They were plunged into darkness. “That’s the power. There’s a bad transformer somewhere along the route, and if it rains hard, we lose electricity.”