Gathering Lies Page 18

  “Of course, that’s what she’s doing. Jeez, you men! You know exactly what’s going on. You just never want to admit it, because then you’d have to do something about it.”

  “I admitted it that summer with you,” he said softly. “I did something about it, too.”

  I looked away, unable to stop the heat that rose to my face. “That was a long time ago.”

  “And we’ve both changed. I know that, Sarah. But tell me you didn’t feel something when you saw me half dead on that dock.”

  “Of course, I felt something. I was scared to death you were dead. We were friends. Why wouldn’t I be worried?”

  “Friends?” He ran a finger beneath my pant leg to the hollow behind my knee.

  I jerked my leg back. “Stop that.”

  “Aha! You felt something.”

  “You’re right. I felt a snake run up my jeans.”

  He grinned again. “You know, speaking of being attracted to someone, I thought I saw you giving old Gabe the eye last night.”

  “Gabe Rossi? You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “Why? He’s good-looking, friendly…even charming, some might say.”

  “Too damned charming, if you ask me.”

  “You think so?”

  “I know so. I’ve had my fill of charming men.”

  “Including me?”

  “I hadn’t noticed you being all that charming lately. But yes, for the moment, including you.”

  “Does that mean that in another moment you might change your mind?”

  Inside the kitchen, Timmy was ringing a small bell to let us know dinner was on.

  “In another moment,” I said, “I’ll be eating a decent meal for the first time in three days. I won’t even remember you.”

  “I remember a time when you were hungrier for me than for a decent meal,” he countered.

  “Teenagers. They’ll eat anything.”

  I realized what I’d said, and the heat rose higher. I could feel it in my scalp.

  He stood and held out his hand.

  “What’s that for?” I said.

  “To help you up. Damn, woman, you sure are mean today. Must’ve been that knock on the head.”

  “I’m mean all the time now,” I said. “And getting meaner by the day. You’ll see.”

  We dragged chairs out onto the terrace and ate around the fire, with the food on napkins in our laps. The fish tasted like the finest ever served in a five-star restaurant, and there were more than enough oysters to go around.

  The kitchen faced the woods, and the setting sun glinted off the tops of the trees. Beneath them the shade was a grayish purple, fading into black. As the night began to encroach and shadows deepened, I fancied I could see the ghosts of those old marauding Indians, watching us. Now and then I thought I saw one move.

  Would this island ever be free of its sad past? I wondered. Or would it always be burdened by the weight of those tragic events? And were the deeds of the early settlers finally catching up—but with us? Were we the ones to pay?

  That was the way it felt, that we’d all been brought here by some cosmic force, to pay for some unknown deed.

  Or was it a current deed, known to only a few?

  Whichever, Esme Island was no longer the paradise of my childhood, and the differences went beyond Timmy, Luke and me. There was something afoot here, something moving in and out of us like a dark cloud.

  But could it change people all that much? Could the Luke I’d known—unconventional, yes, but good—become a killer here? Or had that happened sometime during the years we’d been apart?

  I didn’t know. And I hadn’t turned out to be all that good about judging men lately. In fact, since Luke had flirted with me a while ago, I’d been less and less inclined to see him in any clear light at all.

  The thought occurred to me that for all I knew, that might have been the purpose of his flirting—a deliberate act, designed to blur my emotional vision.

  I looked around at our little group and tried to come up with alternatives. The most obvious was Gabe Rossi. He was the one who had somehow been on the island without showing his face, all the while we’d been out there looking for survivors.

  “Gabe,” I said, wiping my hands on my napkin and setting it on the ground, “when you’re not here on Esme, who are you? I mean, I know you said you owned a software company. But are you married? Do you have children? Where do you live?”

  He gulped down a piece of fish and smiled, then swallowed some water. “Well, let’s see…first of all, I live south of Seattle. Gig Harbor, actually. I’m not married, and I don’t have children. I’ve been too busy setting up my company and getting it off the ground, I’m afraid. One day I suppose I’ll have to see about getting married, though.”

  “Isn’t there someone you’re worried about? A mother or father? A brother?”

  “My family is all living in the East,” he said. “I guess right about now they’re more worried about me. That’s why I was so bummed when the cell phone broke. I tried to reach them right after the quake, but I guess the towers around here were down. I thought if I just kept trying, sooner or later I might connect. What about the rest of you?”

  Amelia and Timmy both said they had, sadly, outlived their families, and Kim said her agent and her studio were probably going nuts in L.A. Dana was oddly silent about her husband in Santa Fe. And Grace didn’t bother to answer.

  Nor, I noticed, did Luke. In fact, he had been watching Gabe closely throughout the meal, while at the same not giving an inch to Gabe’s attempts at conversation.

  “What about you, Sarah?” Gabe asked. “Any family?”

  “My mother. She lives in another state,” I said.

  “Anywhere nearby?”

  “Not really. Why?”

  “I just wondered,” he said offhandedly, “if she might be affected in some way by the quake. Before my radio went out, I heard it was felt all the way to Montana and as far south as San Francisco.”

  “Just how did your radio go out?” Luke asked. “I don’t remember being around when you mentioned that.”

  Gabe met his suspicious tone without flinching. “That’s right, you weren’t here when I first arrived. Well, like I told the ladies, I brought a Walkman with me when I came over on the ferry. When that first shock hit, I must have dropped it somewhere. Didn’t even realize it was gone until later.”

  “That’s too bad,” Luke said. “We really could have used a radio—”

  “Wait a minute,” Grace and I said, almost simultaneously.

  I looked at her, and we both knew we’d caught the same thing. I was the first to speak. “The night you arrived here,” I said to Gabe, “you told us you were out chopping firewood when an aftershock hit. You said the radio fell off your railing and got smashed by falling wood.”

  Luke looked sharply back at Gabe. Gabe kept his eyes on me, the ready smile never leaving his face. “Really? I said that? Well, shoot, if I did, it must be true. I guess my memory hasn’t been too keen since all this happened. Shock, I suppose. That’ll do it.”

  His eyes met Luke’s. “Like you not remembering you were at that ravine by yourself, right? Shock. That’s all it is.”

  Luke didn’t answer for a moment. Then he said, “Right. I guess that’s what it is.”

  The tension in the air was so thick, it gave me chills. Suddenly Grace, of all people, jumped up and said brightly, “I’ve got an idea. Let’s do something fun. I’m so damned sick of these long, cold nights and trying to sleep through them.”

  “Fun?” I said, curiously. “What did you have in mind?”

  “I don’t know. Play games? Tell ghost stories? Something.”

  “I know how to drum,” Dana offered. “We could dance around the campfire. Maybe it would bring in some good spirits.”

  Grace let out a groan.

  “No, really,” Dana said. “We’ve got those big, old, empty spring water bottles inside, the ones Timmy had water brought over in for people
who didn’t like the well water. If you turn them upside down, they make perfectly good drums. Wastebaskets, too.”

  “I like the idea,” Kim said. “I was an Indian in a movie once, and—”

  Grace broke in. “You were an Indian? What did you do, dye that red hair?”

  “Well, sure. I can play all kinds of roles. My agent calls me a chameleon.”

  “A chameleon…” Grace said thoughtfully. “Meaning you can fit in anywhere, and be anything, with no one being the wiser?”

  Kim met her challenge. “Yes, I can do that. And somehow, I suspect you can, too, Grace.”

  There was a silence as the two women stared each other down. Then Dana jumped up and grabbed Luke’s hand, and Kim’s. “C’mon, let’s go get us some drums.”

  There were other protests, but for the first time Dana stood her ground, unwilling to play the part this time of the amenable one. “You’ll see,” she said. “It’ll be fun.”

  It turned out to be both more and less than fun. It started with Timmy, Gabe and I following Dana’s direction with simple drumbeats. Timmy sat on a straight chair brought out from the kitchen, complaining that her arthritis was kicking up since we hadn’t had heat or warm baths. I had noticed her limping earlier, and wondered. Gabe and I sat on the ground with the upside-down five-gallon water bottles between our legs, beating on them with our palms.

  “Once you get into the rhythm, it’s hypnotic,” Dana said. “It can even take you into another space.”

  “She’s right,” Kim added. “Think tropic isle, palm trees, reggae.”

  “Think a nice soft bed,” Amelia groused. “Forget palm trees.”

  She was squatting by the fire, teasing the dinner coals into flames. Once Amelia got it going, Dana took her hand and led her, along with Kim and Luke, into forming a circle around the campfire. At first, no one touched, but left a few feet between themselves and each other. As we began to drum faster, however—something that seemed to take us over almost without our volition—they took each other’s hands. Kim made Hollywood-type Indian sounds like “Heyyahh, Ho-yahh,” and danced like someone out of an old fifties’ Geronimo movie. At first I thought that she hadn’t, apparently, seen the more authentic Dances with Wolves. But then it became clear she was simply having fun, trying to make us laugh. In that, she succeeded.

  Luke, after a rather restrained beginning, fell in line and did the same. After a while he had me in stitches, and I remembered from long ago how he could always make me laugh.

  Then I saw his hand reach out to Grace, and their fingertips touch. The look on his face was one I couldn’t fathom. It was intimate in some way that seemed old, as if they’d known each other forever.

  My smile faded, and the aching in my head that I’d almost forgotten, increased.

  Luke leaned over and whispered into Grace’s ear, and she smiled and nodded.

  Dana was watching them, too, and her eyes met mine. The message passed between us: What’s this all about? I shook my head. You’re guess is as good as mine.

  This went on for a few more minutes. Then Luke and Grace parted. Luke came over and grabbed my hand, and Grace took Gabe’s, both of them urging us to get up and dance. That left Timmy alone, but Dana sat with her and took over my drum. Amelia complained that she was out of shape and out of breath. She sat on an upturned tree stump, outside the circle of dancing.

  Now that Dana was drumming, the beat took on a slow, contemporary rhythm, like that of a forties’ dance band. I glanced over at her in surprise, and saw that she had her eyes closed and was swaying sensually back and forth.

  Luke began to draw me closer, and before I knew it we were slow dancing, as if in a ballroom or at a prom. The drumming slowed even more, and over Luke’s shoulder I saw that Grace and Gabe were close now, as well. Grace was more clingy than I’d ever seen her, an arm draped over Gabe’s shoulder, her hand at the back of his neck, teasing his hair. Gabe laughed softly and nuzzled her neck. It occurred to me that catastrophe, like politics, makes strange bed-fellows.

  We two couples were the only ones remaining on the “dance floor,” and the others, including Kim, were silent, watching us. I began to feel that Luke and I were alone on a cloud, that the past three days hadn’t happened, and that, in fact, the past twenty-two years hadn’t, either. It felt like old times, Luke and I dancing in the forest at seventeen, with the music from his parents’ party drifting through the trees. The “old-timers,” as we had loftily called them, were stuck with a wooden dance floor and bright lights, noise, and far too many drunken people. We were the lucky ones—alone in the world, with soft tufts of grass tickling our bare toes and the smell of pine all around.

  As Luke drew me closer, I could feel his heart beat the way it always had against mine, and I could almost hear the familiar pulse in his neck throb as he began to grow hard, pressing into me, his arm tightening around my lower back. His lips at my ear were warm, his breath even warmer. My legs grew weak, and I leaned into him, wanting to feel him the way I always had, wanting never to leave him, and for this night never to end.

  It was almost as if we were kids again, and when Luke’s hand slid up between us to feel my breast, I began to shake. I was so aroused I had to hang onto him, for fear I’d lose control in front of everyone. But a quick glance around showed that Grace and Gabe had disappeared, the drumming had stopped, and everyone else had gone inside. I saw their shadows moving in the candlelit kitchen, heard their voices as they carried over the air.

  Luke whispered, “Let’s go into the woods,” and nothing could have stopped me then. It was just as if we’d been carried back to those years, and none of the terrible things of the last few months, nor of any time in our lives had occurred. Hand in hand we ran into the woods, with only the moonlight guiding us.

  “Here,” Luke said in a soft, urgent voice, then, “no, it’s softer over here.”

  He had found a carpet of grass to cushion us, just as he always had. My white knight, I’d called him, always seeking to protect me, and not only from the uncomfortable ground. Not that the grass helped all that much. Our lovemaking had always been so passionate, we had come out of it scratched and sometimes even bleeding. Our backs, shoulders, legs and arms would tell the tale, and for days we would have to wear clothes that covered them so that our parents wouldn’t know.

  It was no different now. We had each other’s clothes off within seconds, and when my skin touched his again after all those years, it flamed, just as it used to. “You feel so good,” I whispered, and he whispered back, “You, too. Where have we been all these years?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered.

  “I missed you,” he said. “I didn’t realize till now how much I’ve missed you.”

  We had no use for foreplay, and when he came inside me I knew that feeling again, that sense of being with the only one, the one I’d been “created for.” I knew it was silly and romantic, but the words from the Frank Sinatra song “That Old Black Magic” came to mind, and that’s what it felt like. Magic. All the years wiped away, and all the tears gone with them. I was with Luke, and that’s all that mattered. The world was a better place, and anything could happen now. Seattle would be rebuilt, I would win my trial, I would come out of it all right. Luke and I were together again.

  I was so busy concocting this dream, this fantasy, I didn’t even remember that I hadn’t thought about the Allegra case since it disappeared that afternoon. Nor had I wondered again who took it. All that was distant, now, afloat in the far away future. Nothing to worry about here.

  “Oh, there you are!”

  We had fallen asleep, and I looked up to see Grace staring down at us. We were still naked, and I grabbed for my clothes, holding them against me. My head began to throb again.

  “Sorry,” Grace said, though she looked more angry than regretful. “We were worried when you didn’t come back.”

  I felt more naked in front of Grace’s scornful eyes than I’d ever felt with Luke or any man, and I m
anaged to get to my feet and duck behind some bushes, yanking my clothes on. As I was pulling my T-shirt over my head I heard her say in a low voice, “What the hell are you doing? You’re going to ruin everything! We’ll never find—”

  I emerged from the bushes, and Luke made a sound. Grace turned to see me standing there, and broke off in midsentence.

  “Find what?” I said. “What is it you’ll never find?”

  They were both silent, and Luke looked away.

  Finally Grace said, “A way off this damned island, if nobody here can control themselves!”

  “I thought that included you,” I said. “Didn’t I see you go off with Gabe Rossi?”

  Her mouth hardened. “We were talking,” she said. “That’s all.”

  “Must have been some talk. There are twigs in your hair.”

  Quickly, her hand went to her hair, as if belatedly to hide the evidence. There were no twigs, however. I’d been faking her out—something I often did in court with a reluctant witness: “You say you saw my client that night, Mr. Smith? Were you wearing your glasses?”

  If a hand went automatically to the eyes, I knew the witness ordinarily did wear glasses, but not always, since he hadn’t worn them to court. He also possibly was not wearing them the night he allegedly saw my client rob a liquor store. It was enough to create a small doubt in the minds of the jurors. “So you do wear glasses, Mr. Smith. Why aren’t you wearing them now? Why weren’t you wearing them the night of October eighth?”

  Grace had fallen for my trick, which surprised me. I would have thought she’d be sharper than that. Maybe she was still in the throes of passion, and therefore mind-muddled.

  “You know,” she said waspishly, “I’ve been trying to like you.”

  “Well, that’s more than I can say,” I told her.

  With that, I left the two of them alone in the woods. Obviously, they had things to talk about. Like what they had to “find.”

  A small metal case with fishnet stockings in it? I wondered.

  And there I’d gone again—falling for the wrong man.

  I knew, now, that I would have to be doubly on the alert. It was not a pleasant thought, that I would have to be wary of Luke, but I hadn’t become a total idiot there in the woods. Only half a one. He and Grace had banded together for some reason I didn’t know, but I couldn’t disregard the fact that Jane was dead and someone on this island had attacked me. It was certainly a possibility that either Luke, Grace, or both, had had something to do with that.