"You should have told him everything."
She looked up to find Nick scowling at her from where he'd been holding vigil at the front window. "He wouldn't have believed any of it," she said. "Not without proof."
"What if this guy takes it a little bit farther next time?"
“I don't know," she snapped. "I'll just have to be alert, be careful."
She'd managed to avoid him for all of the twenty minutes it took for him to tape a sheet of polyurethane over the broken pane. Now that he was finished, she was quickly realizing Nick Bastille wasn't a man who could be avoided if he didn't want to be.
She busied herself preparing a pail of detergent and bleach and carried it to the living room to wash away the remaining blood.
"I need to check on Dutch," Nick said. "He's been alone all day." He grimaced. "I don't want to leave you here alone."
"I'll be fine. Don't worry about me."
"Come with me," he said. "I'll introduce you to my father and fix the three of us dinner."
Surprised--and inordinately pleased--by the invitation, Nat looked up from her cleaning to find him staring down at her with an intensity that unnerved. Even with everything that had happened, she found her mind wandering to the intimacies they'd shared in the moments before the window had been shattered. The memory jarred her back to reality, and she shook her head. "I've got things to do here," she said.
"I make a pretty mean gumbo."
"Nick ... "
"I don't like the idea of your being here by yourself."
"Look, I know Alcee. He'll send a deputy by." But she figured they both knew the chief's deputies hated her as much as everyone else in Bellerose. "I'll be fine.”
"The house is secure," Nick said, but he didn't look happy about leaving. "The windows and doors are locked down tight."
Trying hard to ignore the chill that passed through her at the thought of his leaving, she plucked off her rubber gloves and got to her feet. "I'll lock up behind you."
He stared at her long enough to make her uncomfortable, then said, "Nat, about what happened ... "
For an instant, she wasn't sure if he meant the kiss or the doll incident, and it make her feel foolish.
"I just wanted you to know . . . I didn't mean for things to get out of hand."
She pretended to wave off the apology as if it were nothing. "We were wound up pretty tight after leaving the Ratcliffes."
"Adrenaline dump does that sometimes."
She nodded her agreement, but she didn't think either of them believed it. "I don't think either of us is ready for ... "
Because she didn't quite know how to finish the sentence, she let her words trail.
"Ready for what?"
"Each other." She sighed. "I'm a widow, Nick."
Never taking his eyes from hers, he shifted his weight from one foot to the other. "You didn't taste like a widow when you were kissing me. You didn't feel like one when you were pressed up against me."
She tried to deny the quick rise of heat, but couldn't because she'd liked kissing Nick Bastille. For a few precious moments he'd made her feel like a human being, He'd made her feel like a woman. He'd made her feel cherished and alive. Like maybe she had something to live for besides revenge.
"You'd better go check on your dad," she said.
For a moment he looked as if he wanted to say more. Instead, he gave her a look that was half smile, half resignation and turned on his heel and walked out the door.
# # #
Nick cursed himself all the way to his truck, got behind the wheel, and cursed himself some more. Of all the idiotic things he could have done, kissing Nat Jennings was at the top of the list He had enough problems of his own without getting tangled up with a woman. Of all the women in Bellerose he could have developed a hard-on for, why did it have to be her? Hadn't he learned his lesson with Tanya?
But he knew Nat wasn't anything like Tanya. His ex-wife had brought her troubles down on herself. Nat was a victim of circumstance. Some very brutal circumstances, he thought, and remembering her tears, felt a surprisingly sharp pang of guilt. Guilt for pushing when he shouldn't have. Guilt because she'd been hurting, and he'd taken advantage of the situation. She'd needed a friend. not some sex-crazed ex-con.
Maybe he should take Mike Pequinot up on his offer of a hooker. Maybe sex would get this monkey off his back. But Nick had a sinking feeling that it wasn't going to be that simple. Now that he'd had a taste of Nat, there was no way some woman with a pretty face and the morals of an alley cat was going to do the trick.
Rapping his palm against the wheel, he cranked up the engine and tore out of the driveway. He hit the road doing fifty and didn't slow down until the turnoff for the Cypress Creek Mobile Home Park on the south edge of Bellerose. He knew he should have driven straight to the farm to check on Dutch, but this was one thing that wouldn't wait.
He pulled up next to the collage of mailboxes and spotted the name he was looking for. He pulled onto the crushed shell lane and idled past a dozen rusty, broken down trailer homes. Halfway down the street, he parked the truck and cut the engine.
The symphony of the swamp met him through the open window. The incessant buzz of mosquitoes. The chirping of crickets. The grunting of pig frogs. The sun bad dipped below the tree line, casting the forest in shadows. The bayou seemed to sense the coming of night.
Nick left the truck and crossed to the rusty blue-and-white trailer. The place was worse than he'd imagined, and he felt a hard tug of guilt that this was where his son had spent the last years of his short life. He ascended the metal steps and knocked on the dented aluminum door.
A moment later, the door swung open, and he found himself looking at his ex-wife. She had a beer in one hand, a cigarette in the other. She didn't look very happy to see him. ''What the hell are you doing here?"
"Can I come in?”
"Why?"
"Who's there, baby?" came a gruff male voice from somewhere inside the trailer.
"Nobody," she snapped.
Nick looked away, then back at his wife. "I don't care if you have company. I just want to talk for a moment. It won't take long.”
"Who the hell you talkin' to out there?" A man with shoulder-length brown hair, a salt-and-pepper beard, and a belly the size of a Volkswagen came up beside her and gave Nick a narrow-eyed glare. "Quoi tu veux?" What do you want?
"Jacky, this is my ex-husband, Nick Bastille," Tanya said quickly.
The man belched his eyes never leaving Nick. "You going to hassle her, or what?"
"I just need to ask her a few questions." Nick turned his attention to Tanya. "It's important."
Scratching his belly, the man turned away and sauntered back to the living room. Tanya stared at Nick as if she wasn't quite sure what to do next. “You want a beer or something?"
"No."
"Come on in."
Nick didn't want to go inside. He didn't want to see how his ex-wife lived, how his son had lived. He didn't want to know if she'd had men in her bed while his son had lain in his bed and listened. Nick wasn't a jealous man; he'd long since stopped caring about with whom his ex-wife slept. But it bothered him that his young son had been exposed to a lifestyle he should have been protected from. That Nick hadn't been there to protect him.
Tanya opened the door wider, and he stepped into the trailer. The night was hot and humid. The air conditioner rattling in the kitchen window did little to cool the interior. The place reeked of cigarette smoke, cheap carpet. and yesterday's dinner, heavy on the onions.
Tanya crossed to an ancient refrigerator and bent to retrieve a beer. "What brings you out here?" She handed him a beer.
Even though he didn't want it, Nick uncapped it and drank deeply, thankful it was cold. “I need to talk to you about Brandon."
She stared at him as if he'd plunged a knife into her stomach. After Brandon's death, it had been Tanya who'd needed to talk about it, and Nick who'd been unable to do so. But after learning that his son's death hadn't been a
n accident, he knew there was no way around the subject, and no one to do anything about it except him.
"What do you want to know?" she asked warily.
"I need to know what happened that day."
She lifted her hand and dragged hard on the cigarette, then looked at him through the thin cloud of smoke with narrowed eyes. "Why?"
"Because I'm his father."
''Look, if you're looking to lay the blame--"
"I don't want to lay blame anywhere," he said. "I just want to know what happened. What you saw. I need to see the place where he—" Drowned. Nick still couldn't say the word. Even after two years, he couldn't bear to think of his son dying that way, a thought made infinitely worse by the possibility that he'd been murdered.
She crushed out her cigarette in an ashtray teeming with butts. "Let me get my shoes on."
Nick watched her walk to the rear of the trailer. Slouched on the sofa, watching a small black-and-white television, her lover contemplated him with dispassionate eyes.
"Tough thing losing a kid that way," he said.
"Yeah, it was tough.”
"A lot of folks in town blamed her," the other man continued. "Still do, in fact. Saying she was drunk and passed out in her bed."
"Was she?"
"Coulda been. She's been known to tie one on occasionally." He took a long swig of beer. "But she wasn't drunk that night."
"How do you know?"
"I was with her up until almost midnight the night before it happened. We'd been down at The Gator, having us a drink. But I was working third shift at the mill that night, so we came back here around eleven thirty or so. Baby-sitter--Cora Anders from two trailers down--had put Brandon in bed. Tanya herself was in bed asleep and sober as a nun in church when I left."
"She could have gone back to The Gator after you left."
"She didn't."
Nick wasn't going to argue with him. If the other man hadn't figured out by now that Tanya was a liar and an alcoholic, it wasn't his place to enlighten him. The man would find out soon enough.
He looked down at the lock on the door. It was a cheap bolt lock, the kind you could find at any discount or hardware store. The kind a five-year-old would have no problem unlocking if his mom was in bed, and he wanted to go out and play ...
Tanya came down the hall wearing a pair of sneakers without socks. She looked gaunt and unhappy, and for a moment he couldn't believe she was the young woman he'd married just eight years earlier. Because he didn't want her lover tagging along, Nick made eye contact with her, then walked out the door. He waited on the metal steps for her to join him. She came out a moment later. She'd lit another cigarette, and the beer in her hand was full and cold.
"I want you to tell me exactly what happened, exactly what you saw," he said. “Then I want you to take me through every step of how you think it happened."
"Oh, Nicky, I did that for the cops. I don't wanna--"
"Now you can do it for me." When she didn't say anything, he gave her a hard look. "You owe me that much."
She tilted the bottle of beer and drank deeply, then wiped her mouth on her arm. "I don't like talking about it.”
“I don't like talking about it, either. But I need to know what happened."
Cursing beneath her breath, she descended the metal steps. Neither of them spoke as she took him across the crushed-shell street to a wide path cut into the woods. "Brand and I used to walk back here sometimes, just to get out of the trailer, especially when it was hot." She swatted at a mosquito as they entered the woods.
"He ever come out here by himself? Or maybe with another child?"
She shook her head. “There's only one other kid in the trailer park. She's a little older and didn't like playing with Brand."
They walked a couple more minutes. Around them, the bayou teemed with life. Somewhere nearby, an owl hooted. Something rustled in the dead leaves off to his left. The path veered right and took them to a wide pond with a black -glass surface. The bank was muddy but gently sloped. The opposite shore was crowded with reeds as tall as a man.
Nick knew immediately this was where his little boy had died. Such a pretty, peaceful place. He could feel the old pain encroaching, an invading army marching through him, tearing at his insides with steely bayonets.
His heart was pounding when he crossed to the muddy bank and looked out over the water. Beyond, cypress and pine loomed forty feet into the air, blocking the dim light of dusk. Knobby cypress knees jutted from the black water like the legs of old men. For a moment, he could do nothing but stare and try like hen to keep a handle on his emotions.
''Tell me what happened," he heard himself say.
Tanya held her ground behind him, as if she didn't want to venture too close to the water. "I knew something was wrong the moment I woke up," she said. "One minute I was sound asleep. The next I was sitting up in bed. My heart was pounding so hard I thought I was having a heart attack or something."
"What time was that?" he asked.
She looked away, but not before he saw the shame on her face. ''Ten o’clock."
Nick held his tongue against the quick rise of anger and tried hard not to judge her. But Tanya hadn't been a good mother, and there was a part of him that hated her for that. A part of him that blamed her because she'd let their five-year-old child play alone in a dangerous place.
"I ran out of the bedroom and down the hall. Brand was usually in his room, playing. But he wasn't there that morning. And he wasn't at the table."
"Was the front door locked?"
She shook her head. "Closed but not locked."
"You'd locked it the night before?"
"I always lock it, Nicky. I swear."
"You think Brand unlocked it and went out?"
She nodded. "The chain, too."
"So what happened next?"
"Once I realized he wasn't in the house, I started getting worried. I ran outside and called for him. I swear, I thought I'd find him playing with his little matchbox cars in the driveway. He liked to do that sometimes. When I didn't find him there, I got scared. I ran over to the neighbor's trailer and asked her if she'd seen him. She hadn't, so I started looking for him."
She looked down at the muddy bank. Tears shone on her cheeks, but she didn't bother to wipe them off. "I didn't come into the woods right away. I searched the trailer again, under his bed, in his closet. I looked in the car. I even looked in the crawl space beneath the trailer. "But he wasn't anywhere. That's when I knew." Tears shimmered in her eyes when she looked at him. "I ran down the path you and I just took. It was raining and muddy, but I didn't care. I knew what had happened even before I saw his little body." A sound that was pure anguish escaped her. It was the sound of a mother's grief. Of self-recrimination because she knew in her heart that an innocent child shouldn't have been left alone.
"He was laying facedown by the reeds over there." She pointed to the far side of the pond. "He looked so little and pale. I don't remember going into the water. You know I don't swim, and I sure don't like snakes. But the next thing I knew I was standing in water up to my chest and holding him in my arms. I tried to breathe into his mouth, to get some oxygen into his lungs like they do on TV. But he was just limp. And cold. His little head kept lolling back. His eyes were only half open, and his tongue ... oh dear Lord, seeing him like that ...”
Nick had imagined the scene a thousand times in the two years since it had happened. Times when he hadn't been able to hurt or cry or even grieve. Times when he'd had to rely on an endless supply of anger and outrage just to get him through the day. But hearing the words firsthand, standing in the very place where his little boy had lost his life--possibly at the hands of a killer--was almost too much to bear.
Closing his eyes tightly, Nick put the heels of his hands against his eyes. "Le bon Dieu mait la main." God help.
Standing a few feet away, Tanya dropped to her knees in the mud, put her face in her hands and began to sob. Nick knew he should go to h
er, offer her comfort. But he didn't have any comfort to give. There was too much bitterness inside him. Too much grief. Too much blame. Too little forgiveness.
Instead, he turned away from her and walked to the bank closest to the place where she'd found Brand's body and looked out over the water. He took a deep breath. Another and another and slowly the grief began to recede into its deep, black hole.
"Did you see anyone else here that day?" he asked.
She slowly got to her feet. Her knees were caked with mud, but she didn't seem to notice. The cigarette between her fingers had burned out at some point, but she hadn't noticed that, either. She crossed to him and looked out at the water.
"If there had been anyone around, they would have heard me screaming and come to help."
Nick stared hard at her. "Are you absolutely certain?"
She raised her gaze to his. He saw the question in her eyes, and he knew she was wondering what he was getting at. Her face was wet with tears. A black streak of mascara extended from her left eye to her nostril. The face of grief, he thought.
He saw the same thing in his own face. In Nat's. So much grief for one small town . . .
"I didn't see anyone."
"How long before the police arrived?" he asked.
"God, Nick. It could have been five minutes. It could have been five hours." She lifted the cigarette as if to draw on it. realized it had gone out, and tossed it to the ground. "I carried him to shore." Her face screwed up and she began to cry again. "I didn't want to put him down because I didn't want him to get muddy. That's so stupid. He was covered with moss and dirty swamp water. He was wearing the new sneakers I'd just picked up at Wal-Mart. I didn't want him to get them dirty.”
"Did you notice anything else about him?"
"Like what?"
"Did he have any bruises? Anything like that?"
She blinked as if the question had surprised her. "I don't think so. I don't know. I was so upset. ... "
Nick chose his next words carefully. "Did you ever ...lose your temper with him, Tanya? Maybe grab his arm a little too tightly?"
Her mouth opened. Her eyes widened. She made a choking sound. "God no! Nick, how could you ask such a thing?"