Woman on the Run (new version)

  It was a good thing he could drive to Rupert blindfolded because he was so easily distracted by the emotions which crossed her expressive face, everything upfront, in vivid Technicolor. Her coloring was so exquisite, from the pearly perfection of her skin with faint peach undertones, to the deep turquoise eyes and the finely arched auburn brows.

  He hadn’t yet explored her entire body. He hadn’t gone down on her; hell, they’d never even made it beyond the missionary position. He’d never become sated enough to try something new. But he did know exactly what made her come and was eager—at some point in the future in which he wasn’t crazy to be in her—to lazily explore new ways to make love. He did know how her nipples tasted, the sexy little moans she made when he fucked her hard—not that he’d ever fucked her any other way—the tight contractions around him when she came…

  Shit. Another hard-on. Good thing he’d kept his suit jacket on. Think about something else, he ordered himself. But his thoughts kept wandering back to Sally. He felt closer to her than he’d ever felt to a woman. Much closer than he’d ever felt to Melissa, that’s for sure.

  Cooper wondered with deep unease whether she found his silences offensive or strange. Melissa had complained loudly and often about his silences, accusing him of ignoring her.

  Sally was a talker. Ordinarily, that would irritate him. He was a loner by temperament and by inclination, but he found himself ineluctably drawn in by her gentle voice as she talked about her week. She was delightful to listen to—articulate and amusing.

  Then as he listened to her, he grew more and more astounded as she described her dealings with the people in Simpson. Was it possible that there were two different towns with the same name? She told him new things about the lives of people he’d known for years. How could she know all this stuff? And why didn’t he know it?

  He learned that there was something called an “empty nest syndrome” and that Maisie Kellogg was suffering from it and that Beth Jensen had had it as well and that Chuck Pedersen was still depressed over Carly’s death. As he listened to her talk about the people he had grown up with, he was amazed and a little saddened. Why didn’t anyone ever say anything to him?

  Where had he been while all this was going on?

  For a while there, as Cooper drove her through the wilderness, Julia thought he didn’t talk to her much because she was a woman. She kept stealing quick glances at his hard, craggy face and finally decided that he was probably an equal-opportunity non-speaker.

  It occurred to her, not for the first time, that she knew his body more intimately than what went on in his head. They’d had the most intense sex she’d ever had in her life, and she couldn’t get him to open his mouth.

  Ordinarily, she wouldn’t press anyone to talk to her if they didn’t want to. Well, all right, she’d rather talk than not any day, but still…you had to respect people’s choices. Even if the choices were hard to understand—like not talking.

  But she was out in the wild now, out in the open. Out where there were no people, only long sweeps of grass. And then, even worse, a few miles out of Simpson the landscape changed and they drove straight into the heart of first-growth forest where tall, frighteningly dark trees blotted out the sun.

  The landscape was as empty as her life.

  Her life. Julia tried hard not to think about what would happen to her life. Later. After the trial, if she made it that far. She wouldn’t really have a life to go back to.

  If she got back.

  She knew perfectly well that her job wouldn’t be waiting for her when she got back. Oh, the company might keep her on, if the government made a fuss about it, but it would be some low-level paper-pushing job, not the real editing she’d finally moved up to.

  In the corporate world, nobody’s leaving left a hole. Corporations were like the ocean. Waves just washed over the empty spaces and you never knew that anyone had been there.

  Federico Fellini was with another family now and as long as he was getting ample rations and no one bothered him, he was perfectly happy. There was no empty space in Boston that she could step back into. She hadn’t been there long enough to put down roots. Actually, she had never been anywhere long enough to put down roots.

  For better or worse, her life in Simpson was her life now.

  She shivered and barely noticed when Cooper bent to turn on the heating system. She wasn’t cold outside, she was cold inside. Cold and miserable and lonely.

  Who knew how many men were gunning for her? Herbert Davis kept trying to sound reassuring when she called, but she could tell he was worried. Worried about the case, worried about the testimony. Worried that she wouldn’t make it.

  Well, so was she.

  Still, as long as she was in a moving vehicle with Cooper, she was probably safe. She didn’t need to look across to the steering wheel to know that his hands were large and competent. That he was tall and strong. That he seemed to know how to do just about anything.

  If they had a flat tire, he could probably hold the vehicle up with a rope held between his teeth and change the tire while fending off marauders. He was, after all, a trained soldier. And to top it all off, there was even a gun in the truck and Cooper had said that he knew how to use it.

  Then again, he had also said he was better with a knife.

  Julia shuddered at the direction her thoughts had taken. She felt completely lost and alone, out of her depth. What was she doing here? In a place where she was a stranger, in the most literal sense of the term. She wanted to drown her black, bleak thoughts but she didn’t have anything to drown them in—not an old film, not a good book, not even some whisky.

  All she had was Cooper. Cooper was very good for drowning bleak thoughts at night. But now it was daytime and they couldn’t have sex, not while he was driving. So he had to talk to her.

  “Cooper?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Talk to me.” Julia could hear the wistful note in her own voice.

  “Talk to you?” Julia could hear the tension in Cooper’s voice. “What do you want me to talk about?”

  “Tell me—tell me about the Cooper Curse,” she said.

  “Fuck. Sorry.” Cooper’s knuckles turned white on the steering wheel. “Where did you hear about that?”

  “Oh…” she stalled. “Just around.”

  “It’s nothing.” Cooper’s voice was low and tight. “A silly legend.”

  “About what?” When he was silent for a long moment, she repeated the question in a soft voice. “A silly legend about what, Cooper?”

  The silence stretched on until it was clear that he wasn’t going to answer. She’d asked twice. To ask again would be impolite. She was formulating a comment about something neutral, something Cooper would perceive as non-threatening, possibly something inanimate, when she heard his low growl. “What do you want to know?”

  He wasn’t happy about it. But he was talking to her and that was better than silence.

  “Well…what is it? I mean, obviously it’s a curse and it affects your family if it’s a Cooper Curse—as opposed to a Smith Curse or a Jones Curse. It must be fascinating to have a family curse,” she said earnestly. “They have such an impeccable literary pedigree. Like The Canterville Ghost.” She turned to Cooper and smiled. “You’re part of a longstanding literary tradition.”

  She thought she heard a little sigh. “Er…” he said, and stopped.

  “Cooper?” She waited a full minute. “You still there?”

  “Yeah.” There were little groupings of houses now. They were approaching Rupert. He sighed. “I told you about my great-great grandfather, didn’t I?”

  “The twelfth of twelve?” Julia nodded. “The guy who built the original McMansion?”

  Cooper nodded. “Right.” They were on the outskirts of Rupert now. Julia hadn’t made it this far on her previous trip, before turning around. She was surprised to see how attractive it was. “He came out West and was granted the statutory hundred and thirty acres. Once he proved
his claim, he got himself a mail-order bride.”

  “Well, that was strange.”

  “It wasn’t strange in those days, it was sheer survival. Men outnumbered women by about a hundred to one. If you wanted a bride and a shot at a family, you had to import her, like you imported whisky and guns.”

  “Only with whisky and guns you could specify the brand, presumably.” Julia refrained from rolling her eyes.

  Cooper shot her an odd glance. “Well…he imported the wrong brand.”

  “What was wrong with her? Was she defective? Short shelf-life?” Cooper winced as he heard the sarcasm in her voice. “Not up to spec? Though I suppose in those days it must have been hard to send items back to the factory.”

  “He fell in love with her,” Cooper said flatly. “She was Irish, like him. Her parents had taken the family over to America during the potato famine, but then they were both taken ill with influenza. This was before antibiotics. She was left on her own at sixteen, which is when she saw the ad in a newspaper. It was either marry a man she’d never met before or starve. She wrote my great-great grandfather and sent him a daguerreotype. My great-great-grandfather burned it later, when she left him, but they say she was a great beauty. He sent her the money and she traveled west. The problems began almost immediately. It seems that my great-great grandfather was a difficult man. A…taciturn man.”

  You don’t say, Julia thought. “Well…” she said kindly, “a glib tongue isn’t everything.”

  Cooper shot her a questioning glance. “No, I suppose not. Still, the people in Simpson could tell that things were going badly.”

  “Simpson existed even back then?” Julia found it hard to imagine that Simpson was what? Over a hundred years old.

  “Yeah. It was just a hole in the wall back then.”

  As opposed to the bustling metropolis it is today, Julia thought. After a moment or two of silence, she gave him a verbal nudge. “So…we have your great-great grandfather, who wasn’t much of a talker, and his beautiful wife. They’re not getting on. They have a child. A boy.”

  Cooper’s head jerked around. “You already know the story,” he said accusingly.

  “Nope.” She sent him a smug smile. “You told me that much. Besides, if they hadn’t had a child, a male child, to carry on the Cooper name, you wouldn’t be here now, telling me all about it, would you?”

  “No, I guess not.” Cooper’s thighs and forearms started dancing again as traffic thickened. If she hadn’t been so interested in the story, Julia would have become completely distracted. “Anyway, to cut a long story short, she stayed just long enough to wean Ethan—”

  “Your great grandfather.”

  Cooper nodded. “My great grandfather. Just long enough to wean him and ensure that he would survive. He was two when my great grandmother ran off. She just up and went one day, nobody knows where.”

  “Didn’t he try to track her down?”

  “Nope. They say he never spoke again.”

  “Wow.” Julia was busy trying to fit all these details into the image she had of Cooper. “Did he ever remarry?”

  “Nope. He just kept working the farm and making a little more money each year. Then he decided to import some stallions. That was the beginning of the stud farm.”

  “So you’re a fifth-generation breeder.” And a fifth generation non-talker. Maybe he was genetically hardwired for non-communication.

  “Yeah.” Cooper allowed himself a small smile. “We’re fairly well-known.”

  That was an understatement. Loren Jensen had told her that the Cooper stud farm was one of the best in the country. “So what happened next?”

  Cooper frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “Cooper.” Julia threw him a reproachful glance. “One bad marriage does not a Curse make. Any curse worth its name needs some bells and whistles. So what happened? Did your great-great grandmother die and haunt the property or something? Or maybe—let’s see—”

  Cooper shook his head. “Nope, it was just an old-fashioned bolt. She never came back. Either in the flesh or in the spirit.”

  “So then what happened?”

  Cooper sighed. “Then my great-grandfather grew up and inherited the farm and imported more horses. He was the one who really started breeding scientifically. He was one of the first in this country to apply Mendelian genetics to horse breeding. He imported three Arabians in 1937…”

  “Cooper…” Julia said in exasperation, “the Curse.”

  “Oh.” He pursed his lips. “Yeah. Well, my great-grandmother had my grandfather and after five years of marriage she ran away with the Singer man.” He thought for a moment. “She took the sewing machine with her.”

  “And your grandmother?”

  Cooper swerved into a parking place. “Ran off with the foreman.”

  “And your mother died when you were small,” Julia said slowly. “And…and your wife left you. That’s all very sad. But where is the Curse in all of this?”

  He was at the passenger door. “Well…” Cooper was looking very unhappy. He helped her down. “I guess people started putting two and two together and coming up with five. The legend is that that no woman—no female—can live on the Double C. That the Double C is cursed to be womanless. By some fluke, we also breed more colts than fillies.” He put a hand to her back and they started walking.

  Julia was silent as they crossed the street. On the other side, she looked up at him, disappointed. “That’s it? That’s the curse?”

  “That’s the curse.”

  “You didn’t leave anything out? No wailing ghosts, no clanking chains?”

  “Nope.”

  “Just Cooper women who run away from Cooper men?”

  Cooper winced. “That’s about the size of it.”

  Julia turned it all over in her mind. “Well…” she said and watched Cooper tense. “I think that’s ridiculous. I can’t believe the things people make up.”

  “You—what?” Cooper stared.

  “I was expecting something more exciting. A curse. A proper one. I mean all you’ve told me is that there have been some troubled marriages in your family. So what? What’s the big deal? That’s not a curse. That’s life.”

  He stopped suddenly, right in the middle of the sidewalk. “Do you mean that?”

  “Sure I do.” She blinked and smiled. “A curse,” she said, waving her hand dismissively. “I think that’s the silliest thing I ever heard.”

  “Me, too,” he said, and she could hear the relief in his voice. “Let’s get going, then. You’ll want some time in the bookshop. Then I know a great place for lunch.”

  Richard Abt, a.k.a. Robert Littlewood, stepped off the curb in Rockville, Idaho. He wasn’t looking where he was going because there was little need to do so. Rockville was a quiet little town and he was in the residential district. Few cars were to be seen on Crescent Drive, which was a quiet, leafy road.

  Abt was lost in thought. He was due to testify in five months’ time, at which point he could go back to his former life, but the thought had little appeal. He wasn’t married and there wasn’t anyone waiting for him. Besides, there was a crying need for accountants in this part of the world. He could settle in nicely here in a private practice.

  Abt was happily immersed in thoughts of setting up a practice of his own—he could quietly put the word around at the next Lion’s Club meeting—when a car suddenly pulled out from the curb.

  He didn’t have a chance.

  By the time the low growl of the engine registered on his startled senses, he was already flying over the hood like a limp, boneless rag.

  “Good story, isn’t it?” Cooper asked quietly. “Just shows what the human spirit can endure.”

  Julia looked up, confused. She had to wrench her attention back to the here and now. She had been totally immersed in Song Li’s story, transported to Vietnam in the early ‘60s. It was a riveting book already in the first few pages. The back blurb promised the history of the Vietnamese conf
lict as seen through the eyes of a young girl growing up during the war.

  Julia knew she was definitely going to buy it. “Have you read it?”

  Cooper nodded.

  Julia closed the paperback and tapped the cover. Salted Earth. “Is it as good as they say it is?” She’d read the reviews when it had been published and had been intrigued, but had never gotten around to reading it.

  “Better.” Cooper put down the pile of books he was carrying and picked it up. “I read it when it first came out. What a hellhole it was over there. It’s a wonder the woman survived in any shape to tell the tale.” His face was remote, unsmiling as if he were remembering something horrible.

  Julia tilted her head and looked at Cooper. His longish black hair was brushed back. His suit was either an Italian design or from an excellent tailor. It was beautifully cut. His tie was silk and echoed the silk square in his jacket pocket. Today, he looked like what he was—a prosperous businessman—except for his hands, which weren’t the smooth, pampered hands of a businessman. They were large and rough—hands used to a lot of manual labor. Despite the elegant suit and the polished loafers, however, he still looked every inch a warrior. “Chuck Pedersen said you won a medal. What was it for? “

  “Not the war.” Cooper pulled in a deep breath. “Flight 101,” he said grimly.

  “Cooper!” Julia was stunned. Wars were remote events, played out somewhere far away. Flight 101 had been hijacked on American soil—at JFK, not ten miles from where she had just started her studies at Columbia. She had watched the tragedy of Flight 101 unfold on CNN. The whole country had remained glued to their TV sets for four days and four nights, praying for the hostages. Everyone had followed the terrifying sequence of events live—the terrorists’ demands, the stalled negotiations and the horrifying sight of seven of the hostages being shot from the open cockpit, their bodies dropped on the tarmac one by one. “That little girl.” The memory of it had Julia’s stomach clenching. “Were you there when—when—” She couldn’t say it.