The Scent of Rain and Lightning

  She felt safe inside the great vault of a house, and protected by the storm.

  And yet, what she wanted to do in that instant was leave. Not forever. Just for this moment, this wild moment when she felt the thunder in her bones. She wanted to run outside, naked, into the rain and lightning and let it pour on her and flash around her and scare her, and she wanted to keep running until she was out of Rose, out of her marriage, out of her life, away from her child, just for a little while.

  “Or, maybe I’d never come back,” she dared herself, putting the glass down.

  She thought she heard noises on the kitchen porch, muffled by the storm.

  At the sink, she tensed, listening, but didn’t run to put on clothes.

  Then she heard the kitchen door open behind her, heard the rushing sound of the noise of the storm coming in, heard it cut off when the door closed.

  She gripped the edge of the sink and closed her eyes.

  The storm was so loud she couldn’t hear the stocking-clad footsteps coming toward her, so the first she knew of his presence at her back was when his hands came around and cupped her breasts.

  She gasped and leaned back into him.

  “I thought you’d be with Belle,” she murmured as Meryl’s hands moved down, and she gasped again. “Why aren’t you with Belle?”

  “Because I can’t be until we’re married,” her husband’s best friend said as he turned her to face him. “Because it practically killed me not to screw her tonight when she begged for it. Because you called me, you little troublemaker, and told me he’d be gone tonight. Because it could be a long time before we get a chance like this again.”

  “What?” she mocked him. “Not because you love me?”

  “No,” he said, leaning down to kiss her. “Because I want you, and you want me.”

  She always had wanted him in this way and this way only, in those years when Meryl Tapper was still slim, and athletic, good-looking and sexy. They’d been Homecoming King and Queen together when he was a junior and she was only a freshman, but she’d never had her eye on Meryl for anything but fun, and he’d never had his eyes on her for anything but that, either. They had their hooks set for bigger prizes—the Linders, Belle and Hugh-Jay, and even managed to convince themselves, sometimes, they loved them.

  “Did you park in back?”

  “I left my truck at my office and walked over.”

  He was in his socks, which were wet clear through.

  “Walked?” she laughed. “You really wanted this.”

  “So much I barely could walk,” he said, making them both laugh at his dirty joke.

  She gave him a teasing look. “What are you waiting for?”

  Without taking off his own clothes, just unzipping his jeans, Meryl lifted her and took her once with her back against the sink, the metal rim cutting into her until her skin broke and she bled and complained to him. Then he led her upstairs—moving so fast they knocked over a chair, and laughed about that, too. On the second floor, she stepped ahead of him, pulling him to the small guest room at the end of the hall, where they always went, because they didn’t want to leave any clues in the master bedroom for Hugh-Jay to find, not that he’d ever in a million years suspect what they did now and then, they assured themselves whenever they did it.

  “Do you feel guilty?” she asked him as he pushed into her again.

  Hugh-Jay never talked during sex; he treated it like a sacred ritual, making love to her in reverent silence as if she were a virgin every time. It irritated and bored her so much that she did everything she could to get it over with quickly. Sex was supposed to be fun, it wasn’t supposed to be church.

  “No, I don’t feel guilty, do you?” he asked. “It’s not as if we don’t care about them.”

  “I know. Want to meet me out of town somewhere?”

  “What?” Right in the middle of things, he laughed, which she loved. She loved the fact that they didn’t take it seriously. Her back felt raw and bruised and it stung where he had rammed her into the edge of the sink, but the pain pleased her, as if it were a badge of sexual merit, like hickeys and whisker burns used to be when they were kids in high school. The evidence of their mating had changed, but the cause remained the same, and she also loved that and wanted to show it off by wearing hip-hugger jeans or a bikini.

  “Where?” he asked.

  “The Broadmain Hotel. In Colorado.”

  Meryl laughed again. “You mean the Broadmoor?”

  “Yes! Annabelle is giving me five days there.”

  She’d inched it up from three days.

  “On your own? Without Hugh-Jay?”

  “Uh-huh. You could come, too. They’d never know.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  Laurie grinned. “Because she loves me best.”

  “Everybody does,” he said, and pushed in deep enough to make her squeal.

  Even now, when Meryl was an attorney with the potential for making okay money, she still felt she’d made the right and practical choice in marrying Hugh-Jay. Maybe she could have had it all by marrying Meryl, but the “all” that Meryl could offer wasn’t anywhere near as much as being a Linder could do for her—and for her children’s future, she thought with righteous virtue. And marrying her wasn’t anywhere near as helpful to Meryl as marrying the Linders’ only daughter might be. He would be their attorney, the ranches’ main attorney, recommended to all their friends; his future was made, as was hers …

  Provided Hugh-Jay overlooked that little money thing …

  “Think about it,” she murmured, meaning the trip.

  “Are you kidding? That’s probably all I’ll be thinking about now.”

  She laughed, and made excited noises to encourage him, which made him groan and work harder. He imprisoned her wrists above her head, slamming them hard against the backboard of the bed, which startled and thrilled her. She played as if she were trying to get away by twisting and turning beneath him, and that turned him on more. He told her she was the most beautiful, sexy woman in the world and no other woman would ever be as good in bed as she was, and he would always want her, and that she would always know this was what he was thinking of whenever he looked at her, wherever they were, in church, at their in-laws’ house, across a supper table, even when he was standing at the altar of his own wedding, and when she heard that, she let him do whatever he wanted to do to her.

  It was just for fun, no harm intended, no feelings to be hurt.

  IN SPITE OF THE STORM—or because he was so worried and anxious he was oblivious to it—Hugh-Jay made a quick stop at Bailey’s for a shot of courage and a hamburger before going home. There, he heard from several people about the argument—and near physical fight—between Billy Crosby and his brothers. He heard about the swing Billy took at Laurie, and how he got tossed out into the driving rain by his youngest brother and Bailey. He heard that his father and brothers were staying at the motel, that Belle had gone to spend the night at her bank/museum, and that his brother Chase had seen to it that Laurie got a ride home.

  He stayed for a second beer, just to hear about the whole thing.

  By the time he left, whatever small bit of tolerance Hugh-Jay had left for Billy Crosby was gone, just as all sympathy for Billy had disappeared from the hearts of the rest of his family and from nearly every other person in Rose.

  He felt so angry about Billy’s swinging at Laurie he could have killed him.

  He ran through the rain again, climbed into his truck one more time, and drove home past the motel where the other men in his family were. When they wanted to know in the morning why he was home, he’d tell them he started to Colorado late and the storm had prevented him from going all the way. He hoped he could lie about it. According to his mom, he was terrible at lying.

  He parked behind his house and hurried from his truck to the back porch with his head down against the rain, seeing nothing but the ground ahead of him, which was how he noticed boot prints in the mud. Some man had
come this way, running at a loping trot, from the look of the spacing and depth of the prints. Hugh-Jay stepped into them, squashing them to flatness and mixing them with his own prints. They were filled with rainwater almost a second after he lifted each boot, and eventually they disappeared as the rain flattened the mud and everything ran and eroded. At the porch, Hugh-Jay took off his own wet, muddy boots and then his socks, which would only get soaked on the floor of the porch if he left them on. He looked for the boots the other person had worn but didn’t see them. Maybe whoever it was had knocked, Laurie didn’t answer, and he left again. Hugh-Jay looked back for prints going in the other direction, but it was too dark to see.

  He stepped into his house barefoot and dripping.

  A lightning flash showed him a picture that jolted his adrenaline.

  Beside the table where’d he sat for lunch, a chair was overturned.

  A familiar straw hat with a tightly rolled and blackened brim lay on the floor, as if it had fallen off its owner’s head and then been crushed, as if somebody had stepped on it during a struggle.

  Billy’s hat.

  The moment Hugh-Jay saw it, he panicked and thought, Laurie!

  Billy was drunk, he was angry, he was crazy, and he’d already tried to attack her at Bailey’s.

  He raised his face to the ceiling, heart pounding, listening.

  He pulled off his rain slicker, let it fall, and kept moving.

  He wanted to shout his wife’s name but didn’t dare. What if Billy had a gun?

  Desperate to find and rescue his wife, terrified of what kind of revenge a drunken Billy Crosby might be taking on her even at this moment, but also realizing the urgent need to move silently, Hugh-Jay took long strides to his office on the first floor and went immediately to his gun case, where the key was in the lock.

  He pulled out a long-barreled pistol, his favorite of his small arms.

  It was powerful, sharp of aim, straight of shot, and after the thirty seconds it took him to arm it, loaded.

  The gun held in front of him, he hurried down the first-floor hallway, finally grasping that the noise of the storm covered every sound he made, though that meant it also covered every sound that might be coming from upstairs.

  What if Billy hadn’t taken her to the second floor?

  He raced through the other rooms on the first floor, cursing himself for the delay when he didn’t find anyone. He reached the upper landing and quickly checked the rooms there. Master bedroom and bath, second bath, large guest room, Jody’s room, leaving only one to go. With a speed born of fear and fury, he covered the remaining few feet of carpet, burst into the room, and saw the two figures on the bed, the man on top of the woman. His heart clenched with the pain of heartache, betrayal, and outrage as he yelled, “Billy! Get off of her!”

  Hugh-Jay’s voice—harsh, furious, frightened, and sounding nothing like normal—was unrecognizable to the couple in bed. Laurie, seeing a dark and threatening figure in the doorway, screamed. Meryl, rolling off of her, saw the same shadow, but also saw the shape of the gun, and he lunged at the man’s waist. As they fell together to the floor, Hugh-Jay pointed the gun down at the man he still thought was Billy Crosby, but the man moved at the last moment, shoving the gun backward. The bullet fired into Hugh-Jay’s own abdomen, knocking him back onto the carpet.

  Deafened and shocked by the noise and light of the shot, Meryl saw and heard darkness for several moments. It was only when Laurie began screaming Hugh-Jay’s name that he realized whose blood he had all over him.

  “Oh, my God,” he said. “Oh, my God. Oh, no. Oh, God, please no.”

  Meryl Tapper helplessly watched his friend and his future bleed to death on the carpet.

  MERYL STOOD in the shower in the spare bathroom on the second floor with his clothes on, holding a naked Laurie by her upper arms as she screamed and wept. Hugh-Jay’s blood washed from his face, his hair, his neck and arms, his clothes. Her arms where he held her washed pink from the blood on his hands and from the spots on her body where it had splattered onto her. A bit of it had reached her lips, which terrified her when she realized it by tasting it. He thought she might claw her own tongue out in her frantic attempts to get the blood off of it.

  Afterward, he wrapped her in a towel and held her.

  “What will we do?” Laurie cried, shaking and sobbing. “What will we do?”

  Meryl went over multiple scenarios in his head, just as if he were still in law school reviewing evidence from case histories and trials. There were no working phones. They couldn’t call the sheriff, or call for help for Hugh-Jay, even if it weren’t too late for that. He was dead, not instantly, but quickly from the gushing blood they were helpless to stem.

  They could drive to Henderson City to report it, they could …

  We could what? Meryl asked himself as his own teeth chattered with cold fear.

  He made himself keep thinking: If they told the story truly, then Laurie was an adulterer and he was as good as one, and they would forever be held responsible for Hugh-Jay’s death even if nobody thought they’d meant to kill him. But how many people would believe that? Who would believe it was an accident?

  Not many, Meryl thought, wanting to throw up.

  And the Linders … oh, God, he thought, the Linders.

  “I can’t have been here,” he finally said to her. “I was never here tonight.”

  “What about me?” she screamed at him.

  “You have to leave.”

  “Leave? But—”

  “This house. Rose. So people think somebody took you.”

  “What?” She looked at him as if he were insane.

  “Laurie, we have to get you out of here. It has to look as if somebody broke in here and raped and kidnapped you and killed Hugh-Jay when he tried to protect you.”

  “I can’t do that!” She looked stunned, confused. “Where would I go?”

  “We’ll figure that out. I’ll take you somewhere tonight, and then we’ll figure out the rest of it.”

  “Come with me!”

  “What?”

  “Meryl, come with me. We’ll go away together! It will be all right.”

  “No, it won’t, it will never be all right if we do that. I have to stay here. I have to go back to my office and get up in the morning and act as if I was there all night after I left Belle. You have to be gone, where nobody can find you, and then when they do, you have to pretend you were taken.”

  “I can’t do that!”

  “Yes, you can. You have to. Get dressed. Don’t bring anything. Not your purse. Nothing.”

  “I don’t want to, Meryl!”

  “Would you rather be charged with his murder?”

  “What? But we didn’t—”

  “Can you prove that? They’ll want us to prove that, and we can’t.”

  “Maybe he killed himself, we could say he—”

  “Because he found us in bed? No, I don’t think we want that, either.”

  “Meryl, I can’t do what you say I should do. I can’t—”

  “Go put on some clothes. Whatever you need later, I’ll get it for you.”

  When she wouldn’t budge, he ran into her bedroom and took the first thing he saw: her yellow sundress. He came back and put it over her head, pulling it down over her body. Then he picked her up and carried her outside before he remembered he didn’t have his truck. “Shut up,” he told her, so the neighbors wouldn’t hear her during moments when the storm died down. Fearful of being witnessed now, she acquiesced to his plan, even telling him to use Billy Crosby’s truck, which was behind the garage.

  They rolled it silently down to the street.

  With the storm still boiling all around them, Meryl drove her out to Testament Rocks over dirt and gravel roads that made the going slippery and treacherous and threatened to dump them into ditches. They drove through low places where the water came halfway up the tires, and once the truck got stuck and he had to rock it from drive to park and back again severa
l times in order to rock it into moving again.

  “Why here?” Laurie screamed at him when he stopped the truck. The windshield wipers revealed glimpses of the huge rock formations that loomed over the dark, desolate landscape.

  “Because nobody else in the world will be here during this storm.”

  “What if you get stuck on your way back into town, or on your way back to pick me up?”

  “I won’t get stuck. You saw how I got out of that already.”

  “You can’t leave me here alone like this!”

  “I have to go back and take care of things at your house before the storm stops,” he yelled back at her. He knew he couldn’t think straight about how to cover their tracks if he also had to cope with her hysteria. “You can get under that shelf of rock over there. You’ll be okay. Wait for me—”

  “Like I have a choice!”

  “I’ll come back for you when I finish cleaning everything up and we’ll figure this out.”

  When she wouldn’t budge from the truck, Meryl came around to her side, flung open her door and forced her out. She was sobbing and screaming about rain and Hugh-Jay and Jody, and she beat on Meryl as he picked her up again and carried her to where he wanted her to be.

  “Laurie, our lives depend on this. I swear I’ll come back for you!”

  She clung and he forced her to let go and pushed her away. She tried to run after him but he was faster. He left Laurie standing in the middle of nowhere with only the furious storm and the huge rocks for company.

  When he drove away, leaving her in rain, thunder, lightning, and isolation, she was so terrified and furious that she half climbed, half ran up one of the huge rock formations to watch his headlights abandon her.