Noiselessly Jackson tossed her skirt and blouse to her and motioned for her to get dressed.
She couldn’t move. The thought of the police just outside the door made her feel sick with fright. What would happen to them? She began to panic, but Jackson’s hand, strong and warm, settled over her shoulder.
“It’ll be all right,” he whispered, though she didn’t believe him. But it was nice to have him try to comfort her, and she flew into action, throwing on her clothes before anyone saw her nakedness.
Jackson, too, was trying to get dressed. Wincing against the pain ripping down his leg, he struggled into his jeans. His calf and knee had swollen and with the added thickness of his bandage, he had trouble sliding his wounded leg into the tight-fitting Levi’s.
The pounding on the door resumed, and Jackson, limping visibly, slipped to the back of the house, where he carefully peered through the kitchen windows. Rachelle followed him and watched his handsome face fall.
“No way out,” he whispered, cursing under his breath.
“Maybe we should hide.”
“From the sheriff’s department? They’ve got dogs, Rachelle.”
The thought of the police terrified her. Sirens, guns, lights, dogs… “But—”
His face was filled with compassion. “We’ve got no choice.”
She glanced past him to the window. “You mean they’ve got us surrounded—just like in all those crummy old Westerns?” she asked, following his uneven strides back to the den.
“That’s about the size of it.” His gaze swung around the room where morning light was piercing through the shades and the smell of warm ashes, tallow and sex still lingered. The quilt had slid to the floor but throw pillows were still piled on the end of the couch that had supported their heads. Rachelle’s throat tightened at the sight of this, their love nest.
“Moore! Come out with your hands over your head!” the deputy ordered, his voice hard.
“I hear you!” Jackson replied. “Give me a second.”
“Now!”
Jackson swiped his jacket from the screen and tossed Rachelle hers. “Big trouble,” he said, staring into her eyes so deeply that her heart turned over. “I’m sorry.”
“Not me.” She gulped, but tilted her chin upward. Panic seized her, and her stomach clenched into a hard ball.
“You will be,” he predicted as he twined his fingers through hers. He sucked on his lower lip for a minute as he stared at her, then, in a gesture she’d remember the rest of her life, he drew her close, fingers still interlaced, and touched his lips to hers in a chaste kiss that melted most of her fears. “I’ll never forget last night.”
“Me neither.” Tears threatened her eyes as hand in hand they walked to the front door. She felt dead inside, certain that her life—as she’d known it for the past seventeen years—was over, but at least she and Jackson were together, she reminded herself, tossing her tangled hair away from her face and holding her shredded blouse together. What a sight they must make.
“Comin’ out,” Jackson yelled as he opened the door with a decisive turn of his wrist. He and Rachelle stepped onto the front porch. It was early, just after dawn, and there was still a thick mist rising off the lake.
Three cars from the sheriff’s department were parked in the drive. Six officers, weapons drawn, were staring grim-faced at them, sighting their guns as if Rachelle and Jackson were dangerous fugitives who had escaped the law.
Rachelle thought she might faint.
“Let her go,” one deputy ordered, and Jackson released her hand as if it had suddenly seared him.
“No—“ she whispered, but was cut off.
“You’re Rachelle Tremont?” another officer demanded.
She nodded dully. What was this all about? They were trespassing, true, but the somber faces and loaded weapons of the officers reeked of much more heinous crimes than even a possible kidnapping charge. “Jackson?” she whispered.
“Move away from him,” a voice barked.
“But—”
“Move away from him. Now!”
Her spine stiffened in silent rebellion though she was scared to her very soul. With her throat dry as a desert wind, she moved on wooden legs, feeling the distance between Jackson and herself becoming more than physical; as if by walking away from him, she was creating an emotional chasm that might never be bridged again. His expression turned harsh and defensive, and he only glanced at her once, without a glimmer of the kindness or even the cynical humor she’d seen the night before.
Slowly Jackson raised his hands, palms forward into the air, and the officers rushed him. Two grabbed his arms, while another threw him up against the side of the house and quickly frisked him. Rachelle looked on in horror.
“Hey, man, I’m not carrying—”
“Shut up!”
Jackson snapped his mouth closed while another deputy read him his rights.
Rachelle was nearly dragged by yet another to one of the deputies, down the steps and to the cruiser.
“What’s going on?” she demanded, shaking and pulling back, her head craned to look over her shoulder so that she could keep Jackson in view. Her blouse gaped, and she caught it with cold fingers.
“Just get inside, Miss Tremont.”
“But why are you doing this?”
Jackson was being stuffed into another car from the sheriff’s department, and once the deputies had slammed the cruiser’s heavy door shut, they slid into the front seat and flicked on the engine. With red and blue lights flashing, the car roared down the puddle-strewn drive.
“We’re taking you to the department to ask you a few questions,” a short deputy with a bushy red mustache explained. His name tag read Daniel Springer.
“Why?”
“We want to know what you were up to last night.”
She swallowed hard and her cheeks began to burn. “I was here.”
“All night?”
“Y-yes—after we, um, left the party—the party at the Fitzpatrick place on the lake.”
“We know about the party.”
“Jackson and Roy got into a fight. Roy almost killed him….”
“So you were here alone all night with Jackson Moore,” Deputy Springer clarified.
“That’s right.”
“You’d swear to it?”
“Slow down, Dan,” the other deputy, Paul Zalinski, insisted. He lit a cigarette, took a long drag and snapped his lighter closed. Smoke streamed from his nostrils. “We don’t want to screw this up. She’s a minor, for God’s sake. We’ve got to talk to her guardian and probably a lawyer. Then we can get her statement.”
“By then, she and Moore can get her story straight—”
“There’s nothing to get straight,” Rachelle interjected.
The men exchanged glances and told her to get into the waiting car. She had no choice. Nervous sweat broke out between her shoulder blades as she slid into the worn backseat of the cruiser. Deputy Zalinski ground his cigarette out beneath the heel of his boot before climbing into the Ford. Deputy Springer started the car. Soon, they were following the other police cars on their way back to Gold Creek, leaving the Monroe mansion, a rumpled couch and a night of lovemaking far behind them.
Rachelle tried to fight against the terror that she felt creeping into her heart. Arms hugging her middle, she huddled in the backseat of the police cruiser and silently prayed that this was all a bad dream and she’d wake up with Jackson stretched out beside her. She rubbed her arms and stared through the trees to the misty lake. What was the old Indian legend? Drink from the lake but don’t overindulge and the waters will bring you good luck? Well, she was certain both she and Jackson could use a shot of magic water right now. They were in trouble. Deep tro
uble.
However, she wouldn’t realize until hours later just how bottomless that trouble was.
Before the day was out, Jackson Moore, the bad boy of Gold Creek, would be formally charged with the murder of Roy Fitzpatrick.
* * *
“THAT’S CRAZY! JACKSON wouldn’t kill anyone!” Rachelle cried, disbelieving. She leapt out of the hard wooden chair in the interrogation room at the sheriff’s office.
Her mother, two deputies, a lawyer she’d never seen before, and even her father were with her, listening as she tried to explain the circumstances of the night before.
“You’ve got everything wrong!” She was nearly hysterical.
“Calm down, little lady,” Deputy Springer advised. “We’re just talkin’ this thing out. Now, someone hit that boy over the head and drowned him in the lake last night, someone strong enough to hit him and hold him down, someone who was angry with him, someone who had a reason to pick a fight with him.”
“But not Jackson,” she replied staunchly, though her insides were shredding with fear and doubt and a million other emotions.
“You see ’em fightin’ earlier?”
“Yes, but—”
“And didn’t Moore stop Roy from…well, from attacking you?”
Rachelle took in a long breath. “That doesn’t prove anything.”
“A couple of witnesses say that Jackson was lookin’ for a fight with Roy, that he’d already had words with Roy’s daddy at the logging camp a few days ago, and that Roy had almost run Jackson down before the party.”
Rachelle didn’t say anything. Her throat was tight and hot, and she was more scared than she’d ever been in her life.
“Isn’t that what happened?” Deputy Zalinski prodded.
Slowly, so as not to be misunderstood, she said, “I’m telling you I was with him the entire night.” Her voice was raw from talking, and hot tears began to gather in the corners of her eyes. She felt shame that all of Gold Creek would learn of her night with Jackson, but more than shame she felt fear, sheer terror for Jackson. The charges were ridiculous, but the stony, solemn faces of the men who worked for the sheriff’s department convinced her that they meant business. She had to save Jackson. She was the only one who could. “That last time we saw Roy, he was alive. Drunk, and a little beat-up, but alive!”
“And you were awake all night long?” Deputy Zalinski asked. He fiddled with his lighter, but she knew his concentration hadn’t strayed at all. He waited, flipping the lighter end over end in his fingers.
Rachelle hesitated. She couldn’t look her father in the eye. “I slept part of the time.” She was mortified and tired and still in the dirty, ripped clothes she’d been in the night before. All she’d been given was a box of tissues and a glass of water. And her father’s disgrace, so visible in the downcast turn of his eyes, made her cringe inside.
Zalinski finally lit a cigarette. “Are you a heavy sleeper?”
“I don’t know.”
“She sleeps like a log—” her mother began, then snapped her mouth shut when the lawyer shot her a warning glance. Ellen Tremont went back to worrying the handle of her purse between her bony fingers.
“Isn’t it possible that Jackson could have left you for a couple of hours and you would never have been the wiser?” Deputy Zalinski suggested. He took a long drag of his cigarette, and the smoke curled lazily toward the light suspended above the table. “The Monroe place is less than a quarter of a mile away from the Fitzpatricks’.”
“He didn’t leave me!”
“But you were asleep.”
“He was hurt and…” She swallowed back her humiliation and tried not to remember the hours in early dawn when she’d felt him leave the couch to return later—she couldn’t have guessed how long—smelling of pine needles and the rain-washed forest.
“And what, Miss Tremont?” Zalinski pressed on.
“He, uh, he didn’t have his clothes on.”
Her mother gasped, and Rachelle fell back into the folding chair. Somehow she managed to meet Deputy Zalinski’s eyes. “He could barely get into his pants because of the swelling and bandage around his leg.”
“He was wearing jeans this morning.”
“Yes, but he had to struggle to get them on. And I watched him do that—after you had arrived and ordered us out of the house.”
The deputy smiled patiently. “Then it was possible that while you were sleeping, he could’ve ‘struggled’ into his clothes, left and returned before you even missed him.”
“No!” she snapped quickly, and watched as Deputy Springer, propped against the corner of the room, jotted a note to himself.
Zalinski stubbed out his cigarette. “Miss Tremont—”
“Can I go now?” she cut in.
The answer was no. The interrogation lasted another two hours, at the end of which, on the lawyer’s advice, her parents—in the first decision they’d agreed upon for two years—proclaimed that Rachelle wasn’t to see Jackson again. They were both shocked and appalled that their daughter, the reliable, responsible one of their two girls, had gotten involved with “that wretched Moore boy.” Though the police had assured her folks that Rachelle was not a suspect, not even considered for being an accessory, she was as good as convicted in their eyes. She’d slept with a boy she hardly knew, a boy with a reputation as tarnished as her grandmother’s silver tea set, a boy who was now charged with kidnapping, trespassing, assault, breaking and entering and murder.
While Jackson sat alone in the county jail, unable to make bail, Rachelle was grounded. Indefinitely. Even her sister, Heather, who usually enjoyed adventure and took more chances than Rachelle, was subdued and stared at Rachelle with soulful, disbelieving blue eyes.
“I can’t believe it,” Heather whispered, gazing at Rachelle with a look of horror mingled with awe. “You did it? With Jackson Moore?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” Rachelle, sitting on the edge of her bed, towel-dried her hair.
“But what was it like? Was it beautiful, or scary or disgusting?”
Rachelle ripped the towel from her head. “I said I’m not discussing it, Heather, and I mean it. Let it go!” she snapped, and Heather, for once, turned back to the pages of some teen magazine. To Rachelle, her sister, four years younger and a troublemaker in her own right, seemed incredibly naive and juvenile. In one night, Rachelle felt as if she’d grown up. She had no patience for Heather getting vicarious thrills out of Jackson’s bad luck.
And bad luck it was. Jackson, before he was indicted, was branded as a killer by the citizens of Gold Creek, and Thomas Fitzpatrick swore that whoever murdered his boy would live to regret it. Thomas never came out and publicly named Jackson as Roy’s assailant, but it was obvious, from the biting comments made to the press by Roy’s mother, June, that the Fitzpatrick family would leave no stone unturned in seeing that Jackson was found guilty of Roy’s death. The Fitzpatrick money, lawyers and as many private detectives as it would take, would aid the district attorney in the quest to prove Jackson the culprit.
Rachelle was frantic. She would do anything to see Jackson again and she suffered her mother’s reproachful stare. “Just pray you’re not pregnant,” Ellen Tremont said through pinched lips about a week after Jackson was hauled in. She was washing dishes with a vengeance. Soapsuds and water sloshed to the cracked linoleum floor as she scrubbed, her stiff back to her daughter. “It’s bad enough your reputation’s ruined, but think about the fact that you could be carrying his child!” She cast a look over her shoulder and her mouth curved into a frown of distaste. “And then there’s venereal disease. A boy like that—who knows how many girls he’s been with?”
“He’s not like that!”
Her mother slapped down her dishrag and held on to the counter for suppor
t. She was shaking so badly, she could barely stand. “You don’t know what he’s like! And besides all that—” Ellen turned to face her daughter, and her teary reproachful stare was worse than her rage. Her chin wobbled slightly and the lines around her mouth were more pronounced. She looked as if she’d aged ten years. “How will you ever get a scholarship now? We can’t count on your father anymore and…a scholarship’s about the only way you’ll be able to afford college. Lord, Rachelle, God gave you a brain, why didn’t you use it?”
Rachelle couldn’t stand to see her mother’s pain any longer. Nor could she listen as Jackson’s character was destroyed even further. She left the kitchen and slammed the door of her room behind her. But she felt sick as she flopped on her twin bed and stared across the room to her sister’s empty bunk. She flipped on the radio and tried to get lost in the music of Billy Joel, but through the thin walls of the cottage, she could still hear her mother softly crying.
God, please help us all. And be with Jackson. Oh, Jackson, I wish I could see you….
Rachelle squeezed her eyes shut. She refused to break down and sob, but tears slid down her cheeks and she had to bite her lower lip to keep the moans of despair within her lungs. She wouldn’t let her mother or anyone else in town see how much she hurt inside. She would abide the stares, the whispers, the pointed fingers and the knowing snickers, because she knew that she and Jackson had shared something wonderful, something special.
Let the gossip-mongering citizens of Gold Creek make it dirty. Let the damned Clarion, the newspaper where she had worked two afternoons a week and from which she had been fired, tear her reputation to shreds. In her heart of hearts, she knew that she and Jackson would never let go of the unique bond that held them together.
Was it love? Probably not. She couldn’t kid herself any longer. But someday, if things worked out, and the circumstances were right, if given the chance, she and Jackson could fall in love. In time. And together she and Jackson would show everyone that what they’d shared was beautiful. He’d prove his innocence, the town would forgive him and everything would work out.
It had to.