Gossip burned and scarred like a brand.
She didn’t want to do that again, and Hayden was the first man she’d cared about in a very long time. Like, aeons.
He’d only made it as far as the threshold before bolting.
She’d bet a case of books and a Starbucks card that no man had ever walked away from Nikki’s invitation.
Nikki picked the purple onion rings from her salad. “You don’t think he’s married, do you?”
“No.”
Nikki leaned forward and put a hand over hers, lowering her voice so that Poker shuffling his cards at the next table wouldn’t hear. “How do you know? Some men are lying creeps.”
Carrie’s appetite went south. She laid aside her fork. “He’s a public figure. Someone would know.”
“True. I hadn’t thought of that.” Nikki leaned back in her chair. “Thank goodness, he’s not like Simon in that respect.”
“Hayden’s nothing like Simon. Simon was a sleaze who lied about loving me. Hayden is a friend who’s been nothing but a gentleman.” He didn’t know, couldn’t know that she was falling for him. He’d walked away. He’d left her with her pride intact. “Can we change the subject?”
“Any guy who doesn’t appreciate my baby sister doesn’t deserve her.”
Hayden appreciated her. He even found her attractive. But he’d also been honest from the beginning about his plans. Except for the leaving part.
She’d known from the moment they met that he was out of her league. The fact that her heart had cracked a little to discover him gone without so much as a phone call was beside the point. “It isn’t me I’m concerned about, Nik. It’s Brody.”
“They were pals, weren’t they?”
“More than pals. I think Hayden felt some kind of kinship with Brody. He was adamant about hanging out with him after school. He took him to a baseball game and fishing.”
“I hope he didn’t wear those Ferragamos.” Nikki pointed her fork and laughed. “Kidding.”
“Brody doesn’t have much of a family, and Hayden was good to him.” She took her sandwich from the thick white plate, contemplating the dill pickle secured to the top with a toothpick. “I wonder if Hayden let him know he was leaving. Brody will be heartsick if he didn’t.”
“I heard Trey talking to Dad about Brody’s missing mother. He’s putting out feelers for information. However policemen do that.”
Brody’s busted wall flashed in her head.
“Clint Thomson’s not a nice man. Who could blame his wife for leaving?”
“I wonder why she didn’t take her son?”
“That’s the question we’re all asking. Hayden wonders if the Sweat twins are right and Thomson killed her. The curse of a thriller novelist, I guess. He sees the sinister in everything.”
Nikki shivered. “That’s creepy. People in Honey Ridge don’t kill each other.” She grinned. “Well, not physically. We just chop each other to pieces with our tongues.”
Carrie laughed. “That’s too true to be funny.”
“I mean, really, did you notice that tacky window display in Cavandish’s Dress Shop? No stylish woman would ever wear those colors together.”
“The woman should be forced out of town,” Carrie teased.
Nikki was off and running on her rival’s poor taste, but Carrie couldn’t get Brody out of her mind. Hayden had befriended the boy and made promises.
How could he leave without saying goodbye? Was he planning to return? And wasn’t she pitiful for hoping he was?
* * *
THERE WAS NO melody so deep and primal as the rhythm of a Southern night. Filled with magic and seductive music, the air thick and heavy and throbbing with secrets.
From the back veranda of Peach Orchard Inn, Hayden lifted his face to the sky, eyes closed, soaking in the sounds of a night sky filled with the distant rumble of a promised storm. The afternoon heat and humidity had waned, leaving behind the gentle tug of heaviness, of perfume on the wind and restlessness in the soul.
But his soul was always restless, more so since returning from Kentucky after the latest battering of his heart and mind.
Three days of Dora Lee had stripped him down to nothing.
The insanity he feared crept in, black and desolate, gnawing at his soul. He carried Dora Lee’s ugly DNA, the predisposition to be cruel and wild and self-possessed. Her mother had been locked away, a danger to herself. Dora Lee had been a danger to him.
Mental illness flowed in his blood and had him writing of horror and death and man’s inhumanity to man. The line between insanity and creativity, he’d learned, was a fine one, two sides of the same coin. Take van Gogh, for instance.
How did a man know when he’d crossed over?
With the dreams coming nearly every night and the confusion and dark sorrow roiling in his head, he wondered if he, too, was slipping into madness.
He’d gone to Dora Lee’s house the day after she’d ditched him at Packard’s. She wasn’t home. He’d tried her cell phone so many times he’d have to give her money for extra minutes.
The lapse was his fault. He never should have put cash in her hands.
Inside the trailer, he’d kept busy cleaning, grateful the power was back on so he didn’t have to drag water from the creek or go anywhere near the well.
He’d considered calling the sheriff. Maybe Dora Lee hadn’t really abandoned him in pursuit of drugs. Perhaps something terrible had happened. Had she OD’d? Had some other pill addict knocked her in the head, taken her money or drugs and left her to die?
How many times in his childhood had he lain in the dark and cold, worrying over those same questions, both fearing her return and praying for it?
She was his mother, such as she was, and though he despised himself for caring, he did.
Finally, late that evening she had stumbled in, singing at the top of her lungs, leaning on a scrawny bearded dude with black teeth. They were both higher than a Georgia pine.
The memory stung. Of guilt and shame and always, always, the self-blame. He’d done that to her by giving her money.
He simply didn’t know how to stop.
In disgust and despair, he’d driven back to the hotel and to his laptop. Since the discussion with Trey, he’d been fueled with a book idea. A missing mother murdered by her husband, but no one suspects a thing until their son reaches the teen years and begins to ask questions.
That night, he’d been dry as Death Valley.
He’d plopped on the motel bed, hands behind his head and insides in a boil.
He had wished he could talk to Carrie, to share all the putrid filth of his life, to vomit it out and be done with it instead of living with the fear that someone, especially her, would find out.
He should have called her before he left. He could have made some excuse about rushing back to New York on business.
Lies. He didn’t want to lie to Carrie.
Reaching for his cell, he’d flipped through the contacts and highlighted her name. Carrie. Not Carrie Riley. Just Carrie.
She’d want to know where he was, what he was doing. She’d care that he was exhausted and worried and lonely.
He couldn’t tell her where or why.
With a beleaguered sigh, he’d tapped the screen to black and put the phone away.
The next day he’d ordered a new electric heater, a new mattress and linens along with various other supplies and paid a local for delivery before driving back to the trailer with another load of groceries and more carryout. Perhaps if he made Dora Lee’s life better, easier, she would change.
Not that he hadn’t tried before.
Dora Lee and her new friend hadn’t welcomed him with open arms. His mother had stood in the cluttered yard, smoking a cigarette and giggling while the b
oyfriend kissed the back of her neck until Hayden needed to vomit.
While Hayden unloaded the grocery bags, the man stared at him with hollow, sneaky eyes, though his hands were all over Dora Lee. Hayden tried not to look. After a while, the man said, “I know you from somewhere. Didn’t I see your picture in the paper?”
Hayden’s blood ran cold. If Dora Lee’s friends discovered his identity, she would, too. His mouth worked, but nothing came out.
Dora Lee guffawed. “Gawd, Jerry, you must be smoking crack,” and then she’d burst into hysterical laughter because smoking crack was exactly what they’d been doing. They reeked of it.
Pulse ticking like a time bomb with the fear of discovery, Hayden stepped outside to collect his wits.
Behind him, the door slammed and the lock clicked.
They had what they wanted, and he was a third wheel. He wasn’t sorry to be shut out. The need to get far, far away propelled him to the car.
So he’d driven more than five hours back to Honey Ridge, arriving long after dark, too tired and troubled to sleep.
Thank God for a coming storm.
He raised his face to the sky.
The smell of approaching rain was a perfume like no other and could wash away the memory of the previous days. But tonight, the green, clean smell reminded him of boyhood days spent in the deep Appalachian woods inside his hideout when Dora Lee was at her worst. Spurred by stories of Swift’s Lost Silver Mines, he’d wandered the mountains in pursuit of hidden treasure and, in the search, had found his own fragile kind of peace.
He thought of Brody and the boy’s predilection for camping in the woods with his wounded creatures. He, too, was finding his own kind of peace.
Somewhere nearby, a single bullfrog trilled a long, incessant song, undaunted in his love pursuit by nature’s coming fury. The cicadas hummed all the louder, spurred to frenetic action by the heat, humidity and secret cover of darkness.
Miles away lightning flickered above the trees.
Did Carrie hear the approaching thunder? Was she as attuned to the serendipitous moods of nature, though hers in defense instead of pleasure? Was she awake and anxious?
He walked a bit, though the lawn was dark and not a star winked. He had a woodsman’s eyesight, and the white angel gleamed luminescent from Michael’s garden, hauntingly lovely, a reminder evergreen and poignant of the boy who went to school and disappeared and of the mother who still waited with cookies and open arms.
Most mothers loved their little boys.
Hayden circled the big silent house and headed to his car parked in the graveled lot for guests.
He tried to fool himself into thinking he didn’t know where he was going. He was driving with the windows open, feeling the night and the approaching storm, he told himself. Perhaps he’d drive left, up on the ridge and watch the weather roll in. Carrie had taken him to a breathtaking overlook where he could see for miles down into the valley and east to the Smokies.
Carrie. She called to him much as the storm did.
At the end of the long, winding lane leading from house to highway, however, he turned right.
The trip into Honey Ridge was short. He didn’t click on the radio or slide in a CD. He let the feel of the night circle and swirl around him like ghosts of the past.
Maybe, as Julia hinted, the inn had them and that’s why the dreams kept coming with vivid regularity. Ghosts with a tale to tell had discovered in Hayden Winters a damaged mind and a broken soul that was easily invaded.
He didn’t believe in ghosts or houses with messages, but he couldn’t deny what was happening.
The admission brought the fear picking at him like a child with a scab.
Main Street was empty, quiet, rolled up for the night. Two blocks down near the park a single convenience store was bright with lights. A handful of cars rolled lazily through a fast-food drive-through.
At the single traffic signal in midtown, he stopped, pondered the police cruiser parked along the curb in front of First Bank. With humor, he mused that no financial institution was ever called Second Bank.
When the light ticked from red to green, he accelerated across the intersection, lifting a hand toward the officer invisible inside the cruiser, wondering if Trey was on duty. How easily he’d fallen into the rhythm of Honey Ridge, had missed it in those scant days away.
In minutes, he idled through a neighborhood of older frame homes and stopped in front of a tidy gray one with maroon shutters and roof. Carrie was home; the blue Volkswagen was parked along the side of the house.
Lights blazed, casting a buttery glow onto the gardenia blooming rapturously beside the porch. He plucked a stem, broke it from the tall spreading bush. The sensual smell wrapped around him as he stepped onto her porch and lifted the brass knocker.
He owed her more than a stolen flower. Yet he didn’t dare explain why he’d walked away that night. Her invitation had melted him, and his desire to be with her had almost overshadowed his sense of preservation.
A relationship based on a lie was not what he wanted with Carrie Riley.
The question wasn’t what did he want, but what could he allow himself to have?
He held the gardenia to his nose and sniffed. A beautiful flower in bloom. Ugly in death.
Facades were built because the outward structure was unacceptable. He was unacceptable. If he told her, he stood to lose everything, including her.
She opened the door, and his breath swooshed away. In loose lounge pants and a fitted camisole, devoid of makeup, she looked sixteen and way too young for the thoughts running through his head, thoughts he’d sequestered since that night on her porch when he’d almost let himself get too close.
Thunder rumbled, a long kettledrum sound, like snatches of Irish music on the wind.
“Hayden?” Backlit in gold by the living room light, Carrie stared at him, arms crossed, her flesh pale against the blue top.
“We’re in for another storm. May I come in?”
Something flickered in her expression. She was remembering, like him, the invitation he’d rejected.
She stepped to the side and pushed the door open wider.
“I thought you’d left town for good.”
Was that hurt in her voice?
“Not for good.” But he’d have to soon, or they’d both be doomed to a heartache he could neither explain nor avoid.
He stepped inside her tidy house, soothed to be in her space. Everything here was clean and in order, like her. The polar opposite of his mother’s trailer. “I should have called.”
“Brody wondered. He missed you.”
He made an effort to smile. He was too heart weary to be here. Fatigue was dangerous. A man needed to be on his best game when he was feeling vulnerable.
“I missed him, too. And you.”
“Where were you?” she asked and then waved away the words. “Not my business, sorry.”
Thunder boomed closer. Her shoulders jerked. Her ex had humiliated her during a storm.
“You’re nervous.” He offered the gardenia, glad to avoid the subject of his trip.
She took the blossom, sniffed with her eyes closed. “I’m always nervous when the weather is crazy. I should move to California.”
“Then you could worry about wildfires or earthquakes,” he teased, voice gentle. “And you wouldn’t have gardenias blooming outside your windows.”
“My favorite flower.”
He knew. He remembered. A husband to bring her gardenias, but a husband he could never be.
He took the blossom from her and tucked the stem into her hair behind one ear. She reached up, touched it, her brown eyes soft and wondering.
He yearned to talk to her. To tell her. Sometimes the need to be real with someone was so loud he thought he’d go mad.
But how could a woman from a perfect family in a perfectly normal small town even begin to understand or accept where he’d come from? She knew and respected him as Hayden Winters, the author, but would she look down on him, repulsed, to learn of Hayden Briggs, the pillbilly’s son?
He couldn’t take the risk of her, or anyone, knowing he was nothing but a figment of his own imagination.
With an aching chest, he sighed, bewildered at the struggle inside him. He’d been doing this for years. He’d even become comfortable with the masquerade. Why was lying to Carrie any different?
“Would you like coffee?” she asked, her bare feet padding softly against the area rug as they moved deeper into the living room, a small space with beige furniture and apple-green accessories. The smell of gardenias trailed behind her, as heavy and sweet as the coming rain.
“It’s late. Are you sure you don’t mind?”
“Are you crazy? I’ll be up all night.” Lightning flickered, and she cast a worried glance toward the draped windows.
“I thought you might be.”
“Is that why you came?”
Was it?
Hayden experienced a sudden hard knock in his chest, an aha moment like the ones he experienced in his writing. That moment when everything became clear and he understood the message.
He was falling in love with Carrie Riley, if he understood what love was. He’d never felt it before. Desire, yes. Affection, certainly. But not this shattering need to care for her and have her care in return. To be certain she not only was safe but that she felt safe, even in a harmless thunderstorm. The need to pry open his aching soul and pour out everything, trusting that she, of all the women on the earth, would accept and understand.
He was in terrible danger. And so was she. He couldn’t do that to her, not to Carrie. Sweet as the honey that named this town, she’d be kind, but his secret would be hers, and secrets revealed destroyed a person.