His eyes, which had been grim, softened. “You play fair. Thank you.”
“In your experience, do most women not play fair?”
“Aw, just when you and I were getting to be friends again.”
“All right, all right. Gender politics can be debated another day.” When he looked at me with a thoughtful frown, I squinted at him righteously. “I know a few big words. I never went to college because I was making multimillion dollars as an actress by then, but I can spell my own name and even count to ten without using my fingers.”
“Speaking of your fingers, are you going to wear gloves all the time? Not to mention that ski mask?”
He prodded me where it hurt. I couldn’t joke about my scars with him. “It’s time for you to leave,” I said quietly.
“Have you not been outside with your face uncovered since the accident? Not even once?”
My heartrate picked up. “I’ve had . . . publicity issues.”
“Not anymore. Not here. This is private. You’re among friends. If you don’t free yourself from—”
I began backing up. “I’m not a building you can restore. Sorry.”
He took a step toward me. He held out a hand. “The Parthenon. The Roman Coliseum. The Liberty Bell. All are more interesting because they’re not perfect anymore. Give me the ski mask, Cathy.”
Alarm burst my veins and flooded my bones. My heart drummed a spot above my left breast. I took two more stumbling steps backward, my hands up, warding him off. He didn’t grab at me, he didn’t lunge, he simply advanced, his hand out stubbornly. “Take off the mask, Cathy.”
“Get away from me!”
“I know you’ve got the guts to take that thing off.”
I backed into the living-room wall with a force hard enough to jar my teeth. “I’m not a sideshow for people to stare at!”
“If you accept how you look, everyone else will, too.”
“I won’t make it easy for people to exploit me anymore! We live in a culture of sensationalism, an oozing, decadent society where selling photos of misery is considered good ol’ free enterprise and nothing’s sacred anymore! Including my scars! I asked to be a celebrity, but I didn’t give up the right to treated with respect!” I slapped his extended hand.
“Not that many years ago people brought their kids to public hangings for entertainment. Society hasn’t changed, Cathy. Its ability to share its worst impulses has just gotten more efficient.”
“That’s why I came here! I don’t want to be the victim of anyone’s worst impulses again!”
“You can’t live your life worrying about that. Let the hyenas have their pound of flesh. Then they’ll get bored and leave you alone. Screw ’em. I know how it feels to be dogged by reporters. Everyone who lost loved ones on nine-eleven became a go-to interview for the media. Some of us still are, whether we like it or not. What’s my opinion on the Iraq war? Do I think we can achieve peace in the Middle East? Do I hate the President? Do I love the President? What do I think of the plans for Ground Zero? How do I feel about politics? Would I like to run for the Senate against Hillary Clinton? Goddamn. After I came here, they couldn’t find me easily so they quit trying. It’s safe, here. Trust me.” He didn’t waver. “Give me the mask.”
Do we act on impulse or is impulse the excuse for our subconscious to break free? By now I was in the grip of a full panic attack, gasping for air, my thoughts short-circuited, my reactions frenzied. I just wanted Thomas to leave me alone, to let me breathe. I slung the glove off my right hand, grabbed the bottom of the ski mask, dug my scarred fingers deeply into the hot, confining wool, then dragged the mask up and off my head. I shoved it into Thomas’s hand.
Cold air washed over my face. My damp hair feathered my scarred temple and cheek, clung to the striated pink rivers along my jaw, revealed the grisly right ear. Humiliation, anger and grief vibrated through my muscles. If I could have unhinged my chattering teeth to scream obscenities at Thomas, I would have.
Instead, locked inside the lost world of myself, I stared up at him with ferocious misery, scouring his eyes for any hint of repulsion. I couldn’t find it. I couldn’t find anything except calm scrutiny. My ugliness turned him into a poker-faced cipher. Oh, he was good at locking up his own reactions.
Slowly, never taking his eyes off my face, he reached into his coat, brought out his pocket knife and flicked the blade open. With a few swift, surgical movements of his hands he sliced my ski mask into pieces. He threw the pieces onto the hearth. Then he closed his knife, returned it to his pocket, and nodded to me. “I’m going to get a scrap of paper and a pen from my truck. I’ll write my phone number down for you. If you need anything, call me.”
He turned and walked out of the house. I wanted to scream, I wanted to cry, I wanted to hit him or punch the walls or curl up on the floor with my arms around my head. I didn’t feel free, I felt exposed. He had looked at my face, and now he was leaving.
I grabbed the shotgun and followed him outdoors, where I stationed myself on the snowy walkway. The brilliantly blue morning bathed my face, the sunshine warmed the ruined skin that had not felt full sunlight since the day of the accident. My scarred self was a battery of conflicting energies, and I was being charged.
My eyes fell on a gatepost at the edge of the front yard. I remembered a picket fence around a flower bed when I was child. Now, only one wooden sentinel remained to guard my grandmother’s irises and daylilies from hungry wildlife.
Thomas had laid his cell phone atop the post.
I took aim at it.
Returning from his truck with the piece of paper in one hand, he halted when he saw me with the gun. “Don’t do—” he began. I pulled the trigger. The recoil nearly knocked me down; the sound was a thunderclap that shook my scalp loose from my skull.
But his cell phone, the innocent, symbolic victim of my bitterness toward life in general and the outside world in particular, lay in satisfying bits on the snow. Its pieces flew over approximately fifty square feet of my yard. I would find one later, embedded in an oak.
Thomas studied the carnage with a frown. “My brother’s not going to believe this.”
“Get off my property.”
He sighed. “Okay. Plan B.” He pointed to his right, toward the barn, the woods, the road to the creek trail. “My land is that way. “Keep the sun over your right shoulder, walk down the ridge to the creek. Cross the creek, go up the next hill. I’m in the first cabin on the left. Well, the only cabin. Look for the vineyard in the clearing. It’s an unusual pattern—”
“Tree of Life,” I intoned grimly. “Frank Lloyd Wright. I know. I did my research. I saw it on the satellite pictures. It’s pointing right at me.”
“Well, don’t come over and shoot it.”
“You’ve seen what you came here to see. Now just leave. Leave.”
Thomas looked at me a long time, and I made myself stand there and take his scrutiny. “I know you hate me right now,” he said. “And I know you don’t believe me. But I like what I see.”
“Liar.”
After he drove away my legs folded under me and I sat down hard in the snow with my head bowed. In my coat pocket was a thin wool scarf. I pulled it out and raised it toward my hair, intending to drape my head and hide the burned side of my face. Old habits die hard. I almost had the scarf in place when the first small sounds and sensations began to register. A winter bird chirping. The low whisper of the wind in the forest. The air on my face. The warmth of the sun. Seductive.
I looked around furtively, like a cat peeking out of a doorway. Forest, pasture, sky, house. Me. Alone. Safe. I’d dreamed of privacy and freedom here. Thomas had pushed me out of the nest in that direction. All I had to do was practice being comfortable in the open. My hands shaking, I lowered the scarf to my lap. I brushed my hair back, turned my face up to the sun and shut my eyes.
Oh, God. The freedom felt so good.
Chapter 15
Thomas One Week Later
I?
??d told Cathy I’d come looking for her body if she didn’t show up at the Cove in a couple of weeks, but halfway through that grace period I was ready to risk being shot by her again. The snow melted but the weather turned bitterly clear and cold. I paced my cabin’s floor at night, thinking about her without so much as a fire in her fireplace. I didn’t get much sleep that week, and I didn’t take a drink. Not one. My seven-day sobriety record was solely and completely inspired by the thought that I had to be on alert if Cathy needed me.
Apparently, she didn’t.
And I felt guilty not telling Delta the truth. “You sure Cathy sounded fine when she called you?” Delta demanded every day. This time, it was early on a Saturday afternoon, just after the lunch crowd cleared out at the cafe. “Cathy’s okay,” I answered. “As I keep saying, you’ll hear from her when she’s ready.” I wish I felt as sure as I sounded. I stood on a ladder along the café’s front porch with bundles of twinkle lights in my hands, looked down at Delta’s worried expression with a pang of remorse, and nodded. “I promise.”
“Can’t you trust me with a little more information?” Delta tossed one end of a pine garland to Becka, who waved an industrial stapler with maniacal intent as she and Cleo dragged the serpentine greenery into place along the porch’s rail. “Like where is Cathy?”
“She swore me to secrecy. She has her reasons. You’ll see.”
“I just don’t understand why she’d call you but not me.”
“Trust me, you’ll understand eventually. She needs her space.”
“She needs biscuits!”
Santa walked out of the café’s front doors wearing a floor-length brocade coat trimmed in fake mink and a matching brocade-and-fake-mink Santa cap. He made a chunk of spare cash every holiday season playing his namesake at private parties and corporate events in Asheville. “I’m doing a Victorian Kris Kringle thing for the Asheville chamber,” he explained. “I haven’t got the under-robe done yet, but what do you think so far?”
“Looks good with the camo pants and the Rolling Stones sweatshirt,” I said.
“Right on, Rudolph,” he said drily, and went back inside.
I helped Delta and the family decorate the café every Christmas. This was no small chore. By the time they were done each year, the restaurant and all related buildings glowed like a carnival at night. Synchronized reindeer pranced along the roof, and plywood cut-outs of angels, snowmen, carolers, and Santas in sleighs, outlined in multi-colored twinkle lights, paraded along the roadside as if a strange caravan were headed down the Trace. Best of all, Jeb and Bubba parked Bubba’s 1970 Chevrolet Impala in the pasture nearby, outlined it in lights, put sequential strings on the wheels so it appeared they were turning, and arranged lights on the car’s side to read NASCAR ROCKS.
It was a work of art on wheels. People came from all over to admire the NASCAR Christmas car and the Cove’s kitschy light show. I was proud to be part of it.
Delta continued gazing up at me as if I’d betrayed her. “Thomas, don’t take this as an insult, but you haven’t gotten drunk in a week. You haven’t slept under the tree in your truck, either.”
“It’s been twenty degrees at night. I could freeze my . . . I could freeze.”
“That hasn’t stopped you in winters past. This strange behavior of yours has something to do with Cathy, doesn’t it? And I noticed you suddenly have a new cell phone.”
“Didn’t come in the mail!” Becka, our postmistress, called smugly. “I’d have known!”
“That’s right. You didn’t get it in the mail from your brother this time, you went over to Turtleville and bought it.” Delta shook a wreath at me. “What is going on?”
I hung a string of twinkle lights on rusty nails along the porch eaves while I contemplated a diplomatic response. Luckily, Pike roared into the parking lot at that moment and slid his patrol car to a stop next to us, spraying fine gravel. Delta yelped and shook the wreath at him.
He rolled the window down and looked at us grimly. “I just got a call. Laney Cranshaw’s in jail over in Chattanooga. Drunk and disorderly at a bar near the aquarium. Got in a hair-pulling slap-fight last night with her boyfriend. Tennessee’s keeping her ’til tomorrow. All right, who’s volunteering to go pick up Ivy and Cora? Why, thank you, honey.” He nodded at Delta. Then he peered up at me, an evil grin widening his face beneath the bristle of his crewcut. “Why, thank you, Tommy-Son. That little Cora sure does dote on you. Too bad Ivy wants to gut you with a dull fork. Y’all have fun now, you hear?”
He waved at us and drove off.
Delta frowned at me as we walked to my truck. “Just tell me this much. When you talked to Cathy last week did she say anything about coming here to visit?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“That I can’t tell you.” I tossed a Christmas bow to Banger, luring him from the cab of my truck. If I left a window down and parked beside a picnic table beneath the oaks, he always hopped up on the table and climbed inside the truck. “There’s barely enough room for me, Delta, and two girls on the seat of this old truck,” I told him.
“Bah,” he said as he hopped out. I waved Delta into my truck’s rump-sprung passenger seat with the élan of a royal coachman. She poked me on the arm. “When is she coming here? When?”
“Soon.”
I hope.
“We’re not going anywhere,” Ivy insisted, standing in the living room of the cottage on Fox Run. She glared at Delta and even more so at me. “I can take care of Cora. We don’t need any help. Especially from a man.”
I have this effect on girls of all ages, I thought grimly. Ivy and Cathy would make a good pair.
“Oh, hon,” Delta began. “You don’t have to take care of your baby sis alone—”
“We’re not leaving this house,” Ivy repeated. “Don’t worry about Cora. I’ll watch out for her. I always do.”
“You aunt’s gone a lot?” I asked gently.
“No! That’s not what I meant! She’s here all the time!”
My heart twisted. Ivy was streetwise. She’d never admit their aunt deserted them regularly. It would be grounds for another stint in foster care.
“Honey, nobody’s saying you don’t know how to take care of your baby sister,” Delta soothed, while I stepped back. “But why don’t y’all come with me just for the night? Y’all can help out at the café. I’ll pay you a dollar an hour for wiping off tables and stacking plates in the kitchen. Then we’ll have some ice cream and banana pudding, and some hot chocolate, and we’ll watch TV, and then y’all can sleep in one of my guest beds. It’ll be fun!”
Cora, who had dodged both Ivy and Delta to run to me, looked up at me worriedly. “What should we do? I can’t leave Princess Arianna and Herman.”
Herman, the rooster, had a nice coop and fenced pen in the backyard. I’d built it for him. I’d even installed a small heat lamp. “I just checked on him,” I told her gently. “He’s sound asleep. His good eye’s shut.” I nodded at Princess Arianna, the cat, who was curled up, purring, on the couch. “She’s fine, too. We’ll leave her in the house with plenty of food and water and her litter box.”
“Okay, then I’ll go to the café. Do you wipe tables for a dollar an hour, too?”
“I’ve graduated to being a busboy. You can be my assistant.”
“Okay!”
Ivy’s mouth flattened. “We don’t need any help,” she repeated.
“Well, I do,” Delta said. “I need lots of help. And I’m not ashamed to admit it.” She nodded my way. “Thomas needs lots of help, too. He’s the most helpless man I know, especially when he’s trying to avoid telling me what he knows I want to know. Isn’t that right, Thomas?”
She threw down the gauntlet. I gave her a little Matrix hand gesture. Palm up, fingers together, extend, curl. Bring it on, Biscuit Queen. “You know, I do need help with something,” I told the girls. “Cathryn Deen’s coming to visit us soon. I’m sure she’d like some special, homemade Christmas ornament
s. Ivy, you have an eye for design. Cora, you know how to put magic in everyday things. Can you two help me make some ornaments this afternoon?”
“Oh, yes!” Cora squealed. “The real Princess Arianna’s coming here? Oh, boy!”
“Ivy? Will you trust me and Delta? I give you my word you and Cora can come back here as soon as your aunt gets home.”
“Promises are easy to make,” Ivy said. “My aunt makes promises all the time.”
“Do I look like your aunt?”
Cora, missing the point, burst into giggles. “No, you have a beard!”
“I will never break a promise to you, Ivy.” I looked at Delta. “Can I be trusted?”
Delta scowled. “Ivy, this man is like a bank vault. You put your faith in him, he’ll give it back with interest. Come on over to the café and make some Christmas ornaments for my cousin Cathy and don’t worry about it.”
Ivy frowned and chewed her lower lip. “Cathryn Deen lets us rent this house for diddly. So I guess I owe her a few Christmas ornaments. Okay.”
“Good! Pack your overnight bags and let’s get going.”
“Hurray!’ Cora squealed. She bolted from the living room with Ivy following slowly, casting shrewd looks at me as she went.
When we were alone, Delta swung to face me. She grabbed me by the beard. “Thomas Karol Mitternich, were you lying just now? Is Cathy coming here for Christmas?”
“It’s a possibility. That’s all I can say.”
She punched me on the arm.
I just smiled.
Cathy
Cathryn Deen’s Body Found Frozen In Ravine—
Empty Gas Can, Uncharged Cell Phone Seen As Clues
In Embarrassing Death
I didn’t want that headline on my obituary.
“I can make it to the Cove before hypothermia sets in,” I kept telling myself as I staggered through the hollow along Ruby Creek that Saturday. My breath punctuated the frigid air with quick white puffs. My legs were rubbery. Bundled up in sheepskin, wool, leather, and mink ear muffs—in other words, a walking PETA target—I’d left the farm two hours earlier. That’s what you get for lazing in bed all those months in L.A., I chided as my lungs struggled to support my legs. You’re not ready for a mountain aerobics course.