“Along with Rusty. It was his idea. He recruited the rest of us to help him execute his plan. That’s why our digging into the crimes has him off the rails.”
He looked up at her then, and she appeared to be on the verge of boiling over. Her chest was swelling and collapsing like a bellows. She had shut her eyes tightly. When she reopened them, they were shiny with tears of the furious kind.
“You…you—”
“I’m no hero. I told you that.”
“It’s the only truth you’ve told me.”
She turned away from him and went over to the sink. Bracing her hands on the rim, she bent at the waist. He feared she was about to throw up, but her silence attested to a forced containment of emotions, and that was almost worse than retching or ranting would have been.
A drum roll of thunder shook the house. Fat raindrops began to slap against the window above the sink. His wristwatch ticked loudly, reminding him that he should be well on his way to Marshall. But he couldn’t just drop this on her and bail. She deserved time to absorb his revelation and grasp the pervasive dishonesty it represented. She deserved an opportunity to vent her rage.
Whatever form it took would be lighter than he deserved.
Eventually she turned on the faucet and scooped several handfuls of cold water into her mouth. Her movements angry and abrupt, she ripped a paper towel off the roll, blotted her mouth, and dried her hands. She left the towel balled up on the counter, came over and dragged a chair from beneath the table, and sat down across from him.
“You ingratiated yourself into my life.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“To protect you from Rusty.”
She spurted a harsh laugh. “When you were the one I needed protection from.”
He shook his head. “Rusty’s been a monkey on my back for decades, and vice versa. We could have rocked along forever with our issues unresolved, and probably would have. That changed when you came back.”
“So this is on me?”
“Not intentionally, but circumstantially. You showed up out of the clear blue, and it reminded Rusty that he still had a bone to pick with your dad. Joe had outsmarted him. Big time. It was like you were thumbing your nose—”
“I didn’t even know—”
“Doesn’t matter. That’s how Rusty saw it. He doesn’t let things like that slide.”
She digested that but continued to simmer. “What about you? What did you think when I moved back?”
“When I first heard, I wondered what had prompted it, but I intended to keep my distance.”
“You’ve admitted that you followed me into the supermarket.”
“Yeah. That was bizarre. Fate dumped on both of us that day. But you didn’t know me, so I thought no harm had been done. Two months pass, and then I get a freaking voice mail from you. I couldn’t believe it, but I wasn’t going to call you back.
“The next day, you’re in my workshop. God, you looked great. Knocked me for a loop, but…Like I told you last night, I couldn’t let it lead anywhere. I figured that if I acted like enough of an asshole, you for sure wouldn’t want anything to do with me.”
He paused, sighed. “Later that evening, Rusty came into the bar. He’d sought me out there.” He gave her a bullet-point briefing of that conversation. “He’d been keeping tabs on you. I was afraid you would be a soft target for his retribution on Joe. Turns out, I was right.”
She turned her head aside, rolled her lips inward as she thought on everything he’d told her. When she came back to him, she said, “You were here the following morning. When I told you about the car driving past, why didn’t you warn me of Rusty? Why didn’t you come clean then? Afraid I would turn you in as a thief?”
“Afraid you would turn me out,” he said with a heat that matched hers. “And then you would have been completely defenseless.”
“Instead, you deceived me into thinking…” She covered her face with both hands and spoke from behind them. “All sorts of things.”
“Not everything was a lie.”
She lowered her hands. “No? Which part was honest?”
“You know which part.”
“Don’t you dare mention last night.” Her voice cracked on the last two words. She shot from her chair and headed for the room she slept in. “You know your way out.”
He went after her, putting his shoulder to the door she tried to slam in his face.