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  “There’s plenty,” she affirmed, and saw the depth of the relieved breath his small body took before he turned to Evans, standing silently on the finished part of the deck. She couldn’t see her son’s eyes as he looked up at the man who, given the boy’s position on the ground, would certainly loom larger than life in the shadowed gloom of twilight.

  “Would you like to stay for supper, Mr. Evans?” Josh invited.

  Unbelievably, Becki felt her throat tighten at the hopefulness with which the child issued the invitation. There was nothing she could do to protect him if John Evans refused, and she realized that in the waiting silence she, too, was holding her breath.

  “I can’t,” the man said softly.

  Another breath disturbed the small chest in the striped cotton knit shirt.

  “But thanks for inviting me,” John Evans added, perhaps reading the disappointment in the face raised so expectantly to his.

  “You ask him, Mom,” Josh urged.

  She realized what he was thinking—that Evans was simply being polite, waiting for her invitation. Josh had been taught to accept no social engagement without the agreement of the mother involved.

  “You’re more than welcome, Mr. Evans. There really is plenty, and we’d love to have you join us.”

  The pale blue eyes, luminescent in the dusky shadows, lifted from their concentration on Josh’s face to the doorway where she stood. Becki knew she must be little more than a silhouette, a dark shape against the light behind her.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” John Evans said, “but I already have plans.”

  “Some other time, then,” she agreed. “I better check the chicken. Come on in, Josh,” she suggested casually. She walked back into the kitchen with its pleasant smells of supper almost ready. She left the door open for Josh and deliberately didn’t look up from turning the crisply browning pieces of chicken when she heard it close. She listened to his slow footsteps cross the room behind her and finally, distantly, to the sound of water in the bathroom lavatory where he would be washing his hands.

  She took the muffins out of the oven, and scooping a few out of the tin, she split them to insert a pat of margarine. She put those on a plate she took out of the cabinet rather than into the napkin-lined basket she’d already set out on the counter. That was for company, and there would be no company to share tonight’s meal.

  What did you expect? she asked herself a little bitterly. John Evans had made it clear in the months he’d lived next door that he didn’t want anything to do with being neighborly, with being friends. She’d set Josh up for this disappointment tonight, frying chicken and letting the aroma leak outside like some kind of bachelor lure. All she’d accomplished had been another rebuff for her son.

  She stuck the long two-pronged fork she had used to turn the chicken into one of the thighs with more force than was necessary, taking it out of the hot grease to place it on the paper towels that lined the platter. She had to push the chicken off the prongs with her finger.

  “Damn,” she said, raising the forefinger she’d just burned to her mouth to suck it better, a habit from childhood.

  “He doesn’t like me, does he?” Josh’s voice came from behind her, from the doorway of the hall that led to the front of the house.

  She didn’t turn around, but speared another piece of chicken, her stinging finger still in her mouth. She only took it out to answer, “Of course he likes you. He let you help measure. He told Uncle Mike he’d watch out for you. He just had other plans for supper. The invitation was a little impromptu.”

  “Then we can ask him again? Give him more warning?” Josh asked, the hopeful note back in his voice.

  “We’ll see,” she said noncommittally.

  “That means no,” Josh said.

  “It means we’ll see. If the opportunity comes up. You don’t want him to think we’re pushing him to be our friend.”

  “Because you don’t have a husband?” Josh asked bluntly.

  Smiling, she fished the last piece of chicken out of the skillet and turned off the stove. She carried the chicken platter and the plate with the muffins to the table, where she had already placed the corn and tomatoes. She turned back to retrieve the beans from the microwave. Josh sat down at his place, and Becki put a slice of tomato, a spoonful of beans and a small ear of corn on his plate as she answered.

  “Maybe Mr. Evans thinks I’m interested in acquiring one,” she said, smiling at her son, “and he’s been selected.”

  “I wouldn’t mind,” Josh said softly.

  “If I acquired a husband?” She was a little surprised at the openness of that confession.

  “If it was him.”

  She sat down opposite him, wondering how to respond to that.

  “Mr. Evans doesn’t act like he wants to be my friend, Josh, much less my husband. You can’t make people be friendly if they don’t want to be. He’s a very private person. You know that. And just because he didn’t want to have supper with us tonight doesn’t mean he doesn’t like you. It may mean that he doesn’t know how to…” She hesitated, trying to think of a word that expressed the idea without criticism. “To interact with people. He seems to like being by himself. Some people do. And that’s his right,” she reminded him. “I don’t want you bothering him. You can’t make someone be your friend, no matter how much you like them. You know that from school.”

  “I know,” he agreed softly.

  His head was down, eyes on his plate. He had picked up his fork, and with one tine he was tracing the design nature had implanted in the tomato slice. Using her fingers, she reached across the table to place a buttered muffin on his plate and then a drumstick from the chicken. He glanced up, dark eyes full of regret, and she smiled at him.

  “I just wanted him to come,” he said.

  “I know. I know you did, and I’m sorry that he couldn’t. Now eat your supper.”

  She served herself, and they ate a few minutes in silence. She tried to examine her own feelings. What had been her motives in inviting the man next door to dinner? Whatever they had been at the time, she had to admit that she had set her son up for this disappointment. She had known how he felt about John Evans. She might not understand why, but she at least was aware of his feelings. And of her own, she thought. She had even admitted them to her friends this afternoon, and remembering that conversation, she felt the hot flush of embarrassment. Like some kind of lovesick teenager. Daydreaming about a man who had made his disinterest obvious.

  She didn’t think she had sunk to that level, but maybe she had. The first attractive man she’d come in contact with in years, and she invited him over for an intimate dinner for three. No wonder he’d shied away. Somewhere within her self-disgust, she recognized the flaw in that castigation of her behavior. She had had plenty of opportunities to be attracted to men in the past couple of years. A decent interval after Tommy’s death invitations to date had been issued, and bruised by the disinterest of the man next door, the memory of their number was flattering.

  She worked with a couple of unattached males. There were a few single men, widowed or divorced, involved in the program at the ballpark. She hadn’t had to think twice about turning down their invitations, and there was nothing wrong with any of the men who had asked her out. She just hadn’t wanted to go. There had been no interest on her part, at least not until—

  “I hit the ball good in practice today,” Josh announced, breaking into her introspection.

  “Did you?” she asked.

  “All the way to the ditch at the back of the playground,” he bragged, nodding.

  She smiled, wondering how many legs and gloves that ball had rolled through on its way.

  “That’s great,” she said.

  “Uncle Mike showed me a new stance.”

  She put the other drumstick on his plate and half a muffin. At least they had found a safe topic. Something besides the mystery man next door. Even as she thought it, she questioned the phrase. Mystery man. Now, why
in the world would she call John Evans that?

  “And then I hit the ball the first time,” Josh announced with satisfaction.

  “Way to go,” she said, softly, smiling at him, loving him so much it hurt her heart. She was grateful for the resilience of childhood, which had softened the disappointment of the refusal that had been so painful a few minutes ago. Josh would survive his infatuation with John Evans, she thought, secure in the love that surrounded him.

  And so will I, she added determinedly. And so will I.

  Chapter Two

  Deke Summers put his head back against the reassuring solidness of the tree trunk behind him. It seemed to be the only steady thing in the night world that had begun to circle sick-eningly around him. He knew that what he had done tonight wasn’t smart, wasn’t allowed within the careful confines of his existence, but the demons had all been howling and he couldn’t make them shut up.

  Nothing had worked, not even the hard physical labor he used to allow himself to fall into bed, finally exhausted enough to sleep. And he knew why. It had been four years—exactly four years today. Added to the guilt he had always borne was the realization that he had almost forgotten the date, had almost let it slip by without the familiar pain of remembering.

  And he was losing the clarity of the memories. Sometimes he could recall nothing more than a flash of long black hair shimmering with light. Or an echo of laughter. But they were fading—at least the vividness. Sometimes he had to think about the shape of her face, try to re-create the feel of its fragile bone structure against his palm. And that was getting harder and harder to do. To re-create. To remember exactly how she had been before…

  He closed his eyes, raising the beer to his mouth. He should have bought something stronger, he thought again, but the temptation to get blind drunk had been too much. For once, just once, to be allowed to forget. To silence the demons. To relax—only once—into the dark, comforting oblivion of alcohol.

  Too dangerous, a sliver of his brain had reminded. Too dangerous. He wondered if he really cared any longer. There were times he thought he could feel himself coming apart, the images fighting for control of his mind, sometimes very close to winning. In the military they had come up with a name for that unraveling of the mind—posttraumatic stress syndrome. Too much fear. Too much danger. And more pain than the psyche could deal with. He wondered if he had already passed that point, if he were only operating now on some primitive instinct for self-survival. Unbidden, an image flickered into his head, his usual control sufficiently inhibited by the alcohol to allow its formation.

  The little boy next door. Black hair and dark eyes. Like hers. He was even aware of the confusion. Not like his wife’s eyes and hair, although that was true. But like the mother’s. The child’s mother. Eyes dark enough to draw him in, like a vortex whirling in space. Compelling. Pulling him. Except—

  He shattered the picture deliberately, breaking it into a million pieces by opening his eyes. He raised the can to his lips again and realized it was empty. He crushed it with one hand and then lobbed it at the tree directly in front of him. It struck with a sharp, satisfying clang, and Deke Summers grinned, the movement unfamiliar, the muscles it required almost atrophied from disuse.

  Take that, you bastards, he thought. Damn demons. Strike ten or was it nine? The baseball analogy had somehow made sense when he’d started chunking cans at the tree, at the demons. But now he couldn’t remember the count, and he didn’t want to try to figure out how many cans were left. He fumbled into the darkness beside him and was relieved when his fingers encountered metal, cool and damp with condensation. They automatically found the pull-tab and opened it, the sound it made small and sibilant in the darkness, pleasant compared to the clang of the cans hitting his target. He wondered briefly if anyone had heard them, but the soothing night sounds had already begun again around him. He raised the fresh beer to his lips and didn’t worry about it any more.

  Somebody had to kill the demons, he reasoned drunkenly. Somebody always had to do the dirty jobs. Somebody…

  BECKI TRAVERS HAD NOT been sleeping soundly. Something had already disturbed the safe, well-known darkness of the dead-end street they lived on. There were only two houses, built for the company executives when the red ore mine had opened. They stood together, tin roofs unchanged, their wooden exteriors painted and repainted by each generation of owners. Hers was the one at the end, edged against the tall oaks and pines of the ever ready-to-encroach woods.

  But the sound had not come from that direction, and it wasn’t repeated as she lay on her side, listening to the silence. She must have drifted back to sleep, deciding that whatever the noise had been, it did not represent danger, simply an anomaly in the normally peaceful darkness.

  She woke with a start when Wimsey landed lightly on her back, his four-footed passage over her body quick, but startling her out of sleep. He had jumped down from the top of her old-fashioned bookcase-style headboard. That was where he slept—never allowing himself to become too accustomed to the inviting warmth and softness of her bed.

  She had thought when she’d coaxed the battle-scarred tomcat to spend the first night inside that he would eventually cuddle beside her through the dark, lonely hours like the house cats of her childhood, their comforting weight and purring contentment enough then to keep the night monsters away.

  Wimsey apparently had no such intentions. He would tolerate her food and her home, but his independence was too important to be surrendered in exchange for those paltry enticements. He had made his way in the world for a long time without her support, clearly evidenced by the marks he bore, and he obviously did not intend to be seduced into becoming some tame pussycat simply for scraps and a bed.

  She sat up, trying to reconstruct the sound that had preceded Wimsey’s departure. No explanation for what she had half heard came to mind, and so she stumbled out of the bed in the darkness to follow the path the cat had taken down the hallway.

  When she reached the kitchen, the pet door her brother had installed was still swinging. She didn’t turn on any lights, inside or out, but tiptoed across the room to look through the glass panels at the top of the back door, the same door through which Wimsey had obviously just departed. It took her eyes a moment to adjust, although with the spill of moonlight washing the neatly mowed yards, it was really lighter outside than in her dark kitchen.

  The tom seemed to move as smoothly as one of the cloud shadows that floated across the close-cut grass, but he was not stalking, not traveling in that low-crouching hunter’s crawl from one concealing bush to another. He was padding swiftly, focused single-mindedly on something across her lawn and on the one next door. Her gaze followed his intended path and found the man, white T-shirt almost brilliant in the silver moonlight.

  John Evans, she thought, her recognition instantaneous: broad shoulders, strongly muscled arms and sun-streaked hair, its fairness obvious even in the semidarkness. He was sitting on the ground, leaning back against one of the massive oaks that shaded the house he had rented. He held a beer in his right hand, and as she watched he lifted it to his mouth, head thrown back by that motion against the rough bark of the tree.

  Searching still for whatever had awakened her, her gaze moved across the yard to another oak, directly in front of the seated man. Around its trunk lay crushed cans, their metallic gleam catching an occasional moonbeam that filtered through the shifting pattern of light and darkness made by the clouds.

  Quite a few dead soldiers, she thought, the corners of her lips creeping upward. That had been what she’d heard, the noise that had awakened the cat. The sound of beer cans thrown, apparently with pretty good accuracy, at the targeted tree. She wasn’t shocked at their number, although a glass of wine was about the limit of her own drinking. She had grown up with boys who thought a couple of six-packs and Saturday night went together like football and fall.

  Her own brothers could down a few, the only evidence of their imbibing the laughter that rang a li
ttle louder and the jokes that flowed a little more off-color. Of course, that occasional celebrating, usually limited to an afternoon spent watching some prime SEC game they hadn’t been able to get tickets for, was still carefully concealed from their mother, although the youngest son was now almost thirty.

  A toot, she thought, still amused. John Evans was having himself a Saturday-night toot. And despite the fact that it seemed out of character—at least out of the bits and pieces of character he’d grudgingly revealed in the three months he’d lived in the run-down house next door—she smiled again. Maybe it would loosen him up. Relax him a little. Ease the constant wariness of those blue eyes.

  At first, as she’d explained to Josh, she had attributed his standoffishness only to the fact that he was an attractive and apparently unattached male and she was the “widder woman” next door. But there was something else in his eyes, something moving behind the usual Southern so-polite-butter-wouldn’t-melt act he automatically carried out. There was a lot more to John Evans, Becki had decided several weeks ago, than met the eye. A lot more than he wanted to reveal. And so far, she thought, leaning against the wood of her kitchen door, he had revealed almost nothing.

  She watched the cat butt his head into the denim-clad thigh and then circle around to push against the man’s arm. One of the long-fingered hands reached out to scratch the top of the scarred head. Wimsey raised his front feet off the grass, balancing a moment on his hind legs to allow the hand better access to that one spot he could never reach himself.

  They certainly seemed to be old acquaintances, Becki thought. It had taken her almost two months of patient work to achieve the first caress the tom had allowed, and her own petting was still done at Wimsey’s convenience. There were days when he approached her with the same determination he had just used to demand John Evans’s attention and other days when he treated her as if she needed a bath and to brush her teeth, as if her presence strongly offended his delicate sensibilities.