End Times (34 page)

DAPHNE ran out of the funeral home and into the endless gray of the afternoon. The world was blurred and distorted through her tears, the road a ribbon of concrete flying by under her feet. Her shoes rubbed at her heels and broke the skin, blood seeping through the thin canvas, but she didn’t notice. All that existed was the searing ache in her heart, the panic of having her life torn up by the roots and flung at her feet like a handful of weeds.

Why had she lied? Surely the Peytons would have taken her in if she’d told them the truth: that she’d killed a man in self-defense, after years of fending off his unwanted advances. The Peytons were good people, godly people who would have taken her at her word, who would have been happy to give her a fresh start. If only the truth hadn’t stuck in her throat when they asked, gagging her with its repulsive magnitude. If only she’d trusted them enough to let them into her past.

But she hadn’t, and now she was paying the price: a price that stung so bitterly it caught her with a sharp jab and she doubled over, gasping by the side of the road.

A truck blew by, flashing silver in a cloud of dust. Several feet ahead it squealed to a stop and then slowly backed up, flashers blinking red around a Kansas license plate.

“Daphne!” Owen opened the door and leapt out, his suit replaced with jeans and a T-shirt, his work clothes. He wrapped his arms around her, and she sobbed into his chest, ear against his heartbeat. He held her tight, stroking her hair. “What happened?” he asked.

She pulled away and found his eyes through her tears, shocking green against the dingy sky. With another jolt of misery, she realized he didn’t know—he’d left before she approached Doug, before everything had crumbled around her like a pillar of ashes. He didn’t yet realize that the girl standing before him was a murderer and a liar—but he’d find out. Even if she said nothing, if she tried to stretch the charade a few more hours, the news of her deceit would travel through Carbon County at the speed of gossip, eventually reaching his ears. And he was implicated in it, had been there when the baby slid lifeless from her cousin’s body, was as reviled by the town as she was.

“Tell me,” he urged, wiping the tears from her cheeks.

She couldn’t bear the gentleness of his touch. She removed his hand from her face and placed it at his side, then took a step back. Hurt and confusion clouded his eyes.

“They found out the truth about me,” she said flatly, forcing the words to come. “I killed my stepfather and lied about it so the Peytons would take me in. Everyone knows. And now you do, too.”

She braced herself for him to turn and leave. She was ready to taste the dust from his tires, to drink in one last look at the back of his head riding away from her forever. A great gulley of hurt opened inside her, knowing there would be no more kisses, no more bursts of happiness so intense she couldn’t breathe.

But Owen didn’t move.

“I know that’s not the whole story,” he said. He cupped her chin in his hand and tilted her face up to meet his eyes. “What really happened?”

He didn’t understand. “That is the truth,” she insisted. “I stabbed him. End of story.”

Owen shook his head, refusing to believe. “Why?”

Her voice was as small and hard as a cherrystone. “He was trying to rape me. At knifepoint. I got the knife out of his hands and used it on him instead.”

She could still recall with sick precision the soft wetness of the blade slicing through his flesh, the spongy surprise of his organs. Nausea welled up at the memory, but Owen stopped it with a kiss. The shock of his lips on hers cut through the panic, slowing her heart and washing her with a quiet calm.

“Killing a man in self-defense doesn’t make you a murderer, Daphne,” he said when they pulled apart, his palm still resting on her cheek. “Anyone else would have done the same.”

“It’s not true.” She shook her head. “I’m bad. Everyone thinks so. Even the Peytons. Even Pastor Ted.”

“You can’t listen to them,” Owen said firmly. Anger sparked in his eyes. “They’re upset and grieving. They need a scapegoat.”

She shook her head, her face still burning with shame from the confrontation in the funeral home. “They think I’m in league with the devil, that I killed Janie’s baby on purpose, and that you helped. I tried to defend us, but I couldn’t—everyone was talking all at once; they said if we really wanted to save the baby we wouldn’t have delivered him ourselves. The Peytons—you should have seen them. They looked so betrayed. I can’t stay here anymore. I have to leave town.”

“You don’t have to go anywhere,” Owen said immediately. He paused, inhaling sharply. “If you want, you can stay with me and Luna for a while, and we’ll figure things out.”

She shook her head sadly. “I can’t stay here and bring more disgrace to my family. I’ve done enough damage already.”

“You can’t leave.” Owen grasped her hand tightly, the fervor in his voice approaching rage. He brought his lips to hers, and she returned his kiss with a furious need. It sealed their bond, a pact between two outsiders who had found each other at last, a secret agreement of commitment and gratitude and desire. More than any words they could say, it united them against a world that had grown to despise them. It steeled them for what was to come.

“We’ll go to your place and get your things,” Owen said when they were done. “And I’ll tell Dale I need the afternoon off. He’ll be pissed, but he’ll get over it.”

Daphne nodded. Maybe if they hurried, she could clear out before the Peytons got home. As much as she wanted to say goodbye, she didn’t want to cause them any more pain with her presence. She had already hurt them enough. “But then there’s something I have to do,” she said. “Something important.”

Owen turned off Buzzard Road, past the Global Oil sign and down the chewed-up gravel road to the rig. “What’s that?” he asked.

She bit her lip as they rounded a bend and the oil rig came into focus. “I have to get another look at that tablet.”

THE drink in the red can was bubbly and tart and impossibly sweet. Janie gulped it down, and the bubbles tickled her throat and swam into her head and danced there like fairies, whispering at the inside of her brain, making her laugh at everything and nothing. Loud music, aggressively fun, pumped from the parked car, urging them to drink, to kiss, to live.

To live. After the second can, it was all she wanted to do. She wanted to live larger and louder than anyone, to live away all the death and pain, to live until there was only laughter and never loss, until everything was pink and sparkling and perfect. Talk flew around the campfire in spirals, old tales from the motocross track polished and exaggerated until they shone like chrome, trashy celebrity gossip and drinking stories, each brighter and more boisterous than the last. They talked as if their voices could chase away the sadness, to scare the horrible events of the last few days into the bushes, to make them run away and never come back.

And, oh, she wanted them to! She wanted the sparkling red drink to power-wash the milk from her glands, the music to sweep the thoughts of death and loss and longing from her brain. She drank in their voices, their stories, trying to make each thing they said the only thing in the world, trying to focus on the things that were now, the things that were close and real and alive.

She was doing better, maybe even doing good. She saw it in Doug’s eyes, the way he relaxed against a cooler and smiled at her, putting his hand on her knee (the first time he’d touched her since it happened, and oh! His touch felt so good!). She could see the darkness inside him loosen as he downed beer after beer, sending another joke around the fire, bragging about his new bike and reaching into the cooler for another. Always another.

It had bothered her before, she remembered that. In the weeks and months before The Thing happened, his drinking had set her skin on edge and made her clutch her belly protectively, trying to keep their unborn child safe from his moods, his words, the giant fists that she always feared might start swinging. But now she understood. The bright red can in her hand made the bad go away, made everything sweet and bubbly and bright. She was laughing and they were laughing with her, pink and blurry in the firelight; they were glad to see her happy, smiling, and she was glad to be with them, the same old Janie again: Janie who was the life of the party, Janie who knew how to have a good time.

The parked car blasted out a new tune, and she stumbled to her feet, her grin big enough to split wood. “I love this song!” she slurred, and then she was dancing, making big circles with her butt and waving her hands in the air and reaching toward the fire.

The fire was an even better dancer than she was. It leapt and twirled, jumped and cartwheeled high into the sky, embers like a million tiny sequins on a ballroom dancer’s skirt. They were dancing together, she and the flames, twisting and swaying to the beat, the fire anticipating her moves, seducing her like a lover, begging her to come forward, reaching for her body with scarlet fingers.

She danced closer and it was hot, ooooh, so hot, and the heat leapt into her veins and pumped life through them, a bigger and brighter and faster life than before. She was ready to be its partner—in dance, in life, forever. She spread her arms to caress the flames, ready to be stroked by their flickering fingers, to succumb to their torrid embrace. One more step and she’d be inside the ring, engulfed in the feverish dance that could bring her into something even larger and better, greater than any life she’d ever known . . .

“Janie, what the hell!”

A shadow tackled her, back and away from the flames. It grasped her arms, yanking them behind her back until her shoulders cracked and a vicious, miserable wind rushed her body where the delicious heat had been. She cried out like an animal, struggling against the brutal arms that were wrapped around her waist and refusing to let go. She flailed, kicking up dust, trying to squirm away.

“What is
wrong
with you?” Doug hissed in her ear.

“The fire . . .” she tried to explain, still wriggling in his grasp, the red drink sloshing her head sideways and then back again. “We were dancing together.”

“Are you fucking retarded?” Doug spun her around and grasped her by the shoulders, shaking her like a rag doll. His fingers dug into her skin, and she whimpered, realizing she’d done something wrong, something to make the darkness inside of him come rushing back.

“I was just trying to have fun,” she pouted. Doug could be so impossible, so unfair. First he wouldn’t bring her baby back, and then he wouldn’t let her pretend there had never been a baby at all. “That’s what you wanted, right? For me to have fun and forget it ever happened, just like you.”

Doug’s eyes narrowed, and his face went dark. “You think I forgot?” he snarled. “I’ll never forget.”

“Never forget what?” she taunted. The drink had loosened her tongue, and now she wanted him to say it, to face head-on what they’d all been dancing around. That their son was gone. That he wasn’t coming back. That God was punishing them for indiscretions she couldn’t understand, that He had deserted them just when she needed Him the most.

Doug drew himself up like a viper about to strike, reminding her of the snake that had sprung hissing from her laundry back in the spring, what felt like a lifetime before. Deep red blood vessels forked across the whites of his eyes, the capillaries raw and open from drink. “That you let our son die,” he hissed.

Janie recoiled. The words were poison, rotting her blood, paralyzing her flesh. Words disintegrated on her tongue.

“You let that rotten cousin of yours deliver him, you trusted her when you knew you shouldn’t have.” His hands were clamped on her shoulders, fingers hard as iron.

But he was wrong; that wasn’t how it had happened. She tried to find the memory, to explain, but it was like trying to read a paper that’s been drenched in mud: sodden, illegible, buried. “But . . .” she tried.

“You didn’t even want it in the first place, did you?”

“Huh?”

Doug sneered out a laugh. “You didn’t want a baby any more than I did. You were just afraid of losing me, so you did the only thing you could think of to keep me.”

The words crashed against her like a battering ram, bruising her heart. “What are you talking about?” she gasped.

“Don’t play coy with me, Janie. I see right through you. You were going to give him up for adoption, remember?”

Janie shook her head fiercely. It had been a TV commercial, nothing more—a thought she’d entertained only once, when Trey was dead and Doug was angry all the time and she didn’t know where else to turn. A thought that Daphne had put in her head.

Doug wasn’t finished. “You never even cared about having a baby in the first place. All you wanted was to tie me down so I could never leave or be with someone else or have a goddamn life. Admit it: That’s the truth, right?”

“No!” Janie hiccupped. How could Doug’s version be so twisted, so different from her own? “I never asked you to marry me. You were the one who proposed, remember?”

“Oh, that.” Doug laughed meanly. “You really are even dumber than you look. You think I wanted to marry you? My family made me, because they wanted to make sure your stingy-ass dad kept his word about the oil money. If it weren’t for that, no effin’ way would I have proposed. I’m eighteen years old; you think I want to be stuck with
you
forever?”