Playing Dead in Dixie (2 page)

She reached the Stricklands at the same time Wes did.  She spared him a quick, curious glance before turning to his Aunt Bonnie.  "Mrs. Strickland?"

Definitely a Yankee.  Easterner.  Philly, maybe New Jersey.  South, not north.  He'd developed an ear for accents during his four years in the Marines, collecting drawls, brogues and honks like some guys collected bottle caps or baseball cards.

Aunt Bonnie looked up at the taller woman, her expression wary.  "Yes.  I'm sorry, do we know each other?"

The brunette gave a little half-smile, her cheeks growing pink beneath the older woman's gaze.  "No, we haven't met.  I knew your son Steve."

"You knew Stevie?"  Warmth spilled into his aunt's eyes, chasing away the wariness.

Wes's heart sank.  Here we go again.

The brunette placed her slim-fingered hand over Bonnie's.  "I was on the bus with him when it crashed.  He wanted—"

Bonnie's breath hitched.  "Were you with him when . . . ?"

Wes took a step forward, a finger of unease sliding down the back of his neck.  There was something in the brunette's voice when she spoke of Steve, a glimmer of intimacy, as if to suggest, oh-so-subtly, that her friendship with Steve was a little deeper than she let on.

Wes knew better.  He'd talked to Steve a week before his death, and there hadn't been anybody in his life.  Definitely not a brunette with a showgirl's body and sea green eyes.

He placed himself between his aunt and the newcomer, holding out his hand.  "I'm Wes Hollingsworth.  Steve's cousin.  And you are?"

Her green eyes met his gaze.  Her expression was neutral, even guileless, but those eyes were deep and unfathomable.  She took his hand.  "Carly Devlin.  A friend of Steve's."

Her hand was warm, her grip strong.  Heat seeped into his palm where their hands touched.

Her eyes darkened and her hand curled into a fist.  She pressed it against her leg and cleared her throat.  "Steve told me about you."  Though her expression betrayed a flicker of anxiety, her voice still held a hint of intimacy, like she knew something he didn't.

Only he was pretty sure it was the other way around.

"Were you with our boy when he died?" Floyd asked.

Carly looked up at Wes's uncle, moisture pooling in her eyes.  Either she was the best actress this side of Hollywood, or she was fighting with real emotion.  Wes was leaning toward the former, but he had to admit that a less suspicious man would fall for the weepy act without hesitation.

"I wasn't with him at the end," she admitted, her voice quiet.  "He'd lost consciousness and his heart was failing.  A doctor—a guy who saw the crash—was with him.  But Steve never regained consciousness, as far as I know."  She licked her full pink lips, a hint of uneasiness creeping into her expression.  "I know this is a bad time and place to introduce myself—I didn't realize when I arrived that the funeral would be today.  I guess I could have waited at your house until you got back, but there's not really a good time—"

"Don't fret yourself."  Bonnie took Carly's hand in hers.  "You're Steve's friend.  You're welcome here any time.  Why don't you come back to the house with us?  We don't know enough of Steve's friends."

Wes looked at his aunt with alarm, recognizing the telltale signs, the open warmth in the older woman's voice, the fluttering hands itching to be of use.  Bonnie Hollingsworth Strickland was a born nurturer, and if the people around her didn't keep her in check, she'd take in every stray, animal or human, who passed by her door.  The trait was worse under stress, and God knows, losing her only son in an accident qualified as stress.

Wes looked to Floyd, hoping his uncle realized what was happening, but Floyd's face held only a sad, understandable eagerness.  Carly Devlin claimed she'd been with Steve at the last.  No doubt Floyd was thinking maybe Steve had said something, had given Carly some sort of message they could tuck away in their hearts and their memories to comfort them over the hard months to come.

Even Steve's sister Beth, who had more of Wes's native wariness than her parents, looked interested in what Carly Devlin had to say.

"It's just the family," Bonnie was saying, already tucking her arm into the crook of Carly's.  "Did you drive here?"

Carly shook her head, glancing toward Wes.  The look of distress on her face could mean anything, from genuine discomfort at insinuating herself into a private family moment to worry that Wes saw through whatever scheme she was hatching to take advantage of his aunt and uncle.  Her green eyes narrowed as she spoke.  "I rode the bus in from Savannah."  Her face paled, lines marring her smooth brow.  "I don't know why I didn't consider how hard it would be, getting back on a bus.  But I had to come here."

For the first time, Wes believed her without reservation.  She couldn't have faked the haggard look that crossed her face when she spoke of riding the bus to Bangor.  He believed her when she said she'd braved reentering the belly of the diesel beast because she had to come to Bangor.

The question was, why?

THE STRICKLANDS' HOUSE WAS a mirror of the people themselves, solid, simple, warm and inviting.  A stone porch spanned the front of the clapboard house, the grays, browns and duns a pleasing foil for the moss green of the wood siding.

Carly followed Steve's family through the sagging screened door, trying to ignore the laser force of Wes Hollingsworth's suspicious glare.  Scalp prickling, she focused on the sprawling living room on the other side of the screen door, an over-stuffed museum of country kitsch, from the carved wooden owl perched on the pine mantle over the soot-black fireplace to the brown- and gold-checked sofa backed up against the far wall.

Warm, buttery aromas wafted from somewhere near the back of the house.  A tall, rail-thin woman came into the living room in its wake, wiping her hands on her apron.  She gave Steve's sister Beth a hug and turned a tight, sympathetic smile toward Bonnie Strickland. "I've got everything set up in the kitchen.  Y'all want me to stay around and help you clean up?"

Bonnie returned the smile, but Carly could see the strain in her red-rimmed eyes.  "Oh, Maddie, don't you even think about cleanin' up for us.  I'll be happy to have something to keep me busy.  But aren't you going to stay and eat?"

Maddie shook her head.  "Royce is supposed to be coming in this afternoon.  Haven't seen him in a week.  I promised I'd have him a hot meal on the table when he got here."  She gave Bonnie a quick hug and glanced toward Carly, her blue eyes narrowing slightly.  It was an expression Carly was getting used to.  She'd seen it enough times during her trip south.

She was an outsider.

Bonnie turned to Carly.  "Oh, where are my manners?  Maddie, this is Carly Devlin.  Carly, this is Maddie Bagwell.  Carly was a friend of Steve's, Maddie."

Carly tried not to flinch at the way Bonnie Strickland pronounced the word "friend."  She might as well have called her Steve's girlfriend.

And whose fault is that?
a mean little voice whispered inside her head.

Maddie gave Carly a brief, reserved smile. "Nice to meet you, Carly.  It was good of you to come down for the funeral."  She turned back to Bonnie.  "I'll be at the house if you need me."  She gave Steve's mother another hug and left, the screen door slapping shut behind her.

Carly glanced at Steve's cousin Wes, who stood at the mantle, arms crossed, his gaze never leaving her, even when she caught him looking.  He wasn't smiling.

Definitely not as hospitable as the rest of the family, she thought.  Too bad; he was good-looking in that corn-fed, aw-shucks way that reminded her of a few of the country boys she'd met in college.  Earnest, hard-working, charming if you liked the type.  Occasionally she had.

His hair was as dark as hers but sun-kissed with streaks of honey brown a woman would gladly spend eighty dollars to replicate in a salon.  He wore it short, the top just long enough to hint at natural waviness.  His even features were roughhewn enough to be masculine rather than merely handsome, and his lean, muscular body suggested he was no stranger to physical labor.

But his eyes were his most striking feature, dark and intense, with mysteries roiling in their murky depths.  Wes didn't trust her; she could tell that without having to look any deeper.  Definitely didn't buy into his aunt's assumption that Carly had been Steve's "friend."

She'd have to live with that.  After all, Wes couldn't know what kind of relationship she'd had with Steve, could he?

During the hour she and Steve had shared together on the bus out of Atlantic City, Steve had practically told her his life story, all about the little Georgia town he'd outgrown somewhere around the time he graduated from high school, about the family he'd left behind.  He'd been clear that he'd been estranged from them.  He'd been equally clear about his regrets.

What were the odds he'd have spilled his guts about his love life to his cousin?

As guilty as it made her feel, it was probably in her best interest to let the Stricklands think she and Steve had been more than friends.  She needed a place to lay low, to make a little money and save up some cash so she could move on to another town when Bangor, Georgia lost its charm or its safety in a week or two.  Steve had told her his parents owned a store.  If they offered her a job on the strength of their mistaken assumption that she might one day have been their daughter-in-law, she could live with it.

She'd have to.

"Wes, why don't you go get Carly's bags out of Floyd's car?"  Bonnie reached for Carly's hand, catching her by surprise.  "You'll stay here with us while you're in town, all right?  I won't take no for an answer.  I can make up Beth's old bed.  There's plenty of room, and it has a nice view of the woods out back."

Carly started to shake her head, but Wes's look of sheer horror was annoying enough to shout down her guilty conscience.

What could it hurt to accept a little Southern hospitality while she was in town?  She'd help out Bonnie over the next couple of days, show she could be a good, trustworthy worker.  Look into a job at the hardware store or maybe some other place in town, something that would pay enough for her to rent a room somewhere and maybe sock a little away until she could figure out what to do next.  She'd make sure the Stricklands didn't regret their kindness.  What could it hurt?

"If it's no trouble," she found herself saying, her voice tight and raspy.

"It would be so good to have a young person around the house again, wouldn't it, Floyd?"

Carly glanced at Floyd Strickland, steeling herself for an echo of his nephew Wes's suspicion.  But Floyd only nodded, his red-rimmed eyes full of an eager curiosity that made Carly's stomach turn flips.

Another glance at Wes made her wish she'd given the envelope of cash to Steve's mother back at the graveyard and gotten out of town while the getting was good.

Maybe it wasn't too late to do just that.  She reached inside her purse, a long black vinyl bag she'd bought for a buck in a thrift shop back in Virginia before she headed south.  The envelope she withdrew was a new one, a free Priority Mail pouch she'd picked up in the post office in Savannah because she couldn't give them the ten grand in the original envelope.

The one stained red with their son's blood.

She held the envelope out to Bonnie Strickland.  "Steve gave me this, before he died.  He'd gone to a casino in Atlantic City.  One of those day trips.  I wasn't with him at the tables, so I'm not sure how he won this.  But he wanted you to have it."

Bonnie took the envelope and opened it, her eyes widening as she caught sight of the cash inside.  "My goodness."

As Floyd, Beth and Beth's husband moved closer to see what was in the envelope, Wes stepped forward, taking the envelope from his aunt's shaking hands.  His brows lifted as he caught sight of the stack of bills inside.  He shot Carly a dark glare before turning his attention to a quick thumb-through of the bills.  "There's ten thousand dollars here."

Carly nodded.  "Guess it was his lucky day."

Five pained gazes turned to her, and she flushed a deep, horrified red as she realized the thoughtless cruelty of her flip comment.  Mortification flooded through her, turning her skin hot, then cold.  "Oh, my God, I'm so sorry, I didn't—"

Beth crossed to Carly, took her hand and gave it a gentle squeeze.  She smiled through a film of tears.  "I reckon Steve probably thought so, too.  Until the crash."

"He wanted to come home," Carly blurted, shame loosening her tongue.  "I think he was going to come home, but—"

Wes pushed the envelope of money into his uncle's hands and caught Carly by her elbow.  Her skin buzzed with a low-grade electrical charge, her fingers curling into her palms.  She felt the same tilt-a-whirl feeling she'd felt earlier at the gravesite when they'd shaken hands.  Off-balance, almost the way she had when the casino tour bus had left the asphalt and plummeted down the ravine.

Like the world had dropped out from under her feet, pitching her into a dark, tumbling void.

That couldn't be good.

"Come show me where you left your bags."  Wes's grip on her arm tightened as he pushed her toward the door.

Outside, she pulled her arm from his grasp and glared up at him, trying to regain control over her rubbery legs.  "I don't like being manhandled."

"And I don't like liars."

She took a breath, trying to steady her rattled nerves.  "I'm not lying.  I was with Steve on the bus.  He gave me the money."

"Oh, that much I buy."  Wes moved closer, his tall, broad body swallowing her in its shadow.  He towered over her, a giant silhouette backlit by the sun, and spoke in a low, gravelly growl.  "But you definitely weren't Steve's 'friend.'"

She swallowed hard.  "Maybe you didn't know Steve as well as you think.  I mean, I know he wasn't as close as he'd like to be to his family."

"Not to his folks, no," Wes agreed.  He bent closer to her, near enough that she felt his warm breath wash over her cheeks.  "But Steve and I kept in touch. I heard from him three weeks ago, and he definitely didn't have a new 'friend' in his life.  And even if he had, it certainly wouldn't have been you."