Sleeping With the Enemy (31 page)

“Jolene, you have to stop this.  It’s not healthy.  I’m your teacher.  I’m not interested in little girls.”

“Are you worried about getting caught? That’s it, isn’t it? I’d never tell.”

“That’s not it.  Damn it, I’m not interested in you! Period.  You’re sixteen years old.  I’m twenty-six.  You’re smart enough to put the numbers together and come up with a big, fat zero.  Give it up, for Christ’s sake.”

“You know what, Phil? I could make your life hell if I really wanted to.  All I’d have to do is tell my parents that you made a move on me.  How long do you think you’d have your job then?”

“Is that a threat?”

“All you have to do is be nice to me, and I won’t tell.”

“There’s nothing to tell! It’s not the truth!”

“It doesn’t matter, does it? If I went crying to my parents, who do you think they’d believe?”

When Paula stopped the tape, there was absolute silence in the room.  She looked from stunned face to stunned face.  “Heard enough, folks?”

Mrs. Hunter turned to her daughter.  “Jolene?” she said weakly.

The girl’s face might have gone white, but the defiance was still there.  “It’s all your fault,” she told her mother.

Behind her silk and pearls, Mrs. Hunter gasped.  “My fault?  How dare you say such a thing?”

“Because it’s the truth, Mother!  When have you ever looked at me?  You pay more attention to your precious poodle than you do to me!”

Her mother turned bright red, whether from fury or embarrassment, it was impossible
for
Jesse to determine.  “Jolene!”

“But when I came home the other night,” Jolene said, “crying because I’d made such a fool of myself with Mr. Lindstrom, you asked me what was wrong, and you actually seemed to care.  I lied about what happened because you finally looked at me.  You really, truly looked at me.” Her eyes filled with tears, and she swatted furiously at them.  “It’s the first time I can remember you ever listening to anything I said!”

Her father winced and closed his eyes.  Her mother’s mouth fell open.  “Excuse us a moment,” Terry Johnson said.  “I need to confer with my clients.”  He and the Hunters huddled in a corner of the room while Jesse clung to Rose’s hand.

Paula squeezed his shoulder.  Across the table, Henry Lamoreau’s color was rapidly improving.  The grayish pallor had left his face, and he was once again looking his customary chipper self.

Terry Johnson returned to the table.  Cleared his throat.  “Under the circumstances,” he said, “my clients are withdrawing all charges.  And they’d like to offer Mr. Lindstrom an apology.” He looked abashed.  “As well as Mr. Racine.”

Leslie Higgins from DHS leaned back in her chair and closed the appointment book she’d been scribbling in.  “Might I suggest, Mr. and Mrs. Hunter, that you consider family counseling? It sounds like there are some serious issues that need to be resolved.”

“Don’t worry,” Mr. Hunter said grimly.  “We’ll be giving it serious consideration.”

Johnson and Higgins left the room, chatting amiably, followed by the Hunters, silent and stoic as they escorted their weeping daughter from the room.  They were barely out the door before their raised voices drifted back, in battle or reprimand, Jesse couldn’t tell.  He let go of Rose’s hand and watched the color return to her fingers.  “Henry?” he said.

“Um?  Oh, yes, of course.  I’m expecting you to come back to work tomorrow morning.  And it won’t be a minute too soon.”  Henry pulled out a handkerchief and patted his bald head.  “The kids are really working over the substitute.”

“One more thing,” Paula said.  “I think the school owes Mr. Lindstrom a big apology.”

“Certainly.  Certainly.” Henry bobbed his head like one of those little dogs in the rear window of an old Ford.  Squaring his shoulders and puffing out his chest, he said, “I’ll have Hazel type up a memo immediately.  Put it in writing.”  Looking self-important, he added vaguely, “Of course, I knew all along that you were innocent.”  Still sweating profusely, he scurried from the room.

Behind his back, Paula stuck out her tongue, and Jesse held back the grin that was tiptoeing around the corners of his mouth.  She ejected the tape from the recorder and handed it to Phil Racine.  “Yours, I believe.  I can’t begin to tell you how grateful we are for what you’ve done.”

“You’re welcome,” Racine said, “but I think I benefited as much as Jesse did.” He looked at the tape in his hand, shrugged, and tossed it into the trash.  Rubbing his hands together, he said, “It doesn’t look like I’ll be needing it any more.”

Jesse put an arm around Rose’s waist and she turned into his arms.  Burying his face in her hair, he inhaled deeply and said, “Now, can we go home?”

Her hand was cool against the nape of his neck as she turned her face up to his.  “Now,” she said, “we can go home.”

epilogue

“Read it to me?” Rose said.  “I have to work fast, the light’s changing.”

The late-afternoon sun cast elongated shadows, reflecting sixteen-month-old Beth Lindstrom in primary colors in the river that flowed past her ankles.  Beth continued the weighty job of filling her plastic bucket with sand, blissfully unaware that a few feet away, her mother was rushing to capture her likeness on canvas while the afternoon light still cast a shimmering halo around her blond head.

Beside Rose, Jesse sat upright in his lawn chair and carefully tore open Devon’s letter.  
“Dear Mom and Dad,”
he read, and glanced up at his wife.  “Did you hear that? She called me Dad.”

“Mmn.  I noticed.  She should be calling you Dad after the bundle you dropped to send her to Stanford.  Keep reading.”

“Sorry I haven’t written, summer classes have kept me busy.  But it will be worth it in the end.  I know I made the right decision to do my undergraduate work in three years.  I still have law school ahead of me, and at some point before I’m too old, I’d like to have a life again.”

“It would be nice,” Rose said, frowning as she concentrated on blurring Beth’s watery reflection in the background of her canvas, “if she could find the time to come home and visit once in a while.”

“She’ll come home for Thanksgiving.”

“By then, I’ll have forgotten what she looks like.”

“Mikey arrived in one piece, and I’ve been introducing him to all my friends.  They’re already all crushing on him—”
He paused, looked up at Rose.  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“I imagine just what it sounds like.”

“—and telling me how lucky I am to have such a hottie for a stepbrother.  If they only knew what I know.  Anyway, don’t worry about him.  Big sister is watching out for him, and once the semester starts in a couple of weeks, he’ll be too busy with classes to get into any trouble.”

“That’s a comforting thought,” Rose said.

“Isn’t it?” Jesse gave her a quick smile, then turned back to the letter
.  “Congratulations, Dad, on the new job.  Mr.  Lamoreau was way overdue for retirement, and I know you’ll make a kick-ass principal.  Mom, thanks for the painting you sent for my birthday.  My roommate says Jackson Falls looks quaint and picturesque, and she’s dying to visit.  I told her it’s not true, that it’s just a trick of light, but I don’t think she believes me.  Give a big kiss to the squirt for me, and send more pictures!  All the kids think my baby sister is way cool.  Oh, and say hi to the dweeb for me, but don’t make it sound like I miss him or anything.  Love, Devon.”

Rose dabbed a final spot of color on the canvas, stepped back to study it, and set down her brush.  “What do you think?”

Jesse got up from the chair, stood behind her.  “I’m continually amazed by your work.  Is this one going in the show?”

“I haven’t decided yet.  I have to live with it for a while first.” She wiped her hands on a rag, turned and stepped into his arms.  “I am continually amazed by you.”

They kissed tenderly, intimately, while still keeping one eye on their daughter, sitting on the sand.  Beth had pulled off her sun hat and stuffed it into her plastic bucket.  “Look,” she said.  “Wet.”

Rose knelt on the damp sand and scooped up her daughter.  “It’s wet, all right,” she said, and Beth squealed with enjoyment.  “Just like you, Bethy Lindstrom.”

“Wet!” Beth said, pointing and struggling to get down.  “Hat!”

Rose let her go, but her eyes followed her daughter with fierce devotion.  “You know,” Jesse said quietly from behind her, “it all started right here.”

It was all the same as it had been on that summer day two years ago, the hard-packed sand, the rocks that isolated the tiny stretch of beach, the river flowing peacefully downstream.  “I went with you that day on a whim,” she said.  “You looked so good, and I’d been alone for so long.”

He rested a hand on her shoulder, and she reached up and lay hers on top of it.  “Pretty amazing, isn’t it?” he said.  “The way a single instant can change your life?”

But not everything was the same, she thought as she watched her daughter somberly studying a piece of seaweed.  She’d been well on her way to becoming a bitter old woman until Jesse Lindstrom had rescued her from herself.  And they’d been rewarded with a priceless gift in this beautiful child whose very existence could bring tears to her eyes. 

Jesse sat down behind her on the sand, drew her into his arms, and she leaned back against his chest.  “Any regrets?” he said.

Rose took his hand in hers.  Gaze still focused on the laughing child with the Lindstrom blonde hair and the MacKenzie green eyes, she threaded her fingers through her husband’s.  “Not a one.”

THE END

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BOOK 3 IN THE JACKSON FALLS SERIES,

COMING IN LATE 2012:

chapter one

Summer, 1991

Jackson Falls, Maine

Becoming a member of the Jackson Falls Public Library Committee had, quite possibly, been the worst decision Casey Fiore MacKenzie had made in her entire thirty-five years.  Despite  the fact that she’d spent the first eighteen years of her life walking the dusty back roads of this very town, every one of her fellow committee members looked at her as though she were an alien from a distant planet.  It was where she’d been in the years she spent away from here that skewed their perspective.  It would have been laughable if it weren’t so maddening.  Anybody who bought into the whole sex-and-drugs-and-rock-and-roll mystique would be vastly disappointed if they could see how pedestrian her life actually was.

The six of them had spent the last two hours embroiled in a heated debate about book censorship that had ended in a stalemate.  Now she had the beginnings of a headache and was seriously rethinking this whole community service gig.  It was all part of the
What-is-Casey-Going-to-do-With-the-Rest-of-Her-Life
self-actualization program that she’d recently embarked on.  Not that it had been her idea.  As far as she was concerned, at thirty-five, she had plenty of time to figure out the next sixty years.  But Rob had been prodding her, and when he got like that, it was usually easier to just give in.  The man could be relentless, and the fact that he was nearly always right didn’t make it any easier to take.

She’d stopped writing music after Danny died.  It wasn’t that the well had dried up; she’d simply turned off the spigot and hadn’t bothered to turn it back on.  Without him, without that golden voice to bring her music to life, there no longer seemed to be any point to it.  Rob had remained uncharacteristically silent on the issue, although she knew it bothered him more than he wanted to admit.  They’d worked together as partners since they were little more than kids.  But aside from a couple of half-hearted attempts at persuasion that had fallen flat in the early days following Danny’s death, he’d avoided bringing it up.  It was probably better for both of them if he stayed away from that particular can of worms.

But he’d been working without her.  He hadn’t said so, but she recognized the signs.  All those hours he’d been spending out in the zillion-dollar studio they’d built in the barn.  She knew damn well he was out there working on new material, which meant that she needed to start pushing harder with the self-actualization thing, because new material meant a new album, and a new album meant he would be going back out on the road.  She’d seen the restlessness in him for a while, knew him well enough to recognize the signs.  He was a musician; performing was programmed into his DNA.  He would almost certainly ask her to come with him, but they both knew she’d rather have bamboo shoots shoved under her fingernails.  Been there, done that, bought the tour shirt.  He would leave, and she would be left alone for three months while he was out there playing rock god with his Fender strat.  And she’d better find something constructive to do with her time, because Rob MacKenzie was a strong proponent of tough love, and he was apt to plant one of his size-eleven Reeboks up her backside if he thought she was going to spend those three months sitting in her rocking chair, waiting for him to come home.

She’d fully expected that by this time, there would be some indication that they were percolating the newest little Fiore-MacKenzie collaboration.  But so far, nothing.  Even though thirty-five was still young, she knew that once a woman passed thirty, her chances of conceiving decreased with each passing year.  She was nowhere near ready to accept defeat, but sometimes, lying awake in the wee hours, her thoughts danced all around the dark possibility that it might not ever happen.  If it didn’t, they would deal with it.  There were always other options.  She would love any child, no matter the age or race, that was placed in her arms.  They both would.  But she so wanted that child to be a part of both of them.