Storm Track

“For the love of God, Jase! Don’t I mean any thing to you?” Lynn asked impatiently, speaking to his reflection in her mirror. She pushed her hair into the artfully tangled shape she wanted and set it in place with a cloud of perfumed hair spray. “I won’t be here later, remember? Antiquing with my sister? Her and me spending the night in a motel up around Danville? I can’t believe you—”

“Only kidding,” he said. “You don’t think I’d really forget that I’m a bachelor on the prowl tonight, do you?” With his free hand, he stroked a mock mustache and gave her a wicked leer.

“And don’t try to call me because we’re going to ramble till we get tired and then stop at the first motel we come to.”

It pleased her when his leer was replaced by a proper expression of husbandly concern.

“You’ll be careful, won’t you, honey? Don’t let Lurleen talk you into staying somewhere that’s not safe just because it’s cheap, okay?”

“Don’t worry. It’ll be safe. And I’ll call you soon as I’m checked in.”

In the mirror, Lynn watched her husband leave. Not for the first time she wondered why she bothered to try and keep this marriage going. Except that Jason was going to be somebody in this state someday and she was going to be right there by his side. No way was she planning to wind up like her mother (after three husbands and five affairs, she was living on social security in a trailer park in Wake County) or Lurleen (only one husband but God alone knew how many lovers, one of which had left her with herpes and she was just lucky it wasn’t AIDS). Besides, she’d busted her buns working double shifts at the hospital while Jase got his law degree so they wouldn’t have a bunch of debt hanging over them when he started practicing. Now that the long grind was finally over, now that they could start thinking about a fancier house, a winter cruise, maybe even a trip to Hawaii, she wasn’t about to blow it.

But that doesn’t mean I’ve got to keep putting my needs on hold, Lynn thought, absently caressing her smooth cheek. Jase used to be such a tiger in bed. This summer, between long hours at the firm and weekends at the ball field or volunteer fire department—“building contacts” was how he justified so much time away—all he wanted to do in bed most nights was sleep.

Not her.

She took a dainty black lace garter belt from her lingerie drawer and put it in her overnight case. Black hose and a push-up bra followed. She dug out a pair of strappy heels from the back of her closet and put those in, too. Panties? Why bother? You won’t have them on long enough to matter, she told herself with a little shiver of anticipation.

She thought about calling Lurleen, but her sister was going to Norfolk this weekend and wouldn’t be home to answer the phone anyhow if Jase should call. Not that he would. He wasn’t imaginative enough to play the suspicious husband. And no point giving Lurleen another hold over her. She already knew too much.

CHAPTER | 2

The origin of a hurricane is not fully settled. Its accompanying phenomena, however, are significant to even the casual observer.

“C’mon, Deb’rah, we’re one man short and what else you got to do this evening?” Dwight wheedled. “What’s- his-face didn’t change his mind and decide to come, did he?”

Sometimes Dwight can be even more exasperating than one of my eleven brothers. At least they like Kidd and Kidd seems to like all of them. Dwight’s been the same as a brother my whole life—one of my bossier brothers, I might add—and he knows Kidd’s name as well as he knows mine, but he’ll never come right out and use it if he can help it. Don’t ask me why.

Kidd Chapin’s a game warden down east, Dwight Bryant is Sheriff Bo Poole’s right-hand man and heads up Colleton County’s detective squad here in central North Carolina, so they’re both law enforcement agents and they both like to hunt and fish and tromp around in the woods. There’s no reason for them not to be friends. Nevertheless, even though they both deny any animosity, the two of them walk around each other as warily as two strange tomcats.

“No, he hasn’t changed his mind,” I said, with just the right amount of resigned regret.

Dwight would worry me like a dog at a rat hole if I gave him the least little suspicion of how sorry I’d been feeling for myself ever since Kidd called yesterday morning to say he couldn’t come spend this Labor Day weekend with me as we’d planned. Kidd lives in New Bern, a hundred miles away, and we’ve been lovers for over a year now. But let his teenage daughter Amber crook her little finger and he drops everything—including me—to run see what she wants.

I know all about non-custodial angst. Not only do I see a lot of it when I sit domestic court, I’ve watched my own brothers struggle with their guilt. Hell, I even watch Dwight. Let Jonna call and say he can have Cal a day early, and what happens? Ten minutes after she hangs up, he’s rearranged the whole department’s schedule so he can head up I-85 to Virginia.

All the same, knowing about something in theory and liking it in practice are two entirely different things, and I was getting awfully tired of watching Amber jerk the chain of the man who says he loves me, who says he wants to be with me.

I brushed a strand of sandy blonde hair back from my face. It had bleached out this summer and felt like straw here under the torrid afternoon sun. When Dwight drove up in his truck, I’d been standing in the yard of my new house with a twenty-foot length of old zinc pipe in my hands.

“Here,” I said, handing him the pipe. “Hold this and move back a couple of feet, would you?”

“Why?” he asked, as he held it erect and moved to where I’d pointed. “What are you doing?”

“Planning my landscape and I think I want a maple right about—stop!” I cast a critical eye on how the pipe’s shadow fell across my porch. “Right where you’re standing would be good. It’ll shade the whole porch in August.”

Dwight snorted. “It’ll be twenty years before any tree’s tall as this pipe. Unless you buy one with some size on it ’stead of digging a sprout out of the woods?”

Until the spring, my yard had been an open pasture with only a couple of widely scattered oaks and sycamores to shade a few of my daddy’s cows. None of those trees shaded the two-bedroom house I’d had built on a slight rise overlooking the long pond. (A house, I might add, that was supposed to give Kidd and me some privacy. A supposition, I might add, we’ve had too frigging few weekends to test out, thank you very much, Amber.)