“You have a morbid sense of humor.”
“I’m not joking.”
“Maybe James is good for her. She looks happy.”
“He’s a fucking martyr,” he said sullenly. “If he were just some dumb jock, or a spoiled rich kid, like she is, I wouldn’t worry half as much.”
“You may be right. I think he cares about her, though.”
He didn’t dispute her. Instead, he brought her back to his original question. “So where’d you get the blue eyes, my little Guatemalan princess?”
“My dad, I guess.”
“You don’t know?”
“I don’t even know his name.”
“Isn’t it Moore?”
“No. That’s my stepdad.” She felt a twinge of guilt for deceiving him with the phony name, but she was telling the truth. Everett Moore had been her stepfather, and the thought of him made a darkness pass over her, like a cloud occluding the sun.
Ben must have seen it on her face. “Is he the guy?”
She didn’t have to ask what he meant, but she did. “The guy who what?”
“Who made you afraid.”
“He was one of them.”
Ben’s mouth made a thin, hard line. “Where is he now?”
“Why? So you can find him and beat him up?” She laughed, shaking her head.
“I feel protective of you, and you think it’s funny?”
“No. What’s funny is that you assume I need a protector. That tough-guy avenger crap is more about you than me, and it’s insulting. You want to make him pay for ruining your good-girl fantasy, for turning me into a real person with a lot of sexual hang-ups.”
He was silent for a moment. “So where is he?”
Her jaw dropped. “Did you hear anything I just said?”
“Yes.”
“So?”
“So, I think it’s bullshit. I’ve known you had hang-ups from the beginning. Who doesn’t? I still have nightmares about the Japanese girl with the Kung Fu grip. I’ve always thought of you as a real person-you saved my daughter from drowning, for Christ’s sake. And believe it or not, in my fantasies, you’re a bad girl.” His eyes flicked over her. “A very,
“My brother beat you to it,” she said. “He’ll be paying for that mistake the rest of his life.” Upset with herself for giving too much personal information away, she made a nervous gesture from him to her, indicating their relationship. “Last night you told me this was about sex. No emotional involvement.”
He leaned back in his chair. “Sex continues to be my primary objective,” he said with a lazy smile, looking out at the open floor. “Let’s dance.”
She cast him a skeptical glance. The music had just started, and several other couples were already dancing. “You cumbia?”
“Does it involve a lot of thrusting and grinding against each other?”
She smiled back at him, amused in spite of herself. “No.”
He sighed in mock disappointment. “Let’s do it anyway.”
James borrowed some clothes and a duffel bag from his brother and left. He couldn’t face the idea of fighting off Rhoda, or anyone else, tonight. Stephen didn’t know it, because he’d been more interested in drugs than sex for years, but James had already been with some of the party girls who drifted in and out of his brother’s house.
On James’ seventeenth birthday, Arlen gave him a shot of whisky and a punch in the eye, saying that anyone who was still a virgin at his age was either queer or retarded. James was just a teenager, all hormones and attitude, with a lot of anxieties and even more to prove, so he set out to prove he wasn’t queer with the first girl he laid eyes on, in an awkward but consensual grapple against Stephen’s bathroom sink.
It wasn’t a shining moment of his life, but it was a breakthrough.
He’d known he wasn’t queer, but he hadn’t been sure he could have sex like a normal person after all he’d seen and done. James discovered that not only could he do it, he could enjoy it, with an empty heart and a blissfully blank mind.
His performances hadn’t been memorable, but neither had the girls, and at least he didn’t need money or violence to get off. Still, it had deepened rather than filled the void inside him, so he’d stopped going over to Stephen’s house looking to break up the monotony of his miserable existence by getting laid.
When Lisette Bruebaker showed up a few weeks ago, James hadn’t approached her with anything particular in mind. They’d laughed about playing seven minutes in heaven at her thirteenth birthday party. She was so pretty, so full of life, so much different than the intoxicated, hollow-eyed girls he usually saw at Stephen’s.
And she reminded him of Carly.
So when Lisette took him into Stephen’s closet, he followed her, and when she dropped to her knees to give him her own little version of heaven, he didn’t tell her not to. He just threaded his fingers through her hair and pretended she was Carly.
He hadn’t lasted anywhere near seven minutes.
James groaned aloud at the memory, feeling sick to his stomach. If Carly ever found out about that, she’d never talk to him again. He knew very little about sex, and even less about girls, but he knew when to keep his mouth shut. Carly wouldn’t like to hear that he’d been in a closet with her friend.
Her dead friend.
As he walked by Carly’s house, he looked around, checking it out, making sure everything was safe. If someone could brutalize Lisette and dump her in the water, what was to stop them from doing it to Carly?
His gut clenched at the thought.
Stashing his bag between rocks at Windansea, he walked down to the 24-hour mini-mart to make the call. He knew better than to dial 911. Instead he looked up a phone number for a homicide detective.
“Staff Sergeant Paula DeGrassi, Homicide Division,” one of the listings read. It sounded pretty official, and for a moment, he wavered. This could get him in some really deep shit.
Then he thought of Carly, her pretty face. Her slim body tangled in a net.
So he dialed, palms sweaty, heart pounding, blood pumping to his ear where it was pressed against the receiver. Thank God for voice mail. James left a short message, giving Lisette’s name and a pair of memorized GPS coordinates.
When he returned to Windansea, he stayed awake for a long time, staring at black waves crashing against a bone-white beach.
He was dead-tired, too freaked out to sleep.
CHAPTER 9
The following day, Ben rang Sonny’s drunken song-bird doorbell several hours before the pool party was scheduled to begin. When she opened the door, he smiled, and her heart did a funny little flip-flop in her chest.
“I know you work out,” he said, like that was a greeting.
“How?”
“You’re in great shape.”
Smiling back at him, she leaned against her door-jamb. “Is that a challenge?”
“I’m not allowed to surf on Christmas. Family rules. Carly wants to run on the beach, and I’m dying to get some exercise.”
So was she. “You go stir-crazy after only one day without surfing?”
“Yeah. I get the shakes.”
