CHAPTER 11
The good news was that they had caught the Peeper.
The bad news—to Kelly’s way of thinking—was that the story of his capture was plastered over the front pages of newspapers as far away as D.C. and Knoxville.
Thank God Dan had gotten into his jeans before the police had come!
Still, in black and white, for all the world to see, the papers reported that she and Dan had been in the cabin on the mountain. The police had been called at 3:48 a.m. and had arrived to find the Peeper still unconscious, with Mr. Dante Marquette and Mrs. Kelly McGraw standing guard over the subject.
It would have been impossible to tell Jarod that they had driven to the cabin at 3:48 a.m. to feed the deer.
He and Sandy came back around eleven to find Kelly, Dan and Reeves sipping coffee in Dan’s living room. Jarod had burst in like a small tornado, with Sandy in his wake, waving a newspaper in front of him.
“Mom!”
He raced over to her and gave her one of his massive hugs, the kind that she was afraid would break her one day. She was gratified and relieved—at least his first thought was still to assure himself that she was all right.
Sandy gave her the next hug, a much gentler one. “I would have been just terrified. Thank God they caught that awful man, and thank God he’s locked up again. I’m so glad you and Dad were together…” Then she kissed and hugged her father, then told him that he was a hero.
Dan cleared his throat and actually blushed, then told Sandy not to be ridiculous, that he had just been there, and he had gotten the first good slug in.
“Ohhh…Kelly! I would have been so scared! I’d probably have had a heart attack!” Sandy insisted.
“Tea, Sandra? Mr. McGraw?” Reeves interrupted.
“Coffee for me, Reeves, thanks,” Jarod said, and Kelly realized that already her son was changing, a belligerent expression crossing his handsome young face. She didn’t like the way he was looking at her, and liked the way he was looking at Dan even less.
She decided not to confront him and to respond to Sandy’s comment instead. “Sandy, I really didn’t have time to be frightened. I heard him behind me, and then your dad was on top of him,” she said.
Jarod had moved to the window, hands clasped behind his back, staring intently out at the scenery. He turned to Kelly with a curious smile. “What were you doing out on that path at three in the morning, Mom?”
Kelly hardened her features and her heart and stared at him coolly. “Walking, Jarod.”
“So you two were up at the cabin together, huh?”
“Yes, Jarod—” Kelly began, but Dan was suddenly up, sweeping past her, and she began to remember exactly why she had been on that path.
“Yes, we were up at the cabin, Jarod,” he said easily, conversationally, crossing his arms over his chest. “And do you really want to know what your mother was doing on that path?”
Kelly watched Jarod’s knuckles go white. “Yes, I do!” he announced defiantly, his pulse beating at the base of his throat.
“Jarod!” Sandy said in alarm, racing over toward him. She tried to calm him down, to grab his hand, but he wouldn’t let her.
Even Dan said, “Stay out of this, Sandy.”
“Now wait a minute—” Kelly began.
“You, too, Mom!” Jarod snapped.
It wasn’t that she intended to listen to him; it was pure surprise that kept Kelly standing there, her mouth agape.
“I’ll tell you what she was doing on the path!” Dan seemed to roar with the power of a locomotive. “She was walking out on me. And do you want to know why she was walking out on me?”
“Why?” Jarod asked a bit more slowly and warily.
“We were arguing, Jarod. It’s funny. The truth had just slapped me in the face, I mean, I knew it—I think parents just know things sometimes that they don’t exactly want to see. But there I was, picking up pieces of my daughter’s underwear, and something about it just made me snap. I knew what you two had done, but I hadn’t known where you had done it, and suddenly I was forced to stare it all in the face. Hell! You two couldn’t even get dressed after! So I blamed your mother, Jarod. Blamed her for having the cabin. It wasn’t fair, but I wasn’t being particularly rational. And she was naturally furious, so she walked out on me. In the middle of the night. I tried to catch her, to apologize. That’s the full explanation, Jarod. But do you know what, son? I think that if you have any sense at all in that brain of yours, you won’t mention that cabin to me again. Or ask either one of us what we were doing in it.”
Jarod stared at him for a long, long time without answering, but his fists kept clenching and unclenching. Suddenly he turned to stare at Kelly. “Mother, I’m leaving. Are you coming?”
“Jarod, I think that—”
“I think you’re acting like a spoiled brat and that you’d better watch your step with me, young man,” Dan warned.
“Watch my step!” Jarod growled. “We’ve been through this before. I love Sandy. There’s a big difference.” He stared at Kelly again. “A real big difference.”
“Jarod, really!” Kelly snapped, stunned and incredulous that he would behave this way. “Jarod, I’m your mother! You’re not out of high school, and I’m thirty-five. I’ve raised you, and I have the right—”
“It has nothing to do with rights, Mother. It has to do with him. Don’t you see? It’s humiliating. He doesn’t want anything but—it’s just like being his whore.”
There was a deathly silence. Kelly was too amazed to talk; Sandy—and Dan—seemed to be in shock.
Jarod turned and stormed out of the house, slamming the door in his wake.
“I’m going to kill him!” Dan swore suddenly. “Take him apart limb by obnoxious limb—”
“Dad, no!” Sandy cried. “Dad, he really doesn’t mean anything,” she said desperately, running to her father and clutching his arm, holding it tightly—barely restraining him. He stared at her. “Dad, please! Let me talk to him. He’s upset; he’ll apologize!”
She tried to smile at them both, her face ashen. “Please!” she whispered, and she stared at Kelly. “Please!”
Kelly still couldn’t move. She felt frozen. She could only watch as Sandy went racing out after Jarod.
Through the huge window, Kelly and Dan could see them clearly; Sandy trying to soothe him; Jarod shaking off her desperate grip on his shoulder.
Then Dan was suddenly in motion. He started toward the door. Every maternal instinct in Kelly came surging to the fore, and she raced after him.
She was so small and he was so big that for an instant it was as if he didn’t know that she had caught hold of him, that she was hanging on his arm.
“Dan!”
He kept walking.
“Dan!”
He stopped and stared down at her.
“Dan!” Kelly screamed a third time.
“I won’t have her out there like that! Whining and pleading with that obnoxious, overgrown brat!”
“Dan, damn you, she’s going to marry him! She’s carrying his child, and he’s my son! My son!”
“And you didn’t do a damn thing to shut him up!” he reminded her contemptuously.
Kelly jerked away from him as if he had burned her, and she stared at her hands as if they had been dirtied.
“That’s right, Marquette, I didn’t. Like I said, he’s my son. That relationship is between the two of us. Even if he is an obnoxious brat, he’s being protective. And if you so much as go near him, I’ll never speak to you again.”
“Kelly, listen to you! You’re defending his behavior!”
“Damn right,” she said, and she backed away. She saw her purse, lying on the sofa. She picked it up and marched regally toward the door.
Outside, she went sailing by Jarod and Sandy, who stared after her in silence.
Kelly couldn’t see what went on behind her. She only knew that a second later Jarod had caught up with her. That he was upset, anxious. He opened the passenger door and ushered her in, then moved around to the driver’s seat.
They drove home in an awful and absolute silence.
“Mom…” Jarod began once he had parked the car in front of the house.
But Kelly had nothing to say to him. She slammed the car door and started for the house.
He followed. “Mother! Don’t you see? Don’t you understand? He’s all right as a man. As a father-in-law. He likes mountains and streams and fishing and football. And women! Mom, I know you! I’ve known you all my life—”
Still silent, Kelly twisted the key in the front door and stepped inside.
Jarod was right on her tail. “I’ve known you all my life, right?”
Kelly noticed that there were tears brimming in his blue eyes. They didn’t touch her. Nothing seemed to touch her at that moment. Jarod had created a schism, and then Jarod had needed her, and Dan—damn him!—had come on like gangbusters, and Kelly had really had no choice but to stand up for Jarod.
And now Jarod…
“The cabin, Mom!” he exclaimed in sudden fury, clenching his hands at his sides. “How could you? How could you go up there with that man and sell out?”
Kelly slapped him. Hard. And then, even as he clutched his cheek in astonishment, she backed him up against the staircase. “I own that cabin, Jarod; you don’t! And without my knowing a damn thing about it, you brought that man’s daughter—his innocent, underaged daughter!—up there. And she’s pregnant. And he went out of his way and I went out of my way to try to smooth the way for you. We’re both trying to see things rationally, and we’re both willing to help with whatever decisions the two of you make—and you repay me like this? Jarod…”
There were tears in his eyes. Real tears. “It was my father’s cabin!” he shouted back. “My father’s cabin! It was all right for me to be there! It was all right for me to be with a girl there. It wasn’t all right for you! You betrayed him. I was conceived there! It was my father’s place!”
Kelly stopped short, filled with confusion, dizziness and misery. “Jarod, I haven’t betrayed your father! Your father is dead.”
Jarod suddenly sank down on the bottom step, holding his head between his hands. “It was Dad’s cabin,” he repeated softly.
Kelly sank down beside him, slipping an arm around his broad shoulders. “Jarod, I loved your father, through thick and thin. A lot of things were very hard, and we made it anyway. But, Jarod, he’s gone. I miss him, you miss him, but I’ve been alone a long, long time!”
He wasn’t convinced. He looked up at her bitterly again. “So you hopped into bed with Marquette the first chance you got.”
Her hand itched to slap him again. “Damn you, Jarod! I do not believe this! You go out and get that poor girl pregnant, then have the nerve to tell me what I can and can’t do. I will not have it!”
She stood, a tangle of tension and emotion. She started up the stairway, unaware that he had stood up, too, that he was watching her with the tears, the uncertainty, brimming in his eyes once more.
“Mother! Don’t you understand! I love Sandy! Dad loved you; you loved Dad!”
She swung around, still incensed. “No, Jarod, I guess I just don’t understand anything. And all I want you to know is this—if I decide to dance naked on the front lawn, that’s exactly what I’m going to do. And I don’t need your permission to do it! Whatever the hell it was—love or lust—it was of my choosing. I’m old enough to choose, Jarod, and you’re not! I don’t have anything else to say on the matter, and quite frankly, Jarod, I really don’t want to talk to you right now! Excuse me, please!”
She went up to her room, and this time she didn’t even have the energy to slam the door. She just closed it, then locked it.
She sat down on her bed and lifted her hands helplessly, then started to cry. She hated them. Both of them! How dare Jarod call her names? How dare he think that he could dictate to her?
And Dan! What the hell was the matter with him? Couldn’t he understand that Jarod would naturally be upset? Couldn’t he have a little patience, a little empathy? Sandy didn’t remember her mother, Jarod did remember his father. And he was a sensitive young man; maybe something about the cabin really was sacred to him.
She stopped crying and lay back on her bed, staring up at the ceiling. Damn, damn, damn Dan! What would have happened if they hadn’t been fighting to begin with? The cabin would have been locked; the Peeper might just have gone on his way.
And still be on the loose, Kelly reminded herself. Dangerous and on the loose, but now he was back behind bars.
A lot of women would be safe. Her happiness was certainly a small price to pay, wasn’t it?
She and Dan hadn’t even mentioned their fight after the police had arrived. It had seemed too petty. The police had taken the Peeper away, and she and Dan had gone back to his house, where Reeves had made them a couple of good stiff Scotches.
They had sat on the couch and drunk them together. A pair, a team, a couple. His arm had remained around her all the night; she had dozed with her head against his shoulder, and it had been so nice. In good times and bad. That was what love was all about, wasn’t it? Laughing together, knowing fear together. Dan’s wild anger had sent him hurtling against an unknown danger because she was being threatened.
In the same way, she had stood up for Jarod, because she loved him—and because Dan had threatened him.
Except that she loved Dan, too. Jarod didn’t know that, couldn’t see it, and she was afraid to tell him. She had been coming to trust Dan, to believe in him, to believe that he loved her, too, that their relationship was more than an affair.
And now…
Maybe he would call her. Maybe he would apologize. He couldn’t disappear; he couldn’t walk out of her life. They would have to see each other again, because of the kids. Jarod and Sandy were still going to get married.
Kelly sighed, she was exhausted. She’d barely had an hour’s sleep, and her crying jag had exhausted her further. Kelly sighed softly again, and fell to sleep.
* * *
Dan walked out into the backyard, where the air was cool and the trees offered some shade, a place where he could try to curb the awful heat of his temper. He walked, because walking would burn steam; he threw rocks, because tossing them used up the tension in his muscles.
He stared up at the sky—and he talked to it.
“What in God’s name is the matter with her? After what Jarod did, how dare he preach to us? He’s crazy. That boy took my baby—”
He drew a long breath, then exhaled slowly. He was crazy to keep getting upset about Sandy. He had accepted her pregnancy; he had accepted Jarod. They were going to get married; it was going to be all right.
He had been wrong to get upset again at the cabin because he had discovered Sandy’s underwear, but it had been natural. A man shouldn’t have to discover the scene of his daughter’s loss of innocence, but he’d had no right to take it out on Kelly, and he knew it.
But this…
“That kid deserves a good smack on the butt!” he told the sky. That kid…that kid was going to be his son-in-law. The father of his grandchild. Lord, what a mess.
“She’ll call me,” he murmured, sitting down and plucking a piece of grass. He chewed on it and reflected. Yes, Kelly would call him. She would call him because she knew damn well that she had been wrong, that Jarod had been way out of line. Jarod was going to have to come to him and apologize—if he ever wanted to see Sandy again. And once he and Jarod got everything straightened out, Kelly would have to call him.
Because he was right.
He closed his eyes. He wanted to see her. He wanted her back. Sitting on the sofa, handing him a cup of coffee. Staring out the window, laughing, talking, just being with him.
He wanted to be with her. Holding hands across the table at a restaurant. Her eyes bright and excited, and staring into his. Her arm looped through his as she dragged him along.
Up at the cabin…
At the cabin, where they had touched and the blaze had begun. It had been an inferno, a thirst that had to be quenched. And her laughter. That was so important and precious to them, being together after the loving, holding each other….
I love you, Kelly McGraw, he thought, and he stared ahead at nothing, chewing his piece of grass. I love you, and I want you, and I’m…
“I’m sorry!” he swore aloud, rising. But as much as he wanted her, as much as he wanted to hear her voice, he’d be damned if he was going to call her and apologize and tell her, sure, let her son run around acting as if their being together was something dirty and illicit. If Jarod had been anyone else in the world and he had called Kelly a whore, Dan would have decked him.
But he was her son….
I miss you! he thought again.
She’ll call me! he promised himself. She would call, because she was wrong. She had to call.
* * *
But Kelly didn’t call. She didn’t call on Sunday, and she didn’t call on Monday. Or Tuesday.
On Wednesday Dan discovered that Sandy had taken his side. She hadn’t said a word to Jarod since he had walked away on Sunday.
She wouldn’t really talk to Dan about it, but when he asked her if she had seen Kelly, she said no, certainly not, that she hadn’t even spoken to Jarod.
“Sandy,” he had reminded her softly, “you and Jarod have to straighten this out. Not talking doesn’t seem to be the answer. Maybe I should—”
“No!” Sandy interjected fiercely. “No, Dad! Jarod has to grow up! I will not let our situation influence yours again!”
She was gone before Dan could say more.
He spent Thursday and Friday working, then discovered on Saturday that he hadn’t really accomplished anything.
He sat and stared out his plate-glass windows, watching the trees and the birds, and he wondered again how things could have come to such a pass.
Someone needed to talk to Jarod. Someone needed to knock some sense into the boy. It should be him—except that both his daughter and the woman he loved were determined that it wouldn’t be.
Now that his daughter was miserable, he was miserable, Jarod had to be miserable and surely—surely!—Kelly was, too. Unless he had imagined it all. Unless she really didn’t love him. Maybe he had just been a diversion to her. The new man in town and all that.
It was ridiculous. The whole situation was ridiculous. And he was making himself crazy thinking about it.
But nothing changed.
The weekend passed. Sandy moped around the house, and so did he. Reeves kept walking around pretending that nothing was wrong, but Dan could tell that even the old gentleman’s gentleman was upset.
Dan talked to Sandy again. He reminded her that she and Jarod were planning a future—the rest of their lives—together. That whether he and Jarod were best friends or not really didn’t matter, but that whether the two of them got along did.
Dan decided—in silence—that if Jarod didn’t come around to see him by the next weekend, he would go find the boy. Sandy couldn’t be any more unhappy than she already was, and hell, Kelly wasn’t speaking to him anyway. And beyond a doubt, Jarod deserved a good walloping.
To aggravate Dan’s feelings of injustice, Sandy was feeling sick, because she was pregnant.
Boy, when I get my hands on you…he vowed silently.
On Wednesday night, everything changed.
Sandy came home nearly hysterical. Dan wasn’t there when she came in from school, but he came back to find Reeves frantic, because Sandy had come in crying, slammed into her room, stayed there for a few minutes—then run out. And he didn’t know where she was.
Dan went out looking for her. He found her walking toward town and got her into the car, where she promptly burst into tears. Dan decided that he could quite happily take a shotgun to Jarod McGraw.
He took her home, but it was still over an hour before he could get Sandy to talk to him. Then Sandy didn’t want to shut up.
She walked around the room and ranted and raved and said that Jarod thought he was Mr. Macho and he was a cheat and he was awful and she had made the biggest mistake of her life and she wasn’t sure if she even wanted to live. She didn’t want the baby, and she didn’t want any part of Jarod.
In the end Dan discovered that it was all because Jarod had been talking to a redheaded cheerleader. To his credit, Dan stayed fairly calm. He was convinced that Jarod had purposely tried to make Sandy jealous because Sandy had been giving him the silent treatment.
He calmed her down, then decided that this was the time to find Jarod himself. But when he picked up the phone to call the McGraw house, he stopped. Sandy was already on the line—to Jarod. She sounded cool, sophisticated, regal—the perfect lady.
He hung up. Sandy could clearly handle this one herself.
A few minutes later he heard her hang up. A second after that, the phone rang. Dan picked it up.
“Dan, Mr. Marquette! You can’t let her do it! Please, sir, you can’t.”
“Who is this?” Dan asked, smiling. He knew perfectly well who it was, but the boy deserved to squirm a little.
“Me. Jarod. Sandy is mad at me over some little thing—”
“Jarod, this is not ‘some little thing.’ Son—”
“I’m sorry!” Jarod exclaimed. “Oh, God, I’m sorry! Sir, you don’t understand. I know I offended you, but you see, you’ve proved my point. You really don’t care anything about my mother—”
“We’re getting off the real subject here, Jarod, but a son who loves his mother does not refer to her as a whore. And that goes whether you want to consider me Mr. Right or not. And your behavior toward me—”
“Please, I’m sorry! Please—”
“I think you owe your mother the apology.”
There was silence for a minute.
“Yes, sir,” he said very softly. “Yes, sir, I know that. I owe you both an apology. But Dan—Mr. Marquette—sir! Please, you’ve got to help me. Sandy is thinking of giving up the baby. She can’t do that! That baby is mine, too. She has no right—”
“Maybe she doesn’t. Decisions regarding the baby should be made by the two of you.” He hesitated. “On this, Jarod, I do agree with you. The baby is yours, as much as it’s Sandy’s.”
“Mr. Marquette, she says that she’s going to go take care of the paperwork right now. Please, don’t let her leave the house. Not until I get there.”
“I’ll try.”
“I know that she respects you. I know that if you tell her not to leave that house, she won’t. Please—”
“Don’t beg, Jarod. I don’t want you to grovel!”
There was a silence. Then Jarod said softly, “What do you want, Mr. Marquette?”
“Respect, a right to live my own life, and a right to privacy. And an apology to your mother.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll—I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
Dan hung up the phone, smiling. Sandy came out of her room and smiled back at him. Tears were gone, and she suddenly looked completely serene.
“Dad?”
“Yeah?”
“He’s on his way over here, isn’t he?”
“Yes.”
She flew across the room and threw her arms around him. “I love you, Dad!”
“And you love Jarod, too, huh, baby?”
She nodded, beautiful eyes wide.
“As mad as I’ve been at Jarod, Sandy, I believe with all my heart that he loves you.”
She nodded. Then she smiled. “And you love her, don’t you? Kelly. You love Kelly.”
“Yeah. I think I do, babe. I think I do.”