Secrets and Lies: He's A Bad Boy / He's Just A Cowboy

“Bastard,” she muttered, refusing to spend too much time thinking of him. The mirage, for that’s all it was, disappeared.

The sun crested the hills and sunlight streaked across the sky, lighting the dark waters of the lake, turning the surface to golden fire. The mist closed in, pressing against her face, wet and cool.

She drew in a long breath and wrapped her arms over her chest. Maybe coming home hadn’t been such a hot idea. What was the point of stirring things up again?

Because you have to. Because of David.

She smiled sadly when she thought of David. Kind David. Sweet David. Understanding David. A man as opposite from Jackson as a man could be. A man who wanted nothing more than for her to become his wife.

With one final glance at the still waters of Whitefire Lake, she dusted off her hands and walked up the gravel-and-dirt path to her car. The mist rose slowly and without the fog as a shroud, the forest seemed warm and familiar again. A chipmunk darted into the brambles and in the canopy of branches overhead, a blue jay screeched and scolded her.

“Don’t worry,” she told the jay. “I’m going, I’m going.” She unlocked the door of her old Ford Escort and slid onto a cracked vinyl seat. Someday soon she’d have to replace the car, she knew, but she had resisted so far. This car, bought and paid for with her first paycheck from the San Francisco Herald, was a part of her she’d rather not throw away just yet.

With an unsettling grind, the engine turned over, coughed and sputtered before idling unevenly on the sandy road. Java meowed loudly. Rachelle sighed and turned on the radio. A song from years past reverberated through the speakers and she thought again of Jackson.

Rolling down a window, she breathed deep of the wooded air, then threw the little car into gear and started down the winding road that would lead her back to Gold Creek.

Jackson Moore. She wondered what he was doing right now. The last she’d heard, he was in the heart of New York City, practicing law, but still a rebel.

* * *

“I TELL YOU, THERE’S GONNA be trouble. Big-time,” Brian Fitzpatrick insisted. He tossed a newspaper onto his father’s desk and, muttering an oath under his breath, flopped into one of the expensive side chairs.

Thomas was used to Brian’s moods. The boy had always been a hothead who didn’t have the mental fortitude to run the logging company, but there’d been no choice in the matter. Not after Roy’s death. At the thought of that tragic night, Thomas set his jaw. God help us all, he’d thought then. And now, as he stared at the Tremont girl’s headline, he thought it again.

“Back to Gold Creek,” the article was titled. Thomas’s gut clenched. He skimmed the article and his lips thinned angrily. So she was returning. What a fool. She was better off living in the city, burying the past deep as he and the rest of his family had.

“Thomas? Did I hear Brian’s voice?” his wife, June, called. He heard her footsteps clicking against the marble foyer of the house they’d called home for nearly twenty years. She poked her head into the den and her pale face lit with a smile at the sight of her son. “Weren’t you even going to say ‘hi’?” she admonished with that special sparkle in her eyes she reserved for her children.

“’Course I was, Mom,” Brian replied. He was putty in her hands. Just as Roy had been. “Dad and I were just discussing business.”

She rolled her eyes. “Always. So Laura isn’t with you?”

At the mention of his wife’s name, Brian forced a cool smile. “Nope. I came directly from the office.”

“She should stop by more often, bring that grandson of mine over here. I haven’t seen Zachary for nearly a month,” June reprimanded gently—with a smile and a will of iron.

“I’ll bring him over.”

“And Laura, too,” June insisted, and started for the door. But as she turned, she spied the newspaper, folded open to Rachelle Tremont’s article. Her pale face grew whiter still. “What’s this?” she whispered.

“Nothing to get upset about,” Brian intervened quickly.

Wearily Thomas handed his wife the paper. She’d find out soon enough as it was. “Rachelle Tremont’s coming back to town.”

“No!”

“We can’t stop her, June.”

Two points of color stained her cheeks as she read the article. “I won’t have it, Thomas. Not after what happened.” Her throat worked and she clasped a thin hand to her chest.

“She has family here. You can’t stop her from visiting.”

“That little tramp is the reason that Jackson Moore wasn’t convicted!” she said, her eyes bright. She collapsed on the couch and closed her eyes. “Why?” she whispered. “Why now?” The agony in her voice nearly broke Thomas’s heart all over again.

“I don’t know.”

“If she comes, he won’t be far behind,” she predicted fatalistically.

“Who? Moore?” Brian asked. “No way. He was lucky to get out of this town with his skin. The coward won’t dare show his face around here.”

“He’ll be back,” she whispered intently, unnervingly.

Thomas rounded the desk and sat on the edge of the couch, taking her frail hands in his. “He’s a hotshot lawyer in Manhattan. He probably doesn’t even know that she’s coming back.”

“He’ll know. And mark my words, he’ll be here.”

“He could’ve come back any number of times. It’s been twelve years.”

Her eyes flew open and she looked over his shoulder and through the window, as if staring at the hills in the distance, but Thomas knew she wasn’t seeing anything other than her own vision of the future and that the vision frightened her to her very bones. He felt her fingers tremble in his hands, saw her swallow as if in fear.

“He’s a coward. A murdering, low-life coward,” she said, her voice cracking. “But he’ll be back. Because of her.” With a strength he wouldn’t have believed she possessed, she crumpled the newspaper in her fist and blinked against the tears that she’d held at bay for over a decade.

“He’s in New York,” Thomas assured her, and they both knew that Thomas had kept track of Jackson Moore ever since he’d left Gold Creek. There were reasons to keep track of him, reasons Thomas and his wife never discussed. “He won’t come back.”

But Thomas was lying. With a certainty as cold as the bottom of Whitefire Lake, Thomas knew that Jackson Moore would return.

* * *

THE HEAT OF THE DAY STILL simmered in the city and the air was sultry and humid, a cloying blanket that caused sweat to rise beneath collar and cuffs. Even the breath of wind slipping across the East River didn’t bring much relief through the open window of Jackson Moore’s Manhattan apartment.

He rubbed the kinks from the back of his neck, then poured Scotch over two cubes of ice in his glass and sat on the window ledge. The air-conditioning was on the fritz again, and his apartment sweltered while dusk settled over the concrete-and-steel alleys of the city.

As he had for the past six summers since he’d started working, he wondered why he didn’t pack his bags and move on. New York held no fascination for him—well, nothing much did. He’d spent too many years chasing after a demon who probably had never existed, before giving up on his past and settling here in this city of broken dreams.

“Keep it up, Moore, and you’ll break my heart,” he told himself as he swirled his drink, letting the cubes melt as condensation covered the exterior of the glass. He didn’t have it so bad. Not really. His apartment was big enough for one, maybe two, should the need arise, and he did have a view of the park.

By all accounts he was a rich man. Not a millionaire, but close enough. Pretty damn good for a kid from the wrong side of the tracks, he thought reflectively, a kid once considered the bad boy of a sleepy little Northern California town. Not that it mattered much. He tossed back his drink and felt the fiery warmth of the liquor mingle with the frigid ice as the liquid splashed against the back of his throat. A nice little zing. A zing he was beginning to enjoy too much.

He flipped through the mail. Bills, invoices and yet another big win in a clearing-house drawing where he would become an instant millionaire—all he had to do was take a chance. He snorted. He’d been taking chances all his life. The afternoon edition of the New York Daily was folded neatly under the stack of crisp envelopes and, as he had every Saturday since her syndicated column had appeared, he opened the paper to Section D, and there, under the small byline of Rachelle Tremont, was her article—if you could call it that. Her weekly exposés were little more than expressions of her own opinions about life in general—or her latest pet peeve of the week, usually on the side of someone she thought had been wronged. Not exactly hard-core journalism. Not exactly his cup of tea. Why he tortured himself by reading her column and reminding himself of her week after week, he didn’t bother to analyze; if he did he’d probably end up on the couch of an expensive shrink. But each Friday evening, when the Saturday edition was left near his door, he poured himself a drink and allowed himself the pleasure and pain of tripping down memory lane. “Idiot,” he muttered, and his voice bounced off the walls of his empty apartment.

He leaned a hip against the table and read the headline. Back to Gold Creek. Distractedly he read the editor’s note that followed, indicating that the column would be written from good ol’ Gold Creek, California, for the next ten weeks while Rachelle returned home to examine the small town where she’d grown up and compare that small-minded little village now to what it had been when she’d lived there.

Jackson sucked in a disbelieving breath. His gut jerked hard against his diaphragm. Was that woman out of her mind? She was always too inquisitive for her own good—too trusting to have much common sense, but he’d given her credit for more brains than this!

A small trickle of sweat collected at the base of his skull as he thought of Rachelle as he’d found her that night in the gazebo, drenched from the rain, her long hair wet and soaked against bare skin where her blouse had been torn. A metallic taste crawled up the back of his throat as he remembered how frightened she’d been, how desperate she’d felt in his arms and how he, himself, had unwittingly used her.

So now she was going back? To all that pain? He’d never thought her a fool—well, maybe once before. But this—this journey back in time was a fool’s mission—a mission he’d inadvertently caused all those years ago.