Heart Of The Hunter

Rain drummed on the roof and dripped from the eaves. Blooms flanking the garden wall bowed drenched heads to the ground. Lightning flashed, turning the courtyard neon bright, and the low lament of thunder faded before she answered. “I wasn’t sure you would want to, not when you had time for second thoughts.”

“Why wouldn’t I?” Jeb took her glass from her, folding her hand into his.

“Have you forgotten what an awful pest I was? You could hardly turn around without tripping over me.”

“Was that you?” Jeb grimaced in mock surprise. “I thought it was my shadow.”

“Sure, with wild, shaggy hair, and glasses perched eternally on the end of her nose. Its nose.”

Jeb reached across the table to slide a finger beneath a lock of her hair, tucking it behind her ear as he’d seen her do. He remembered when he used to ruffle it to a tousled mass. Now it was sleek, smooth, silky to his touch. “Nothing this beautiful could ever have been ugly.”

“I refuse to show you the photographs that would prove you wrong.”

Ignoring her disclaimer, he tapped her nose. “I have to admit I never knew what a shame it was to hide this under those heavy glasses. And your eyes? You can’t expect me to believe I’m the first man to tell you how wonderful they are.”

“Contacts.”

“No, Nicky, not the contacts. Your eyes. You.”

Nicole muttered a derisive non sequitur and tried to take back her hand. He refused, holding her fast as he leaned back in his chair, looking at her as a man would look at a beautiful woman. As she’d always wanted him to look at her.

His thumb stroked the rushing pulse at her wrist. There was tenderness in his eyes, and in his smile.

“Friends?” he asked softly.

The rain slowed, then stopped. It was so quiet she could almost believe there was only this. A quiet little world, no fears, no demons. One woman. One man.

Jeb.

Over their linked fingers she smiled back at him, her eyes never leaving his. As softly as he, she murmured, “Yes.”

Then she laughed, a happy sound. Perhaps it was because he called her Nicky. Or the outrageous compliments. Or that he’d been kind.

Or even that for no reason at all, she simply wanted to laugh.

Three

Live oaks whispered in the wind. Somewhere across the bay a halyard rapped against an aluminum mast. Ships creaked with the tide, straining against their mooring. The marina had bedded down, the most dedicated reveler long in his bunk. Beneath the familiar clatter a profound stillness gathered in the hours that belonged to the night.

Jeb sat in the darkness, head back, eyes closed, listening to the distant crash of the surf. Below deck Mitch Ryan groused softly to himself as he finished an unexpected chore.

He would have helped with the chore, even welcomed mind-numbing labor. But Mitch had cast an appraising look over him, then said no. And Jeb was left to his thoughts.

Damnable thoughts he couldn’t escape.

“Done!” Mitch stepped onto the deck, scrubbing his hands with a cloth reeking of oil. “Good as new.” Dragging a match over a brad on his jeans, he stared at its flaring, charring head then dropped it down the globe of a hurricane lamp. In a second he was sprawled in a chair with a groan that welcomed the easing of cramped muscles.

Neither of them spoke as fire hissed and coughed, flickered, then caught the wick in a spurt of yellow flame. The light was a feeble pinpoint beneath a lightless canopy, yet enough that Jeb saw fatigue etched on the younger man’s haggard features. The utter weariness his nonchalance couldn’t mask.

This little difficulty with the engine hadn’t taken long. Not for Mitch. Never for Mitch, who knew engines—cars, boats, any sort—as well as he knew people. The problem was timing, that it had come at the close of a twenty hour day. Jeb suspected there had been and would be more such days.

“Have you slept?” he asked almost to himself, more thoughtful observation than question. “Do you ever sleep, Mitchell Ryan?”

Mitch looked up, his auburn hair stained by sweat. Eyes like sherry, strained and irritated by engine fumes, locked with gray. “Do you, Cap?” His question, as Jeb’s, was little more than a thought spoken aloud. “Have you?”

Jeb settled deeper into his chair. After a while he sighed and shrugged. He hadn’t slept. He wondered when he would again.

He’d returned from Charleston, then spent the evening searching through Nicole’s dossier looking for something he might have missed. Anything that would explain her.

An hour past midnight Simon had called, and his last hope for sleep was gone. Tony Callison had killed again.

A little girl. Thirteen, pretty, quiet. A dedicated student, a long-distance runner training for varsity track. A child much loved, with a lot to live for. Julie, who was never late. Julie, the paradigm of dependability. Julie, too kindhearted to worry her disabled father. He reported her missing at eight o’clock in the evening, two hours after she should have returned from her daily run.

An hour later a local deputy found her.

Julie Brown was dead.

Word spread. Telephones rang. Julie Brown was news.

Before the avid eyes of the world, tragedy visited the rural midwestern community. Needless tragedy, savage, cruel, the likes of which it had never known. And, if God were kind, would never know again.

Thirteen! The number echoed in Jeb’s mind. A knell of sadness for a life hardly begun, ended on a hot summer evening in a shriveling cornfield. A sweet child, tossed aside like a cast-off rag doll, with a cheap, gaudy sun-face medallion draped over a naked, pubescent breast.

The face of the sun. A celestial icon, once the cachet embraced by a close-knit band of surfers. Spoiled and arrogant college kids fancying themselves unique, the self-appointed sons of Apollo, wearing the medallion to prove it.

A symbol of self-centered indulgence and childish narcissism.

Jeb’s lay tarnishing in some forgotten box in a dusty attic.

...when I became a man, I put away childish things.

But one had not. For Tony Callison this symbol of foolish young men had become a signature for murder.

“Hurts, doesn’t it?”

“What?” Jeb jerked back from the black maw of memory.

Mitch glanced at Jeb’s clenched hands. “To lose a friend.”

“I lost him a long time ago.”

“I know.” Mitch ignored the bitterness. “But for a while, he was more than just a friend. He was a good friend.”

Jeb hesitated, then agreed. “The best.” The admission rose out of regret.

“What was he like?”

The sloop rocked with the lazy undulations of the water, a rope scrubbed against a cleat, and Jeb pondered. How did he explain Tony? Could he?