Through the Sheriff's Eyes

“Count on it.”

“Don’t worry about Faith,” Gray said. “Do what you have to do.”

Ben nodded, allowed himself one more look at Faith’s face, white and shell-shocked, and made himself turn and walk out of the room.

CHAPTER FOUR

“I’LL STAY WITH YOU,” Char offered, hovering beside the blown-up air mattress in Gray’s library. She offered a wavering smile. “Sleepover.”

Charlotte had demanded her own bedroom when the twins were ten years old. In the years after that, however, sometimes one sister or the other desperately needed to talk or just to have this one person in all the world close. “Sleepover?” she’d suggest, and they would share a double bed the way they had when they were young. In the trauma of the past couple of months, they’d done that a couple of times. Just the soft sound of Char breathing beside her was a comfort to Faith.

Tonight, Faith wanted no one.

An image of Ben flashed into her mind, and she remembered the way he’d held her cradled on his lap, his hand on her nape, pressing her face against his shoulder. His throat had been so temptingly close, she’d inched her face over to warm her cold nose against his skin and breathe in his scent, soap and sweat and man.

No. She didn’t want him, either. But a stricken feeling inside told Faith that she might not have been able to resist him if he’d actually been here.

Faith shook her head. “No, please. I’m not sure I can sleep, and … I need to be alone.”

“Are you sure?” Char kept hovering.

“Yes. Please,” Faith repeated.

Wearing a pair of flannel pajamas borrowed from Gray, cuffs and sleeves rolled, she sat on the edge of the bed. Despite the hot, sweet tea Char had plied her with, Faith was still cold. She felt chilled to her marrow.

At last her sister nodded reluctantly and hugged her. “Wake me up if you want me, Faith. I mean it.

Okay?”

Faith nodded because it was expected of her. “Good night.”

Gray, she saw, waited in the hall. He looked as worried as Char did. Faith wondered vaguely what they saw that scared them so. Dad, thank goodness, must have already gone to bed in the guest room. Still recovering from his injuries, he’d needed the better bed.

It was a huge relief when Gray and Char withdrew, turning off the overhead light. She heard them go down the hall to their own bedroom, but there was no click of a door closing—they wanted to be able to hear her. She should have felt reassured, but she didn’t. She didn’t feel much at all, or at least nothing … normal. There was a hollow place inside her that was new. It was like an ice cave, terribly cold, a place where her breath might freeze.

When Faith lay back on the mattress and pulled the covers over herself, she left the bedside lamp burning. She’d never minded the dark before, but she had a feeling it would be a long time before it would seem comforting to her again.

If ever.

Despite the comforter and the blanket Char had added, Faith shivered. I’m so cold.

She couldn’t seem to tear her eyes from the open door to the hall. When she closed her eyes, she saw the dark rectangle of the doorway to her own bedroom, and then the deeper shadow of a man within it. Her eyes snapped open again.

At last she got up and shut the door. After a minute, she dragged a chair away from the desk and braced it at an angle under the knob. At least nobody could get in without making a lot of noise. She hoped Char wouldn’t try and become alarmed.

Back in bed, she pulled the heavy weight of covers up to her chin and lay still, listening to the silence. Gray’s house, which he’d designed himself, was new and lacked the old farmhouse’s sounds of settling. The silence seemed even denser because the multilayered house was built literally into the bluff, so that this lower floor not only had earth beneath it but behind it. The highway was too far away for her to hear the scant evening traffic. Houses on the river bluff were set far apart, all on at least five acres, with woods in between to muffle any sound of barking dogs, voices or cars coming and going. Faith couldn’t decide if the quiet would be soothing or unsettling long-term.

Not that she’d be here for very long. She had to go home soon. Preferably tomorrow. If she put it off, she might lose her nerve. Faith wasn’t sure she could ever sleep in her bedroom again, though. She thought she might move into Char’s. Char had only been spending the occasional night anyway, and then only because she was anxious about Faith.

For better or worse, Char could quit worrying about Rory.

A shudder gripped Faith, one that rattled her bones.

Oh, God. I killed him. I pulled the trigger.

Even though her eyes were open, she saw his face in that moment, rage transformed into astonishment at the sight of the gun leveled at his chest. And then … and then, fear and pain. Blood blossoming. Him stumbling. Because his momentum continued to drive him forward, she’d shot again. And again, she thought. At least three times. Her ears rang with the crack, crack, crack.

Her fingernails bit into her palms as she felt the gun jump in her hands again. So powerful. So lethal. So much more terrible even than she had imagined. Death dealing. Like a movie, images kept running through her mind, inescapable. Blood spurting. The light going out of his eyes even as he stopped abruptly, then dropped, shaking the bed as he toppled against it. Thump. The heaviest, darkest sound she’d ever heard.

Faith gasped, shook, clutched the bedcovers with desperate hands. She stared blindly and thought, What if he came only to threaten me? To try to frighten me into going back to him?

What if he had never intended to kill her?

She couldn’t imagine how she would ever know the answer to that question. How she could live without knowing it.

Faith wasn’t absolutely sure whether Char and Dad and Gray and Ben really did think she’d defended herself the only way she could, or whether they were just saying that because there was no going back from what she’d done and they were determined to reassure her.

What would she have done if she hadn’t had the gun beneath the pillow?

Screamed and thrown herself off the bed. Grabbed for a weapon, any weapon. The chair, perhaps, or she would have likely kept the baseball bat close at hand.

Would she have made it off the bed, if the force of the bullets slamming into his chest hadn’t slowed Rory’s momentum? Shivering, shivering, she didn’t know.

She kept replaying it, from the moment she heard the shush of something brushing the wall outside her room. What could she have done differently? But it was too late to change anything. Tonight, she had killed. She’d chosen to shoot dead the man she had once believed she loved. The man she’d married.

What about your wedding vows? Do you ever think about what you promised?

She curled into as small a ball as she could manage, hugging herself. Yes! she wanted to scream. How could she forget them?

But Rory had made promises, too. He was supposed to cherish her, and he hadn’t. He’d hurt her, over and over. Terrified her, stalked her, assaulted Char. Faith wanted, oh, she wanted so much, to believe she’d been right to defend herself in such a final way.

But what if it was all bluster? The time he had almost killed her, his fists rising and falling, slamming into her until she was like Raggedy Ann, bouncing and flopping, her consciousness seeping away, that time he had been in a towering rage. He’d lost all control. He’d wept the next day, she had been told, and said over and over, “I never meant to hurt her. I never meant it.” Slipping into her house tonight had been planned, which was different. Yes, he’d punched Char the other time, and even lashed out with the knife and cut her, but Charlotte was Charlotte, taunting him. Tonight, he’d had a plan. He had been moving in silence, in the cloak of darkness. What if he had intended only to sit on the edge of the bed, leaning close until an awareness of the mattress dipping awakened her. He might have touched the tip of the knife to her throat while he whispered of his anger. He might have left her eventually, with perhaps a last, near soundless reminder that he could come back any time, that no mere locks would keep him out. That she was his.

Faith shook harder. Her teeth chattered now.

Oh God oh God. She couldn’t have kept living like that, waiting for him to come back. Even if she’d fled to Phoenix or Tampa Bay, the way she’d sometimes imagined, he could have followed her.

He had no right, she told herself fiercely. She would almost rather have died than go on that way, fear hunched beneath her breastbone and rising to clog in her throat. She simply couldn’t have borne it.

It was his fault. All his fault that she’d had to kill him.

But she was the one who had to live with it.

Sleep was not going to come to Faith, not now, when only the lamplight held off the darkness, and not later, when the pale light of dawn crept around the edges of the blinds.

How can I ever sleep again? she asked herself, and didn’t know the answer.

TELLING A MOTHER that her son had been shot dead was a hell of a way to start a morning. Especially when Ben hadn’t made it back to bed last night.