Carnal Innocence

stopped in to buy a birthday card for her sister in Natchez, and had stayed for twenty minutes.
    Of course, that Longstreet man had come in as well, to flirt with the women and dispense southern-fried charm. His dark glasses hadn’t disguised the fact that he’d been fighting. When questioned about it, he’d milked sympathy from every female in the store.
    His type always did, she thought. If Luis had gotten a hangnail, women were ready to donate blood.
    Thank God she was through with him, with men, with everything about them. It had been pathetically easy for her to rebuff Tucker’s smooth charm.
    “Miz Caroline” he’d called her, she remembered with a thin smile. She was quite sure his eyes had been laughing behind those dark lenses.
    A pity about his hands though, she thought as she ducked under hanging moss. They were really quite beautiful, long-fingered, wide-palmed. It had been a shame to see the knuckles skinned and bruised.
    Annoyed, she shook off the sympathy. The moment he’d strolled out—limping slightly—the women had begun to buzz about him and someone named Edda Lou. Caroline took a deep breath of the verdant smell of heat and green, and smiled to herself.
    It looked like our slippery-smooth Mr. Longstreet had gotten himself into a nasty little mess. His girlfriend was pregnant and screaming for marriage. And, according to the local gossip, her father was the type who’d be more than willing to load up the shotgun.
    Trailing a finger over a branch, she began to scent the water. Lord, she was a long way from Philadelphia. How could she have known it would be so peaceful and so entertaining to listen to the chatter about the town lothario?
    She’d enjoyed her half-hour visit to town, the ladies’ talk about children, recipes, men. Sex. She laughed a little. Apparently, North or South, when women got together, sex was a favored topic. But downhere they were so frank about it. Who was sleeping with whom, and who wasn’t.
    Must be the heat, she thought, and sat down on the log to watch the water and listen to the music of early evening.
    She was glad she’d come to Innocence. Every day she could feel herself healing. The quiet, the vicious sun that baked all of the energy out of you, the simple beauty of water shaded by moss-hung trees. She was even getting used to the night noises, and that blacker-than-night country darkness.
    The previous night she had slept for eight hours straight, the first time in weeks. And she’d awakened without that plaguing headache. It was working, the solitude, the serenity of small-town and rural rituals.
    The roots she’d never been allowed to plant, the roots her mother would have furiously denied existed, had begun to take hold. Nothing and no one was going to pull them free again.
    She might even try her hand at fishing. The idea made her laugh and wonder if she still had a taste for catfish. She shifted and picked up a pebble to toss in the water. It made such a satisfying plop that she picked up another, and another, watching the ripples spread. Spotting a flat-sided stone by the verge of the water, she rose to pry it up. It would be fun to try to skip it. That, too, was an old, almost forgotten image. Her grandfather standing here, just here, and trying to teach her how to skip the rock over the water.
    Pleased with the memory, she bent, curled her fingers around it. Odd, she had the most ridiculous sensation of being watched. Stared at. Even as the first shiver worked down her spine, she caught something white out of the corner of her eye.
    She turned, looked. And froze. Even the scream turned to ice in her throat.
    She was being stared at, though the eyes that watched saw nothing. There was only a face, bobbing above the rippling surface of dark water, with a hideous mop of long blond hair that had tangled and caught in the roots of an old tree.
    Her breath hitched, coming through her lips in small, terrified whimpers as she stumbled back. But she couldn’t take her eyes off that face, the way the water lapped at the chin, the way a shaft of sunlight beamed off those flat, lifeless eyes.
    It wasn’t until she managed to throw her hands over her face, blocking the image, that she was able to draw the air to scream. The sound echoed through the bayou, bouncing off the dark water and sending birds streaking from the trees.

c·h·a·p·t·e·r 4
    M ost of the sickness had passed. Sour waves of nausea still rose in her stomach, but if she forced