Carolina Moon

outside. I’m going to go look.”
    “No.” Now the fear was all for him. “It’s not your turn.”
    “What?”
    She held up both hands and sank down onto the mattress. “I’m sorry. My mind’s confused. He’s gone, Cade. He’s not out there now. He was watching, earlier, I think earlier. When we were …” It made her queasy. “When we were making love, he watched.”
    Grimly, Cade nodded. “I’ll look anyway.”
    “You won’t find him,” she murmured, as Cade strode out.
    But he wanted to. He wanted to find someone, and use his fists, use his fury. He switched on the outside lights, scanned the area washed in pale yellow. He walked to his truck, got a flashlight out of his toolbox, and the knife he kept there.
    Armed, he circled the house, sweeping the light over the ground, into the shadows. Near the bedroom window, where the grass needed trimming, he crouched beside a flattened area where a man might have stood.
    “Son of a bitch.” He hissed it between his teeth, and his hand tightened on the hilt of the knife. He straightened, spun around to stalk into the marsh.
    He stood on the verge and strained against impotence. He could go in, thrash around, work off some of his anger. And by doing so leave Tory alone.
    Instead he went back inside, left the knife and flashlight on the kitchen table.
    She still sat there, her fists bunched on her knees. She lifted her head when he came in but said nothing. She didn’t have to.
    “What we did together in here was ours,” Cade said. “He doesn’t change that.” He sat beside her, took her hand. “He can’t, if we don’t let him.”
    “He made it dirty.”
    “For him, not for us. Not for us, Tory,” he murmured, and turned her face to his.
    She sighed once, touched the back of his hand with her fingers. “You’re so angry. How do you tie it up that way?”
    “I kicked my truck a couple of times.” He pressed his lips to her hair. “Will you tell me what you saw?”
    “His anger. Blacker than yours ever could be, but not … I don’t know how to explain, not substantial, not real. And a kind of pride. I don’t know. Maybe it’s more a satisfaction. I can’t see it—see him. I’m not the one he wants, but he can’t let me stay, he can’t trust me this close to Hope.
    “I don’t know if those are my thoughts or his.” She squeezed her eyes shut, shook her head. “I can’t get him clear. It’s as if something’s missing. In him or in me, I don’t know. But I can’t see him.”
    “It wasn’t a drifter who killed her. The way we thought all these years.”
    “No.” She opened her eyes again, turned away from her own grief and toward his. “It was someone who knew her, who watched her. Us. I think I knew that even back then, but I was so afraid I closed it up. If I’d gone back the morning after, if I’d had the courage to go in with you and your father instead of telling you where she was, I might have seen. I can’t be sure, but I might’ve. Then it would’ve been over.”
    “We don’t know that. But we can start to end it now. We’ll call the police.”
    “Cade, the police …” Her throat wanted to close. “It’s very rare that even the most forward-thinking, open-minded cop listens to someone like me. I don’t expect to find that particular breed here in Progress.”
    “Chief Russ might take some convincing, but he’ll listen to you.” Cade would make sure of it. “Why don’t you get dressed.”
    “You’re going to call him now? At four in the morning.”
    “Yeah.” Cade picked up the bedside phone. “That’s what he gets paid for.”

17
    P olice Chief Carl D. Russ wasn’t a big man. He’d reached the height of five-feet-six-and-a-quarter when he was sixteen, and had stayed plugged there.
    He wasn’t a handsome man. His face was wide and pitted with his ears stuck on either side like oversized cup handles. His hair was as grizzled as a used-up scouring pad.
    He had a scrawny build and topped the scale at one thirty. Fully dressed and soaking wet.
    His ancestors had been slaves, field-workers. Later they’d been sharecroppers eking out stingy livings on another man’s land.
    His mother had wanted more for him, and had pushed, prodded, harangued, and browbeat until, mostly out of self-defense, he aimed for more.
    Carl D.’s mother enjoyed the fact that her boy was police chief nearly as much as he did.
    He wasn’t a brilliant man. Information cruised into his brain, meandering about,