Carolina Moon

daisies. But flowers died quickly when laid on the earth. Tory had never understood the symbolism of leaving what would fade and wither on the grave of a loved one.
    She supposed they brought comfort to those left behind.
    She brought no flowers to Hope. Instead she brought one of the few keepsakes she’d allowed herself. Inside the small globe a winged horse flew, and when it was shaken, silver stars sparkled.
    It had been a gift, the last birthday gift from a lost friend.
    She carried it across the long, sloping field where generations of Lavelles, generations of the people of Progress, were laid to rest. There were markers, simple as a brick of stone, elaborate as the rearing horse and rider cast in bronze.
    Hope had called the horseman Uncle Clyde, and indeed he was the likeness of one of her ancestors, a cavalry officer who’d died in the War of Northern Aggression.
    Once, Hope had dared her to climb up behind Uncle Clyde and ride his great steed. Tory remembered hitching herself up, sliding over the sunbaked metal that reddened her skin, and wondering if God would strike her dead with a handy bolt of lightning for blasphemy.
    He hadn’t, and for a moment, clinging to the cast bronze, the world spread out in greens and browns beneath her, the sun beating on her head like a dull hammer, she’d felt invincible. The towers of Beaux Reves had seemed closer, approachable. She’d shouted down to Hope that she and the horse would fly to them, land on the top turret.
    She’d nearly broken her neck on the way down, and had been lucky to land on her butt instead of her head. But the bruised tailbone had been nothing compared to that moment so high on the rearing horse.
    For her next birthday, her eighth, Hope had given her the globe. It was the only thing Tory had kept from that year of her life.
    Now, as they had then, live oaks and fragrant magnolia guarded the stones and bones, and offered shade in dapples of light and shadows. They also provided a screen between that testament to mortality and the regal house that had outlasted its many owners and occupants.
    It was a pleasant enough walk from the cemetery to the family home. She and Hope had walked it countless times, in blistering summer, in rainy winter. Hope had liked to look at the names carved in the stone, to say them out loud for luck, she’d said.
    Now Tory walked to the grave, and the marble angel that serenaded it with a harp. And said the name out loud.
    “Hope Angelica Lavelle. Hello, Hope.”
    She knelt on the soft grass, sat back on her heels. The breeze was soft and warm, and carried the sweet perfume of the pink baby rosebushes that flanked the angel. “I’m sorry I didn’t come before. I kept putting it off, but I’ve thought of you so often over the years. I’ve never had another friend like you, someone I could tell everything to. I was so lucky to have you.”
    As she closed her eyes, opened herself to the memories, someone watched from the shelter of trees. Someone with fists clenched to white bone. Someone who knew what it was to crave the unspeakable. To live, year after year, with the desire for it hidden in a heart that thundered now with both that craving, and with the knowledge it could feed.
    Sixteen years, and she’d come back. He’d waited, and he’d watched, always knowing there was a chance some day she could circle around, despite everything, and come back here where it had all begun.
    What a pretty picture they’d made. Hope and Tory, Tory and Hope. The dark and the bright, the pampered and the damaged. Nothing he’d done before, nothing he’d done after that night in August, had brought him the same thrill. He’d tried to recapture it; when the pressure built so high and hot inside him, he’d reconstruct that night and its sheer, speechless glory.
    Nothing had matched it.
    Now it was Tory who was a threat. He could deal with her, quickly, easily. But then he would lose this fresh excitement of living on the edge. Maybe, maybe this was just what he’d been waiting for, all this time. For her to come back, for him to have her in place again.
    He would have to wait until August, if he could. A hot night in August when everything would be as it had been eighteen years before.
    He could have dealt with her any time over the years. Finished her. But he was a man who believed in symbols, in grand pictures. It had to be here. Where it began, he thought, and watching her, imagining her, stroked himself to climax, as he