Jeff Abbott - A Kiss Gone Bad

Heather turned her gaze back out across the bay to the hump of Santa Margarita Island. ‘You’re a busy bee.’

‘It was easy to check.’

‘Judy and I thought we’d go to see friends in Houston. That okay with the local Nazi regime?’

‘I don’t want you leaving town before this inquest.’

‘You can’t expect me to wait around forever.’

Claudia fished a card out of her pocket. ‘In case Judy kicks you out.’ She jotted numbers on the card and handed it to Heather. ‘That’s got my home and my office number. And my ex-husband’s number – he’s a deputy with the sheriff’s department.’

‘He cute?’ Heather asked.

‘Very,’ Claudia said. ‘Call. I’m around twenty-four/ seven.’

‘I’ll program you on my speed dial. Thanks.’

Claudia dusted the sand from her rump and walked away. When she reached her car, she watched Heather sitting, notebook open, sketching with a pencil, the sunset painting the low clouds orange and purple, the light beginning to fade.

Two pelicans glided across St Leo Bay with graceful swoops, the tips of their wings barely brushing the water. Claudia watched them fly, and then she drove back to town.

The two old women lumbered inside the nursing home, their cackles of laughter drifting down the beach to Heather. A Caspian tern, squeaking its nasally call, dove down into the darkening water, its bill bloodred but not from prey. The tern shot back into the sky, wet, dinner-less. Heather watched it. You don’t always get what you want, babycakes. The tern tried again, farther out into the bay. Heather watched the surf-walking boy and the two chatting girls leave the beach. When she looked back out, the tern was gone. Shame. She opened to a blank page and began to sketch out the muscled wings, the probing beak, the egg-shaped head.

She stopped as the sun set behind her. She wished Sam were here, to drink red wine, cuddle up close to her, run his tongue along the backside of her ear. But he wasn’t coming. No escape from the Hubble guardians. No escape at all -

A hand grabbed her shoulder.

Whit Mosley and Faith Hubble had first made love – an altogether too kind term, considering the bourbon and muscle cramps involved – in July. They met at a wind-down party after three days of ShellFest, Port Leo’s annual salute to all things crustacean and culinary. Over ten thousand fairgoers, both locals and tourists, jammed the St Leo Bay area to guzzle beer, buy crafts, stomp to forgettable jazz and blues and country-western acts, and to deplete the shrimp and oyster populations through structured gluttony. Lucinda judged a shrimp recipe cook-off, glad-handed voters, and raced back to her Austin condo with Sam in tow to hear a classical piano concert at UT.

Faith didn’t. She lingered in town, hanging out at the Shell Inn, drinking bourbon in a back booth with a clutch of old high school girlfriends. The women’s group slowly merged with two more groups, which is what happens in a small bar where nearly everyone knows everyone else and has been drinking for three days. Tables were pushed together, drinks ordered again, and Faith sat next to Judge Whit Mosley. She vaguely remembered his brothers from her school days, knew he was the youngest of the wild and handsome pack of Mosley boys. Even though now a judge he dressed like a townie bum without two dimes, in his frayed, sun-faded orange polo shirt and weathered khaki shorts and Birkenstock sandals. But the legs leading to the sandals were nicely formed, and she liked his odd gray eyes and the direct and knowing way he smiled, not at all put off by her height or weight. She grinned at the quiet way he indulged the drunken boasts of his friends when the topic turned to fishing, not joining in but not deflating his buddies’ hackneyed tales, and although his polo shirt was old and the neon orange a color out of style, the chest and arms beneath the fabric were tanned and firm.

He didn’t look like any judge she ever knew.

She had been lonely for a long time, plowing all her time into Lucinda’s career, and no one had given her jokes a sincere laugh in a long while. He offered her a ride home; she was drunk. She asked him to come inside and have a cup of coffee and a couple of aspirin to help sober themselves up (although she had watched him nurse a single Corona for two hours and knew the only drunk one was herself), and while they stood chatting in the kitchen and the coffee brewed, she surprised herself by reaching out for him and saying, ‘Is that a gavel or you just happy to see me?’ Her jokes got worse with more bourbon.

It wasn’t a gavel and he amply liked her, too. They spent the next several hours in bed, half of the time sleeping, the other half making strenuous love. She was left gasping but energized, freeing some long-buried shadow of herself to face the world. She watched Whit nap and traced his lips with a fingernail while he softly snored. Since Pete had left her, the few men she’d allowed intimacy with her tended to be older and snagged in the intricate web of state politics. They talked of little else. Here was a man lying beside her who was younger with a flat stomach and long legs and probably not overly bright but he knew how to make her feel my-God shivery good. She brushed his light fuzz of whiskers grown in the course of the day, wondering how quickly he would bolt in the morning.

He didn’t. He made love to her again, and she almost wept with pleasure and an odd relief. She didn’t want a romance, but she did want him, warm and kissing her throat and giving his halfway smile as he filled her. They began to see each other discreetly. She didn’t want Sam or Lucinda to know – he was the only private part of her life – and Whit didn’t argue.

They saw each other perhaps twice a month. Faith and Whit learned about the constellation of small motels along the Coastal Bend, little way stations in Rockport and Aransas Pass and Laurel Point and Copano. They would meet, share a bottle of Shiner Bock while kissing and slowly unburdening each other of their clothes, soap their skin in the shower, make love on the bed, and then talk – about her work, about his struggle to learn enough law to be an effective JP, about books they’d both read. He was smarter than she thought. A love of reading was, other than sex, the only thing they had in common. All perfectly friendly.

But now he had failed her, and the memory of the taste of his skin soured in her mouth. Faith backed her BMW out of the Hubble driveway and gunned the engine toward Whit’s house.

Faith rocketed over to the Mosleys’, ready to carve Whit’s guts into ribbons of flesh, but instead the storm turned to shower. She cried as soon as she saw him.

Babe and Irina were dining with friends in Rockport and would not be back for quite a while.

Faith and Whit sat in the cramped living room in the guest house, the Corpus Christi news turned on but muted. Pete’s death – as the son of a prominent state senator, not as a porn star, which had not yet been mentioned by any news source – had been the second story, after the gunshot war that had slowed down the Nueces County coroner’s office.

Faith’s hard, heavy weeping slowly eased. Whit handed her a wad of tissues to replace the ones she’d rendered sopping, and he poured them each a hefty glass of an inexpensive merlot. She gulped down a third of the glass in a long swallow.

‘You don’t think you can cry for someone you ceased to love a long while back.’ Faith sniffed, tamped her nostrils with the tissues. ‘I keep thinking of the boy I knew and married, not the sleaze he turned out to be… but he came home, and all I saw was the sleaze. Nothing more.’ She drank again. ‘This is good, Whit. Thanks. You know how he proposed to me? On Port Leo Beach, at midnight. The beach was closed, but we snuck in and sat on the sand and counted stars. He told me I had missed one, and then he dangled this beautiful diamond on a string before my eyes.’ She studied the red depths of the wineglass. ‘I loved him then – sure I did. But he married me only because his mother wanted it. I found out later she’d bought the ring for him and told him just how to propose. She knew what would light my fire.’ She set the wineglass down, folded her fingers together in her lap. ‘Whit, you’ve got to believe me… We didn’t have anything to do with Pete’s death. Nothing. And Lucinda, she shouldn’t have come across so hard-assed with you.’