Carla Neggers - Night’s Landing

He smiled back at her. “Sarah Dunnemore, Ph.D.” But he tilted back in his chair and hoisted his feet up onto the porch rail, a warm breeze bringing with it the smells of grass, flowers, river. Nate, who’d been in marshal mode for hours, glanced at her with those incisive, impatient blue eyes. “Why would our young John Wesley Poe think the president would grant Nicholas Janssen a pardon if you asked him? It’s got to be more than your pretty gray eyes.”

Sarah looked straight ahead, across the shaded lawn to the river and didn’t answer.

“What do you have on the president?” Nate asked quietly.

“You have a suspicious mind, Deputy.” She laid on the sexy southern accent but still didn’t look at him. “The Dunnemores and Poes have been neighbors for a lot of years. I’m sure we can tell many tales about each other.”

“Whatever it is, it’s going to come out now. The media’s descending. You’ve got the Secret Service crawling all over this place. The FBI, the marshals, the ATF, your local sheriff-they’re all going to want to know why Conroy Fontaine/John Wesley Poe thought President Poe would grant a fugitive a pardon if only he could manipulate you into asking him.”

“And I could tell them I have no idea,” she said. “I could tell them that Conroy never discussed his reasoning with me when he had me in the cave.” She glanced sideways at him. “Here’s a question for you. Should I have tried to scream when he grabbed me in the cottage kitchen and put the gun to my head?”

“You should have trusted your instincts, which is what you did.”

“How long before you and Ethan realized he had me?”

“Seconds. We didn’t want to get you killed.” His eyes narrowed, darkened. “It was not a good moment.”

She felt a rush of warmth, but warned herself against reading too much into it, too much into the sparks that had flown between the two of them for days. They both had so much to process. And yet, she didn’t want him to go back to New York. She wanted to keep him right here, sitting with her on the front porch.

“I trusted you to deal with your snake,” he said.

Back to what she had on the president of the United States. She was smart to remain on her guard. “I left you no other choice.”

“I could have kept you from doing that kamikaze, feetfirst dive into the water, or I could have gone in with the two of you.”

“And got bit, too.”

“The point is that I trusted you to handle yourself.”

“Thank you, and I trust you to do your job as a marshal and therefore tell your superiors if I tell you something about the president, who is, after all, your ultimate boss.”

“So you’re saying you do have something on the president?”

She groaned.

“All right. Don’t tell me. I’ll read about it in the papers.”

He didn’t seem irritated or even that curious, just satisfied that he was right and she did have a presidential secret.

He tilted back in his chair. “I’ll bet it has something to do with snakes.”

“You’re like the cottonmouth that had hold of my neck. You won’t let go, will you?”

“Ah, Sarah.” He grinned at her, his tiredness evident underneath, but a light of humor and pure, deliberate sexiness shone in his eyes. “I’d love to latch onto you in about a dozen different ways right now. But don’t compare me to a snake, okay?”

“You’ve seen more cottonmouths since being here than I’ve seen in the last ten years-” But she sighed, and set her glass down, gazing again at the river. “Wes was a self-made businessman when I was in high school, a millionaire with political ambitions and a desire to serve the public. Leola and Violet were still alive. He’d drive out here to see them. Evelyn, his wife, often didn’t come.”

“Sarah…”

She pretended not to hear him. “It was a hot day. Muggy. Rob and I were home from school. I didn’t know Wes was here. As I told you, I’d been visiting Leola and Violet-they didn’t know, either. He and Ev had just lost their fourth child. Ev was very depressed. There were rumors she was suicidal.” Sarah shut her eyes and rocked back into the chair, feeling herself at almost seventeen, practically skipping back from the Poe house. “Wes believed he was at fault, that his ambition, the pressures of his work, had hurt their chances of having a child. He came out to the river to pull himself together. It was the low point in his life, in his marriage.”

“He told you all this?”

She nodded, opening her eyes, wishing she could slow her mind, stop the pace of the images repeating themselves. “He was standing on that narrow ledge in front of the cave where Conroy had taken Juliet. I heard him from the path. He was sobbing. I don’t think-” She broke off a moment, searching for the right words. “He’s not one to cry in front of other people.”

Nate picked up her iced-tea glass and took a sip. “Think he was going to jump?”

“I don’t know. I’ll never know.” She rocked back in her chair. “I don’t think he intentionally went out to the ledge to jump. I think he just found himself there. It’s not that much of a jump-there’s no guarantee he’d have died even if he had planned to commit suicide.”

“Water’s deep there, current’s strong.”

“He’s an excellent swimmer. Not that it matters if he’d wanted to die.”

“Was he drunk?”

“Who’s telling this story?” But he’d brought her back to the present, and that was where she needed to be to continue. “He surprised a water moccasin on the ledge. I saw it. It came after him-they can be very aggressive when they’re startled. Wes panicked.”

“And you?”

“I grabbed the snake and threw it in the water.”

Nate smiled. “You and these snakes.”

“The story got told differently than how it was.”

“That’s one way of putting it. He said he saved you from the snake. That he saw you on the ledge and you were the one who panicked.”

“Ah. You’ve done your research. No, he said none of that. It was how the story got told. It was how people wanted it to be. A high school girl and a man who would be president-wouldn’t you want him to be the one to save her from the snake?” She looked out at the river, smelled it on the breeze. “He simply never corrected it.”

“Did he ever ask you not to correct it?”

“Never. Not once. I think if I hadn’t been there, he’d have crawled into the cave and died. He wouldn’t have jumped in the river and committed suicide, but he would have seen the snake as confirmation of all he’d thought and doubted about himself that day. I don’t mind how the story’s been told. Wes understands what it’s like to be at rock bottom. He’s brought that into his public service. His political enemies would say he was a grown man saved by a seventeen-year-old girl, but the truth is far more complicated.”

“He’d never have granted Janssen a pardon on your say-so.”

It was a statement, but Sarah shook her head. “Never. He took an oath. He just wouldn’t-no, never. That Conroy-John Wesley-believed he would was a fantasy on his part.”

Nate took another swallow of tea. “This tea punch is growing on me. I still think it could use a pound less of sugar.”

“Are you drinking out of my glass?”

He leaned toward her, skimmed his knuckles across her cheek. “If this place wasn’t crawling with feds and you hadn’t just been bit by a cottonmouth, I’d be carrying you upstairs right now and drinking-”

“You’re determined to embarrass me, aren’t you?”

“Uh-uh.” He kissed her on her forehead. “Just to make you smile.”

The Dutch authorities released the Dunnemores into the protective custody of a deputy U.S. marshal sent in specifically for the task, who in turn not only put them on a plane but sat next to them for the duration of their flight to New York.