Tami Hoag - Cry Wolf

There was such a thing as being poor and happy. After her father had died, Laurel had often offered God every toy she possessed, every party dress, for the chance to have parents who cared more about her and Savannah than they did about wealth. She had known a number of families whose parents worked on Beauvoir, who had little and still smiled and hugged their children. The Cajuns were famously unmaterialistic and strongly family-oriented. But she had a feeling this had not been the case with Jack's family.

Curiosity itched inside her, but she didn't ask. Personal questions didn't seem wise.

They each took a net out into the water, spacing them a good distance apart. Jack worked quickly and methodically, the ritual as second-nature to him as tying his shoes. Laurel kept stumbling over tangles of alligator weed that was entwined with delicate yellow bladderwort and water primrose. The spot she had chosen to drop her net was choked with lavender water hyacinth that fought her for control of the net.

"Uh-huh," Jack muttered dryly, suddenly beside her, reaching around her, enveloping her in his warm male scent. "I can see you grew up eating store-bought crawfish."

Laurel shot him an offended look. "I did not. I'll have you know, I've done this lots of times. Just not in the last fifteen years, that's all."

Jack set the net and helped her wade back to shore, balancing her when the roots and reeds caught at her boots. When they were back on solid ground, he gave her a dubious look.

"I saw where you grew up, sugar. I can't picture any daughter of that house wading for mudbugs."

"That just shows what a reverse snob you are," Laurel said as she stepped out of the hot boots and let her bare feet sink into the soft ground of the bank. "Daddy used to take Savannah and me."

She leaned back against the side of the Jeep and stared across the bayou, thinking of happier times. On the far bank lush ferns and purple wild iris grew in the shade of hardwood trees dripping moss and willows waving their pendulous ribbons of green. In brighter spots black-eyed Susans and white-topped daisy fleabane dotted the bank like dollops of sunshine. Somewhere along the stream a pileated woodpecker began drumming against a tree trunk in search of an insect snack and the racket startled a pair of prothonotary warblers from their roost in a nearby hackberry sapling. The little birds fluttered past, flashes of slate blue and bright yellow.

"What happened to him?" Jack asked softly.

Emotion solidified in Laurel 's throat like a chunk of amber. "He died," she whispered, the beautiful growth along the far bank blurring as unexpected tears glazed across her eyes. "He was killed… an accident… in the cane fields…"

One swift, terrible moment, and all their lives had been changed irrevocably.

Jack watched the sadness cloud her face like a veil. Automatically, he reached for her, curled his arm around her shoulder, pulled her gently against his side. "Hey, sugar," he murmured, his lips brushing her temple. "Don' cry. I didn' mean to make you cry. I brought you out here to make you happy."

Laurel stifled the urge to lean against him, straightening away instead, scrubbing at the embarrassment that reddened her cheeks. "I'm okay." She sniffed and shook her head, smiling against the desire to cry. "That just kind of snuck up on me. I'm okay." She nodded succinctly, as if she had managed to convince herself at least, if not Jack.

He watched her out of the corner of his eye. Tough little cookie, bucking up when she wanted to crumble. She was a fighter, all right. He had learned that not only by experience, but through his reading. According to the papers he had culled out of his collection of a year's worth, she had been as tenacious as a pit bull going after the alleged perpetrators in the Scott County case. She had driven her staff mercilessly, but worked none harder than she worked herself in the relentless-and, as it had turned out, futile-pursuit of justice. He couldn't help wondering where that hunger for truth and fairness had come from. Reporters had described it as an obsession. Obsessions grew out of seeds sown deep inside. He knew all about obsessions.

"How old were you?" he asked.

Laurel pulled up a black-eyed Susan and began plucking off the petals methodically. "Ten."

He wanted to offer some words of sympathy, tell her he knew how tough it was. But the fact of the matter was, he had hated his father and hadn't mourned his passing for even a fraction of a second.

"What about you?" Laurel asked, giving in to her curiosity on the grounds of good manners. He had asked her first. It would have been rude not to ask in return. "Do your parents live around here?"

"They're dead," Jack said flatly. "Did he want you to be a lawyer, your daddy?"

Laurel looked down at the mutilated flower in her hand, thinking of it as a representation of her life. The petals were like the years her father had been alive, all of them stripped away, leaving her with nothing but ugliness. "He wanted me to be happy."

"And the law made you happy?"

She shook her head a little, almost imperceptibly. "I went into law to see justice done. Why did you go into it?"

To show my old man. "To get rich."

"And did you?"

"Oh, yeah, absolutely. Me, I had it all." And then I killed it, crushed it, threw it all away.

Jack shifted his weight restlessly from one squishy wet sneaker to the other. She was turning the tables on him, neatly, easily, subtly. He shot her a glance askance. "You're good, counselor."

Laurel blinked at him in innocence. "I don't know what you mean."

"I mean, I'm the one asking the questions, so how come I'm all of a sudden giving answers?"

Her mouth turned down in a frown. "I thought this was a conversation, not an interrogation. Why can't I ask questions?"

"Because you won' like my answers, sugar," he said darkly.

"How will I know until I hear them?"

"Trust me."

Laurel took advantage of the silence to study him for a moment as he stared out at the brown water, that intense, brooding look on his face. The feeling that he was two very different men struck her once again. One minute he was the wild-eyed devil who wanted nothing more than to get into trouble and have a good time; the next he was this closed, dark man who kept the door shut on the part of himself he didn't want anyone to see. She found herself wanting to know what was on the other side of that door. A dangerous curiosity, she thought, pulling herself back from asking more questions.

Down the bank Huey suddenly bounded out of a stand of cattails and coffee weed, baying excitedly. The children who had been chasing around their parents' cars farther downstream came running, squealing with excitement to see what the hound had discovered, shrieking delightedly when they found the dog's quarry was a painted turtle with a spotted salamander riding on its back.

The turtle lumbered along, ignoring the sniffing hound, its lethargic gait seeming out of sync with its gaudy coloring. Its ebony-green shell shone like a bowling ball and was crisscrossed with a network of reddish-yellow lines. A broad red stripe stroked down the center of it from head to tail. The salamander flicked its long tongue out at the dog, sending Huey into another gale of howls that in turn set the children off again.

Poor Huey couldn't seem to figure out why the turtle didn't spring away from him so he could give chase. He batted a paw at it and yipped in surprise as the salamander shot off its hard-shelled taxi and skittered into the tall weeds. The hound wheeled and ran, bowling over a toddler in his haste to escape.

Being the closest adult, Laurel automatically went to the little girl's aid. She hefted up twenty pounds of squalling baby fat and perched the child on her hip as if it were the most natural thing in the world.