Tami Hoag - Cry Wolf

He sighed as his mind idly drew character sketches of Savannah, and his gaze fell through the window, taking in the details of the setting. The bayou was a strip of bottle green beyond the yard, and beyond the banks lay the tangled wilderness of the Atchafalaya. Wild and sultry, like Savannah, unpredictable and deceivingly delicate, fragility in the guise of unforgiving toughness.

He thought he ought to write the image down, but he couldn't work up the ambition to go and get his notebook. Instead, he let the lines fade away and tended to his packing. Five pairs of shorts, five pairs of socks, the tie bar Astor had given him the Christmas before she forgot his name.

Astor. God, how different she had been from Savannah. She had always worn her fragility like a beautiful orchid corsage, as if it were the badge of a true lady, a sign of breeding. Her toughness had been inside, a stoic strength that had borne her through the stages of her decline with dignity. She would have disapproved of Savannah-silently, politely, with a tip of her head and a cluck of her tongue. But he imagined Astor would have forgiven Savannah her sins. He wasn't so sure the same could be said for his case. He had made his wife a pledge, after all.

The doorbell intruded on his musings, and Coop abandoned the closet and his shirt selections to answer it, never expecting to find Laurel Chandler standing on the stoop.

"Mr. Cooper, I'm Laurel Chandler," she said, all business, no seductive smile, no gleam of carnal fire in the eyes behind the oversize, mannish spectacles.

"Yes, of course," he said. Remembering his manners, he stepped back from the door. "Would you care to come in?"

"I'll be blunt, Mr. Cooper," Laurel said, making no move to enter the house. "I'm looking for my sister."

Coop sighed heavily, wearily, feeling his age and the weight of his infidelity bearing down on his broad shoulders. "Yes. Do come in, Miz Chandler, please. I'm afraid I'm in a bit of a hurry, but we can talk as I pack."

Determined to dislike him, Laurel stepped past him and into the entry hall of a lovely old home that held family heirlooms and an ageless sense of loneliness with equal grace. Everything was in its place and polished to a shine, with no one here to see it. A grandfather clock ticked the seconds away at the foot of the stairs, marking time to the end of a family. Cooper and his wife had no children. When they were gone, so would be the memories the family had made in this house over the generations.

She cast a hard glance at Conroy Cooper. Behind the lenses of his gold-rimmed glasses, he met her gaze with the bluest, warmest, saddest eyes she had ever seen, and he smiled, wistfully, regretfully. It wasn't difficult to see what had attracted her sister. He was a big, strong, athletic man, even at an age that had to be near sixty. His face had probably taken young ladies' breath in his hey-day. A strong jaw and a boyish grin. Now it was a map etched with lines of stress and living. No less handsome; more interesting. He stood there in rumpled chinos with one leg cocked, his head tipped on one side. A gray T-shirt with a faded Tulane logo spanned his shoulders and hung free of his pants.

"I am certain you are well aware of my relationship with your sister," he drawled, that smooth, wonderful voice rolling out of him, rolling over Laurel like sunwarmed caramel. She steeled herself against its effects. "And you think less of me for it."

"You're an adulterer, Mr. Cooper. What am I supposed to think of you?"

"That perhaps I loved Savannah as best I could while trying to keep a promise to a woman who no longer remembers me or anything of the life we once had together."

Laurel pressed her lips together and looked down at her shoes, dodging the steady blue gaze.

"Savannah once told me you thought in absolutes," he said. "Right or wrong. Guilty or not guilty. Life isn't quite so black and white as you would like for it to be, Laurel. Nothing is as absolute in reality as it is in our minds in our youth."

"Loved," Laurel repeated, seizing on the thought to fend off any pangs of contrition his words may have inspired. She raised her head and looked at him sharply again. "You said loved. Past tense."

"Yes. It's over." He ran a hand back through his blond hair, glancing at the clock as it ticked away another few seconds. "I don't mean to be rude, but I have to be in N'Awlins this afternoon. If you'll excuse my back, I'll lead the way."

As she followed him into his bedroom, a feeling of something like déjà vu stole over her. The furnishings were big and masculine. The smell of leather and shoe polish underscored the faint woodsy tang of aftershave. Like Daddy's room back home before Vivian had dismantled it and given it over to Ross.

A duffel bag sat open on the white counterpane on the bed, giving her a peek of white cotton and polished wingtips. Cooper went to the closet and selected three shirts, which he hung neatly in a black garment bag on the closet door.

"She wanted to go with me on this trip," he said. "Of course, I had to tell her no. She knew very well the boundaries of our relationship. If you think she took the news well, I should point out to you that I used to have a collection of fine antique shaving mugs left to me by my grandfather. I kept them in that cabinet next to the bathroom door."

The curio cabinet stood, an empty frame with no glass in its sides and no antique shaving mugs within. All signs of the destruction had been vacuumed away, but Laurel could very easily picture her sister hurling mugs at Cooper's head. She had that kind of rage in her, that kind of violence.

Fingers of tension curled around her stomach and squeezed.

"When did this argument take place?" she asked, turning to face Cooper once again.

He hung a pearl gray suit in the garment bag and smoothed the sleeves. "Tuesday. Why?"

"Because I haven't seen her since Tuesday morning."

He pulled another suit from the closet and added it to the bag, frowning as his mind rushed to plot out scenarios. "Then she's probably gone on to N'Awlins. I wouldn't put it past her to think she could disrupt my stay."

"She didn't have a car."

"She may have caught a ride with a friend." His mouth compressed into a tight line as he zipped the bag shut. "Or another man. You might check with the Maison de Ville. She likes to stay in the cottages there."

"Yes," Laurel murmured. "I know."

They had stayed there the spring before their father died. A family outing, one of the few she remembered happily. She could still hear Vivian going on about how movie stars sometimes stayed there. She could still see the thick-walled cottages and the courtyard, could still hear the noise and smell the ripe smells of New Orleans as she had perceived them then, through the senses of a child.

Cooper pulled the garment bag down from the closet door, folded and latched it securely. Laurel watched his hands. They were thick and strong with square-cut nails. The hands of a farmer or a carpenter, not a writer. A gold band, burnished with age, circled the third finger of his left hand.

"How is your wife?"

His head came up sharply, eyes shining with interest and surprise as he studied her. He swung the bag onto the bed beside the duffel.

Laurel picked at her ravaged thumbnail absently, uncomfortable with the topic and his scrutiny. "I heard about the incident at St. Joseph's. I'm sorry."

Coop nodded slowly, finding it interesting that Laurel would apologize for the actions of her sister. They were two sides of the same coin-one light, one dark; one driven by angst to acts of justice, one to strange fits of passion. Laurel subdued everything feminine about herself; Savannah flaunted and magnified. Laurel held everything within; Savannah knew no boundaries and no control.