Christine Rimmer - Mercury Rising

Drinking alone was just too depressing. So he was headed for the Highgrade, a combination saloon/café/gift shop/gaming establishment on Main Street. Headed for home—or at least, the closest thing to home he’d every known. He’d grown up there, in the rambling apartment above the action, on the second floor.

Flat-roofed and sided in clapboard, the Highgrade was paneled inside in never-ending knotty pine. Slots lined the walls and the air smelled of greasy burgers, stale beer and too many cigarettes.

Okay, there had to be better places for a man in need of cheering up to go. But even on Sunday, he knew he’d find a few die-hard regulars in the bar. They wouldn’t be big talkers. He’d be lucky to get a few grunts and a “Hiya, Cade.” But technically at least, he wouldn’t be drinking alone.

It was a very short drive to Main Street. Cade swung into the alley between the Highgrade and Jane’s store, Silver Unicorn Books.

Jane. The name echoed like a taunt in his brain.

Seemed he couldn’t turn around lately without being reminded of her. Ubiquitous. That was the word for her.

And don’t laugh. Yeah, maybe he hadn’t been to college—like Jane. And like both of his brothers. But he could read. And set goals. He tried to learn a new word for every weekday. Five new words a week. Times fifty-two. Do the math. Two hundred sixty new words a year. Including ubiquitous, which was another word for Jane.

Because she was everywhere. She had the store next to his mother’s place. One of her two closest friends had married his brother. And she lived in the house beside his.

Yeah, yeah. If living next to her bothered him, he shouldn’t have bought the damn house in the first place.

But he’d had that itch to move back home. And he’d scratched it by buying the old Lipcott place. How the hell was he supposed to know what was going to happen to him as a result of buying a damn house? How was he going to know ahead of time that proximity would breed awareness? And that awareness would develop into a yen.

It just wasn’t the kind of thing that he’d ever imagined could happen to him. Uh-uh. Cade Bravo didn’t brood over lovers—or over women he wished would become his lovers.

Why should he? In spite of his lack of formal education, women liked him just fine. He’d never had to put up with a whole lot of rejection. Most women were willing to look at him twice. And besides, he’d always been a guy who took life as it came. If a woman didn’t respond to him, well, hey, guess what? There’d be someone new on the horizon real soon.

He’d never been the type to pine and yearn.

Or at least, he hadn’t until now.

Cade parked his car in one of the spaces reserved for family at the rear of the building and went in through the back door.

Caitlin Bravo had owned the Highgrade for over thirty years, since before Cade was born. The way Cade understood it, his bad dad, Blake Bravo, had set her up with it. The old man had given her three sons and the Highgrade and then vanished from their lives, never to be seen by any of them again.

In fact, Cade had never seen his father, period—not in the flesh anyway, only in pictures. It was no source of pride to him that he was the only one of Caitlin’s three sons who had his daddy’s eyes. Silvery eyes. Scary eyes, a lot of folks thought.

And let’s lay it on the table here, the old man had been a pretty scary guy.

Blake Bravo had faked his own death in an apartment fire not all that long after he’d planted the seed that would one day be Cade. And later, once everyone thought he was dead, he had kidnapped his own brother’s second son, claimed a huge ransom—and never returned the child.

The way everyone figured it now, in hindsight, Blake must have put some poor loser’s body in his place when he burned that apartment building down. And somehow, he must have managed to falsify dental records. He’d been out on bail at the time, up on a manslaughter charge after killing some other luckless fool in a barroom brawl.

Getting dead had made it possible for him to beat the manslaughter rap without even going to trial. One clever guy, that Blake Bravo.

The good news was, Blake was really and truly dead now. He’d died in an Oklahoma hospital a little over a year ago. Embarrassed the hell out of Caitlin, to learn that the dead guy she’d always considered the love of her life had lived an extra thirty years and then some beyond what she’d known about.

Inside the Highgrade, things were hopping on the café side. It was usually that way on Sundays after church. Caitlin, in skintight jeans and a spangled Western shirt, was playing hostess, leading people to the booths, ringing them up at the register when they were ready to go. She saw him and gave him a wink.

He went the other way, into the comforting morose silence of the bar.

Bertha was bartending. Big and solid with carrot-colored braids anchored in a crown around her head, Bertha didn’t talk much. She had a good heart and a ready smile. Cade had never known a Highgrade without Bertha Slider working there.

“Hey, honeybunch.” One look in his face and Bertha knew what to do. She put the bottle of Cuervo on the bar with a shot glass beside it, set out the lime wedges and the salt, poured the beer chaser.

There were two other guys down the bar a ways. Cade saluted them and got the expected pair of grunts in response. He fisted his hand, licked the side of it and poured on the salt. Then he knocked back the first shot.

It was no good, he realized about an hour later. He’d only had a couple of shots, after all, hadn’t even gotten himself to the stage where his lips started feeling numb.

And he didn’t want any more. Didn’t want to get drunk.

Things had gotten pretty bad when a man didn’t even have the heart to pour a river of tequila over his sorrows. He tossed a twenty on the bar, said goodbye to Bertha and got the hell out.

He knew he shouldn’t have, but he went back to his house. Somehow, while those two shots and that one beer to chase them hadn’t made him even close to drunk, they had broken through his determination to put the book-peddling temptress next door out of his mind. He stopped in front of his house and turned off the engine and just sat there behind the wheel, staring at her front yard where flowers of every kind and color twined the fences and lined the walk.

He didn’t see her. She must be in back. He knew she was out in that yard of hers somewhere. It was her gardening day.

Sundays, as a rule, she went to church with her mother. And after that, she would go out and work in the yard. Sometimes she wore a huge, ugly straw hat. But sometimes she didn’t. Sometimes, she’d go bare-headed, anchoring that wildly curling coffee-colored hair in a tumbling knot on her head. Always, for working in the yard, she wore baggy old clothes that somehow, to him, seemed all the more provocative for what they didn’t reveal.

Yeah, all right. He knew her habits. He knew her ways.

He’d observed her going in and out of her house morning, afternoon and evening, headed to and from that bookstore of hers, all that hair loose on her shoulders, snaky tendrils of it lifted and teased by the wind.

She often left her windows open. He could hear her in there sometimes, talking on the phone in that soft alto voice of hers. Her laughter was low, musical…warm.

The sound of her had the same effect on him as the sight of her. It made him think of getting her naked and burying his face in all that hair—of listening to that gorgeous voice of hers pitched to a whisper, saying wicked things meant for his ears alone.

He knew damn well she had a wild side. He also knew she kept it under strictest control. Ask anyone. They’d tell you. Since Rusty Jenkins died seven or eight years back in a botched convenience store robbery, Jane Elliott had strictly walked the straight and narrow. She’d gone to Stanford after Rusty died, got herself a nice liberal arts degree. She had her garden and her auntie’s house and her cute little bookstore on Main Street. She dated only upwardly mobile guys with steady jobs. She was thoroughly practical, completely down-to-earth and obstinately sensible.