LITMIR.BIZ

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interjected.

       The men exchanged glances and told her to get into the waiting car. She had no choice. Nervous sweat broke out between her shoulder blades as she slid into the worn backseat of the cruiser. Deputy Zalinski ground his cigarette out beneath the heel of his boot before climbing into the Ford. Deputy Springer started the car. Soon, they were following the other police cars on their way back to Gold Creek, leaving the Monroe mansion, a rumpled couch and a night of lovemaking far behind them.

       Rachelle tried to fight against the terror that she felt creeping into her heart. Arms hugging her middle, she huddled in the backseat of the police cruiser and silently prayed that this was all a bad dream and she’d wake up with Jackson stretched out beside her. She rubbed her arms and stared through the trees to the misty lake. What was the old Indian legend? Drink from the lake but don’t overindulge and the waters will bring you good luck? Well, she was certain both she and Jackson could use a shot of magic water right now. They were in trouble. Deep trouble.

       However, she wouldn’t realize until hours later just how bottomless that trouble was.

       Before the day was out, Jackson Moore, the bad boy of Gold Creek, would be formally charged with the murder of Roy Fitzpatrick.

      * * *

      “THAT’S CRAZY! JACKSONwouldn’t kill anyone!” Rachelle cried, disbelieving. She leapt out of the hard wooden chair in the interrogation room at the sheriff’s office.

       Her mother, two deputies, a lawyer she’d never seen before, and even her father were with her, listening as she tried to explain the circumstances of the night before.

       “You’ve got everything wrong!” She was nearly hysterical.

       “Calm down, little lady,” Deputy Springer advised. “We’re just talkin’ this thing out. Now, someone hit that boy over the head and drowned him in the lake last night, someone strong enough to hit him and hold him down, someone who was angry with him, someone who had a reason to pick a fight with him.”

       “But not Jackson,” she replied staunchly, though her insides were shredding with fear and doubt and a million other emotions.

       “You see ’em fightin’ earlier?”

       “Yes, but—”

       “And didn’t Moore stop Roy from…well, from attacking you?”

       Rachelle took in a long breath. “That doesn’t prove anything.”

       “A couple of witnesses say that Jackson was lookin’ for a fight with Roy, that he’d already had words with Roy’s daddy at the logging camp a few days ago, and that Roy had almost run Jackson down before the party.”

       Rachelle didn’t say anything. Her throat was tight and hot, and she was more scared than she’d ever been in her life.

       “Isn’t that what happened?” Deputy Zalinski prodded.

       Slowly, so as not to be misunderstood, she said, “I’m telling you I was with him the entire night.” Her voice was raw from talking, and hot tears began to gather in the corners of her eyes. She felt shame that all of Gold Creek would learn of her night with Jackson, but more than shame she felt fear, sheer terror for Jackson. The charges were ridiculous, but the stony, solemn faces of the men who worked for the sheriff’s department convinced her that they meant business. She had to save Jackson. She was the only one who could. “That last time we saw Roy, he was alive. Drunk, and a little beat-up, but alive!”

       “And you were awake all night long?” Deputy Zalinski asked. He fiddled with his lighter, but she knew his concentration hadn’t strayed at all. He waited, flipping the lighter end over end in his fingers.

       Rachelle hesitated. She couldn’t look her father in the eye. “I slept part of the time.” She was mortified and tired and still in the dirty, ripped clothes she’d been in the night before. All she’d been given was a box of tissues and a glass of water. And her father’s disgrace, so visible in the downcast turn of his eyes, made her cringe inside.

       Zalinski finally lit a cigarette. “Are you a heavy sleeper?”

       “I don’t know.”

       “She sleeps like a log—” her mother began, then snapped her mouth shut when the lawyer shot her a warning glance. Ellen Tremont went back to worrying the handle of her purse between her bony fingers.

       “Isn’t it possible that Jackson could have left you for a couple of hours and you would never have been the wiser?” Deputy Zalinski suggested. He took a long drag of his cigarette, and the smoke curled lazily toward the light suspended above the table. “The Monroe place is less than a quarter of a mile away from the Fitzpatricks’.”

       “He didn’t leave me!”

       “But you were asleep.”

       “He was hurt and…” She swallowed back her humiliation and tried not to remember the hours in early dawn when she’d felt him leave the couch to return later—she couldn’t have guessed how long—smelling of pine needles and the rain-washed forest.

       “And what, Miss Tremont?” Zalinski pressed on.

       “He, uh, he didn’t have his clothes on.”

       Her mother gasped, and Rachelle fell back into the folding chair. Somehow she managed to meet Deputy Zalinski’s eyes. “He could barely get into his pants because of the swelling and bandage around his leg.”

       “He was wearing jeans this morning.”

       “Yes, but he had to struggle to get them on. And I watched him do that—after you had arrived and ordered us out of the house.”

       The deputy smiled patiently. “Then it was possible that while you were sleeping, he could’ve ‘struggled’ into his clothes, left and returned before you even missed him.”

       “No!” she snapped quickly, and watched as Deputy Springer, propped against the corner of the room, jotted a note to himself.

       Zalinski stubbed out his cigarette. “Miss Tremont—”

       “Can I go now?” she cut in.

       The answer was no. The interrogation lasted another two hours, at the end of which, on the lawyer’s advice, her parents—in the first decision they’d agreed upon for two years—proclaimed that Rachelle wasn’t to see Jackson again. They were both shocked and appalled that their daughter, the reliable, responsible one of their two girls, had gotten involved with “that wretched Moore boy.” Though the police had assured her folks that Rachelle was not a suspect, not even considered for being an accessory, she was as good as convicted in their eyes. She’d slept with a boy she hardly knew, a boy with a reputation as tarnished as her grandmother’s silver tea set, a boy who was now charged with kidnapping, trespassing, assault, breaking and entering and murder.

       While Jackson sat alone in the county jail, unable to make bail, Rachelle was grounded. Indefinitely. Even her sister, Heather, who usually enjoyed adventure and took more chances than Rachelle, was subdued and stared at Rachelle with soulful, disbelieving blue eyes.

       “I can’t believe it,” Heather whispered, gazing at Rachelle with a look of horror mingled with awe. “You did it? With Jackson Moore?”

       “I don’t want to talk about it.” Rachelle, sitting on the edge of her bed, towel-dried her hair.

       “But what was it like? Was it beautiful, or scary or disgusting?”

       Rachelle ripped the towel from her head. “I said I’m not discussing it, Heather, and I mean it. Let it go!” she snapped, and Heather, for once, turned back to the pages of some teen magazine. To Rachelle, her sister, four years younger and a troublemaker in her own right, seemed incredibly naive and juvenile. In one night, Rachelle felt as if she’d grown up. She had no patience for Heather getting vicarious thrills out of Jackson’s bad luck.

       And bad luck it was. Jackson, before he was

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