“Makeovers?” Effie asked.
“Yes,” Sara said, holding tightly onto R.J.’s arm.
“Same way she knows ever’ thing. Gideon.”
“And who is he?” R.J. asked, and there was as much hostility in his voice as there was in the girls’.
“That’s for me to know and you to find out,” the oldest girl said, smirking.
Before R.J. could say anything, Sara pulled him through the door, shut it behind them, then led him to the shade of a big tree. “What was wrong with you?” she hissed. “We’re supposed to find out information, not antagonize them.”
R.J. leaned against the tree and looked out at the water. “That’s like what I grew up in,” he said quietly. “My sisters …” He didn’t finish, but just stood there looking at the water.
If it hadn’t been for the blood vein throbbing in his neck, she wouldn’t have known how agitated he was. She sat down on a big tree root by his feet. “I would imagine those children have been abused,” she said. “At least neglected. I doubt that they’ve had a chance to be anything except what their parents made them into.”
“Why is it that two children can grow up in the same household, suffer the same abuse, but one turns out to be a murderer and the other one helps people?”
“I think they’ve been trying to answer that since Cain killed Abel.”
R.J. sat down beside her. “I think that under the dirt on those little kids are bruises.” He looked away, his eyes focused on something inside himself.
She wanted to sit there and listen to what R.J. needed to tell someone. She knew him well enough to know that he confided in no one, not his friends, not anyone. But Sara knew that they didn’t have time for listening to anything right now. Maybe it was just now hitting R.J. what he was up against, what they were all up against. A dead man was a great deal different from a dead dog.
“At least you had sisters,” she said. “My old man took out everything on me. Just me. For seventeen years I heard how my sainted mother had been killed by ’them.’ He meant the people in Arundel. I thought they’d sent a hit man. You know what I found out after he died? That my father had been driving the car when she was killed and that he was drunk. I also found out that my mother’s family paid for the lawyer that kept my father out of jail. I wondered if they’d done me a favor by that. If he’d been sent to prison, would I have been sent to live with one of them? Would I have grown up as Ariel did, with her trips to New York to have clothes made for her? Would I have a boyfriend like David?”
When she finished her speech, she looked at R.J. and saw that his eyes were no longer angry. He was smiling at her. “They did you a favor,” he said softly. “If you were like Ariel, I wouldn’t like you.”
She wanted to make a smart-aleck retort to that, and a week ago she would have, but now she was pleased by the compliment. “Are you making a pass at me?”
“You haven’t looked in a mirror for a long time, have you?” he asked, but he was chuckling. He got up, then held out his hands to her. When she came up, she was standing on a tree root and nearly as tall as he was. Their faces were close together.
There was something about the moment, about their shared backgrounds, that made her feel different toward him.
“If you fall in love with me I’ll have to get a new secretary,” R.J. said softly.
“Good,” she said, moving away from him. “Then I’ll get a good severance and move to L.A. and become a movie star.”
She expected him to say something negative, that she was too old, or might be in jail for the rest of her life, but he didn’t. Turning away, he said, “I’m sure you’ll make it. You certainly have enough talent.”
She followed him, smiling, but a few minutes later, she wondered if what he’d said was a compliment or not. Was he telling her that she was usually acting? That she wasn’t a sincere, honest person?
“You want to tell me what you meant by that crack?” she asked, moving beside him. When she saw that he was smiling, she knew she was right. “What a rat fink you are! Here I was feeling sorry for you, but you say something nasty to me in return. You—”
She broke off because he put his arm around her waist, pulled her against him, and kissed her. It wasn’t a light kiss, but the deep, hard kiss of a man who was at last getting something he’d wanted for a very long time. Sara felt herself melting against him, collapsing against him as though she was trying to draw strength from him. In the last horrible days, her world had been turned upside down, but she had stamped down her fears, and with them, she had buried her needs for reassurance. Now, in R.J.’s strong arms, she hugged him back; she kissed him back.
When he moved his face from hers, she was ashamed to find that there were tears on her cheeks. “Sssssh,” he said, caressing her hair, holding her against him. “It’ll be all right. I’ll see to that. I’m sorry I got angry back there. It won’t happen again.”
“It’s okay,” she said, sniffing and pulling away from him. She turned away so he couldn’t see her face. When he was silent, she saw he was looking at her strangely. “I’m not going back to Ariel, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“No, I wasn’t thinking that at all,” he said softly. “About this …” He waved his hand to mean the kissing. “It was just one of those spur-of-the-moment things. I …” He trailed off and looked away. He seemed to be puzzled by something. “How about if we go find this kid Gideon?”
Sara was embarrassed about the way she’d kissed him back, about the way she’d held onto him. He’d never made a physical pass at her before. He’d made a thousand little sex jokes, pretending to want to make love to her, to want to— She looked up at him, but he was looking at the pathway in front of them. It led up a steep hill and into the dark woods. “I can’t imagine how dumb he is,” Sara sai
d at last, breaking the awkward silence.
“Because Effie is the smart one?” R.J. said, and seemed to be glad for something else to talk about.
“Exactly,” she said.