Perspiration and talcum powder, I thought. Or maybe baby shampoo. The kind that doesn’t sting eyes.
I’d rescued her, I reminded myself. Rescued an innocent. The way I’d rescued so many others in the years since Missy’s death. I’d preserved the Underground and, over the past eight years, helped many dozens of helpless women escape to new, better lives. And I’d given up the only man I’d ever loved because I couldn’t tolerate lying to him and I dared not tell him the truth. Wasn’t that enough to make up for breaking the law, for abusing in death someone who’d been so badly abused by life?
I couldn’t convince myself that it was.
The rescue, with enough people and the right equipment, was quick and safe. Tina, Possum and I left the ravine at a place several yards distant from the exposed root system of the massive tree. I handed Tina over to a paramedic and then, with Possum by my side, followed the tree line to the yellow-taped perimeter that Chad was creating several yards back from the ravine. The tape was a standard item in my pack. Chad always seemed to have it with him, too. And I wondered briefly what that said about our expectations.
Chad paused in his work and reached down to ruffle the fur on Possum’s head.
“Good job, Possum,” he said. “I’m going to get you a big rawhide chew. And maybe a tube of new tennis balls.”
Possum responded as he would to anyone whose voice was so full of praise. He wiggled most of the back half of his shaggy black-and-tan body.
Then Chad straightened and turned toward me. His body blocked the glare from a high-powered lantern that was set up nearby, but there was still enough light to see the dark patches of perspiration staining his uniform shirt and the long, bloody gouge that some branch had carved beneath his right eye. It nearly intersected the puckered, white line that paralleled his strong jaw—a scar that Chad’s daddy had put there more than a decade earlier.
“Thank you,” he said. “You’re fabulous.”
I felt my cheeks redden and my pulse quicken in response to the admiration I heard in his voice, and I knew without doubt that I wouldn’t have reacted that way to just anyone. Only Chad.
Quickly, I focused my attention on Possum, who was butting Chad’s hand with his broad head in an attempt to get more petting. I ordered him to lie down and stay—probably more firmly than I should have—and waited until his body was sprawled comfortably on the ground. Then I helped Chad finish tying off the tape. I took my end all the way back to the dangerous edge, finally wrapping it around a sapling that was about fifteen feet from the cottonwood tree where I’d found the bones. After rejoining Chad beneath the lantern and taking a moment to survey our work, I turned and looked him squarely in the eyes.
“Okay, now let me take a look at your face.”
He shook his head. “No big deal,” he began. “We need to—”
“No,” I said, cutting him off midsentence and probably midthought. “Before we do another thing, you let me take care of that cheek.”
From long experience, I knew just how stubborn he could be. So I didn’t wait for his reply. Or his permission. I grabbed his chin, tipped his injured cheek in my direction and peered at the wound.
“It’s only a scratch,” he said.
“Bull. Shit. Hold. Still.”
I gave his chin a quick pinch to make my point.
One way or another, I’d been dealing with Chad’s stubbornness and patching him up for years. The first time was just after he’d come to live with a family that took in foster kids. Their house was down the hill from the Cherokee Rose. Even though Chad had been a boy—and, at twelve, I’d written off the opposite sex as pretty much useless—I’d been predisposed to like him. His family situation had distracted most of Maryville from their ongoing gossip about ours. Our mother was merely a runaway and a thief, who’d abandoned her children in a crack house in Los Angeles. Chad’s father had murdered his wife, attempted to slash his son’s throat and then had claimed that God had told him to do it.
The wound on Chad’s cheek was ragged and deep. I pulled an antiseptic pad from my emergency pack and began gently washing blood and bits of debris away from it.
“It doesn’t look as if you’ll need stitches,” I said when the cheek was clean.
“Oh, good,” he said, self-mockery evident in his voice. “I was real worried that another scar would ruin my ruggedly handsome good looks.”
“It’d take a heck of a lot more than that,” I muttered, contradicting him as I always did, knowing that when he looked in the mirror all he saw was a face with a scar. And maybe felt again, just for a heartbeat, the hatred that had put it there.
But, as he always did, he shrugged.
Stupid man, I thought. Why can’t he see that despite the scarring along his jaw, or maybe because of it, he was utterly desirable?
Too desirable.
At almost nineteen, when he’d joined the military and gone away to fight in the Middle East, he hadn’t been at all desirable. At least, not as far as I’d been concerned. I’d watched him grow from a scrawny, carrot-topped boy to a rangy acne-prone adolescent male. I missed him only because he was my best buddy and the boy next door, never anticipating that a few years away would transform him into a six-foot-tall hunk with green eyes and copper hair. I hadn’t expected that old friendship would eventually evolve into new intimacy. Or that in a matter of months, our enthusiastic lust would abruptly transform itself into troublesome love. But that’s exactly what had happened.
Get over it, I told myself.
I looked away from his expressive eyes and back at his bloody cheek.
He did a good job of pretending that he didn’t feel anything when I smoothed a layer of antibiotic cream over the wound. Then, as gently as I could, I used several butterfly closures to pull together the edges along the deepest part of the wound.
He flinched.
“Sorry,” I murmured.
“Doesn’t hurt,” he lied.
“Have I ever accused you of being accident prone?”
“Often,” he said, flashing me a smile.
Halfheartedly, I scolded him for moving as I grinned back. It was an old joke and a good memory. We’d met when he’d crashed in front of the Cherokee Rose while attempting a skateboard stunt involving empty wooden peach crates and a plywood ramp.
Chad’s expression grew serious, though he was careful not to frown.
“You and I have a jurisdictional issue to resolve,” he said. “Fact is, you’d need a surveyor to figure out whether we’re standing on county land or if this is still Maryville Township.”
I made a sound that was more acknowledgment than an answer as I concentrated on anchoring a square of gauze across his cheek with a final strip of tape. Then I used another antiseptic pad to wipe away the blood that had smeared across his face. Finally, I stepped back to survey my work.
“That should hold you for a while,” I said.
