The Best Revenge Page 5

  The speech went on, and she noted that in typical Alden fashion, the man was making some rather grand statements without much planning to back them up. He was full of big ideas, but could never be pinned down as to how he would carry them out. Yes, a big, modern hospital would be nice, but Cedar hardly had the population to support it, without huge taxes no one could pay and survive. Expanding the smaller, existing clinic, perhaps, she thought. And a brand-new, state-of-the-art library was a pipe dream, the tax base simply wouldn’t, couldn’t support it. A remodel of the still solid old building, including computer stations, could be done for a third as much. For every big idea he expounded on, there was a cheaper, more practical alternative. Alternatives her father would have begun with.

  But then, her father had never been in it for the big impression. He’d been in it because he loved Cedar, and wanted it to be what the people who lived here, people he liked and respected, wanted it to be.

  Albert Alden wanted it to be what he wanted it to be.

  And the rest of you better just get on board, she thought as she listened.

  And many had. Including the Cedar Report, the town newspaper that came out three days a week. Although they had always in the past supported her father, they’d recently printed a ringing endorsement of Alden. It had stung, she had to admit that, but she’d been almost glad to see her mother’s outrage, the first strong emotion outside her grief that Jessa had seen from her in this eight months of hell.

  As was his wont, the longer Alden’s speech—she couldn’t help the fact that the word sermon popped into her head—went, the more dramatic he became. She wondered if he studied video of famous speeches; some of the gestures and phrasing seemed familiar.

  Abruptly, she’d had enough. Since it seemed almost everybody in town was here, she should go back to the store and take advantage of the lull to catch up on the paperwork that always threatened to get out of control. And she had some bills to pay. It was going to be tight this month, but they’d make it. Not that she wasn’t still worried; her own situation was bleaker. This campaign thing was eating up her savings at an alarming rate.

  Dad always told you that doing the right thing sometimes has a price, she reminded herself as she turned to go.

  At least at the back of the crowd no one would notice her departure. She had the sinking feeling, as they all seemed enraptured by the man in the covered gazebo, that she could leave the race and nobody would notice that, either.

  Maybe she should. She certainly didn’t want this, after all. Just because her father had been the longest-serving mayor in the 130-year history of Cedar, and his father the second longest, didn’t automatically qualify her for the job.

  But if there was anything her father had taught her, in both words and his own actions, it was that not even trying because you might lose wasn’t an option.

  Something caught her eye as she worked her way along the edge of the crowd that had spilled out into the street. A man standing apart, his hands fisted into the pockets of his jacket as he stared at the man orating some fifty feet away, his expression the most intensely fierce she’d ever seen. St. John.

  As she passed behind him, although she should have been out of his field of vision, he seemed to notice her movement and glanced her way. And that quickly, the fierceness was gone, nothing remaining but the cool calm she’d noticed yesterday. It was so swift and complete that it stopped her in her tracks, and left her with the impression of a man who had changed masks, a disturbing thought, and one she guessed she would do well to remember. “Deserting?”

  His voice matched his current expression. But she knew she hadn’t been wrong about the intensity; there had been more than just campaign zeal there.

  “I can get his talking points from that flashy Web site of his.”

  “Half can’t,” he said, his slight gesture managing to include the throng.

  She was surprised he realized that. Most people from big cities were so used to their conveniences, with high-speed wireless even at their local coffee vendor, that the idea of a little place like Cedar, which barely had high-speed dial-up, never occurred to them.

  “You’d think he’d realize that,” she said.

  “Image.”

  “Hard to create one if people can’t access the site.”

  “Future.”

  She blinked. “You think he’s…building for the future, that Cedar is just a stepping stone.” It wasn’t really a question, since this had occurred to her early on, when she saw the way Alden was running his campaign, but she hadn’t expected this outsider to see it.

  Something flickered in his eyes then, something oddly like approval. And again she felt that tiny burst of warmth, and wondered how on earth she’d given this man the power to make her happier with just a look. She reminded herself of that startling change of masks and quashed that pleased sensation sternly.

  “I’m going back to work,” she said, and started to walk. Without a word St. John turned and accompanied her. That hadn’t really been in her plan, but she didn’t quite know how to stop him. She felt the slightest of pressures at the small of her back as they worked through the crowd, and tried to ignore the sensation that rippled through her.

  He didn’t speak—hardly a surprise, given his excessive terseness in general—and even though she’d realized he probably got people absolutely babbling with that trick, she couldn’t help but say something. Anything.

  “Where are you staying? The Cedar Inn is closed for renovations, and it’s the only place in town.”

  “River Mill.”

  “The Timberland?”

  He nodded.

  “That’s a drive.”

  He shrugged. Wordlessly, of course.

  A cheer went up from behind them as the crowd reacted to Alden’s latest promise.

  “This is the second time he’s filled the square to overflowing,” she muttered as they had to cross the street to get a clear path to walk.

  He still said nothing, but flicked her a sideways glance she interpreted as inquiry.

  “He got married there, three years ago. Invited the whole town. And I swear they all showed up.”

  “You?”

  “No. I was in Seattle. Not that I would have gone anyway.”

  She heard how sour she sounded, and reminded herself to watch that. Openly showing her dislike of her opponent didn’t seem like a good idea. Fortunately, he didn’t comment.

  “College?” he said instead.

  “University of Washington,” she said as they reached the corner across from the store. “But I was done by then. Had a great job with a veterinary supply firm up there.”

  “But left.”

  “Dad needed me,” she said simply.

  She headed down the side of the store. She wanted to go in the back, leaving the customer entrance closed. Not that anybody was likely to desert the great orator for a sack of feed, she thought. “Sorry?”

  She dug in her pocket for her keys as she tried to work out exactly what he was asking. Finally she just answered both possibilities.

  “That I had to leave? Yes. That I did? No.”

  She pulled open the door and they stepped inside. The back storeroom was cool and dark and rich with the smell of sweet feed.

  “Expensive school.” The words came as they walked through to the office. She opened that door, reached in and flipped on the light before turning to face him.

  “Yes. If not for Dad and the money he started putting away before I was even born, I wouldn’t have been able to go to college in the first place. Or I’d still be paying off massive student loans.”

  “Planning.”

  “Yes. And love.”

  He said nothing, but she saw something flicker in his eyes. Something that made her feel an odd sensation down deep, like that niggling feeling she got sometimes early in the morning when she was still half-asleep, and had to ask, “What was it that was bothering me yesterday?”

  Another cheer went up from the cr
owd down in the square. She didn’t think her expression changed, but St. John said softly, “You can.”

  Startled by his perceptiveness, she turned away and walked over to her father’s desk. “But do I want to?”

  She’d said it in a whisper, almost under her breath, but he seemed to hear it anyway. “Only one.”

  She turned then. “If I am the only one who can beat him, then it’s just because of my name.”

  “Whatever works.”

  “No one should be elected just for that,” she insisted, leaning against the front of the desk. “No more than Alden should be elected just because he’s rich enough to afford a flashy campaign. It’s not like he earned the money himself.”

  St. John didn’t speak—no surprise—but looked at her steadily, one brow arching upward. He managed to say a lot in very few words, she thought. And again, she felt compelled to elaborate, even if he hadn’t asked.

  “His grandfather made their money. Logging, paper, transportation. My dad said he was a real entrepreneur. His son apparently had the same knack for business, but he and his wife were killed in a car accident. Dad said it really took the heart out of the old man.”

  St. John seemed to be listening intently, so she kept going, although she didn’t quite understand his interest. Perhaps it was just a matter of knowing all you could about your opponent.

  “My mother thinks his grandfather spoiled him, handed him everything he wanted, never made him work for a thing, because he’d lost his parents. Entitlement mentality explains a lot, I guess.”

  “Not all.”

  He said it about as quietly as she’d asked if she really wanted to keep going on this seemingly quixotic quest. But she knew she’d heard it. What she didn’t know was what he’d meant by it. Did he somehow know about Alden’s predilections?

  “I knew his son,” she said suddenly.

  It was a moment before he said, with no inflection at all, “The one who died.”

  My God, a complete sentence. The shock may be too much.

  “Yes,” she said, recovering. “The one who—officially—died in a huge storm and flood here, twenty years ago.”

  He went very still. “Officially?”

  She almost wished she hadn’t started this. She had no business having this discussion with a near stranger. And yet she kept doing uncharacteristic things around him, as she had since he’d shown up here that day…Was it really only three days ago?

  “I don’t believe it.”

  There. It was out. And she didn’t think she was imagining a sudden tension in him.

  “Why?”

  “Like I said, I knew Adam. I knew the kind of relationship he had with his father. How…bad it was.”

  She heard the faintest echo of that tension in his voice when, after a moment that seemed as if he were almost struggling to pick his words—or word—he spoke again. “Meaning?”

  “I don’t think Adam was just swept away in the floodwaters by accident. I think he let it happen. Or even made it happen.”

  He seemed to breathe again. “His mother.”

  “Yes, like his mother. She ended her own misery, maybe he did, too.”

  “Surprised Alden admits that.”

  He said it thoughtfully, and the near-complete sentence made her wonder if his thoughts were as clipped and staccato as his speech. Or did he think in full sentences, and just pare them to the minimum before speaking? And most curious of all, why? What had made him develop this laconic shorthand?

  “You mean because it might make people wonder if he’d driven her to it?” “Should.”

  “Yes, it should. But he has the town convinced she had long been mentally ill, and he’d done his noble best to help her, but she was beyond help.”

  An odd sound broke from him, something that sounded almost like a strangled snort of disgust. Nobility in a politician was an anachronism these days, she thought. Her father and grandfather had been exceptions. But then, they’d never had aspirations beyond Cedar.

  She glanced at the award the town had presented her grandfather at his retirement from office, a bronze sculpture of a man at a lectern with a gavel in one hand. Her father had kept it here where he would see it every day, a reminder to follow as best he could in the footsteps left by very large, nearly unfillable shoes.

  She turned her attention back to St. John. He wasn’t looking at her. He was staring at a photograph on the wall. Not the one he’d wanted to use in the flyer, but one of her at sixteen with her beloved Max, who had carried her to the state championships. Kula, in a rare moment of stillness, was posed at the horse’s front feet. “Nice horse.”

  That startled her; he seemed all city boy to her, not the type who would know or care about matters equine.

  “He’s the best,” she said, distracted.

  “Is?” He sounded surprised.

  “He’s twenty now. Leading a well-earned life of leisure. Doc Halperin says it wouldn’t surprise him if he made twenty-five.”

  She glanced at the photo herself, her mouth tightening slightly. She resisted the urge to reach out and touch the image of the dog with the goofy grin.

  “If only dogs lived as long,” she said softly.

  “Still sad?”

  “Of course I am. I’ll always miss Kula. He was a great, great dog. But we have his grandson now. Maui.”

  St. John glanced around as if to look for the dog.

  “He’s been with Mom all week,” she explained. “He always knows which one of us is doing worse, and attaches himself.”

  She half expected him to scoff. He seemed like such a hard case sometimes, disdaining the softer emotions.

  But he didn’t. “Inherited,” he said.

  She blinked. That had been one of Kula’s greatest gifts, that innate sensitivity about who was most in need of his gentle, loving presence. He would try to lure the sufferer into play, with a canine sort of wisdom she’d thought brilliant, but failing that he’d settle in for some long-term comforting. And he had rarely failed at that.

  She opened her mouth to ask how on earth he’d known, when he cut her off and began talking about a new idea. She had to admit it was a good one; donating her father’s vast collection of books to the town library in his name seemed a good tribute, one he would have appreciated. And the stickers he’d suggested be put in each book would keep her father’s name and memory alive for every person who checked the books out.

  “No fight?” he asked as she slowly nodded.

  “This is different than the picture. It’s something I’d like to do anyway, something he would want done. And it’s not a piece of campaign literature, playing on his passing.”

  “Save some,” he suggested.

  “Yes. There are a few I’ll want to keep. Personal ones. The book about the revolutionary war that his great-times-I-don’t-know-what grandfather is mentioned in. And the copies of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn he read to me when I was little. I was reading Huck to him the day he died.” She sighed. “It still has the bookmark he always used, with the little clay dog hanging on it, that I made him in third grade.”

  St. John gave her an odd look then, one she couldn’t decipher. And suddenly he had something else to do, leaving in more than a little bit of hurry.

  And she found herself staring at that photographic image of a long-ago loyal companion, and wondering how a man knew so much about a dog he’d never known.

  Chapter 7

  St. John walked along the path that paralleled the river, trying to convince himself he wasn’t as shaken as he felt. He stared down at the water, willing himself with all the power and self-discipline he’d acquired since the last night he’d walked here, to get unwanted, uncharacteristic and unproductive emotions under control.

  He left the main path, making his way down to the water’s edge. The river was normal now. Wider here after passing through the big bend that formed the raised point of land Cedar sat on, it meandered slowly, the greenish-brown color of the water a reflectio
n of the overhanging trees. Someone had chosen wisely when building the town here, above the flood stage of the river, so that little damage was done unless there was a hundred-years storm.

  Like there had been twenty years ago.

  He reached the spot. Stopped. Sat down on the outcropping where he had sat that night, shivering in the sheeting rain, watching the river swirl around the base of this huge, jutting rock that was normally a good ten feet above the water.

  He drew in a deep breath, as if to prove to himself he could. He’d come close to making Jessa’s suspicions a reality that night, although it had never been his intent. He’d thought no further than if he left some things here, some clues, they’d think he’d been caught by the rain-swollen river and drowned.

  Once the rain had stopped, he’d made his move. He’d shoved his hoard of cash, saved over the last couple of years, supplemented with a stack of bills purloined from his father’s cash box, along with the fancy money clip that held them, deep into his front jeans pocket. The old man would know as soon as he opened the thing, but by then, he’d be far, far away.

  Then he had taken the few things he wanted out of his school backpack, and dropped it so the rest spilled out, thinking they would assume the missing things had simply been washed away. Not that anybody would notice anything missing, since the things he was taking were so few and so mundane that nobody would even realize they were gone. But they’d been precious to him. The single photograph he had of his grandparents, kept in part because everyone had always said he’d looked just like the grandfather he’d never known, was in his back pocket, wrapped in plastic left over from a sandwich from his school lunch.

  Then came the stone he’d found on his twelfth birthday, the one that was shaped amazingly like a horse head. He’d thought it wondrous, and taken it home. But he’d forgotten it for a very long time in the aftermath of what his father had taught him that very day was his function in the family, now that he was old enough to be “interesting.” He’d kept it as a reminder not to trust anything good because it would somehow turn on you.