The Marriage Conspiracy Page 13

  He learned, as time went by, that Stacey not only wanted his attention. She needed it. Craved it. The way a drunk needs his bottle, the way a junkie requires a regular fix.

  And damn it, he was not a bottle of scotch. He was not a hit of smack. He just couldn’t do it, feed that hunger of hers indefinitely.

  He knew now he should have tried to get her some help. But at the time, it was hard to see anything very clearly. At the time, his reaction had been to pull away.

  And the more he pulled away, the more she needed. The more she cried and ranted and raved, accusing him of not loving her, not wanting her, not being there for her.

  She staged some crazy stunts in her ongoing quest to get his undivided attention.

  She’d tried getting him good and jealous.

  If they went out to dinner, she’d flirt with the guy at the next table, so charmingly—and so blatantly—that the guy would get up and follow her when she went to the women’s room. They would end up in the parking lot, Dekker and his wife’s new admirer, duking it out—or at least, that’s how it went the first four or five times she pulled that one.

  But eventually Dekker got wise. As soon as she had picked out a sucker at another table, he would get up and leave her there.

  So she changed tactics. She became totally devoted to him. She drowned him in her damned devotion, hanging on his every word, cooking lavish meals. She developed a kind of radar about those big meals of hers. Whenever he was working an important, time-consuming case, she would cook a lot of them. He would work late and miss them. And she would be crushed.

  The total devotion lasted for a long time. And then, after one of their big fights when he didn’t show up to eat another of her gourmet feasts, she disappeared. He came home the next night and she was gone. She left a note on fine linen stationery scented with her perfume. It said she “couldn’t take it anymore.” She “wasn’t sure if she could even go on.”

  That note scared the hell out of him. She’d done some crazy things, but she’d never hinted at suicide before.

  He was frantic, certain she meant to do something to hurt herself and desperate to make sure that she was all right. It was two in the morning.

  He’d gone straight to Jo, pounded on the door of her mama’s house, where she was still living then, not giving a damn if he woke up Camilla and the other girls.

  But the others didn’t wake. Or if they did, they stayed in their beds. Jo was the one who came to the door in her pajamas and robe, rubbing the sleep from her eyes.

  He’d demanded to know where his wife was.

  Jo pulled him inside, led him to the kitchen, made coffee and set a steaming mug of it in front of him.

  Then she said she didn’t know where Stacey had gone.

  “She was here, then? You talked to her?”

  “Drink your coffee, Dekker. Settle down.”

  “Did you ask her, try to find out where the hell she planned to go next?”

  Jo dropped into the chair across from him. She stared at him for a moment that seemed to stretch out for at least a year. At last she nodded. “Yes. Yes, I did ask her.”

  He fisted his hands to keep from lurching across the table, grabbing her out of that chair and shaking her until everything she knew came spilling out. “And?”

  “Oh, Dekker, what she said to me was between us. I just don’t know if I should be talkin’ to you about it. I don’t know if it’s the right thing to—”

  “Tell me, damn you. I have to know.”

  Jo folded her hands on the table and looked down at them. Now she was shaking her head. “Stacey said…she said she couldn’t trust me. She said that I would only end up telling you.” Jo looked up then, a sad little smile curving her mouth. “It’s strange, you know? But you and me, we go back such a long ways. You are family to me, Dekker. And Stacey, well, she is a dear, dear friend. I love her and I hurt for her, for everything she’s goin’ through. But it is not the same. And she knew that. Better than I did, I guess, until she said it to me….” Her voice trailed off. She was looking at her hands again.

  Impatience tightened inside him like a fist. “Said what to you?”

  Her head snapped up. Shadows haunted her eyes and her mouth trembled. “Oh, I don’t—” She cut off the protests herself that time. And she told him, “Stacey said that my basic loyalty was to you. That when you came here lookin’ for her, you would get me to tell you whatever I knew, no matter if I swore to her that I would never betray her trust.”

  “It’s not betraying her trust if you talk to me. You know it’s not. She’s not thinking clearly. And I have to find her. You have to tell me whatever you know.”

  “I don’t really know anything, honestly. She was here. She was upset. She would not say where she planned to go next.”

  “Why the hell didn’t you call me the minute she walked out your front door?”

  “She asked me not to.”

  “And you did what she asked?” He sneered those words, glaring at her. “Damn it, what are you, a stone idiot?”

  She didn’t rise to the bait. Even worried sick over his missing wife, he noticed that. She only met his gaze across her mama’s breakfast table, her own eyes steady, her expression soft and sad with understanding.

  Yeah. What really stuck with him, looking back now on that grim night, was how hard Jo had tried to make it easy on him. She hadn’t fought back when he had insulted her. She hadn’t ranted at him, though she could have made a case in her own mind that he deserved to hear a little ranting. She hadn’t laid it on him hard, saying it was for his own good. She hadn’t copped a single huffy, holier-than-thou attitude.

  Because by that night, Jo had grown up. The touchy, insecure teenager was gone. Somehow, while he hadn’t been looking, while he’d been busy reeling through his life, trying to get ahead on the OCPD and be Stacey’s husband at the same time, Jo had become a woman—and the kind of woman who refused to judge others, who could take a few verbal blows from a friend in need without feeling she had to retaliate.

  She’d put it to him so gently, chosen her words with great care. Stacey had cried on her shoulder, she’d said. Stacey had talked about how things weren’t working out.

  But Jo’s sweet kindness to him that night hadn’t kept him from knowing what had really gone on. He knew his wife too well, knew that Stacey would have wailed and moaned. She would have called him a hard-hearted SOB who refused to love a woman the way she needed to be loved.

  “She’ll be all right, Dekker,” Jo had promised him. “She’ll come back. I know she will….”

  And she had come back. Six days later. Looking like hell, like she’d been at some weeklong party somewhere doing things he was probably better off never knowing about.

  But alive. In one piece.

  There had been a big scene, another in the infinite chain of big scenes. At the end she had begged him to take her back. She’d sworn she would never pull anything like that again.

  And she hadn’t.

  Next, she started calling him at the station, leaving messages with the dispatcher.

  “Please. You have to help me. Tell him he has to come home immediately. It’s an emergency. It’s life and death….”

  The dispatcher would radio him and he would go charging back to the house—to find her sitting on the couch in a sexy nightgown, ready to show him her snowflake tattoo.

  By then he had zero interest in her tattoo. Or in any part of her pretty, scented, smooth little body. He didn’t want to make love with her. He didn’t know if he would ever want to make love with her again—or with any woman, for that matter. The equipment, it seemed, had stopped working.

  And he really didn’t give a damn. A sort of numbness had set in. Which was okay with him. Numbness was a big improvement over the grueling agony of loving Stacey. It was a relief, more than anything. He was through, done, finished. No longer able to rise to the occasion.

  His body was telling him something. It was time to surrender the field,
to give up on the impossible task of trying to love a woman who could never get enough.

  He found himself an apartment and moved out.

  There were more big, teary scenes. For Stacey, anyway. He opted out of them. He would hang up the minute he heard her voice on the phone, hear her moaning and sobbing and begging him to give her just one more chance. He would refuse to open the door when she came pounding on it, calling his name, demanding that he open up and talk to her.

  She had needed help. She had needed help every bit as much as a drowning woman needs someone to throw her a lifeline. But he’d been no help at all to her. He’d been too desperate himself—to keep from going down with her.

  Jo had done better with Stacey—been more of a friend than he had ever been a husband. She’d thrown the damn lifelines. She’d taken Stacey to a counselor and arranged for her to join some kind of group therapy sessions. But Stacey had screwed it up. She would miss her appointments with the counselor. She wouldn’t show up at group. The counselor had finally dropped her. The group had voted her out.

  And she’d kept calling him, begging him, pleading with him to come back to her.

  Her final call to him wasn’t that much different from some of the calls that went before it. By then, it wasn’t anything new when she said that she couldn’t take it anymore. That if he didn’t talk to her, she was going to end it.

  He wasn’t there to take that call. She left her last message for him on his answering machine. In it, she accused him of all the same old things—of deserting her, of not loving her, of not being there when she needed him most. She cried that she had had enough, more than she could take, of life and everything that went into it. She said she would wait ten minutes and if he didn’t get back to her, she was swallowing a bottle of pills and she was going to bed. For good.

  By the time he got that message, seven hours later, she was deep in the coma from which she would never wake.

  The door across the room opened.

  Jo came padding through it, barefoot, wearing a white cotton robe that reached her knees. Her face was scrubbed clean of makeup, and her hair curled, soft and full, around her heart-shaped face.

  “Your turn,” she said, her tone too bright—forced. Not right.

  “Jo.”

  The tight little smile she was giving him vanished. She hovered there, several yards away from him, near the end of the huge bed. Those big brown eyes were bigger than ever right then, dark and soft and full of all the things that, for some reason, she wouldn’t tell him.

  It came to him, hit him all over again, as if for the first time, in a flash of painful insight that constricted his throat and made his chest feel too small for the heart trapped inside it.

  She was his lifeline. As much as she’d ever tried to be Stacey’s. She had saved him from going down after Stacey died. She had come to him with her casseroles and her perky talk, with her insistence that he get out of the apartment, go to a movie, to a car show, to art festivals on the lawns at OCC, to flea markets at the state fair-grounds. She must have hauled out the damn Sunday Oklahoman every week for three or four months, there, and scanned all the ads and articles, picking out places she could drag him to. And then, after she picked them out, she worked on him, gently and without mercy, never giving up until he would finally agree to go there with her.

  That was a friend.

  They didn’t come any better.

  And he couldn’t bear…this distance. This strangeness, between them.

  He swung his feet off the coffee table and stood. He still didn’t know how to make her talk to him, how to get rid of whatever it was that had come between them.

  But the distance. He could do something about that. He could close it.

  He went to her. She watched him coming, eyes that couldn’t get any wider, somehow doing just that.

  When he stood about two feet from her, where he could see the gold flecks in those wide, wide eyes, smell soap and a faint, sweet perfume—and peppermint toothpaste, when she let out a long, jittery breath—he made himself ask her. Again.

  “What the hell is it? What’s bothering you?”

  She lifted a hand and put it against her throat. He saw the war going on inside her. She was thinking up lies, deciding whether or not to try running them past him.

  He shook his head at her, slowly, tenderly. “Don’t do it. Don’t lie to me…”

  She took that hand from her throat, waved it, as if she didn’t know what to do with it.

  He caught it. She stiffened. He thought, for a split second, that she would do what she had done to him down in the pool: jerk away, whisper hotly “Don’t!”

  But no. She caught herself. Her lashes swooped down. She dragged in another long, shaky breath and let it out with great care. Deliberately she twined her fingers with his.

  Better, he thought. Now we’re getting somewhere….

  Her lashes fluttered up. She looked at him anxiously. “Let’s…um. Could we sit down, do you think?”

  He almost smiled. “Yeah. I think we could.” The bed had no footboard, just the big padded satin affair at the head. “How about right here?” He sat on the end of it and pulled her down beside him. She came somewhat reluctantly, as if she’d thought better of the idea, but didn’t know how to get out of it now.

  It didn’t matter if she hesitated, he told himself. She did sit. Beside him. She had laced her fingers with his. And now she would tell him what the hell was happening with her.

  She spoke. “Um. Dekker…”

  He gave her hand a reassuring squeeze. “Those are very nice feet you have. But do you think you could make yourself look at me?”

  She did it, with obvious effort. “I…” She let out a small, anguished-sounding moan. “Oh, I just can’t. I really can’t, Dekker. Please try to understand….”

  “Can’t what?”

  “Can’t…talk about this, not right now. Please. Just don’t make me. If you would only…”

  “What? If I would only what?”

  “Just…believe me when I tell you, it is not your fault. It is nothin’ you have done. It is my problem. And I am going to handle it the best way I know how.”

  “Which is?”

  She pulled her hand from his, waved it in the air some more. “No. I mean it. You have got to give me a little time here, okay?”

  “Time for…?”

  “To deal with it. To…work it out in my mind.”

  He almost demanded, Work what out? But he shut his mouth over those words. She was asking for time.

  As her friend—hell, as her husband—it was his duty to see that she got what she needed. He owed it to her, for the sake of all that they were to each other, to wait until she felt that she could tell him this deep, dark secret of hers.

  After a minute of strained silence, he muttered, “All right,” then added more forcefully, “When?”

  “When what?”

  “When can you talk to me?”

  She looked absolutely miserable. He wanted to grab her and…what? Pull her close. Protect her forever. Promise her that everything would be okay.

  And then force her, somehow, to tell him. All of it. Whatever it was that she thought was so awful she couldn’t even share it with him.

  Nothing could be that awful. She ought to know that. There was nothing she could tell him that he couldn’t take.

  And besides, if she did tell him, well, maybe he could fix the problem, could make it okay….

  But no.

  He was not going to grab her. He was going to remember, to keep foremost in his mind all that she had done for him. Always, if he possibly could, he would honor her wishes.

  He waited.

  Finally she told him in a small, unhappy voice. “Soon. I promise. I will work this out and then we will talk about it.”

  “Soon,” he echoed, wondering with a stab of impatience what exactly she meant by that.

  “Yes.” She was looking at her feet again, her voice small, sad and lost. “S
oon…”

  Chapter 12

  Dekker took his turn in the bathroom and then they went to bed—Joleen in the bed, Dekker on one of the couches across the room. Joleen had a hard time getting to sleep. She wondered if Dekker was awake, too. Not a sound came from his side of the room. Could be he was just a very silent sleeper.

  Or maybe he was lying over there on the cramped sofa in the dark, wondering what her problem was and when she would finally break down and tell him.

  Oh, she didn’t think she ever could.

  How would she do it? How would she…get her mouth around the words?

  Well, Dekker, the problem is, I have got the hots for you….

  Not.

  Or I have rethought this whole separate beds thing, and I have changed my mind about it. I would rather you just come on over here and climb into bed with me so that I can jump your bones….

  I mean, that is, if you would like your bones jumped by me. Would you? Could you…?

  Right.

  No. Better to wait. At least for a while.

  Maybe a way to tell him would come to her. Or maybe these crazy new feelings she had for him would just…go away. Maybe she’d get used to them. Learn to live with them, to cope with them….

  Oh, who did she think she was kidding?

  Even if she woke up tomorrow and discovered that these irksome new longings had vanished with the light of day, Dekker was still going to want to know what it had all been about.

  But that would be all right, wouldn’t it?

  If only she didn’t feel this way, if these little shivers and flashes of heat would just stop quivering through her when he touched her, when he looked at her, when she looked at him, then they could laugh about it.

  They could agree that it had only been a kind of temporary insanity. They could talk it over and come to some nice, neat, safe conclusion. They would decide that it was probably brought on by all the stress in the past few weeks. Good old Jo had just snapped for a little while there, gone delusional, imagined that she wanted more from Dekker than he would ever be willing to give.