One Summer Read online

  Although being Johnny Harris’s friend was turning out to be altogether more difficult than she had anticipated.

  “After all, it’s been ten years since I’ve had the pleasure of a woman’s—oh, sorry, in your case I guess I should say a lady’s—company. You might be worried that I’m kinda horny.”

  “What?” This time it was more a gasp than a question as she stared at him in disbelief.

  “Damnation, woman, watch the road!” The unexpected roar made Rachel jump to obey, even as his hand shot out to grab and jerk the steering wheel. A heavily laden coal truck thundered past, causing the small car to shiver.

  “You nearly got us killed! Jesus H. Christ!”

  Heat and tension combined to make Rachel nauseous. She pushed the buttons that rolled up the windows. The flow from the vents was now blessedly cool. For a moment she enjoyed the feel of the chilled air on her overheated face.

  “For God’s sake, who the hell taught you how to drive? You’re a menace!”

  When she didn’t reply, he slumped back into his seat. His hands, which were clenched into fists in his lap, were the only outward sign of tension he betrayed. That, and the way his eyes were now fastened on the road.

  At least she had found a solution to the problem of warding off his lewd glances. But ignoring the issue was probably a mistake. The only way she or anyone else had ever been able to deal with the youthful Johnny Harris was to stand up to him. If he thought he could walk all over someone, he did.

  “You can’t talk to me that way,” she said into the tense silence. “I won’t allow it.”

  Both her hands grasped the steering wheel as she spoke, and she kept her eyes fixed firmly on the road. Stay cool, calm, and collected, she told herself. That was the way to handle him. Unfortunately, the bus depot was on the other side of town from their destination, which was still some ten minutes away. Traffic on this Thursday afternoon was surprisingly heavy. Even under the best of conditions she had a regrettable tendency to let her mind wander from the road. She was always building castles in the air, to use her mother’s exasperated description, instead of keeping her feet planted firmly on the ground and her mind affixed to her business. As a result, she had suffered untold numbers of fender benders.

  These were not the best of conditions.

  “What way? Oh, you mean the part about my being horny? I was just trying to reassure you. You don’t have to worry about being attacked or anything. At least, not by me.”

  This innocent-sounding statement was accompanied by another sliding glance that made no effort to disguise its purpose: a blatant appraisal of her body. It was almost as if he were deliberately trying to make her uneasy in his presence, though if he was, Rachel couldn’t imagine why. At this point, she was just about the only ally he had left in town, if not in the world.

  “Are you determined to make things difficult for yourself, Johnny?” she asked quietly.

  His eyes narrowed. “Don’t come all teacherish with me, Miss Grant. I’m not in high school anymore.”

  “Your manners were better then.”

  “So were my prospects. They’ve both gone to hell since, and you know what? I don’t give a big goddamn.”

  That shut her up, as it was no doubt meant to.

  In silence they passed the Wal-Mart, the Burger King, the Kroger, and the cluster of antique shops that had sprung up on the corner of Vine and Main. With their destination now near at hand, Rachel began to relax a little. Just a few more minutes, and she would be rid of him. She concentrated on pulling without mishap into the parking lot at the rear of Grant Hardware, which her grandfather had founded just after the turn of the century and which she now oversaw.

  “There’s an apartment over the store. It’s yours. Just go around to the side and up the stairs.” Rachel stopped the car and put the transmission into park as she spoke. Reaching into the door pocket beside her, she handed him a single key dangling from a round metal ring.

  “Here’s the key. The rent will be deducted from your paycheck each week. As I told you in my letter, the hours are from eight in the morning till six at night, with an hour for lunch, Monday through Saturday. I expect you to be on the job at eight in the morning.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “Good.”

  Still he sat, the key dangling from his fingers, looking at her with an expression she couldn’t decipher.

  “Why’d you offer me a job, anyway? Aren’t you just a little bit afraid of a man who’d rape and kill a teenage girl?”

  “We both know that you were innocent of raping Marybeth Edwards,” Rachel replied crisply, though such plain speaking caused her hands to close tightly around the steering wheel. “I, for one, am perfectly willing to believe that the two of you had consensual sex, just as you claimed. And that she was alive when you left her. Now, would you please get out of my car? I have things to do.”

  To Rachel’s secret relief, he opened the door and slid out without another word. How she would have ejected him had he proved difficult, she couldn’t imagine. Putting her foot on the brake, she carefully moved the gearshift down to drive. When she looked up again he was beside her, his arm resting on the roof of the car as he pecked with one finger on her window.

  Lips compressing, Rachel pushed the button that rolled the window down. The heat assaulted her anew.

  “There’s something I gotta tell you,” he said in a confidential tone as he leaned toward her. His face was close to hers, too close. He was making her uncomfortable again, as he no doubt intended.

  That notion stiffened her spine.

  “What?” she all but snapped.

  “I had a major case of the hots for you when I was in high school. I still do.”

  Rachel’s mouth dropped open in shock. He grinned at her cockily and straightened.

  It was only as she watched him saunter away that she realized her mouth was agape. She closed it with a snap.

  2

  From the driver’s seat of a nondescript tan car that had pulled to the curb a little way up the road from the hardware store, an unnoticed observer watched them with an unwavering gaze. The watcher’s eyes were faintly glassy as they drank in every detail of the man walking with slow arrogance across the parking lot and around the corner out of sight. The blue Maxima reversed with a squeal of tires and pulled out into the street far too fast, then drove off heading away from where the parked car waited. But the watcher hardly noticed.

  He was back. Johnny Harris was back. The watcher had been waiting—oh, it seemed like forever—for this moment. The rumors had been true for once, though the watcher had scarcely dared believe them until he stepped off that bus and into view.

  Johnny Harris. He was home at last, and now it was time to finish what had been started eleven years ago.

  The watcher smiled with anticipation.

  3

  “Did you hear? Idell says her boy saw Rachel Grant meeting somebody at the bus depot this afternoon, and you’ll never for the life of you guess who!”

  “Who?”

  “Johnny Harris.”

  “Johnny Harris! Why, he’s in prison! Idell must’ve got it wrong.”

  “No, she swears that’s what Jeff told her. He must’ve got out on parole or something.”

  “Do they do that, for murder?”

  “I guess. Anyhow, Idell says Jeff saw him, big as life, with Rachel Grant. Can you believe it?”

  “No!”

  “It’s true, Mrs. Ashton.” Rachel interrupted the conversation. “Johnny Harris is out on parole, and he’s going to be working at Grant Hardware.” Still shaken from her encounter with the aforesaid Johnny Harris, Rachel had a hard time summoning up a serene smile to show to her neighbors, though in the end she managed it. This was, at one and the same time, both the best and worst thing about Tylerville: there was no escaping being the recipient of other folks’ views about what was going on in your life. The two chatting women were in the checkout lane at the Kroger’s, so busy
with their gossip that they hadn’t noticed her in the next lane over. Mrs. Ashton was sixtyish, a friend of Rachel’s mother, and the recipient of the news. Pam Collier was younger, perhaps forty-five, with a terror of a sixteen-year-old son who would, in all likelihood, be in Rachel’s class the coming fall. Rachel would have thought that with such a hellion of her own, Pam might be slightly sympathetic to Johnny’s plight, but apparently she was not.

  “Oh, Rachel, what about the Edwardses? They’ll just die when they hear.” Mrs. Ashton’s distress for the slain girl’s family was plain in her eyes.

  “I’m sorry for them, you know I am,” Rachel said, “but I never did think Johnny Harris killed Marybeth Edwards, and I still don’t. I taught him in high school, remember, and he wasn’t a bad boy. At least, not that bad.” Conscience forced her to amend that last sentence. Johnny Harris had been bad, in a lip-curling, back-talking, black-leather-jacket kind of way guaranteed to set up the backs of the decent folks of Tylerville. He got drunk, he got in fights, he smashed lights and windows, he cursed people out, and he rode a motorcycle. The kids he had associated with were mostly trash like himself, and if talk were believed, he and his crowd had done some wild partying the likes of which had not been seen in Tylerville before or since. He’d been in almost constant trouble in school and out, and his smart mouth had not helped his reputation any. But his saving grace, in Rachel’s eyes, was that he had liked to read. In fact, that was what had first caused her to think he might be different from what he seemed.

  She’d been hall monitor one day in the fall of her first semester of teaching, when she was just about to turn twenty-two, and she’d seen sixteen-year-old Johnny Harris swagger out the side door of the school as if he had every right in the world to do so. She followed him, suspecting he meant to sneak a cigarette or worse, and discovered him finally in the parking lot, stretched out in the back seat of some other student’s car. Alone, his high-top sneakers with the hole in the left sole sticking out the window, his long legs crossed at the ankles, one arm bent behind his head for a pillow. An open book had been propped on his sweatshirted chest.

  Her astonishment had nearly matched his belligerence upon being discovered.

  “All those Harrises are bad—every last one! Why, you remember when Buck Harris claimed to have got religion and started calling himself a minister, then set up his own church and collected no telling how much in donations for it, saying as how the money was going to go to feed starving children in Appalachia? And he went and spent that money himself, gamblin’ and drinkin’ and livin’ high? He went to jail for near a year for that, and that isn’t the worst thing he’s done. Not by a long shot, probably, if the truth were known.” Mrs. Ashton was tight-lipped at the memory.

  Rachel wondered if perhaps she were one of those who had contributed to Buck Harris’s “church.” It was well known around town that only the more gullible residents had fallen for that one. After all, who in his or her right mind would trust Buck Harris? She said mildly, “You can’t blame Johnny for something his brother did.”

  “Hmmph!” said Mrs. Ashton, clearly unconvinced.

  Rachel saw with relief that Betty Nichols, the checkout clerk, was busy stuffing her groceries into two brown paper bags even as the girl listened to the gossip wide-eyed. Blood pounding in Rachel’s temples signaled the impending onset of a headache. She’d been prone to them for years now, ever since she had figured out that she was never going to get away from Tylerville. Not ever. Bonds of love and duty had closed around her, and now held her fast as securely as iron chains. She had accepted that, was resigned to it, and even felt a certain grim humor at her fate. She, who had always dreamed of flying high and far into a very different sort of life, had had her wings summarily clipped. That fateful summer eleven years ago could count her, too, as one of its victims.

  Her life was now solidly set on the track it would doubtless travel for the next fifty years: that of a small-town schoolteacher. It was her calling to undertake the often-Herculean task of prying open the minds of Tylerville’s youth, to acquaint them with the power and beauty of words. At first the prospect had excited her. But over the years she had come to realize that delving for the requisite spark of imagination and creativity in the brains of those she taught was as unrewarding a task as searching through an ocean bed full of oysters for the occasional pearl. Only the infrequent successes made it a job worth doing.

  Johnny Harris had been one such success. Perhaps, even, her least likely one.

  At the thought of him, her headache came on in earnest. Wincing, she fumbled in her purse for her checkbook, the faster to make her escape from the grocery store. What she did not need, at the moment, was the stress of having to defend Johnny Harris (who, however innocent of murder he might be, was not the boy she remembered) to anyone before she was comfortable with what he had become herself. Just at that moment, what she most craved was ten minutes alone. Mrs. Ashton’s groceries were already being loaded into a cart, and Pam Collier’s last few items were being passed over the computerized price reader. The catechism would not last much longer, thank heaven. In just minutes she should be able to escape.

  “Sue Ann Harris was nothing but a little slut, if you’ll excuse my French. Now she’s living up in Detroit, and I hear she’s one of those welfare mothers with three kids by three different men. And she never married any of ’em, either.”

  “You don’t say!” Mrs. Ashton shook her head.

  Pam nodded. “That’s what I hear. And everybody knows that Grady Harris was the biggest drug dealer in the state when he drowned three years ago. And he wouldn’t have drowned if he hadn’t been high on some kind of dope.”

  Rachel took a deep, calming breath. Her head throbbed, but she ignored the pain. “What I heard was that he and some friends had been partying on a boat, and he fell overboard and hit his head. If he’d been doing anything but drinking bourbon, then it’s more than anybody ever proved. And if drinking bourbon’s a crime, there sure are a lot of criminals around these parts.” Despite her own very recently renewed misgivings about at least one of the Harris siblings, Rachel felt obliged to point out the facts, much good might it do. Like everyone else in town, she was aware of the gossip. What neither she nor anyone else knew was how much of it was actually true. Not that that stopped anyone from repeating it, of course. Gossip was the lifeblood of Tylerville. Silence it, and she suspected that a good portion of the population might actually expire.

  Though if she faced the issue squarely, she would have to admit that there was more than a grain of truth in what Pam and Mrs. Ashton said. As a group, the Harrises were not Tylerville’s most desirable citizens. Rachel wasn’t disputing that. All she wanted to do was offer a second chance to a boy—no, a man now—whom she felt deserved one. She was not trying to promote Johnny Harris to sainthood. She merely felt that, as far as the murder of Marybeth Edwards was concerned, he had gotten a bum rap.

  “Willie Harris has kids all over the place, too. Even some of ’em in Perrytown are his, is what I hear.” Pam’s voice dropped as she related this last tidbit. To understand its significance, one would have to know that Perrytown was the black enclave just on the outskirts of town. While integration was the law and nearly everyone in Tylerville was a vocal opponent of racism of any stripe, the reality was that most of the blacks lived together in their own small community.

  “Oh, I don’t believe that!” Even Mrs. Ashton sounded shocked at this slander on Johnny’s father.

  “That’s what I hear.”

  “That’ll be thirty-seven sixty-two, Miss Grant.”

  “What?”

  Betty Nichols patiently repeated the total. Recalled with relief to the business at hand, Rachel hastily wrote a check and passed it over. Everyone in Tylerville knew everyone else. Betty was a former student of hers, so there was no need for a driver’s license or anything like that. The whole town knew that the Grants’ checks were good as gold, just as the whole town would have refused to accep
t one from any of the Harrises.

  That was life in Tylerville.

  “ ’Bye, Mrs. Ashton. ’Bye, Pam.” Rachel caught a bag up in each arm and headed for the parking lot.

  “Wait, Rachel!” Mrs. Ashton called after her. Pam called something, too, but by then Rachel was through the automatic door and didn’t hear what it was. Not that she was sorry.

  Driving toward home, head pounding, Rachel decided that she’d never felt so wrung out in her life. Maybe it was the heat. Or maybe it was the strain of championing Johnny Harris.

  Her purse rested on the passenger seat. Pulling it toward her and groping inside it with one hand, she found the tin of aspirin that she always carried with her. Opening the small metal container without running off the road was quite a trick, but she managed it and swallowed two tablets dry.

  “ ‘This is my letter to the world / that never wrote to me.…’ ”

  Emily Dickinson’s words flitted into Rachel’s mind. She had always loved poetry, and that line had lately seemed to her an apt summation of her existence. To her, it symbolized a yearning soul locked tight into the humdrum everydayness of an ordinary life. Like Emily Dickinson, Rachel lately found herself wanting more, though just what it was she longed for she couldn’t have said. Often she felt almost achingly alone despite the fact that she had never lacked for friends or company. But no one she knew was the rarest of all creatures—a kindred spirit.

  Over the years, she had come to realize the she did not quite fit in in Tylerville. She was different from her family, different from her neighbors, different from her co-workers and students. She read everything she could get her hands on—novels and plays, biographies and poetry. Newspapers, magazines, cereal boxes—anything. Her mother and sister read cookbooks and fashion magazines. Her father read Business Week and Sports Illustrated. She was content in her own company for hours on end. Given the choice, she even preferred to be alone. They were unhappy without a busy social calendar. She even wrote poetry herself and dreamed that one day it might actually be published.