CHAPTER 7

PLEASE NOTE: IF THIS IS YOUR FIRST VISIT TO THE REDEEMER’S LAW PROJECT, YOU ARE COMING INTO THE STORY ALREADY IN PROGRESS. YOUR EXPERIENCE HERE WILL BE FAR LESS CONFUSING IF YOU USE THE CHAPTER INDEX ON THE RIGHT TO GO BACK TO THE INTRODUCTION. OR AT LEAST TO THE PROLOGUE.

-- DAN

CHAPTER 7

“Creep. Bastard. Bastard.”

Tracy hugged herself and stared out at the parking lot. Her cheek had begun to darken where Brett struck her, and she had a small knot on her head where it smacked against the car window. She ignored the menu on the table in front of her.

Simon Grove cleared his throat self-consciously. “Would you prefer, uh, Supreme or Super Supreme?” He took a sip of his iced tea and tried to make eye contact with her. She may have felt him looking; she finally turned her head and smiled softly.

“Oh, Simon, I’m sorry. I ought to be paying attention to you. Instead of thinking about him.”

Simon shook his head. “It’s only natural for you to be upset.”

Tracy put her elbows on the table and leaned forward, watched him intently. Her eyes narrowed slightly. “Y’know...I just met you. Not two hours ago. How come I feel like I can tell you anything?” Her smile still hovered about her lips, which were thin but well-shaped. Simon cleared his throat.

“I...feel sort of...connected to you, too,” he said quietly. “‘Cause you don’t know me, really. You don’t have any preconceived ideas of me. It’s nice.” He touched his clothes, his earring. “All this stuff is new, actually. I’m kind of going through a change of image.”

“I like it.” She stretched, and her shirt pulled tight across her ample chest. Simon tried his best not to stare, or at least not to look as if he were staring. Several seconds later it occurred to him that she might have wanted him to stare, and he couldn’t decide whether that pleased him or scared him. Why would she do that for him? Why would anyone do that?

“Y’know, if anybody had asked me this morning if I’d accept a ride from a total stranger, and then let him buy me dinner, I would’ve just laughed. But here we are.”

“I don’t know that I’d call this dinner. It’s just pizza.”

“Hey, around here this is as good as it gets for a date.”

They both fell silent, and the word “date” bounced around in Simon’s mind. He wasn’t sure this was smart; he only had to think back a few days to remind himself why he was on the road. But Tracy was ... different? Was that the word? Or maybe it wasn’t Tracy that was different. Maybe it was the new surroundings. Maybe it was him.

“So you’re headed east? Got a destination, or’re you just driving?”

“I’m not sure,” he said, truthfully. “I...think I’m going to Atlanta.”

She smiled a little. “Mmmm...never been there. I’d like to go sometime.” Tracy tilted her head slightly to one side, and said, “So Simon...what’s your secret?”

He flinched, and saw her eyes widen, and forced his smile back into place.

“Are you okay?” Tracy asked, suddenly all concerned and caring, all sweet and sugary like frosting.

Abruptly another name came to him, another face. Another girl who’d also acted concerned and caring. Tracy Worley began to seem...

...fake.

“I didn’t mean to pry...! You just said you could be yourself ’cause you were here with me...on neutral ground, right? Like starting over? I’d just like to know more about you. Like, y’know, your last name and stuff. If that’s okay with you. That’s all.”

He shut his eyes, thought of his mother. People said she stayed so beautiful because of exercise, and diet, and luck. Simon knew better. He knew full well the connection between himself and his mother. Not that she’d ever admit it. Not after what had happened. What he’d done.

“My last name is Brown,” he said.

“Simon Brown. Well. I’d really love to know how you got to be in Crawford Shoals. But, y’know, only if you want to tell me.” She smiled again, and he returned it, at least on the surface.

Fake. She was fake. So obvious. He resisted the urge to look around the restaurant, try to spot her friends, watching him from a far table. Had someone known he was coming? Known what road he was on, and put this girl there for him to find?

But Simon surprised himself with how well he hid his suspicions. The two of them talked freely and easily; their food arrived, but didn’t hinder the conversation, and they stayed long after they’d both finished.

Simon spun the Alabama schoolgirl a tale of a rich grandfather and an inheritance and a desire to see the world.

Tracy listened more than she talked, but she seemed comfortable enough to relate the high points of growing up in a tiny, far-removed Alabama town, dealing with a distant, loveless mother and a well-meaning but spineless father.

Simon thought perhaps her story sounded a bit too pat, a bit too movie-of-the-week, but he decided to let it pass. For now.

Equally difficult to deal with, she said, were the boys she had to choose from. “Pickings are slim, as the saying goes. Most of the guys around here are just dumb rednecks, and the few that aren’t...” Her eyes unfocused, slightly, and she slumped a little. “Really, I guess, all the guys around here are just dumb rednecks.” She straightened her shoulders again, gave him a small, coy smile. “I guess I’ll have to look for a guy from somewhere else.”

Simon finished his tea, set down the glass. Watched her. Her with her blonde hair and pretty eyes and big tits. Miss Popularity, no doubt. Trapped in a small town. What a tragedy. He said, “How would you like to take a spin? Just drive around for a while?”

# # #

“You’re sure, now? This is the place?” Simon steadied himself in the dark, one hand on her upper arm.

“I’m the one who grew up here, right? I know where I’m going.”

Full dark had come, and Tracy led the way down a narrow path choked with Bermuda grass and wild blackberry bushes, their only illumination a penlight she carried in her pocketbook.

Not that Simon really needed the light.

More than once he pricked himself on one of the long, sharp blackberry thorns, and the first time he nearly screamed. He stopped short in the darkness and held up his hand, and Tracy rushed back to him, sugary sweet, and he examined it in the penlight’s weak beam. A small, ragged hole had punched into the fleshy part of his left palm and torn slightly, so that a tiny red ribbon of blood seeped out of a teardrop-shaped wound.

As he stared, the bleeding slowed and stopped, and the blood reversed course, retreated into the wound. He turned his hand away so she couldn’t see the skin start to close.

“Did it get you real bad?” There was that concern again, so thick and treacly. If she hadn’t had the light near his face he would have sneered.

“No, no, I’m okay.”

Tracy pulled him further into the darkness. “Come on, then. It’ll be worth it, I swear.”

After several more minutes of tripping over roots they came out of the trees and onto the shore of a lake.

Simon leaned against the trunk of a pine and stared.

“Wow,” he breathed out, solemnly.

“Glad I brought you here now?”

Simon wavered. It was so beautiful. Michelle... Michelle wouldn’t ever have brought him to a place like this. Maybe Tracy wasn’t trying to trick him after all. Maybe she really did want to be here, just with him, just for him.

He felt so confused now, he didn’t know...

Simon reached out, took Tracy’s arm and pulled her gently to him. She nestled against him, her back to his chest, and the two of them gazed out over the water. She made a small, pleased sound, and he twined his arms around her waist.

The half-moon rested on its side in the sky like a shining cradle. The water’s surface rippled with tiny, breeze-driven wavelets, and the moon’s radiance infused them, so that the water itself seemed liquid silver. After a few moments Tracy moved away from Simon, but took his hand again and led him to the water’s edge, farther from the trees.

“You can see the stars better from here,” she said, and when she tilted her head up to look, Simon kissed her. Her hand glided up his arm to rest on the nape of his neck, while the other pressed into the small of his back.

Could he have been so wrong about her? Could this be something real? The grass was soft on the dark earth of the lakeside, and he laid her gently down on it, and stretched out beside her. She kissed his lips, his cheeks, his eyelids, his neck. She nipped the skin just to the side of his Adam’s apple—

— and he felt it begin.

No. No! Not here, not now!

Just a touch, just a tingle. But a part of his mind already knew: though Tracy’s lips and body felt incredible, though he was already hard and straining for her, nothing she could ever give him compared with what he could take.

He discovered her pushing his shirt up, and her light kisses covered each exposed portion of skin. Simon stared at the top of her head in the moonlight and ran his fingers delicately through her hair.

He felt it coming.

On a level just above his subconscious, he wanted it to.

But, damn it, he could talk to this girl! How many other girls had he ever been able to talk to? Maybe...maybe he could stop it, keep it down, control it, take Tracy in his arms and make love to her. He could take her away, away from here, from her dried-up little town. Keep her with him. Protect her.

She looked up, and the moonlight lived in her eyes, made them sparkle and shine as if they belonged to some mythical woodland creature, a dryad come to life just for him. At that moment she was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen.

Her hand trailed down, lower, and she touched him lightly, just with her fingertips.

But that pushed it over the edge, and with a self-hatred blacker than coal Simon welcomed it.

Tracy’s eyes reflected the change even as it happened, and she would have screamed, but twisting white coils entwined her head and filled her open mouth.

# # #

As the next day dawned on Crawford Shoals, Robert Worley fumbled with his necktie and hurried toward the door. He had a habit of showing up for work five minutes late, almost every day, even when he didn’t have a good reason for it. This morning he promised his reflection in the hallway mirror that he’d make it to work on time, no matter what. He mis-tied his tie for the third time, and pulled it off in disgust.

Tracy hadn’t come home the night before. That worried him a little, but it was nothing she hadn’t done in the past. Standing at the bar in the kitchen, Tracy’s mother Irene muttered to herself and methodically ate a bowl of high-fiber cereal.

Robert finally got the knot right in his tie and, feeling positive about the day ahead, opened the front door.

# # #

Annoyed, Irene Worley strode into the living room when she heard her husband violently retching.

“Robert? Robert. What’s wrong with you? What’s the matter?”

Then she saw the thing on the porch, and her voice left her. She continued walking. Slowly. Drawn to it, couldn’t keep her eyes away from it. On the floor, Robert retched again, spewed his breakfast across the hardwood, and started to sob.

Something that had once been her daughter sat propped against the porch railing, her hands folded in her lap, still dressed as she’d been when she left the house the day before. Irene recognized her only by the clothes.

Pinned to Tracy’s brown-stained, crusted shirt was a note written on yellow legal paper, printed in clean block letters.

I’M SO SORRY.



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