One Track Mind (4 page)

Actually, it was a wide, nasty cut, and it made her rather sick. She was glad she was pale by nature, because she could feel her own blood draining from her face. But she kept a stoic expression.

“How’d you manage to do that?” she asked.

“The trellis broke,” he said slowly, as if explaining it to a child. “The slats cracked, and one shot into my side. I think it bounced off a rib. It’s not as bad as it looks. It’s not deep. It’ll heal.”

“You’ve got a splinter in it,” she said, staring at his naked
side. “More than one. Let me get the tweezers. I’ll pull them out and patch you up. But then you should go get a tetanus shot.”

“You don’t get tetanus from wood,” he informed her. Then he faced away from her and let the hose run on his open wound.

She began to back toward the house. “I’m going to get the first aid kit. You better be here when I get back, or I’ll tell Mr. Merkle and—”

“I know, I know,” he said with distaste. “I’ll never work in this business again.”

Breathlessly she ran inside, seized the first aid kit out of the downstairs bathroom cabinet, and sprinted back to him. He’d gone back to the garden, picked up his T-shirt, wet it, and now held it to his side and was turning off the water. He’d pulled out the biggest splinter, and blood still trickled down his ribs.

“I brought soap, too,” she said. “Let me really clean those cuts.”

“
I’ll
do it,” he said firmly, and took the bar from her. His wet fingers brushed her dry ones, and a spectacular jolt of awareness went through her.

She stood and watched as he soaped and rinsed his wounds, his face rigid with control. And for the first time, she let herself look at the tattoos on his body. There were bands of them around both upper arms, like bracelets of an exotic design. On top of his right shoulder, a crescent moon was etched in blue, a star inside its curve, and on the right a picture of the sun. Both the sun and moon had faces.

The skin of his chest was smooth and bronzed, with only a dusting of dark hair down his breastbone. He had well-developed pectoral muscles, and above each brownish nipple was a tattoo of a flying bird. They were identical and faced each other from opposite sides of his chest.

“Okay,” he said. “Now give me some tape and let me get on with the job.”

“I’ll tape you,” she said, trying to keep her eyes off the flying birds. “Some are in awkward spots. Especially the one on your ribs. That one’s going to take some doing.”

He sighed. His chest heaved, and the birds moved in unison.

“Come over by the pool and sit down. It’ll be easier, and the light’s better. I need to get the rest of those splinters out.”

“Just do it here,” he muttered.

“No,” she countered. “You’ve actually lost a lot of blood. Come sit down for a minute. Do I have to
drag
you?”

She seized his hand, and he gave a snort of surprise. Still he followed her, at a maddening amble, as if she were making a fuss about nothing. He refused to sit on any of the furniture, but instead plopped down at the farthest edge of the concrete around the pool. She sat beside him and opened her kit.

“I don’t know why you won’t make yourself more comfortable,” she grumbled.

He gave her an impatient look and showed his palm, the skin still red and damp with scratches from grabbing at the falling roses. “I’ll slop up your nice, clean poolside.”

He struck a dramatic pose and stared at his hand. In a surprisingly sonorous voice he said, “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red.”

He paused and gave her a wry look. “And your white pool furniture corpuscle pink.”

He could not have surprised her more if he had suddenly sprouted man-sized wings.

She stared at him, the antiseptic wipe in her hand forgotten. “That’s from
Macbeth,
” she breathed.

“Yeah?” he said, raising his brows questioning. “So what? Despite what you might think, I can actually read.”

She felt the rebuke in his words, but she held his gaze. “I know you can read. I just didn’t think you’d read Shakespeare.”

“Last year, I had two study halls in a row,” he said, almost defensively. “I’d get my stuff done and there was nothing else to read. It was the assigned play. I didn’t want to read the algebra book, for God’s sake.”

He’s proud,
she thought.
He’s smart and brave—and proud. But everybody’s looked at him as if he’s dirt.

“Well,” she murmured a bit ashamed of herself, “it’s not the kind of thing I’d guess you’d memorize, that’s all.”

“I didn’t memorize it on purpose,” he said. “I just read it about a hundred times. It stuck in my mind.”

“Oh.” She gazed into his face, still stunning in spite of its scratches. She wondered what else was in that mind of his.

And he looked back, as if wondering the same thing about her.

That was the beginning of it for her. That was how it started. A boy fell down in the roses.

O
KAY
, K
ANE THOUGHT
, his footsteps echoing in the empty hallway. The Halesboro Speedway was haunted.

It was haunted by its own former eminence. Down the hall that housed the offices—most now seemingly deserted—were photos and framed newspaper and magazine stories of the track in its heyday. It had been one of the toughest tracks in the nation, both a driver’s dream and nightmare. A dream to win, a nightmare fighting for that win.

A high-banked oval, the track was one of the most abrasive on the circuit. The asphalt with its high sand content chewed up tires like a monster gnawing jerky. It was as demanding as tracks came, and its nickname, fully earned, was Hellsboro.

But a hard track had made for challenging races; drivers had fought out thrilling contests here, set unforgettable records. Halesboro saw one of the closest finishes in NASCAR history, a 1999 win by 0.0033 seconds—people still talked about it, a decade later.

The photos and the yellowing clippings brought back vivid images and high emotions. Memories hung in the air like ghostly smoke. Outside, Kane had seen the old statue of black granite, an imposing carving of a flame symbolizing “Hellsboro,” and on the flame’s granite and bronze pedestal were engraved the names of the track’s greatest winners.

But if the nostalgia of greatness haunted the halls, so did the sense of glory so long past it was turning into the depressing sense of present weakness and future failure. What the hell was he getting himself into?

Kane found Clyde by the scoreboard next to the infield care center, and the two men shook hands with self-conscious awkwardness. The last time Kane had seen the older man, Clyde had been his mentor, teaching him and encouraging him to learn more. Clyde didn’t give a damn that Kane didn’t come from “respectable” people. Clyde had grown up poor himself, nothing handed to him; he was a self-made man who’d earned the respect he got.

Maybe Clyde had seen something of himself in the teenage Kane, who’d volunteered as a crewman for local, more recreational races. Andrew J. Simmons gave small importance to those races. He provided what the community thought he should provide—a training ground for kids with racing talent.

Clyde saw the local races as something far more important, a low rung that a determined young man could use to climb higher. He might rise into the racing stratosphere if he had the guts, the brains and reflexes. Now Clyde looked at his protégé with something akin to shyness.

“You don’t look like the kid that blew this place and didn’t leave a forwarding address,” Clyde told him, taking in the dark silk shirt, the tailored slacks, the expensive shoes. “But I’ve heard about you and what you been doin’. Good on you, boy.”

Kane felt a pang of emotion looking at the aging man. Clyde’s brown eyes still shone with alertness; his weathered face was kind. “I had good teachers,” Kane said gruffly.

“Best teacher’s the school of hard knocks,” Clyde said, with a measuring sideways glance. “Want to see the track, the pits?”

“And the stands,” Kane answered. “Yeah. All of it.”

“It isn’t what it was,” Clyde warned him. “Life’s like a big ol’seesaw. Some things go up—” he looked Kane over “—and some go down. You feelin’ sentimental, or you got another reason to come back and look this over?”

I’ve got more than one reason,
Kane thought, keeping all expression from his face. And he thought of an old proverb. “The heart has reasons that reason does not know.” He kept
those words from crossing his lips and ejected the idea from his mind. He was excellent at hiding what he thought and what he felt.

But Clyde, somehow, had always known him a little too well for Kane’s own comfort. Clyde said. “She called me about you. Lori. You seen her, huh?”

“Yeah,” Kane said tonelessly. “Sure.”

“She’s been through a lot,” Clyde said. “Her daddy wasn’t himself in his last years. Responsibility for this place wasn’t supposed to fall on her. It was supposed to be her brother’s concern. You heard what happened to him?”

Kane nodded without emotion. “Yeah. I read it in the papers.”

A. J. Simmons, Jr., Second Lieutenant in the North Carolina National Guard, had died in Afghanistan four years ago.

Clyde shook his head. “The old man never got over it. A.J. dyin’ did him in. Nobody but Lori to hold things together. She’s done her best. Always has. Kept her chin up through the whole thing. But the odds against her? Look at that scoreboard.”

Kane looked up. It was the same scoreboard that had stood there more than twenty years ago, and it had been old then.

“It can only show the first five positions in the race,” Clyde muttered. “Shoulda replaced it years ago.” He turned and gestured at the track. “And look at that asphalt. That asphalt needs serious work…”

Kane could see that, as well as the worn seating rising in tiers, the shoddiness that had set in. He saw the shot-out night lights and all the signs of the Halesboro’s aging infrastructure. They surrounded him like both a challenge and a rebuke.

He took in the changes time had brought, none of them good. But his mind only half registered them. What he saw more vividly was Lori herself, that first afternoon they’d talked.

Seeing her in that office made him feel as if he’d stepped into a time machine. He’d hurtled backward to that summer day they’d truly met. The memory came rushing back so strongly he still couldn’t exorcise it.

H
E’D SEEN HER
the minute he’d popped the latch and opened the gate into her backyard.

He hadn’t expected that. Oh, no.

She lay stretched on a white lounge chair by the pool, shaded by a big green-and-white umbrella. It was the biggest umbrella he’d ever seen, and it had a NASCAR logo on it. But even its shadow couldn’t dull the red-gold of her hair heaped atop her head, or dim the white curve of her throat as she sat reading her book.

She barely glanced at him; his presence didn’t even seem to register. She went back to perusing her book, and his heart knotted in his chest like a fist clenching so hard it hurt. He’d seen her at school before—a petite girl with a face so lovely it could commandeer his gaze and keep it if he didn’t control himself. He was glad he was a master of self-control.

This girl was out of his league. Half the guys in school wanted her, and she could have her pick of them. The odd thing was she hadn’t picked anybody. Even in his self-imposed distance from other students, he heard she went out. But not with anyone special.

He figured she was smart enough—he’d heard she was very smart indeed—to be saving herself for someone better than Halesboro could offer. She’d end up going to an expensive university and marrying a handsome boy with a daddy even richer than hers.

And her daddy was mighty rich. He owned and ran the speedway, and Kane knew he socialized with all those famous racing people. He imagined Lori at formal dinners in an impossibly fancy banquet room in her big house, being courted by handsome young drivers, guys who were up-and-coming heroes and would someday be millionaires.

So, to him, she seemed the most unattainable girl in school—and the most desirable. The maddening thing wasn’t that she was desirable simply because she was pretty. Halesboro had pretty girls aplenty.

No. There was something different about Lori Simmons,
some indefinable thing that set her off from all the others. She never called attention to herself, yet somehow she commanded attention. She gave off a sense of individuality, a natural independence.

She carried more books than any other girl in school. He mostly hated school, but he liked books. And she didn’t just carry her assigned textbooks. He’d see her sitting in study hall, her homework done—she seemed to get her homework done with lightning speed; she must never have to take it home—instead she’d be reading something he’d never heard of. That always made him feel curious…and inferior, a know-nothing.

What, for instance, was
Wuthering Heights?
She’d sat at the study table, reading it so intently she seemed to tune out the rest of the world. What did
wuthering
mean, anyway? It wasn’t in the dictionary, because he looked it up, and it wasn’t in the library because he’d looked there, too.

He hadn’t expected to see her that afternoon he went to work in her father’s backyard.

The whole time he was there, he kept stealing glances at her, but he never once caught her looking back. Why should she? She was like a princess who lived in a castle, and he was like the raggle-taggle gypsy in the song.

He made himself concentrate—almost ninety-seven percent—on pruning the roses. He was lucky to get this job from Old Man Merkle, and he intended to keep it. He wanted to do a good job, so Mrs. Simmons would want him back. “She’s picky, that one,” Merkle had said in disgust. “Can’t ever please her.”

He’d checked out two books on roses from the public library and spent Friday night reading about how to prune roses, for God’s sake. Every other guy in town was out hooting and cruising and raising hell, and he was cramming his brain full with stuff like “growth nodes” and “nutrients in woody canes.”

But three percent of the time he couldn’t help himself, and he’d steal a look at the princess, who, as a princess should, ignored him. But his heart vaulted and stuck in his throat
when she stood, shed her white gauzy blouse and lowered herself into the pool. That made concentration difficult.

Then she got out, the full sunshine on her gold-red hair and water streaming down her pale body, hidden only by the two green pieces of her bathing suit. That made concentration almost impossible.

But he had a lot of willpower—“stubborn as hell,” his mother called him—and he did fine until he started to work on that central trellis. There was something wrong with the trellis itself, he sensed, and Merkle had let the vines overpower it.

He was half-convinced that the lattice work was rotten under all those vines, and that old man Merkle should have replaced it long—

Then the damn thing came down on top of him. A broken slat shot into his ribs, and he had his arms full of thorny roses about to crash into the dirt. Merkle would kill him.

He fought with all his strength to save the thing, and at last it seemed stabilized, and he realized his head and arms and throat stung with scratches, and his side was bleeding.

And while he still seemed half-smothered by roses, he looked between them and saw—oh, humiliation—that
now
she noticed him. Her mouth dropped open, and the book fell out of her hand. She didn’t even seem to know it. Her attention was focused on him.

He felt like a perfect fool. He extricated himself and made for the shed to repair the damage from the broken trellis, but Lori Simmons was on him like a duck on a june bug. He was appalled. He felt like a clumsy peasant, and he did all he could to ward off her attempt to help him.

She was not a girl who could be warded off once she’d made up her mind. He didn’t think the U.S. Marines could ward her off. And before he could help himself, he’d been captured.

He’d sat at the edge of the pool’s concrete, and she actually seized his hand to examine it, and her touch made him hot, dizzy, confused, desirous and so desperate to impress her that he’d blurted out some lines of poetry, hardly knowing where
they came from. He’d been trying to be a smart aleck, show her he wasn’t like some poor yard dog who’d got a thorn in his paw.

And she’d kept hold of his hand and looked into his face as if she really saw him for the first time, and he found himself mumbling some nonsense about study hall, but all he could look at were her eyes, and all he could think of were her lips.

He felt as if he were tumbling into an alternate universe. She sat beside him, her bright hair dancing in the breeze. The emerald green of her damp bathing suit clung to her slender body, and her eyes were the same emerald green. And she looked at him as if he were
somebody.
Somebody special.

Her hands were on him, gentle and sure. She took a pair of tweezers and pulled the thorn from deep in his arm, and he could not allow himself to flinch in this girl’s presence. She was dabbing his arms and then his chest with antiseptic.

Oh.

Good.

Lord.

She cleaned his side, used tweezers to pull out the remaining slivers—they were impressively long, and he was rather glad they were, and acted as if nothing hurt at all, like a knight trying to seem nonchalant about his wounds.

She poured antiseptic right into the gash. Yikes! He had to allow himself to clench his teeth a bit. “Did that hurt?” she asked, her voice so full of concern something inside him melted.

“It…um…smarted a bit,” he admitted. “Nothing really.”

“I’ll put a bandage on it,” she said, and took one from its wrapper. She held the edges of the cut together with small, steady fingers. Her fingertips made him forget that his side hurt, he was only conscious of her touch.

“Be sure to change that often,” she said. “Promise.”

“I will,” he said gruffly. He wasn’t used to anybody fussing over him like this.

People hurting you? He’d been there, plenty of times. But somebody who touched you gently, kindly, with the utmost
deliberate care, bent on making you feel better, this was novel. And he liked it. He liked it a
lot.

He tried to think of something smart to say and couldn’t. He just let her keep doing what she was doing.

She wiped clean the scratch on his neck. “I don’t think that needs a bandage,” she said in almost a whisper. “Just let it get some air.”

He could feel her breath on his throat. “Yeah,” he managed to say.

She put her hand on his face and turned it so she could examine the long scratch next to his mouth. He stared straight ahead at a long row of gooseberry bushes.

She ran her fingers along the edge of the cut, so lightly it was like a moth exploring his skin. “It’s deep,” she said in the same hushed voice. “I’ll clean it.”