Two Hearts, Slightly Used. Dixie Browning
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yes. I left word at the asylum I’d be leaving. So thanks again for all your kind assistance,” she said with a saccharine smile. It was almost too dark to see inside the house, even with the front door standing wide open. She flicked on a light switch. Nothing happened.
“I warned you.” He was still holding both sacks of groceries, and she caught the gleam of a smile—a malicious smile, she told herself.
“Lucky for me, I’m not afraid of the dark.” She was afraid of three things—snakes, lightning and being made a fool of again. “Just put them anywhere—on that counter over there.”
“I may as well go get—”
“No, thank you. I need the exercise.” She held the door wide, hoping her grimace would pass for a smile in the dim light. In about five seconds she was going to cry, curse or kick something—hard! And she’d just as soon not have any witnesses.
* * *
Back at the Hunt several minutes later, Brace let himself inside and reached automatically for the light switch. His hand fell to his side, closed into a fist and then slid into his pocket. Dammit, his conscience was already giving him flak for all the lies he’d laid on her, and the crazy thing was, he didn’t even possess a conscience!
If she was still here tomorrow, he promised himself he would check out her generator. The tank wasn’t empty. They were kept topped off to prevent condensation.
Of course, he could simply flip the breakers and she wouldn’t need a generator. Unless the power cut out. Keegan had explained how salt buildup could cause transformers to arc, setting off pole fires, but there’d been enough rain lately to wash the salt off the lines.
On the other hand, there was no point in making things too easy for her. The more uncomfortable she was, the sooner she’d head back to wherever she’d come from. If there was one thing Brace didn’t need right now, it was company! Keegan had sworn the place was deserted by all but a few die-hard hunters in the wintertime.
Using his excellent night vision, he made his way to the back part of the restored central section of the lodge called Keegan’s Hunt. It had been built about a hundred years ago as a private hunting club and was on the way to falling into ruins when Rich Keegan, a few generations removed from the original builder, had come down to see if there was anything worth salvaging before the family’s ninety-nine-year lease ran out.
He’d found a squatter named Maudie—a divorcee with a grown daughter—married her and begun the task of rebuilding the elegant old hunt club and establishing a small but thriving air-commuter service between Billy Mitchell Airport on Hatteras and the mainland.
Not until Brace reached his own room, a corridorlike affair with a single oddly placed window, did he switch on a light, confident that it wouldn’t be seen from cottage row. Standing before a bow-fronted, bird’s-eye maple bureau with an ornate, gilt-framed mirror above it, he studied his own face dispassionately for the first time since he’d arrived a week and a half ago to island-sit for the Keegans while they went West.
It had been pretty dark. He figured she couldn’t have gotten a good look at him. Too bad. Stroking his jaw, he told himself that if she’d come a little earlier in the day, he could’ve scared the hell out of her without having to lay on all those lies. The way Brace figured it, in the long run the truth was a lot easier than lies. He’d never been a candidate for sainthood, but at least he drew the line somewhere.
Dispassionately he studied the image in the clouded and speckled old mirror. A few parts of the face that stared back were familiar. The deep-set gray eyes, narrowed from years of squinting against the sun. The hairline that was just beginning to migrate northward—at least, he imagined it was. As for the hair itself, it was still thick, of a nondescript shade of brown that turned paler on top in the summer sun. The gray hardly showed, not that he gave a good damn. He’d earned every last one of those gray hairs the hard way.
Earned the scars, too, he acknowledged ruefully as he studied the network of fine white lines that marred the left side of his face. His left cheekbone was slightly higher than the right one, but his new nose was a decided improvement over the old model. After a few too many walk-away crashes, not to mention more barroom brawls than he cared to recall, the old one had been barely functional. This new version—he fingered the straight slope—in addition to running a true northeast, southwest course, had the added advantage of working.
Switching off the light, Brace smiled bleakly into the darkness. He’d been accused of a lot of things in his long and colorful career—of carrying a chip on his shoulder the size of an old-growth redwood. Of trying to prove something to himself—God knew what. Of running on a mixture of jet fuel, adrenaline and testosterone.
Guilty on all three counts. It had taken a fiery, near-fatal crash in the top-secret ATX-4 he’d been testing to clip his wings permanently. Thirty-two months of intermittent hospitalization for reconstruction and rehabilitation gave a man a little too much time to think.
It was during that same period that he’d met Rich Keegan. Neither man had been into socializing, but they’d had flying in common. Finding themselves alone in the ward, while the others hung out in the rec room watching TV and playing video games, they’d gradually begun to talk. Behind the protective covering of a faceful of bandages, Brace had found himself opening up for the first time since he’d confided in a foster parent some thirty-odd years before that his real father was an Air Force general who was too busy saving the world to take care of him.
Hell, he’d never had a clue as to who his old man was. His mother, either. Once, though, he’d overheard a social worker telling a cop who’d busted him for some petty offense or another that he’d been left in a shopping cart in a department store rest room and was more trouble than any kid they’d ever had to deal with.
To this day Brace could recall how proud he’d been at the distinction. They’d called him John Henry because they’d had to call him something, but he’d never felt like a John Henry. When he was thirteen, he’d taken the name of Bracewell after a local war hero who was being feted about that time. The Ridgeway had come from the department store. He’d rather liked that touch. As soon as he’d been old enough, he’d had the name made legal.
Now he wandered back out to the kitchen and lit the burner under the pot of day-old coffee. With his face in traction for so long, he’d had to give up cigarettes. Alcohol didn’t mix with too many of the drugs he’d been on in the hospital, so he’d cut down on that vice, too. Mostly, he made do with bad coffee. Black as tar and strong enough to float an F-18. Sooner or later the stuff would probably eat a hole in his gut, and he’d wind up back in a hospital bed. He’d sworn never to set foot in another hospital. The day he’d walked out a free man, he’d sworn the only way anyone would ever get him back in another hospital was feetfirst, in a Ziploc bag.
He’d sworn a lot of things when he’d learned that if he so much as pulled a single G, his whole carcass would probably self-destruct.
His flying days were over, but what the hell—he’d survive. If there was one thing Brace had learned about himself over some forty-three years, it was that he was too damn mean to die young.
In the Hunt’s main living room, paneled in pickled cypress and decorated with an eye more to comfort than style, he turned on the TV and slid a video in the VCR. He poured himself a pint-size mug of thick coffee and settled down to watch an old World War II training film.
The P-51. Now there was one sweet plane! Yawning, he slipped farther down into the deep leather-covered chair. The furnace cut in as the temperature fell. Outside, rain rattled against the tall windows as wind gusted against the northeast side of the house.
Half-asleep, he wondered if the woman had ever found the switch box. Probably hadn’t even thought to look. Most women wouldn’t know a switch box from a sushi bar. Keegan’s Maudie, of course, would’ve had everything ticking over in two minutes flat. But then, Keegan’s Maudie was one in a million.
His thoughts drifted aimlessly back to some of the women who had figured briefly in his own life over the years. By mutual choice