“This is purely unselfish on your part?” she murmured.
Laughing softly, he nuzzled her ear. “Not this, no. Feel how well we fit? Damn. No way in hell could you be a letdown.”
He felt it immediately. She’d been molding herself to him, making adjustments that put his control in jeopardy.
And in the next instant she went as rigid as a flagpole. Her hands pushed against his chest to break the embrace, and when she backed away, her eyes were as wide as saucers.
“What did you say?” she asked in a hoarse voice.
Dent couldn’t account for her sudden withdrawal, or for the way she was looking at him. At a loss, he held his arms out to his sides. “What?”
“You said… you said… I couldn’t be a letdown. That’s what you said. Specifically. A letdown. Why did you use that particular word?”
“Because that’s the word you used earlier today. I was merely repeating—”
“No, wait!” She pressed the heels of her hands to her temples as though trying to squeeze out a thought. Or perhaps to keep an unwelcome one inside, and the possibility of that made him slightly queasy.
“Bellamy…” He took a step toward her, but she stuck out her hand to halt him.
“You used that word because Susan used it.” Her eyes were on him, but they were seeing something else, someone else. “She said it at the barbecue. At the boathouse. During your argument.”
He hadn’t remembered the exact terminology Susan had used, but the memory that had just worked itself free of Bellamy’s subconscious was a bad one, one that he’d hoped she would never regain. His heartbeat spiked, but he played it calmly and coolly, played it dumb. “I don’t remember what she said.”
“Yes you do!” she cried shrilly. “You remember. That’s why you refused to talk about it night before last at your apartment. I knew you were holding something back.” She covered her mouth with her hands and closed her eyes. “I remember. Oh God, I remember now what you wanted to keep from me.”
Her breaths started coming in harsh gasps. “You and Susan were in the throes of your argument. You were trying to placate her, to kiss and make up, but Susan was furious. She said… she said that if you wanted to fuck a Lyston girl, you could go fuck… me.” She sucked in a breath so hard she winced with the pain of it. “Then she said, ‘Of course since you’ve had me, Bellamy will be a huge letdown.’”
She’d used that word today, so for all these years it must have been there in the back of her mind just waiting to be triggered. He cursed himself for being the one to do it. He hoped to heaven her recollection would stop there. “Who gives a damn what Susan said?”
But Bellamy seemed not to hear him. She was back at the boathouse, listening to her sister mocking her. “After saying that, she laughed. She smiled that smile that Steven remembers and described to us so well. That triumphant smile. That’s when you left her.”
She focused on him, seeking verification. Reluctantly, he nodded. “I couldn’t stand the sight of her for one second longer. I wheeled my motorcycle around and was about to ride off. That’s when I spotted you crouching there in the bushes. I knew you must have overheard what she’d said, and my gut sank. She always treated you like dirt. And you were—”
“Pathetic.”
“I wasn’t going to say that, but you were an easy target for her ridicule. It was an awful thing for her to say, in any case. But it was especially mean because she knew you were there and would overhear it.”
“Yes, I’m sure she got double pleasure out of taunting you and humiliating me.”
He watched her eyes, noting the shifting emotions they revealed. One second she looked abject and lost, like the awkward and insecure pre-adolescent who had been so cruelly insulted. Next, her eyes reflected the bewilderment she felt over that cruelty and the heartless nature of a sister who could inflict it. Finally, her blue eyes began to shimmer with tears of fury.
He’d watched from astride his motorcycle as the same transformation had taken place in the eyes of the twelve-year-old Bellamy.
Quietly, he said, “You had every right to hate her.”
“Oh, I did.” Her voice vibrated with the intensity of her hatred. Her hands closed into tight fists. “Knowing that I had a hopeless crush on you, she deliberately said the most hurtful thing possible. It was evil of her. I despised her. I wanted to claw her eyes out. I wanted to—”
He knew the instant the thought struck her, because she looked stricken by it. “I wanted to kill her.” Moments ticked by while she gaped at him, breathing through slightly parted lips. “I wanted to kill her, and you thought I had. Didn’t you? That’s why you didn’t tell the police that I’d seen you leaving the state park. You would have had to recount what was said between you and Susan in the boathouse, which the police would have seen as a motive for me to murder my sister. But you didn’t tell. You protected me.”
“Like hell. I was no hero, Bellamy. If it had come down to ratting you out or saving my own skin, I would have told. But when Moody came to my house the next morning and started questioning me, he never mentioned the quarrel at the boathouse, only the one Susan and I had had at your house that morning.
“It became clear to me that he didn’t know about that second argument, didn’t know I’d been with her at the boathouse, and that definitely worked in my favor. So I kept quiet about it.” He took a step closer, but she took a corresponding step back, so he stayed where he was. “I couldn’t figure why you didn’t tell Moody about it.”
“My memory of it was blocked.”
“But I didn’t know that. I thought you were holding back because—”
“Because I had killed her.”
He hesitated, then reluctantly mumbled, “It crossed my mind.”
“And now?”
“Now?”
“Do you still think I did?”
“I’ve got better sense. You were a scrawny kid. Susan outweighed you fifteen, twenty pounds.”
She folded her arms and hugged her elbows. “She was clouted over the back of her head, remember? In a fit of rage, I could have hit her with something hard enough to dull her senses.”
“I don’t see that happening, do you? Seriously?”
“With a surge of adrenaline, people can perform physical feats that would be impossible for them at other times.”
“Only in the movies and Ripley’s Believe It or Not.”
Furious over the quip, she cried, “This isn’t funny!”
“You’re right, it’s not. It is, however, ridiculous to think that you—”
“Answer my question, Dent.”
“What was the question?”
“You know the question!”
“Do I think you killed your sister? No!”
“How do you know? I was at the scene. I saw her before her purse was sucked into the tornado. How do you know I didn’t kill her?”
“Why would you have taken her underwear?”
“Maybe I didn’t. Maybe by the time I caught up with her in the woods, she wasn’t wearing any. She could have given her panties to you.”
“She didn’t.”
“To Steven. To Allen Strickland.” Squeezing her eyes closed, she asked in a frightened whisper, “Did I see her do that?”
“Stop it, Bellamy. This is crazy. You can’t force yourself to remember things that didn’t happen.”
She pulled her lower lip through her teeth, but now it didn’t look sexy. It was the gesture of someone in torment. “Rupe Collier thought it possible.”
“He was only trying to get a rise out of you. You know that.”
“I think Daddy suspects.”
“What?”
“It’s occurred to him. I know it has.”