Serena shrieked and jumped back from the armoire as if it had suddenly come alive. She swung around with a hand over her heart to keep it from leaping out of her chest. Standing at the entrance to the room was a boy of about thirteen, beanpole-thin in jeans that were too short and a T-shirt that proclaimed Breaux Bridge to be the crawfish capital of the world. His eyes were dark and round with excitement.
«You ain't Lucky,» he blurted out. «But Lucky sure is.»
The instant the remark registered in his brain he flushed a shade of red that rivaled the color of the baseball cap he wore backward on his head.
Serena laughed, more out of relief than anything. «You startled me,» she said, pushing the door of the armoire closed. «Lucky's not here right now. He should be back in about half an hour. I'm Serena Sheridan.»
«Will Guidry.» He came forward hesitantly, started to offer her his hand but stopped midway to check it for dirt. Finding it relatively clean, he stuck it out in front of him again, looking as if he fully expected contact with her to give him a painful shock.
«It's nice to meet you, Will.» Serena gave his hand a firm shake and released it. «Would you care to wait for Lucky to come back?»
«Um-well-no-that's okay,» the youth stammered. He jammed his hands into his pants pockets and shuffled his oversize feet, staring down at them as if they were the most amazing sight he'd come across recently. «I was just leavin' off some stuff. Mom says she knows he won't take nothing-«He grimaced and corrected himself. «Won't take anything for runnin' them poachers off our crawfish nets, but she said the least she could do was bake him somethin' nice seein' as how he lives out here all alone-«He broke off and winced again, as if some unseen etiquette monitor was smacking him with a switch every time he goofed up. «I mean, he did live alone until you- But then, maybe you aren't-I mean, this could just be- Aw, hell-I mean, heck-«
Serena stared at him, everything inside her going still. «What did you say?» she asked softly, ignoring the boy's red-faced embarrassment. «Did you say 'running poachers off?»
Will shuffled his sneakers and shrugged, giving her a look that told her he suspected she might be a little odd. «Well, yeah. That's sorta what he does.»
«But I thought-«Serena cut herself off, snapping her mouth shut with an audible click.
She had thought what Lucky had wanted her to think. She had taken one look at him and assumed he was an outlaw, and he had let her believe it, had reinforced that image every chance he'd gotten. This was certainly her day to feel like a fool.
«We been havin' some trouble, you know,» Will said somberly, scratching his bony elbow. «My dad's gone down to the Gulf to look for work, so it's just Mom and us kids to home. Poachers figured our nets would be easy pickin'. Lucky showed 'em different.»
«Lucky,» Serena murmured. Big bad Lucky Doucet. Savior of orphaned animals. Defender of the defenseless. Not poaching, but chasing poachers away from the nets of women and children.
«He's some kind of man,» Will said happily. «But I guess you already know that.» His gaze dropped abruptly and he turned red again. He was at the age where nearly everything struck him as a sexual innuendo, and every social blunder seemed catastrophic. He looked at Serena with horror. «I didn't mean that you'd know. I meant, you know…»
«I know,» she said absently, still too stunned to take much pity on the poor kid.
If Lucky wasn't a poacher, then why had he let her believe he was? And why the antipathy between him and the game warden? Maybe they simply didn't like each other. Maybe Lucky didn't think Perry Davis was doing a good enough job. There could have been any number of reasons, not all of them good. Just because he wasn't a poacher didn't mean «he wasn't guilty of something. There was still the matter of the illegal liquor and the room upstairs he didn't want her to see.
«Anyhow,» Will said, gulping down his embarrassment. «I oughta be goin'.» He shuffled backward toward the door, swinging a long, bony arm in the direction of the kitchen. «I just left the stuff on the counter.»
«Yes, thank you. I'm sure Lucky will appreciate it,» Serena said, resurrecting her manners and her smile. «It was nice meeting you, Will.»
He blushed and shrugged, ducking his head and grinning shyly. «Yeah, you too. See ya 'round.»
He bolted out the front door and loped across the yard to a canoe beached on the bank of the bayou. Serena wandered out onto the gallery and waved to him as he paddled away. Even from a distance she could see him blush. Adolescence. What hell. She shook her head in a combination of amusement and sympathy, and wondered what Lucky might have been like at that age.
As if she didn't have enough to figure out about the grown man. If he wasn't a poacher, then what was he? A bootlegger? A gun runner with a heart of gold?
Her gaze drifted across the porch to the stairs that led up to the overhanging grenier, the forbidden room.
Never you mind what I keep up here… It's nothing for a pretty shrink to go sniffing through… You're a helluva lot better off not knowing.
She was better off not knowing, or he was safer if she didn't know?
She was on the steps before she could tell herself not to go on. Whether it was a need to understand the man that compelled her, or a need to justify her attraction to him, she didn't try to discern. In fact, she tried not to think at all. Almost as if they belonged to someone else's body, she watched her feet ascend one step at a time, watched her hand reach for the doorknob and turn it, watched the door swing back.
Nothing could have prepared her for what she saw. Not in her wildest imagination had she suspected this. She thought she had been prepared for anything-crates of guns, bales of drugs, boxes of stolen goods-but she hadn't been at all prepared for beauty, for art.
The room was ringed with paintings. Canvases, stacked three deep, leaned back against the walls. An easel took center stage in the open, airy room. On it was propped a work in progress.
Serena wandered into the room, gazing all around her in a daze. Unlike the first floor, the attic was not divided, but was one large room with windows at either gable end and skylights punctuating the ceiling on the north side. The light that filtered in through the blinds was soft and dusty-looking, spilling onto the floor in oblong bars of gold. There was a long workbench against one wall, loaded with jars of brushes and tubes of paint, sketch pads, pencils, paint-spotted rags. A heavy sheet of canvas served as rug and drop-cloth, covering a large area of the wooden floor surrounding the easel. The smell of oil paint and mineral spirits hung heavy in the air like cheap perfume.
So this was Lucky's deep dark secret. He was an artist.
Serena walked around the edge of the dropcloth, trying to take in the paintings propped against the wall. They depicted the swamp as a solitary place of trees and mist, capturing the stillness, the sense of waiting. They were beautiful, hauntingly, powerfully beautiful, filled with a dark tension and an aching sense of loneliness. They were magnificent and terrifying.
She stood before one that featured a single white egret, the great bird looking small and insignificant among the columns of gray cypress trunks and tattered banners of gray moss and smoke-gray morning mist. She stood there in the hot, stuffy room and felt as if the painting were drawing her in and swallowing her whole. She could feel the chill of the mist, could smell the swamp, could hear the distant cries of birds.
All the paintings shared that ability to draw the viewer into the center of the swamp and the center of the artist's anguish. They were extraordinary.
«Oh, Lucky,» she whispered as understanding dawned painfully inside her. She closed her eyes and pressed her hands to her face.
This was what he hadn't wanted, for her to see beyond the facade of macho bravado, not because he was ashamed of what she would find, but because it was too personal, too private. He wasn't a man who would easily share his inner self; she'd known that all along. But she had never suspected his inner self would be so tender, so full of pain and longing.