Goose in the Pond - Earlene Fowler [113]
When I reached the front porch, I could hear music vibrating through the solid core door—a sad Spanish song that throbbed like a fresh bruise. I stood for a moment with my hand on the doorknob, letting the cold metal soothe my sweating palm. Taking a deep breath, I opened the door.
Inside, the music was louder, the sweet, clear voice of Tish Hinojosa, the only country-western musician Gabe liked. Her music, an unusual fusion of Texas roadhouse honky-tonk, sad Spanish love ballads, and high-energy Mexican folk music, had struck a kindred chord in him. The room was darker than outside; through the six-pane windows the thin light of the moon and the flickering streetlight cast squares of gold across the carpeted floor. Blue light from the stereo glowed across the room as she sang in Spanish about being alone and the pain deep in her chest.
“Gabe?” I called out softly.
“Why are you here?” Gabe’s cold, husky voice asked from a dark corner. My eyes slowly started adjusting, and the outline of his white T-shirt emerged. He sat on the floor, his back against one side of the corner fireplace. He’d left so quickly he hadn’t put on shoes. For some reason the sight of his bare, vulnerable feet tightened my throat. His face was in shadows, but a flicker of moonlight caught a glint of liquid when he lifted the bottle and drank.
I froze, shocked.
His voice came from the shadows again. “Answer me.”
I spoke through the dry cotton feel in my mouth. “I was worried.”
“No reason.” He stood up and came toward me. His face moved in and out of the murky light until he stood close enough for me to smell the sharp, sweet whiskey on his breath. He brought the Jack Daniel’s bottle up and drank again.
I stared up into his face, crisscrossed with shadow stripes from the windowpanes, his expression rigid and unassailable with that macho Latin bravado he did so well. An electric-quick memory jolted through me—Jack’s young face in his polished mahogany coffin, the lips I’d kissed so often as cold and lifeless as the wooden casket he was buried in.
“Gabe—”
“Go home,” he said, his voice as unyielding as his expression. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“You’re wrong. This is exactly where I should be.”
His eyes never left my face as he lifted the bottle and drank.
“You don’t have to go through this alone,” I said quietly. “You can’t keep it all inside.” When he didn’t acknowledge me, I said, “Maybe you should take some time off—”
“Stop it!” he snapped, his translucent eyes alcohol-bright and wild. “You’re just like everyone else. You think I can’t handle this? Well, you’re wrong. I’m handling it fine, but I’d certainly get a lot more done if everyone would just leave me alone and let me do my job.”
“I didn’t mean—”
He held his finger and thumb an inch apart. “I’m this far from charging someone, but if everyone doesn’t get off my back—”
“Who?” I asked before I could stop myself.
He narrowed his eyes. “I told you to go home.”
I held back the urge to ask more. Right now Nora’s killer took second place to my husband’s precarious mental state. “No, I won’t.” I stretched up and kissed him gently on the mouth.
He hesitated, then set the bottle on the floor. He put a cold palm against my cheek. “Poor little niña,” he whispered. “You had no idea what you were getting into when you married me.”
“I’m not a little girl.” I kissed him again, not as gently this time, and he responded. The whiskey taste of him was startling and unfamiliar, like kissing a stranger.
He started unbuttoning my chambray shirt. “You shouldn’t have come here,” he murmured against my throat, then groaned softly. “Querida, querida, estas una frego en mi alma.”
I felt