Lost & Found - Jacqueline Sheehan [75]
He had stepped closer to her with each word and he suddenly reached out and put his hands on the edges of her jaw and into her hair and she wasn’t sure how he had gotten there, whether he had been pulled or he had been shot out of an archer’s bow. Rocky’s hat popped off and she grabbed both of his hands.
“I want to tell you about why I’m here and about the dog and about this woman who was an archer, who used to own him and how she killed herself after something terrible happened to the dog, and now the dog is gone, her parents came to get him and this is such a terrible mistake…”
A look of bewilderment followed by horror came over his face. He dropped his hands and stepped back.
“I can’t believe this. Why didn’t I put this together?” He sank down on the stone wall, put his head into his hands, and then looked back at the stunned Rocky.
“I need to tell you something, and I’m going to do it quickly.” He swallowed hard and pressed his lips together when they had started to quiver. “The world of archery competition in Maine is a small community and the number of women archers is an even smaller piece of the pie,” he said.
Oh, no, thought Rocky, already skipping ahead to a likely conclusion, I am such an idiot.
“The reason my wife and I are separated is because I went to a competition about a year and a half ago in Orono and stayed the night. I met a woman there. I’d never seen her before at any of the competitions and she was good, really good. I couldn’t help but notice her and she had it, she really had something. That flow that we were just talking about? She could step into it like no one I’ve ever seen. Anyone could see she loved everything about archery. I stayed with her for one night at my motel. After that I dragged myself home and Julie knew it the first minute I walked in the door.”
A gust of wind found them and Rocky’s hair blew into her face. She reached down to get her hat and rammed it on her head. “You knew Liz Townsend? Does everyone but me know this woman? Am I suddenly her receptacle for dogs and old lovers? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Tell you what? That I cheated on my wife once and everything went to shit after that? I’m not proud of what I did. And I didn’t want my wife to leave me.”
“No, I mean, yes, you should have said something. But you should have put two and two together about the dog. I told you I had a dog that had been shot. You knew, didn’t you?”
Everything that had opened in Rocky was closing down and it felt like a river was changing course from north to south. How could she have been so wrong about him?
Hill stood up. “How could I have known anything about her dog? She might have mentioned that she had a dog, but we weren’t really talking about dogs then. Rocky, this was a one-night stand. I told her the next morning that we couldn’t see each other again.”
“This whole thing just got too weird for me. Forget that I left you a message, forget about lessons, forget that you ever drove out here,” said Rocky. She wrapped her arms around her torso.
Hill took a step toward her and she wondered how much of a mistake she had made. There was no one else around within shouting distance. Rocky knew she was not a poker face; whatever he saw made him stop abruptly. Hill stopped and opened both his palms toward her as if she were a stray animal that needed reassurance. That’s what she did before she captured a stray.
“Okay, Rocky. I’m not exactly sure what happened here, but try not to blame me for something that happened before you even met me. I did read about Liz’s death, but I never put it together with your dog that was wounded.”
Rocky knew that for the most part, it’s impossible to tell if someone is telling the truth. But she suddenly had zero idea if Hill was telling her the truth or if the world