“He knows we’re running?” Ava asked, as they walked back out onto the porch, bags in tow.
“One of three people I trust outside the club with all this, yeah. He knows, and nobody could get a word out of him about it. Lew’s good people.”
She agreed.
Mercy stripped all the saddlebags off the Dyna and rolled it into one of the outbuildings that he then locked with a combination Master lock. He told her the code and made her repeat it back to him five times, so he was confident she’d memorized it. Then they went down to the dock, to one of the small, weathered fiberglass boats that were anchored on boat hooks. The thing was stained and ancient, a sharp contrast to the shiny huge motor on the back. It was an Evinrude, and she knew just enough about boats to know this engine could send it flying across the water.
“She ain’t pretty,” Mercy said as he stepped down into it with one foot and began loading their belongings. “But she’ll get the job done.”
Ava handed over the bags one at a time. “And that’s for backup?” she asked of the long pole resting in the bottom of the boat.
“Push pole,” he explained. “If I was worth a damn, I’d use that instead of the engine. Safer for the wildlife, cleaner.” He shook his head. “But I grew up with motors. It’s easy to get lost out here and you need the speed. Plus” – he glanced up at her – “I ain’t taking you anywhere that I can’t make a fast getaway.”
She nodded, not wanting to dwell on the potential for getaways.
When he’d arranged everything to his liking, he reached up a hand for her, a bright excitement in his dark eyes. “M’lady,” he said with a smirk, though his tone was serious and respectful.
As Ava laid her palm against his, and as his fingers closed around hers, she felt a shiver move through his arm and up into hers. He wasn’t just inviting her down into this boat; he was inviting her into the part of his life he’d never shown her, that moss-draped past that captivated her, and that he’d kept guarded so tightly.
It’s okay, she wanted to tell him.Nothing you show me will change things. I love you more than anything; there’s not a skeleton I can’t overlook.
She put her foot down and felt the movement of the boat, the water shifting under her. She grabbed at the front of Mercy’s shirt as she stepped fully down, letting him catch her weight and steady her.
“Okay, so…” She tipped her head back and sought to project all her warmth and acceptance toward him. “Where are we going?”
**
He was a man torn. In so many ways, he hated this place. This hot, smelly, head-wrecking place that had devoured his meager family and sent him running. It always came back to running, didn’t it? How many times would he run back and forth between New Orleans and Knoxville? Seeking to escape the horrors at either end. He hated the idea of having his girl here, bringing her to the place that had crippled him so badly. There were ghosts in these swamps, some of his own making, and he didn’t want the taint getting into her blood, turning her soft writer’s heart into a bloody abscess.
But on the other hand, this moment was a recurring dream brought to life. Ava at the bow of his boat, legs drawn back behind her, face in the wind as the Evinrude powered them through the black water, the cypress rising tall around them. Her eyes were wide, scanning both banks, drinking it all in. As he sat at the stern, hand on the throttle, he watched her grip the edge of the boat and lean down, fingertips skimming across the shiny green duckweed.
He edged back the speed, so she could hear him, and said, “What do you think?”
“It’s beautiful.” And she meant it, too.
“Giving you story ideas?” he asked.
“So many.”
It was a gorgeous night on the bayou. The sun fell in hazy shafts through the cypress trunks, glimmered on the dark surface of the water, bold stripes that rippled as the spreading wake of the boat lapped toward the banks. Moss hung in thick drifts. Amongst the knobby knees of cypress roots, a white egret was startled and took flight, winging silently above them. Turtles sunned themselves on half-submerged logs. And…there, there was one. A gator at ten o’clock, its eyes and tip of its snout all that were visible above the water. To a tourist, it would go unnoticed; Mercy could spot a gator like it was glowing neon.
He slowed the boat and pointed it out to Ava. “You’ll see a lot more than that,” he assured her, and he loved the light in her eyes, the way being enchanted made her seem even younger, more like she’d been at seventeen, before anything bad –
No. He wasn’t going to think about the bad parts. That was why he’d put the ring on her finger. A promise that nothing like those five years would ever come between them from now on. This wasn’t a fresh start, but a return to what had been. A do-over.
As they moved toward their destination, he planned their boat trips in the days to come, the hours exploring his childhood stomping ground. But for now, they’d go to their home for the next…however long. Their honeymoon spot and sanctuary from all outside threats.
He took a hard right, through a curtain of moss, where the banks compressed and it looked like the boat couldn’t possibly go through. He slowed the boat, then killed the motor, plucking the pole up and sinking it down below the surface toward the bottom.
“The water’s deep here,” he said, “deeper than it looks. But we’ll go in careful, so you can see your way.”
He hadn’t been to this spot in years and years, not since Daddy was still alive, but its textures came back to him, fresh and familiar all at once.
The bank rose steeply to the right, and crawling down its face where high-kneed cypress roots that formed a deep cavern going into the hill, a little wooden cave floored with water.
“Duck,” Mercy instructed, and Ava dropped down low as he poled the boat into the opening.
Tiny stripes of light fell across them, and there, at the far end, where he could just make out a similar boat tied up, a thick spill of sunlight flooded through the opening that led up into the clearing above. In its golden light, he could make out the earthen and wood stair carved into the bank that was their way out.
