Cry Wolf

Chapter Three

" Laurel, help us! Laurel, please! Please! Please… please…"

She'd had the dream a hundred times. It played through her mind like a videotape over and over, wearing on her, tearing at her conscience, ripping at her heart. Always the voices were the worst part of it. The voices of the children, frantic, begging, pleading. The qualities in those voices touched nerves, set off automatic physiological reactions. Her pulse jumped, her breath came in short, shallow, unsatisfying gasps. Adrenaline and frustration pumped through her in equal amounts.

Dr. Pritchard had attempted to teach her to recognize those signals and defuse them. Theoretically, she should have been able to stop the dream and all the horrible feelings it unleashed, but she never could. She just lay there feeling enraged and panic-stricken and helpless, watching the drama unfold in her subconscious to play out to its inevitable end, unable to awaken, unable to stop it, unable to change the course of events that caused it. Weak, impotent, inadequate, incapable.

"The charges are being dropped, Ms. Chandler, for lack of sufficient evidence."

Here she always tried to swallow and couldn't. A Freudian thing, she supposed. She couldn't choke down the attorney general's decision any more than she could have chewed up and swallowed the Congressional Record. Or perhaps it was the burden of guilt that tightened around her throat, threatening to choke her. She had failed to prove her case. She had failed, and the children would pay the consequences.

"Help us, Laurel! Please! Please… please…"

She thrashed against the bed, against the imagined bonds of her own incompetence. She could see the three key children behind the attorney general, their faces pale ovals dominated by dark eyes filled with torment and dying hope. They had depended on her, trusted her. She had promised help, guaranteed justice.

"… lack of sufficient evidence, Ms. Chandler…"

Quentin Parker loomed larger in her mind's eye, turning dark and menacing, metamorphosing into a hideous monster as the children's faces drifted further and further away. Paler and paler they grew as they floated back, their eyes growing wider and wider with fear.

"Help us, Laurel! Please… please… please…"

"… will be returned to their parents…"

"No," she whimpered, tossing, turning, kicking at the bedclothes.

"Help us, Laurel!"

"… returned to the custody of…"

"No!" She thumped her fists against the mattress over and over, pounding in time with her denial. "No! No!"

"… a formal apology will be issued…"

"NO!!"

Laurel pitched herself upright as the door slammed shut on her subconscious. The air heaved in and out of her lungs in tremendous hot, ragged gasps. Her nightgown was plastered to her skin with cold sweat. She opened her eyes wide and forced herself to take in her surroundings, busying her brain by cataloging every item she saw-the foot of the half-tester bed, the enormous French Colonial armoire looming darkly against the wall, the marble-topped walnut commode with porcelain pitcher and bowl displaying an arrangement of spring blooms. Normal things, familiar things illuminated by the pale, now-you-see-it-now-you-don't moon shining in through the French doors. She wasn't in Georgia any longer. This wasn't Scott County. This was Belle Rivière, Aunt Caroline's house in Bayou Breaux. The place she had run to.

Coward.

She ground her teeth against the word and rubbed her hands hard over her face, then plowed her fingers back through her disheveled mess of sweat-damp hair.

" Laurel?"

The bedroom door opened, and Sava

It seemed odd, considering it was Laurel who had grown up to take charge of her life, she who had struck out and made a career and a name for herself. Sava

"Hey, Baby," Sava

Laurel wrapped her arms around her knees, sniffed, and forced a smile as her sister settled on the edge of the bed. "I'm fine."

Sava

"I didn't think you were coming home tonight," Laurel said, railroading the conversation onto other tracks. She tossed and turned every night, had nightmares every night. That had become the norm for her, nothing worth talking about.

Sava

"Where were you?" Somewhere with smoke and liquor. Laurel could smell the combination over and above a generous application of Obsession. Smoke and liquor and something wilder, earthier, like sex or the swamp.

"It doesn't matter." Sava

Laurel stayed where she was as her sister went to the cherry highboy and began pulling open drawers in search of lingerie. She probably should have insisted on taking care of herself, but the truth of the matter was she didn't feel up to it. She was exhausted from lack of sleep and from her encounter with Jack Boudreaux. Besides, wasn't this part of what she had come home for? To be comforted and cared for by familiar faces?

Much as she hated to admit it, she was still feeling physically weak, as well as emotionally battered. Coming unhinged was hard on a person, she reflected with a grimace. But as Dr. Pritchard had been so fond of pointing out, her physical decline had begun long before her breakdown. All during what the press had labeled simply "The Scott County Case" she had been too focused, too obsessed to think of trivial things like food, sleep, exercise. Her mind had been consumed with charges of sexual abuse, the pursuit of evidence, the protection of children, the upholding of justice.

Sava

She came back to the bed holding an oversize white cotton T-shirt at arm's length, as if she were afraid its plai

"Nobody sees it but me," she said. She stripped her damp gown off over her head and slipped the new one on, enjoying the feel of the cool, dry fabric as it settled against her sticky skin.

An indignant sniff was Sava

"Don't." Laurel softened the order with a tentative smile and reached out to touch the hand Sava

"Wasn't his-!"

Laurel cut off what was sure to be another tirade defaming her ex-husband. Wesley claimed he hadn't left her, but that she had driven him away, that she had crushed their young marriage with the weight of her obsession for The Case. That was probably true. Laurel didn't try to deny it. Sava

"Hush," she said, squeezing Sava

Sava

"What about you?" Laurel asked. "Don't you need sleep, too?"

"Me?" She made an attempt at a wry smile, but it came nowhere near her eyes, where old ghosts haunted the cool blue depths. "I'm a creature of the night. Didn't you know that?"

Laurel said nothing as old pain surfaced like oil inside her to mingle with the new.

With a sigh Sava

"I mean it, you know," she murmured. "If Wesley Brooks showed up here now, I'd cut his fucking balls off and stuff 'em in his ears." She cocked her fingers like pistols and pointed them at Laurel. "And then I'd get mean."

Laurel managed a weak chuckle. God, how Vivian would blanch to hear language like that from one of her daughters. Daughters she had raised to be debutantes. Sparkling, soft-spoken belles who never cursed and nearly swooned in the face of vulgarity. Vivian had expected sorority princesses, but God knew Sava