Murmuring assurances, squeezing her hand a final time, Laurel stepped back. She thought Maisie appeared quieter, more comfortable in her mind as she was wheeled out the doors. Then her pale, rounded figure under the green sheet was lost from view as the hospital personnel closed ranks around her. Assured and efficient, they bundled her into the helicopter. The rotor blades whined into a higher tempo, then began to whip the moist, warm air as if beating a meringue. Seconds later, Maisie was gone.
Turning carefully, holding the pain of Maisie’s suspicions inside her like a mother carrying a spoonful of bitter medicine to the mouth of a child, she faced the hall. She stopped.
Alec was there, standing tall and strong and wind-ruffled, with his motorcycle helmet in his hand. His eyes were as hot and hungry as the dragon’s that lay hidden on his shoulder. Derision and anger showed in every magnificent, taut line of his body. He had heard what Maisie had said. Or perhaps Dan, standing not far away with his hand braced near the gun on his belt, had said something that had made the situation clear. It would not have taken a great deal—not for Alec.
“I was on my way out to the house when I saw them dragging your Buick out of the ditch,” Alec said, his eyes black yet sightless as they rested on her face. “The door was caved in on the driver’s side, the seat soaked in blood. I thought,” he added softly, “that you must have been in it.”
She drew a swift breath. “Oh, Alec, I’m sorry. But you know about Maisie?”
“I do now.”
“When Dan called, I thought only about her. It never occurred to me that you…”
“Let it go,” he said abruptly as the lines at the corners of his eyes lost some of their depth. “Where are you headed from here?”
“I hadn’t thought.” She rubbed at the ache beginning behind her temples. “Home, I guess.”
Dan stepped forward, moving between them. In a heavy assumption of authority, he said to Laurel, “I’ll take you.”
“I have my bike,” Alec countered.
He didn’t plead or demand or make any promises of comfort or even safety. He didn’t hold out his hand as Dan was doing. All he did was wait with his shoulders stiff and legs set in a wide stance. Regardless, Laurel could feel the strength of his will surrounding her like a steel cord, closing tight, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to be free.
“The bike is fine,” she said, not looking at Dan. “I think it would be good to blow the cobwebs out of my brain.”
“You sure, Laurel?” Dan put both hands on his wide belt—a mistake since it showed the sweat stains under his arms.
Laurel gave him a faint smile. “Apparently. I prefer to do my own checking, you see.”
“Then don’t blame me for what happens.”
“I wouldn’t think of it,” she said, covering the short distance between her and Alec, taking his arm.
The two men exchanged a long look, combative on one side, impassive on the other. Then Alec took her hand from his arm and meshed his fingers with hers, holding them firmly as he turned and moved with her down the hall.
The ride back to Ivywild didn’t take long. Laurel had only begun to subdue her pain and regret by the time they arrived, and had done nothing about her disorganized thought processes. He held the bike for her to dismount, then swung off and followed her to the veranda. When she unlocked the door, he caught her arm before she could step inside.
“Let me,” he said, and went ahead with caution and efficiency, gliding through the darkened rooms on either side of the hall. Returning down its long length after a few seconds, he flipped on the light. “Looks to be all clear.”
She went straight to the kitchen. She started to make coffee, but remembered that Alec didn’t like it and took down the bourbon bottle instead. She needed the courage, not to mention the sedative effect for her strung-out nerves.
He came to stand in the doorway, watching her. “Don’t,” he said, the word compressed. “Not for me. I prefer you to remember that I was willing and in full command of my tongue when I made my confession.”
She set the whiskey bottle on the countertop with great care. Crossing her arms over her chest to hold herself together, she said, “I’m not sure I want to hear it.”
“I think you’re going to have to. Paying for my own mistakes is one thing, but being set up as a scapegoat is something else again.”
“Who do you think is setting you up?” She turned to face him with her back pressed against the cabinet.
“Good question. We might figure it out between us, but first there’s some garbage we need to get out of the way.”
“About your wife.” The words came out barely above a whisper.
“About my wife,” he repeated. “It’s a long story. You want the full version, or the condensed one?”
He was watching her, his gaze annihilatingly straight. She was the one who looked away first. “Whatever you want to tell me.”
“I’m not sure how much of it you’ve heard from Gregory. You know we moved to the Chadwick place after Mom died, and Mrs. Chadwick took an interest in us, right?” At her quick nod, he continued. “She was especially taken with Mita, my little sister. I think she enjoyed buying clothes for her, sending her to school. Mita was a bright, sweet kid—still is.”
The look of pride that came and went across his face touched Laurel more than the most fervent declaration of affection. “Mita is some sort of doctor now, isn’t she?”
“A pediatrician. She remembered too well all the times she was sick as a kid and there was next to no one there to help her. Until Mrs. Chadwick, that is.”
“That’s what you called the woman you married—Mrs. Chadwick?” Laurel wasn’t sure whether her question came from curiosity or the need to delay what she didn’t want to hear.
“She was my boss lady and benefactor a lot longer than she was my wife.”
“I see.”
“I doubt it,” he corrected, his voice tight. “It wasn’t the way you think, the way everybody seemed to think. I didn’t worm my way into her bed, didn’t flatter her or make up to her or any of the ridiculous ideas people have of a younger man who marries an older woman. I was in and out of the house all the time. We used to talk over tea—she served it every afternoon with silver, china, linen napkins, the whole bit. We were friends. Then one day she called me over to where she was sitting on the patio. She had been to the doctor, she said, and had only a few months to live. A year, max. She didn’t want to leave what she had to her children, who never came around and wouldn’t care if she dropped off the face of the earth so long as it didn’t disturb their busy schedules. But she was afraid they would create problems, tie everything up in court for years, if she willed it to me and Mita. If I married her, it would make everything more binding, plus she could start to transfer assets immediately. Besides that, she needed someone to look after things, look after her, when the time came that she was no longer able to do it for herself.”
“So you agreed.”
He put a hand on the back of his neck, gripping tightly. “It was just a legal arrangement. We never shared a bedroom, never slept together. For one thing, she was so sick it was impossible. And for another, she was more like a mother than my own had ever been, so it was entirely too…Oedipal.”
Laurel made a soft sound at the sudden insight. He watched her for a moment, then his voice hardened as he went on. “I don’t mean to say I would have refused to carry through if she had insisted—I owed her too much for that. But she wasn’t the kind of woman who would have been satisfied with gratitude, no matter how fervently expressed, and I was too young at the time to have the courtesy to pretend anything more.”
She wondered, briefly, if he had aged to that point now. However, asking didn’t seem polite or sensible. She prompted instead, “And then?”
“Then one night, when the marriage was maybe six months old and the pain too much for her to bear any longer, the time came for repayment of her generosity. She asked me to kill her.”
“Kill her?” Laurel repeated the words because she wasn’t sure, with the compression of his voice, that she had heard them correctly. The answer, however, was in the sallow copper-bronze shade of his skin. She added in a near whisper, “What did you do?”
He sighed and turned to put his backbone against the doorjamb, tilting his head against it, as well. “I wanted to do it, I really did. Can you understand that? I wanted to end her unbearable pain, end my own night-and-day vigil—end the whole, wearing travesty. It would have been so easy. I had been studying martial arts with Mr. Wu for years by then, knew every trick he could teach me, plus a few I picked up in back alleys. A little pressure in the right place, and it would have been over. She would never have felt a thing. There would have been no sign.” He paused. “I couldn’t. I just—couldn’t.”
The air left her lungs in a telling rush. She was so weak with relief that she might have fallen except for the cabinet behind her. Her voice no more than a whisper, she said, “Thank God.”
He turned his head toward her, and his features were perfectly still. “What faith,” he said shortly. “If I’m that good at acting the natural-born killer, maybe I should take up television wrestling.”
“Maybe you should tell me how your wife really died.” If she had thought before that he could kill, given the right reason, she now believed him every bit as innocent as he claimed. Which either made her willfully pigheaded or was fine proof that love really was blind.
“Mrs. Chadwick was a determined woman.” His mouth turned down at one corner. “You remind me of her in that, sometimes. When she knew I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, help her out of this world, she began to palm the painkillers I was giving her and hide them in a drawer beside her bed. On the evening she finally had a big enough hoard, she called a beautician to the house to give her a shampoo, manicure and full makeup. Then she took a long perfumed bath and put on a pink satin gown. She sat down and wrote her notes of goodbye—one for me and one for her children. Then she swallowed all the pills she had saved and lay down on the bed with her nightgown arranged in perfect folds and her hands together on her chest like some medieval queen on a tomb. When I went to check on her, she was—” He stopped and turned his face away while his jaw tensed until the muscle stood out like a rock in his cheek.
“You loved her,” she said softly.
He pushed his fingers into the tops of his jeans pockets and swallowed visibly. “Not like you mean.”
“I didn’t mean it that way at all,” she assured him. “I just…think there was something more between you than you’ve said.”
“She was kind, always,” he replied with a glance that dared her to find his reasoning unusual. “She taught me how to speak fairly correct English, how to eat with the right fork, how to appreciate fine things and recognize value when I see it. She let me and Mita stay with her when we had nowhere else to go. She kept us safe so we could be together, dressed us, sent us to school, taught us self-respect and made us respectable in a way we had never been before. I looked up to her exactly as a dumb peasant back in the old days might have looked up to some fine lady who was good to him. I’m not ashamed to admit it, and I don’t regret anything. Except, maybe, that I couldn’t do the one thing she ever really needed from me.”
“If she was everything you say, then she was probably proud that you couldn’t,” Laurel said. “Anyway, she seems to have managed it herself without too much trouble.”
“I knew what she was doing,” he admitted in a voice like glass breaking under a steel roller. “I found her hoard of pills in that drawer weeks before she died. I found them and I left them there. I refilled her prescriptions as often as I dared, and gave her medication closer together than was prescribed so she could take one now and then—not hurt more than she could bear.”
“You couldn’t have known she would really do it.”
The look he flashed in her direction was edged with old grief. “I knew,” he repeated with emphasis. “I could have stopped her, but I didn’t. If that makes me guilty of her death, then all right, I’m guilty. But I don’t regret it for a minute.”
So now she had the full story. She waited for some feeling of condemnation. There was none. She was hardly in a position to cast stones, of course, since she had her own guilt to manage as best she could. Yet she felt no revulsion at all. It was easy to second-guess the moral calls made by other people, but no one could say with certainty whether they were right or wrong until they had stood in the exact same place in a world that changed its orbit a little every day.
“Tell me about the legal business,” she asked abruptly.
His head came around. Voice husky with amazement, he said, “You believe me.”
“Yes.”
“Just like that.”
“It was the truth, wasn’t it?” The heat of a flush rose under her skin as she spoke.
“Every word, but I expected—I thought it would take more to convince you.”
She shielded her eyes with her lashes, afraid of what he might see there if he looked too closely. “I want to hear the rest of it, anyway.”
His gaze moved over the pale oval of her face, lingered on her hands, which still had a tendency to tremble, then came to rest on the countertop behind her and the scattered remains of the salad she had been making when the call came about Maisie. “You haven’t had dinner, have you?” he said. “Eat something while we talk, and I’ll tell you.”
“I don’t think I can, but I could make you a sandwich.”
“I’ve already eaten. Force yourself.”
“I can’t, really.” When his face did not lose its implacable cast, she swung from him in irritation. “Oh, all right. But I want details while I’m at it. All of them.”
She listened carefully while she finished the salad she had started earlier, then sat down to pick at it. It was a sorry tale of avarice and trumped-up indignation. When Mrs. Chadwick’s grown children could not force the D.A.’s office to bring a murder charge against Alec, they had done their best to see to it that Alec did not enjoy what he had gained by their mother’s death. The court proceedings had been lengthy and virulent. The popular press had had a field day with the scandalous details of the rich older woman and her young lover, with all the emphasis on “Lady Chadwick’s Lover” that might have been expected, given the circumstances. The final decision had been in Alec’s favor—the will had been upheld—but, as Dan had said, it was the lawyers who had benefited. Alec had been forced to sell the estate to pay the fees. What was left had been used to put Mita and himself through four years of college and, later, to help take care of Gregory.
Hearing the pain in his voice as he spoke, Laurel knew he had hated the notoriety, the loss of the respectability he had spoken of with such intensity. She thought it possible that his unconventional appearance and attitude were a reaction to all the slurs and suspicions that had come his way, a variation of the adage about dogs and bad names. She hated to think of the humiliation he had endured, with no one to stand by him, no one to take his side.
At least she had no need to go to Miss Callie for the details as Maisie had suggested. She knew everything she required.
“You mentioned that the Chadwick heirs might have something to do with what has been going on here,” she said. “Was there some particular reason?”
Distaste curled the corner of his mouth. “They preferred sneak attacks. Causing problems that could be blamed on me, doing me out of the job I valued would be right down their alley. To make my life miserable was a specialty with them for so long, I guess I’ve gotten used to looking for them in everything.”
“It makes sense, but Hillsboro is a long way from California.”
His nod of acquiescence was brief. “I was so wrapped up in my own past problems, so afraid that you would be hurt because of me, that it took me a while to see you were the main target.”
She put down the forkful of lettuce and tomato she had been carrying to her mouth. Her face stiff, she sai
d, “Now you may be hurt because of me, instead.”
“That isn’t important.” His gaze was intent in spite of the offhand inflection of the words.
“Maybe not to you,” she stated slowly, her eyes dark blue with consideration. “For me, it changes everything.”
19
Alec sat in the swing on the dark veranda, keeping it moving with one foot, ignoring the squeak of its rusty chain, while he thought about what Laurel had said. It was one thing, or so it seemed, if he was hurt because of his own decisions, but something else again if he came to grief for her sake. The hint of concern in that bit of convoluted logic sent some odd, almost-forgotten feeling tripping along his veins. He thought it just might be hope.
She was still inside. She was supposed to be taking a bath, though he had heard her on the phone a short while ago. He had checked all the windows and doors, then made his rounds of the yard and the cleared area surrounding the house. He had stood awhile among the trees, watching and listening, but he had found nothing out of the ordinary. So far as he could tell, no unwelcome company was anywhere around.
He quartered the night with an alert gaze once more, even as he increased the pace of the swing with a firmer push of his heel. He was doing his best to be vigilant, but it wasn’t easy with Laurel rising like a vision in his mind. He would never forget the way she had listened to what he had to say—with no sign of horror, no shocked comment, no withdrawal. She had understood.
He hadn’t been prepared for it; couldn’t get over it. He had expected to use every argument at his command to persuade her to see his side. It wouldn’t have surprised him to have been shown the door.
If he hadn’t known how special she was before, he knew it now. She had her own griefs as reference points, of course, but she was still amazing in her tolerance. He had pulled no punches, and she hadn’t flinched from what he’d said, or from him. Instead, she had accepted his word.
It was possible that a part of it was because she cared, although he didn’t dare take that for granted; she had never said it, after all. Still, it showed her trust, and the gratitude he felt for that gift rose inside him like a shout of triumph. It made him feel that nothing she could ask of him would be too much, no sacrifice too great. She deserved whatever he had in him to give.
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